The Thing Around Your Neck

The Thing Around Your Neck comprises up of twelve short stories

portraying a coterie of characters from Nigeria exploring Africanism,
what it means to be Nigerian. The characters are young to old, single
women, married women, young boys and men. Nigerian identity is
central to the stories and they constitute a study into the nature of men
and his relation tothe physical environment. The stories by large have a
similar setting and portray Nigeria during General Abacha’s
militaryregime. The stories are built upon a wide a range of themes and
ideas presenting domestic nuances to political upheaval. Some of the
broader themes include: marriage, conjugal relationships and infidelity,
gender dynamics, power equation, identity crisis, wealth and poverty,
cultural hybridity, immigration and migration. Though there are other
themes from social life and doings as well.

These stories feature individuals and their subjective experiences

over a short period of time raising the issues of existence and Nigerian
identity. Adichie often extrapolates from individual narratives a broader
Nigerian identity. She constantly involves the perspective of time as in
the story A Private Experience; uses characters without a name positing
them as representative of African characters as in Jumping Monkey Hill;
she uses multiple modes of narration to tell the story from different
perspectives.

Background and Context of the stories

Adichie’s works seek toexplore the experience of being African

and that too being a member of Igbo tribe in particular. She is a follower
of Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka as far as her draft is considered.
Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel, Things Fall Apart, opened the magic
casement of African Fiction and set a path for s series of writers to ensue.
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His novel constitutes a powerful study of the impact of British
colonisation on Igbo culture and people. Adichie pursues this trend set by
Achebe in his works. She too is an Igbo but like Achebe chose English to
be the medium of her writings. Interestingly, she once lived in the same
Achebe lived, and it is Chinua Achebe as a writer who has most
influenced her art.

The settings in the stories of The Thing Around Your Neck

encompass real places and events. Nearly half the stories are set in
African and the rest half in America, where she lived and studied for a
long part of her life.

Most of these are set in Nigerian (with the exception of “Jumping

Monkey Hill”, which is set near Cape Town), cities of Kano, Lagos and
Nsukka. Nigeria by far is a large country in the west of Africa. It is a
developing country with a high rate of population growth. The area was
colonised by British in around 1800 s and was part of the British Empire
until 1960, when British left making it a republic.

Kano, Nssuka, Lagos are the three main cities of Nigeria which
Adichie uses as a background for her stories. Kano is heavily and densely
populated, housing largely Hausa Muslims. The Hausa community and
their language of the same name is one of the main Nigerian languages. It
is also capital of Kano State, cultivation of groundnuts is the main
business of Hausa people. Adichie pictures this is in “A Private
Experience” where a Hausa woman’s daughter sells the main commercial
products of the territory.

Nsukka on the other hand is a small city in Enugu State in South

Nigeria. It is principally anIgbo-speaking and Igbo dominated area, and
home to the University of Nigeria, where Adichie’s parents were in
employment and several of her characters are portrayed living their

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livelihood; for example, the father in ‘Cell One’James Nwoye, and
Ikenna in “Ghosts.” Nsukka was also the prominent town in the defected
Biafra, one of the first sites of conflict during the war, and a centre of the
insurgency. When Nigerian forces regained the town from Biafran armies
they burnt the university down in antagonism which Adichie recollects in
“Ghosts”.

Lagos is the third major principality of Nigeria located in the south

of Nigeria, in Lagos State and on the coast where the Gulf of Guinea
meets the continent. It is the largest Nigerian city by population and also
one of the largest African cities. For most of the twentieth century, Lagos
was the nation’s capital prior to being replaced by Abuja. It still remains
the most important Nigerian city from commercial point and trading
centre.

Adichie strongly opposes Nigeria to recognised as Africa and has

at length discussed differences between African nations and Nigeria in
the article “Our “Africa” Lenses” written in 2006, and even in her fiction
(for example, in “Jumping Monkey Hill”). She emphasizes the need of
referring to Nigeria with its singular identity and to be recognised
singularly with African.

Nigeria and its Politics

During the colonial era British administered the area imposing an

artificial sense of nationalism and homogeneity to diverse geographic,
religious and ethnic partsof West Africa under their dominion and when
they left they gave the territory a name and mixed ethnic status. They did
not took into consideration the ethnic borders while drafting political
borders of the country, which complicated the problems of the area
bringing the ethnic and religious communities into direct conflict which
was the only cause of insurgency in Nigeria.

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 Nigeria is populated by hundreds of different ethnic groups. The
three largest of these, the Hausa–Fulani, Yoruba and Igbo constitute the
majority of the Nigerian population, and are time and again mentioned in
the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck. Though most of the
characters are Igbo like Adichie herself. The two major religions which
equally divide Nigerian population are Christianity and Islam. These
religious divisions somewhat align with the geographical distribution of
their population with the North largely being Muslim and the South
Christian. Some of the tribal religions are also practised by people most
important of them being the Igbo community. However, most Igbo people
are Christian their Christianity is one blended with Igbo beliefs and
traditions.

Nigeria has a history of internal conflict, the most impacting of

them being the Nigerian civil war or the so called Nigerian Biafra War
(1967–70). In late 1960s many of the provinces in the south of formed an
alliance declaring the formation of the Republic of Biafra. Biafra existed
for less than three years causing serious hardship and misery to Igbo
community leaving them devastated. More than a million people are
believed to have died and several generations have borne the wounds of
the defection and war.

Literary Writings in Africa and Nigeria

1980s onwards the Nigerian and African writings have gained

impetus and the writers a place for them in the larger body of Western
writers. Authors such as Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer and J.M.
Coetzee have been Nobel laureates and the Man Booker Prize has been
granted to several African writers. These writers greatly modify the
English literary cannot and continues to bemodified by a new generation
of writers in the English language.

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 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie belongs to the newer generation of
writers, who are constantly reshaping and renewing the literatures of
Africaat the same time influencing the literature globally. Adichie is by
now the most talked aboutand read African writers on the world literary
stage. She stands as a continuator of the works of Chinua Achebe
considered being the father of African literature. She herself accepts that
reading Achebe meant discovering for her African stories where “girls
with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could notform
ponytails” (Adichie, n) could also become part of literature.

