African author. Something around the neck. Surely there is a reference here to the South African “necklacing” of the 1980s? Horrific summary executions carried out by “people’s courts,” necklacing consisted of filling a tire with gasoline, securing it around the neck of the victim (collaborators, business rivals, political enemies), and setting it on fire. This grisly image easily encapsulates the violent and divisive history of South African apartheid. A generation later, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is not nearly so brutal.
While the horrors of racism, poverty and war may not be front and centre in The Thing Around Your Neck, Adichie traces their legacies in every African – those who stay, lives circumscribed by limited opportunity, and those who leave, ambitions mocked by illusions of opportunity.
Born in Nigeria and living in the US since the age of 19, her concerns are with the African middle class, those who through education, money, marriage, or luck find themselves on the “right” side of history. Split evenly between African and American settings, the stories are finely wrought, unadorned tales of the “abundance of unreasonable hope.” A bright young boy, caught up in a local gang, is lost in the labyrinthine prison system in “Cell One,” his parents frantic for his return. In “A Private Experience,” two women from opposite sides of sectarian strife duck out of a riot together, a shared moment that offers but never quite bestows commonality. In “The American Embassy” a woman whose husband has been detained and son murdered applies for a US visa. But she walks out of the office, refusing to confide her pain to “the face of a person who did not understand her.”
Adichie’s mostly female narrators are often caught between family and exile – sometimes forced into both. Set in Philadelphia, a young bride in Imitation discovers her husband continues his philandering in Lagos. In “On Monday of Last Week,” a woman joins her husband in America, taking a job as a nanny to a mixed race couple. The African-American wife, an artist, emerges rarely from her studio but when she does, the Nigerian woman is bewildered – and besotted. In the title story, a young woman finally gets her much-sought-after American visa and goes to live with her uncle’s family. His nightly visits threaten to destroy everything.
Writing in a spare and lyrical style, Adichie possesses the tone and confidence of a writer twice her age. She neither tries too hard nor wastes her words. In 2007 Adichie won the Orange Prize for her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, followed by a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (the “genius” award). Speaking at the TED talks last year, the 32 year old writer cautioned about the “danger of a single story.” It negates and obfuscates: Africans are more than just poor, Mexicans are more than just immigrants to America, and so on. She herself was chastised for writing stories that were not “authentically African.” Meaning, her characters were middle class, educated and drove cars.
From necklacing to necklaces, it is important to break out of the idea that a person or a place has only one story. To paraphrase the narrator of “Ghosts” when asked if he has lived a good life, “It is not good or bad, I tell her, it is simply mine. And that is good enough.”
Leila Marshy has been published in a number of literary journals and anthologies. She tries not to tell the same story over and over again. She tries not to tell the same story over and over again. She tries not to tell the same story over and over again.
