Identity: Reflections of Tragedy

by Christina Weir Thorpe

Identity is often born in random moments of calamity.  This experience of calamity molds and encircles your being.  It makes one stronger or weaker.  It propels one’s actions and directs one’s future.  According to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, identity is born in “that short moment…an open moment, a moment you saw the blueness of everything, of life itself” (196).  Through this moment of revelation character and identity solidifies.  In The Thing Around Your Neck, Adichie uses reflection of significantly tragic moments to define identity. 

In “American Embassy” a mother experiences the devastating loss of her young son as he is murdered before her eyes.  Heartbroken and shocked into abstraction, she realizes “in a space of a few days… [she] no longer recognize[s] her life” (131). Just as the birth of her son defined her as a mother, this tragedy has changed her circumstantial existence. Though self-preservation propelled her initial actions of flight, her rumination of her loss precipitated a realization of identity that ultimately altered her course. She no longer wishes to escape her tragic past.  The “new life she wanted” (141) was not in the asylum of another country but in her hometown, in the remains of her life as a mother.

            Adichie further explores identity in “Tomorrow is Too Far” where the realization of identity hinges on remembering a defining moment of tragedy.  Here the narrator has continued for 18 years without breaking down, without facing the truth.  Then when tragedy returns in the death of her grandmother, the speaker experiences “a lifetime of silence collapsing” where she remembered “Nonso and… him… in the amoral kingdom of …childhood and…all the things you had not allowed yourself to think about… and tucked away” (192).  The last 18 years become an existence in limbo before the speaker allows for grief and responsibility to merge her two identities.  She is not just an escapee of the past but a participant, a survivor of calamity.

            Adichie’s powerful storytelling reveals how identity hinges on the recollections of the past, or on a specific momentous event.  Though violence and tragedy influence and shape our lives, these random moments of adversity offer individual significance beyond the visual scope.  We become crippled, or empowered, or mere survivors.  The experiences become embedded in our rudimentary existence defining our perception of life.