Self Care Awareness Month Issue 10

Searing and profound, suffused with magnificence, distress, and yearning, these stories map, with Adichie's unique enthusiastic insight, the crash of two societies and the profoundly human battle to accommodate them. The Thing Around Your Neck is a resonating affirmation of the enormous scholarly powers of one of our most fundamental essayists.

From the award winning creator of We Should All Be Feminists - the story is about the narrative of two Nigerians advancing in the U.S. also, the UK, bringing up widespread issues of race, having a place, the abroad experience for the African diaspora, and the quest for identity and a home. Ifemelu and Obinze are youthful and in love when they left military-administered Nigeria for the West. Delightful, confident Ifemelu sets out toward America, where regardless of her scholarly achievement, she is compelled to wrestle with being dark for the first time. Calm, smart Obinze had would have liked to join her, however with post-9/11 America closed to him, he rather dives into a risky, undocumented life in London. After fifteen years, they rejoin in a recently democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion for one another and for their country.

The joys of motherhood is a gripping fascinating tale of a woman - Nnu Ego who gives everything away to the cultural responsibility of a woman needing to be fertile and produce sons.  The Joys of Motherhood is a fundamental text in the wider cannon of Nigerian postcolonial literature.  The story of Nnu Ego will stay with the reader for a long, long time.