Avoiding a single story through many stories

I’ve been super enthralled with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie this CBR, and I thought I needed to read her collection of short stories to make the reading experience complete. As it turns out, there’s a speech/essay published called “We Should All be Feminists,” so I’ll read that too. But I do feel glad for reading her short story collection, as I have more teaching ideas for the next year and beyond.

The Thing Around Your Neck focuses on many of the same themes, ideas, or settings found in Adichie’s novels, so if you are a fan of hers, these shorter works will feel welcome and familiar. My personal favorites were “Jumping Monkey Hill” and “The Headstrong Historian,” because they were concise and yet complicated at the same time. “Jumping Monkey Hill” features a writing retreat across Africa, with authors from Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, and other countries, all being told that their respective experiences are not “African” enough. Of course, the expert is a “compassionate” white man, whose idea of Africa is filtered by the suffering that we often come to associate with African literature. In the text, we can see Adichie’s dangers of telling “a single story” take hold. I highly recommend it for anyone new to Anglophone literature.

While this did not have the same wrenching aspects of Half of a Yellow Sun or Americanah, I do very much recommend this collection. The writing is terrific and there is plenty to chew on. I find that sometimes a collection of short stories is better for summer reading, since you can read in little bursts. And right now, I’m on vacation, so that means my reading time is coming only in short bursts…