THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK SUMMARY AND ITS THEMES by Karl Marx

THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK SUMMARY AND ITS THEMES by Karl Marx

The Thing Around Your Neck is arranged as a series of short stories. In the first story, "Cell One," the Cell One narrator tells the story of her brother's time in prison.Nnamabia is a handsome and charming teenager who steals and pawns his mother's jewelry when he's 17. Three years later, the Nsukka university campus where the siblings’ Mother and Father teach is embroiled in cult wars. The cults began as fraternities, but soon became exceptionally violent. Nnamabia is arrested after three boys are shot on campus. When Mother, Father, and the narrator visit him in jail, he seems to enjoy dramatizing what he's going through in jail. Mother maintains that Nnamabia is innocent. Nnamabia is in jail for several weeks and his defenses begin to break down, particularly as he's threatened with transfer to the dangerous Cell One. Eventually, an innocent old man joins his cell. Nnamabia watches the police taunt the old man for being poor and sick. Finally, on the day that the superintendent calls for Nnamabia's release, Nnamabia stands up for the old man. He's transferred to Cell One and then another prison, where he's beaten. When his parents and the narrator come to get him, he doesn't dramatize his retelling of what happened.

In "Imitation," Nkem studies the Benin mask on her mantel and listens to her friend say that Nkem's husband, Obiora, has a girlfriend in Lagos, Nigeria. (Nkem is living in Philadelphia.) When Nkem first came to America, Obiora stayed in Philadelphia for a few months, but soon returned to Nigeria. Nkem had two children and now Obiora only visits once per year. Nkem goes upstairs and cuts her hair short. She thinks about how her relationship with Obiora began. Later, Nkem watches her housegirl Amaechi makes dinner. Nkem brings up Obiora's girlfriend, and Amaechi says all men "are like that" and counsels Nkem that it's best to not know things like that. Nkem calls Nigeria later, and the houseboy won't tell her if anyone is at home. The next week Obiora visits. Obiora asks Nkem to shower with him, and she agrees. In the shower, she says she'd like to move back to Lagos.

In "A Private Experience," Chika hides from the violence of a riot in an abandoned shop with a Hausa Muslim woman. Chika fears that her sister Nnedi is lost in the riot, and the woman tells Chika about her eldest daughter, who also went missing in the fray. Chika says that she's a medical student, and the woman asks Chika to examine her burning nipples, which are cracked and dry from nursing her baby. Chika and the woman spend the night in the store and part ways in the morning, each telling the other to greet their loved ones. Chika knows that she won't find Nnedi.

In "Ghosts," Professor James Nwoye runs into Ikenna Okaro on the Nsukka campus. He had previously believed that Ikenna died when the Nigerian army invaded Nsukka in 1967. Ikenna explains that he moved to Sweden and organized pro-Biafra rallies all over Europe. When Ikenna asks aboutEbere, James' wife, James explains that Ebere has been dead for three years but that she "visits." James explains to the reader that Ebere's ghost visits regularly and massages lotion into his skin. James invites Ikenna to come to his house, but Ikenna refuses. When James gets home, he waits for his daughter to call and for Ebere to visit later that night.

In "On Monday of Last Week," Kamaracomes to Philadelphia after five years apart from her husband Tobechi. Upon her arrival in America, Kamara becomes depressed and extremely disillusioned with Tobechi, who has adopted a troubling American accent. Kamara takes a job as a nanny forJosh, a seven-year-old biracial boy. Josh's father, Neil, worries constantly about trans fats and high fructose corn syrup in his son's diet, and pushes Josh to be as successful as possible. When Kamara meetsTracy, Josh's African-American artist mother, Tracy asks Kamara to model for her. Kamara begins to come out of her depression and experience attraction to Tracy. She learns after a week, though, that Tracy habitually asks women to model for her, and Tracy's request didn't come from sexual attraction.

