The Man Who Rediscovered Africa: How Achebe's novels captured the soul of a continent -- and helped me discover my own history

Photo: AP/CRAIG RUTTLE
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Salon


This article also appears as the introduction to Chinua Achebe’s "The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God" now available through Everyman’s Library.

When, in 1958, the London publishers William Heinemann received a manuscript of Chinua Achebe’s "Things Fall Apart," they were unsure whether to publish it. The central question, according to editor Alan Hill, was this: "Would anyone possibly buy a novel by an African?" Not only were there a mere handful of examples of African writing in English at the time – such as Amos Tutuola’s surreal "The Palm-Wine Drinkard" and Cyprian Ekwensi’s novel of contemporary Lagos, "People of the City" – but none of them had the ambition, the subtlety, or the confidence of "Things Fall Apart."

Chinua Achebe had initially conceived it as a story of three generations: a man in pre-colonial Igboland who struggles against the changes brought by the first European missionaries and administrators; his son who converts to Christianity and receives some Western education; and his grandson who is educated in England and is living the life of the new elite on the cusp of independence. Achebe later scaled down the novel, focusing only on the first generation, to produce a carefully observed story of the African-European colonial encounter set among the Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria in the 1890s, with the tragic hero Okonkwo at its center. Achebe’s second novel, "No Longer At Ease," would skip a generation and tell the story of Okonkwo’s grandson, Obi, a civil servant in 1950s Lagos. His third novel, "Arrow of God," about an Igbo priest and a British district officer in 1920s Igboland, can be read as representative of the times of Okonkwo’s son. All three novels, taken together as Achebe’s "African Trilogy," create a full and beautifully nuanced arc, a human chronicle of the cultural and political changes that brought about what is now seen as the modern African state.

After William Heinemann overcame their reservations and published "Things Fall Apart" in June 1958, it became a critical success. Achebe, the Times Literary Supplement wrote, had "genuinely succeeded in presenting tribal life from the inside." A novelty indeed. "Things Fall Apart" was pioneering not in its subject but in its African point of view, as there were already many well-regarded books about Africans written by non-Africans; tribal life had already been endlessly portrayed from the outside. Achebe himself first read some of the better-known examples of these "colonialism classics" as a secondary school student in the 1940s. "I did not see myself as an African to begin with," he has written about his response to the African characters. "I took sides with the white men against the savages. The white man was good and reasonable and intelligent and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid or, at the most, cunning. I hated their guts." As Achebe matured and became more critical in his reading, he began to understand the enormous power that stories had, and how much this power was shaped by who told the stories and by how they were told. As a university student in the 1950s, in addition to reading Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Coleridge, Achebe also read Joyce Carey’s "Mister Johnson," a novel set in Nigeria, which Time magazine had named the "best book ever written about Africa." Achebe disagreed. Not only was the Nigerian character in the novel unrecognizable to him and his classmates but he also detected, in the description of Nigerians, "an undertow of uncharitableness ... a contagion of distaste, hatred, and mockery."

There has been much written about Chinua Achebe’s "Things Fall Apart" as a response to Mister Johnson, and one likes to think that Achebe would have written his novel even if he had not read Cary’s. Still, the prejudiced representation of African characters in literature could not but have had an influence on Achebe’s development as a writer. He would, years later, write a famous essay about the portrayal of Africans in Joseph Conrad’s classic novel "Heart of Darkness," arguing not that Conrad should not have written honestly about the racism of the time, but that Conrad failed to hold an authorial rejection of that worldview.

The strangeness of seeing oneself distorted in literature – and indeed of not seeing oneself at all – was part of my own childhood. I grew up in the Nigerian university town of Nsukka in the 1980s, reading a lot of British children’s books. My early writing mimicked the books I was reading: all my characters were white and all my stories were set in England. Then I read "Things Fall Apart." It was a glorious shock of discovery, as was "Arrow of God," which I read shortly afterwards; I did not know in a concrete way until then that people like me could exist in literature. Here was a book that was unapologetically African, that was achingly familiar, but that was, also, exotic because it detailed the life of my people a hundred years before. Because I was educated in a Nigerian system that taught me little of my pre-colonial past, because I could not, for example, imagine with any accuracy how life had been organized in my part of the world in 1890, Achebe’s novels became strangely personal. "Things Fall Apart" was no longer a novel about a man whose exaggerated masculinity and encompassing fear of weakness make it impossible for him to adapt to the changes in his society, it became the life my great-grandfather might have lived. "Arrow of God" was no longer just about the British administration’s creation of warrant chiefs, and the linked destinies of two men – one an Igbo priest the other a British administrator – it became the story of my ancestral hometown during my grandfather’s time. "And No Longer at Ease" transcended the story of an educated young Nigerian struggling with the pressure of new urban expectations in Lagos, and became the story of my father’s generation.

