A Private Experience
A Private Experience is one of the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Adichie was born and raised in Nigeria until she graduated from high school. She later on went to Drexel University in Philadelphia and studied Communications and Political Science.
The story took place at Kano, Nigeria. It was about 2 women hiding in a store while there was a riot running outside. The protagonist Chika has a conflict on a Hausa woman, which is known as the antagonist, is hiding with her in the store. At the end of the story, Chika solved the conflict and cleared the stereotype on the woman, which brings out that the conflict of the story is person versus person. One of the possible reasons of she writing this story is because she was born in Nigeria. That’s why the story took place in a city of Nigeria. And the second reason is that she got identified by the colour of her skin. ‘While the novelist was growing up in Nigeria, she was not used to being identifies by the colour of her skin, which only began to happen as soon as she arrived in the US for college. As a black African in America, Adichie was suddenly confronted with what it meant to be a person of colour in the US. Race as an idea became some that she had to navigate and learn.’(Wikipedia ) & ‘The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but they are incomplete. They make one story the only story’ -Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie .
The story started by using literary device called ‘In Media Res’, which means, starting in the middle of an action. ‘Chika climbs in through the store window first and then holds the shutter as the woman climbs in after her.’ Like all other war movie does, the setting in the beginning of the story was scary, full of worriedness and panic; ‘Chika’s hands are trembling, her calves burning after the unsteady run from the market in her high-heeled sandals.’ Instead of directly tell us Chika was scared, the author chooses to describe the non-volunteered physical movement of Chika, to showed how the worriedness comes from the inside and to the outside. This also involves the psychological criticism lens which there are some subtle movements can reflect people’s emotion.
This story was written in a third person, limited omniscient point of view as we were able to read Chika’s thoughts in her head but not the woman’s. This allows the author to control what kind of information the reader know and to limit reader’s perspective. For example, Chika and the woman both lost on of their beloved items. Chika lost her Burberry handbag, and the woman lost her necklace. Chika immediately thinks the necklace is cheap and it cannot compare that to her expensive bag she got in London. ‘The woman sighs and Chika imagines that she is thinking of her necklace, probably plastic beads threaded on a piece of string.’
As the story goes on, we know that Chika is a young Igbo Christian medical student. She comes off as a materialistic and wealthy character. Chika is a dynamic character because she assumes the woman was less intelligent than her, but she quickly realized that the media paints an exaggerated and violent portrait of the Hausa Muslims. Bringing it back to the Hausa Muslim woman, we knew that she leads Chika to a safe place when the riot breaks out. When Chika gets hurt from the riot, the Hausa woman shows affection and generosity by wrapping her wound with her scarf. The woman acts as a round character because she showed us multiple sides to her personality from comforting Chika to expressing her concern for her daughter and Chika’s sister. “The woman wipes her eyes with one end of her blouse. ‘Allah keep your sister and Halima in safe place, she says.’ “
In conclusion, the theme of the story wants to bring out that despite your religion, race and class diversity, every human will find a way to connect and bond with one and other. The most significant event in the story was when Chika lied about her mother’s cracked nipples. The reason why she did that symbolised she wants to make connection with woman and wanted her to listen to her advice based on some ‘real’ experience. “’It was the same with my mother. Her nipples cracked when the sixth child came, she didn’t know what caused it, until a friend told her that she had to moisturize,’ Chika says. She hardly ever lies, but the few times she does, there is always a purpose behind the lie. She wonders what purpose this lie serves; this need to draw on a fictional past similar to the woman’s; she and Nnedi are her mother’s only child.”