Private Experience

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Private Experience


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This Study Guide consists of approximately 26 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more -
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A Private Experience Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to
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A Private Experience by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.



The following version of this story was used to create the guide: Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. A Private Experience. The Guardian, 2008.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's third person short story, A Private Experience, is written in the present, past, and future tenses, and employs an atypical narrative structure. The following summary adheres to the present tense, and a linear form.
While on vacation from university, sisters Chika and Nnedi travel to Kano to visit their auntie. Curious to explore the city beyond their auntie's gated community, the sisters venture into the marketplace. While Chika is shopping for oranges, Nnedi wanders off in search of groundnuts. Shortly thereafter, a riot breaks out in the streets. People begin running and screaming, and the market fills with smoke. Chika cannot find her sister anywhere. She does not know who is who, nor why the fighting has begun.
Suddenly a woman calls out to her. She tells Chika she is running towards the danger, and leads her away from the chaos. Chika follows her out of the market and into an abandoned shop. Once inside, Chika notices the woman's accent, facial structure, and dress, identifying them as signs that she is a Hausa Muslim. Meanwhile, Chika wonders if the woman is noting her rosary ring and pale complexion as obvious signs that she is an Igbo Christian. The more the women talk, the more determined Chika is to prove how different they are from one another. This is the first time Chika has ever been to Kano. She is educated, and comes from money. She does not want Kano, its people, culture, or history to have anything to do with her. She does not want to believe that riots like the one in the marketplace have the power to threaten her secure reality.
As the hours pass, Chika learns that she is not the only one who has lost a loved one in the chaos. The woman says that her young daughter, Halima, has also gone missing. She begins to cry, and Chika notices her humanity. The woman also complains about discomfort from breastfeeding, and Chika examines her. The moment creates a shift in Chika's emotional center. Suddenly she wants to connect with and relate to the woman. She lies, and says that her mother has also had six children, and suffered from the same pain.
Shortly thereafter, the woman discovers a rusty tap in the corner of the shop. Though all of the shops on the street have been slated for demolition, abandoned for months, the tap miraculously produces water. The woman uses the water to wash, and begins praying. Chika has never believed in God, but is filled with a sudden longing for faith. She wishes some divine entity might deliver her, and return her sister.
After the woman finishes praying, Chika decides to leave. Out in the street, she prays that some magical or supernatural power will undo everything that has happened. Then she sees a burned body in the road, and becomes overwhelmed by terror. She races back to the shop, where she and the woman notice a cut on her leg. The woman cleans the wound and wraps it in her headscarf.
When dawn comes, the woman speaks with someone through the window. The riot has ended, and they must leave before the soldiers come. Chika asks the woman to keep the scarf, in case her wound continues bleeding.
Chika walks all the way home to her auntie's, where she finds her auntie pacing and cursing herself for ever having invited Chika and Nnedi to Kano. They then travel the city with a policeman in search of Nnedi. Throughout the drive, Chika sees the burned bodies in the streets, the burned skeletons of cars, and considers what has been lost. Later, she pastes photos of her sister around the market and stores. Her family holds a series of Masses, desperate for Nnedi's return. Nnedi is never found.
No matter what Chika hears and reads in the news about the riots, she feels angry and despairing. The media has sterilized a conflict that cannot be articulated. Chika does not want to hear about the history of violence between the Muslims and non-Muslims. She will never forget the grace and kindness the Hausa Muslim woman showed her.



