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.