The Thing Around Your Neck

Agh, so good. Soooooo good. Short story collections have two things NOT going for them: (1) the story ends as soon as you get into it, and it's hard to switch contexts, and (2) stories can be uneven. The (1) problem wasn't that bad - mostly since each story immediately pulled you in. They were similar to Adichie's Americanah concerns: Nigerian (specifically, Igbo) intellectuals in Lagos, Philadelphia, and Princeton. The (2) problem also wasn't that bad; of course, some stories were especially good, but none were duds. All of them were basically great.

Agh. Agghhhh. I love Adichie's portrayal of Nigeria. I love her portrayal of America. She's so precise and incisive in her writing. I loved the meta qualities, when you wonder how much is about Adichie's life herself - the titular story, for example, about a group of African writers at a retreat in South Africa led by a bloviating, patronizing, white British author. I mean, like, that must have happened to her, right? It's hard to travel around Africa without tripping over one of these bloviating white old English dudes saying vaguely racist things.

The real piece de resistance of the collection, though, is the final story: a glorious, GLORIOUS!!, fanfic about Things Fall Apart. Of course, Achebe also centralized his stories on the Igbo experience, and - when I read Things Fall Apart - I did indeed get an itch of, “But how would Chimamanda respond to this?” The final story, The Headstrong Historian (available here), is that glorious response. I loved it. Oh man. So good. I loved that it started, and you realize, sneakily, that it's set in a pre-colonial Nigeria, and you're like, “Oh, cool, not modern anymore, interesting.” And then someone mentions “Obierika”, and you're like, “Why is that name familiar.” Oh, cause it's that one side character from Things Fall Apart. And then someone mentions Okonkwo, and you're like, OMG FANFIC YUSSSSS.

But beyond it being high-falutin' fanfic (and thus a direct line to my heart), it was also so wonderfully A RESPONSE to Achebe (and to bloviating male descriptions of Africa). It tells the entire story from Obierika's wife's perspective, a “headstrong”, opinionated lady named Nwamgba. It covers the same overall theme of a traditional Igbo village being violently transformed by the arrival of Christian missionaries, but - MWAH - it's done so much better than Achebe. Nwamgba's son, who she sends to the missionary school so he can learn English and get better at settling legal disputes in this new colonial world, grows up into the biggest asshole ever - rejecting his mom's “savage” traditions, going on and on about Jesus stuff, refusing to call himself by his “tribal” name. Nwamgba's not too cut up about this. And there's this great/amazing/moving moment when Nwamgba, now an old woman, refuses to call her baby granddaughter by her Christian name (“Grace”), calling her instead Afamefuma (“My name will not be lost”), and then hopes/prays that Afamefuma will maintain her resilience and strength and pride in the face of these undermining colonial transformations:

She feared that, at boarding school, the new ways would dissolve her granddaughter's fighting spirit and replace it with either an incurious rigidity, like her son's, or a limp helplessness, like Mgbeke's.