A Private Experience

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie




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Chika climbs in through the store window first and then holds the shutter as the woman climbs in after her. The store looks like it was deserted long before the riots started; the empty rows of wooden shelves are covered in yellow dust, as are the metal paint containers stacked in a corner. The store is small, smaller than Chika’s walk-in closet back home. The woman climbs in, and the shutters of the window squeak as Chika lets go of them. Chika wants to thank the woman, for stopping her as she dashed past, for saying, in Pidgin English, “I saw people running from that direction.” But before she can say thank you, the woman says, “I lost my necklace when I was running; I didn’t even know.”
“I dropped everything,” Chika says. “I was buying oranges, and I dropped the oranges and my handbag as well.” She does not add that the handbag was an original Coach, that her mother bought it on a recent trip to New York.
The woman sighs, and Chika imagines that she is thinking of her necklace, probably plastic beads strung on a piece of string. Even without the tribal marks ingrained in deep, curving lines on the woman’s face, Chika can tell she is Hausa, from the narrowness of her face, the rise of her cheekbones. And that she is Muslim, not just because Chika is aware that most Hausa are Muslim, but also because of the scarf. It hangs around the woman’s neck now, but it was probably wound loosely around her face before, covering her ears. Modesty. A long, flimsy, pink and black scarf, with the garish prettiness of cheap things. Chika wonders if the woman is looking at her as well, if the woman can tell from her accent and the crucifix hanging on a gold chain around her neck that she is Igbo and Christian. Later, Chika will learn that Hausa Muslims are hacking down Igbo Christians with machetes, clubbing them with huge stones, as she and the woman are speaking. But now she says, “Thank you for calling me. I might have been running to danger. Thank you.”
“We will be fine here,” the woman says, in a voice that is so soft it sounds like a whisper. “They won’t go to small shops like this. They will go to big buildings and the market.”
“Yes,” Chika says, although she has no reason to agree or disagree; she knows nothing about riots; the closest she has come is the pro-democracy rally at the university, where she held a bright green branch and joined in chanting, “The Military Must Go!” and “Democracy Now!” Besides, she would not even have participated in that rally if her sister, Nnedi, had not been one of the organizers.
Her hands are still trembling, her calves still burning after the unsteady run from the market in her high-heeled sandals. She is still incredulous at the thought that, just half an hour ago, she was in the market buying oranges, and then there was shouting. English cries of “They are rioting! Fire! They are rioting!” Igbo cries of “ Gbabanu oh! Run for your lives! They’ve killed a woman!” Similarly toned Hausa and Yoruba cries that Chika did not understand. Then people around her were running, pushing against each other, overturning wheelbarrows full of yams, leaving behind bruised vegetables they had just bargained hard for. Stampede. Chika smelled the sweat and fear, and she ran, too, across wide streets, into this narrow one, which she feared—felt—was dangerous, until she saw the woman.
She and the woman stand silently in the store for a while, looking out of the window they have just climbed through, its squeaky wooden shutters swinging in the air. The street is quiet at first, and then they hear the sound of running feet. Soon a man and a young lady appear; the young lady is holding her wrapper up above her knees and has a baby tied to her back. The man is speaking swiftly in Igbo, and all Chika hears is, “Don’t cry; we will find her, inugo. She may have run to Uncle’s house.” Both of them look towards the store and then hurry past.
“We should close the window; it is safer,” the woman says.
Chika shuts the windows; the dust in the room is so thick she can see it, billowing above her, like the clouds outside an airplane window. The smell is heavy, fills her nose, makes breathing difficult. It smells nothing like the streets outside, which smell like the kind of sky-colored smoke that wafts around her neighborhood during Christmas as people throw whole goats into fires to burn the hair off the skin. The streets where she ran blindly, 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 who.
Later she will see the hulks of burned cars, rectangular holes in place of their windows and windshields, and she will imagine the burning cars dotting the streets like picnic bonfires, silent witnesses to so much. She will find out it all started a few streets away, when a man drove over a copy of the Holy Koran on the roadside, a man who happened to be Igbo and Christian. And the Muslims nearby pulled him out of his pickup truck and cut his head off with one flash of a machete and carried it around the town of Kano, asking others to join in; the Christian Igbo had desecrated the Holy Book. She will imagine the man’s head, his rolled-back eyes, and she will throw up on the floor and spend hours cleaning up the watery vomit. But now, she asks the woman, “Can you still smell the smoke?”
“Yes,” the woman says. She unties her bright yellow wrapper and spreads it on the dusty floor. She has on only a blouse and a shimmery black slip, torn at the seams. “Come and sit.”
Chika looks at the threadbare wrapper on the floor; she can tell that it is clean, that it is probably one of two the woman owns, but that it is always clean. She looks down at her own blue denim skirt and red T-shirt embossed with a picture of the statue of liberty, both of which she bought when she and Nnedi spent a few summer weeks with relatives in New York. “No, your wrapper …” she says.
“Sit,” the woman says. “We will be here a while.”
“We should stay at least until tonight, or tomorrow morning.”
“Oh, God,” Chika says. She raises her hand to her forehead, as though checking for a malaria fever. The touch of her cool palm usually calms her, but this time her palm is moist and sweaty. “My sister. I left my sister buying pineapples. I don’t know where she is.”
“Nnedi,” the woman repeats, and her Hausa accent sheaths the Igbo name in a feathery gentleness.
Later, Chika will comb the hospital mortuaries looking for Nnedi; she will go to newspaper houses clutching the photo she and Nnedi took at a studio just two weeks ago, the one where she has a stupid smile-yelp on her face because Nnedi pinched her just before the take. She will tape photocopies of the photo on the walls of the market and the stadium. She will not find Nnedi. She will never find Nnedi. But now she says to the woman, “Nnedi and I came up here last week to visit our Aunty. We are on vacation from school.”
“You go to school?” the woman asks. “You and your sister?”
