The Hypocrite Killer

She didn’t expect Obama to “change water into wine,” she added, “but I am comfortable with the idea of the person who wrote Dreams From My Father making decisions that will affect not only Americans but the rest of the world.”

Adichie’s global connectedness, as well as her uncanny ability to evoke the effects of the past on the present and future, are prominent in The Thing Around Your Neck.

I asked her about a couple of my favorites, stories set in Nigeria.

“A Private Experience” begins in the midst of a riot that started when several Muslim men beheaded a Christian Igbo man because he had accidentally driven over a copy of the Koran. Chika, a well-to-do young Igbo woman, has been pulled to safety in a deserted shop by a Hausa Muslim woman. Later, Chika learns that, “as she and the woman are speaking, Hausa Muslims are hacking down Igbo Christians with machetes, clubbing them with stones.” The intimacy that develops between the two women is a sharp contrast to the violent men in the story, a contrast Adichie told me was intentional. “I think that women are brought up differently and because they are raised differently, they are more likely to compromise, to reach across, to have empathy.”

In “Ghosts,” a retired professor whose pension is being withheld is visited by the ghost of his wife and also encounters Ikenna, a man he had not seen since the Biafra-Nigeria conflict in the 1960s.

“ ‘Ghosts’ is in many ways a love letter to my father,” Adichie said. “It is about a town I love, about that slow nostalgic change that overwhelms us when the people and places we love go into a kind of decline. My mother is very much alive (while the character’s wife is dead) but I think the story is also about the love they have. They have been married for 46 years and have a solid and real partnership.”

The pension situation she describes in the story is “much better now,” she explained. “My dad gets his, but for months he didn’t, and neither did all the retired staff of the university and many of the poorer ones died.”

Biafra, she added, “isn’t something people really talk about openly; it’s still contested and contentious…But I did hear a few stories when researching my novel about people who reappeared after many years, and worse, of people who just never came back and still haven’t.”

Like Achebe, Adichie has written consistently of about Nigeria falling apart, a country in decline. Has that downward trajectory continued?

“I do have hope,” she responded. “There’s a lot that has changed for the better in Nigeria—the middle class destroyed under military rule is slowly re-emerging. But the divide between rich and poor is still atrocious, as is our leadership. Individual initiative is incredible though. Nigeria is a kind of libertarian exercise, in some ways.”

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Jane Ciabattari’s work has appeared in Bookforum, The Guardian online, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, among others. She is president of the National Book Critics Circle and author of the short-story collection Stealing the Fire. Recent short stories are online at KGB Bar Lit, Verbsap, Literary Mama and Lost magazine.