The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[were-duck.livejournal.com]

Wow. This collection is amazing. Adichie makes good use of the form of the short story, with well-wrought characters and just the right balance of detail and compact plotting. The stories all have Nigerian women as protagonists (except for "Ghosts", which featured a Nigerian man), some of whom live in America, many in disappointing marriages or otherwise difficult circumstances. While that could easily become repetitive, the author makes it work well--each woman's voice and situation is distinct, and while many of the stories deal with similar issues, they all approach them in different ways. It's a difficult thing to pull off with a collection of stories, but Adichie succeeds admirably.

There's a sustained note of simmering, tightly restrained outrage held through these stories. The women are often caught by their families, husbands, governments. Their lives are sometimes comfortable, sometimes horrific, and always claustrophobic. The women living in Nigeria witness the horrors of Abacha's regime, of corruption, of the loss of their culture and oppression. The women living in America are silenced, the comforts and memories of home, the details of their culture commodified, twisted, sold back to them by white folks. Each woman reacts to her situation differently, and none of these stories offer right and wrong, or fixes for them. In most cases, we don't even see how it ends up--the time of each piece is restricted to a few days or months, in which the character's dissatisfaction and horror come to a head, she (or he) is finally confronted by it, and then...?

What I liked best about these stories is that their messages are not polemic--they are individual, they are complexly, even paradoxically untenable. For instance, in "The American Embassy", the wife of a prominent editor who risked his life by writing against Abacha's undemocratic quashing of free speech, mourns her young son who was killed by government agents who invade their home looking for her husband. It doesn't matter to the protagonist, known to us only as "Ugonna's mother", what lofty, prodemocratic intentions her husband had. What matters is that her son is dead. I also really liked "A Private Experience" for the way in which it threw two women who belong to opposite sides of the Igbo Christian and Hausa Muslim sides during the bombing of a marketplace. Each woman is human, and their quiet, fragile bubble of sanctuary gives them--and the reader--time to consider the complex ways class and custom contribute to the conflict. It's a lost, forgotten kind of moment, embedded in an experience that will change both women's lives forever, but the author crafts that moment with care. She's deft drawing the most out of those kind of moments.

I also particularly liked the way certain details recurred in different stories, with vastly different meanings--the juxtaposition of details between stories is incredible. For instance, Ugonna's mother in "The American Embassy" smells pepper soup on the breath of one of her attackers, and realizes distantly that she will never eat it again. In the very next story, " The Shivering", Nigerian grad student Ukamaka feeds her neighbor some pepper stew in an apartment at Princeton, smelling it on his breath--but the emotional valence here is completely different. It's so gorgeously well-crafted, the arrangement of the stories is dead on. The last one, "The Headstrong Historian", spans three generations and is an exhilarating feat of reclamation. I think it is, in its way, one answer to the unanswerable questions we've been faced with in the earlier stories, and it's a fitting close on an incredibly nuanced, beautifully wrought collection.

Comments

[vegablack62.livejournal.com]

Wow, what a great review, I really want to read these stories now.