That thing around your neck

That thing around your neck

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

THING AROUND YOUR NECK

A Private Experience

On Monday Of Last Week

Jumping Monkey Hill

The Thing Around Your Neck

The American Embassy

The Arrangers Of Marriage

Tomorrow Is Too Far

The Headstrong Historian

About the Author

Also By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

About the Publisher

The first time our house was robbed, it was our neighbor Osita who climbed in through the dining room window and stole our TV, our VCR, and the Purple Rain and Thriller videotapes my father had brought back from America. The second time our house was robbed, it was my brother Nnamabia who faked a break-in and stole my mother’s jewelry. It happened on a Sunday. My parents had traveled to our hometown, Mbaise, to visit our grandparents, so Nnamabia and I went to church alone. He drove my mother’s green Peugeot 504. We sat together in church as we usually did, but we did not nudge each other and stifle giggles about somebody’s ugly hat or threadbare caftan, because Nnamabia left without a word after about ten minutes. He came back just before the priest said, “The Mass is ended. Go in peace.” I was a little piqued. I imagined he had gone off to smoke and to see some girl, since he had the car to himself for once, but he could at least have told me where he was going. We drove home in silence and, when he parked in our long driveway, I stopped to pluck some ixora flowers while Nnamabia unlocked the front door. I went inside to find him standing still in the middle of the parlor.

“We’ve been robbed!” he said in English.

It took me a moment to understand, to take in the scattered room. Even then, I felt that there was a theatrical quality to the way the drawers were flung open, as if it had been done by somebody who wanted to make an impression on the discoverers. Or perhaps it was simply that I knew my brother so well. Later, when my parents came home and neighbors began to troop in to say ndo, and to snap their fingers and heave their shoulders up and down, I sat alone in my room upstairs and realized what the queasiness in my gut was: Nnamabia had done it, I knew. My father knew, too. He pointed out that the window louvers had been slipped out from the inside, rather than outside (Nnamabia was really much smarter than that; perhaps he had been in a hurry to get back to church before Mass ended), and that the robber knew exactly where my mother’s jewelry was—the left corner of her metal trunk. Nnamabia stared at my father with dramatic, wounded eyes and said, “I know I have caused you both terrible pain in the past, but I would never violate your trust like this.” He spoke English, using unnecessary words like “terrible pain” and “violate,” as he always did when he was defending himself. Then he walked out through the back door and did not come home that night. Or the next night. Or the night after. He came home two weeks later, gaunt, smelling of beer, crying, saying he was sorry and he had pawned the jewelry to the Hausa traders in Enugu and all the money was gone.

“How much did they give you for my gold?” my mother asked him. And when he told her, she placed both hands on her head and cried, “Oh! Oh! Chi m egbuo m! My God has killed me!” It was as if she felt that the least he could have done was get a good price. I wanted to slap her. My father asked Nnamabia to write a report: how he had sold the jewelry, what he had spent the money on, with whom he had spent it. I didn’t think Nnamabia would tell the truth, and I don’t think my father thought he would, either, but he liked reports, my professor father, he liked things written down and nicely documented. Besides, Nnamabia was seventeen, with a carefully tended beard. He was in that space between secondary school and university and was too old for caning. What else could my father have done? After Nnamabia wrote the report, my father filed it in the steel drawer in his study where he kept our school papers.

“That he could hurt his mother like this” was the last thing my father said, in a mutter.

But Nnamabia really hadn’t set out to hurt her. He did it because my mother’s jewelry was the only thing of any value in the house: a lifetime’s collection of solid gold pieces. He did it, too, because other sons of professors were doing it. This was the season of thefts on our serene Nsukka campus. Boys who had grown up watching Sesame Street, reading Enid Blyton, eating cornflakes for breakfast, attending the university staff primary school in smartly polished brown sandals, were now cutting through the mosquito netting of their neighbors’ windows, sliding out glass louvers, and climbing in to steal TVs and VCRs. We knew the thieves. Nsukka campus was such a small place—the houses sitting side by side on tree-lined streets, separated only by low hedges—that we could not but know who was stealing. Still, when their professor parents saw one another at the staff club or at church or at a faculty meeting, they continued to moan about riffraff from town coming onto their sacred campus to steal.

The thieving boys were the popular ones. They drove their parents’ cars in the evening, their seats pushed back and their arms stretched out to reach the steering wheel. Osita, the neighbor who had stolen our TV only weeks before the Nnamabia incident, was lithe and handsome in a brooding sort of way and walked with the grace of a cat. His shirts were always sharply ironed; I used to look across the hedge and see him and close my eyes and imagine that he was walking toward me, coming to claim me as his. He never noticed me. When he stole from us, my parents did not go over to Professor Ebube’s house to ask him to ask his son to bring back our things. They said publicly that it was riffraff from town. But they knew it was Osita. Osita was two years older than Nnamabia; most of the thieving boys were a little older than Nnamabia, and perhaps that was why Nnamabia did not steal from another person’s house. Perhaps he did not feel old enough, qualified enough, for anything bigger than my mother’s jewelry.

