Teaching "The Thing Around Your Neck"

In my African Literature course this semester, one of the works we have been discussing is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck. I have taught Adichie's works before, as I wrote on this blog, but not this collection of stories.  reads like a panoramic survey of modern African Anglophone literature in terms of the themes it covers.

In terms of its themes, The Thing Around Your Neck reads like a panoramic of modern African Anglophone literature. At the same time, it deals with themes common in Adichie's works: life on a Nigerian university campus, which features in Purple Hibiscus; the Nigerian civil war, the focal point of Half of a Yellow Sun; the experiences of Nigerians abroad, which is a key theme in Americanah; as well as corruption in its various guises and manifestations.

Though often dealing with painful themes, such as abuse and alienation, Adichie infuses her stories with humour and sarcasm. The last story in the collection, "The Headstrong Historian," bears the influence of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, moving briskly through the main themes of that novel, while reworking them in various ways.

Adichie's fictional works are notable for their cosmopolitanism; they tend to feature contemporary urbanized Africans for whom the world is indeed a global village. They travel between Africa and the outside world, especially Europe and the USA, and maintain their global networks wherever they are. This is a feature of much contemporary African literature, as can be seen in works I have taught, such as Athol Fugard's Sorrows and Rejoicings, Leila Aboulela's Minaret: A Novel, Doreen Baingana's Tropical Fish: Tales From Entebbe. and Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.

The Last Week of Summer School

Tomorrow, August 24, is the last day of my African Literature summer course. As I reflect on the experience of this course, I am particularly pleased to have taught Athol Fugard's Valley Song, Mia Couto's The Tuner of Silences and Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, all of which I had taught only once before. Teaching these works again has enriched my understanding. I have also taught, for the first time, Mariama Ba's Scarlet Song.

Valley Song is a short play set in a rural location in post apartheid South Africa. There is an Afrikaner farmer who is rooted to this place and his granddaughter, Veronica, who dreams of going to the city of Johannesburg to pursue a career as a singer. The grandfather is worried, because his daughter, the aspiring singer's mother died in the city, having left the rural village. Fortunately, the matter is resolved, finally, and the old man allows Veronica to leave. There is optimism in the air, akin to the optimism of a farmer who sows pumpkin seeds and awaits a bountiful harvest of pumpkins.

The Tuner of Silences is a deeply moving text, riddled with paradoxes, suspense, and surprise endings. Unfolding under the shadow of the devastation of war, on a landscape rendered as an apocalyptic wasteland, the narrative is infused with existentialist sentiments, with spiritually broken human beings in a world that lacks a moral anchor. It is a tale of man's inhumanity to man, signified by betrayal and oppression, especially of women, and the violence of an unpredictable and disoriented father towards his own sons.

This is not, however, a depressing tale without redeeming qualities. In the midst of all the grimness, we see a bond of friendship blossoming between two women--one white and one black--born of a shared heartbreaking experience of betrayal by the same man. It is a natural bond, in the truest sense, neither sullied nor encumberred by racial differences, but transcending them.

Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is a tale centered on three African young men, from Ethiopia, Kenya, and Congo, who find themselves in the same city in the USA, trying to make it. Despite the challenges they encounter, they exude a spirit of courage and perseverance.

It is not only immigrants who struggle in America. There are poor people and beggars, prostitutes and drug addicts, the homeless and the jobless. In the midst of all this, the human spirit shines bright. The solidarity among the three African young men, who look out for each other, and a friendship between the Ethiopian young man and a white woman Judith and her young daughter is heartwarming.

Our penultimate text for the course was Mariama Ba's Scarlet Song. I had not read this novel, even though I had bought my copy of it on July 21, 1987, in Dar es Salaam. I have been greatly moved by this novel. It dwells on themes found in Ba's first novel, So Long a Letter, especially polygamous marriage in the Islamic society of Senegal. In Scarlet Song, the theme is complicated by the fact that the protagonist, a Senegalese man, marries a French woman, against the wishes of her parents.

Although the woman converts to Islam before the marriage, and although the couple beget a son, cultural differences make her life very difficult, leading to her mental breakdown. In this state, she fatally poisons her young son. It is a tragic ending to an engaging novel which explores the complexities of human behaviour, religion, culture, and race relations.

I had wanted us to conclude our course with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck, a collection of short stories. We ran out of time and managed only to discuss the first two stories. In my introduction to Adichie, I had mentioned that her fiction dwells often on life of academics and their families on the campus of Nsukka University, which is where she herself was born and raised.

I had also said that she goes beyond that space and writes about the lives of Nigerians abroad, especially in the USA, where she went to school and spends considerable time. There is a marked cosmopolitanism in both Adichie's life and fiction, and those aspects are evident in the first two stories in The Thing Around Your Neck. Having taught and greatly appreciated other works of Adichie, I plan to teach The Thing Around Your Neck in the future.

A Discussion on Adichie's "Purple Hibiscus"

This evening, we had a discussion at St. Olaf College on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, organized by Professor Joan Hepburn f the English Department. She had lined me up as discussion leader together with herself.

I started the discussion by giving the context of Adichie's life and work. I stated how she fit in the tradition of African Anglophone literature which goes back to the days before independence as is exemplified  in Nigeria by writers like Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, and Cyprian Ekwensi.

I then discussed Adichie, her upbringing on a university campus in Nigeria and her travels abroad, including her time as a student in the USA. I emphasized the cosmopolitanism in both her life and writings. I talked about her writings, highlighting her novels and short stories and giving an overview of her key themes. I mentioned her TED lectures as well.

