Taking a sharp turn away from Chekhov, today’s story is “The Headstrong Historian” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. 
It was originally published in The New Yorker and I pulled it from “The Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories: 2010”.
This is a story about cultural dislocation due to colonization and losing and recapturing a heritage that has been stripped away. As a young woman, Nwamgba marries a local man, Obierika, despite the wishes of many around her due to the curse of infertility in her future husband’s family. After marrying and suffering four miscarriages, Nwamgba decides it is time to find another wife for her husband so he can have children. Soon after, however, she discovers she is pregnant and gives birth to a son, Anikwenwa. Obierikia dies and Nwemgba suspects poisoning by his greedy cousins. The cousins subsequently take her husband’s possessions and some of their land.
Christian missionaries are prosletyzing in the area and recruiting Africans to their schools. Nwamgba decides to send her son to a missionary school so we can become an educated man who speaks English in order to force her husband’s greedy cousins to return her property. Anikwenwa is baptized as “Michael” by the Catholic missionaries and slowly becomes alienated from his mother until becoming a teacher and missionary himself. The priest at the school notes, “There was something troublingly assertive about her, something he had seen in many women here; there was much potential to be harnessed if their wildness were tamed.” The priest vows to “redeem” Anikwenwa/Michael as his “special vocation was the redemption of the black heathens.” With the school, representing a type of Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the form of the school, Anikwenwa not only stops eating his mother’s food but goes so far as insisting that his mother herself dress more modestly and cover her breasts. “She looked at him, amused by his earnestness but worried nonetheless and asked why he had only just begun to notice her nakedness.”
Michael and his Christian wife have two children, a son, Peter, and a daughter, Grace, who her grandmother calls Afamefuna. Michael attempts to keep his children separated from his mother but Afamefuna/Grace finally visits her grandmother as she is dying. The conclusion of the story vaults into the decades ahead with Afamefuna reclaiming her history as she becomes the headstrong historian of the story’s title.
Failed Poetry 