The Thing Around Your Neck Sparknotes

In her collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Adichie writes about struggles of the individual to reconcile their cultural values in an ever changing society. In the short story, “The Thing Around Your Neck,” Akunna emigrates to the United States and faces conflicts with the world around her and within herself. In the story, the metaphor of “the thing around your neck,” represents the sadness and internal struggle experienced by the main character, Akunna, as an immigrant. Akunna’s experience in America is disappointing and empty, which weighs on her, especially when she is alone. Upon leaving her uncle’s house, Akunna sends her family money “every month. You wrapped the money carefully in white paper but you didn’t write a letter. There was nothing to write about” (Adichie 118). She misses her family and has a lot to say about the American way of
At this point, she feels the thing around her neck, sadness, is choking her. Later the weight of the thing around her neck begins to lift when she meets a young white man, who treats her well and gives her gifts. The weight around her neck is not completely alleviated because while she likes him, she is conflicted by his privilege and her own experiences with poverty. When he offers to take her back to Nigeria, she “[does] not want him to go to Nigeria, to add to the list of countries where he went to gawk at the lives of poor people who could never gawk back at his life” (Adichie 124-125). For Akunna, Nigeria is her heritage and identity, which she is both protective and ashamed of, but in her mind, her boyfriend’s interest in Nigeria is superficial and touristic. Despite his best intentions, she cannot fully trust