Diasporic Consciousness and Narrative Ambiguity in Short Stories by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Chika Unigwe

This chapter examines diasporic consciousness (understood here as an individual’s worldview shaped by their diasporic experiences) in selected short stories by Nigerian writers Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Chika Unigwe. More specifically, the chapter argues that Adichie’s “On Monday of Last Week” (2009) and several of the interconnected short stories in Chika Unigwe’s collection Better Never than Late (2019) exemplify a “poetics of ambiguity” that is typical of new diasporic African writing, in which literary techniques such as point of view (also known as focalization) are used to produce ambiguous narratives couched in language that often resists interpretative closure. The chapter shows that, in Adichie’s story, internal focalization, combined with symbolism linked to space and race, is deployed to comment on the balance of power between the old and new African diasporas in the US. In Unigwe’s stories, point of view alternates between characters, producing narrative echoes and leaving blind spots that are central to the deployment of a form of diasporic consciousness in which gender issues feature prominently. Both Adichie’s and Unigwe’s texts feature ambiguous endings that, ultimately, may be the expression of a diasporic consciousness that is still contending with uncertainty and that, as a consequence, remains in flux.