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The Thing Around Your Neck has been around for a while now. However, Oyebanji Ayodele’s
thoughts on it are refreshing. Reading this review, and if you had read this
book before now, you will really want to go into it once more. Oyebanji Ayodele
engages one that well in this.
Read
this guest review by Oyebanji Ayodele. Enjoy.
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The short story is renowned for its
fleeting nature. Like life. That is probably the singular reason readers like
myself find themselves immersed in its charm. The reader is saved from the
long, winding and grand narratives of the novel. Hence, the wit exhibited by
proficient short story writers. They manipulate form with such compressed
intensity as to make every word matter, creatively injecting ‘that moment when everything
changes’. This is a fact I often remember the BBC Open Book podcast on short
stories for. An interviewee in that particular edition posits that “…the best short stories are about the moment
everything changes…” R.K. Narayan’s A Horse and Two Goats, F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin
Button, V.S. Naipaul’s My Aunt Gold
Teeth and Rotimi Babatunde’s Bombay’s
Republic exhibit this, and to my
satisfaction.
I love short story collections. They
afford the writer a kind of productive dynamism as s/he negotiates his or her
themes, each story with its own. This - courtesy of the fact that the stories
exist with quite a lot of issues lurking behind the porch - leaves me with
enough cud to chew.
The short story sub-genre has thrived well
in this dispensation. Thanks to the internet. You could read as much as you
like and wherever: an attestation to the impending end of paperbacks.
Paperbacks were once like permits into the literary world. You are no writer if
you haven’t published the traditional way. However, things have changed that even
when short story collections make it into print, some stories therein would
have enjoyed enough readership on cyberspace. This is the case with Doreen
Baingana’s Tropical
Fish, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Whispering
Trees and Chimamanda’s The Thing
Around Your Neck.
THE THING AROUND
YOUR NECK: A RUNDOWN OF
SOME STORIES
Cell One
Cell One is the name that arouses fear in the
minds of the Enugu Police Station inmates. The reckless son of a Mathematics
professor, Nnamabia would find his way to prison, and from there, to Cell One. He
entertains no trait of cowardice as he risks his life for a fellow inmate.
The beauty of this story
consists in the suspense that brands its end.
Imitation
When the original begins
to lack its value or is nowhere to be found, it is no sin to make do with an
imitation. Imitation tells the tale
of how pertinent identity is to humans, irrespective of location. Nkem, though
in America has to compromise her identity in terms of looks just to claim her
straying husband.
What fascinates me in
this story is how the motifs of immigration and imitation are made to anchor on
the hair motif. Moreover, the story
affords Adichie an opportunity to tacitly mention her new book, Americanah:
“I hope you understand
the big-big English they speak; they are Americanah
now, oh!”
On Monday of Last Week
On
Monday of Last Week relates Kamara’s journey to self-realization. That
lesbian part of her that is probably squelched by reason of her conservative
culture finds expression in America. It resurges with the appearance of Tracy,
the painter and mother of Josh, the boy she babysits.
The Thing Around Your
Neck
The occasional thing that
ties itself around Akunna’s neck is not a pendant. Neither is it physical. It
is a sign. When the conduit through which she gets to the New World disenchants
her, she settles for an independent life that is intermittently paused by
something tying itself around her neck. Akunna will have to trace the significance
of the sign.
The American Embassy
Unlike every other
America-bound character in the collection, the anonymous protagonist of this
story is on her way to the United States of America for a different purpose. A
partaker of the high-handedness of the rule of Nigerian despot, General Sanni
Abacha towards the press, she helps her journalist-husband sneak out of the
country and loses her only child. Her story details the frustration inherent in
the pursuit of the American dream.
There is a creative shuttling
between the actual narration and reminiscences.
The Shivering
What could send ripples
down one’s spine? The Shivering. It transcends spiritual exercises of praying
and speaking in incomprehensible tongues. The shivering comes when one tries to
reminisce and unveil a doleful past. For Chinedu, the devout Christian who is also
conflicted, the past is Abidemi,; for Ukamaka, Udenna. The Shivering climaxes with Ukamaka and Chinedu discovering
themselves and seeing where their lives dovetail. They seem optimistic, that
they will overcome.