In “Jumping Monkey Hill,” Ujunwa, a young Nigerian writer, attends a writers' workshop at the Jumping Monkey Hill resort. From the outset she doesn't like Edward, the British organizer of the workshop. He stares at Ujunwa's body and makes suggestive comments to her. Ujunwa writes a story about a woman who gets a job at a bank. Her job is to bring in new clients, which she soon learns means using sexual means to bring in the clients. As the writers at the workshop begin the process of reading and critiquing each others' stories, Edward says that many of them aren't representations of the "real Africa," including the Senegalesewoman's true story about coming out to her parents. When Ujunwa reads her own story, Edward deems it implausible. Ujunwa says that every word of it is true; it happened to her.

In "The Thing Around Your Neck, Akunnawins the "American visa lottery" and travels to live with her uncle in America. When her uncle tries to abuse her sexually, Akunna takes a bus to a small town in Connecticut and gets a job in a restaurant. A white boybegins visiting and tries to talk to Akunna about Africa. They soon begin a relationship, but the boy is rich and condescending. He doesn't understand why Akunna is upset that he doesn't correct waiters who assume that she's not his girlfriend. Akunna finally writes home and learns that her father has died. She flies home alone.

In "The American Embassy," the embassy narrator stands in line to get an asylum visa. The man behind her tries to engage her in conversation, but the narrator can only think of her son, Ugonna, who was killed the day before. After the narrator'shusband, a reporter, published an article that angered the head of state, he'd received a call that he was going to be arrested and killed. The narrator smuggled her husband out of the country, but three men came looking for him and shot Ugonna. The woman and the man behind her are let into the embassy for their interviews. As she sits, the narrator thinks that she'd rather stay in Nigeria and plant flowers on Ugonna's grave than use his death to get a visa. She leaves the embassy.

“The Shivering” takes place in Princeton, New Jersey. Ukamaka refreshes web pages, checking Nigerian news sources for news of a plane crash in Nigeria. She worries that her ex-boyfriend, Udenna, was on the plane. Chinedu, another Nigerian man from her building, knocks on her door and asks to pray with her for Nigeria. Ukamaka learns that Udenna wasn't on the flight. Over the next several weeks, Chinedu and Ukamaka become friends and Ukamaka talks at length about her relationship with Udenna. They shop together and she drives him to his Pentecostal church on Sundays before attending her own Catholic church. They argue one day when Chinedu shares that he dated a controlling man and Ukamaka says that Chinedu's partner sounds like Udenna. The next Sunday Chinedu admits that he's not a student; he's hiding from the government to avoid a deportation notice, as his visa expired three years ago. Chinedu accompanies Ukamaka to Mass.

In “The Arrangers of Marriage,” Chinazaarrives in New York with her new husband,Ofodile. Her aunt and uncle arranged the marriage and thought it was a good thing: Ofodile is a doctor. Chinaza is immediately disillusioned, as Ofodile's "house" is a sparsely furnished apartment. Ofodile shows her around New York and corrects her every time she uses an Igbo or British English word instead of its American counterpart. He tells her that in America, he goes by “Dave Bell” instead of his Nigerian name. He fills out her application for a social security card with the name “Agatha Bell,” and buys Chinaza an American cookbook so she can learn to cook American food. Chinaza later meets Nia, a young woman who lives in the apartment building. Chinaza thinks that Nia looks like a prostitute, but she likes listening to Nia talk. One night, Ofodile admits that he married an American woman to get his green card and the woman is refusing to divorce him. Chinaza goes to Nia's apartment, where Nia admits that she slept with Ofodile two years ago. She encourages Chinaza to stick with Ofodile until her papers come through, and Chinaza goes back to her husband the next night.

In “Tomorrow is Too Far,” the tomorrow narrator returns to Nigeria for the first time in 18 years. She remembers her childhood summers in Nigeria when her Grandmamaonly praised the narrator's brother, Nonso, and ignored the narrator and her cousin,Dozie. Dozie was the "wrong grandson" and the narrator was female. One day Nonso fell out of the avocado tree and died. Three months after Nonso's funeral, the narrator told her mother that Grandmama played a trick on Nonso and he fell out of the tree. The narrator then explains what really happened: the narrator felt that something had to happen to Nonso so that the narrator could get some of her mother's love. She tricked Nonso into climbing the tree, and yelled that a poisonous snake was near him when he reached the top. He died instantly. The narrator's mother never gave the narrator the love she hoped for after Nonso's death, however. In the present, the narrator asks Dozie what he wanted that summer, and he says he only cared about what the narrator wanted.

