BIOGRAPHY
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https://blanesbookclub.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-thing-around-your-neck-by.html
Written by Elisa Sola:
A little introduction about Nigeria and its ethnic and linguistic diversity
Nigeria is a very ethnically diverse country with 371
ethnic groups, the largest of which are the Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo.
In spite of this diversity, Nigeria has one official
language: English, as a result of the British colonial rule over the nation.
Nevertheless, it is not spoken as a first language in the entire country
because other languages are majority in terms of number of native speakers.
Nigeria stands out as one of the world’s most linguistically diverse nations,
with over 500 languages, spoken among 223 million people. Some of the most
popular languages spoken in Nigeria are: Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Edo…
Chimamanda Ngozi was born into an Igbo family in Enugu
(Nigeria), and in her formal education, Chimamanda was taught in both, Igbo and
English. Although Igbo was not a popular subject, she continued taking courses
of Igbo in high school.
SUMMARY
Tomorrow is Too Far tells the story of a family
tragedy and the consequences it has on the protagonist and on all of her
family.
The main character is a twenty-eight-year-old woman
(we don’t know what is her name) who clearly relives the moment when her older
brother (Nonso) died eighteen years earlier, when he was twelve years old. She,
who was ten at the time, reveals that she caused Nonso’s death by challenging
him to climb an avocado tree and then scaring him by telling him there was a
dangerous snake (echi eteka), the “Tomorrow is Too Far” snake.
The story takes place in Nigeria, in Gradmama’s yard,
in a humid and warm summer. The atmosphere is important because it shows us an
exuberant and ripe nature, which is about to explode, like the feelings of the
girl, who was torn between the hate and jealousy she felt towards her brother
(for the preferential treatment he received
̶ patriarchal upbringing) and the love and desire she felt for her
cousin Dozie, thirteen years old.
A fatal triangle is drawn that will bring tragic
consequences and will dynamite not only the relationship of all family members
between themselves, but also their entire lives.
The decision to keep the secret for all these years in
order to try to achieve the love and recognition of her parents means that she
has not been able to overcome the facts, and at this moment, eighteen years
later, she’s still not able to understand what happened in the “amoral kingdom
of her childhood”. Things being like this, when she receives the news of her
Grandmama’s death, she returns to the scene of the crime in a state of shock.
The fact that the story is told in the second person
by an omniscient narrator helps to picture the image of a girl who is shocked, and she has difficulty expressing herself: everything we know about her is told
us by this narrator who is inside her, but she is silent, blocked.
The representation that we have of the cousin is of a
passive and sad character, overwhelmed by the events. When the girl asks him
“what did you want that summer?”, trying to share the blame a little, his
answer is categorical: “What mattered was what you wanted”.
The story ends with a beautiful image of ants,
because, in fact, she and the entire family is like a “column of black ants
making his way up the trunk, each ant carrying” a bit of guilty and a lot of
sorrow.
QUESTIONS