While studying her writing it has to be taken into account that

Achebe’s stories had a massive influence on her narrative, her personal
and individual style was inspired by Achebe’s writings. Her first two
novels Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) are both
set in her Nigeria following the footsteps of Achebe while her collection
of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), is set partly in
Nigeria and partly in the United States. Her later novel, Americanah, too
has a similar setting and feature America, Britain and Nigeria in
succession. Adichie’s works record an experience that she registered over
the years commuting between these places as she explains in “The Writer
as Two Selves”:

Citizenship goes beyond a mere passport, it is a sensibility…

Citizenship for a person like me, from a country like Nigeria, in a
continent like Africa,is not just a sensibility, it is also a condition.
A condition that arises frombeing what I like to call ‘inhabitants of
the periphery’. And what do I mean by ‘inhabitants of the
periphery?’ I am not merely referring to political expressions like
‘Third World’, but to the phenomenon of being outside of the
centre in ways more subtle than mere politics, in ways

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 metaphysical and psychological… We are a people conditioned by
our history and by our place in the world to look somewhere else
for validation.

Paul Bandia in one of his recent works, “Translocation:

Translation, Migration and the Relocation of Cultures,” highlights that
African writers need to “translocate” in order to be admired in the West:

For me, ‘translocation’ is a reality in the writing practice of

peripheral orminority literature to seek a space within the global
literary context. It is notjust a matter of choosing in what language
to write. Themes, writing style, trends and, in some cases, physical
movement or displacement are important.(Bandia, 150)

Adichie blends the personal and the political doings in her writing
and her collection of short stories The Thing Around Your Neck,
recuperates the diaspora experience. She accepts that she consciously
started identifying as African only after her stay in USA. Radhakrishnan
explains this as a phenomenal rebirth: the immigrant’s “naturalization
into American citizenship simultaneously minoritizes her identity. She is
now reborn as an ethnic minority American citizen.” (121) Adichie
experienced in US that the Western world holds a single story of Africa’s
identity—that too drenched in racism. This portrayal of the Africa
prevents people from outside from seeing an African “as equally human.”
(2008: 45) Consequently, Adichie writes to counter these stereotypes. Her
characters are educated, lead comfortable lives, and enjoy luxuries. These
qualities may make them look non-African. It is here, where she breaks
away from the tradition Nigerian writers, thus constituting for her a new
generation of writers. Adichie portrays diverse faces of Africa presenting
a more real and truthful picture of the African and more precisely
Nigerian society of her days. She says when asked about Achebe’s

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characterisation that, “Achebe’s characters were nothing like me and
lived without the things that I saw as the norm in my life: cars, electricity
and telephones.” (2008: 42)

Diasporic characters

Adichie’s own experience forms the backbone of her diasporic

stories. She initially started writing under the westernized name Amanda
N. Adichie, but later changed it her Igbo one, and in her works we meet
the diasporic characters who re-name themselves to assimilate into the
Western culture giving up their fostered suppression of ethnicity. Adichie
presents a fine example of this suppression of ethnicity in one of her short
story in The Thing Around Your Neck titled, “The Arrangers of
Marriage.”

The story is narrated by a young Nigerian woman, Chinaza Oka

for, who marries Ofodile Udenwa and moves to US. The man is an
authoritarian and a successful doctor in US. Living in US he prefers
himself to be called Dave and has even changed his last name to Bell
because the Americans did not find it easy to go with Udenwa. He even
compels Chinaza, his wife, to adapt herself to the American way of life,
and even forces her to change her name to Agatha Bell:

You don’t understand how it works in this country. If you want to

get anywhere you have to be as mainstream as possible. If not, you
will be left by the roadside. You have to use your English name
here.” (The Arrangers of Marriage, 172)

Adichie brings forth the hypocrisy of such Nigerian people. Dave

is in all praise of American culture and civilisation and tries to assimilate
to the American way of life as swiftly as he can and is all set to pay a

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price for the same—by completely abolishing his African and Nigerian
identity. He constrained Chinaza to speak Igbo and cook Nigerian food:

“This is not like Nigeria, where you shout out to the conductor,” he
said, sneering, as though he was the one who had invented the
superior American system. (173)

Adichie reveals the dichotomy between the American system and

the Igbo tradition presenting her diasporic characters denouncing their
own cultural and ancestral attitudes assimilating the western style of
living. This trait often marks the character’s role in the narrative. In The
Thing Around Your Neck, Adichie presents the American too like the
African. The titled story “The Thing Around Your Neck” is narrated in
second-person, Adichie recollects the encounters that Akunna faces after
winning the visa lottery. Contrarily, to the “The Arrangers of Marriage”
Akunna embraces her Igbo origin and traditions, but her uncle forces her
to adopt the western way of life. Adichie brings out the disappointment
that Akunna faces on realising that America is quite different from what
she had perceived:

You thought everybody in America had a car and a gun; your

uncles and aunts and cousins thought so… Right after you won the
American visa lottery, they told you: In a month, you will have a
big car. Soon, a big house. But don’t buy a gun like those
Americans. (115)

Her dream of a pleasant and memorable stay in America is

thwarted by a volley of nonsensical questions about her learning English,
if she has a real house in Nigeria. Her Uncle, who had registered her
name for the Visa lottery, too changed when in America. Instead of
supporting her, he tries to rape her citing a pretext that, this what smart
women do all the time in America: “The trick was to understand

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America, to know that America was give-and-take. You gave up a lot, but
you gained a lot, too.” (116) Akunna runs away to Connecticut leaving
him, she takes the job of a waitress’s for two dollars less than other
employees. The American dream is shattered into pieces. She can no
more afford school, lives in a dingy room, and sends money back home
every month. “At night, something would wrap itself around your neck,
something that nearly choked you before you fell asleep.” (119) she is
filled with remorse and shame at her pitiable condition so much so that
she cannot face anyone in person. The fanciful vision and dreams of
America that she had collected over the years disperse beneath the weight
of disappointment and oppression she faced owing to being from a
different culture, and she feels repentance for disowning her own cultural
and familial bonds and a weight of remorse hanging around her neck so
much so that she even stops speaking to anybody.

Kamara, the protagonist of “On Monday of Last Week” (another

short story included in “The Thing Around Your Neck”) also goes
through a similar series of bewildering experiences. She quickly gets
disheartened after joining her husband in Philadelphia and abandons her
Master’s degree for a baby sitting job that allows her to be with his
husband—Tobechi. Tobechi too shares a similar fate for himself after
moving to America with great hopes and facing disappointment instead:

America was about hard work, they both knew, and one would
make it if one was prepared to work hard. Tobechi would get to
America and find a job and work for two years and get a green card
and send for her. But two years passed, then four, and… Tobechi
could not send as much money as he wanted to because most of it
was going into what he called “sorting his papers”. Her aunties’

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 whisperings became louder and louder: What is that boy waiting
for? (84)

Tobechi’s failure in US, like Akunna’s in “The Thing Around Your

Neck”, turn out to be a great matter of disappointment for his entire
family and especially his wife. His family had expected him to be sending
more money back home than he really is sending.

