'Zikora' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Third in an occasional series on fine individual short stories. The first was on Lucia Berlin’s ‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’, the second on Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Daughters of the Late Colonel’.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s most recent novel is Americanah, which was published in 2013. She has published plenty of non-fiction since then, but fans are certainly eagerly waiting for novel 4. Her other book of fiction is the 2009 short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck.
Meanwhile, as we wait…
‘Zikora’ is a short story published on Amazon Kindle in October 2020, and it shares some of Americanah’s background. We are plunged straight into the middle of the narrator’s labour (‘All through the night my mother sat near me but never touched me’) but what is really impressive is the sense of amplitude in the story. She manages to give a sense of a much wider life, opening out from the raw immediacy of that start to a series of different connections, all of which are skilfully drawn.
Zikora’s mother is sharply portrayed, not entirely comforting or reassuring as a delivery ward companion:
Did other mothers sit there overnight as my mother had, still as a coffin, glasses gold framed, face perfectly powdered in MAC NC45?
Kwame, the too-good-to-be-true perfect sensitive boyfriend, father of Zikora’s child, abandoned her as soon as she became pregnant, and puts up radio silence after the birth, having cut her off for good to her distressed bewilderment:
I wanted to rewind and redo. Have us walk into my apartment again, laughing, me saying, Let’s make margaritas, and him saying, I really want a burger; I don’t know what that tiny Chilean bass thing at dinner was about. Then I saw it, the almost imperceptible shrug. A shrug. He shrugged. His response was a shrug. From the deepest vaults of his being, a shrug.
Her father treats Zikora like a infantilised princess, rather than a mature adult woman. Years ago he moved out to live with a second wife called ‘Aunty Nwanneka’:
My father took me to her house, a brief visit, on our way to his tennis club. She was young, plump, skin glistening as though dipped in oil. She smiled and smiled. She slipped in and out of the parlor and each time reappeared with a new source of pleasure for me: chocolates, chin-chin, Fanta. She called me Ziko, not Zikky like everyone else, and I like it that it sounded older, that she took me seriously. I liked her. Only later did I see how, to survive, she wielded her niceness lie a subtle sharp knife.
And the kindest person in the story is a stranger:
Some kindnesses you do not ever forget. You carry them to your grave, held warmly somewhere, brought up and savored from time to time. Such was the kindness of the African American woman with short pressed hair at the Planned Parenthood clinic on Angel Street. She smiled with all of her open face, kind, matter-of-fact, and she touched my shoulder while I settled tensely on my back.
As ever, always Adichie writes like a dream, carrying you along with pleasure.