The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I stayed in South Africa for one summer many years ago. I was there as a researcher to learn about social capital – a measure of social coherence and civil engagement – in a small Black South African community outside Pretoria. I went there, with full faith in a survey instrument developed by international researchers, tested in varied country sites. When I arrived, some South Africans I met were deeply offended by the purpose of the study and my survey instrument (developed abroad). Their offense still troubles me today. Is it arrogant to believe that all cultures are knowable or comparable? In what ways should a stranger try to know a community? I thought of these things as I slowly made my way through The Thing Around Your Neck.

To be candid, there is something about the publication of difference that makes me shy. Fiction can give us entry into another culture but it's more difficult when the boundaries are drawn with force. Not only does it become more important that we are permitted to pour ourselves into fiction's characters but also that we are given a glimpse of how to respond to the reality of identity politics.

The Thing Around Your Neck is a collection of short stories by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The stories are peopled by Nigerian-born men and women who live in America or Nigeria, and who each encounter prejudice, ignorance, and goodwill. The cadence of our narrator’s voice is distinct, precise, faceted like a stone. And Adichie is a master of the short story. Every story is framed on a perfect, affecting, narrative arc: the hero submits to a dominant (usually, American) culture, makes personal sacrifice of honor or family loss, and then reaches a point of humiliation or suffering that goes unseen by the arrogant and ignorant eye.* What makes the stories devastating is how effectively the stories convey the burden of being unknown or unrecognized in some fundamental, unchangeable, way. Brutal events are relayed flatly, daring the reader to dramatize (e.g., war and corruption, torture). But the events are never the main characters; difference is not the dominant ingredient (so unlike the “cartoons” created by an African writer who writes to satisfy an ignoble British critic in the story, Jumping Monkey Hill). The things not said emerge slowly and linger; survive long after the arc of the story is completed. Perhaps it’s not so surprising that fiction resolves that knotty fix of figuring out how best to know another person. The stories here give us a glimpse; satisfy not the desire to know another person but permit rare view into how a person is singular and unknown.

*A tiny point: the repetition of this narrative structure made for a bit of reading fatigue; perhaps short stories are not meant to be read one after another ? but that will be another post.