27: The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[puritybrown.livejournal.com]

27: The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Thing Around Your Neck is a remarkable book. The stories here are exquisitely written, clear and lucid and so full of brilliant scenes and extraordinary sentences that I am not going to quote any of it because if I let myself start, I'd end up typing out the whole book. The characters are incredibly real, their lives vivid; and there's more. Every time I read a book, I get a glimpse of the author's mind, the frames and filters through which they look at the world; what you might call their "vision". Adichie's vision is startling and breathtaking and true, or in any case it feels true. I get the sense of a writer who does not sacrifice complexity, does not succumb (as one of her characters does) to "the need to smooth out wrinkles, to flatten out things you find too bumpy".

This is a particular concern because, of course, Adichie is Nigerian, African, and is therefore very much alive to the simplifications of her people's history and culture made by outsiders, even well-meaning ones; and by Nigerians, too, who want to shape their country in a particular way that doesn't leave room for certain kinds of people or certain ways of life. More than once her protagonists are faced by people who think they know about "the real Africa" and are unwilling to have their illusions dispelled by the actual knowledge and experience of actual Africans. I think the funniest story in the book, and the most explicitly trenchant, is "Jumping Monkey Hill", in which a Nigerian writer attends an "African Writers' Workshop" arranged by a white Englishman with as much regard for flesh-and-blood Africans as a puppetteer has for the feelings of his puppets.

In fact, it's just occurred to me that one of Adichie's recurring themes is the way in which people see only what they want to see; "Jumping Monkey Hill" is scathing about how this works when the person looking and wanting not to see is in a position of cultural privilege (so that their version of events will be listened to, and will make people doubt their own knowledge, even if they actually know better), but it comes up again and again in these stories; Ukamaka in "The Shivering", for instance, is so preoccupied with her own anger and bitterness over the ending of her relationship that she doesn't notice the much bigger problems that her new friend Chinedu has, until they become impossible to ignore. The other side of this is the way in which people carefully edit themselves for public consumption, not revealing the whole truth; this, too, crops up over and over, most startlingly in "Tomorrow Is Too Far".

The final story, "The Headstrong Historian", is a tribute to Chinua Achebe, and specifically to Things Fall Apart; it tells a similar story of an Igbo village before and during colonisation, although Adichie's angle on what happens is different, focusing on the reframing of Nigerian history rather than on the dismantling of traditional Igbo society. It works as a kind of sequel-in-spirit to Things Fall Apart, in that it lets its story go on after the point where Things Fall Apart ended, and gives the titular historian the chance to reclaim her people's history and decentre the account written by the colonisers. In its own way, fiction can do that kind of work just as history can, and The Thing Around Your Neck is a fine example.

Comments

[sheafrotherdon.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for this recommendation. I've ordered the book from my library, yay!