The Visit|Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Can you imagine a world where women hold all the power and men take on the secondary status of women, where women run the show as presidents, legislators and corporate leaders? Well, that's the basis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's new short story The Visit. Set in Nigeria, it revolves around a stay-at-home dad, Obinna, and opens in an undefined near future where not much has changed save for the inversion of gender roles, a scenario reflected in the upholding of a forty-year old law that stipulates 15 year jail terms for men caught masturbating in the United States. The parallel between the fictive Male Masturbatory Act and the ongoing fight to limit women's reproductive rights is evident, more so by the phalanx of male demonstrators wielding placards behind their president that read: Respect the bodily autonomy of men; Our Body Our Choice.
For his part, Obinna peruses the scene unfolding on TV with keen interest, mildly vexed by the voluble Americans and their propensity to raise unnecessary hell over private and easily circumventable issues. Men, he reasons, can quietly carry on masturbating in private as he does, despite it being illegal in Nigeria. It's a rationale that holds water until Eze, his Nigerian friend visiting from the US, narrates a story about an incarcerated pal whose girlfriend had secretly filmed him in the act then reported to the authorities.
Eze's story shows how the limited reach of a law designed to police personal deeds, can be stretched when governments empowers citizens to commit privacy violations, something various African governments have encouraged with their anti-gay legislation. In Uganda, a newspaper brazenly published names of alleged homosexuals leading to their persecution, while Nigerian police officers and citizens occasionally infiltrate LGBTQ spaces in disguise to either expose or arrest members of the community.
A similar line can be traced to the recent anti-abortion law drafted and passed by the mostly male lawmakers in the US state of Texas, barring abortions at six weeks of a pregnancy and giving residents the right to sue those who aid, abet or support pregnant women seeking the procedure. One can easily imagine the surreal scenario of anti-abortion activists, or anyone looking to make easy money, taking illegal or extreme measures to access private medical records to ascertain pregnancy timelines in a bid to launch a suit.
Aside from the Male Masturbatory Act, which the fictional US president touts as a means to prevent the "waste of a potential child," The Visit explores various aspects of gender norms. For instance, Eze's mother, a medical doctor in the Middle East, maintains a sober, distant relationship with her son--a common posture between fathers and their children--that sharply contrasts with the personality of Eze's warm, solicitous father, a stay-at-home parent who takes on the guiding, nurturing role of a mother. In that capacity, he scolds Obinna for ungainly licking cashew juice off his fingers.
"Don't lick your fingers like a bush boy. How will you find a wife with this kind of behaviour?"
In another inverted gender scenario, Obinna's wife worries Nigeria's new oil minister might be a man and, thus, unfit for the "sensitive position," a troubling sentiment he himself shares, no different from women who espouse misogyny in the real world.
"And how will it look when we go to OPEC meetings and it turns out that only Nigeria has a male minister?" he opines, garnering his wife's approval. "They won't take us seriously."
Meanwhile, Obinna embodies the role of the jealous, insecure husband, constantly obsessing over his wife's male secretary, her male colleagues with rock hard abs, and their houseboy with a penchant for clothes that accentuate his crotch, evil forces hovering over a marriage he is desperate to protect but powerless against. In his predicament, he mourns the early days of their relationship before the professional achievements and concomitant financial perks came along even as Eze tries to awaken a part of him he's left to die, buried by his marriage.
Adichie's prose is crisp and concise, and insofar as women running the world is concerned, The Visit recalls Naomi Alderman's novel The Power. But that's as far as the similarities go. For one, Adichie's short story steers away from the conditions that led to men losing power. (In The Power, a mutation advantages women over men.) It also doesn't reimagine how women wield their new-found powers, focusing instead on prevailing gender and societal mores in a bid to expose and ridicule them.
Case in point, a policewoman acts like a typical policeman and promptly berates Eze for dressing like a prostitute before realising he's "somebody's husband." Eze's father, a former theatre actor, quit his job because his wife believes "married men who were actors were considered promiscuous." The gendered performance of marriage proposals and even classism are not spared, with Eze bemoaning his experience at the hands of marriage-shy exes, and poorer women experiencing difficulty in accessing their government-issued pregnancy check, which makes Adichie's flippant treatment of the G-15 summit a tad puzzling.
Rather than Eze decry the self-serving nature of these high-powered meetings, he gripes about women leaders' tendency to focus on pedicure, breast enlargement procedures and pregnancy grants, leaving a small question mark on The Visit's premise of copying-and-pasting current gender norms. No matter how politically uneducated or frustrated she might be with the status quo, it's unlikely a woman in real life would vocalise such ridiculous thoughts about a G-pick-a-number summit.
Perhaps such comical exaggerations exist to highlight and mesh with the absurdity of our gendered world, which as The Visit demonstrates, elicits episodes of sardonic laughter, pensive considerations, and outright irritation at the artificiality and folly of so-called traditional values.
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