« From placelessness to place and revelation in The Thing Around Your Neck de C.N.Adichie »
Résumé
In postcolonial theory, the notion of place has been related by critics both with roots and origins and with transgressing boundaries or setting new landmarks. In Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s volume of short stories “The Thing Around Your Neck” (2009), centered on short moments of the characters' everyday life, place and placelessness are main focus points in the contemporary globalised context. This presentation will analyse how the collection illustrates the evolution from placelessness to a place of writing “everyday revelations”.
First, I will focus on the relation between placelessness and voicelessness. Most of the characters belong to the category of the voiceless, which means both not having a voice and not having, or not finding, a place. This double condition highlights the intensity of their experiences and their uniqueness. Second, the short story becomes a place for writing the shifting boundaries, because it is through voicing the voiceless that relations and clear categorizations (ways of setting places for others) are blurred . Moreover, writing trauma can be seen as a mode of writing change in the characters' way of picturing the world. Dis-placing the ordinary to create the extra-ordinary represents a movement from placelessness to another dimension of place.
Finally, it is often in confined spaces that the stories literally take place, expand and allow the extra-ordinary to occur. It also represents the way characters take their own place. Despite this confinement, the displacement a powerful event has performed upon the placeless character can, surprisingly, root him and make him belong. Place therefore becomes a metaphor for the inner territories of the at-last placed self, a literary place of and as revelation.
To conclude, the process from placelessness to writing “everyday revelations” is constructed as an interior journey through geographical and metaphorical places, from not being in place to finding one's place within artistic space.