THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Knopf Canada, 217 pages, $29.95, ISBN: 978-0307397898
*****
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's short-story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, is full of the tensions and complexity that rip through her powerful novel Half of a Yellow Sun, winner of the 2007 Orange Prize.
Here, too, is the chaos of violent street riots, the corruption of government officials, systemic sexism and the inchoate hatred that springs upon Adichie's often-innocent protagonists without warning.
In the story A Private Experience, two women hide together in an abandoned store during a riot. One is a Hausa Muslim, the other Igbo and a Christian, each a representative of the warring factions on the street from which they have escaped. They are from different classes: Chika is a medical student from Lagos, the other woman sells onions in the market.
The story is an elegant parable about the absurdity of violence, the thin veil between evil and its opposite. The women help each other with simple kindness, while bystanders in the market outside are hacked to death with machetes. Only the thin metal shutter that covers the storefront shields them from the illogical horror outside.
Adichie's stories are about nuances of class and gender politics, the traumas of immigration and war, the unravelling of the skeins of history, identity, folklore and meaning under colonial rule. Her characters are political refugees in need of asylum, or spoiled young college men who have taken to petty crime for the fun of it, crime that turns ugly and uncontrollable in the blink of an eye.
There are the Nigerian wives of rich businessmen who move to the United States, becoming pampered and powerless, cut off from all they know, sequestered in sterile American suburbs. These stories remind me of Jhumpa Lahiri's short fiction, which also delves into the immigrant experience in the United States and in which the clear prose style and finely calibrated building of suspense is similar. Lahiri's Indian characters - especially the female ones - also undergo quests for belonging, suffer love relationships fraught with see-saw power imbalances.
Many of Adichie's characters, like Lahiri's, have one foot in the United States and the other firmly set in the places they have left behind. But a more apt comparison might be with Junot Díaz, another writer whose characters straddle two worlds, in Díaz's case, the Dominican Republic and the United States. Adichie shares with Díaz a need to bear witness, to tell of the atrocities of war or despotism, to celebrate unique cultural identity as it rubs up against modern-day America and to rewrite postcolonial history.
Adichie, like Díaz, mixes a powerful cocktail of fate and a profound moral vision; their characters often wrest their lives back from fate, at tremendous cost.
Jumping Monkey Hill is a story about an African writer's retreat. The white leader of the writing workshop demands that the students capture the "real" Africa in their fiction - as if he is in a position to recognize it - and Adichie's protagonist is criticized during the workshop for creating agenda-driven stories. This is a metafictional joke - Adichie's stories are overtly political, of course - and the story cleverly dares the reader to take issue with that stance.
The workshop participants quietly accept the criticism levelled at their stories because they know the workshop leader can hook them up with an agent who might get them published in Britain or the United States. This is a smart, and bitterly satirical, story about authenticity of voice, about writing from the periphery.
What startles about Adichie's stories is how compelling they are: They grip; they strike. Adichie's style is transparent, the sentences declarative, sure and unadorned.
These stories provide sharp, fable-like glimpses wherein characters are altered forever often through a brief encounter. Each scene is vivid. A stone shatters a windshield; there are burned corpses on the roadside; an elderly prisoner is stripped of his clothes, tortured and humiliated in front of all the other prisoners. What forms is the portrait of a nation, of the immigrant experience and the subtleties of postcolonial experience, both particular to Nigeria and universal.
Adichie has written about her admiration for Chinua Achebe, and there are similarities: a grace when it comes to providing a bridge for Western readers who may not know Nigerian culture, and a refusal to sacrifice particular detail while reaching out to that audience. And Adichie shares Achebe's political vision, full of a sorrow and a vigour that does not allow for despair. The last story in this collection, The Headstrong Historian, is an homage to Achebe's Things Fall Apart - there is a mirroring of subject matter and form.
Adichie flits through the life of her main character, Nwamgba, a village woman who struggles against her in-laws to control her land holdings after her husband dies. Here is a character as vivid as Achebe's Okonkwo, and the seemingly effortless portrayal of the culturally crushing influence of Christian missionaries and British colonialism.
In the story's penultimate paragraph, a young Nigerian woman returns to her grandmother's village from university and changes her anglicized name, Grace, back to her Nigerian name, Afamefuna, meaning "my name will not be lost." The name-changing is a reclaiming of a culture almost buried under colonial rule, and sums up much of the nature of the story collection.
I admired the scope of Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, an epic novel that illuminates the civil war that gave rise, briefly, to the state of Biafra, and led to staggering man-made famine and violence. These stories are full of the complexity of Adichie's novel. They are snapshots - close-ups - with great depth of field.
St. John's writer Lisa Moore's most recent book is the novel February
OK
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