Tobechi had come to America five years in advance to Kamara.

They were childhood friends and married just before Tobechi left for
America. Kamara stayed back teaching in Enugu for five years while
Tobechi was a taxi driver in Philadelphia. Kamra is a character
completely dependent on other and she look to Tobechi for her existence
and identity. Both of them had high hopes to achieve in American.
Instead, their life goes the other way, and America gives them the exact
opposite state. This leads them to disillusionment as their hopes of
America are crushed and their marriage ran into a crisis leaving Kamara
depressed. Kamara decided to get pregnant but a poor sexual life between
the two failed her dream leaving her increasingly depressed. As her
relation with Tobechi grew colder, Kamara needed someone to support
her as she herself isn’t autonomous and needed someone to define her.
Kamara always saw herself in the eye of the other and when Josh asks her
to model she feels privileged and taken care off. She dresses well so as to
impress Tracy and this expels some of her depression. But the excitement
of leading a happier life and realising that a relationship outside marriage
may make her happier did not last long. Kamara soon realises after the
episode of French tutor and Tracy. She again takes to eating and the story
ends leaving her dejected.

In another episode from the short story collection the protagonist of

“The American Embassy” narrates the humiliating experience on

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applying for a US asylum visa in Nigeria. The theme of disappointment is
multiplied by the dashed hopes and expectations of the protagonist:

Was she imagining it, or was the sympathy draining from the visa
interviewer’s face? She saw the swift way the woman pushed her
reddish-gold hair back even though it did not disturb her, it stayed
quiet on her neck, framing a pale face. Her future rested on that
face. The face of a person who did not understand her, who
probably did not cook with palm oil… She turned slowly and
headed for the exit. (141)

The narrator of the story has gone through tremendous violence

and lost her son, Ugonna was murdered a day before. She has come to
seek asylum and is not carried away by American Dream as the crowd in
the embassy. She can only think of her son, and the man behind her
expresses that Americans enjoy position and power at the cost of others—
like Nigerians.

The story has been set in violence by the government forces as we

find that the narrator’s husband had received a call from the authorities
stating that he would bearrested and killed. The narrator manages an
escape for her husband but three people come looking for him and kill her
son Ugonna. The narrator must use Ugonna story to influence others. She
finds it difficult to show her grief to an audience in order to preserve her
future. This scene is indicative of the hopelessness of the trust and
enigma the people have put in the notion of American dream.

The narrator pours great emphasis on family values and her

husband loves his work. She has given up her job of journalism so as to
raise a family and at the same time serve to reveal how women are placed
in the society and that they are expected to support a family. Contrarily
the narrator’s husband’s job ushers in disastrous consequences for the

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family. Alarmingly his job has brought about the violent and disastrous
death of their son.

Narrator’s act of approaching the American embassy to seek for

asylum signifies that American Dream if not really very lucrative and
also highlight the fact that despite hopelessness the power of America and
safety it promises. Ugonna’s death is a personal and private tragedy.
Waiting for her turn for interview the narrator realises that her true
identity lies around being Ugonna’s mother. She finally decides to live
with this identity and overlooking the threat to her life and fear of death
and decides to stay back preferring family and love over an American
Visa and spend the days planting flowers on Ugonna’s grave instead of
using the threat to her life for getting an American Visa.

The titled story “The Thing Around Your Neck” opens with
Akunna’s family thrilled with her having won the American lottery. They
are elated by the prospects of her going to America and envision that
soon she will have a big house and live a luxurious life in United States.
However, her arrival in America is marked by a completely opposite
realisation. This lead her to disillusionment presenting the lives of many
like her who travel to America anticipating the realisation of their dream
but find life moving the other way round. They enter into a direct
confrontation with their own culture, the American way of life, and the
political machinery controlling the scene from the background.

Adichie also presents a vivid description of the American dream.

Akunna and her family are completely ignorant of the life and physical
conditions of America, and thereby create a rich colourful picture of the
world in their minds, where every of their dream will come true; whereas,
Kamara fills her world with great anxiety finding so many options and
alternative resources. We also meet Nkem who lives in perceptible luxury

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in Philadelphia, in ironic contrast to Chianza and Akunna who live close
to poverty.

Adichie through the portrayal of Nkem surfaces the futility of

living a luxurious life in mansions, driving luxury cars, and living in a
false impression that their life is comfortable and a happy one. She
explores the real happiness that one can find shedding false ideals and
notions in light of more rational thought, rather a sense of belongingness
and community among ones people and class. The American Dream is
not simple confined to moving to and/or living in America it is rather the
realisation of the truth of life and needs to be supplemented by living in
harmony.

Adichie’s female characters show more anxiety as far as the failure

of American Dream is concerned. She, also, draws attention to the fact
that men are treated with greater respect in Nigeria than in America.
While in America they work hard in an attempt to secure a brighter future
for them as well as their families, despite this characters like Ofodile and
Tobechi fail in materialising their dreams and thus contribute more to
worries. On the other hand, women like Chinaza and Kamara try their
very best to adapt to American standards of living, yet fall short of the
expectations of their adaptability and the standards of life that they have
initially thought to have achieved in America. This adds up to the
depression and disillusionment they multiply living in America. Thus, we
confront both men and women who came to America with big dreams of
life and future prosperity but fail miserably to adapt them completely into
foreign standards of living and only end up in distress and agony.

Adichie puts the scene best in the mouth of the embassy narrator
who finally decides to drop the idea of asylum and prefers to stay back in

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Nigeria symbolising that the strength and the extent of American dream is
unattainable.

Adichie’s characters also reflect the complexities of the diasporic

experience and the evolving relation between individuals and nationhood.
Her writings recreate the idea of national belongingness, as she
problematizes the conceptualisation of the American Dream and
expectations related to achieving it. Bundled with migrant’s experiences,
her characters turn reminiscent towards home and Nigeria appears in their
reconstructed memories as a place where they need to return to seek
salvation and fulfilment of their unfulfilled dreams—as is the case with
her as well.

In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Imitation”, Obiora sends his

wife and children to Philadelphia in the United States of America. He
cites that there are better schools in US. This implies that the socio-
political condition of Nigeria is such that it is unable to provide proper
education and livelihood to its citizens. Obiora’s wife describes America
as a:

… country of curiosities and crudities, this country where you

could drive at night and not fear armed robbers, where restaurants
served one person enough food for three.

… America has grown on her snaked its roots under her skin. (37)

This pictures the luxurious life that Nkem has become used to
living while in America. Though, she is reminiscent of her Nigerian roots
but she grimly recalls her days of poverty and fells content realising that
her fate is not in line with the majority of Nigerian population. This
contrast in the portrayal of social condition of Nigeria presents the
readers a grin picture of the inability of the nation and its governance to

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heed to the major problem of the citizens over a lond period of
independence and self-rule.