Later, as an adult confronting the portrayals of Africa in non-African literature – Africa as a place without history, without humanity, without hope – and filled with that peculiar sense of defensiveness and vulnerability that comes with knowing that your humanity is seen as negotiable, I would turn again to Achebe’s novels. In the stark, sheer poetry of "Things Fall Apart," in the humor and complexity of "Arrow of God," I found a gentle reprimand: Don’t you dare believe other people’s stories of you.

Considering the time and circumstances under which he wrote, perhaps Chinua Achebe sensed that his work would become, for a generation of Africans, both literature and history. He has written that he would be satisfied if his novels did no more than teach his readers that their past "was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them." He has, on occasion, adopted a somewhat anthropological voice in his fiction: "Fortunately among these people," we are told in "Things Fall Apart," "a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father." But what is remarkable is that Achebe’s art never sinks under this burden of responsibility. A reader expecting to find simple answers in Chinua Achebe’s work will be disappointed, because he is a writer who embraces honesty and ambiguity and who complicates every situation. His criticism of the effects of colonialism on the Igbo is implicit, but so is his interrogation of the internal structure of Igbo society. When Nwoye, Okonkwo’s son in "Things Fall Apart," breaks away from his family and community to join the Christians, it is a victory for the Europeans but also a victory for Nwoye, who finds peace and an outlet for deep disillusions he had long been nursing about his people’s traditions. When a character says, "The White man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers and our clan can no longer act as one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart," the reader is aware that Achebe’s narrative is as much about the knife as it is about the vulnerabilities, the internal complexities, the cracks that already existed.

Achebe writes spare, elegant sentences in English but it is a Nigerian English and often, more specifically, an Igbo English. All three novels are filled with direct translations from the Igbo, resulting in expressions like "still carrying breakfast" and "what is called 'the box is moving?'" as well as in laugh-out-loud lines, especially for an Igbo-speaking reader, like "the white man whose father or mother nobody knows." It is, however, the rendition of proverbs, of speech, of manners of speaking, that elevate Achebe’s novels into a celebration of language. In "Arrow of God," for example, Ezeulu eloquently captures his own cautious progressiveness when he tells his son whom he has decided to send to the missionary school: "I am like the bird eneke-nti-oba. When his friends asked him why he was always on the wing he replied: men of today have learnt to shoot without missing and so I have learnt to fly without perching…the world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place."

Achebe takes his characters seriously but not too seriously; he finds subtly subversive ways to question them and even laugh at them, and he refuses to rescue them from their foibles. Okonkwo, perhaps the best-known character in modern African writing in English, is the quintessential Strong Man, and is ruled by a profound fear that blinds him. His insecurities result in a relentless harshness and an extremist view of masculinity – he is so terrified of being thought weak that he destroys a person he loves and yet the reader empathizes with his remorse, repressed as it is.

It is impossible, especially for the contemporary reader, not to be struck by the portrayal of gender in "Things Fall Apart," and the equating of weakness and inability with femaleness. More interesting, however, and perhaps more revealing, are the subtle ways in which Achebe interrogates this patriarchy: Okonkwo denigrates women and yet the child he most respects is his daughter Ezinma, the only character who dares to answer back to him and who happens to be confident and forthright in a way that his male children are not. My favorite part of the novel, and a small part indeed, is the love story of the old couple Ozoemena and Ndulue. When Ndulue dies, his wife Ozoemena goes to his hut to see his body and then goes into her own hut and is later found dead there. Okonkwo’s friend Obierika recalls, "It was always said that Ndulue and Ozoemena had one mind. I remember when I was a young boy and there was a song about them. He could not do anything without telling her." This recollection troubles Okonkwo because, in his eyes, it casts doubts on Ndulue’s authentic masculinity. He says, "I thought he was a strong man in his youth." The others agree that Ndulue was a strong man and had led the clan to war in those days. They do not see, as Okonkwo obviously does, a contradiction between the old man’s greatness in the realm of masculinity and his mutually dependent relationship with his wife.