“Yes. We go to university, the University of Lagos.” Chika wonders if the woman even knows what going to university means. And she wonders, too, if she mentioned school only to feed herself the reality she needs now—that Nnedi is not lost in an insane riot, that Nnedi is safe somewhere, probably laughing in her easy, mouth-all-open way, probably making one of her political arguments. Like how Africa’s problems would be solved if all the nations adopted the detribalized, pan-African socialism of Julius Nyerere. Or how the huge popularity of blond hair attachments was a direct, traceable result of British colonialism.
“What are you doing in the university?” the woman asks.
Chika lowers herself and sits on the wrapper-covered floor. She sits much closer to the woman than she ordinarily would have, so as to rest her body entirely on the wrapper. She smells something on the woman, something harsh and clean like the bar soap their maid back home uses to wash the bed linen. “Doing?” she asks. “I am studying medicine. Nnedi is studying political science.”
“Oh,” the woman says, nodding. A vacant nod. Chika is certain she has no clue what it means to study medicine or political science.
“We have only spent a week here with our Aunty; we have never even been to Kano before,” Chika says, and she wonders if she is unconsciously explaining why she and her sister should not be affected by the riot.
“Was your Aunty in the market with you?” the woman asks.
“No, she’s at work. She is the director at the secretariat.” Chika raises her hand to her forehead again. The conversation seems surreal; she feels as though she has been hastily penciled into a cartoon show. “I still can’t believe this is happening, this riot.”
“Evil comes in many forms,” the woman says, her voice even lower.
Chika says nothing, wondering if that is all the woman thinks of the riots, if that is all she sees it as—evil. She wishes Nnedi were here; she imagines the cocoa brown of Nnedi’s eyes lighting up, her lips moving quickly, explaining that things like this riot do not happen in a vacuum, that religion and ethnicity are often politicized, that British colonialism created a country that was never meant to be. Then Chika feels a prick of guilt for wondering if this woman’s mind is large enough to grasp any of that.
“How far have you gone in medicine? Have you started to see sick people in the hospital?” the woman asks.
Chika turns to stare and then averts her gaze quickly so that the woman will not see the surprise. “My Clinicals? Yes, we started this semester. We see patients at the Teaching Hospital.”
“I am a trader. I sell groundnuts and melons and onions,” the woman says.
Chika listens carefully for sarcasm or reproach in the tone, but there is none. The voice is gentle and low, a woman simply telling what she does. “I hope they will not destroy market stalls,” Chika says finally, because she does not know what to say, because she wants to say something that will match the dignity she feels swirling around her, in the dust.
“There are always people who loot when there is a riot,” the woman says.
Chika wants to ask the woman how many riots she has witnessed, but she does not. She has read about the other riots in the past, and they are mostly the same: Hausa Muslim zealots attacking Igbo Christians, and sometimes Igbo Christians going on murderous missions of revenge. She does not want a conversation of naming names.
“My nipples have been burning,” the woman says.
“My nipples have been burning, like pepper. Will you look at them?”
Before Chika can swallow the bubble of surprise in her throat and say anything, the woman pulls her blouse up and unhooks the front clasp of a blue, threadbare bra. She brings out the naira notes folded inside her bra before freeing her full breasts. Chika stares at her, at the oval-shaped face of a Hausa Muslim woman, a lower-class woman who puts money in her bra, a trader whose mind is not occupied with questioning abstract ideologies or case studies, but with the price of groundnuts, the length of the rainy season, the harvest of crops.
“They burn,” the woman says, cupping her breasts.
Chika moves closer and examines the dark brown nipples, touches them, feels the breasts. “Do you have a baby?” she asks.
“Your nipples are cracked because they are too dry. When you nurse, you have to moisturize them afterwards.”
“But the baby’s saliva makes them wet.”
“Yes, but afterwards it makes them dry. Saliva is like kai-kai ; it is liquid, it makes your tongue wet, but you are thirsty after you drink it.”
The woman gives Chika a long look. “This is my fifth child. Nothing like this happened with the others.”
“It was the same with my mother. Her nipples cracked when the sixth child came, and she didn’t know what caused it, until a friend told her,” Chika says. She hardly lies, but the few times she does, there is always a purpose behind the lie. Now, she wonders what purpose this lie serves. She and Nnedi are her mother’s only children. Besides, her mother always had a British-trained GP a phone call away. Later, she will wonder why she lied to the woman, why she felt the need to draw on a fictional past similar to the woman’s.
“What did your mother use on her nipples?” the woman asks.
“Cocoa butter. The cracks healed fast.”
“Eh?” The woman watches Chika for a while, as if this disclosure has created a bond. “I will use it too.” She plays with her scarf for a moment, then says, “I don’t know where my daughter is. We went to the market together this morning. I gave her groundnuts to hawk near the bus stop, because there are many customers there. Then this whole thing started. I looked all over the market for her.”
“The baby?” Chika asks, knowing how stupid she sounds even as she asks.
The woman shakes her head. “The baby is at home with my second daughter. It is Halima I am talking about. She is fourteen. My first daughter.” The woman starts to cry; she cries quietly, her shoulders heaving up and down, not the kind of loud sobbing that the women Chika knows do, the kind that screams, Hold me and comfort me because I cannot deal with this alone. The woman’s crying is private, as though she is carrying out a necessary ritual that involves no one else. Chika wants to reach out and take her hand, press strength into the long, ring-free fingers. But she knows she has no strength to offer, that the woman has more than she does, more than she ever will.
Later, when Chika will wish that she and Nnedi had not decided to take a taxi to the market just to see a little of the ancient city of Kano outside their aunt’s neighborhood, she will wish also that the woman’s daughter Halima had been sick or something, so she would not have sold groundnuts that day.
The woman stops crying and wipes her eyes carefully with one end of her blouse. “May Allah keep your sister and Halima safe,” she says. And because Chika is not sure what Muslims say to show agreement—it can
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