The Thing Around Your Neck
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 271pp; Fourth Estate (UK)
Most of the stories in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s debut collection, The Thing Around Your Neck end with people moving; through doors, windows, or across open spaces.
“She smiles a slight, distracted smile ... and turns to climb out of the window” (‘A Private Experience’). “He is walking away. And you are weeping, standing alone under the avocado tree” (‘Tomorrow is Too Far’). “I rang the doorbell and he opened the door, stood aside, and let me pass” (‘The Arrangers of Marriage’). “Father Patrick was walking up and down, flicking water on the people...” (‘The Shivering’).
“It was Grace who, feeling an odd rootlessness in the later years of her life ... would go to the courthouse in Lagos and officially change her first name from Grace to Afamefuna” (The Headstrong Historian”).
Even Chioma, the fictional character in a story within a story written by Ujunwa, the heroine of ‘Jumping Monkey Hill’, is not immune to this affliction of motion: “She walks and walks, past the high gates and out to the street where she gets in a taxi...
” What Adichie has committed to these pages is a band of restless men and women, trapped in between what they have left behind and what they imagine is a place where their varied longings will be quelled. Alas, in most cases the reader can see that they will never enjoy the fulfilment of arrival.
The characters themselves seem to sense that they are on futile journeys. And we—reader and character—both mourn. This painful realisation of futility is like something around the neck, strangling with increasing ferocity.
But it is clear that something around the neck does not mean something around the feet. From the endings quoted above, these are unhindered feet—quick to go off in search of love or happiness, quick to abandon—or to attempt to abandon—Nigeria for America, or even America for Nigeria, as in the case of Nkem, the heroine of ‘Imitation’.
“We are moving back to live in Lagos. We are moving back,” she gently but determinedly informs her husband, Obiora, whose bed in America “is used only two months of the year” because he insists on spending the rest of the time managing his “government contracts” in Nigeria.
Moving is not the only thing these people are obsessed with. They are passionately caught up in thinking, talking and not-talking; ponderous thoughts, ponderous words, ponderous silences. When, in ‘Cell One’, the narrator’s brother chooses to remain silent about his jail experiences, she is left with no other choice than to imagine him “raising his voice, calling the policeman a stupid idiot, a spineless coward, a sadist, a bastard...”
“There is nothing left to talk about” is Nkem’s realisation at the end of ‘Imitation.’ Everyone but her is a storyteller—Obiora her husband, Ijemamaka her friend who calls long-distance from Lagos, Amaechi her teenage maid imported from Nigeria.
In ‘A Private Experience’, an uneducated Muslim Hausa woman does most of the talking, while a Christian Igbo medical-school student listens and answers. Holed up in a hideout as a mob of Hausa Muslims goes on rampage around them, “hacking down Igbo Christians with machetes”, both realise that in this instant they have more in common than anyone could possibly imagine.
In ‘Jumping Monkey Hill’ it is Edward, an old white man and fervent lover of Africa who is the Talker, holding court before an eclectic mix of African writers whom he expects to listen unquestioningly.
The bulk of the talking in ‘The American Embassy’ comes from “[a] nondescript face with a dark complexion unusually smooth for a man.” “Ugonna’s mother”, the heroine of the story is mostly silent, trapped in a reverie born of the trauma that follows the loss of her four-year-old only child to assassins’ bullets. Even when the circumstances demand speech (when she stands before an American visa interviewer—a pair of “green eyes” and “faded pink lips in a freckled, insulated face”), she chooses silence.
These are all powerful stories, steeped in the carefully selected details that breathe life into fiction. Someday the adjective “Chimamandaesque” will come in handy for describing Adichie’s gift for brilliantly evoking mood and setting by directing her gaze—and thus ours—on simple but compelling detail.
These are also stories that push the boundaries and surprise at every turn; stories of ordinary humans living (mostly) ordinary lives of quiet desperation and responding in ways that surprise them and us. There is a satisfying absence of melodrama and “odd world” surprises in them.
Occasionally though, someone steps out from the cast who is not ordinary. Like Chinedu, the loud-praying, demon-chasing, blood-of-Jesus-deploying homosexual Nigerian living illegally in America (“The Shivering”).
And “Prof”, the 71-year old retired mathematics professor who, despite telling us that he is “supposed to have armed [himself] with enough science to laugh indulgently at the ways of [his] people”, is not ashamed to believe that the ghost of his wife visits him every now and then to massage his hands and feet and rub Nivea lotion on his skin, like she used to do when she was alive. (“Ghosts”) I have nothing to complain about in these stories, other than the “broken English” that Adichie forces into the mouth of the Hausa woman in ‘A Private Experience’.
Time and again I cringed at her speech, coming to the conclusion that perhaps this illiterate woman had been spending too much time in the presence of another (more famous, half-literate) fictional character, Agu, the hero of Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation.
But then again, isn’t this the point that the stories in this collection seek to drive home: that under the influence of that thing around the neck, ordinary people will often begin to act in strange ways.
‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ will be published in Nigeria by Farafina in July.