The Thing Around Your Neck

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck is an addictive read, but weakened by some of the Nigerian-American short stories being too similar. At times, one forgets the distinctions between those tales, even though some address certain themes of sexuality absent elsewhere. Otherwise, the collection of short stories entertains, informs, educates, and reminds one of the importance of diaspora and the changing face of immigration in the United States. African immigrants, especially Nigerians, have been coming to the US in greater numbers and the black immigrant experience is still neglected if not completely ignored in mainstream literature, so Adichie's collection serves as a useful foray into the experiences of Nigerian immigrants. Furthermore, she delves into issues of race, which, for African immigrants, is importance to acknowledge for improving relations between African-Americans and black immigrant communities. This is a theme that comes to the forefront in the brilliant novel, Americanah, but one can detect signs of that theme already in The Thing Around Your Neck. 

In addition, Adichie's vindicationist retelling of recent Igbo history through the lives of an Igbo woman and her educated grandchild, was a thrilling read. Obviously shaped by Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, she retells the story of British conquest of the 'primitive tribes of southern Nigeria' with an excellent, intertextual short story. Similarly, Adichie, a product of a middle-class Nigerian background, challenges stereotypes of Nigerians and Africans in general with some of her tales, which tell the tale of educated, professional individuals or families struggling against corruption in Nigeria and racism and classism in the US. The struggle for democracy and equality in Nigeria remains just as relevant for Nigerians in America as the struggle for finding one's 'place' in the US, the battle to assimilate without losing one's heritage.

Other highlights include "Jumping Monkey Hill," which speaks to the dominance of white, Western lens for elevating or promoting a 'proper African' or 'really African' literature. The white Englishman who puts together the literary conference in Cape Town dominates all reviews, imposes his own standards and definitions of Africa on the assortment of writers, and is taken more seriously despite his racist and sexist stereotypes of Africa. Alas, the hegemony of Western images of Africa retains its potency, despite valiant and numerous critiques from the best of African writers for decades (such as Chinua Achebe, who deconstructs racist images of Africa in 'classics' like Conrad's Heart of Darkness). The tale about religious and ethnic conflict in Kano during a riot also stands out for Adichie's keen eye for challenging internal divisions in Nigeria. This is of course a much larger theme in Half of a Yellow Sun, but nonetheless critical for Adichie's other fiction about one of the most diverse African countries.