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In 2007 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won the Orange prize with her Biafran epic Half of a Yellow Sun, which went on to sell half a million copies in the UK alone. This novel was a major achievement, a brilliant followup to her subtle and moving debut Purple Hibiscus, which dealt with the themes of domestic violence and religiosity and itself won the author a Commonwealth award. Half of a Yellow Sun brought Adichie’s work to a worldwide audience and the kind of readers who would never normally pick up a book set in Nigeria by an African writer. Last year Adichie also won a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation fellowship, popularly known as America’s ‘genius award’.
Since then, many have wondered what Adichie, who is still only 31, will do next. Her answer has been to return to short fiction, for which she also won awards and critical acclaim — though less public notice — early in her career. The Thing Around Your Neck is a collection of 12 short stories, focusing mainly on the lives and experiences of Nigerian women — women caught up in political or religious violence, coping with displacement, loneliness and disappointment in their new lives or their new marriages, surviving tragedy. The women are generally middle class, intelligent but unconfident, and tend to be routed by more selfish and amoral characters. In ‘Imitation’, a young wife, living a life of isolation in America, discovers her wealthy husband has moved a mistress into the family home in Lagos. ‘On Monday of Last Week’ tells the story of a university-educated Nigerian woman, again in America, forced to make ends meet by working as a home help. In ‘The America Embassy’, a woman whose child has been murdered by political thugs hunting for her husband suffers the many petty humiliations shared by anyone who has ever applied for a visa from a poor African country to a wealthy western one. Though there are faint notes of optimism, overall these are melancholy stories, of disappointment and endurance rather than hope.
Only one story features a male narrator. ‘Ghosts’ relates an encounter between a retired university professor and a former colleague who the professor believed had died during the Biafran war. During their conversation, the professor inwardly recalls the many changes that have taken place in the intervening years, the betrayals by colleagues and by governments, the loss of dreams and also of the professor’s own wife as a result of being treated with counterfeit drugs, the same wife who still pays nightly visits to her husband’s room. It is a moving, tender story that takes us back to the world Adichie relayed so convincingly in Half of a Yellow Sun.
Adichie’s writing is suffused with social and political comment; she is a writer who evidently takes seriously her role as a mouthpiece for the experiences of those living in the continent of her birth. But if this is the driving force behind many writers coming out of Africa, it is also the black writer’s burden — to be moved by what one sees and yet not be bound by it. Adichie handled the balance best in Half of a Yellow Sun, perhaps because the scale of the narrative allowed her the time and opportunity to explore the effect of war on character. However, some of the stories in this collection fall short of the acuity and accomplishment of her novels, so that one wonders if they perhaps come from an earlier period in Adichie’s writing and have been dusted off for this collection.
The least successful stories are those where the author’s desire to make a statement is too plainly felt, the most successful when she concentrates on character, situation or (as in ‘Tomorrow Is Too Far’, one of the shortest but most deft of the stories) how lives are changed in a single moment. Then the powerful themes close to Adichie’s heart shine through, but never overshadow writing of clarity and brilliance.
THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fourth Estate,
2009, pp 300, £14.99