“Imitation” on the other hand presents the loneliness and insecurity

of living in America, which comes much near to otherisation of the non-
American community. The story replaces glamour of America with
despair and even a feeling of dissatisfaction from one’s own self. Adichie
portrays that America is no more able to absorb the immigrants and the
real problem of their failure is the absence of a friendly atmosphere and
comradeship. Nkem, finally, vows to return back to Lagos despite all the
comfort of a luxurious life and the riches that America has to offer her
family. She concludes,

“We are moving back at the end of the school year. We are moving
back to stay in Lagos. We are moving back.” She speaks slowly to
convince him, to convince herself as well.

… We can spend holidays here, together” (41).

The story describes her failure to adapt herself to America and

American way of life. She suffers mentally throughout the time she stays
in America. The readers are moved by the pain and suffering she endures
and her harsh decision which Obiora finds insensitive and callous. The
visions and the dream of a happy and prosperous life lived in America
with family is short-lived for her and she concludes that, “There is
nothing left to talk about.” (42)

“The Shivering” presents the desolation of Africans living in

America and their uncertain lives. Chinedu says:

I am out of status. My visa expired three years ago. This apartment

belongs to a friend… I am going to get a deportation notice from
Immigration anytime soon. Nobody at home knows my real

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 situation. I haven’t been able to send them much since I lost my
construction job.” (163)

The way Chinedu has been presented living in United States of

America is representative of lives of similar other Nigerians living in
illegally in America. There is another interesting character Ukamaka who
supports Chinedu to continue living in a similar way as she ensures him,
“You are not going to be deported, Chinedu. We will find a way. We
will…” (165). Chinedu is elated at the prospect and carries on his life in
hiding. This form of life leaves them mentally imbalanced and physically
intricate. Ukamaka in the long run is adding to his misery rather than
providing something beneficial for his growth and future.

The success of Adichie’s stories lie in interconnecting the

migrants’ life to their Nigerian roots. Braga and Gonçalves express finely
that:

They have ambiguous recollections of Nigeria: on the one hand,

Nigeria lacks jobs, university opportunities and equality between
sexes; on the other hand, it is the familiar territory in which they
know how to face adversities. In a state of permanent hesitation,
they wish to stay in the United States and return to Africa at the
same time (Braga & Gonçalves, 2).

Adichie’s diasporic characters narrate fictional identities within the

fragmented identities and discourses. She employs the idea of
belongingness towards national identity in order to accommodate these
displaced individuals, who canno longer be seen as a “compound of
separate, constructed national identities” (Braga & Gonçalves, 2014). She
thus illuminate the challenges faced by the nation and the people of
Nigeria seeking to find their national as well as their individual identity
both within in and beyond national boundaries.

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Postcolonial concerns

The postcolonial theory and its praxis have gained ground over
the last few years. There is no definite range in which postcolonial theory
can be expanded into; actually the prefix post leaves the term to be
interpreted infinitely. Writers often go beyond the primary structure of
history to create a discourse that reflects the cultural inequalities
inaugurated as a result ofa colonial encounter. Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie is one such writer from Nigeria. Her stories present a shift from
postcolonial concerns focusing on a new order with themes as diverse as
in Jumping Monkey Hill, which portray the problems faced by young
writers; or the Identity crisis as in The Arrangers of Marriage.

Adichie uses stories as a powerful medium to voice the

oppression, suffering, exploitation, and regional prejudices in a socially
and politically dynamic society. These writers express in their voices the
loss to arts and culture caused by oppression of the colonizers. Texts by
these writers are thus seen as a piece of postcolonial literature as they
account for the loss and damage to language, society, and culture.
Further, literatures by these writers, like Adichie, do not limit itself to
postcolonial theory and is open to numerous interpretations.

Placing these writers in the postcolonial cannon does not imply

that they have been a party to, or have witnessed colonial rule, instead
their constraint of theme and representation make them postcolonial.
These writers do not transcend the colonial rule in their writings, they just
happen to present reflections of the rule in form of their writings. Both
colonial and postcolonial readings are based on differentiating the power
equation as presented in the world portrayed by these writers, the
demarcation betwixt the two is very thin and may not conform to political
history. Adichie’s short stories transcend the boundaries of postcolonial

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discourse. They present an authentic cultural voice where we “share a
common and equal humanity,” said Adichie in a lecture. (Commonwealth
Lecture)

Judie Newman says, “When colonialism ends writers must have

the freedom to write about trees or love.” (Newman) this freedom
constitutes a response to political and social happenings of the
contemporary scene. The image of Africa that Adichie presents conforms
to the demands of the new cosmopolitan audience. She absorbs the recent
advancements and progress that has taken place to be absorbed in the new
social fabric of the day. She finely merges the old and the new in a
system that is beneficial for the both new and the old. Chinua Achebe
expresses this state as:

So important have stories been to mankind that they are not

restricted to accounts of initial creation but will be found following
human societies as they recreate themselves through vicissitudes of
their history, validating their social organisations, their political
systems, their moral attitudes and religious beliefs, even their
prejudices ... but they also serve to sanction change when it can no
longer be denied. At such critical moments new versions of old
stories or entirely fresh ones tend to be brought into being to
mediate the changes and sometimes to consecrate opportunistic
defections into more honourable rites of passage. (Achebe, 163)

Adichie in her stories follow the footsteps set by his forerunner,

she tells her tale from the notion that art has a purpose and that she
contributes to art through this canon established by Chinua Achebe. She
establishes the utility of literature in terms of social and political motifs,
achieving coherence in her narratives. Adichie opines that stories are
defined by the principle of power as, “How they are told, who tells them,

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when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on
power… Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person,
but to make it the definitive story of that person.” (Adichie, The Danger
of a Single Story)

Her short stories encompass diverse themes ranging from war to

peace. We get a glimpse of Biafra War in “A Private Experience”and
“Ghosts”; modern Nigeria reeling in corruption and adding to misery of
its citizens in “Cell One”, “The American Embassy”, and “The
Shivering”; Nigeria’s past in “The Headstrong Historian”, and about
African writers in “Jumping Monkey Hill.”

These stories apprehend the reader with the power equation of the
day, this not being of the coloniser and the colonised, but of a new
power—the economy (in terms of financial power). We come across in a
number of her stories and even novels whose characters are planning an
escape to America to fulfil their dreams in an attempt to embrace the
economic power of America. “The American Embassy” stands tall in this
series of stories followed by “The Shivering” and “The Arranger of
Marriages.” These stories portray ordinary people with their extra
ordinary confrontations thwarting their dreams, hopes, strive and seek.
They rather nurture a sense of helplessness and defeat at the hands of fate
diving into catastrophic and cataclysmic decay.

