The latest Fab 5 meeting began with a trip report. One of us had gone to her hometown of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and she regaled us with tales of mysterious Wisconsin food staples such as cheese curds and visits to exotic places like Goesse’s, the Meat Market and Clem’s Wagon Wheel. She also got a tour of the Kohler factory, a tour guided by one Elmer VanderWeele, brother to the famous Calvin College English professor, Steve.
While this may seem like a strange way to start a book discussion, it was oddly fitting. This month’s book was The Thing around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Adichie is a Nigerian author who now divides her time between the United States and Nigeria. The Thing Around Your Neck is a collection of short stories, and each one reveals some level of homesickness for what was and for what should be. Adichie does an excellent job of illuminating the tension of living somewhere between two cultures.
Sonya pointed out that, while Adichie is a good writer, the stories often end too abruptly. You’re left feeling as though the story isn’t finished, just ended. Also, she noted that the men in the stories do not come off well, particularly the Nigerian men. I agree, but it seems as though each story explores the way one person is silenced or repressed, someone who needs to speak (or face) the truth. Some of these characters are a woman in an arranged marriage, a young man who is beginning to see what corruption of justice leads to, and a girl who has played a hand in her brother's death. Some struggle with their sexuality. All of her narrators or main characters are women, and in Nigeria like many societies, men have power and so are the most likely candidates to oppress. So it is partly the themes of the book that lead to negative images of men.
Sonya did enjoy some of Adichie's insights, including a story where a Nigerian woman is a nanny for a young boy in America. She observes that "American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Amercians 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." She also skewers the food culture of this country, when a young woman in a newly arrange marriage accompanies her husband to an American mall. "We ate the pizza sitting at a small round table in what he called a 'food court.' A sea of people sitting around circular tables, hunched over paper plates of greasy food...There was something humiliatingly public, something lacking in dignity, about this place, this open space of too many tables and too much food."
Made us wonder what she'd think of the former tradition at the denominational building where all of us work. Once a week, someone get a bunch of donuts and set them up in the breakroom for anyone who wanted to pay 50 cents. What a great idea. Extra calories for a bunch of us who already spend too much time sitting at desks , with the added bonus that when someone “forgot” to pay the denomination could foot the bill for the demise of the health that they pay to care for. Hmm. I think we know why that one fizzled out. But back to the book.
Adichie examines the strange brew that has come to be the culture of Nigeria—corruption, inequity, oppression—due to many factors such as colonialism, tribalism and religious differences. In my favorite story of the book, a Hausa Muslim woman and a young Igbo woman who'd been raised Catholic hide together in an abandoned storefront as a riot goes on in the market. The very human contact that these two women have as they wait for a safe exit belies the angry mob outside the door, and it gives a glimpse into the complicated nature of such disputes. All of these difficulties have formed a society where the only way to get what you need from the government, the police, the bank, or the merchant is to have some power. And power is abused wherever it is found, not just in Nigeria and not just in Africa.
The even stranger brew comes when you throw in Western society. Take a Nigerian woman and plant her in a home that her husband has prepared in the United States. She must somehow navigate her own culture shock, the man she married who may not be who she thought, the expectations of neighbors, and a bond with a home country that slowly becomes less her own. Where does she belong? Who does she belong with?
Beyond the societal issues, Adichie takes a close look at bonds between parent and child, husband and wife, brother and sister. She is a keen observer of human nature and the way we relate to each other. It’s hard to imagine the matriarchal grandmother in the book who puts all of her hopes and dreams into one grandson, belittling the rest. Especially after hearing Barbara detail a day spent with her grandchild—watching out the window for trucks, playing with toys, watching the little one sleep in her bed. When does power enter a relationship, and when does it begin to change it? Barbara's obvious infatuation with her grandchild makes the tension that can come in a family seem impossible.
We topped off our meaty discussion with some meat pies, hummus and flatbread. I would have loved to make some Nigerian food like jollof rice or pounded yam with egusi soup, but that's a lot of work, and as much as I love these ladies, I don’t love them enough for that right now. So we settled for another food that I ate in Nigeria, since it is a country rife with excellent Lebanese food due to all the Lebanese expats there.
And if you want to hear me wax nostalgic for Nigeria, where I spent exactly one out of my 41 and 23/24 years, just ask me. One kind of character that shows up on much of what I've read of Adichie's work is the American or Brit who is overly fascinated with African culture, or who seems to claim it as their own, even after a short experience there. I try hard not to take that personally.
While the rest of my book club now thinks Nigeria doesn’t sound so great, reading these stories oddly makes me want to jump on the next plane. Readers had the same mixed reaction when the Neland Women read one of my favorite books, also by Adichie, called Purple Hibiscus. I’ve decided that Adichie can describe the smells and sounds so well that if you’ve been there, it brings back all of the good things, even though she doesn’t always tell about the good things.
And the good things are not always so easy to explain—even describing them might leave others thinking they don’t sound so good. When I worked for Christian Reformed World Missions, our communications director shared with me two and fast rules about video presentations. First, none should end with a shot of a sunset--cliche, cliche, cliche. Second, no missionary should title their video presentation "Land of Contrasts," because that can be said about any country. But you can understand the impulse. Whenever you visit a new country, you are struck by the contrasts you wouldn't notice in your own. And Adichie's book seems intent on introducing us to the contrasts within both Nigeria and America and between the two of them.
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