In "The Headstrong Historian," Nwambgamarries Obierika and has one son,Anikwenwa, after several miscarriages. Following Obierika's murder by his two cousins, Nwambga decides to put Anikwenwa in a Catholic mission school so he can learn English and take his father's cousins to court. Anikwenwa hates school at first, but soon becomes very devout. He becomes a teacher and refuses to eat his mother's food, though he does win Nwambga's land case for her. He marries a woman named Mgbeke, who cries often and doesn't stand up for herself. They have two children and Nwambga sees that their second child, Grace, possesses the soul of Obierika. Though Grace attends Catholic school and receives a Western education, she remains fascinated by her grandmother's culture. She returns from school to sit with her grandmother on her deathbed. Later, as she matures, Grace begins to question her own education. She attends college, writes books about Nigerian history, and divorces her husband because he doesn't think her interests in the native peoples of Nigeria are worthy. In her old age, Grace changes her name to Afemefuna, the name given to her by Nwambga.

Theme Analysis

The American Dream

In the story “The Thing Around Your Neck,"” Akunna's family members in Nigeria are absolutely thrilled that she won the "visa lottery" and gets to go to America. Upon her departure they celebrate that she'll soon have a big house and a big car. Once in America, however, she finds these dreams to be unrealistic and unattainable. Disillusionment at the realities of life in America touches most of the characters in the book as they grapple with being immigrants and navigate the difficulties that the American government, as well as their American neighbors, put them through.

The collection defines the American dream in a variety of ways. For those who have never experienced America, like Akunna's family, America is a place of big homes, cars, and guns. Nkem notes that she admires the uniquely American belief that anyone can rise and be successful, whileKamara observes that the plentiful resources available to American parents actually creates a great deal of anxiety. Notably, none of the Nigerian characters who immigrate to America are particularly happy in their new home. This is true of women like Nkem, who lives a life of privilege in Philadelphia, as well as those like Chinaza and Akunna, who find themselves living close to poverty. Nkem's situation in particular shows that even when these women are immersed in the trappings of upper class American suburbia, they remain unfulfilled. Simply possessing a beautiful home, having access to good schools, and driving nice cars isn't enough to make them happy. What the women lack is a sense of community and camaraderie. Their relationships to their husbands or boyfriends are generally unhappy, and their neighbors treat them as interesting talking points.

The lack of fulfillment in America isn't something unique to the female characters. When Nkem runs into another Nigerian woman at a party, the woman points out that their husbands, both “Big Men” by Nigerian standards, are treated with far more respect in Nigeria than in America. This in turn justifies (in the men's eyes) keeping their wives in America but living and working in Nigeria, where they get to enjoy their high status. Male characters such as Chinaza's husband Ofodile and Kamara's husband Tobechi work hard in America to try to create a better life for themselves as well as for their wives, but their wives struggle to share their husbands' optimism. As Chinaza and Kamara attempt to adjust to life in America, they find that they're as disillusioned with their husbands as they are with the lies their husbands told them. Kamara joins Tobechi after five years to find that he gained weight, grew unattractive hair, and developed an American accent that she finds troubling. Chinaza leaves Nigeria believing that Ofodile lives in a house, but must quickly adjust her expectations when she learns that the "house" is actually a sparsely furnished apartment. The men, however, remain fixated on their own dreams of making it in America and seem not to notice their wives' depression and disillusionment. In this way, the men themselves become a representation of the failure of the American dream. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Tobechi and Ofodile remain hopeful that they'll climb the ladder and achieve success in America. Their wives, however, must contend with the evidence that the American dream they were promised is, at best, simply less fantastical than expected. At worst, their husbands' promises simply won't come true.

However, despite the widespread disillusionment the characters experience upon arriving in America, the desire to live in America and pursue the American dream is intoxicating for many characters in Nigeria. Though the embassy narratorultimately decides to stay in Nigeria, her descriptions of the snaking line up to the American embassy and the lengths to which people will go to get an interview for a visa indicate that the pull of the American dream is impossibly strong, even if the dream itself is unattainable.