Adichie recognises common men and women with their frailties

and maintains:

I’ve always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a

place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that
place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It
robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal

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 humanity difficult. It emphasises how we are different rather than
how we are similar. (Adichie, The Danger of a Single Story)

The “Jumping Monkey Hill,” finely narrates the tensions between

the western view of Africa and what African actually is. Ujunwa travels
to attend a writers’ seminar in Cape Town which is conducted by
Edward, a British who is born and brought up in England and has earned
an expertise on African Studies and considers him to be more
knowledgeable on matters concerning African than any of the natives. He
exercises power and authority over the participants of the seminar and
tells the women in the seminar that their stories about Africa are false and
proceeds to decide what stories of Africa are real and knowledgeable
ones. This way Edward constructs a false image of Africa by accepting
the unreal stories as true and supressing the real stories that honestly
portray Africa.

Writers from Kenya, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Nigeria

attend the workshop presided by a British Lecturer. They were asked to
write a story, the same was to be reviewed by the other. Edward praises a
story on killing in the Congo over Ujunwa’s story of a Nigerian girl
seeking for a job. Edward dismisses Ujunwa’s writing as “agenda
Writing” (109) and calls the other story as “Urgent and relevant.” (115)

The story Ujunwa writes is least postcolonial and deals with the
present day theme and nuances. Edward’s inability to have feelings for
the African sentiments is a highlighting point and something in the story
that casts shadows of colonial rule which never considered Africans as
human beings and gave them an existence and meaning as per their
desires. The cultural violence that once Edward’s forefathers performed is
revived in form of Edward’s act of assigning meaning to African
landscape which is confirmed by Ujunwa’s closing views, “There were

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other things that Ujunwa wanted to say, but she did not say them.” (114)
It unearths European misconceptions and emphasizes the points that need
to re-examined in light of better argument rather than hypocrisy.

Isabel also shares with her husband—Edward—false impressions

about Africa and its people. Looking at “exquisite bone structure,” and
good “looks” (99) of Ujunwa she concludes that Ujunwa must have come
from royal blood of Nigeria. This suggests that Isabela terms all Africans
as Ugly and nurtures the view that they are barbarians. Edward always
looked at Ujunwa with a sexual intent as he is filling of superiority
complex as he, “would never look at a white woman like that because
what he felt for Ujunwa was a fancy without respect” (109).

Their dismissal of realistic stories in lieu of stories dealing with

violence implies that uphold false ideals about Africa. Adichie in
“Jumping Monkey Hill” discloses the gulf between, Africans and whites.
The white guests at “Jumping Monkey Hill” looking at Black people
suspicion; Edward dismissal of true stories about Africa epitomises racial
discrimination and the treatment of Africans as the “Other”. This calls for
a greater understanding and respect for a social integration between the
races.

Adichie’s registers a thematic shift to history in “The

Headstrong Historian.” The story pictures Nigeria of the past days
which was being converted to a Christian community by the missionaries
in the upper Niger delta. It presents a strong women character—
Nwamgba—portrayed by Adichies.

Nawamgba’s is married to Obierika and she suffers from several

miscarriages, until their first son Anikwanwa was born. Obierika soon
dies being poisoned, and Nwamgba suspects his cousins for Obierika’s
death over a land dispute, she fears the same fate for Anikwanwa. In

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order to save his son she sent him to school learning the Christian faith.
Anikwanwa grew up and married a Christian woman called Mgbeke, he
soon was baptised as Michael. He had three children; two sons and a
daughter called grace, which Nwamgba names Afamefuna, as she feels
that her husband Obierika’s spirit has returned. Afamefuna grows up
witnessing her grandmother’s adapthands at pottery and her father’s
contempt for traditional Igbo way of living. She goes to a Christian
school where once she read a chapter in history class titled, “The
Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of Southern Nigeria” written by a
British administrator. She gets disturbed to read the chapter and it
compels her, to “make a clear link between education and dignity,
between the hard, obvious things that are printed in books and the soft,
subtle things that lodge themselves into the soul.” (216) She is disturbed
by the mention of destroyed villages and decides to sift through archives
and find the truth. She writes “Pacifying with Bullets: A Reclaimed
History of Southern Nigeria.”

This story about empowerment and change that has come over
the years in Nigeria questions whether it is possible for a person to rise
and be successful without uprooting himself from his cultural roots.
Anikwenwa progresses as a result of English education which results he
being uprooted from his own culture. He even compels to convert to
Christianity. This gathers moss as we learn that Anikwenwa regains their
land and comes to Nwambga with papers that say the land stolen by
Okafo and Okoye belongs to her.

The themes of acceptance and loss are dominant throughout the

story and appear to be two sides of the same coin. This story enumerates
the mental and emotional hardships that a race went through in order to
save themselves from the hands of oppressors who were neither aware of

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their culture nor ever tried to understand it. The head strong historian who
pursue towards the end to study and save African culture does signal
some hope of survival and concord between the old and the modern world
view.

The surface story of “Imitation” discloses the complex

relationship of Nkem and her husband Obiora. Obiora has a girlfriend in
Lagos, Nigeria and has kept his wife Nkem in Philadelphia. Adichie here
presents the fortunate class of Nigeria where the wives are living in USA
for a brighter future of their children, whereas men travel freely between
Nigeria and USA on business trips and enter into multiple amorous and
extra-marital affairs. Obiora initially stayed in Philadelphia with Nkem
for a few months and afterwards visited her yearly, she has two children.
Contrarily Obiora’s girlfriend is of a different disposition; she considers
all men alike and takes things lightly. Fed up with Obiora’s living style
Nkem finally decides to return to Lagos.

When Obiora bought the Benin masks he told Nkem how:

...the British had stolen original masks in the late 1800s during
what they called the Punitive Expedition; how the British had had a
way of using words like “expedition” and “pacification” for killing
and stealing. The masks...were regarded as “war booty” and were
now displayed in museums all over the world. (25)

Nkem realises that human heads were used to bury kings and the people,
“The people who had to kill for their king. I’m sure they wished they
could change the way things were, they couldn’t have been happy.” (40)

The story presents Nkem’s response in difficult times when she

learns about the disloyalty of her husband. This complex nature is
heightened by Obiora’s status of living in Nigerian and Nkem as an

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immigrant in USA. Thereby, the story also reflects the false ideals that
the people of third world countries are continuously cherishing about the
luxuries and comforts of American life.

