- Points Possible20
Write a reflection essay based on the following prompt:
In what ways might “The Headstrong Historian” be considered Things Fall Apart fan fiction? In what ways is Adichie’s story something more? What do the resonances with Things Fall Apart add to “The Headstrong Historian”? What do Adichie’s innovations add to the experience of reading Things Fall Apart?
250+ words (not including direct quotations)
11/2/2018 The Headstrong Historian | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/23/the-headstrong-historian 1/15 M any years after her husband had died, Nwamgba still closed her eyes from timeto time to relive his nightly visits to her hut, and the mornings after, when she would walk to the stream humming a song, thinking of the smoky scent of him and the �rmness of his weight, and feeling as if she were surrounded by light. Other memories of Obierika also remained clear—his stubby �ngers curled around his �ute when he played in the evenings, his delight when she set down his bowls of food, his sweaty back when he brought baskets �lled with fresh clay for her pottery. From the moment she had �rst seen him, at a wrestling match, both of them staring and staring, both of them too young, her waist not yet wearing the menstruation cloth, she had believed with a quiet stubbornness that her chi and his chi had destined their marriage, and so when he and his relatives came to her father a few years later with pots of palm wine she told her mother that this was the man she would marry. Her mother was aghast. Did Nwamgba not know that Obierika was an only child, that his late father had been an only child whose wives had lost pregnancies and buried babies? Perhaps somebody in their family had committed the taboo of selling a girl into slavery and the earth god Ani was visiting misfortune on them. Nwamgba ignored her mother. She went into her father’s obi and told him she would run away from any other man’s house if she was not allowed to marry Obierika. Her father found her exhausting, this sharp-tongued, headstrong daughter who had once wrestled her brother to the ground. (Her father had had to warn those who saw this not to let anyone outside the compound know that a girl had thrown a boy.) He, too, was concerned about the infertility in Obierika’s family, but it was not a bad family: Obierika’s late father had taken the Ozo title; Obierika was already giving out his seed yams to sharecroppers. Nwamgba would not starve if she married him. Besides, it was better that he let his daughter go with the man she chose than to endure years of trouble in which she would keep returning home after confrontations with her in-laws; and so he gave his blessing, and she smiled and called him by his praise name. Fiction June 23, 2008 Issue The Headstrong Historian By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/fiction https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/23 https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie https://www.newyorker.com/ 11/2/2018 The Headstrong Historian | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/23/the-headstrong-historian 2/15 N To pay her bride price, Obierika came with two maternal cousins, Okafo and Okoye, who were like brothers to him. Nwamgba loathed them at �rst sight. She saw a grasping envy in their eyes that afternoon, as they drank palm wine in her father’s obi; and in the following years—years in which Obierika took titles and widened his compound and sold his yams to strangers from afar—she saw their envy blacken. But she tolerated them, because they mattered to Obierika, because he pretended not to notice that they didn’t work but came to him for yams and chickens, because he wanted to imagine that he had brothers. It was they who urged him, after her third miscarriage, to marry another wife. Obierika told them that he would give it some thought, but when they were alone in her hut at night he assured her that they would have a home full of children, and that he would not marry another wife until they were old, so that they would have somebody to care for them. She thought this strange of him, a prosperous man with only one wife, and she worried more than he did about their childlessness, about the songs that people sang, the melodious mean-spirited words: She has sold her womb. She has eaten his penis. He plays his �ute and hands over his wealth to her. Once, at a moonlight gathering, the square full of women telling stories and learning new dances, a group of girls saw Nwamgba and began to sing, their aggressive breasts pointing at her. She asked if they would mind singing a little louder, so that she could hear the words and then show them who was the greater of two tortoises. They stopped singing. She enjoyed their fear, the way they backed away from her, but it was then that she decided to �nd a wife for Obierika herself. wamgba liked going to the Oyi stream, untying her wrapper from her waist and walking down the slope to the silvery rush of water that burst out from a rock. The waters of Oyi seemed fresher than those of the other stream, Ogalanya, or perhaps it was simply that Nwamgba felt comforted by the shrine of the Oyi goddess, tucked away in a corner; as a child she had learned that Oyi was the protector of women, the reason it was taboo to sell women into slavery. Nwamgba’s closest friend, Ayaju, was already at the stream, and as Nwamgba helped Ayaju raise her pot to her head she asked her who might be a good