The Thing Around Your Neck: Ugonna's Mother

               In the story The American Embassy, the female character around which the story is centered is never given a name in the traditional sense. She is only referred to as she, representing her lack of identity in wake the of Ugonna's death. "It was Ugonna who had given her a new life, surprised by how quickly she took to the new identity her gave her, the person he made her. 'I'm Ugonna's mother,' she would say at his nursery school. to teachers, to parents of other children" (Adichie, 140), she describes her old identity. She is not given a name because that is not what defines her at the stage in life in which she is introduced to the readers. She is without purpose, without her son, and without an identity. Her husband has fled the country and she makes no mention of other relatives or friends who would have known her in a life before Ugonna's birth, by a name other than Ugonna's mother. To the people she meets waiting outside the embassy, she has nothing to say as Ugonna was her world and in his absence she feels she is a nameless character in the background of life.
              As she is quizzed by an interviewer in an attempt to gain a United States visa to flee a country where her husband is a wanted man, and she is guilty by association, she remembers Ugonna living as a boy with out palm oil like blood splattered across his chest. In remembering Ugonna, she finds her she is not ready to let go of her identity as Ugonna's mother. "She wanted to arrange the sucked flowers side by side, like Ugonna had done with his LEGO blocks. That, she realized, was the new life she wanted" (141), the narrator says as she discovers by leaving Nigeria, she will be forced to end Ugonna's story and begin a new identity in a country of people who never met Ugonna. She has accepted that Ugonna is dead, but she is not ready to accept that her interaction with him is over. She does not want to be "Nanny of Neil" or "Student at Princeton" or any other new identity she may be known as in America other than "Ugonna's mother."