African History in The Thing Around Your Neck

Adichie’s fiction constitutes an honest and reliable portrayal of the

history of Nigeria as well as the brutalities of colonialization. She follows
the footsteps of Achebe who in Things Fall Apart has beautifully and
honestly portrayed the pursuance of cultural eccentricities, like the killing
of Ifemelu, despite knowing the fact that these are wrong. The loot of
Africa and the division of the continent between themselves proved
disastrous for the natives. European divided the continent bisecting the
tribal boundaries as per their economic interests these divisions led to
wars and mutual armed conflicts. The Biafra war is the direct result of
this treatment on part of the Europeans, and the literature produced in
Nigeria since then has been pre-eminently influenced by this man-made
cataclysm.

The story “A Private Experience” presents a Hausa and an Igbo

women who find shelter in an abandoned place as communal riots break
out owing to a Christian-Muslim clash. These two women find comfort
betwixt their company unmindful of the death of their family members in
the ensuing riots. At the same time “Ghosts” picture the University of
Nigeria that was burned down by the Nigerian soldiers after the Biafra
War. The forces has evacuated the University campus and themselves
occupied it. People returned back to life as normalcy was restored after
the war to find their houses destroyed and their belongings looted.
Adichie portrays the tough time that people had in an attempt to
accommodate the losses and rebuild their houses, what was left of the old
days now were only memories. “Cell One” has in its accounts the modern

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day Nigeria with its reeling corruption and an inconsiderate government
in power. “The American Embassy” on the other hand presents an
escaping exigency in the country where the people are fleeing the country
to West in an expectation to find better jobs and life. The same rejection
and ejection towards Nigerian life is also portrayed in “The Arranger of
Marriages.”Adichie presents the hardships that the people had to face
while attempting to immigrate to foreign lands. She also presents the
apprehensions that arise due to different laws and fear deportation as in
“The Shivering.” The lady seeking asylum in USA in “The American
Embassy” prefers to stay back and plant ixora flowers on his son’s grave,
while others return owing to guilt feeling as the narrator of “Tomorrow is
too Far.” The American Dream of Nigerian people come out shattered
and let down. America which has been presented as a land of,
“unreasonable hope” (26), a “country of curiosities” (37) as in
“Imitation,” changes to a, “mixture of ignorance and arrogance” (116) in
“The Thing Around Your Neck.”

“The Headstrong Historian” picturises the o Igbo History from

the pre-colonial through the colonial to modern times. The advent of
Christianity, the introduction of western education, the rise of colonial
empire, the fight against oppressing forces, the quest for political
freedom, and the greater dejection and disorientation of masses and races
all are pictured with honesty and parted just referral. The portrayal of
Nwamgba and the cousin of her husband, the three generations of
Obierika and Nwamgba, Michael and Agnes and Grace and Peter present
glimpses of the Nigerian social history from old traditional to modern
times through colonial rule and its impact of the culture and civilisation.
“The Headstrong Historian” thus encapsulates the themes of clash, the
zeal of Christian converts, the pre-colonial Igbo society and their religion,

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their system of justice, belief system, myth and legends. Grace’s return to
her grandmother portrays a feeling of realisation about their cultural roots
of the modern generation—for Grace are a Christian and her grandmother
a pagan. This also presents the absorption and the acceptance of the new
religion by the old and Vicé versa. Grace’s role in the story reflects a new
social order where the new generation is returning to African ways of life
and culture, and if this return is not complete yet it is marked by a
vehement adoption and amalgamation betwixt the old and the new and
Vicé versa. The movement, Negritude, which sought to restore the dignity
and beauty of blackness also find mention in the story in form of
Nwamgba’s rejection of husband—a Cambridge scholar.

The Thing Around Your Necksketches the Nigerian Civil War and
corruption that was rampant in the country in those days. The civil has
been a major theme dealt with in the stories and novels of Adichie, both
of the novels Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus, it is mentioned
continuously, and also constitutes the subject of the story “Ghosts”.

“Ghosts” presents a completely differently picture of war than the

one available in Adichie’s fiction. It enumerates the innumerable
suffering of the people and their survival. The colossal human sufferings
led men into disbelief and loss of hope as Adichie recollects in her story:

… we hardly talked about the war. When we did, it was with an

implacable vagueness, as if what mattered were not that we had
crouched in muddy bunkers during air raids after which we buried
corpses with bits of pink on their charred skin, not that we had
eaten cassava peels and watched our children’s bellies swell from
malnutrition, but that we had survived. (73)

Ekwensi’s Survive the Peace also reveals the difficulties of

surviving the peace which turned out to be more miserable than the war

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itself. The years that followed the war left people into poverty and
disease, inflation rose higher day by day, and the corrupt Nigerian
government added to the misery of the people feeding them fake
medicines, depriving them of pensions and salaries for month after the
war, whereas the government officials at high posts continued to enjoy
luxuries ate the cost of its humble citizens who were left powerless and
weakened. The aftermath of the civil war with all its sufferings, deaths,
monumental greed, fraud, graft and unequalled corruption continued to
rise steadily to unimaginable heights.

Professor James Nwoye and Ikenna Okaro meet in Nsukka campus

of the University. James was of the opinion that Ikenna died during the
civil war invasion of the university by the Nigerian forces. Ikenna in act
has moved to Sweden with his family and worked to muster support for
Biafra from Europe. He left for Sweden on a Red Cross plane a month
after the evacuation of the University. His family died at when Orlu was
bombed, and thereby he did not return to Nigeria. James explains that he
and Ebere left for United States in 1970. When Ikenna asks about James
daughter he explains that she died in the war and he and Ebere had
another daughter in US after the war. When Ikemma asks about Ebere,
James tells that she has been dead three years, but visits him regularly to
massage him. This shocks Ikenna and he enquires if his daughter knows
this. James replies that is he’ll tell her daughter, who is a doctor in
Connecticut; she will call him to USA. They then contemplate what
would have been the scene today if they had won the war.

The apparition of Ebere is suggestive of the fact that James lives

with the burden of the civil war as he sees that the war robbed him of his
most precious possessions. In reality James connects him to his family
and community both dead and alive. It is apparent from the story that

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James has weaved a world of lies around him and he lives in them which
is the real cause of his sustenance. If his daughter doesn’t call he’ll go
back to his room to meet Ebere. Through these lies he maintains a
balances his own life and well-being. Further, it also serves as a means
for repentance for the ills that they all have been once party to. James’s
life is an epitome of the act that everyone who experienced the war lives
by the memories of the war in a similar way he lives. People may find
another recluse in life but the war is the real ghost that lives with their
lives and lives within them.

