The Thing Around Your Neck: Behind the Title

                  The Thing Around Your Neck is used as a title for the collection of short stories written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche and is also the title for one of the stories. The namesake chapter is one of only two written in second person, giving the reader a chance to experience firsthand the lives of the Nigerian immigrants around whom the stories are centered. Within the story, "the thing around your neck" acts as a metaphor for underlying unhappiness you experience when you are alone at night, reflecting upon what your life has become since leaving Lagos. The first mention, "At night, something would wrap itself around your neck, something that very nearly choked you before you fell asleep" (Adichie, 119), comes after  a dismal description of not writing home, initially out of boredom with American life, feeling as if there were no stories to tell; then later, yearning to write to everyone from family to friends, but not having enough money to buy gifts to send with the letters. Adiche describes feeling invisible, guarded to a new world that could you worry would never accept you, even if you gave it a chance to know you. Through the detailed description of a tragic life, coupled with the use of second person, perhaps for the more empathetic reader, that thing wraps around his neck.
                 The thing around your neck is only mentioned by name in this story, however its ideal is a common thread through out the book. For Nigerian immigrants arriving on American soil, the thing is the weight of being an outsider in a primarily white society. For the Nigerians in the turmoil of their own country, the thing is having their homelands ravaged by violence and turned into an unrecognizable battle field. For Chinaza in The Arrangers of Marriage, her new husband's incessant correcting of her colloquial Nigerian terms to words he deems more acceptable for English-speakign society, the taking of her Igbo name, and sharing a bed with a strange man are the thing around her neck. In The American Embassy, the thing around the protagonist's neck is the knowledge that exploiting her dead son, Ugonna, for sympathy would be the only escape from Nigeria, a country in which she risked being killed herself for her husband's controversial pro-democracy writings. The thing around your neck is subtly referenced as she remembers Ugonna before his death and "How he grapsed her neck tight when she held him" (139), making him both literally and figuratively the thing around her neck.
               The Thing Around Your Neck is an appropriate title as it acknowledges a commonality between all the stories: a struggle. Adichie, who grew up in Nigeria, writes to honor the fight of Nigerian woman, whether at home or in a strange new land. Every woman has something wrapped around her neck, the strength of its grip is based upon how she handles it.