31 pages • 1 hour read
Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieA Private Experience
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Consequences of Religious and Ethnic Intolerance
“A Private Experience” is rooted in an exploration of how religious and ethnic intolerance fosters hatred and violence. The riot is sparked when an Igbo Christian man drives over a Koran lying on the roadside, and a group of Hausa Muslim men kill him in response. The initial event is immediately abstracted when the men take his severed head to the market and encourage others to join in. What is presented to the marketgoers is decontextualized—similar to the way the man has been dismembered—but it is enough to set off existing ethnic and religious tensions. This reflects how intolerance, conflict, and hatred leave people primed to commit extreme acts of violence. By the end of the riot, the city’s streets are littered with charred corpses, ultimately indistinguishable from each other. United in death, the burnt corpses represent not only how people are ultimately the same despite ethnic and religious differences but also that there are no winners in such hate-fueled conflicts. Everyone ends up in the same place—dead, desecrated, and anonymous.
This point is underscored when the Hausa woman recounts past riots to Chika. She points out that “they break market” each time a riot occurs (49). The market is located in Kano, which is predominantly Hausa, and its destruction symbolizes the intrinsic harm of such violence on the Hausa people. The market is a place of nourishment, where people buy their food and interact with their community members—without it, the people are materially and spiritually impoverished. While Igbos are targeted in this riot, the Hausa people cannot thrive in such a climate. This shared trauma is cemented by both the Hausa woman and Chika losing loved ones during the riot. The periodic riots, always ready to ignite in an atmosphere of mistrust and intolerance, destroy all sense of safety for everyone, regardless of ethnic group or religious belief. Since riots also take place in locales beyond Kano, the result is a country that is constantly retraumatized by repeated atrocities and cannot move forward because the people are forever dealing with the shards of lives fractured by violence. A country that is constantly engaged with death and destruction cannot grow and flourish.
While Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie offers no easy solutions to such deep-rooted conflict, she explores the potential for healing and reconciliation in the interactions between Chika and the woman. This is present from the very start, when the woman rescues Chika, seeing in her a young woman in need of help, not an Igbo Christian to be reviled and destroyed. Chika, in turn, confronts her prejudices throughout the story, constantly making assumptions about the woman that are immediately undermined by their interactions. While the story does not explore the woman’s interiority, Chika is different by the end of the story—more open-minded and tolerant, represented by her newfound respect for her family’s faith. Mutual respect and compassion as the way to peace is symbolized in the story by the color green, which represents growth, renewal, and life. In the first instance, Chika holds up a green branch during a demonstration advocating for democracy against the dictatorship. The second instance is the woman’s green wrapper that she spreads on the floor so that the two women, one from each side of the ethno-religious divide, can rest and be comfortable together. The Nigerian flag is also green and white, so the color symbolism in this story asserts that resolving ethnic and religious conflict will result in a peaceful, prosperous Nigeria.
The Power of Female Connection
The two main characters in “A Private Experience” are women, and their conversations often focus on their female loved ones—Nnedi, Chika’s aunt, and the woman’s daughters. Additionally, the two women bond over intimate moments they can only share as women, from the woman uncovering her hair and praying in front of Chika to Chika examining her nipple and offering her nursing advice. Through these details, the story asserts that women survive and thrive together, relying on each other to navigate an uncertain world.
Chika’s closest relationship is with her sister and best friend, Nnedi. They are raised by their wealthy mother—there is no mention of their father—and they have no other siblings. The aunt, who invites her nieces to visit her in Kano, is a successful and self-sufficient woman. As such, Chika’s family and context are shown to be matriarchal, and Chika is nurtured and educated by the women in her life. For example, she relies on Nnedi to interpret the world around her and share the historical and political context of things. Without Nnedi, Chika feels unmoored, severed from her most important connection. While the woman’s context is different—she is neither wealthy nor educated—she and her daughter, Halima, are united as caretakers. They sell onions and groundnuts at the market, working together to provide for the other four children. Her husband is not mentioned during the story, and it becomes clear that both women gain strength from the women in their families.
Despite the things that divide them, this fact gives them common ground. During the riot, Chika is “not sure if the man running beside her was a friend or an enemy” (45), but she implicitly trusts the Hausa woman. In contrast to the violence outside—started between men—there is a presumption of safety in their shelter, symbolized by the Hausa woman removing her green wrapper and, later, her head scarf. While their bond is tenuous, Chika is trustworthy enough as a fellow woman that the Hausa woman feels comfortable removing her modesty garments. These garments become a sort of mutual property—they sit on the wrapper and the woman binds Chika’s wound with the scarf—deepening their connection.