It is this rigidity of Okonkwo’s, in addition to his uncompromising nature, his rashness, his excesses, for which the reader feels impatience. Yet, when placed in the context of the many small humiliations of the colonial encounter, his actions become worthy of empathy. The power structures of his society have been so easily overturned. Okonkwo is left struggling to understand a world in which the dignity he had always taken for granted has disappeared, in which elders are treated with scorn and he, proud warrior that he is, is flogged by agents of the District commissioner. The reader is moved to understand the helpless rage, and final violent actions, that are Okonkwo’s response to the enormous, and perhaps baffling, political and economic power that came with Christianity and Colonialism. We are left, in the end, with an unforgettable tragic character: a man who is gravely flawed but who has also been gravely wronged.

Ezeulu, the character at the center of "Arrow of God," which remains my favorite novel, is both flawed and wronged like Okonkwo, and is also held captive by what he imagines his society expects of him. Unlike Okonkwo, a character who was clearly in Achebe’s control, Ezeulu is wondrously unwieldy and his deep complexity lends "Arrow of God" much of its enduring power. I suspect that, as happens in the best fiction, Chinua Achebe did not have complete control over this character; ultimately the spirit of Ezeulu dictated how his story would be told. "Arrow of God" is told from the points of view of both Ezeulu and the British district commissioner Winterbottom; when the novel begins, the central event has already occurred, much like a Greek drama, and what Achebe explores is the aftermath. Ezeulu has testified against his own people in a land case with the neighboring town, because he is determined to speak the truth, and this action has earned him the respect of the district officer the as well as the ire of his local opponents. It will also act as a catalyst that – added to Ezeulu’s stubborness, his idealism, his pride – will contribute to his tragic end.

Like "Things Fall Apart," "Arrow of God" shows the angry helplessness of people in the face of formalized European power: powerful men are treated with scorn by government agents, great men are flogged, the justice system is replaced by one the people do not understand and do not have a say in, and the internal dynamics of the society is turned around.

In "No Longer at Ease," however, this helplessness is replaced by something inchoate but less suffocating, because the terms have changed during the short-lived optimism of independence. Obi, struggling with the pressures of the new Nigerian society, captures this change when he thinks of his boss the Englishman Mr. Green, who he is sure "loved Africa but only Africa of a certain kind: the Africa of Charles the messenger, the Africa of his gardenboy and stewardboy. In 1900 Mr Green might have ranked among the greatest missionaries, in 1935 he would have made do with slapping headmasters in the presence of their pupils, but in 1957 he could only curse and swear."

Achebe writes in the realist tradition and there are often traces of the autobiographical in his work. He was born in 1930 in the Igbo town of Ogidi, southeastern Nigeria. His parents were firm Christians but many of his relatives had retained the Igbo religion and so he grew up a witness to both sides of his heritage and, more importantly, a recipient of stories from both. Influences of his great-uncle, a wealthy and important man who had allowed the first missionaries to stay in his compound but later asked them to leave because he found their music too sad, are obvious in "Things Fall Apart." He worked as a radio producer in Lagos in the 1950s and the details of this life – film shows and clubs and bars, observing formerly expatriate clubs that were now admitting a few Nigerians – give "No Longer at Ease" its verisimilitude. It was through a radio program that Achebe heard the story of an Igbo priest in a nearby town who, as a result of a number of events with the British administration, had postponed the sacred New Yam festival, which had never been done before. He decided to go and visit this town and the story inspired "Arrow of God."

All of Achebe’s work is, in some way, about strong communitarian values, the use of language as collective art, the central place of storytelling and the importance of symbolic acts and objects in keeping a community together. The American writer John Updike, after reading "Arrow of God," wrote to Achebe to say that a western writer would not have allowed the destruction of a character as rich as Ezeulu. This is debatable, but perhaps what Updike had understood was that Achebe was as much concerned with a person as he was with a people, an idea well captured in the proverb that a character in Arrow of God recites: "An animal rubs its itching flank against a tree, but a man asks his kinsman to scratch him."

