The danger of a single short story: Reality, fiction and metafiction in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Jumping Monkey Hill”

Abstract

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story “Jumping Monkey Hill” was inspired by its author’s experience at the inaugural workshop of the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2003, during which, the writer says, she was faced with the lustful and patronizing attitude of the then-administrator of the award. Adichie’s piece, by virtue of being a short story about writing itself, is a so-called “metafictional” text. It is on this self-reflexive quality that this essay focuses. More precisely, the article examines the interaction between reality and fiction in Adichie’s story, paying particular attention to the ways in which the text uses techniques of mise en abyme to comment on gender subjection, colonially tinged condescension, and resistance to both of these forms of oppression. Ultimately, the essay argues that “Jumping Monkey Hill” can be read as a literary manifesto that incarnates its own theorization, a conclusion that is, however, shown to be problematic in more than one respect.

Keywords:

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• metafiction
• short story
• mise en abyme
• genre
• gender

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Erratum

Notes

This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected/amended. Please see Erratum (https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2018.1438123).

1. These are not exceptional statements: similar comments about metafiction can be found in Boyd (1983, 9; quoted in Ommundsen 1993, 9), Hutcheon ([1980] 2013, 15) and Waugh (1984, 2).

2. Incidentally (or not), the Lord Chamberlain has historically been associated with the policing of creativity through his presiding over theatre censorship until 1968.

3. The name of the original location is mentioned in Elam (2003, 6).

4. My comment about the inclusion of Ujunwa’s short story is hedged by “what one assumes to be” because, while the text is unambiguously presented as her story (the different sections of her fiction are systematically preceded by a mention of Ujunwa sitting in front of her laptop [Adichie 2009a, 100, 103, 110]), a minute dissonance at the end of “Jumping Monkey Hill” indicates that this fact should be approached with caution. Indeed, when the participants gather to discuss Ujunwa’s story, one of them praises her for “captur[ing] Lagos well, the smells and sounds” (113), while her untitled piece actually does no such thing: even if it is set in Lagos, it does not describe the city’s olfactory or aural atmospheres. The text that does do this, however, is Adichie’s short story “Lagos, Lagos”, which I discuss later in this paragraph.

5. This mirroring of reality in fiction actually extends to the genesis of “Lagos, Lagos” itself, and to its reception at the Caine Prize workshop. Indeed, Adichie has said in an interview that this short story was “literally lifted from [her] friend’s life in Lagos”, and that the administrator had deemed it to be “agenda writing” (Adichie 2011).