Women, Marriage, and Gender Roles

Many of the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck focus on fraught relationships between men and women. Specifically, Adichie explores the roles women are asked to play within their birth families and then in their romantic relationships. Most of the coupled female characters subsume themselves in favor of their husbands or partners and lose sight of their own identities and sense of agency in the process. The stories question how and why this happens, and then set about discovering what can be done about it.

A number of the collection's partnered women experience an epiphany in which they realize they've shaped their entire lives around the whims and desires of their husbands or boyfriends: Nkem habitually waxes her pubic hair the way her husband likes it; Ukamaka cooks with hot peppers even though she doesn't like them much herself; Chinaza learns English to comply with her husband's desire to assimilate into American culture in private as well as in public. The thought processes of the married women specifically suggest that there's safety and prestige in being the wife of a “Big Man,” particularly when the Big Man sends his wife to America. This suggests that women's goals are centered on attaining marriage and financial security through that marriage, rather than personal fulfillment. The women's discontent, however, indicates that reaching these goals isn't as fulfilling as many of these women hoped it would be.

Furthermore, many of these women's husbands have other girlfriends. Though this makes the men look prestigious (the girlfriends signify that they can afford to care for multiple women at once), the wives' discontent at these situations shows that what they want on some level is to be noticed and valued as a person with feelings and desires, rather than seen only for their role in making their husbands look powerful. However, Nkem mentions that when she was young she dated married men, and she notes that it's not uncommon for young women to do so. In this way, the reader gets a sense that this kind of situation is cyclical and based on a female desire to be noticed by powerful men, as well as the obvious male desire for power.

Several of the women find purpose and a new sense of identity in their marriages as they become mothers or caregivers. While for some this is a welcome distraction from their unhappy marriages and creates a sense of purpose, for other women, like the embassy narrator, it becomes all-consuming. Because the embassy narrator's young son Ugonna provided her an outlet through which to emotionally distance herself from her difficult relationship with her husband, Ugonna's sudden and violent death leaves her completely broken. When she later gives up on immigrating to America to join her husband, she loses all hope of having a happy life as she has nobody to care for anymore.

Many of the book’s women also question how they got to the point at which they subsume their lives into their husbands’. The stories of younger women answer this by showing that placing value on male lives and desires over female ones is a widespread cultural practice, and one that begins in childhood. The Cell One narratorobserves that her beautiful and troubled older brother, Nnamabia, is allowed to get away with all sorts of bad behavior. He steals, cheats, and skips class, and because he's handsome and male, their parents excuse Nnamabia's behavior. This dynamic is taken to the extreme in "Tomorrow is Too Far" when the tomorrow narrator admits to accidentally killing her older brother Nonsowith the hope that she might take his revered place in their parents' hearts. She's ultimately unsuccessful, which once again supports the idea that mothers define themselves in terms of their male children, while female children are relatively ignored. Further, both the “Cell One” narrator and the “Tomorrow” narrator are unnamed in their stories, which illustrates how little they're valued as people in relation to their male family members.

Essentially, the lives of most of the women in the collection are lived in terms of their relationships to others, whether those others are family members, spouses, or children. Though the collection doesn't prescribe one remedy (or indeed, any remedies) for its female characters' discontent, it suggests that women can move closer to happiness when they begin to take control of their own lives and demand that their voices be heard by the men around them.

Colonialism and Violence
As a coastal region, people in what is now Nigeria experienced contact with Europeans early. Nigeria became an official British colony in 1914, and in 1960, Great Britain granted Nigeria its independence as a Commonwealth country. From 1967-1970 the country experienced a civil war, which pitted the conservative Nigerian government against the secessionist state of Biafra. The Biafran Conflict figures into a number of stories in the collection, as does the ongoing religious and ethnic violence that Nigeria still experience. These conflicts have their roots in Nigeria's colonial experience and as such, one of the book's primary concerns is to explore colonialism and its legacies, particularly the legacies of physical and cultural violence.