BOOK REVIEW: The Thing Around Your Neck

At Home and Abroad by Neha Bhatt/New Delhi

The Thing Around Your Neck stays with you from beginning till end, and beyond. It’s unlikely it would take more than a few pages for you to be drawn in by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s casual, free-flowing narrative style. Her collection of 12 elegant short stories has made an utterly intimate space. The stories inhabit Nigeria and America, nestling among the growing human aspirations and inevitable frustrations, which is what ultimately connects the people of the two countries.

It’s a fine balance the Nigerian author writes with. As heartwarming as each of her people are (they never seem to be merely characters in a story, for she writes as if they were her people, lives she has carefully observed; and many are of Igbo descent, an ethnic group that she belongs to), there is a quiet pain in equal measure.

This is 31-year-old Adichie’s third book. The first two, released within the last few years — Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun — are prizewinning works.

The title story of her new collection, “The Thing Around Your Neck”, works wonderfully as a metaphor for the rest of the book, and delicately so. Told in second person (a technique that is incredibly delightful to read here, and thankfully she repeats it in another story in this collection), this story has a young Nigerian girl who moves to America in search of better financial prospects at its heart. The move isn’t at all what she imagined it might be, yet, in despair, she’s finally able to let go, of that thing around her neck that has troubled her for so long.

This is a recurring theme throughout the book: Nigerian families and their fragmented lives, their past and unnerving present, based firmly within but sometimes very far away from their homeland.

Adichie has a way with words, a flawless style that is so alive it breathes. She could be telling you these stories at an informal gathering over tea. Her tone is consistent and thoroughly engaging, and lyrical in both familiar (the less privileged of her countrymen are fascinated by the West, much like us Indians) and unfamiliar (the immigrant life) surroundings.

She expertly masks the most painful and intense experiences with her gentle, no-fuss manner, her perceptions being remarkably sensitive and surreal. Her stories stay aloof of any stark, negative connotations, lending a unique, positive quality to a book with a theme such as this. There is an understated and unaffected poise, with a confident, soothing strain running through each of the unusual situations at the crux of these stories. And these are tales that you would want to hear and relish, perhaps reading just one at a time before moving on to the next.

For that reason it’s difficult, and perhaps unfair, to try and pick a favourite, or even to summarise any story from this collection. It does, however, appear that young Nigerian women — on the brink of something new, exploring, learning, growing — are the author’s favourite protagonists, and are most endearing at that, perhaps because they are the ones most full of hope.

In “On Monday of Last Week”, a young woman, in America and thus far from home, experiences an inexplicable thrill at the admiring, if fake, glances of another woman. Another Nigerian woman in America, in “Imitation”, decides to pull the plug on her supposedly cheating husband who visits from their homeland only a few months a year.

In “A Private Experience”, a medical student’s unruffled life unravels in a matter of hours when she hides with a Muslim woman during a riot in Nigeria.

These are stories that span minutes, sometimes decades, and run a little more than 20 pages each, but will last a great deal longer in the reader’s mind.

BOOK REVIEW: The Thing Around Your Neck

Hopes and Impediments

In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new collection of stories, many Nigerians leave their troubled country for safety and opportunity elsewhere. But, Amy Rosenberg writes, getting away doesn’t get them much.

In a 1962 radio interview, Chinua Achebe, Nigeria’s best-known novelist, explained that he started writing out of anger over Mister Johnson, a 1939 novel by the white British author Joyce Cary. The title character is an ambitious but clownish Nigerian clerk who blindly and cheerfully enmeshes himself in larceny, graft and murder while trying to gain the respect of his colonial superiors.

Of the much-praised novel, Achebe said: “It was clear to me that this was a most superficial picture of – not only of the country, but even of the Nigerian character. I thought… someone ought to try and look at this from the inside.” Forty-five years later, during a talk at Harvard, another Nigerian novelist explained that she began writing because she was startled, as a young child who had devoured books by Enid Blyton, to stumble across Achebe’s work and realise that novels also could be about black people. “Things Fall Apart is the book that gave me permission to tell my own stories,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said.

