Adichie’s stories are comfortable hybrids
In 1956, Horace Miner published an anthropology paper about the exotic customs and medicine men of the Nacirema, a tribe that fetishises a mouth-rite that “consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalised series of gestures”.

Of course, Nacirema is just American spelt backwards and scrutinised with a neutral-seeming, estranging eye. And in some ways, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new collection of short stories does exactly that.
In ‘Since Last Monday’, a fresh-off-the-boat Nigerian nanny is amused by the anxious regulations of “healthy parenting” like “we don’t do high-fructose corn syrup, bleached flour or trans-fat”. A young wife is coached by her bumptious husband in ‘The Arrangers of Marriages’— “Americans say busy, not engaged”, “Americans don’t drink their tea with milk and sugar”— even as she observes the vulgarity of food courts and the bleak particulars of Flatbush Avenue, where she has been pitched.

Though her stories span Nigeria and America, they are not neat parables about how the nation’s shadow falls on the condition of exile. In one story, a woman seeking political asylum and torn by her four-year-old son’s killing, walks out of an uncomprehending American embassy, because “the new life” she wants to build is in her ancestral hometown where she would plant ixora flowers and tend her son’s memory.

Adichie’s characters are pulled along multiple identifications. One of the most artful stories is ‘Ghosts’, where an elderly professor runs into an old colleague, long supposed dead in the Biafran conflict. In the course of a brief conversation, she layers an entire history of personal tragedy and compromise, ageing and loneliness.

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