Adichie presents in “A Private Experience” the ethno-religious

violence that has been one of the most important issues in northern
Nigeria in recent times. The story of two girls, one Igbo Christian and
another Hausa Muslim, who seek shelter after a sudden spurt of ethnic
violence in Kano is sarcastically and humorously portrayed in the short
story. Adichie examines with humour and a nonsensical insight the
episode which led to the spurt of violence:

…it had all started at the Motor Park, when a man drove over a
copy of the Holy Koran that lay on the roadside, a man who
happened to be Igbo and Christian. The men nearby, men who sat
around all day playing draughts, men who happened to be Muslim,
pulled him out of his pickup truck, cut his head off with one flash
of a machete, and carried it to the market asking others to join in;
the infidel had desecrated the Holy Book. (46)

The narration is striking as it portrays people who indolent and

enjoy playing draughts entire day unless and until something abrupt
happens. When a, perhaps coincidental, driver who is an Igbo Christian
inadvertently drives his vehicle over Holy Koran these people playing
draughts who are Hausa Muslims sprang into action. Adichie beautifully

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portrays the mental bankruptcy of the people as they have no premediated
preparation about the acts they are going to involve themselves in and
enter into a spree of violence on account of no serious religious
disagreement. Adichie seems to establish that this action owes to poverty,
unemployment, as they sit and play draughts all day; ignorance and
illiteracy, as we are told that they suddenly sprang into action on account
of no insinuation. Adichie hints at the causes of recurring instances of
violence. Adichie honestly surfaces the absence of any reason of
whatsoever gravity for these violent acts. She candidly continues to
portray:

She will look at only one of the corpses, naked, stiff, facedown,
and it will strike her that she cannot tell if the partially burned man
is Igbo or Hausa, Christian or Muslim, from looking at the charred
flesh. She will listen to BBC and hear the accounts of deaths and
the riots – religious with undertones of ethnic tension. (53-4)

Adichie with sheer honest records the brutal, senseless, and

baseless happenings that plunge into a violent scene in country’s cultural
diversity and violent systems it has cherished over the years. Ironically in
a violence torn state the two women enter into a conversation about
motherhood.

Adichie’s narration reinforces the sense of separation between

people by presenting a disturbing account of the happenings around and
the way people are connected to one another. This disconnection is
proportional to the one portrayed in “Cell One,” where Nnamabia
narrates his experiences with excitement and as if it something unique.
There is clear portrayal that before the violence people of different
communities were existing in peace. Chika reflects at the act of violence
as an act of depression and a failure of political state of affairs. The

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women Chika meets seems to her as if she has been through several such
violent sprees. The differences between two communities have also been
brought out in the story seeking to establish that the socio-economic
reasons are the backbone of such nonsensical acts:

We are further told that: “Later Chika will read in The Guardian
“that reactionary Hausa-speaking Muslim in the North have a
history of violence against non-Muslims,” and in the middle of her
grief, she will stop to remember that she examined the nipples and
experienced the gentleness of a woman who is Hausa and Muslim.
(55)

This hate theory has been promoted by politicians and jingoists

who envisage keeping a permanent rift between the two communities so
as to get advantage of the same. Festus Iyayi in his Heroes has finely
narrated this theory as:

On this bridge, Ibo Soldiers lay dead in their numbers side by side
with Yoruba soldiers and Hausa soldiers and Esan soldiers and
their blood ran and flowed into a common pool and mixed. There
was nothing like Ibo written on the blood as these men lay in death,
nor anything like Hausa, Yoruba or Edo. The blood of these men
gushed out and mixed freely without the illusion of labels. In death
they had achieved something they had been told was impossible in
life. (196)

The violent clashes in Nigeria present a divide betwixt the Hausa

North which is primarily Muslim and the Igbo South. Which is primarily
Christian? This rift has been created over a long period of time and is
symbolic failure of the country.

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 Adichie’s story “Cell One” presents the theme of Cultism
prevailing in the University of Nigeria campus. University students are
known to possess weapons and use them to harass and threat.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie deals with this issue in “Cell One”—the first
story in the collection.

Here the narrator of “Cell One” tells the story of days her brother
spent in prison. Nnamabia, who is 17, her brother is rather spoilt as we
see in the opening scene of the story which opens with the stealing of
mother’s jewellery. The mother and father is a teacher at Nsukka campus
where there is a cult war and Nnamabia is arrested as a suspect in the
shooting incidence of three students. When the parents visit the narrator’s
brother in jail he seems to enjoy the prison life and narrates
enthusiastically his experiences of prison. Nnamabia’s defences take a
long time and he enters into a duet with police officers over the issue of
beating an old man, and in turn he is beaten and transferred to Cell One.
Finally, when the parents and the narrator gets him out he turn to be
changed a lot and doesn’t narrate his prison experience and is quitter
instead. This change portrays his realisation and acceptance of the harder
truth.

The narrator herself recognises that the season of cults on Nsukka

Campus was at its heights. There were big signboards that read, SAY NO
TO CULTS. The Black Axe, the Buccaneers, and the Pirates were the
prominent gangs in operation. They initially tried to breed up some
understanding between them but later evolved autonomous and came to
be known as “cults”

Guns and tortured loyalties and axes had become common. Cult
wars had become common: a boy would leer at a girlfriend of the
Capone of the Black Axe and that boy … would be stabbed in the

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 thigh…and so his fellow Buccaneers would go to a beer parlour
and shoot the nearest Black Axe boy in the shoulder…Girls stayed
inside their hostels after lectures and lecturers quivered when a fly
buzzed too loudly. (7-8)

These boys started turning out miscreants causing troubles both to

people within their homes as well as their neighbours. Nnamabia’s
portrayal reveals the fact in colour. His parents were unable to put a
check on his conduct and gradually he turned out to be a member of one
of the operating cults. We are told:

The second time our house was robbed, it was my brother

Nnamabia who faked a break-in and stole my mother’s jewellery. It
happened on Sunday. My parents had travelled to our hometown,
Mbaise, to visit our grandparents…” (3)

Adichie has presented Catholic sensibilities in the story by

depicting that Nnamabia has failed to receive the Holy Communion. It is
to be noted that Jaja too in Purple Hibiscus and Scobie in Graham
Greene’s The Heart of the Matter also did not receive the Holy
Communion timely. Though “Cell One” presents deep rooted feelings in
Adichie Catholicism, yet the issues in the story is of the problems
surrounding rampant corruption in Nigeria and its Police administration.