The Arrangers of Marriage
The culture of arranging
marriages between parties not known to each other is peculiar to the African
society. Such relationships brim with imperative voids and uncertainties which
have to be sorted out. Agatha finds out later that the arrangers of her
marriage to Dave Bell (‘my new husband’ as she refers to him) have withheld
more than enough from her. They probably consider them trivial. She does puzzle
the inconsequential realities out later.
***
TALKING HONESTY
Ngozi Chimamanda Adichie with The Thing Around Your Neck asserts her
honesty as a writer. I find that she fits into Emmanuel Iduma’s description in
a recent article - On Writing Now (1) - of
what writing must be:
Writing
always demands honesty to place, honesty to time, and honesty to self.
Adichie’s writing appeals
to the temporal and all that surrounds it. The importance of nursing an
American dream for a Nigerian in the twenty-first century is given considerable
space in the collection. To nurse the American dream is to be a party to the stereotyping
of Nigeria; an expression of its binary oppositeness to America, but I often
ponder on the possibility of excusing our writings from the fangs of
stereotypes. The truth is this: stereotypes continue to be turned out when certain
realities remain tied to the everyday lives of a people. That justifies the
existence of the many America-working schemes – the Christian ones especially -
that smear Adichie’s work.
For documenting how
America has Nigerians by the short hairs, Adichie becomes what Ayodele Morocco-Clarke, in her Gambit
interview, calls ‘the gatekeeper of what is the sepulchre of her era’.
Hair. The issue of hair
is not just an Americanah
phenomenon. It is an Adichie thing. I
have not read Americanah
and I’m glad about it. I have a lot to carry into it. Having read reviews of
the book as well as a couple of the author’s interviews, all talking about the
germane-ness of hair to her narration, I went into The Thing Around
Your Neck with the mind of finding some other recurring motif. Something
different from the Biafra tale. Not even hair. Lo, I found hair! Adichie takes a woman’s hair as a veritable tool for starting
critical discourses on identity. In Imitation,
she does explore hair in its entirety. The pubic hair is not exempted. It
foreshadows the relatedness of the work to sexuality.
Sexuality does deserve a
mention. The collection does not privilege heterosexuality; it has a fair
amount of queer characters. This turns out to be remarkable because of the
hostile treatment Africans have always meted out to homosexuals. I am gripped
by the homophobia of Africans in this:
“…Tracy
appeared, curvy in leggings and a tight sweater, smiling, squinting, pushing
away long dreadlocks from her face with paint-stained fingers. It was a strange
moment. Their eyes held and suddenly Kamara wanted to lose weight and wear
makeup again. A fellow woman who has the same thing you have? her friend Chinwe
would say if she ever told her. Tufia! What kind of foolishness is that?”
(On Monday of
Last Week, Pg 81)
Adichie’s collection
presents the reverse of Daniel Vignal’s position as it is expressed in Chris
Dunton’s Wheytin be Dat? The
Treatment of Homosexuality in African Literature:
"For the
majority of [African writers], homophilia is exclusively a deviation introduced
by colonialists or their descendants; by outsiders of all kinds: Arabs, French,
English, metis, and so on. It is difficult for them to conceive that homophilia
might be the act of a black Africa"
She uses the like of Kamara
(in On Monday of Last Week), the
Senegalese (in Jumping Monkey Hill)
and Chinedu (in The Shivering) accentuate
her position. This queer trio does not attribute its sexual orientation to
western influences.
***
“THE THING AROUND
YOUR NECK” AND ME
I dislike The Thing Around Your Neck for the parallels
that abound in its stories, the immigrant stories especially. The reader keeps
encountering almost the same thing, time and again. What’s more? The personification
of most of her male characters is one-sided. I feel for the poor things, but that
is simply Adichie.
That Adichie is a gifted
storyteller needs no more proof. Her stories teem with depth and originality. However,
whenever she is mentioned, I often demand that she is saved the hype that comes
off. She is a good writer. That’s all.
***
- Oyebanji Ayodele blogs at ayoyebanji.blogspot.com and tweets @ayoyebanji. He could be reached via ayoyebanji@gmail.com
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