second wife for Obierika. She and Ayaju had grown up together and had married men from the same clan. The difference between them, though, was that Ayaju was of slave descent. Ayaju did not 11/2/2018 The Headstrong Historian | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/23/the-headstrong-historian 3/15 T care for her husband, Okenwa, who she said resembled and smelled like a rat, but her marriage prospects had been limited; no man from a freeborn family would have come for her hand. Ayaju was a trader, and her rangy, quick-moving body spoke of her many journeys; she had even travelled beyond Onicha. It was she who had �rst brought back tales of the strange customs of the Igala and Edo traders, she who had �rst told stories of the white-skinned men who had arrived in Onicha with mirrors and fabrics and the biggest guns the people of those parts had ever seen. This cosmopolitanism earned her respect, and she was the only person of slave descent who talked loudly at the Women’s Council, the only person who had answers for everything. She promptly suggested, for Obierika’s second wife, a young girl from the Okonkwo family, who had beautiful wide hips and who was respectful, nothing like the other young girls of today, with their heads full of nonsense. As they walked home from the stream, Ayaju said that perhaps Nwamgba should do what other women in her situation did—take a lover and get pregnant in order to continue Obierika’s lineage. Nwamgba’s retort was sharp, because she did not like Ayaju’s tone, which suggested that Obierika was impotent, and, as if in response to her thoughts, she felt a furious stabbing sensation in her back and knew that she was pregnant again, but she said nothing, because she knew, too, that she would lose it again. Her miscarriage happened a few weeks later, lumpy blood running down her legs. Obierika comforted her and suggested that they go to the famous oracle, Kisa, as soon as she was well enough for the half day’s journey. After the dibia had consulted the oracle, Nwamgba cringed at the thought of sacri�cing a whole cow; Obierika certainly had greedy ancestors. But they performed the ritual cleansings and the sacri�ces as required, and when she suggested that he go and see the Okonkwo family about their daughter he delayed and delayed until another sharp pain spliced her back, and, months later, she was lying on a pile of freshly washed banana leaves behind her hut, straining and pushing until the baby slipped out. hey named him Anikwenwa: the earth god Ani had �nally granted a child. He was dark and solidly built, and had Obierika’s happy curiosity. Obierika took him to pick medicinal herbs, to collect clay for Nwamgba’s pottery, to twist yam vines at the farm. Obierika’s cousins Okafo and Okoye visited often. They marvelled at how well 11/2/2018 The Headstrong Historian | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/23/the-headstrong-historian 4/15 Anikwenwa played the �ute, how quickly he was learning poetry and wrestling moves from his father, but Nwamgba saw the glowing malevolence that their smiles could not hide. She feared for her child and for her husband, and when Obierika died—a man who had been hearty and laughing and drinking palm wine moments before he slumped—she knew that they had killed him with medicine. She clung to his corpse until a neighbor slapped her to make her let go; she lay in the cold ash for days, tore at the patterns shaved into her hair. Obierika’s death left her with an unending despair. She thought often of a woman who, after losing a tenth child, had gone to her back yard and hanged herself on a kola-nut tree. But she would not do it, because of Anikwenwa. VIDEO FROM THE N� YORKER The High Stakes of the Trump Midterms Later, she wished she had made Obierika’s cousins drink his mmili ozu before the oracle. She had witnessed this once, when a wealthy man died and his family forced his rival to drink his mmili ozu. Nwamgba had watched an unmarried woman take a cupped leaf full of water, touch it to the dead man’s body, all the time speaking solemnly, and give the leaf-cup to the accused man. He drank. Everyone looked to http://video.newyorker.com/watch/the-high-stakes-of-the-trump-midterms 11/2/2018 The Headstrong Historian | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/23/the-headstrong-historian 5/15 A make sure that he swallowed, a grave silence in the air, because they knew that if he was guilty he would die. He died days later, and his family lowered their heads in shame. Nwamgba felt strangely shaken by it all. She should have insisted on this with Obierika’s cousins, but she had been blinded by grief and now Obierika was buried and it was too late. His cousins, during the funeral, took his ivory tusk, claiming that the trappings of titles went to brothers and not to sons. It was when they emptied his barn of yams and led away the adult goats in his pen that she confronted them, shouting, and when they brushed her aside she waited until evening, then walked around the clan singing about their wickedness, the abominations they were heaping on the land by cheating a widow, until the elders asked them to leave her alone. She complained to the Women’s Council, and twenty women went at night to Okafo’s and Okoye’s homes, brandishing pestles, warning them to leave Nwamgba alone. But Nwamgba knew that those grasping cousins would never really stop. She dreamed of killing them. She certainly could, those weaklings who had spent