Nnamabia looked just like my mother, with that honey-fair complexion, large eyes, and a generous mouth that curved perfectly. When my mother took us to the market, traders would call out, “Hey! Madam, why did you waste your fair skin on a boy and leave the girl so dark? What is a boy doing with all this beauty?” And my mother would chuckle, as though she took a mischievous and joyful responsibility for Nnamabia’s good looks. When, at eleven, Nnamabia broke the window of his classroom with a stone, my mother gave him the money to replace it and did not tell my father. When he lost some library books in class two, she told his form-mistress that our houseboy had stolen them. When, in class three, he left early every day to attend catechism and it turned out he never once went and so could not receive Holy Communion, she told the other parents that he had malaria on the examination day. When he took the key of my father’s car and pressed it into a piece of soap that my father found before Nnamabia could take it to a locksmith, she made vague sounds about how he was just experimenting and it didn’t mean a thing. When he stole the exam questions from the study and sold them to my father’s students, she shouted at him but then told my father that Nnamabia was sixteen, after all, and really should be given more pocket money.

I don’t know whether Nnamabia felt remorse for stealing her jewelry. I could not always tell from my brother’s gracious, smiling face what it was he really felt. And we did not talk about it. Even though my mother’s sisters sent her their gold earrings, even though she bought an earring-and-pendant set from Mrs. Mozie, the glamorous woman who imported gold from Italy, and began to drive to Mrs. Mozie’s h
ouse once a month to pay for it in installments, we never talked, after that day, about Nnamabia’s stealing her jewelry. It was as if pretending that Nnamabia had not done the things he had done would give him the opportunity to start afresh. The robbery might never have been mentioned again if Nnamabia had not been arrested three years later, in his third year in the university, and locked up at the police station.

It was the season of cults on our serene Nsukka campus. It was the time when signboards all over the university read, in bold letters, SAY NO TO CULTS. The Black Axe, the Buccaneers, and the Pirates were the best known. They may once have been benign fraternities, but they had evolved and were now called “cults”; eighteen-year-olds who had mastered the swagger of American rap videos were undergoing secret and strange initiations that sometimes left one or two of them dead on Odim Hill. Guns and tortured loyalties and axes had become common. Cult wars had become common: a boy would leer at a girl who turned out to be the girlfriend of the Capone of the Black Axe, and that boy, as he walked to a kiosk to buy a cigarette later, would be stabbed in the thigh, and he would turn out to be a member of the Buccaneers, and so his fellow Buccaneers would go to a beer parlor and shoot the nearest Black Axe boy in the shoulder, and then the next day a Buccaneer member would be shot dead in the refectory, his body falling against aluminum bowls of soup, and that evening a Black Axe boy would be hacked to death in his room in a lecturer’s Boys’ Quarters, his CD player splattered with blood. It was senseless. It was so abnormal that it quickly became normal. Girls stayed inside their hostel rooms after lectures and lecturers quivered and when a fly buzzed too loudly, people were afraid. So the police were called in. They sped across campus in their rickety blue Peugeot 505, rusty guns poking out of the car windows, and glowered at the students. Nnamabia came home from his lectures laughing. He thought the police would have to do better; everyone knew the cult boys had more modern guns.

My parents watched Nnamabia’s laughing face with silent concern and I knew that they, too, were wondering whether he was in a cult. Sometimes I thought he was. Cult boys were popular and Nnamabia was very popular. Boys yelled out his nickname—“The Funk!”—and shook his hand whenever he passed by, and girls, especially the popular Big Chicks, hugged him for too long when they said hello. He went to all the parties, the tame ones on campus and the wilder ones in town, and he was the kind of ladies’ man who was also a guy’s guy, the kind who smoked a pack of Rothmans a day and was reputed to be able to finish a carton of Star beer in a sitting. Other times I thought he was not in a cult, because he was so popular and it seemed more his style that he would befriend all the different cult boys and be the enemy of none. And I was not entirely sure, either, that my brother had whatever it took—guts or insecurity—to join a cult. The only time I asked him if he was in a cult, he looked at me with surprise, his eyelashes long and thick, as if I should have known better than to ask, before he said, “Of course not.” I believed him. My father believed him, too. But our believing him made little difference, because he had already been arrested and accused of belonging to a cult. He told me this—“Of course not”—on our first visit to the police station where he was locked up.