Both Nnamabiaand Jaja are mercilessly beaten and traumatised

when detained so much so that there are wounds all over their bodies. The
old man who is arrested for the sins of his son is also rendered a similar
treatment. Furthermore, it is to be noted that Nnamabia is not punished in
a similar way at his initial arrest as his mother has successfully bribed the
police, but when he enters into a duet with police he is mercilessly beaten
that too on the pretext of sighting that the old man is innocent. These

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issues portray the dire and the sole cause of Nigeria’s socio-political and
economic problems.

Adichie’s “The America Embassy” serves as a canvas presenting

the complete Nigerian scenario of the days and times she lived in. the
story is set in Lagos and Adichie narrates with terrible brutality that
exemplifies the military-civilian relationship, the poverty of the masses,
the harassment of masses, and the violence and trauma which is forcing
people to move out of the country seeking asylum.

The story has been narrated by a woman who has come to the
American Embassy to seek asylum in US as she fears for her life. Just a
few days back she has helped her husband slip out of the country to save
his life, and a day after three armed men came to her house questioning
about her husband’s whereabouts and when her son intervened in
between the men shot him dead. Government’s violence and corruption is
the major acting force of the novel, something that has destroyed her
family. This way the government is depriving its citizens of the very
basic rights necessary for survival and sustenance. This has resulted into
people fleeing the country. The story portrays the scene outside the
American Embassy where in order to control large crowd of Nigerians
waiting to be interviewed for visas, the military is in order to maintain
orderliness itself turns wild thrusting unjust punishments on innocent
people:

A soldier was flogging a bespectacled man with a long whip that

curled in the air before it landed on the man’s face, or his neck, she
wasn’t sure because the man’s hands were raised as if to ward off
the whip. She saw the man’s glasses slip off and fall. She saw the
heel of the soldiers boot squash the black frames, the tinted lenses.
(129)

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 The picture is in sharp contrast to what life in America is and what
people are striving for and what their government is impinging on them.
The narrator of the story wonders: “Sometimes I wonder if the American
embassy people look out of their window and enjoy watching the soldiers
flogging people…” (131). The contrast gathers moss as the Americans
who are sanctioning Visa to many applicants from these countries have
closed their eyes towards these prevailing inhuman practises. The nation
that fascinates people on the pretext of equality and democratic ideals
itself is blind towards the ground realities. The irony behind the point is
that Americans get cheap labour from these countries for their own
benefit and hence allows these nations to retain their status so that so they
can flourish. Adichie portrays in the stories the days of Abacha’s reign
which were the most notorious and tumultuous times in the history of
Nigeria other than the civil war. During this exigency a journalist has
written an account of Abacha’s reign where he is accuses:

…General Abacha of inventing a coup so that he could kill and jail

his opponents. Soldiers had come to the newspaper office and
carted away large numbers of that edition in a black truck; still,
photocopies got out and circulated throughout Lago—a neighbour
had seen a copy posted on the wall of a bridge… The soldiers had
detained her husband for two weeks and broken the skin on his
fore-head, leaving the scar the shape of an L. (135)

There are other instancestoo; the soldiers attempt to rape the

woman after killing her son when they come in search of her husband.
The military rule in Nigeria was a synonym to such atrocities. They
reveal the savagery in the hearts and mind of men engineering such acts
under the pretext of national welfare.

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 “The American Embassy” stands tall in Adichie’s collection of
short stories for its profundity of theme that epitomises the Nigerian
socio-political evets of the day and narrate the hardships that ordinary
people had to face owing to no fault of theirs. Adichie employs the stream
of consciousness technique to weave the events of the present and the
past, the dialogues and their reportage have been finely blended to focus
on the theme at the cost of characters.

A reading of The Thing Around Your Neck reveals Adichie’s

mastery of the art of story-telling. Her stories achieve unity and
coherence which one of his commentators Ada Azodo sums up in
following remarks:

the writer seizes the plot at the high point of emotion, when the
story is most interesting to the reader or listener and does not relent
until the final denouement. This condensation of a full story in a
form that can be easily adapted in terms of time and space to the
small interstices of busy everyday lives gives the short story a
definitive edge over the novel. (3)

Adichie in her stories employs all the techniques of story-telling,

irony, humour, prosody, abrupt opening and closing, stream of
consciousness, Unity of time and place, and the orientation of her readers.
Her stories present a vivid and honest account of Nigeria and its native
culture and tribal community. She touches the issues that thwart growth
and development in Nigeria, such as irrational tribal beliefs and their
pursuance, slave mentality, religious fundamentalism, corruption,
illiteracy, poverty, racism, cultism, irascibility of military rule, decay of
the education system, and finally a race that has preferred to stagnate and
decay.

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 Adichie speaks positioning her identity differently. She casts
herself as an Igbo, a Nigerian, an African woman, and a migrant living
between Nigeria and America. She further employs all these identities in
shaping her short stories, which are spread over a vast territory. She
queries Western ways of perceiving the African Other and the way they
reflect upon the culture and traditions of this other—African other here.
Her characters are a spokesperson of this fragmented identities and
positioning. She also presents the differences on account of the
challenges that people of Nigeria face due to troubles at homeland, thus
constituting the discourse that ensues.

Adichie like many other writers surfaces these problems, though

she too rarely offers any solutions to overcome these social and economic
demands. She, like other writers enacts her part of highlighting the
problems so as to attend to them and seek to find some solutions.

Adichie addresses human concerns untied to a race, history and

politics. Her stories connect us to what we may rightly call world cultures
seeking to locate a place for us in the larger structure. She continues the
African tradition of storytelling at the same time is not bound to the
continent and its geography. She explores the larger world and exposes
the characters to fortunes and miseries that lie hidden in the social and
political trap. She registers for herself a place amidst the body of writers
aiming to achieve universality through their literary framework. Her
writings cannot be restricted to any one literary cannon but seek to exploit
the postcolonial as well as the modernist societies, at the same time
reflecting glimpses into the old traditional world of magic realism. She
presents ordinary lives of people long forgotten over the prevailing
national sentiment universalising them for their significant part they once
played in the broader national development contributing their very best to

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the national, culture and the world. This idealisation of the real world
makes Adichie’s stories transcend boundaries presenting a discourse that
usher in a sea of meanings that are yet to be deciphered and examined in
the light of more rational thought presenting a claim in the world of
literary writers.

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Works cited

Adichie, Chimamanda N. “African ‘Authenticity’ and the Biafran

Experience.” Transition, vol. 99. 2008: 42-53. Print.

______. “The Writer as Two Selves: Reflections on the Private Act of

Writing and the Public Act of Citizenship.” Princeton University. 20
Oct. 2010. Web. 30 Nov. 2016. <http://
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