Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer principally known for her novels and short stories while her TED talks on ‘The Danger of a Single Story’ [1] and ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ [2] are widely viewed. Her most well-known novel is ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ [3] which deals with Biafran independence and the ensuing civil war in Nigeria. Recurring themes in her work are colonialism and post-colonialism, gender, and the African diaspora. Adichie’s latest novel is ‘Dream Count’ [4], but in this blog I return to her much earlier collection of short stories ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ [5].
The stories in this collection mostly focus on the experiences of Nigerian women, either in Nigeria itself or living in USA. They deal in different ways with loneliness (this is ‘the thing around your neck’), crossing frontiers, resilience and, in one case at least, violent events.
I had missed this collection at the time but turned to it recently not only for the themes she tackled but also for the way Adichie illustrates how a short story works. I will pick on the story that most engaged me, ‘A Private Experience’, to explore this.
In ‘A Private Experience’, Adichie covers the experiences of two women: Chika who is middle class, educated and of Igbo background and a Muslem women who scratches out a living selling onions in the market and is referred to throughout as ‘the woman’. A riot has erupted in the market place resulting in attacks and murders of Igbo people. Both the two women have fled from the chaos and danger and find refuge in a disused shop or store. The story explores the way they support each other.
This focus on a single event in their lives is what makes this a short story. Adiche seems to be saying you can get the whole picture if you want but think about the specifics of a moment that two or more people share. If you go straight to the wider narrative you will miss the complexity of what has happened and importantly you will dilute your empathy with the characters.
The second thing I learnt from ‘A Private Experience’ is that you do not need to say much. For example, Adichie describes what the two women are wearing:
Chika looks at the threadbare wrapper on the floor; it is probably one of the two the woman owns. She looks down at her own denim skirt and red T-shirt embossed with a picture of the Statue of Liberty, both of which she bought when she and Nnedi spent a few summer weeks with relatives in New York.
OK we learn more about them later on but right away you get the picture of what kind of people they are. In a short story, whatever is introduced has to be there for a reason. As Chekov put it, ‘if you say there is a rifle hanging on the wall then later in the story it absolutely must go off’. In this story to the women’ surprise there is a working tap, even if the water from it is foul. It is there to enable the woman to show her religious observance:
The woman turns on the tap and they both watch—surprised—as water trickles out. Brownish, and so metallic Chika can smell it already. Still, it runs. “I wash and pray,” the woman says, her voice louder now, and she smiles for the first time to show even-sized teeth, the front ones stained brown.
Third, a short story is there to make a point. Some me of the stories strike me (and some other reviewers [6]) as rather heavy-handed, or polemical, but ‘A Private Experience’ is more subtle. The contrast is offered between the two women sharing their experience of hiding from the riots and the violence going on in the world outside. The story works well as the relationship between the two women does not require them to call on special reserves of sympathy and understanding; their kindness is matter-of-fact as when ‘the woman’ rescues Chika in the first place:
She (Chika) wants to thank the woman, for stopping her as she dashed past, for saying “No run that way!” and for leading her, instead, to this empty store where they could hide. But before she can say thank you, the woman says, reaching out to touch her bare neck, “My necklace lost when I’m running.”
Chika and the woman are not angels – they left behind in Chika’s case a sister and the woman’s case a daughter in the market place, but they are not to blame. They get on with the business of looking out for each other. They meet, share an intimacy but will be unlikely ever to meet again. And that is, I think, Adichie’s world view: we are here to support each other, but you do not have to sacrifice yourself to do that. In this case the two women come to realise that what unites them (loss and a sense of danger) is more than what divides them even if the woman goes to places that Chika cannot, in particular when she expresses her faith.
Short stories end with a change, events change you. Chika is naïve she feels that riots like this are ‘what happens to other people’. She is not an activist and only took part in a recent pro-democracy protest to support her sister. She lacks confidence in herself and in her chosen subject of medicine. Later, we learn that Nnendi (Chika’s sister) is never found, but in my reading she gains strength from grief. She grows up. And almost as a postscript to the story we find that she goes to the newspapers, the hospitals and does whatever she can to find or at least account for her sister. I imagine, too, that Chika is writing this story which explains why she has a name but her companion is not.
The wider point is that Chika is changed as she gains an understanding that there is no single story that captures what happened in the those deadly riots:
Later, Chika will read in The Guardian (this is the Nigerian paper) that “the reactionary Hausa-speaking Muslims in the North have a history of violence against non-Muslims,” and in the middle of her grief, she will stop to remember that she examined the nipples and experienced the gentleness of a woman who is Hausa and Muslim.
As put it in her TED talk [1]. When we realise there is never a single story we regain paradise.
References
[1] Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (2009 )The danger of a single story [Online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg
[2] Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (2013) ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ [Online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg3umXU_qWc
[3] Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (2007) Half of a Yellow Sun. Fourth Estate, London.
[4] Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (2025) Dream Count, Fourth Estate, London.
[5] Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (2009) The Thing Around Your Neck, Fourth Estate, London.
[6] The book has been widely reviewed in journals and blogs, see examples below. In most cases the reviews are very positive though one or two find some of the stories over-polemical. One reviewer makes the point that some of the titles do not capture the nub of the stories themselves, something I tend to agree with.
akankebon@yahoo.com (2008) The Reader’s Review Blog [Online]
Forna, A. (2009) Endurance tests, Guardian 16 May 2009 [Online]https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/16/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-thing-around-your-neck.
McCandlessm,, H. (2010) Book Reviews, Identity Theory
[Online] https://www.identitytheory.com/the-neck-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie/
Roberts, M. (2009) Expressions of exile: That Thing Around Your Neck, Literary Review [online] https://literaryreview.co.uk/expressions-of-exile
Róisín (2016) Book Review: The thing around your neck by Chimamanda-Ngozi-Adichie. [Online]
Michael Hammond 