Review: The Thing Around Your Neck

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POSTED: 31 MAY 2009

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

(Fourth Estate; 226pp paperback; $32.99)

Creating real people in the space of 20 or so pages is a considerable skill, and Chimamanda Ngosi Adichie has that in plenty. Her stories in The Thing Around Your Neck are beautifully crafted in style and substance, and provide crystal insights into the currents that churn around and affect the lives of the everyday characters she conceives.

Many of the stories involve Nigerian women — educated, intelligent, often overawed women — coping (or not) with violence, displacement, exploitation, isolation and disappointment in their early adult lives. The social and political upheaval that exists in a post-colonial world provides the grist for Adichie's stories, and along the way she takes potshots at new-age parental neuroticism, pompous twits, evangelising missionaries and patriarchal attitudes.

The Arrangers of Marriage, Imitation and The Thing Around Your Neck deal with immigration to the USA — so desirable in the fantasy, yet so disappointing in reality. The women in these stories find themselves the envy of families at home in Africa. They have won the lottery, they have a chance to “get rich” and luxuriate in the American Utopia. Adichie's characters, of course, find life nothing like that at all, but family expectations and naive ignorance isolates and traps them in their new world existence.

Instead of the dream, there is a dictatorial husband full of his new life who dominates and demeans his “bush girl” wife and bullies her out of her natural ways into some imitation white-picket-fence life. There is the sexual predator uncle who expects more than kind words as an expression of gratitude for hosting his newly arrived niece. And there is the trophy wife, caught in the “Rich Nigerian Men Who Send Their Wives To America To Have Babies” club to enhance the husband’s prestige and “big man” status at home, but which condemns her to a lonely, empty and shallow life abroad.

The experience of Adichie's heroines is distressing but, reassuringly, they are survivors. They have plans, they are patient, and they see futures that will improve. They see through patronising behaviours and learn from their human mistakes.

There are stories that speak of the more noble aspects of humanity. A Private Experience, for example, is the story of a Hausa Muslim street vendor and an Igbo Christian medical student who take refuge in a disused shop during a riot between their respective communities. Both women are dreading a personal loss from the mayhem that is raging around them ... one fears for a sister, the other for a daughter. Despite the pressing situation, the exploding violence, and the differences of religion, ethnicity and culture between them, they each are considerate and caring of the other, their individual humanity overriding the broader divisions whirling over them.

All of the 12 stories in this collection tell us something of the human condition, and a lot about the challenges of life during social, economic and political change. Each leaves you wanting more — a sign of great writing.

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