Somewhere there is a pair of well-meaning, white “Africanists” blushing from shame at their fictional depiction as witless racists in Jumping Monkey Hill , one of a dozen note-perfect short stories in Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's new collection, The Thing Around Your Neck . One of the Oxbridge experts Adichie skewers, named Isabel, reveals herself by commending Ujunwa, the young Nigerian narrator, for her “exquisite bone structure” – and guesses she is descended from ancient Nigerian royalty.
“The first thing that came to Ujunwa's mind was to ask if Isabel ever needed royal blood to explain the good looks of friends back in London,” Adichie writes. “She did not ask that but instead said – because she could not resist – that she was indeed a princess and came from an ancient lineage and that one of her forebears had captured a Portuguese trader in the 17th century and kept him, pampered and oiled, in a royal cage.”
Meeting the 32-year-old author, however, inspires sympathy for Isabel. Perhaps it is the thrill of having a Haitian-born beauty serve as our own quasi-sovereign – perhaps it is the Michelle effect. Contemporary princesses are nominated by fate, not lineage. But you know one when you see one.
Adichie's exquisite bone structure, set off by a stylish, crisply tailored suit, supports a commanding presence that belies her youth. She stoops to publicize her work, admitting she would prefer that it emanated of its own accord, but undergoes the ritual patiently. Like many of her characters – middle-class Nigerians of Igbo descent, making new lives in the United States – she is accustomed to fielding compliments about her English, her native tongue. She absorbs the ignorance and misunderstanding with graceful forbearance.
There are people who think that to be a good Nigerian is to shut up about all the things that are bad.
Adichie is so polished it seems only natural to ask her about her own political ambitions. Naturally, she has them.
“I only imagine, I don't think I will take the step,” answers the author, who received her postsecondary education in the United States and now divides her time between suburban Maryland and downtown Lagos. “I imagine I will go back to Nigeria and run for governor of my home state.”
Some of the few friends with whom she has shared the dream “laugh very loudly,” the Adichie admits, saying she is mainly known in her native country as “that crazy feminist who won't shut up and writes sex scenes in her fiction.” But one astute acquaintance offered to manage her campaign.
There is one problem: Adichie's depiction of Nigeria is far more scathing than her satire of the white enthusiasts who patronize its writers. Her highly praised first novel, Half of a Yellow Sun , dealt with the horrific civil war that followed the attempted secession of the new state of Biafra, which riveted world attention in the late 1960s and resulted in the deaths of uncounted millions – mainly the Igbo people who supported the breakaway state, including several members of Adichie's own family.
The stories in The Thing Around Your Neck chronicle the brutal military dictatorships that controlled the country in the 1990s. In A Private Experience , a Christian Igbo girl takes shelter with a Muslim shopkeeper during a Lagos riot in which “Muslims are hacking down Igbo Christians with machetes, clubbing them with stones,” and killing a sister with whom she came downtown to shop. In The American Embassy , the wife of a crusading journalist seeks asylum two days after police thugs murdered her only child, joining an anarchic crowd of visa hopefuls who watched impassively as a soldier flogged “a bespectacled man with a long whip.”
“She saw the man's glasses slip and fall. She saw the heel of the soldier's boot squash the black frames, the tinted lenses.”
Don't get the wrong impression, Adichie warns. The Nigeria she writes about is not the Nigeria she knows today. The habitual violence that runs like a flooded river through her current book ended with the death of military dictator Sani Abacha in 1998. “I find myself constantly talking about the problems of Nigeria and forgetting to add that I have a lot of hope in my generation,” she says, especially “if we get into positions of leadership and power and the old guard dies, which we hope happens soon.
