The American Embassy by Adichie - On Not Crying Too Much

The Thing Around Your Neck, page 134: "Don't falter as you answer the questions, the voices had said. Tell them all about Ugonna, what he was like, but don't overdo it, because every day people lie to them to get asylum visas, about dead relatives that were never even born. Make Ugonna real. Cry, but don’t cry too much.”

             “Cry, but don’t cry too much” can be taken as a commentary on the Nigerian storyteller’s predicament when writing to American audiences. Adichie uses the story of the bereaved mother’s embassy visit to temper the story of how the woman lost her husband and son over the course of four days. Readers are spared the pain of the woman’s unfiltered story; it comes, instead, in bits and pieces as she comes off tranquilizers at the American embassy, trying her best to “keep her mind blank” (128). Her story is filtered through Nigerian political conflict, the suffering of a man being whipped by a soldier, and the boredom of people seeking visas or asylum at the Embassy. We hear the mother crying, but it is not too much.

Nigerian stories aside, it can be dangerous to bludgeon readers with personal trauma without sprinkling in a frame narrative; traumatic stories without metanarrative are dispiriting. But the story seems more specifically concerned with the need to please American ears. American readers (or publishers) are like the woman at the embassy, asking big political questions, framing every small-time criminal as a symbol of larger cultural problems, eager to listen only to stories with  larger implications. Late in “The American Embassy,” the narrator reflects, “’Government’ was such a big label, it was freeing, it gave people room to maneuver and excuse and re-blame. Three men. Three men like her husband or her brother or the man behind her on the visa line. Three men.” The narrator, like Adichie, wants to tell a personal story – who her son was and how he died – not cannibalize his death into a larger narrative about military dictatorships in Nigeria. Nigerian writers who want to be published in the American market (see “Jumping Monkey Hill”) dilute their stories with dull visits to the American embassy or sweeping political statements; Adichie would rather write human stories, not Nigerian stories.