Narrated by a limited third-person narrator, A Private Experience is a short story that presents an encounter between two Nigerian women belonging to different and conflicting religious and ethnic communities during a riot in Kona, Nigeria. It was first published in 2009 as a part of the collection The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Adichie.
Award-winning Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the most important figures of contemporary anglophone African literature. Having been a recipient of several prestigious awards, fellowships, and honorary degrees, Adichie has multiple novels, short story collections, and nonfiction works to her name. Some of her best-known works are Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus.
A Private Experience | Summary
The text begins in medias res with the protagonist, Chika, climbing inside a deserted shop through the window, and helping an unknown woman get in after her. She notices that the store is smaller than the “walk-in closet back home.” Hands still trembling and calves aching from the run, Chika feels gratitude towards the woman who stopped her while she was running directionlessly and led her to this deserted store where they could hide. As she is about to thank her, the woman tells her that she has lost her necklace, and Chika tells her that she too had dropped her oranges and purse in the middle of the panic and chaos. She hides the fact that the handbag is from an expensive foreign brand, reflecting Chika’s affluent upbringing. From her facial features and the scarf around her neck, Chika can tell that the woman is a Hausa and a Muslim, and wonders if the woman can also tell that she is an Igbo and a Christian. Their communities have frequently been involved in communal clashes in recent times. Nevertheless, she thanked the woman for guiding her to a safe place. The woman assures her that the shop is safe, as rioters usually don’t waste time looking into small shops. Chika nods, knowing nothing about riots herself. Her only active political experience to date has been participating in a pro-democracy rally at the behest of her sister, Nnedi.
Chika trembles remembering the scene as the riot broke out around her as she and Nnedi were in the market buying oranges. In the confusion, she ran mindlessly, losing her sister in the crowd. For some time, she and the woman stand inside the shop in silence. Soon, they hear the sound of rushing feet and people talking and hide beside the window, closing it after a couple with an infant passes in front of the shop. The dustiness and stuffiness of the shop are nothing like the streets outside, and bring her back to the riot again when she had run –
“not sure in which direction Nnedi had run, not sure if the man running beside her was a friend or an enemy, not sure if she should stop and pick up one of the bewildered-looking children separated from their mothers in the rush, not even sure who was who or who was killing whom.”
At this point in the story, the narrative suddenly shifts to the future, allowing the reader to glimpse what Chika will experience soon enough, but hasn’t yet, beginning the first of the multiple times that the narrative will keep switching between the past and the future. The narrative tells us that later, Chika will see the remnants of violence and arson across the town – burned cars, and destroyed property. She’ll find out how the riot started when someone threw a copy of the Holy Quran on the road and a Christian man accidentally drove over it. A group of Muslim men nearby pulled him out of his truck, hacked his head off with a machete, and paraded his head through the town inviting others to join and exact revenge for the “infidel” who has “desecrated” their holy book. As Chika imagines his corpse, she throws up. But now, she just asks the woman if she can still smell smoke.
The woman unties her wrapper and spreads it across the floor, inviting her to come and sit on it. Although Chika hesitates, not wanting to get the woman’s wrapper dirty, she insists. Wiping her forehead, Chika tells her that she has lost her sister in the commotion of the riot, and the woman reassures her that she must be in a safe place, pronouncing Nnedi’s Igbo name with her Hausa accent that adds a touch of “feathery gentleness.” Again, the narrative jumps to the future, informing the reader that later, Chika will go to every possible corner of the town in search of her sister, but she will never find her. But now she tells the woman that she and Nnedi are visiting their aunt on a school vacation. T
he woman enquires about their schools, and Chika tells her that she is a student of medicine, and Nnedi of political science, while wondering if she is only engaging in this conversation about their education to keep reality at bay. She imagines her sister safe somewhere, laughing and arguing about the political situation of the country. She realizes that she feels like “she and her sister should not be affected by the riot. Riots like this were what she read about in newspapers. Riots like this were what happened to other people.” As she tells the woman that her aunt is a director at the secretariat, she smells something on the woman, something “like the bar soap their housegirl uses to wash the bed linen”, reflecting that the woman probably comes from the opposite end of the economic spectrum from Chika. She assures her that her aunt is safe. As Chika tells her how surreal the riot feels, she says “It is a work of evil”, and Chika wonders if that is truly what she thinks about the riots. She imagines her sister explaining the larger political motivations of political parties and governments who trigger riots to protect their own interest and feels guilty for doubting if the woman would understand the complexities of all this.
