The Thing Around Your Neck

The Thing Around Your Neck is a short-story collection by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, first published in April 2009 by Fourth Estate in the UK and by Knopf in the US. It received many positive reviews, including: "She makes storytelling seem as easy as birdsong" (

Contents

• "Cell One" (first published in The New Yorker), in which a spoilt brother and son of a professor is sent to a Nigerian prison and ends up in the infamous Cell One.
• "Imitation" (first published in
  Other Voices) is set in Philadelphia and concerns Nkem, a young mother whose art-dealer husband visits only two months a year. She finds out that his lover has moved into their Lagos
  home.
• "A Private Experience" (first published in Virginia Quarterly Review), in which two women caught up in a riot between Christians and Muslims take refuge in an abandoned shop. This story highlights the friendliness and peace between two women with different religions, and makes the point that regardless of someone's religious beliefs , or their ethnic background, we are all ultimately human. It is told in a third-person narrative so that readers are put in an omniscient position to understand this idea.
• "Ghosts" (first published in Zoetrope: All-Story), in which a retired university professor looks back on his life.
• "On Monday of Last Week" (first published in Granta 98: The Deep End), in which Kamara, a Nigerian woman who has joined her husband in America, takes a job as a nanny to an upper-class family and becomes obsessed with the mother.
• "Jumping Monkey Hill" (first published in Granta 95: Loved Ones) is the most autobiographical story. Set in Cape Town at a writers' retreat where authors from all over Africa gather, it tells of the conflicts experienced by the young Nigerian narrator.
• "The Thing Around Your Neck" (first published in Prospect 99), in which a woman named Akunna gains a sought-after American visa and goes to live with her uncle; however, he molests her and she ends up working as a waitress in Connecticut. She meets a man with whom she falls in love, but along the way experiences cultural difficulties with him.
• "The American Embassy" (first published in
  PRISM international
  ), in which a woman applies for asylum but ends up walking away, unwilling to describe her son's murder for the sake of a visa.
• "The Shivering", set on the campus of Princeton University, it concerns a Catholic Nigerian woman, whose boyfriend has left her, finding solace in the earnest prayers of a stranger who knocks at her door.
• "The Arrangers of Marriage" (first published as "New Husband" in
  Iowa Review), in which a newly married wife arrives in New York City
  with her husband; and finds she is unable to accept his rejection of their Nigerian identity.
• "Tomorrow Is Too Far" (first published in Prospect 118), in which a young woman reveals the devastating secret of her brother's death.
• "The Headstrong Historian" (first published in The New Yorker) covers the life-story of a woman called Nwangba, who believes her husband to have been killed by his cousins and is determined to regain the inheritance for her son through his education by missionaries. Though her son did not realise what she hoped, her granddaughter managed to retrieve it, highlighting the significance of holding on to one's past and one's origin in order to thrive in the future.

Feminist analyses of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "The Headstrong Historian" read the short story as a revisioning of Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, offering a feminist perspective on the Southern Nigerian Igbo community and its experience with Western colonialism.^[3][4][5] Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi criticises Nigerian literature for its exclusion of women.^[6] Adichie's contemporary Elleke Boehmer commends "The Headstrong Historian" for its feminist agenda, which is identified as extending Achebe's Things Fall Apart and challenging its account of Igbo history.^[7]

Contemporary feminist scholar Anene Ejikeme notes that, since its publication in Western publishing outlets, Things Fall Apart has been celebrated as the authentic account of the late nineteenth-century Igbo experience during the colonial era.

Adichie says that "The Headstrong Historian" was written in an effort to "imagine the life of [her] great-grandmother" after first reading Things Fall Apart, which she saw as a representation of her "great-grandfather’s life".[13]^[14] In response to this gendered revisioning, Anene Ejikeme says that while ""The Headstrong Historian" writes with Achebe's canonical work, to say that "The Headstrong Historian" completes Things Fall Apart is to foreclose the possibility of Africans telling multiple stories about the Igbo past".^[15] While Ejikeme argues that Adichie challenges Achebe’s canonical authority, Brian Doherty maintains that Adichie's feminising of the Igbo colonial experience is not exclusively critical. Doherty says that Adichie’s feminist revision does not reimagine misrepresented perspectives in Achebe's text, but underrepresented perspectives, which acts as "a corrective lens to a venerated elder's myopic vision" of Igbo history.^[16]

Kamene Okonjo presents a feminist reading of ‘The Headstrong Historian,’ which says that Adichie establishes the historicity of her narrative by invoking Achebe’s colonial context and representing the Igbo dual-sex system.^[17] In Women in Africa, Okonjo details how dual-sex systems in pre-colonial Igboland gave women greater authority than the Western single-sex system.^[17] Research works by Nkiru Nzegwu and Ifi Amadiume also discuss Igbo women’s collective agency.^[18][19] In "The Headstrong Historian", Nwamgba receives support from the Women's Council when her late husband's cousins steal his property and, as a result, several women "sit on" the cousins.^[20] One criticism of Achebe's Things Fall Apart focuses on the representation of women as powerless in the Igbo tribal system, beyond conducting marriage ceremonies.^[21] Judith Van Allen notes that early ethnographic studies of Igbo communities comment on the 1929 Women's War in southeastern Nigeria, a protest that saw Igbo women challenge the policies of the colonial government.^[22] Rhonda Cobham's feminist reading says that while Achebe mentions the Women's Council, he does not establish its civic agency, which saw women intervene in community disputes by "sitting on" men, thereby publicly shaming them.^[23] Cobhman says that Adichie locates Nwamgba's protests to the Women's Council in a historical context that counters Achebe's representation of oppressed Igbo women.

In her youth, Nwamgba defeats her brother in a wrestling match. This is considered by Daria Tunca to be an inversion of Okonkwo’s masculinity, which was earned as a result of his own wrestling victory.^[24] Tunca says that Adichie further remaps the ideal of masculinity in Things Fall Apart by presenting Obierika as a flute player, which is described in Achebe's text as an "unmanly" characteristic.^[25] Tunca also says that Achebe's Okonkwo is placed in the margins of Adichie's narrative: his name is mentioned twice, both in reference to his daughter. Conversely, Tunca also maintains that although Nwamgba "wrestled her brother to the ground", her father warns "everyone not to let the news leave the compound", in compliance with normative gender hierarchies.^[26]

Adichie comments on the

In her Ted Talk, Adichie details how a reader believed that the abusive father in Purple Hibiscus represented all African men: Adichie notes that "The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story".^[12] The future Grace teaches at an Igbo school and delivers seminars on southern Nigerian history after learning about a Western-educated Nigerian historian who resigned upon hearing that African history was to be added to the university syllabus. In later years, Grace returns to Nigeria and changes her name to Afamefuna, the Igbo name that Nwamgba had given her, meaning "My Name Will Not Be Lost". Michael L. Ross says that this revisionary gesture allows Grace to remap and retrieve her communal Igbo identity.^[33] Daria Tunca and Bénédicte Ledent say that, as third generation Igbo historians, both Grace and Adichie supplement Achebe's historical account of Igbo history by highlighting "the danger of a single story" and providing a more authentically recorded womanist perspective of Igbo past.^[34]

Bibliography