This is how it happened. On a humid Monday, four cult members waited at the campus gate and waylaid a professor driving a red Mercedes. They pressed a gun to her head, shoved her out of the car, and drove it to the Faculty of Engineering, where they shot three boys walking out of their lecture halls. It was noon. I was in a class nearby, and when we heard the sharp bangs, our lecturer was the first to run out of the room. There was loud screaming and suddenly the staircases were packed with scrambling students unsure in which direction to run. Outside, three bodies lay on the lawn. The red Mercedes had screeched away. Many students packed hasty bags and okada drivers charged twice the usual fare to take them to the motor park. The vice chancellor announced that all evening classes were canceled and everyone had to be indoors after 9 p.m. This did not make much sense to me, since the shooting happened in sparkling daylight, and perhaps it did not make sense to Nnamabia, either, because on the first day of the curfew, he was not home at 9 p.m. and did not come home that night. I assumed he had stayed at a friend’s; he did not always come home anyway. The next morning, a security man came to tell my parents that Nnamabia had been arrested with some cult boys at a bar and had been taken away in a police van. My mother screamed, “Ekwuzikwana! Don’t say that!” My father calmly thanked the security man. He drove us to the police station in town. There, a constable chewing on a dirty pen cover said, “You mean those cult boys arrested yesterday night? They have been taken to Enugu. Very serious case! We must stop this cult trouble once and for all!”

We got back into the car and a new fear gripped us all. Nsukka—our slow, insular campus and the slower, more insular town—was manageable; my father would know the police superintendent. But Enugu was anonymous, the state capital with the Mechanized Division of the Nigerian Army and the police headquarters and the traffic wardens at busy intersections. It was where the police could do what they were famed for when under pressure to produce results: kill people.

The Enugu police station was in a walled-around, sprawling compound full of buildings; dusty, damaged cars were piled by the gate, near the sign that said offiCE OF THE COMMISSIONER OF POLICE. My father drove toward the rectangular bungalow at the other end of the compound. My mother bribed the two policemen at the desk with money and with jollof rice and meat, all tied up in a black waterproof bag, and they allowed Nnamabia to come out of his cell and sit on a bench with us under an umbrella tree. Nobody asked why he stayed out that night when he knew that a curfew had been imposed. Nobody said that the policemen were irrational to walk into a bar and arrest all the boys drinking there, as well as the barman. Instead we listened to Nnamabia talk. He sat straddling the wooden bench, a food flask of rice and chicken in front of him, his eyes brightly expectant: an entertainer about to perform.

“If we ran Nigeria like this cell,” he said, “we would have no problems in this country. Things are so organized. Our cell has a chief called General Abacha and he has a second in command. Once you come in, you have to give them some money. If you don’t, you’re in trouble.”

“And did you have any money?” my mother asked.

Nnamabia smiled, his face even more beautiful with a new pimple-like insect bite on his forehead, and said in Igbo that he had slipped his money into his anus shortly after the arrest at the bar. He knew the policemen would take it if he didn’t hide it and he knew he would need it to buy his peace in the cell. He bit into a fried drumstick and switched to English. “General Abacha was impressed with how I hid my money. I’ve made myself amenable to him. I praise him all the time. When the men asked all of us newcomers to hold our ears and frog-jump to their singing, he let me go after ten minutes. The others had to do it for almost thirty minutes.”

My mother hugged herself, as though she felt cold. My father said nothing, watching Nnamabia carefully. And I imagined him, my amenable brother, rolling one-hundred-naira notes into thin cigarette shapes and then slipping a hand into the back of his trousers to slide them painfully into himself.

Later, as we drove back to Nsukka, my father said, “This is what I should have done when he broke into the house. I should have had him locked up in a cell.”

My mother stared silently out of the window.

“Because this has shaken him for once. Couldn’t you see?” my father asked with a small smile. I couldn’t see it. Not that day. Nnamabia seemed fine to me, slipping his money into his anus and all.

Nnamabia’s first shock was seeing the Buccaneer sobbing. The boy was tall and tough, rumored to have carried out one of the killings, to be in line for Capone next semester, and yet there he was in the cell cowering and sobbing after the chief had given him a knock behind the head. Nnamabia told me this on our visit the following day, in a voice lined with both disgust and dis
appointment; it was as if he had suddenly been made to see that the Incredible Hulk was really just green paint. His second shock, a few days later, was Cell One, the cell beyond his. Two policemen had carried out a swollen dead man from Cell One and stopped by Nnamabia’s cell to make sure the corpse was seen by all.

