The Thing Around Your Neck

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2009

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Themes

The Complexity of Familial Relationships

Families and their internal structures are repeatedly deconstructed within the stories of The Thing Around Your Neck. The expectations of family, traditional roles within the family, and clashes with American or otherwise foreign ideas of family all recur throughout the stories. In “Imitation,” Nkem marries Obiora to provide for the family as first daughter, which she perceives as her role. Their marriage is complicated by their disparity of wealth, and Nkem’s eventual disclosure of her desire to move back to Nigeria is a change in the established and expected dynamic. Marriage too plays a role in Chinaza’s relationship to family in “The Arrangers of Marriage.” Her marriage to David is strained, but even beyond that, she is frustrated with her aunt and uncle who arranged the marriage for her without warning her what the realities of it would be.

There is also culture clash at work to complicate family relationships. Kamara in “On Monday of Last Week” finds the dictates of the white American father she works for, Neil, to be ridiculous. She feels “a pitying affection for Neil” even as his micromanaging and nervousness are annoying to Kamara (71). The feelings she develops for Tracy, Neil’s wife, and the affection their son feels for Kamara further muddies the family relationships. Akunna in “The Thing Around Your Neck” also feels conflicted over family. She loves her family but feels she has failed them by being unable to provide more. In contrast, her American boyfriend seems to feel no obligation toward his family, nor does he desire to be around them, an attitude that upsets Akunna.

There is also frustration about family roles, particularly between men and women. The circumstances surrounding the death of the main character’s brother in “Tomorrow is Too Far” come to be because of the main character’s frustration with the attention her brother is given as the son of her grandmother’s son. There is nothing she can do to supplant him, so she must get rid of him. The narrator of “Cell One,” though she loves her brother, also struggles with being pushed to the side. She recounts how Nnamabia is her mother’s favorite and how merchants would ask “why did you waste your fair skin on a boy and leave the girl so dark? What is a boy doing with all this beauty?” (8). The gendered tension takes a different form in “The Headstrong Historian,” however. Nwambga is a woman who knows how to use power within her role. Though she expects her deceased husband to appear through her son, it is in actuality her granddaughter, Afamefuna, who takes up his heritage.

The Immigrant Experience

The Immigrant Experience is an important theme, with many of the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck being concerned with characters who are immigrants from Nigeria to the US. Through interrogating the immigrant experience, the stories in this collection are able to explore ideas of identity, culture, colonization, and power. The way that immigration affects these characters changes depending on their circumstances. Marriage is one of the main ways characters in these stories immigrate. Chinaza in “The Arrangers of Marriage” is a key example—her entire experience of immigration and, eventually, the legitimacy of her immigration. is controlled by her marriage. Even when Chinaza wants to leave, her American neighbor tells her

“You can wait until you get your papers and then leave,” Nia said. “You can apply for benefits while you get your shit together, and then you’ll get a job and find a place and support yourself and start afresh. This is the U.S. of fucking A., for God’s sake” (164).

This shows the power immigration documents have over someone. In “Imitation” as well, Nkem’s immigration to America is part of her husband’s power. She identifies him as part of the “Rich Nigerian Men Who Sent Their Wives to America to Have Their Babies league” (25), her immigration an extension of his financial power. Thus, immigration becomes a way to exert power.

Guilt is also a factor in the immigration stories within The Thing Around Your Neck. Ikenna in “Ghosts” harbors a deep guilt for leaving Nigeria during a time of conflict, to the point of trying to assuage his guilt to a man he hasn’t seen in years. James identifies that he sounds like he has given his justifications “over and over to many people” (58) and that it is more about Ikenna himself, and his feelings of having failed his home by leaving, than it is about James. In “The Thing Around Your Neck,” Akunna also feels guilt connected to her immigration. Having been seen as very lucky for receiving a visa, she spends the whole story feeling guilt for not having been as successful as was expected and for not being able to send back gifts. This guilt drives her to not even write to her family, only sending back money, not finding out her father has died until months later. Still, immigration is not portrayed as a singularly bad thing. Though Ukamaka and Chinedu both feel loneliness in “The Shivering,” they both also find comfort and joy in the US, partially through their friendship with each other. Immigration is not so much a sign of ill tidings as it is one of irrevocable change. As one of the other Nigerian immigrants tells Nkem in “Imitation,” “But how can I live in Nigeria again? she said. When you’ve been here so long, you’re not the same, you’re not like the people there” (27-28).

The Rejection of Societal Expectations

Throughout the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck, many characters are expected to either accept or actively engage in behaviors upsetting and antithetical to their personalities and morals. Rejection of cruelty is one of the most common examples of rejected behavior. Nnamabia in “Cell One” develops from a self-centered young man willing to hurt his family for personal pleasure to someone who stands up for and is punished in the place of a defenseless old man. His exposure to the realities of suffering and the injustice of it move him to define and stand by his own moral code, despite the behavior expected of him in the prison. Nkem in “Imitation” also questions accepted cruelty, wondering about the history behind the Benin mask reproductions her husband brings home and questioning if the young men who wore them were happy killing people. “The American Embassy” contains a different kind of rejection of cruelty, one of rejecting cruelty toward oneself. The visa process is shown to be dehumanizing and cruel in its treatment of those seeking aid. The main character, by refusing to use her son’s memory and murder as a bargaining tool, rejects this system despite the fact that it means she will not be able to get a visa.

These behaviors that are expected of the characters in the book are often based on class lines. The experience that Chika and the Muslim woman she hides with share in “A Private Experience” is not only one of people divided by religion but also by class. Chika notices the differences in the quality of their clothes almost immediately. In “The Shivering,” class differences come up as well; Ukamaka’s initial resistance to Chinedu’s overtures of friendship are partly inspired by “how very bush” his mannerisms are (131) and her memories of her ex-boyfriend’s classism and derisive opinions about people like Chinedu. Nkem in “Imitation” also experiences this: Her final assertion that she would like to return to Nigeria ends the story with a rejection of the pattern she and her rich husband have fallen into. Coming from a poor background, Nkem remembers that, when her husband proposed, she wondered why he asked as “she would have been happy simply to be told” (30). The connections that form between people and the rejection of expected behaviors is a rejection of the society that creates such class differences.

These expectations are also signs of the long arm of colonialism, with white, Western characters like Edward in “Jumping Monkey Hill” or Neil in “On Monday of Last Week” expecting certain behaviors from the Nigerian characters based on their idea of what Africa is and how African people behave. Ujunwa’s rejection of Edward’s rules for what constitutes a story about “real Africa” not only goes against his stereotyping (96), but also against his idea of how Ujunwa as an individual should live and behave. Grace/Akamefuna’s rejection of the colonialized identity despite cultural expectations in “The Headstrong Historian” is another example of colonial ideas at play in societal norms. Her rejection of the colonial education she received and her reaffirmation of her cultural heritage with her legal name change are what allows her to ‘inherit’ her grandfather’s legacy, showing the power that rejecting a pre-defined role can have.