It's the final story in the collection, "The Headstrong Historian," that provides the reader with a starting point for all the violence of the previous stories. Because it follows three generations of a Nigerian family, beginning in the late 19th century and ending at an indeterminate point after 1972, this story gives an overarching sense of the beliefs and practices that shaped the Nigerian people's relationships with their colonizers and the West in general.Nwambga, a woman of the first generation, learns from a friend that people become rulers because they have better guns, not because they're better people. The idea that there's power in violence and in possessing better weapons repeats throughout the stories, particularly in "Cell One." Nnamabia laughs at police attempts to subdue student gang activity with their "rusty guns," since the students themselves have modern weapons with which to fight back. The cell one narrator notes that the thieves and gang members of her university neighborhood had "mastered the swagger of American rap videos," indicating that the senseless violence of the gangs was partially due to America's cultural influence over the world. This mirrors the way that Nwambga's children and grandchildren embrace the power of Europeans and use that power to violently force native people to adopt European social systems and religions.

Many characters embrace Western culture in an attempt to protect themselves from violence. Though embracing Western culture has its benefits—including education, financial success, and for some characters, the opportunity to immigrate to America—in many cases it leads the characters to reject, hide, or minimize their native culture to avoid further violence from Westerners, and in some cases, from their Nigerian peers. Though Nwambga's son Anikwenwa is able to win Nwambga’s legal disputes for her because of the power afforded to him by his Western education, he also participates in forms of cultural violence against his mother and her beliefs. He refuses to attend Nwambga's funeral unless she agrees to be baptized, and treats non-Christians as though they're diseased. A hundred years later, in "The Arrangers of Marriage," Chinaza suffers at the actual hands of Americans as some of her Nigerian foodstuffs are seized at customs, and then suffers the humiliation of her husband's insistence that she change her name to her English middle name, speak English even at home, and cook only American foods. Though Chinaza's husband claims to want the opportunity to experience success in America and believes that this can only happen through assimilation, Chinaza feels violated and lost as she's forced to give up her culture. Other Nigerian characters feel similarly violated and isolated living in America, where their culture goes mostly unacknowledged or is rudely questioned by their white American neighbors. They experience firsthand the effects of colonization: their own culture is considered strange, primitive, or less-than, while Western culture is held up as superior and “normal.”

The third generation of "The Headstrong Historian," Grace, suggests through her actions that there is a way to combat the violence of colonialism. Though Anikwenwa insists that Grace receive her education in a Catholic school, Grace then uses her Western education to return to her roots. She writes a book about the physical violence in colonial Nigeria, advocates for Nigerian history to be taught in Nigerian schools, and in her old age, she changes her name to Afamefuna, the name given to her by her grandmother. This final act in particular suggests that the legacies of colonialism can begin to be broken down when individuals like Grace celebrate their culture and tell their stories, rather than deny and erase them.

Stories and Representation
Adichie's collection splits its time between America and Nigeria, primarily in the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s. As the Nigerian characters encounter white Americans, black Americans, and other Nigerians of different economic classes, they run up against differing ideas about what Nigeria is again and again. As such, many of the stories concern themselves directly with what it means to be Nigerian and the problems that arise when others have very narrow views of what Nigeria, and Africa in general, is supposed to look like.

This tension between a Western idea of Africa and what Africa truly is becomes most apparent in the story "Jumping Monkey Hill." As Ujunwa attends a writer's conference in South Africa led by Edward, a British man, she initially finds him crude and disrespectful of her because she's female. Soon, however, she finds that he also has a very narrow view of what happens in Africa. This is, of course, ironic, as the story implies that Edward was born, raised, and educated in England, not Africa. However, because Edward has a degree in African Studies, he believes himself to be more of an expert on what goes on in Africa than people who were actually born and raised there. Edward tries to tell Ujunwa and her lesbian Senegalese peer at the workshop that their true and autobiographical stories are "agenda writing" rather than representative of what actually goes on in Africa. Though Edward doesn't have lived experience as an African person, he has the power and authority to tell the women that their stories are false, as well as the power to decide what stories are "real" or truly representative of Africa. Because Edward has this power to decide what's real, he insures that the false or oversimplified representations of Africa that he deems real are rewarded and circulated, while suppressing nuanced and true stories that depict different aspects of life in Africa.