Achebe and Adichie’s tales are part of the same story, one that encompasses both Nigeria’s development as a modern, independent nation and the idea of the novel as a force for social and personal transformation. When Achebe made his statement, the Nigerian novel was only about 10 years old; the country had been independent for only two years; and the conflicts that would explode into civil war five years later were just simmering. By the time Adichie made hers, Nigerian literary life had blossomed: Wole Soyinka had won the Nobel Prize, and Ken Saro-Wiwa, Ben Okri and Chris Abani, to name a few, had gained international recognition.

But these achievements came in the aftermath of the civil war of 1967 to 1970, which killed between one and two million people, most of them Igbo. The Igbos, largely Christian, comprise one of the main ethnic groups in Nigeria; the Hausa and the Fulani, mostly Muslim, and the Yoruba, a mix of Christian and Muslim, comprise the others. Massacred during hate campaigns before and during the war, the Igbos seceded, carving out the southeastern corner of their country to create the short-lived nation of Biafra. Following Biafra’s collapse in 1970, Nigeria suffered a series of coups and dictatorships, which ended only in 1999; the democratic governments that have been in power since have been thin in democracy and thick in corruption, riding the revenues of an oil boom that has created a rich elite without redressing the country’s essential problems.

Adichie’s first two novels, Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), addressed some of these historical complexities. In the former, a masterful coming-of-age story about a girl whose religious father abuses her while government corruption threatens to destroy the entire family, Adichie acknowledged her debt to Achebe with the opening line: “Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the étagère.” In The Thing Around Your Neck, Adichie’s rich and thoughtful new collection of short stories, the 32-year-old writer turns her attention to the present. The book focuses on independent Nigeria’s grown-up grandchildren – granddaughters, mostly – who came of age right around the time their country adopted democracy, who are middle class or better, but whose lives are rarely comfortable.

For this group, the West beckons; nine of the book’s 12 stories take place in, or are in some way connected to, America. But having grown up in the double shadows of colonialism and failed secession, with the additional burdens of patriarchy and religious oppression, the characters in these stories cannot rest easy with America, even when they are drawn to it. They have too much history for a country that pretends history is irrelevant. The problem is laid out neatly in Ghosts, which features the only protagonist in the book who is not a young woman, a 71-year-old retired mathematics professor nicknamed Prof. He scoffs at his daughter’s campaign to move him from his Nigerian university town to Connecticut, where she lives with her son and works as a doctor. “I will be forced to live a life... littered with what we call ‘opportunities’,” he says. For Prof, there is a difference between American-style opportunity and what he and his generation once had, then lost: “time immersed in possibility”, the hope of creating a new nation for an oppressed minority.

One day Prof runs into a former colleague he thought had been killed 37 years earlier during the war. As the two catch up, a picture of a difficult life emerges. Prof watched his first daughter, a little girl at the time, die during the war. He left his university town when it was evacuated at the start of the war and returned three years later to find that his books had been burnt and his personal belongings defiled. He saw his wife die a preventable death because she was given fake drugs to treat an illness. Each month, he is turned away from the university bursary, where he goes to pick up his pension, because the vice-chancellor is using the pension funds to buy new cars for himself. Still, he refuses to leave Nigeria.

For his daughter’s generation, the story is different. Lacking firsthand memory of a clear cause like the nation of Biafra, reeling from the decades of coups, oil scandals, human rights abuses and hard-grinding life, many younger people chose to move to America, a country where, as Adichie writes in Imitation, “you could drive at night and not fear armed robbers, where restaurants served one person enough food for three”. Members of this generation saw what America had (safety, plenty, possibility) and wanted it too.

But making it to America does not entail the automatic achievement of wealth, let alone carefree daily living and fulfilment. Money is certainly an issue for Adichie’s characters – especially for Akunna, the protagonist of the collection’s title story, a young woman from a lower-middle class family who wins a visa lottery and is sent to live in a small town in Maine – but most of the immigrants described here are students, doctors, art dealers and their wives, not working-class newcomers struggling to get by. As members of the global middle class, they wrestle more with psychological afflictions than material want.