Even the chief of his cell seemed afraid of Cell One. When Nnamabia and his cell mates, those who could afford to buy bathing water in the plastic buckets that had once held paint, were let out to bathe in the open yard, the policemen watched them and often shouted, “Stop that or you are going to Cell One now!” Nnamabia had nightmares about Cell One. He could not imagine a place worse than his cell, which was so crowded he often stood pressed against the cracked wall. Tiny kwalikwata lived inside the cracks and their bites were vicious, and when he yelped his cell mates called him Milk and Banana Boy, University Boy, Yeye Fine Boy.

They were too tiny to bite so painfully, those bugs. The biting was worse during the night, when they all had to sleep on their sides, head to foot, except the chief with his whole back lavishly on the floor. It was the chief who shared the plates of garri and watery soup that were pushed into the cell everyday. Each person got two mouthfuls. Nnamabia told us this during the first week. As he spoke I wondered if the bugs in the wall had bitten his face, too, or if the bumps spreading all over his forehead had come from an infection. Some of them were tipped with pus the color of cream. He scratched at them as he said, “I had to shit in a waterproof bag today, standing up. The toilet was too full. They flush it only on Saturdays.”

His tone was histrionic. I wanted to ask him to shut up, because he was enjoying his new role as the sufferer of indignities, and because he did not understand how lucky he was that the policemen allowed him to come out and eat our food, how stupid he’d been to stay out drinking that night, how uncertain his chances were of being released.

The Thing Around Your Neck Summary

The Thing Around Your Neck is arranged as a series of short stories. In the first story, «Cell One,» the Cell One narrator tells the story of her brother’s time in prison. Nnamabia is a handsome and charming teenager who steals and pawns his mother’s jewelry when he’s 17. Three years later, the Nsukka university campus where the siblings’ Mother and Father teach is embroiled in cult wars. The cults began as fraternities, but soon became exceptionally violent. Nnamabia is arrested after three boys are shot on campus. When Mother, Father, and the narrator visit him in jail, he seems to enjoy dramatizing what he’s going through in jail. Mother maintains that Nnamabia is innocent. Nnamabia is in jail for several weeks and his defenses begin to break down, particularly as he’s threatened with transfer to the dangerous Cell One. Eventually, an innocent old man joins his cell. Nnamabia watches the police taunt the old man for being poor and sick. Finally, on the day that the superintendent calls for Nnamabia’s release, Nnamabia stands up for the old man. He’s transferred to Cell One and then another prison, where he’s beaten. When his parents and the narrator come to get him, he doesn’t dramatize his retelling of what happened.

In «The Thing Around Your Neck, Akunna wins the «American visa lottery» and travels to live with her uncle in America. When her uncle tries to abuse her sexually, Akunna takes a bus to a small town in Connecticut and gets a job in a restaurant. A white boy begins visiting and tries to talk to Akunna about Africa. They soon begin a relationship, but the boy is rich and condescending. He doesn’t understand why Akunna is upset that he doesn’t correct waiters who assume that she’s not his girlfriend. Akunna finally writes home and learns that her father has died. She flies home alone.

The Thing Around Your Neck Summary

The Thing Around Your Neck is a collection of twelve individual short stories. Though the stories do not share any of the same characters or plot, they are woven together by their common themes.

“Cell One” follows the story of a Nigerian boy named Nnamabia. Told from his sister’s point of view, the story highlights the corrupt Nigerian justice system. Although Nnamabia is mistreated while imprisoned, his parents are able to bribe the police in order for him to receive preferential treatment. The narrator grows increasingly frustrated at her brother’s male privilege, and she retaliates against her parents for showing favoritism towards her guilty brother. The prison experience is incredibly formative for Nnamabia. Though he once relied on his charm, masculinity, and social class advantages, his privileged worldview changes forever.

«Imitation» is set in the suburbs of Philadelphia. The protagonist, Nkem, must grapple with the hardships of immigrating to the United States from Nigeria. Nkem’s husband, Obiora, only visits Nkem and their children for two months every year. When Nkem hears that Obiora has a new girlfriend in Nigeria, she must learn to set limits and advocate for herself in her marriage.

“A Private Experience” tells the story of a woman named Chika and an unnamed Hausa woman after a riot over religious differences breaks out in Kano, Nigeria. The Hausa woman offers Chika shelter in her store, and the women’s religious and class differences become evident. Despite the religious and ethnic turmoil that aims to divide them, the two women from different backgrounds demonstrate sympathy and understanding toward each other.

«Ghosts» chronicles the aging process of professor James Nwoye. James is startled when he runs into Ikenna Okaro, a colleague who he previously believed had died years ago, on the Nsukka campus. The two discuss what has happened to them in their years apart. Ikenna explains how he suffered during the country’s political revolution, and why he fled to Sweden. James tells Ikenna that although his wife, Ebere, has been dead for many years, her ghost visits him often and massages lotion into his skin.

