Tales of Nigerian outsiders, trapped between two worlds

July 12, 2009|Saul Austerlitz

Anger. Defensiveness. The feeling of being unloved, unwanted, undesired. Above all, the nagging sensation that your story - your truth - is being stifled by flashier, louder tales. “The Thing Around Your Neck,’’ pointedly, is not relegated to an impersonal, unspecific other; it’s closing ever tighter around your neck, too, buster, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is intent that you don’t forget it.

The Nigerian-born author of the Biafran War novel “Half of a Yellow Sun,’’ Adichie made a name for herself with that searing vision of a stratified society torn asunder by fraternal strife. This volume, her first collection of short stories, is purposefully cooler; the baking yellow sun is mostly banked behind clouds. It is Nigerian life seen from outside: the perspective of the American immigrant, the memory tourist, the second-class gender. They are the stories of those whose tales are not told.

Like those of Jhumpa Lahiri, whose work bears a notable resemblance to Adichie’s, the characters of “The Thing Around Your Neck’’ are caught between past and present, original and adopted homelands. Many of them, like Ukamaka in “The Shivering’’ and Nkem in the “Imitation,’’ are forgotten women, abandoned by their men to American life, and a slow, unconscious acclimation to its foreign ways. Nkem’s husband is a member of “the Rich Nigerian Men Who Sent Their Wives to America to Have Their Babies League,’’ and she feels strangely proud when he uses the plural instead of the singular to characterize his decisions: “She liked it when he said ‘we,’ as though she really had a say in it.’’ Ukamaka talks obsessively about her ex-boyfriend Udenna with a fellow countryman she meets in Princeton, N.J., until he finally snaps: “Udenna did this to you and Udenna did that to you, but why did you let him? Why did you let him? Have you ever considered that it wasn’t love?’’

America is a land of yoga classes, drive-through banks, and copious supermarket carts, but it is also a surprisingly unsatisfactory promised land. It is the “airless hallway with frayed carpeting,’’ instead of the green grass and white picket fence she had eagerly expected, that the new bride in “The Arrangers of Marriage’’ discovers waiting for her across the Atlantic. It is the place where all the equivocations, half-truths, and buried secrets that form a life are ruthlessly exposed, making it, for all its advantages, a strangely gloomy place.