Cell One

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses police violence and gang violence.

At its core, “Cell One” is a story concerned with social cycles that generate and propagate systemic violence. Through the jaded eyes of her young narrator, Adichie reveals a tangled web of hurtful behavior amongst a cast of central characters who (unintentionally) victimize others as much as they are victims themselves. In the central figure of Nnamabia, Adichie offers insight into what breaking those cycles may look like on an individual level, even though the broad social injustices of the story remain unresolved in the end.

On the lowest level, individual characters engage in behaviors that result in social harm. The simplest example of this phenomenon is the introductory episode of the story, when Nnamabia’s self-centered decision to rob the family causes great distress for his mother. His copycat crime is the story’s introduction to The Dangers of the Bandwagon Effect, which motivates most of his behavior throughout “Cell One.” The narrator observes Nnamabia’s careful emulation of the boys in the neighborhood who steal for fun such as “Osita [who] was two years older than Nnamabia” (Paragraph 7). Here, Nnamabia’s fundamental insecurity and desperation for approval from the boys around him is laid bare, and it is apparent that in his mind, this desperation justifies the robbery, even though his mother is hurt. Indeed, their mother’s horrified exclamations when she learns that Nnamabia stole the gold, “Oh! Oh! Chi m egbuo m! My God has killed me!” (Paragraph 4), speak to the raw feelings of betrayal that the incident triggers for their mother. However, the brother does not hear this pain.

Within the familial dynamic, Nnamabia’s vainglorious quest for popularity is encouraged by his parents’ passive parenting style. Despite being hurt by the robbery, the mother ultimately reverts to doting on Nnamabia: “[She] told my father that Nnamabia was sixteen, after all, and really should be given more pocket money” (Paragraph 8). Without any meaningful consequences, Nnamabia’s harmful habits begin to compound and escalate, such that by the time he is a university student he is involved with the murderous cult culture on campus, seemingly without care for the harm it causes. This emphasizes The Normalization of Violence Under Oppressive Systems. At the same time that Nnamabia becomes more emboldened by this parenting strategy, the narrator grows resentful. By the middle of the story, she begins to behave violently herself. As she self-reports in a removed tone, “I picked up a stone near the ixora brush and hurled it at the windshield of the Volvo” (Paragraph 26). Just as with Nnamabia, her parents respond to this violence by acquiescing to her wishes (the family trip to visit Nnamabia is postponed) rather than implementing consequences. This is a key example of how the story’s individual scale of conflict expands outward to reveal how violent cycles operate at various social scales–in this case at the level of the family.

What becomes clear over the course of the story is that the narrator is also a participant in the cycle of social violence, despite her self-superior attitude toward other characters. The Volvo incident is just one of several instances throughout the narrative in which she contributes to the violent atmosphere. She speaks of wanting to slap her mother and chooses to ignore the suffering of a boy she knows when he is brutally beaten by police outside the prison rather than confronting injustice when she witnesses it. Adichie’s utilization of an unreliable narrator in “Cell One” demonstrates the way in which destructive behavior can become compulsive and how one person may not see their own contributions to systemic violence, even if they are apparent from the outside. The narrator’s unthinkingly harmful behavior points to The Harms of Privilege-Fueled Apathy amongst the characters.

As the consequences of each individual’s contribution to cyclical violence spirals outward, reverberating at increasingly large social scales, the old man’s introduction to “Cell One” represents underprivileged individuals who ultimately suffer the most from systemic violence. When Nnamabia is confronted by the sheer helplessness of the old man, he appears shocked to the family: “The following days, he was more subdued. He spoke less, mostly about the old man: how he could not afford bathing water […] how he looked frightened and so terribly small” (Paragraph 33). Whereas Nnamabia can escape the violent prison system because of the influence that his parents wield, the old man’s fate is left unclear; he does not have the luxury of family members to save him and the story implicitly suggests that he will not get released.

The irony, therefore, of “Cell One” is that Nnamabia’s heroic act in defense of the old man at the story’s climax does not actually result in the justice for the old man that he seeks. This structure, in which the desired ending does not follow from a triumphant climax, generates bathos regarding the progression of justice: His defense yields no reported results and his affluent parents pick him up. The ambiguity of justice at the end of the “Cell One” evokes a sense of realism that transfers to the story’s lessons. Adichie highlights the triumph of Nnamabia’s character growth without cultivating the illusion that it is sufficient to remedy the broader systems of violence and injustice within the postcolonial world of Igboland. The sociological precision of this narrative structure bolsters the story’s overarching political critiques, which ultimately present the corrupt and violent Nigerian policing system as no better than the criminal activity that occurs amongst the general population. In her character studies, Adichie thus finds systemic injustice in everyone, while providing hope for (small-scale) redemption in her protagonist, Nnamabia.