After my presentation, Professor Hepburn led a discussion of Purple Hibiscus, which moved through key themes such as family, religion, and politics. We dwelt at length on the theme of religion and its peculiar effects on characters like Papa. We probed these themes in depth and discovered the complexity with which they are realized.

Teaching Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Works

Like countless other people around the world, I am an ardent admirer of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's works. I first read and taught Purple Hibiscus, her first novel, in 2006, reading as I taught.

Then she published Half of a Yellow Sun. On October 14, 2006, she introduced it at the Twin Cities Book Festival in Minneapolis. I attended her reading and book signing and posed for a picture with her.

Proud of my signed copy, I was sure that someday I would teach Half of a Yellow Sun. I did, in the summer of 2013. I had thought that given the sadness and tragedy of its theme, this was a bitter novel. I was surprised to discover, as we moved through it, a story of the resilience of the human spirit.

I then decided to teach Americanah, which I did this semester. A dazzling artistic tapestry, it explores themes such as immigration, relationships between men and women, and between races, with remarkable insight and sophistication. I enjoyed Ifemelu's reflections on American culture, often resembling my own in Africans and Americans: Embracing Cultural Differences.

Ifemelu, the main protagonist, shares her reflections on these themes through her blog, and the very theme of blogging, so pervasive in Americanah, reminded me of the conversation I had with Adichie on the day we met. She talked about a blog she was involved with, which was dear to her.

Now, I am preparing to teach a summer course on African Literature. I have already decided to include Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck, which I have not read. I have no doubt that it is going to be a great experience for my class.
 

Teaching "Americanah" This Semester

This week, in my Post-colonial Literature class, we have been discussing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, among other awards. Since then, she has continued to write and to win award after award.

In September 2006, she attended the Twin Cities Book Festival in Minneapolis, as one of the invited authors, to launch Half of a Yellow Sun. I attended her book reading and signing, and had the opportunity to have my copy signed, chat with her, and take a photo.

Having taught Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, I decided to include Americanah in my Post-colonial Literature course this semester.

Although we are not yet half-way into this novel, we can see that it is a moving tale of the lives of Nigerian characters at home and abroad, mainly in the USA. With a keen insight and enjoyable writing style, Adichie explores themes such as relationships between men and women and between races, cultural differences, and the mystique of America.

Africans who have lived in America can relate to the situations and experiences described in Americanah. I can guarantee this, having written Africans and Americans: Embracing Cultural Differences.

My Postcolonial Literature course, Spring 2015

Today, I completed drawing up the list of books I plan to use for my Postcolonial Literature course this Spring. The idea of Postcolonial Literature has always been contentious, and teaching a course with that name requires, in my view, incorporating the conflicting perspectives. It is never easy to justify any list or configuration of texts for this course. Nevertheless, one must prepare such a list.

I have taught Postcolonial Literature from my first year here at St. Olaf College. The English Department I was hired to initiate this course, at a time when English Departments across the USA were awakening to the need to embrace literatures in English from around the world. In view of the large and growing number of authors and texts that fall under the "post-colonial" rubric, one must select only a handful.

For the Spring, I plan to teach the following works:

Aboulela, L. Minaret
Adichie, C.Americanah.
Desai, A. Village by the Sea
Fugard, A. Sorrows and Rejoicings.
Gunesekera, R. Monkfish Moon
Roy, A. The God of Small Things.

One can see that all the authors are contemporary in the truest sense of the word, some very young. I wish to say a word about each.

I had heard about Leila Aboulela for a few years, but did not get the opportunity to acquire and read any of her works. Recently, I bought her Minaret, and read a little about her and her work. Born in Khartoum, she reminds me of Tayeb Salih, the Sudanese writer, whose Season of Migration to the North is well known. I remember having taught his short stories at the University of Dar es Salaam. Leila also reminds me of Meena Alexander, a notable Indian writer who was born and raised in Sudan.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the young Nigerian writer who has been quickly gaining international acclaim with her writing, such as Purple Hibiscus and Half of Yellow Sun, both of which I have taught. I badly wanted to read and teach her Americanah, which readers and critics are raving about.

I have taught some of Anita Desai's works before, such as Fire on the Mountain and Baumgartner's Bombay and am touched by her views on writing. With this background, I want to teach more of her work, hence my choice of Village by the Sea.

Athol Fugard is a playwright I first knew about when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Dar es Salaam. Fellow students Martin Mhando and Jesse Mollel (now known as Tololwa M. Mollel) staged an unforgettable performance of Fugard's The Island. In graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we studied Athol Fugard's A Lesson From Aloes with Professor Edris Makward.

Here at St. Olaf College, the first Fugard work I taught was Master Harold and the Boys. I went on to teach Sorrows and Rejoicings, several times. My experience with Sorrows and Rejoicings, slowly discovering its deep implications and nuances, parallels my experience of reading and teaching Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Ama Ata Aidoo's Dilemma of a Ghost.

Only recently have I discovered Romesh Gunesekera, when I designed a course on South Asian Literature. I chose his novel, Reef, and ended up teaching it each time I have taught the South Asian Literature course. This time, however, I have decided to try Monkfish Moon, one of Gunesekera's collections of short stories.

Finally, there is Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. There was a time when everybody around me seemed to be raving about The God of Small Things , and, not having read it, I felt like an outsider or a traitor. Then I included it in one of my courses, but my selection of texts was, it turned out, rather ambitious. We did not manage to read The God of Small Things . If I remember correctly, we just started it, before the semester was over. I hope things will work out better this time.