Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck addresses the fundamental question: what is, and is not, the truth about a culture or a group of people?

If we only hear a single dialogue about race, how can we better understand what is or is not “really” Asian, “authentically” American or, in this case, “truly” Nigerian?

Adichie’s stories have an answer: she insists that a person is comprised of more than just a single perception. The collection is a series of narratives set around the world, each only a few pages long and tied together with the central theme of the nature of truth which begins by recounting a young Nigerian with a stealing problem. When the police catch him taking jewelry from his neighbors, he is sent to jail and faces the corruption of the Nigerian officials, as his family struggles to bribe the local leaders to set him free. Though he enters his sentence as a privileged university student, he leaves broken and silent, influenced by the suffering he has witnessed. In another story, a young woman loses her boyfriend when his plane crashes while traveling to visit his family in Nigeria; while another is about a woman who leaves Nigeria for America and communicates only by sending letters with money back home.

The title of the collection is the name of one of her stories, which relays the stereotyping Adichie herself found when she came to the United States and discovered that generalizations choked her ability to be herself. Adichie repeatedly references the problems her country faces with its government and economy, and broader themes of these societal issues run throughout her novel. However, this is not the focus of her work.

Rather, Adichie’s stories revolve around the fundamental idea that issues of class, generalizations, and socioeconomic disparities are not unique to a single culture. Many of her tales depict a society that may be surprisingly familiar. In one, a young Nigerian woman studying at Princeton meets a young man she eventually realizes is gay. In another, she visits her family in Nigeria with her American boyfriend and discovers cultural differences that exist between his perception of her background and her understanding of what it is really like. All of the characters, whether set in Adichie’s native Nigeria or in an elite setting in the United States, showcase the complexity of a single individual.

Much of the book is based on Adichie’s own life. Like one of her characters, she was born in the Nigerian college town of Nsukka. At age 19, she moved to the United States for college and found success with her earliest novels, Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. The Thing Around Your Neck is built upon the experiences Adichie had with her earlier publications, as she came to realize that the Western perception of Nigeria was far different from how it was portrayed in the media. As Adichie explains, “I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. Yet if I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner.”

Throughout the collection, Adichie frequently references these misperceptions of the Nigerian story. In one section of the book, a young woman brings her work to a professor who tells her that her story doesn’t portray the massacres in Congo accurately. When the young writer tells this professor that her stories stem directly from her own experiences, the professor acts condescendingly and refuses to listen.

In Adichie’s own life, questions of how she was and was not “authentically” African arose as she progressed as a writer. As she says, “One professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore, they were not authentically African.” Yet while some critics say that the book is too “middle-class,” through the juxtaposition of her stories readers can experience the multi-layered nature of Adichie’s culture.

The varied voices in Adichie’s book prove that we must look at multiple stories in order to properly understand a group of people. When we don’t, we risk the trap of generalizations. As she writes, “Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government, but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government. Both sides of this story matter.”

Her short story collection largely accomplishes this goal by vividly illustrating the breadth of what makes something Nigerian. By placing her characters in different situations and having them face issues not always associated with African culture, the reader is forced to consider what is “truly” African in a new light. It is an eye-opening read, whether you know a lot about Nigeria and have a personal connection, or, like me, picked up this book by chance and thought that the title sounded interesting. The book is probably best read when one is at least a young adult, both because of a few graphic references in the novel (such as descriptions of jail conditions in Nigeria), and because the book is most enjoyable when one is equipped with a basic understanding of Nigeria, colonialism, institutionalized racism, and the immigration controversies taking place in the United States. In other words, with a world history class, most readers should be good to go. Adichie uses a mixture of dialogue and a deeply personal narrative style, sometimes illuminated through short, clipped sentences when writing from her first person point-of-view. It is a fast read.

Ultimately, Adichie’s novel is relevant to individuals of all cultures.

My life is made up of many different stories, and the perspective gained from a single chronicle cannot accurately summarize all of who I am or what I believe. People, especially in an increasingly multicultural world, are more complicated than that, and this idea
— that we cannot understand the truth about an entire culture from a single viewpoint — is central to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s excellent short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck.