The Thing Around Your Neck Themes

Many of the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck focus on fraught relationships between men and women. Specifically, Adichie explores the roles women are asked to play within their birth families and then in their romantic relationships. Most of the coupled female characters subsume themselves in favor of their husbands or partners and lose sight of their own identities and sense of agency in the process. The stories question how and why this happens…

Adichie's collection splits its time between America and Nigeria, primarily in the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s. As the Nigerian characters encounter white Americans, black Americans, and other Nigerians of different economic classes, they run up against differing ideas about what Nigeria is again and again. As such, many of the stories concern themselves directly with what it means to be Nigerian and the problems that arise when others have very narrow views of what…

As a coastal region, people in what is now Nigeria experienced contact with Europeans early. Nigeria became an official British colony in 1914, and in 1960, Great Britain granted Nigeria its independence as a Commonwealth country. From 1967-1970 the country experienced a civil war, which pitted the conservative Nigerian government against the secessionist state of Biafra. The Biafran Conflict figures into a number of stories in the collection, as does the ongoing religious and ethnic…

In the story “The Thing Around Your Neck,"” Akunna's family members in Nigeria are absolutely thrilled that she won the "visa lottery" and gets to go to America. Upon her departure they celebrate that she'll soon have a big house and a big car. Once in America, however, she finds these dreams to be unrealistic and unattainable. Disillusionment at the realities of life in America touches most of the characters in the book…