In «On Monday of Last Week,» narrator Kamara joins her husband, Tobechi, in Philadelphia after living in Nigeria. Kamara has a difficult time adjusting to life in the United States, and she finds that her relationship with Tobechi is not as strong as she thought it was. In order to support herself while waiting for her green card, she gets hired as a nanny for a biracial family. Neil, the child’s Jewish father, is neurotic and obsessive about his young son, Josh. Kamara becomes intrigued by Josh’s elusive mother, Tracy, a painter who spends her time working in the basement. After Tracy expresses her desire to paint Kamara nude, Kamara becomes obsessed with and attracted to her.

«Jumping Monkey Hill» follows Ujunwa, a young Nigerian writer, as she attends a writing workshop at Jumping Monkey Hill. The writer’s retreat is sponsored by Edward Campbell, a British scholar who clearly fetishizes African culture. Each writer chosen for the retreat represents their home nation. Ujunwa grows frustrated at Edward’s attitude and judgment. After Ujunwa workshops her short story about a woman working at a bank, Edward critiques her plot for being «implausible.» This prompts Ujunwa to retaliate against Edward’s problematic behavior.

“The Thing Around Your Neck” is told from the second-person perspective. The female narrator, Akunna, wins the American visa lottery and moves from Nigeria to Maine. Akunna has a difficult adjustment to rural American life. One evening, her uncle sexually assaults her, and she leaves on a one-way bus ticket to Connecticut. There, she works as a waitress and struggles to make ends meet. One day, a young white man comes to the restaurant. He has traveled to Africa before, and he shows that he is interested in Akunna’s life and background. Akunna and the boy begin to date, but she realizes the differences between herself and the boy. Although he is somewhat knowledgeable about non-Western countries, he romanticizes the lives of poor, foreign populations. Akunna realizes that he is blindingly oblivious about his privilege. Akunna receives a letter from her family notifying her that her father has passed away. She flies back to Nigeria, and it is unsure whether she will return to America or to her relationship.

«The American Embassy» chronicles the story of an unnamed narrator who visits the American embassy in Nigeria in hopes of receiving an asylum visa. The narrator is still reeling from the death of her four-year-old son, Ugonna, who was killed by government officials earlier in the week. The narrator’s husband, a reporter, published a controversial article that angered the government. As a result, her husband fled the country and the officials killed their son instead. People advise the narrator to speak about the brutality of Ugonna’s death so that she can be granted the asylum visa. However, during her embassy interview, the narrator realizes that she would rather stay in Nigeria and plant flowers on Ugonna’s grave. She decides not to «use» his death to flee the country.

«The Shivering» takes place in Princeton, New Jersey. After hearing about a deadly plane crash in Nigeria, Ukamaka worries about the well-being of her ex-boyfriend, Udenna. She hears a knock on the door, and she is greeted by Chinedu, another Nigerian man who lives in her building. Ukamaka hears that Udenna is safe, but the two fail to reignite contact. Chinedu and Ukumaka become friends, and Ukumaka finds that she can speak at lengths to Chinedu about her breakup and he is receptive. Chinedu reveals that he had a boyfriend in Nigeria. One day, the two friends have a fight about Ukumaka’s selfish behavior. They go for weeks without speaking, until Ukumaka knocks on Chinedu’s door. Chinedu reveals that he is not a graduate student at Princeton, but rather he is hiding from the government because his visa expired. Ukumaka and Chinedu go to mass together, and Ukumaka vows to help Chinedu through his hardships.

«The Arrangers of Marriage» follows a new wife as she moves to New York City with her husband. The two have an arranged marriage. Following the move, she realizes that her husband does not accept her Nigerian identity. With the help of a new friend in the building, Chinaza learns to stand up for herself.

“Tomorrow Is Too Far” follows the story of a young woman as she reminisces about a summer she spent in Nigeria eighteen years ago. As children, she and her brother would go to visit her father’s mother, “Grandmama,” in Nigeria every summer. They pass time with their cousin, Dozie, whom the narrator also has a crush on. The narrator is often made to feel inferior to her older brother by her parents and Grandmama. Grandmama especially favors the narrator’s brother, since he will carry on the family name. The narrator is overcome with feelings of jealousy, and she wants to be given attention from her family. One afternoon, she challenges her brother to climb one of the fruit trees in her grandmother’s backyard. She then startles him, causing him to slip and fall to his death. She never intended for her brother to die, and the event causes her to retreat from her family. Her parents divorce, and she doesn’t visit Nigeria or see Dozie again until eighteen years later.