The woman tells Chika that she is a trader who sells onions, and asks her if she has actually diagnosed and treated patients. Chika tells her that her clinical trials have begun, and hopes that there hasn’t been any damage to the market. The woman tells her that markets get damaged in every riot, and Chika wants to ask if she has seen other ones too but refrains. Suddenly, the woman tells her that her “nipple is burning like pepper,” and starts taking off her clothes to let Chika take a look, catching her by surprise. As the woman cups her breasts as if in an “offering” to Chika, she nervously remembers an early experience of clinical trials where she had to feel the heartbeat of a boy.
The woman’s nipples, however, are completely different from the boy’s, and she examines them and tells her that they are dry, and need to be moisturized after she feeds her baby. The woman is surprised as this is her sixth child and she has encountered no such issue with the previous five, Chika makes up a story about her mother facing the same problem with her sixth child, although her mother only has two children. She usually has a purpose behind her lies and wonders what purpose this one serves, feeling a distinct need to somehow connect to the woman’s past. She recommends cocoa butter for moisturization to ease the dryness of the woman’s nipples. The woman watches Chika for a while, as if this disclosure has created a bond, and tells her that she has lost her daughter inside the market, who sells groundnuts in front of the bus stop, and she has not been able to find her since the riot began. Chika stupidly asks if she is talking about the baby, angering the woman. She tells her that it is her eldest child, Halima, and begins to cry in a manner different from how Chika has seen women cry, seeking comfort and support:
“The woman’s crying is private, as though she is carrying out a necessary ritual that involves no one else.”
Later, when Chika looks for her sister, regretting their decision to explore the Kano market, she will also wishes that Halima had not come out to sell groundnuts that day. Now, the woman utters a prayer to Allah hoping for the safety of Halima and Nnedi, and Chika nods, not knowing the Muslim way of replying. The woman washes in the water running from a tap within the shop and offers namaaz, and once again Chika finds it to be a private experience, like the tears. At the moment she wishes to pray herself or to believe in God whose idea has always been cloudy and neglected in her mind. Later when her family offers repeated masses hoping for Nnedi’s return, she will remember this woman offering her prayers.
As the woman finishes her prayers, Chika prepares to leave, anxious to find her sister and aunt. The woman is concerned about the danger outside but Chika tells her she cannot smell smoke anymore, meaning the violence must have subsided. Before leaving, she offers to come back and drive the woman to her home.
Chika leaves, walking on the empty streets hoping for a taxi with her sister in it. Lost in her thoughts, she almost stumbles on a body that has recently been burnt. The smell of burnt flesh sickens her. Later when she goes out to search for her sister with a policeman and her aunt, she will encounter many such bodies, and realize that she cannot distinguish between the bodies of Igbos and Hausas, Christians and Muslims. She’ll listen to BBC radio define the riots as “religious with undertones of ethnic tension”, and infuriated at how so many people who have been hurt or killed “has all been packaged and sanitized and made to fit into so few words,” will fling the radio to the wall. But now, unable to handle the sight and the smell of the burnt body, she rushes back to the safety of the store and the woman’s company. She runs towards the store and keeps rapping the window until the woman opens it. Her leg is bleeding from an unknown injury and the woman ties her scarf around the wound. The woman lies down on the scarf, and she and Chika hear incomprehensible chanting noises in the distance. “Later, Chika will read in the Guardian that “the reactionary Hausa-speaking Muslims in the North has a history of violence against non-Muslims”, and in the middle of her grief, she will stop to remember that she examined the nipples and experienced the gentleness of a woman who is Hausa and Muslim.”
Chika barely sleeps that night, the image of the corpse coming back to haunt her again and again. The woman gets up and climbs out of the window, then calls out to someone, speaking in Hausa that Chika doesn’t understand. The woman comes back to the store and informs her that the danger is over and she is leaving before the police arrive and starts harassing people. Chika stands and stretches. Soon, she will be walking back home to her aunt who is cursing herself over inviting her nieces, and will lead her back to the sofa to comfort her. Now, she unties the bloodstained scarf and hands it to the woman, who reminds her to wash her leg and greet her people on her behalf. Chika also tells her to greet her baby and Halima. Later, while walking home, she picks up a bloodstained stone as a souvenir for the day, having an instinctive knowledge at that moment that she will never find her sister. But now, she just asks the woman for her scarf back, which the other gives willingly, and the two part ways.
