‘The Thing around your Neck’, Chimamanda Adichie

In the story, entitled, “The Thing around Your Neck”, we are exposed to the frustration and
disappointment faced by immigrants abroad. The protagonist of the story, whose account
is recounted in the second person, has a mental picture of the USA before embarking on
the physical journey. The story revolves around the despairing experiences of a young
Nigerian woman of a humble economic background, who travels to the US through a
visa lottery facilitated by her US-based family friend, known to her as Uncle. When the
lady arrives in the USA, she is accommodated by the said uncle, whom she later learns
to be a brother to her father’s sister’s husband. By implication, they are not related by
blood. Before embarking on her journey to the USA, she has a mental picture of an uncle
who would serve as a father to her in the new land; disappointingly, when she arrives
in the USA, the man she calls her uncle makes sexual advances towards her. When she
refuses to give in to the man’s demands for sexual encounters, she is sent away. All of these
experiences did not constitute the centre stage of her mental journey to the US, which had
preceded her physical migration.

The young lady, who has a perfect picture of the US as a land of possibilities, where people
pick money on the street, is disappointed when she is subjected to the hard way, the kind
of life she had been exposed to in Nigeria. For her to survive, she engages in several
menial jobs, which include working as a waitress in a restaurant. Within her moments of
deep distress, she falls in love with an arrogant American who again reminds her of racial
typecasts. Through the use of the second person narrative point of view, Adichie creates
a dramatic approach to engage a universal audience on the common disappointments
experienced by migrants in Europe and America. Through the story of this young lady, the
reader is made to understand that the picture of the USA which is ushered to her through
her mental journey is at variance with her physical journey. By implication, the mental
expectations of the migrant and that of the people she leaves behind in her homeland
are not realised. In the excerpt below, the protagonist conveys the disparity between her
mental and physical journeys to the USA:

You thought everybody in America had 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.
They trooped into the room in Lagos where you lived with your father
and mother and three siblings, leaning against the unpainted walls
because there weren’t enough chairs to go round, to say goodbye in
loud voices and tell you with lowered voices what they wanted you
to send them. In comparison to the big car and house (and possibly
gun), the things they wanted were minor— handbags and shoes and
perfumes and clothes. You said okay, no problem (p.115).

The experiences of the lady during her physical journey make her realise that, her mental
journey to the USA harbours illusory, exaggerated ideas, success and fame. In all areas of
her experiences in the USA, she feels this strong disappointment; a sharp cut from the
reality— from food to her habitation, social acceptance to work permit, the migrant lady
experiences a form of alienation and disenchantment in the new world of her dream. She
begins to show a lack of interest right from the moment she is picked up at the airport and
offered American food which nauseates her: “He picked you up at the airport and bought
you a big hot dog with yellow mustard that nauseated you. Introduction to America, he
said with a laugh. He lived in a small white town in Maine, in a thirty-year-old house by
the lake”(p.115).
The disappointments of the lady are legions— from the larger physical space, where she
experiences racial prejudices to the intricate domestic domain, where she is sexually harassed
by the man she calls her uncle, the lady experiences a sharp shift from the experiences she
gathers from her psychic journey to the US. Again, she recounts her disenchantments:

You laughed with your uncle and you felt at home in his house; his
wife called you nwanne, sister, and his two school-age children called
you Aunty. They spoke Igbo and ate gam for lunch and it was like
home. Until your uncle came into the camped basement where you
slept with old boxes and cartons and pulled you forcefully to him,
squeezing your buttocks, moaning. He wasn’t really your uncle; he
was actually a brother of your father’s sister’s husband, not related by
blood. After you pushed him away, he sat on your bed— it was his
house, after all— and smiled and said you were no longer a child at
twenty two. If you let him, he would do many things for you. Smart
women did it all the time. How did you think those women back
home in Lagos with well-paying job made it? Even women in New
York City?
You locked yourself in the bathroom until he went back upstairs, and
the next morning, you left, walking the long windy road... (116-117).

Through her mental journey to the USA, which precedes the actual physical journey, she
perceives a healthy environment where she will be protected by her uncle. Sadly, the same
uncle tries to sexually exploit her with the dehumanising utterance of “America was giveand-
take” (116). In reality, the lady is welcomed to a physical America that does not align
with the America that lies in her mindscape. Her dream of America is therefore shattered
on her arrival. In Olusegun Adekoya’s examination of the collapsed American dream on
the psychosocial life of the migrant, he notes that, the American Dream “include[s] success
in all areas of culture, material prosperity, unshakable hope in human creative capacity
and the future, unlimited personal freedom to work and to make profit and unfettered
happiness” (p. 36). Adekoya concludes that the failure of the American dream has posed
some terrible discontents to migrants in the USA:

However, less than two hundred years after the promise was given,
almost all the vital elements of the dream have decayed and dissolved.
What is left of the dream today is its carcass to which great multitudes
still cling for sizeable portions of leftovers of the meat. Many reasons
have been adduced for the failure of the dream, among which are
greed, fear, human nature, individualism, lack of compassion, racism,
sexism and slavery (p. 36-37).