This is not a utopic depiction of women as inherently peaceful or unbiased; Chika is judgmental, especially at the beginning, and the woman becomes irritated when Chika doesn’t listen to her. However, the women share private aspects of their lives with each other, partly to bridge the gap between them and partly to give voice to the fear, pain, and loss each is experiencing. Each shares the name of the person most dear to them—Nnedi and Halima. Nevertheless, it is significant that they do not exchange their own names. The reader knows Chika’s name because she is the protagonist, and the story is told from her point of view. But the woman remains anonymous, unnamed to the reader because she is unnamed to Chika. Ordinarily, one of the first things people do when encountering a stranger is introduce themselves. That these two women do not exchange names suggests that neither one expects the bond to last long.
Indeed, when the women part at the end, there is no indication that their fragile relationship will survive the breach. The woman gives Chika her scarf, but her smile is distracted, her attention already turning back to her real life. Chika possibly requests the scarf because she understands that the connection is now broken and needs a touchstone, a tangible reminder that she can survive in the world. Chika has benefitted from the strength and independence of the women who surrounded her growing up, yet she remained hesitant and filled with self-doubt. However, the woman’s gentle strength and her calm acceptance have given Chika something else—a sense of confidence and compassion that she takes with her into the world.
Public Experiences Versus Private Experiences
There are various private experiences described in the story. Chika identifies two: when the woman cries over her lost daughter, Halima, and when she seeks comfort in prayer. However, Chika considers these private because they both cause her discomfort. By contrast, the woman does not view them as experiences that should be hidden. She cries without expectation of comfort from anyone else and comforts herself with prayer, which she engages in whether or not there are others around to witness it. For her, these experiences are personal—particular to her—but not private in the sense that they need to be concealed.
Other traditionally private experiences are conducted in front of someone else in the story—namely, those related to the human body. Since the two women are trapped in the store by the riot, the woman turns an empty container into a makeshift toilet. She does what she can to preserve privacy by placing it at the back of the store. After using it, she takes it outdoors, away from their shared space, and apologizes for the odor. Similarly, she is matter-of-fact about exposing her breasts to Chika because her physical pain prompts her to seek Chika’s medical opinion. For the woman, her body is just her body. This contrasts with a common notion that women’s bodies, especially breasts, can be either sexual or maternal but not just part of someone’s body. The woman is practical and logical; when Chika reveals she is studying medicine, the woman accesses her expertise.
Chika is uncomfortable with the idea that others might rely on her. She hesitates to assist children separated from their mothers during the riot, she fumbles a medical exam of a child in school, and she is flustered when the woman shares private emotional pain with her. Chika is accustomed to being the child in all her relationships, the one who follows and who keeps her opinions to herself, or who has not worked out what her true opinions are. She goes to a pro-democracy rally because her sister organized it; she wears a finger rosary because her mother wants her to. Her personal values are subsumed to the expectations or priorities of others. She even conducts a medical examination of the woman because the woman expects her to. However, Chika is competent and confident during this exam, perhaps because the public performance component is absent: The woman assumes Chika will be competent within her field of expertise, allowing Chika to rise to the challenge.
Within the safe space of the store, away from the riot outside and the external pressure to conform to the demands of their social groups, the two women are free to determine their relationship with each other. They meet on neutral ground, which permits them to learn, share, see, and think for themselves. Although the store is small and claustrophobic, symbolizing the polarized and suffocating society they live in, their minds are paradoxically free to expand within it. In fact, it is the space’s smallness that permits this. As the woman explains: “This place safe […]. Them not going to small-small shop, only big-big shop and market” (44). In this story, public spaces limit personal freedom because large groups of people cede their right to independent opinions, or else that right is forcibly taken from them. The Igbo Christian man is murdered by a group, and his death is turned into a public experience designed to silence dissent. The murderers operate as a unit with no indication that they think or act as individuals, or even that they wish to. The market, a public place that traditionally symbolizes freedom of exchange between people from all walks of life, is instead transformed into a place of danger, fear, and death, with charred corpses serving as a warning. In this story, the more public a space is, and the more people there are to act as witnesses, the more pressure there is on individuals to perform in a group-sanctioned way. When the audience is removed, so, too, is the pressure, and people are free to explore their roles and experiment with different ways of relating to others.
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By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
