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Blog Post 9: The Thing Around Your Neck

Chimamanda Adichie’s short story novel, The Things Around Neck, was a fascinating read. Focusing on the Nigerian perspective of life in the United States and Nigeria this novel delves deep into the complicated world of assimilation to the bleak, convenient, white washed society that is American culture. The first eleven stories in Adichie’s novel focused on the need to leave Nigeria; There was always a component escaping Nigeria in hope of finding a better, more fulfilling life in the United States. People dreams of marrying someone who is already a citizen or to win the visa lottery to get in the Unites States. The twelfth and final story in The Thing Around Your Neck was a fitting way to wrap up the series of stories. The twelfth story, “The Headstrong Historian”, revolved around the return to Nigerian culture; the embrace of the motherland, reclaiming stolen identity and stolen culture. “It was Grace who, as she received faculty prizes, as she spoke to the solemn-faced people at the conferences about the Ijaw and Ibibio and Igbo and Efik peoples of Southern Nigeria, as she report for international organizations about the commonsense things for which she nevertheless received generous pay, would imagine her grandmother looking on and chuckling with great amusement. It was Grace who, feeling an odd rootlessness in the later years of her life, surrounded by her awards, her friends, her garden of peerless roses, would go to the courthouse in Lagos and officially change her name from Grace to Afamefuna” (The Thing Around Your Neck, 2015). When Grace embraces and reclaims her African name, Afamefuna, she recovers her past and present self; appropriately her African name translates to ‘My name will not be forgotten.’

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Post #9: Jumping Monkey Hill

Reading through The Thing Around Your Neck it was hard to choose one story to talk about. There were stories in the book that I found interesting and situations that I could not dream of finding myself in. I particularly enjoyed how she put a spotlight, an emphasis, on the ordinary person’s life and struggles. Chimamanda Adichie squeezes so much emotion and detail in 15 to 20 pages without saying much; the simplicity of her stories are welcoming but harness a depth that we the reader does not always consider.

For this post, I have chosen to analyze the short story “Jumping Monkey Hill”. The short story starts off with a man, Edward, clearly disregarding the subtle but clear hits from a woman that she was uninterested. When first reading this I thought to myself, well I’ve been there, a man demanding your attention and response, refusing to leave you be because he decides when the conversation ends. It was unoriginal, this is everyday life for most women and that is why it is important. This scene is a crucial foreshadowing for later in the story. Encounters with Edward escalate into inappropriate and sexually suggestive language towards women that have attended the conference as his equal. Yet, as these encounters grow more frequent no one speaks up about the improper and demeaning nature of them. The main character, fed up with these confrontations exclaims, “‘But why do we say nothing?’ Ujunwa asked. She raised her voice and looked at the others. ‘Why do we always say nothing’” (Adichie, 2009)? I cannot help but relate this back to what Chimamanda Adichie states in her speech We Should All Be Feminists.  To take a stand for yourself as a woman, to say no to a man, to deny him of his wants, to not fulfill his fantasies, to position yourself as his equal, to respect yourself, to be a feminist, collectively that is ‘un-African’. That is why no one spoke up to Edward. To question the patriarchy is not their culture, but also as Chimamanda Adichie states in We Should All Be Feminists, “Some people will say that a woman being subordinate to a man is our culture. But culture is constantly changing” (2013). Culture is not stagnant, it changes with generations. Edward not only had an air of misogyny and the creep factor to him but also a mist of the colonizer. His male gaze upon the women of the conference, his colonizer gaze; Edward wanted to dominate them.