The Thing Around Your Neck: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Last month, I reread Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck and had to make minor adjustments to my previously held perception of the author whom I had mistakenly put in same genre as Jhumpa Lahiri. The similarity seems small now between the two except for that both write immigrants' stories, their bottled tragedies, implicit sufferings and paradoxical anxieties that unfold in pursuit of a seemingly better life in USA albeit with very different methods. While Jhumpa is a pro in creating stories in the form of slow motion, detail by detail, never ending affliction, so much so that you feel gloomy and tortured during and after the end which certainly end but do not get over. That is probably her expertise and she does it with poised dexterity. Ngozi, on the other hand, produces sharp and witty narratives in a powerful story-telling format and you will feel like feeling amused at her sarcasm and subtle humor but you hold it as she brings it out along with profound understanding of cultural nuances and you muster your understanding for a right reaction. Sample this, from one of the stories, On Monday of Last Week in which Kamara, a Nigerian woman who has joined her husband in America takes up a job as a nanny to an upper class family and becomes obsessed with the mother:

She was still holding the phone; it had started to buzz noisily. She touched the PROTECT OUR ANGELS stickers that Neil had recently placed on the cradle, a day after he called, frantic, because he has just seen a photo on the Internet of a child molester who had recently moved to their neighborhood and who looked exactly like the UPS delivery man. Where is Josh? Where is Josh? Neil had asked, as if Josh would have been anywhere else but somewhere in the house. Kamara had hung up feeling sorry for him. She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rare disease that they had just read about, made them think they had the right to protect their child from disappointment and want and failure. A sated belly gave Americans the luxury of praising themselves for being good parents, as if caring for one's child were the exception rather than the rule. It used to amuse Kamara, watching women on television talk about how much they loved their children, what sacrifices they made for them. Now, it annoyed her. Now that her periods insisted on coming month after month, she resented those manicured women with their effortlessly conceived babies and their breezy expressions like "healthy parenting."

For those who want to know more about the author, I would recommend her talk on TED which will mesmerize you, that much I am certain: The Danger of Single Story.