«The Headstrong Historian» is a story about the life of a woman named Nwambga whose husband was killed by his cousins. She is desperate to change the course of her life, and she sends her son to Catholic school to avoid any problems with her family. Her son ends up rejecting his mother’s traditional Nigerian customs, which deeply hurts Nwambga. Years later, her son has a daughter named Grace. Nwambga realizes that Grace carries the spirit of her husband, and she encourages Grace to embrace traditional Nigerian culture. Grace attends college and publishes books about Nigerian history. At the end of the story, Grace changes her name to Afemefuna, the Nigerian name given to her by her grandmother.

Chimamanda Adichi: The Thing Around Your Neck

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Chimamanda Adichi: The Thing Around Your Neck» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию). В некоторых случаях присутствует краткое содержание. Город: London, год выпуска: 2009, ISBN: 978007321049, издательство: HarperCollinsPublishers, категория: Современная проза / на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале. Библиотека «Либ Кат» — LibCat.ru создана для любителей полистать хорошую книжку и предлагает широкий выбор жанров:

Выбрав категорию по душе Вы сможете найти действительно стоящие книги и насладиться погружением в мир воображения, прочувствовать переживания героев или узнать для себя что-то новое, совершить внутреннее открытие. Подробная информация для ознакомления по текущему запросу представлена ниже:

The Thing Around Your Neck: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «The Thing Around Your Neck»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

Chimamanda Adichi: другие книги автора

Кто написал The Thing Around Your Neck? Узнайте фамилию, как зовут автора книги и список всех его произведений по сериям.

Возможность размещать книги на на нашем сайте есть у любого зарегистрированного пользователя. Если Ваша книга была опубликована без Вашего на то согласия, пожалуйста, направьте Вашу жалобу на info@libcat.ru или заполните форму обратной связи.

В течение 24 часов мы закроем доступ к нелегально размещенному контенту.

The Thing Around Your Neck — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «The Thing Around Your Neck», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The Thing Around Your Neck

The first time our house was robbed, it was our neighbor Osita who climbed in through the dining room window and stole our TV, our VCR, and the Purple Rain and Thriller videotapes my father had brought back from America. The second time our house was robbed, it was my brother Nnamabia who faked a break-in and stole my mother’s jewelry. It happened on a Sunday. My parents had traveled to our hometown, Mbaise, to visit our grandparents, so Nnamabia and I went to church alone. He drove my mother’s green Peugeot 504. We sat together in church as we usually did, but we did not nudge each other and stifle giggles about somebody’s ugly hat or threadbare caftan, because Nnamabia left without a word after about ten minutes. He came back just before the priest said, “The Mass is ended. Go in peace.” I was a little piqued. I imagined he had gone off to smoke and to see some girl, since he had the car to himself for once, but he could at least have told me where he was going. We drove home in silence and, when he parked in our long driveway, I stopped to pluck some ixora flowers while Nnamabia unlocked the front door. I went inside to find him standing still in the middle of the parlor.

“We’ve been robbed!” he said in English.

It took me a moment to understand, to take in the scattered room. Even then, I felt that there was a theatrical quality to the way the drawers were flung open, as if it had been done by somebody who wanted to make an impression on the discoverers. Or perhaps it was simply that I knew my brother so well. Later, when my parents came home and neighbors began to troop in to say ndo, and to snap their fingers and heave their shoulders up and down, I sat alone in my room upstairs and realized what the queasiness in my gut was: Nnamabia had done it, I knew. My father knew, too. He pointed out that the window louvers had been slipped out from the inside, rather than outside (Nnamabia was really much smarter than that; perhaps he had been in a hurry to get back to church before Mass ended), and that the robber knew exactly where my mother’s jewelry was — the left corner of her metal trunk. Nnamabia stared at my father with dramatic, wounded eyes and said, “I know I have caused you both terrible pain in the past, but I would never violate your trust like this.” He spoke English, using unnecessary words like “terrible pain” and “violate,” as he always did when he was defending himself. Then he walked out through the back door and did not come home that night. Or the next night. Or the night after. He came home two weeks later, gaunt, smelling of beer, crying, saying he was sorry and he had pawned the jewelry to the Hausa traders in Enugu and all the money was gone.

“How much did they give you for my gold?” my mother asked him. And when he told her, she placed both hands on her head and cried, “Oh! Oh! Chi m egbuom! My God has killed me!” It was as if she felt that the least he could have done was get a good price. I wanted to slap her. My father asked Nnamabia to write a report: how he had sold the jewelry, what he had spent the money on, with whom he had spent it. I didn’t think Nnamabia would tell the truth, and I don’t think my father thought he would, either, but he liked reports, my professor father, he liked things written down and nicely documented. Besides, Nnamabia was seventeen, with a carefully tended beard. He was in that space between secondary school and university and was too old for caning. What else could my father have done? After Nnamabia wrote the report, my father filed it in the steel drawer in his study where he kept our school papers.

