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The Thing Around Your Neck

“You thought everybody in America has a car and a gun; your uncles and aunts and cousins thought so, too. Right after you won the American visa lottery, they told you: In a month, you will have a big car. Soon, a big house. But don’t buy a gun like those Americans”.


 

The Thing Around Your Neck is a short-story collection published in 2009 by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It approaches topics such as the position of women as negotiators of their own life, the experience of coming to America and starting anew, and how the imagined American dream clashes with reality. This is not a one-book crusade, it is an ongoing struggle that Adichie further develops on other published works such as her later novel Americanah (2013).


The author has set the purpose to expose the dangers of a single narrative about how we perceive foreign cultures and from whose standpoint have we been taught history, including how the condition of the immigrant is communicated. Every decision that we make is based on a give-and -take action: choosing foreignness over familiarity, comfort over country, silence over voice.


“Your uncle told you to expect it; a mixture of ignorance and arrogance, he called it. Then he told you how the neighbors said, a few months after he moved into his house, that the squirrels had started to disappear. They had heard that Africans ate all kinds of wild animals”.

One of the stories, “A Private Experience” talks about religion as a basis of identification between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria and how these differences are unimportant when it comes to helping another human being. It also places women in the narrative to appear much more in touch with their humanity than men in power.


In “Jumping Monkey Hill” we can gather how at a writer's retreat in Cape Town, African women writers especially try to defend their truth in front of the male gaze and rebuke the myths around them.


Another story, “The American Embassy” highlights a woman who has lost everything that was important to her, trying to apply for asylum while enduring a scorching bureaucratic process only to realize that nothing makes sense anymore and that she doesn't have the strength to fight the system.


As a prelude to some of the themes present in Americanah, “The Arrangers of Marriage” explores how many Nigerian citizens that immigrate to the U.S. try to get rid of their Nigerian heritage and customs to become someone “like everybody else”.


Why try to hide one's roots when it carries you down a path of deep unsettlement? Why not speak up for what has been lost or forgotten to bring it back into the realm of social consciousness? It will be a life-long quest that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie looks forward to.

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