The Thing Around Your Neck
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
(Knopf, 218 pp., $24.95)
In “Jumping Monkey Hill,” the most wicked story in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new collection, a group of young writers selected from all over Africa have gathered for a workshop at a fancy resort outside Cape Town--”the kind of place,” thinks Ujunwa, the representative Nigerian, “where . . . affluent foreign tourists would dart around taking pictures of lizards and then return home still mostly unaware that there were more black people than red-capped lizards in South Africa.” The workshop is run by a white couple of a familiar type: liberal expats who proclaim their attachment to their new home a bit too loudly. (“White people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same--condescending,” Adichie writes in another story.) The wife compliments Ujunwa’s bone structure and asks if she is descended from royalty: “The first thing that came to Ujunwa’s mind was to ask if Isabel ever needed royal blood to explain the good looks of friends back in London.” The smarmy husband makes lewd remarks to the women and speaks pompously of his own authority on Africa.
When it comes time for the writers to present their work, the director instructs them that the only appropriate African literature is political. He singles out a story by one of the writers, about killings in the Congo, as “urgent and relevant.” (Ujunwa thinks it “read[s] like a piece from The Economist with cartoon characters painted in.”) But he has no use for the majority of their work, which focuses on personal subjects--love, family life--which he deems “implausible” and “passé.” It is beside the point, he declaims, to write a story about coming of age in Zimbabwe when one could be writing about “the horrible Mugabe.” And stories about homosexuality are not “reflective of Africa, really.” When Ujunwa retorts, “Which Africa?,” he looks at her “in the way one would look at a child who refused to keep still in church and said that he wasn’t speaking as an Oxford-trained Africanist, but as one who was keen on the real Africa and not the imposing of Western ideas on African venues.”
The story is satirical--though not so much so as to remove the suspicion that it might well be, in Ujunwa’s words, “a real story of real people.” But the director’s point has often been made in more respectable ways, including by Chinua Achebe, the patriarch of the African novel, who has argued strenuously for a literature of political engagement. “An African creative writer who tries to avoid the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up being completely irrelevant,” Achebe once wrote. Adichie, a Nigerian novelist young enough to be Achebe’s granddaughter, has followed in his path in many ways, including her choice of English as the language of her fiction and her interest in African subjects. But while her work is never without political undertones--can any novel about Africa ever be entirely apolitical?--her primary purpose is literary, not doctrinal. Her work does not buckle under its political burden, but supports it with a great humanity.
Even if Adichie had not begun her first novel with the words “Things started to fall apart,” comparisons with Achebe would have been inevitable. She grew up in the university town of Nsukka, in the same house Achebe lived in when he was a professor there. And like Achebe, her family is Igbo, a minority ethnic group whose members were the targets of racially motivated violence in the late 1960s after a military coup. The violence led to the brutal war over Biafra, the Igbo-dominated region of eastern Nigeria that fatally declared independence. Adichie has credited Achebe for providing her with a model as a writer. “It was Achebe’s fiction that made me realize my own story could be in a book,” she once said in an interview. “When I started to write, I was writing Enid Blyton stories, even though I had never been to England. I didn’t think it was possible for people like me to be in books.”
Things Fall Apart, Achebe’s masterpiece, has been justly celebrated for its straightforward portrayal of rural Igbo life, and of the villagers’ struggle to hold on to their traditions after the encounter with colonialism. If Achebe’s insistence that African novelists have a responsibility to write about African subjects may seem tendentious in today’s globalized literary culture, it is worth remembering that when he was in school, in the 1930s and 1940s, the best-known novels about Africa were by colonialist writers such as John Buchan (who asserted that “the difference between white and black [is] the gift of responsibility”) and Joyce Cary (notorious for describing Nigerians as “jealous savages” and “unhuman”). When Achebe submitted Things Fall Apart to his publisher a little over fifty years ago, his editor wondered whether anyone would buy a novel by an African. As late as the 1970s, Achebe’s wife would report to him that a student of hers refused to refer in his writing to the harmattan--the dusty wind that characterizes the West African dry season--because it was “bush.” “Things like this show one that the writer has the responsibility to teach his audience that there is nothing shameful about the harmattan, that it is not only daffodils that can make a fit subject for poetry but the palm tree and so on,” Achebe observed in his essay “The Novelist as Teacher.”
Adichie has obviously taken this lesson seriously: her fiction has focused exclusively on matters related to Africa. Purple Hibiscus, her first novel, took up one of Achebe’s primary themes: the conflict between tribal religion and Christianity. Kambili, fifteen years old, and her older brother Jaja are kept strictly in line by their father, an excessively zealous convert who orders their free time according to a written schedule and shuns his own father for continuing to practice “pagan” rituals. He beats his wife and subjects his children to excruciating punishments for what he perceives as their crimes against God, such as pouring boiling water on Kambili’s feet after she “walks into sin” by not informing him about a visit with her grandfather. By contrast, the world of women--particularly the household of a widowed aunt, where Kambili and her brother are sent on an extended visit--is warm and consoling, the language sprinkled with Igbo endearments. (The father, whose sister describes him as “too much of a colonial product,” speaks only English with his children.)