“That he could hurt his mother like this” was the last thing my father said, in a mutter.

But Nnamabia really hadn’t set out to hurt her. He did it because my mother’s jewelry was the only thing of any value in the house: a lifetime’s collection of solid gold pieces. He did it, too, because other sons of professors were doing it. This was the season of thefts on our serene Nsukka campus. Boys who had grown up watching Sesame Street, reading Enid Blyton, eating cornflakes for breakfast, attending the university staff primary school in smartly polished brown sandals, were now cutting through the mosquito netting of their neighbors’ windows, sliding out glass louvers, and climbing in to steal TVs and VCRs. We knew the thieves. Nsukka campus was such a small place — the houses sitting side by side on tree-lined streets, separated only by low hedges — that we could not but know who was stealing. Still, when their professor parents saw one another at the staff club or at church or at a faculty meeting, they continued to moan about riffraff from town coming onto their sacred campus to steal.

The thieving boys were the popular ones. They drove their parents’ cars in the evening, their seats pushed back and their arms stretched out to reach the steering wheel. Osita, the neighbor who had stolen our TV only weeks before the Nnamabia incident, was lithe and handsome in a brooding sort of way and walked with the grace of a cat. His shirts were always sharply ironed; I used to look across the hedge and see him and close my eyes and imagine that he was walking toward me, coming to claim me as his. He never noticed me. When he stole from us, my parents did not go over to Professor Ebube’s house to ask him to ask his son to bring back our things. They said publicly that it was riffraff from town. But they knew it was Osita. Osita was two years older than Nnamabia; most of the thieving boys were a little older than Nnamabia, and perhaps that was why Nnamabia did not steal from another person’s house. Perhaps he did not feel old enough, qualified enough, for anything bigger than my mother’s jewelry.

Nnamabia looked just like my mother, with that honey-fair complexion, large eyes, and a generous mouth that curved perfectly. When my mother took us to the market, traders would call out, “Hey! Madam, why did you waste your fair skin on a boy and leave the girl so dark? What is a boy doing with all this beauty?” And my mother would chuckle, as though she took a mischievous and joyful responsibility for Nnamabia’s good looks. When, at eleven, Nnamabia broke the window of his classroom with a stone, my mother gave him the money to replace it and did not tell my father. When he lost some library books in class two, she told his form-mistress that our houseboy had stolen them. When, in class three, he left early every day to attend catechism and it turned out he never once went and so could not receive Holy Communion, she told the other parents that he had malaria on the examination day. When he took the key of my father’s car and pressed it into a piece of soap that my father found before Nnamabia could take it to a locksmith, she made vague sounds about how he was just experimenting and it didn’t mean a thing. When he stole the exam questions from the study and sold them to my father’s students, she shouted at him but then told my father that Nnamabia was sixteen, after all, and really should be given more pocket money.

I don’t know whether Nnamabia felt remorse for stealing her jewelry. I could not always tell from my brother’s gracious, smiling face what it was he really felt. And we did not talk about it. Even though my mother’s sisters sent her their gold earrings, even though she bought an earring-and-pendant set from Mrs. Mozie, the glamorous woman who imported gold from Italy, and began to drive to Mrs. Mozie’s house once a month to pay for it in installments, we never talked, after that day, about Nnamabia’s stealing her jewelry. It was as if pretending that Nnamabia had not done the things he had done would give him the opportunity to start afresh. The robbery might never have been mentioned again if Nnamabia had not been arrested three years later, in his third year in the university, and locked up at the police station.

The Thing Around Your Neck Summary and Analysis of «Cell One» and «Imitation»

Summary

An unnamed narrator begins describing the two times her family home was robbed. The first robbery occurred when the neighbor, Osita, climbed in through the living room window and stole the TV, VCR, and two videotapes. The second robbery was committed by the narrator’s brother, Nnamabia. Although Nnamabia first protested his innocence, he later admits to traveling far from home and pawning his mother’s gold jewelry. The narrator continues, explaining that Nnamabia’s actions reveal a greater pattern of behavior among the community. All of the children of professors at the Nsukka campus are robbing neighborhood families.

The robbers are called “cults,” and they terrorize the college community in an intensifying series of violent actions. A series of murders are committed on campus, and female students begin to fear for their lives. The narrator suspects that her brother is a cult member, as he is revered and respected among his community. This suspicion is confirmed when Nnamabia is arrested for his suspected involvement in the murder of three boys on campus. Nnamabia is taken to a high-security prison in another town, three hours from Nsukka.

