Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, revolves around questions of identity in an era of globalization. We live in a world of ethnic neighborhoods with hazy geographic borders, a world of immigration, diasporas, and hybridization. The “things” hanging around all of our necks are complicated strands of social, cultural, religious, and historical roots that gradually weave into the cord of one’s self.
In twelve absorbing stories, Adichie realistically portrays the lives of (mostly) women in contemporary Nigeria and the United States. The Nigerians living in the United States have come for a variety of reasons: one wife joins her medical-student husband after a six-year separation, a young woman enters into an arranged marriage, and the wife and children of a wealthy businessman enjoy an upper-middle class suburban existence in the U.S. while he travels back and forth to Lagos. All the characters struggle to find their identity in their unfamiliar settings.
The stories set in Nigeria depict a range of concerns: a woman stands in line to apply for political asylum at the American Embassy after the flight of her journalist husband and murder of her son; an Igbo Christian medical student takes shelter with an older Hausa Muslim woman in an abandoned store while machete-wielding mobs randomly kill people in the streets, and a brother and sister from the U.S. visit their Nigerian grandmother one summer and experience an Edenic fall into sin and death.
“Jumping Monkey Hill” relates the experiences of a young Nigerian writer, Ujunwa Ogundu, who is attending an “African Writers Workshop” in South Africa after quitting a Lagos banking job (where she was expected to provide sexual services for her clients). Except for Ujunwa and the elderly British South African workshop director, Edward Campbell, the rest of the characters are named only by their national and gender identity: “the Kenyan man,” “the Senegalese woman.”
The story’s wry account of the expectations readers may have for contemporary African writing makes one wonder about Adichie’s own writing workshop experiences. Ujunwa finds the Zimbabwean’s story “familiar and funny, about a Harare secondary school teacher whose Pentecostal minister tells him that he and his wife will not have a child until they get a confession from the witches who have tied up his wife’s womb. They become convinced that the witches are their next-door neighbors, and every morning they pray loudly, throwing verbal Holy Ghost bombs over the fence.” But Edward protests that “there was something terribly passé about [the story] when one considered all the other things happening in Zimbabwe under the horrible Mugabe.” Shocked by the director’s response, Ujunwa thinks, “How could a story so true be passé?” When she submits a autobiographical story of her experiences in the Lagos business world, Edward scoffs: “This is agenda writing, it isn’t a real story of real people.” But he’s enthusiastic about a Tanzanian student’s graphic account of killings in the Congo.
Adichie’s previous work has occasionally received similar comments; some critics regarded her epic novel of the Biafran War, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), as overly concerned with personal relationships at the cost of political commentary, but her fiction furnishes a wider panorama of life, including but surpassing the political. Widely heralded as the literary granddaughter of Chinua Achebe (author of Things Fall Apart), Adichie grew up in the small Nigerian university town of Nsukka, living in the same house formerly occupied by Achebe. She now divides her time between the U.S. and Nigeria.
My favorite story among many fine ones in this collection is called “The Shivering.” It contrasts the experiences of a Nigerian graduate student at Princeton, the daughter of a Big Man from Lagos, with that of a less-educated village man who has lost his American construction job and is facing deportation because his visa has expired. Ukumaka and Chinedu meet when a plane crashes in Nigeria, and he knocks on her apartment door while she is anxiously monitoring the internet for news. “I am Nigerian,” he announces. “I live on the third floor. I came so that we can pray about what is happening in our country.” A Catholic who is struggling with her faith, Ukumaka is wary of this stranger, but Chinedu takes her hand: “He prayed in that particularly Nigerian Pentecostal way that made her uneasy: he covered things with the blood of Jesus, he bound up demons and cast them in the sea, he battled evil spirits.”
As the prayer grows more loudly fervent, Ukumaka’s awkwardness and skepticism also grow, but then the story takes an unexpected turn:
She felt herself start to shiver, an involuntary quivering of her whole body. Was it God? Once, years ago when she was a teenager who meticulously said the rosary every morning, words she did not understand had burst out of her mouth as she knelt by the scratchy wooden frame of her bed. It had lasted mere seconds, that outpouring of incomprehensible words in the middle of a Hail Mary, but she had truly … felt terrified and sure that the white-cool feeling that enveloped her was God. [Her boyfriend] said she had created the experience herself. But how could I have? She had asked. How could I create something I did not even want?
Adichie’s lyrically written stories frequently depict the elements of competing religious perspectives that are such a central part of Nigerian life today. In a 2003 interview, she explained, “I am fascinated by the power of religion. I grew up Catholic, still am although I am what may be called a Liberal Catholic, which is that I believe in Lourdes but also think that contraception is a good thing … . I think religion will probably feature in some way in everything I write—it, and the idea of faith itself, is something that I question, grapple with, almost daily.”
Faith is a central part of what it means to be a global citizen in today’s flat world, and Adichie’s potent fiction helps us to recognize the truths and the lies, the connections and the divisions, that characterize our time.
Susan VanZanten is professor of English and director of the Center for Scholarship and Faculty Development at Seattle Pacific University.