The lady’s search for a decent job exposes her more and more to the collapse of her
American dream, which her psychic journey to the USA conveys to her. In order to adjust
to the physical America, she “gave up a lot” about the America in her mind (p. 116). It
is through this adjustment to the realities posed to her by the physical America that she
is able to live through her displeasures and negotiate her survival. She does different jobs,
including working in a gas station in Main Street. In her quest for job, she realises that
there are common racial discriminations which her mental journey to the USA does not
reveal to her:
They asked where you learned to speak English and if you had real
houses back in Africa and if you’d seen a car before you came to
America. They gawped at your hair. Does it stand up or fall down
when you take out the braid? [...] You smiled tightly when they
asked those questions. 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 (p. 116).

Within the mindscape of this lady, America is a flawless land of possibilities without hassles.
The reality that confronts her when she arrives in America with her physical self, disagrees
with her preconceived thought of rosiness about America. Her inward’s migration to the
US does not bear a single negative picture of America, as her outward’s migration later
exposes to her. In other words, all the aspirations and expectations of the lady have been
truncated on her getting to the USA. This implies that the perfect America only exists
in her mind, the world of fantasy. For instance, on her arrival to the USA, her beautiful
dream of attaining tertiary education is truncated. The following excerpt underscores the
lady’s distress:
You could not afford to go to school, because now you paid rent for
the tiny room with the stained carpet. Besides, the small Connecticut
town didn’t have a community college and credits at the state university
cost too much (p. 117).

The actual experiences, of the migrant, show that America is not different from Nigeria,
her country. Given the dissatisfying and choking realities which the nameless migrant lady
is exposed to in the US, she occasionally longs for the homeland, where she will experience
familial bond and interactions. However, each time her mind streams to her homeland in
Nigeria, she is again pushed away by the strains occasioned by poverty. Torn between a
lonely environment pervaded by racial pressure, where she must work hard to survive, and
her poverty-stricken homeland of familial love and care, the migrant is left in the realm of
indecision which underscores her psychophysical reaction to the new settlement:

Sometimes you sat on the hungry mattress of your twin bed and
thought about home— your aunts who hawked dried fish and
plantains, cajoling customers to buy and then shouting insults when
they didn’t; your uncles who drank local gin and crammed their
families and lives into single rooms; your friends who had come out to
say goodbye before you left, to rejoice because you won the American
visa lottery, to confess their envy; your parents who often held hands
as they walked to church on Sunday mornings, the neighbors from
the next room laughing and teasing them (p. 117-118).

Contrary to the expectations which her inner world preconceived about America, she has
been unable to send a reasonable amount of money to her poor parents and relatives. This
leaves her heartbroken. Though she sends half of her monthly earning to her parents, it is
still insignificant compared to her mental picture of the fortune which America holds for
every first time emigrant. The narrator aptly foregrounds her distress thus: “Every month
you wrapped the money carefully in white paper but you didn’t write a letter. There was
nothing to write about” (p. 118).

Following her quest to reconnect with the familiar things at home, she becomes cheerful
when her American boyfriend takes her to an African store. She is happy that she can buy
garri and onugbu with which she makes onugbu soup. Though the boyfriend vomits after
the meal, she never minds— she is happy that home is reinvented and she will be cooking
her favourite onugbu food from that moment. This shows that the migrant misses home
and all the things that make the homeland enlivening.

Even as she struggles to make ends meet so that she can continue to cater for her parents
back home, her father dies, and “they had used some of the money [she] sent to give
him a good burial” (p. 127). She is obviously depressed by the fact that she could not
improve the financial status of her parents as she had wished before migrating to the US.
We learn from the narrative that the migrant lady is quite attached to her people back
home. As such, her boyfriend buys her clothes, she reserves them for her friends, aunts
and uncles and she promises that any time she is opportune to go home, she will take the
clothes to them. This is borne out of her love for her people. The quest for and failure
of the migrant to meet up with his/her expectations brings to the fore different upsetting
memories.

Metaphorically, these unresolved problems are regarded as “the thing around”

the migrant’s neck in the story. Some of the migrants’ experiences encountered in the
examined texts are acculturation into the new settlement, disappointment by the climatic
and the physical landscape, challenges in securing jobs and a longing for the homeland.