Akunna, for example, moves in with her “uncle” – really her father’s sister’s husband’s brother – who shows her how to apply for a cashier job, enrols her in community college, and attempts to molest her in his basement. She strikes out on her own, taking a Greyhound bus to its final destination somewhere in Connecticut. The story is narrated in the second person, a choice that imbues the tale with a sense of inevitability – an I-know-exactly-how-this-all-ends feeling – and also creates a discomfiting intimacy between the protagonist and the reader.

At the community college Akunna attended in Maine, other girls were curious about her, asking ignorant questions: “They gawped at your hair. Does it stand up or fall down when you take out the braids?… All of it stands up? How? Why?” It is easy to imagine one of these well-intentioned classmates affably asking, in reference to an elaborate African necklace, “What’s that thing around your neck?” But Adichie’s title ends up referring to something else altogether:

“Nobody knew where you were, because you told no one. Sometimes you felt invisible and tried to walk through your room wall into the hallway, and when you bumped into the wall, it left bruises on your arm…. At night, something would wrap itself around your neck, something that very nearly choked you before you fell asleep.”

That suffocating loneliness afflicts many of the characters in the collection, especially the wives who are brought to America because of their husbands’ work, or, more chillingly, who are brought to America, dumped in big suburban houses, and left there by husbands who want to join “the coveted league, the Rich Nigerian Men Who Sent Their Wives to America to Have Their Babies League”. Nkem, in Imitation, is one such woman. Her art-dealer husband visits her and their two children in their house in Pennsylvania for a couple months each year. He collects imitations of ancient Nigerian statues and masks, but the real imitation in this story is Nkem’s life. It looks similar to the lives her neighbours lead —“lives [her husband] often called ‘plastic’” – but it’s filled with suppressed desire for the smells and sights of Lagos, the touch of a dusty harmattan wind. Like many of the angry, sad or lonely women in this collection, Nkem cannot speak about her emotions; she barely acknowledges them to herself. Perhaps she, and some others, have found safety and plenty, perhaps even “opportunity”, but the price has been steep: their dreams, their voices, even their names (as with Chinaza Udenwa, in The Arrangers of Marriage, whose husband forces her to become Agatha Bell).

Adichie offers some respite from her characters’ silence by giving them the power to act. This is true especially for those who have not left for America, as if staying in Nigeria connects them to a source of strength. One young woman throws a rock at the windscreen of her parents’ car rather than explain why she doesn’t want to visit her brother in prison. Another, whose journalist husband has been chased out of the country and whose four-year-old son has been shot by government thugs, turns away from the American visa interviewer assessing her application for asylum and heads to the village burial ground where her son’s body lies. When a young writer on a retreat designed for African writers by a lecherous, white Englishman can no longer stand to be lectured on what is allowable in African fiction, she stands up at the dinner table, laughs uncontrollably, and leaves the room.

Adichie is at her best when she’s with these characters, the ones who haven’t left yet. Her descriptions of their lives are suffused with tenderness and longing – perhaps the longing of a writer who has crossed the border to the West herself (Adichie currently lives between the United States and Nigeria). In the stories set in her home country, the pace picks up, the sentences breathe more freely, the nuanced simplicity with which Adichie writes becomes less simple, more nuanced. This quality builds throughout the collection, so that the final story feels almost like the climax of a novel. It takes place entirely in Nigeria, and it’s the only one that shifts its gaze fully from the present to Nigeria’s colonial past, spanning from the late 19th century to the 1970s. It recounts the life of a village woman who sends her son to a missionary school and lives to regret his subsequent harsh Christianity – his turning away from her and their African way of life. At the end, however, the woman’s granddaughter simultaneously moves forward and turns back to the past. She defies the expectations of family, friends and Church by earning a university degree, studying in London, divorcing her husband – then returning home, writing a book about a reclaimed history of southern Nigeria, and changing her name from Grace to Afamefuna. She embraces her homeland, and, in doing so, she finds a kind of modest empowerment that has eluded many who left.