In several stories, it's evident that people like Edward have been successful in disseminating these poor representations of Africa: several American characters can't identify where Nigeria is, and others ask rude questions about Nigerian characters' hair or names. The prevalence of Western characters who question how Nigerian characters learned English illustrates the immense power of the stories like the ones Edward wishes to publish. These stories allow the Western characters to feel superior to the Nigerian characters, as all the Western characters know Edward's version of Africa—the continent as a violent and uncivilized place. As a result, many of the male Nigerian characters in particular loudly denounce their culture, adopt American names, and stop speaking their native languages. Even the Nigerian characters in Nigeria seek to separate and distance themselves from this singular story of their country. In "A Private Experience," Chika, a medical student from cosmopolitan Lagos, unexpectedly finds herself in the middle of a violent riot in rural Kano. However, because of her high socioeconomic status and education, she feels as though she shouldn't be affected by the riot or by Nigeria's conflicts at all. Her status as a well-off student allows her to disassociate from the violence and conceptualize the violence as being unique to the poor of Nigeria.

As the collection presents characters of a variety of social classes, genders, religions, and life stages, the reader is offered a vast array of different stories. Though the struggle to define their relationship to their Nigerian roots and to understand what it means to be Nigerian carries through every story, the fact that the collection doesn't come to a single conclusion on the matter suggests that there is no singular story about Nigeria. Rather, the final story, "The Headstrong Historian," suggests that one can begin to define and understand Nigeria when one seeks to tell the many different stories of its people, rather than attempting to distill the idea of Nigeria down to the singular stories of characters like Edward.

Family and Lies
For many of the book’s characters, love and family are driving forces in their lives. While several of the stories are concerned specifically with romantic (and often married) relationships, Adichie also explores the inter-generational relationships between parents, children, siblings, and grandparents. Specifically, she explores the instances in which individual family members lie or tell stories in order to preserve their family, break it down, or attempt to earn the love of other family members. These lies more often than not lead to grief and disillusionment rather than happiness and fulfillment.

The prevalence of cheating spouses throughout the collection suggests that lies between romantic partners are both common and dangerous, though the way women see their husbands' infidelity shows that many of them believe lying to be typical of marriage. Taken together, the stories suggest that the types of lies that people tell often break down by gender. Men lie (either outright or by omission) about the lives they lead, including the existence of their extramarital relationships, while women lie about whether or not they're happy. Further, while the men in question are mostly successful in pursuing their extramarital relationships, their wives have no such luck feeling happy. When Kamara experiences feelings for Tracy, the mysterious artist mother of her nannying charge, she's initially given reason to believe that the attraction is mutual. She soon finds, however, that Tracy is simply a magnetic person and habitually asks women to model nude for her. Kamara isn't special, and Tracy's modeling request didn't come from a place of sexual desire. Similarly, thetomorrow narrator lies about the particulars of her brother's death to try to earn her mother's love, but she is likewise unsuccessful in achieving happiness and the coveted role of the favorite child. For both of these women, their attempts to look outside their proscribed familial roles (wife and female second child respectively) are thwarted. This suggests that it's often impossible for women to find happiness by violating strict familial roles.

To preserve their marriages, women, particularly Nkem, tell themselves stories about their husbands that allow them to ignore infidelity and maintain a happy-looking façade despite their unhappy marriages. Though Nkem doesn't fully acknowledge that her husband is conducting extramarital relationships until a friend tells her, she realizes that she's always known about his affairs but ignored the signs. Chika uses a similar thought process to help herself believe that her sister hasn't been killed in a riot. Though she comes to realize she'll never see her sister again, the mental narrative that her sister is still alive allows Chika to keep herself alive and find her way out of the riots and back to the safety of her aunt's house. This shows that lying to oneself can be used as a method of preserving and maintaining a relationship, even when the relationship itself is broken or wholly absent. The storytellers tell the stories of these vibrant, living relationships to placate and allow themselves the opportunity to continue living. Though for characters like Chika this method of storytelling is wholly necessary to survive, for other women, the lies only trap them more tightly in their unhappy relationships.