(10 unread)
This week I’ve had the good fortune to review a book I actually enjoyed reading. It took a bit of doing – choosing the book myself, lobbying the magazine to agree, then virtually having to promise any future offspring to the local book store so that they would lend me the book to read. (They were thrilled to see it back! And somewhat surprised I think!)
The book is That Thing Around Your Neck, by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Her first two novels – Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun – have been incredibly successful earning her a Commonwealth Writers Prize and Orange Prize respectively. Her latest, a collection of short stories, has just been nominated for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, which will be announced in April.
Adichie's stories are beautifully written and had I not read Juhmpa Lahiri’s collection – The Interpreter of Maladies – a couple of weeks beforehand, I probably would have loved them more. Lahiri’s book is written in a very similar style, but with India as a focus rather than Nigeria, and is absolutely stunning. While many of Lahiri’s stories are quite bleak, there are passages of writing that you just want to reread and savour. Adichie is not quite in the same class, but her stories paint a vivid picture of the lives of Nigerians, both at home and living in the United States.
I have to admit though, that I find Adichie the commentator, even more interesting than Adichie the writer. Her TED talks presentation on the danger of telling a single story for example, is well constructed and provides great food for thought on the ease of seeing people/cultures/issues in a blinkered way: ie all Nigerians are terrorists/scammers, all Mexicans are illegal immigrants, all Africans live in mud huts in the desert and in poverty.
While it is easy to dismiss her argument as being something ‘other people do’ you really don’t have to look too far to see the single story creeping in.
I read an interesting blog article by a woman talking about her daughter’s kindergarten class learning about Africa. As she wandered around the classroom looking at photographs of skinny children squatting outside mud huts and lots of pictures of wild animals, she felt her irritation growing. Where were the pictures of bustling cities? The multitude of races and religions? The professionals? The artists? The athletes? The snow covered mountains, the beaches or the jungles?
I sometimes wonder whether people perceive our experience here in Ghana through a similar filter.
Perhaps one of Adichie’s greatest strengths is her ability to see the danger of the single story in herself. In the TED talk she refers to her preconceptions about Mexicans. In another interview she talks about being prepared to hate Dave Eggers, for daring, as a white man, to write about Africa in the way he did, and then having to admit later that not only was his book, What is the What wonderful, but that she also liked him as a person.
The question of who is qualified to write about Africa is clearly one Adichie has strong views on. In That Thing Around Your Neck, one of the stories is set at a writers retreat in South Africa where the narrator goes head to head with the English moderator of the group who continually berates them for not writing “authentic” stories. He demands poverty and violence, dismissing the everyday struggles of ordinary people dealing with relationships, bad bosses or, as Adichie does in her other short stories, tales of wayward teenagers, childhood mistakes, jobs, parenting and old age.
My one regret with this review, is not being able to track Adichie down for an interview. I would have loved to discuss the extent to which she believes the ability to tell an authentic story is dependant upon the race of the reader/writer.Perhaps that time will come. I should have a long list of questions by then!
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