Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, at only 37, has made quite a splash on the global literary scene. In 2011, The Times Literary Supplement hailed as the “most prominent” of a long list of young authors working to attract “a new generation of readers to African literature.”
Adichie, herself from Nigeria, won more than a dozen accolades – including the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant – before 30. With two master’s degrees and three Ivy League fellowships under her belt, Adichie can also count an Orange Prize nomination, a Booker Prize nomination, and a 10 Best Books of 2013 selection amongst her accomplishments.
The Thing Around Your Neck, published in 2009, may not be Adichie’s most decorated work, but the 12 short stories may be some of her most important. In a New York Times review of the collection, Jess Row notes that Adichie masters a “tricky balance,” in this work more than any other, by “exposing, while also at times playing on, her audience’s prejudices.”
The stories, for the most part, focus on the lives of Nigerian women and their experiences with displacement, loneliness, violence, disappointment, and tragedy. Adichie is expert at presenting both a realistic representation of the African female experience and a characterization with which a wide range of audiences can identify.
Particular standouts include “The America Embassy,” an emotionally grueling look at the broken experiences of a woman whose child has died at the hands of political thugs, and the uncomfortable, yet eye-opening, “On Monday of Last Week,” which explores the life of a highly-educated Nigerian woman who must work as “the help” for a wealthy American family in order to make ends meet. “Ghosts,” the only male-narrated story of the collection, is also moving and nostalgic, reminiscent of Adichie’s previous novelistic work.
Perhaps the strongest moment of tension comes in “Jumping Monkey Hill,” which details the eventful conflicts of a writers’ retreat in Cape Town. Noted by Adichie to be the “most auto-biographical” of the stories, “Jumping Monkey Hill” highlights the reality of a violent gender war. The tension comes to a head when the retired professor running the workshop calls out a particular story – featuring a female Nigerian bank clerk asked to trade sexual favours for a new client’s business – as “agenda writing.”
“Women are never victims in that sort of crude way,” the professor asserts, only to be met with objection from the author herself, a young woman who mentions that the story came, in fact, from her own experience.
Adichie’s entire collection is saturated in important tensions such as these: between expectations and experience, between fiction and truth, and between the prejudices of those outside and the reality of those inside.