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Magazine
SHORT FICTION
Told with insight
KANKANA BASU
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A lusciously readable set of narratives that strike at the heart of identity.
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The Thing Around Your Neck. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Fourth Estate, Rs.299
For all those who fell under a spell while reading Half of a YellowSun and Purple Hibiscus, the magic is likely to continue with The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s lat
est collection of short stories. The lucid fluidity of language is here once again as is the innocent simplicity while talking of matters which are anything but innocent or simple. Wars, coups, riots and the killing of children could never be simple but under the author’s limpid gaze everything seems to take on a strange clarity that is both illuminating and unsettling.
Thus we learn about the lethal cult culture among adolescents, children selling bread by the road in strife-ridden Nigeria, the hollowness of arranged marriages, slavery, missionaries, conversion, same-gender attraction, writers’ retreats, sibling jealousy and so many other things in the twelve skilfully crafted stories. The characters narrating the stories hail from Nigeria and range from young girls and much married women to an elderly man walking the tightrope between the real and the hallucinatory (‘Ghosts’).
Sense of restlessness
The noticeable thread running through the entire collection of stories is a sense of restlessness and a desperate craving for identity in people perennially stranded on a no-man’s land between the West and their homeland. Though physical and geographical descriptions are few and far between, vivid scenes are created in the mind’s eye by the author’s supreme talent for the understated. It becomes imperative after a point to let go of all resistance and flow along with the heady tide of words, feeling complete empathy with a bereaved mother’s search for political asylum, a timid married woman coming into her own and asserting herself in the face of invisible competition (‘Imitation’), of moving back and forth from the past to the present (‘Ghosts’) and falling in love but not quite in the expected manner (‘On Monday of Last Week’). One sympathises with the heroine as she gags over mustard while eating her first hot dog on arriving in the US (‘The Thing Around Your Neck’) while another learns to say ‘elevator’ for lift and ‘cookies’ for biscuits and discovers that the American way to have tea is to sip it sans milk and sugar (‘The Arrangers of Marriage’).
Struggle for dignity
The suffocating confines of arranged marriages and nostalgia for sights, sounds and tastes of their native land replay in the characters a dozen times over and one suspects that the author is, in an obtuse manner, laying bare a part of her own yearnings. Ghosts and goddesses flit in and out of tales and are, almost symbolically, female. Insights into the narrow insular world of a certain section of Nigerian women, their struggle for dignity, secret cravings for education, resignation to arranged marriages and stoic acceptance of extra-marital affairs paint a landscape that is grim and barren.
However, from somewhere within the depths of this sombre picture, Adichie allows for the invincibility of the human spirit to shine through (as an Igbo girl and a Hausa Muslim woman huddle together during a religious riot in (‘A Private Experience’) and it is this that gives an otherwise grey book an incandescent edge of hope. Adichie’s sympathy for the plight of Nigerian women is fierce in its presence all through and diverse threads like ancient beliefs, the struggle to survive, the perils of having springy Afro hair, the importance of having a skin tone lighter than the usual coffee or ebony (and its implications in the matrimonial market), the nostalgia for traditional food of one’s native land and the desperate search for a more meaningful way of life (if necessary away from home) weave delicately through the tapestry of tales. Crevices within relationships are explored gently instead of slamming into the relationships them selves and a rare poignancy is revealed when Adichie writes about the Nigerian condemned to remain a perennial misfit in a white society.
Lack of artifice
Everybody here dreams of escape and having escaped, aches to return home. In this shifting mosaic dealing with the diverse cultures of Nigeria and the US, the pieces seem to fit with painstaking effort only to dislodge again. There is an amazing lack of artifice in the writing, a complete absence of forced literary techniques that comes across as wonderfully charming. Adichie says so much while saying so little.
A quick and seamlessly smooth read from a master story-teller, though the aftermath of reading this book could be sharp and long lasting. Beg, borrow, steal or buy this book but have it you must. A collector’s item, no less.
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