A Private Experience
Monday 2 September 2024
"It is like the woman's tears, a private experience, and she wishes that she could leave the store."
This week we have published a further page on a story from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck.
'A Private Experience' depicts an encounter between two women—a Christian Igbo woman and a Muslim Hausa woman—who seek refuge in an abandoned shop during a violent riot in Kano, Nigeria. The story is told from the perspective of Chika, the young Christian woman, and has an interesting use of time as it moves between the encounter in the shop, flashbacks to the riot and flashforwards to the aftermath of the riot and what Chika learns has happened afterwards
This is the fourth story we have added resources for, and more will follow. The pages are all linked below.
The Thing Around Your Neck unit of study
"The thing that wrapped itself around your neck, that nearly always choked you before you fell asleep, started to loosen, to let go." Welcome to this unit of study on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's short...
Cell One
The first story in the collection, Cell One is told from the perspective of a young Nigerian girl whose brother gets arrested and put in prison. The story depicts the family's visits to him in prison...
Jumping Monkey Hill
'Jumping Monkey Hill' follows the journey of Ujunwa, a young Nigerian woman who attends a writers' workshop at Jumping Monkey Hill, a resort in South Africa. The workshop is facilitated by a well-known...
The Thing Around Your Neck
The title story from the collection follows a young Nigerian woman, Akunna, who moves to American and grapples with the complexities of adapting to a new culture while also trying to maintain her own...
A Private Experience
'A Private Experience' depicts an encounter between two women—a Christian Igbo woman and a Muslim Hausa woman—who seek refuge in an abandoned shop during a violent riot in Kano, Nigeria. The story...
Adichie is on the Prescribed reading List (PRL) and this is a beautifully written and powerful collection of stories which students find engaging and rich for exploration.
This unit has been written specifically with IB students in mind, and makes connections to the areas of exploration, the concepts, global issues and the requirements of IB examinations. Each page focusses on a different story and includes before, during, and after reading sections, although you may prefer students to read each story first before engaging in any activities.
As ever with our resources, this unit it is not intended to be prescriptive and of course you may supplement our materials with others, and you may select from and modify them to meet your own requirements. In addition, it is important that you read the stories and any materials we publish to ensure that they are appropriate to your own local context. We hope that you and your students enjoy working with this unit.
Before embarking on the short story collection you may want to show your students Adichie's talk, The Dangers of a Single Story which can be found linked from the Identity page.