The narrator accompanies her parents to the prison to visit Nnamabia. Her mother bribes the security officer with jollof rice, and Nnamabia is allowed to leave his cell to have a meal with his family. The narrator’s brother first appears unphased by his conditions, though he has an insect bite on his forehead. He reveals that in order to receive better treatment in prison, he had to bribe the officers with money that he hid upon entry. Over the next week of visits, Nnamabia begins to describe the horrific conditions of the prison.

The second week of the visits, the narrator protests against visiting her brother because it is costing the family too much gas money. As an act of rebellion, the narrator hurls a stone at the window of the family’s car, shattering it. When the family returns to visit Nnamabia another day, they find that his condition has deteriorated. He has run out of money to bribe the police, and he is deeply hurt by the authorities’ treatment of an old and innocent prisoner.

Later on, after another crime is committed in the community, Nnamabia is acquitted of the crime. The family ventures to the prison to retrieve him, but he is nowhere to be found. They fear that Nnamabia has been killed by the corrupt police. Instead, they find that he was transferred to “Cell One,” the cell that is infamous for its harsh violence. After being placed in Cell One, Nnamabia was transferred to another facility, and then released. The family is reunited, and Nnamabia appears to have grown from his experience in prison.

At her home in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Nkem receives a call from her friend, Ijemamaka. Ijemamaka has just returned from a trip to Lagos, and she calls to inform Nkem that Nkem’s husband, Obiora, has a new girlfriend that has moved into the family’s home in Nigeria. This news startles Nkem. She begins to think about her life in America and how it compares to her life in Nigeria. She reminisces about her impoverished upbringing, and she recalls her own previous relationships with married men.

Nkem explains that Obiora spends only two months a year in the United States. As she prepares for her husband’s annual visit, she grows defiant. After hearing that Obiora’s new girlfriend has short hair, Nkem chooses to cut and style her hair differently. In addition, she refuses to shave. Nkem confides in her housemaid, Amaechi, about her husband’s affair. Amaechi attempts to persuade Nkem that she should not be preoccupied with this news. She explains that the story could be untrue, and Ijemamaka is merely acting out of jealousy. Nkem seems unconvinced.

Each visit, Obiora brings back gifts for his wife and children. However, during this visit, everyone can sense that Nkem is on edge. When Obiora offers Nkem a bronze statue, Nkem asks questions about the statue’s meaning and historical significance. For the first time in her life, Nkem begins to take a stand and become her own person. As they shower together for the first time in years, Nkem tells Obiora that the entire family will be relocating to Lagos in the following year.

Analysis

In “Cell One,” the narrator uses the occasion of Nnamabia’s arrest to explore and understand societal flaws. As university professors, the family epitomizes the privileges of the educated class. Although crime and gang-related activity is often associated with impoverished communities, the narrator explains that her brother and his friends engage in criminal activities on the Nsukka campus. This aspect introduces a motif of appearance versus reality. Although the professors aim to depict their university life as idyllic, their children wreak havoc on their own community.

This motif reappears during Nnamabia’s imprisonment. Nnamabia’s experience highlights the irony of jails as a symbol of justice and discipline. Ultimately, Nnamabia is able to receive preferential treatment in jail because his family barters and negotiates with security officers. This action demonstrates the prevalence of corruption in the judicial system. As time passes, Nnamabia witnesses the mistreatment of many other prisoners. He realizes his own privilege, and he is humbled by his prison experience.

Throughout the That Thing Around Your Neck, food remains a recurring symbol of identity and family. In “Cell One,” food also symbolizes currency. Nnamabia’s prison life is significantly impacted by his mother’s ability to cook and provide food for the prison guards. The shifted emphasis on the importance of food further indicates the country’s disparity at the moment of Nnamabia’s arrest.

Both “Cell One” and “Imitation” are told from the female perspective. In this way, both stories address the drastic differences between the societal treatment of men versus the treatment of women. In “Cell One,” the unnamed narrator grows frustrated when she realizes that her family sacrifices their own economic welfare on Nnamabia’s behalf. The “Cell One” narrator grows resentful when she realizes that her family would not do the same if she was in Nnamabia’s shoes. As she hurls the stone at the window of her family’s car, the narrator asserts that her family needs a wakeup call. This action symbolizes the physical manifestation of her frustration.

In “Imitation,” Nkem is expected to be the perfect housewife and mother. These expectations differ greatly from that of her husband. After Nkem learns that Obiora has been having an extramarital affair, she aims to demonstrate the repercussions of his actions. Nkem’s behavior addresses the significance of the story’s title. Nkem imitates being a happy Nigerian wife adjusting to a new American life. Beneath the surface, however, she struggles with raising her children in a foreign country while navigating a crumbling marriage.