Passion minus the melodrama

The Thing Around Your Neck
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fourth Estate
217 pages, Rs299

With Half Of A Yellow Sun, Adichie acquired the status of a ‘good writer’, if not a much-felicitated one (she won the Orange Prize for it). The Thing Around Your Neck, a collection of short stories, will go some way in reinforcing this status.

The stories are divided, in terms of both settings and the characters, between the US and Nigeria. In ‘Cell One,’ Adichie maps the corrupt, inhuman conditions of Nigeria’s social and legal systems that make young men criminals for life. Nnamabia, a petty thief and the brother of the narrator, becomes dehumanised as a result of torture. Nkem, who comes to the US with dreams in her eyes and hope in heart, discovers that her husband has a mistress back in Nigeria in ‘Imitation’. The ‘land of the free’ paradoxically underscores her incarceration within a family structure that comes with her all the way from Nigeria. When she decides to return to Lagos, it is a decision to abandon the life America offers, just so that she can “know when a new houseboy is hired in my house,” as she puts it.

In ‘Ghosts,’ the professor deals with life on his own after his retirement and the death of his wife. America, he discovers, leaves you alone, but Nigerian ghosts — of his wife, for instance — keep him company in his old age.

‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ becomes Adichie’s metaphor for the continuing connection with the homeland that the woman protagonist discovers. When she finds love in America, this choking thing around her neck seems to loosen. Yet, finally, she lets go of the love and returns home.

In ‘American Embassy,’ a woman who has just lost her young son to the Nigerian government’s military (her husband had published anti-government pieces in his newspaper) applies to the US Embassy for a visa. In this scorching tale of grief and politics, the visa officer asks her for proof that she needs asylum. Unable to furnish proof of either her loss or her grief, she quietly walks away from the visa interview.

‘The Shivering’ is a tale of quiet desperation, of Nigerians who seek  American material and social benefits even when they’re strongly rooted in their memories of Nigeria. “If  you want to get anywhere you have to be as mainstream as possible,” Udenwa (who has changed his name to David Bell to become mainstream) tells his new wife, Chinaza, in ‘The Arrangers of Marriage’. He thus characterises the non-Americans in the US as desperately trying to fit in, even at the cost of losing their ‘core’, their identity. Chinaza decides to stay on in the US even after discovering that Udenwa is already married, for she comes to realise that there is no going back to Nigeria. Deculturation is also the theme of ‘The Headstrong Historian’ where Anikwenwa is Anglicised at school. He begins to “occupy a mental space that was foreign” to his own mother.

Adichie’s tales are less plot-driven than one expects in short stories. She grasps moments of intense grief, love or anxiety as few story-tellers have in recent times. The stories are, essentially, about these moments, nothing else. The events themselves are very often excuses — a meal, an affair — for Adichie to explore these intensities.

Adichie measures the distances between cultures, the process of acculturation and deculturation in such moments. Nigeria’s corruption and its emphasis on family relations are contrasted with American ease and forced ‘closeness’ in her characters’ lives in the form of moments of discovery, nostalgia and, most often, coruscating grief. Adichie refrains from excessive sermonising about American consumerism (a welcome feature) or hyper-criticism of collapsing ‘home’ values.

The Thing Around Your Neck is definitely worth a buy and a read. For those who wish for a last-para twist, Adichie is not the appropriate author. But for those who wish to read tales handled with sensitivity (minus the melodrama), here is the author of choice.