Purple Hibiscus was published in 2003, when Adichie was just twenty-six, and in certain ways it feels like a first novel: the book’s symbolism is a bit obvious, and the contrast between male and female, English and Igbo, is too broadly drawn. But Adichie excels at the depiction of complicated relationships, familial and romantic: the love between the children and their father is truly vivid, despite his abuse, and even the most conventional subplot--Kambili’s first crush, on a young priest--is fresh in Adichie’s hands. Most important, the overriding theme feels true not only to contemporary Nigeria (though of course I cannot expertly judge this), but also more generally to human experience: two cultures at war must learn to balance each other out, respectfully and without a hunger for dominance.
Adichie’s second novel was a departure. Half of a Yellow Sun, which appeared three years ago, is an extraordinary chronicle of the Biafran war, viewed through the households of two sisters, Olanna and Kainene, twins brought up in a privileged family in Lagos. At the start of the book, Olanna is about to come to Nsukka to live (somewhat scandalously) with her boyfriend, a revolutionary professor named Odenigbo; and we see her arrival through the eyes of Ugwu, a village boy who has just started work as Odenigbo’s houseboy. (It appears that in Nigeria in the 1960s even revolutionaries had servants.) Kainene, who has assumed the son’s traditional role of tending the family business, becomes involved with Richard, a white Englishman who has come to Nigeria to write a book about Igbo pottery. After two coups lead to genocidal violence against the Igbo by the Muslim Hausa, Biafra declares independence, and Adichie’s characters devote themselves in different ways to the cause.
The shock of Biafra was, of course, its intra-racial brutality: a civil war only seven years after independence in which blacks were killing other blacks. In an essay called “The African Writer and the Biafran Cause,” Achebe declared that “Biafra stands in opposition to the murder and rape of Africa by whites and blacks alike because she has tasted both and found them equally bitter. No government, black or white, has the right to stigmatize and destroy groups of its own citizens without undermining the basis of its own existence.” As Adichie’s characters witness these atrocities, they undergo a heartbreaking loss of innocence. Olanna, who happens to be visiting her aunt and uncle in the northern Hausa city of Kano when the violence breaks out, is protected by her Muslim ex-boyfriend, but discovers that her relatives were killed by a Hausa man who had been their friend. During her nightmarish journey home, seated on the urine-soaked floor of a train car packed with terrified refugees, she meets a woman who is carrying the severed head of her young daughter in a calabash, her hair still braided in neat plaits. “Do you know,” the woman tells her, “it took me so long to plait this hair? She had such thick hair.”
The novel gently navigates the era’s racial politics, particularly in the character of Richard, the Englishman who, after falling in love with Kainene, learns to speak fluent Igbo and will proudly identify himself as a Biafran. To win the acceptance of the surprised Igbo he encounters, he repeats to them a native proverb: one’s brother may come from a different land. He identifies far more with Kainene and her family than with the other English expats, whose racism ranges from latent to blatant. One of the book’s most hateful characters is his ex-girlfriend, who threw jealous fits when he talked to white women at parties but did not care if he flirted with black women, whom she did not view as competition. When the violence begins, she says that the Igbo had it coming, “with their being so clannish and uppity and controlling the markets. Very Jewish, really.” Richard himself, it turns out at the book’s end, is not immune to unconscious racism.
Despite all Richard’s efforts, he can never completely eradicate the differences between himself and the native Biafrans--nor, the novel suggests, should he be able to do so. As the war grows particularly bleak, Kainene’s friend Colonel Madu encourages Richard to write articles for Western newspapers about the situation in Biafra. Richard is at first indignant: “You would not have asked me if I were not white.” “Of course I asked because you were white,” Madu replies. “They will take what you write more seriously because you are white. Look, the truth is that this is not your war. This is not your cause. Your government will evacuate you in a minute if you ask them to…. If you really want to contribute, this is the way that you can. The world has to know the truth of what is happening, because they simply cannot remain silent while we die.” The fact that Biafra is not Richard’s war, not his cause, is brought home by his final inability to write his book. “The war isn’t my story to tell, really,” he says near the end. It will be told by others.
Half of a Yellow Sun--the title comes from the symbol of Biafra, on its flags and army uniforms--is not only a political novel. To be sure, it takes a strong political stance; no one could come away from this book unsure of which side Adichie supports. But its primary focus, which guards it from didacticism, is on the human experience of the war. As Biafra starves--its roads and its ports were blockaded by the British-backed Nigerian army--Olanna is reduced to begging for powdered egg yolk to feed her ailing daughter. Meanwhile, children all around her succumb to kwashiorkor, the disease of protein deficiency whose sufferers are marked by their bloated bellies, pale skin, and reddish hair. We feel Olanna’s terror as her little girl’s hair falls out in fuzzy tufts as she combs it, and her relief later as her daughter’s skin darkens once more. (At the height of the famine, it was reported that five thousand to eight thousand people, most of them children, died every day.)