A Private Experience | Analysis
The title, “A Private Experience”, underlines the emotional intimacy and friendship shared by two women from conflicting communities who do not even know each other’s names, which lasts for the duration of one night, making it incomprehensible to outsiders, thus emphasizing on the private nature of the experience that only the two of them share.
The story thematically focuses on communal violence and feminine solidarity as its core concerns, exploring how the latter can help soothe the traumatic, jarring effects of the former. The woman, unnamed throughout the story in a manner that singularizes her instead of casting her in the same light as everyone else, belongs to the opposite end to Chika on the spectrum of the economy, religion, and ethnicity. As a Hausa Muslim, she belongs to the community that is currently clashing with Chika’s Igbo Christian community. Moreover, she also comes from a financial background that is much humbler than Chika’s, who belongs to the affluent, elite section of society. However, these superficial differences do not endure in the face of the genuine humane connection of solidarity and intimacy that the women build in their brief encounters. Their connection, forged completely coincidentally, is based on mutual empathy and the recognition that communities do not start riots, only evil politics do.
Despite being from conflicting communities, both Chika and the woman recognize from the very beginning that both of them are victims of the riots no matter which side started it, and both of them are looking for their loved ones lost in the middle of this meaningless violence. They support each other through their anxieties and griefs and share a genuine, intimate connection like old friends that makes the woman comfortable enough to bare her breasts to a stranger, and Chika bold enough to ask her if she can keep her scarf, which becomes a physical reminder of their solidarity and friendship on that dreadful day. Through Chika and the woman, thus, Adichie manages to convey the twin messages that are central to this story – that evil does not come from one religion/community or another, but from people, and that women have the potential to resist and overturn the effects of such violence through their solidarity, friendship, and support of one another.
The moments within the shop when the woman shows her breasts to Chika is not only a moment of exceptional intimacy, it is also charged with a momentary but strong erotic undertone, subtly hinting towards a more holistic view of female relationships that may be forged on friendship, love, and attraction. The intimacy of the experience is such that both women express their vulnerabilities to each other despite not knowing each other’s names. This makes the encounter and the connection deeply personal, even private, something that would not be comprehensible to anyone who had not been present inside that shop, witnessing two women, scared and anxious, comforting each other through their grief.
The motif of “privacy” appears repeatedly, in Chika finding the woman’s tears and her prayer extremely private and feeling the need to look away. The reader has this urge when Chika is examining the woman’s nipples, the intimacy of the experience generating a need for privacy. This is later reflected in Chika’s need to connect with the woman’s past when she lies about her mother having six children, a need that can only be explained by the connection that they share, a connection that is so inexplicable to an outsider that it makes it necessarily private.
The narrative structure of the story is fascinating, featuring an unusual mix of present and future tense in a non-linear fashion. The third-person narrator who appears limited in the present scenes as her gaze is only limited to Chika appears omniscient in the future scenes as the ability of foretelling is usually present only in omniscient narrations. This makes the narrative technique hard to categorize, challenging normative rational discourses of time that maintain linearity in the chronology of events. The story is thus an excellent depiction of feminine solidarity and empathy triumphing over the divisive forces of communal violence that are mostly engendered by men, challenging the patriarchal code of violent masculinity by positing female intimacy and its restorative strength against it.
A Private Experience | Characters
Chika – A medical student, Chika comes from a wealthy and powerful Igbo Christian family. She is compassionate, kind, elitist, and nervous, easily disoriented in critical times. Before the riot, she was almost apolitical in her stance, her only political experience having been derived from her sister’s activism and politics. Her experience of the riots and her encounter with the woman makes her reassess her views on people, politics, and violence, and by the end of the story, she is capable of recognizing the hypocrisies of the government and the media while reporting such events.
The Woman – Unnamed throughout the story, the woman is a Hausa Muslim. Although the violence has reportedly been started by some people from her own community, she is as much a victim of the violence as anybody else, having lost her eldest daughter in the riot. She still manages to remain extremely compassionate and empathetic towards Chika’s grief despite harboring her own, leading her to safety inside the shop when she was no more than a stranger running on the street. The woman’s character embodies the message that violence is not an inherent part of any community but people and people themselves can counter and thwart these divisive forces through compassion and solidarity.
Nnedi – Chika’s sister who is lost in the riot never to be found again, Nnedi is not apolitical like her sister and has liberal and progressive views on politics, as well as a good understanding of it. Courageous and unafraid, she is vocal about what she believes in and is a key influence in shaping Chika’s understanding of politics.
