40. “The Thing Around Your Neck” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Year of first publication: 2009
Genre: collection of short stories

Country: Nigeria (but some stories are set in the USA and one in South Africa)

What it’s all about: This is a collection of twelve short stories, set in Nigeria and in the USA. The protagonists are all Nigerians, but their backgrounds and lives s are very different, ranging from experiences of war and riots in the author’s home country to the immigrant experience in America. Adichie’s stories often feature young women and their everyday epiphanies, tackling themes such as the brutality of war, colonialism, family relationships, the immigrant experience and the miscomprehensions between husband and wife.

Some thoughts: Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while know that I’m not particularly fond of short stories. There is not much time to develop the characters in a story, consequently only good writers are able to say something really clever in just a few pages. Adichie is one of them: the stories are cleverly constructed, involving and offer a wide range of complex characters. Without any doubts, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the most talented young African writers around. However, my favourite works by Adichie remain her two novels, Half of a Yellow Sun especially.
In “A Private Experience” an Igbo girl is sheltering from a riot among her people and Hausa people in a shop. She befriends a Hausa woman, demonstrating the inconsistency of ethnic conflicts at the personal level. The one described in the story is an episode of religious and ethnic friction that seems to be quite common in Nigeria but also scary and dangerous. In “Ghosts” the setting is the beloved university campus of Nsukka where Adichie grew up. The main character is a retired university professor of mathematics enquiring about his pension that never comes in, just like “el coronel” Buendía in García Márquez’s El Coronel No Tiene Quien Le Escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel). Floating in the darkness there is not only the ghosts of people he believed to be dead, but also the ghost of the Biafra war, which features prominently in her novel Half of a Yellow Sun. There are also stories concerning the experiences of Nigerian immigrants in America, such as “The Shivering”, about a young Nigerian woman in an American college and her gay friend Chinedu who is also very religious. As my blogger friend Nana wrote in his blog, homosexuality is sort of a taboo subject in Africa, but Adichie touches on it in two stories (the other one being “Jumping Monkey Hill” about a creative writing workshop in South Africa, but I would also suggest a strain of it in “On Monday of Last Week”). By doing this, she shows her “open-mindedness” and her sensibility on the matter. Other important themes are the relationship of Nigerian wives with their husbands, especially relating to distance and immigration (“The Arrangers of Marriage”), and family relationships (“Tomorrow is Too Far”, “The American Embassy”). The last story, “The Headstrong Historian”, can be considered a follow-up of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart because it relates the colonisation of a village in three generations’ time. The traditions of the village and their animistic religion are swept awat by Christianity and the white man in a bitter way. This story demonstrates that Adichie can deal with traditional Nigerian lifestyles just as well, but it’s also a sort of reminder that Adichie takes on from Chinua Achebe in order to continue a tradition of excellent story-telling. Some people argued that it was pretentious for Adichie to write such a story, but I don’t think so. Adichie shows her admiration for Achebe without boasting about a comparison between her and the most prestigious of Nigerian writers.

About the author: see this post

Read my reviews of other works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie here and here.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story

I am currently reading The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Needless to say, I'm enjoying it very much. Everything that this young Ningerian novelist writes is a blessing.

As a quick snack, I would like to share this video with you. Adichie speaks about the danger of falling into stereotypes if you have only one story as reference.

By the way, Half of a Yellow Sun by Adichie has been chosen for this month's Guardian book club and there is a beautiful article by John Mullan, the man behind this book club, about the crossing of Igbo and English in the novel. Make sure you click on the links provided!

"Purple Hibiscus" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Year of publication: 2003
Genre: novel
Setting and time: Nigeria, just after a military coup (as Junot Diaz would put it, I skipped my mandatory three seconds of Nigerian history back at school)

Themes: religious extremism, childhood, family life, education, political commitment, everyday life in Nigeria

Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa

About the author: see this post

Plot: Fifteen-year-old Kambili's world is circumscribed by the high walls of her family compound and the frangipani trees she can see from her bedroom window. Her wealthy Catholic father, although generous and well-respected in the community, is repressive and fanatically religious at home. Her life is lived under his shadow and regulated by schedules: prayer, sleep, study, and more prayer. When Kambili is sent to her aunt’s house in Nsukka she discovers love and a life -- dangerous and heathen -- beyond the confines of her father's authority.