BOOK REVIEW: The Thing Around Your Neck

By Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie

Reviewed by Bernardine Evaristo, The Times

This stunning collection of short stories confirms Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's position as one of Africa's brightest new literary stars. She is the author of two important novels about the Igbo people of Nigeria - Purple Hibiscus and the Orange prize-winning Half of a Yellow Sun - yet her writing is even more poignant when applied to the short story: crisp, succinct, vigorous and loaded.

Adichie was born and raised in Nigeria and now lives in America. These slice-of-life stories straddle both countries and dissect the imbalance of power and moral corruption in a wide range of relationships and settings. The first story, Cell One, shows a descent into lawlessness and police brutality that we've come to expect depicted in Nigerian literature. Yet in Adichie's hands it is seen afresh. The writer's cool, intelligent, observant, female antennae are sensitive to the subtleties of how people behave, and why, in this story about the interplay of motherhood and teenage waywardness. Set on a university campus, its young men belong to gangs who steal, fight and kill: “... eighteen-year-olds who had mastered the swagger of American rap videos were undergoing secret and strange initiations that sometimes left one or two of them dead on Odim Hill”. The female narrator's teenage brother, Nnamabia, is arrested by the police after one such gang has run riot, shooting students and escaping in a professor's car. As his mother's spoilt only son, it's unclear whether he is guilty of the shooting but he is imprisoned without charge and left to the mercy of corrupt policemen. It is to Adichie's credit that her writing is so understated that at the end of the story the reader is left to imagine what happens rather than being force-fed the gory details. Her endings are always unpredictable and suspenseful.

In A Private Experience two women take refuge in a shack in the middle of a riot carried out by Hausa Muslims against Igbo Christians in northern Nigeria a few years ago. One is an Igbo medical student, the other a Hausa market-trader, and their brief interaction affirms the power of humanity to resist and survive tribal warfare. All Adichie's stories are suffused with evocative atmospheric detail. The riot-torn streets outside the shack “smell like the kind of sky-coloured smoke that wafts around during Christmas when people throw goat carcasses into fires to burn the hair off the skin”. And there is plenty of quirky detail too. What do these two refugees from the riot talk about? Well, the Hausa woman thrusts her naked breasts at the medical student with the plea, “My nipple is burning like pepper”.

In her stories about immigration to the US, Adichie highlights the adjustments required when you arrive in the world's most powerful and pervasive country. She invites us to ask whether it is really worth it. In Imitation, a bored Igbo housewife, Nkem, has been deposited in a smart American suburb by her businessman husband while he lives in Nigeria. Despite being part of the “Rich Nigerian Men Who Send Their Wives to America to Have Babies” league, she is still a powerless “Bush Girl” who gets her English tenses mixed up. But finding that her husband has installed a mistress in their Nigerian home galvanises her inner warrior and she takes control of the situation, rendering him mute and compliant.

Patriarchal attitudes are kicked in the groin in several of these stories. The Arrangers of Marriage shows a new wife arriving in Brooklyn to be treated by her dictatorial husband as something merely to use and abuse. She plans to leave him. In The Thing Around Your Neck an “uncle” who has enabled a young woman to live in the US expects sexual services in return. She refuses. Edward, the organiser of a workshop and prize for African writers in Jumping Monkey Hill, is pompous, lecherous and patronising. He also considers himself the arbiter of what is authentic in African fiction - despite being white, English and clueless. He gets his come-uppance.

Adiche pokes fun at US middle-class parental angst in On Monday of Last Week. Kamara, the nanny of the son of a neurotic father, describes the contents of their fridge: “The shop shelf was stacked with plastic bottles of juiced organic spinach. Cans of herbal tea had filled that space two weeks ago, when Neil was reading Herbal Drinks for Children, and before that it was soy beverages, and before that protein shakes for growing bones.” Yet the story also touches on lesbian desire. When the mother of the boy finally appears, Kamara falls prey to the power of the woman's ambiguous, flirtatious sexuality. A closet gay Nigerian man makes an appearance in The Shivering. Such sightings are rare in African fiction.

While there is a sense of anger at the injustices that Nigerians have to endure in their home country, these stories also question whether life in the US is any better. Many of the immigrants' stories are driven by loneliness and alienation and some do decide to return home - for better or worse. Adichie offers insights into both worlds and, like all fine storytellers, leaves us wanting more.