Some thoughts: A wonderful book! There are many novels that try to analyse the problem of religious extremism in the Muslim world, but this is the first time that I read something about Catholic extremism. It’s quite scary, actually. I never thought that people like Kambili’s father (called Papa or Eugene in the novel) could exist. It is disturbing how he can be despotic and violent at home while he is generous and brave to the outer world. At home he uses violence and fear to punish his family for what he sees as sins (like visiting his “heathen” father or coming second-best in the math class), but at the same time he is a benefactor, paying for the educations of dozens of children and giving money to charity. Furthermore, he is one of the few people who has the courage to speak up about the political situation of the country: he publishes pamphlets against the military regime. Obviously, his commitment will have disastrous consequences on his life and on that of his family.
The whole idea of writing a novel from the point of few of a fifteen-year-old girl is quite good: Adichie manages to depict the reality surrounding Kambili in a simple way. For example, there are no detailed explanations of the political situation of Nigeria. In fact, I could not even understand in which years the novel is set (1980s-90s, maybe?). While for other novels this could be considered a flaw, in this case it is quite appropriate, because the political and socio-economical deterioration of Nigeria is not the main topic of the novel, but it serves as a purpose to highlight Eugene’s contradictions.
One thing I really loved about this novel is the use of Igbo in the dialogues (so now I can say “kedu”!) and the portrayal of everyday life in a Nigerian compound. However, it was quite impossible to live up to Half of a Yellow Sun, the other novel by Adichie (my review here). I didn’t find in this book a character that I loved as much as I loved Ugwu, the houseboy in Half of a Yellow Sun, or expressions that stayed in my mind for a long time such as Odenigbo’s “you are such an ignoramus!”.

In conclusion, I love this writer and I really look forward to reading another of her wonderful novels.

“Half of a Yellow Sun” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Year of publication: 2006
Genre: historical novel
Setting and time: Nigeria, 1960s
Themes: war, love, colonialism, tribalism vs. modernity, ethnic tensions, national identity

Orange Prize for Fiction, 2007

About the author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka ,where she attended primary and secondary schools. She went to university in the USA and now lives between Connecticut and Nigeria. Purple Hibiscus (2003), her first novel, was short-listed for the Orange-Prize for Fiction and won the CommonwealthWriters’ Best First Book Award. Half of a Yellow Sun is her second novel to date.

Plot: In 1960s Nigeria, a country blighted by civil war, three lives intersect. Ugwu, a boy from a poor village, works as a houseboy for a university lecturer. Olanna, a young beautiful woman, has abandoned her life of privilege to live with her charismatic lover, the professor. The third is Richard, an Englishman in thrall to Olanna’s enigmatic twin sister Kainene. When in 1967 the shocking horror of the Nigerian–Biafra war engulfs them, their lives change forever.

Some thoughts: I loved this novel, it’s going straight to my all-time favourites! I liked everything about it: the characters are developed very well, the story is compelling and the style is superb. It is uniquely African without being ‘burdened’ with traditions and customs that can be difficult to understand for the average western reader. At the same time, it perfectly explains the situation behind the Nigeria-Biafra war without being pedantic. I particularly liked the fact that all characters have their flaws: Olanna is sometimes haughty, Odenigbo too idealistic and Ugwu a bit simple-minded. I loved how they evolved and changed as the story went on. There is no omniscient narrator, which means that you need to make sense of different perspectives by your own. Adichie’s characters are mostly wealthy educated Nigerians who discuss international politics and development economies, as well as poetry and art. There are nonetheless two characters in the novel that are utterly different from everything that Adichie might have experienced in her life: Ugwu and Richard. It must have been a challenge to write about a white Englishman in Nigeria and a poor houseboy, but Adichie achieves her goal. All of them felt so alive that I was thinking of them as if they were real people! The narrative is so compelling that when the characters are engulfed in the civil war you only wish that the war would finish, so that Olanna’s and Odenigbo’s suffering can end.

What makes this book precious is nonetheless the Igbo culture that permeates the story: it was really interesting to read about the reasons that triggers the ethnic conflicts in Western Africa, but also to read about everyday life in Nigeria (habits, fashion, food, education). I look forward to reading Purple Hibiscus!