The Thing Around Your Neck, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at the Wikipedia

The Thing Around Your Neck at the Wikipedia

The Thing Around Your Neck: summary and analysis, LitCharts

Chimamanda website

Chimamanda independent website

Nigeria at the Wikipedia

Biafra at the Wikipedia

Tedx talk: We should all be feminists (very easy to understand and very funny)

Half of a Yellow Sun (trailer)

Presentation, by Adriana Cruz

BIOGRAPHY

Chiamamanda Ngozi Adichie is a famous writer, teacher, novelist, playwright and feminist activist.
She was born in Agba village, Enugu (Nigeria) on the15th September, 1977. She grew up as the fifth of six children in Nsukka city. 
Her father, James Nwoye Adichie worked as a professor of statistics, and her mother, Grace Ifeoma was the first secretary of the University of Nigeria.
The family lost almost everything during the Nigerian Civil War, including both maternal and paternal grandfathers. Her family's ancestral village is in Abba in Anambra State, Nigeria.
She studied Medicine and Pharmacy at the University of Nigeria for a year and a half. During this period, she edited The Compass, a magazine run by the Catholic University's medical students. At the age of 19, Adichie left Nigeria for the United States to study Communications and Political Science at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She soon transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University to be near her sister Uche, who had a medical practice in Coventry, Connecticut.
 She got married to Ivara Esege, and they have one child.
From 2016 to 2019 he won several honorary titles as the Doctor of Humane Letters and the Doctor Honoris Causa, from the Université de Fribourg, Switzerland.
She was the author of many novels: Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (translated into 19 languages), and the essay We Should All Be Feminists. Her most recent books are Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions and Notes on Grief.
Adichie divides her time between the United States and her second residence in Nigeria, where she teaches writing workshops.

 The Thing Around Your Neck

This book was first published in 2009, and talks about a woman named Akunna who gains a sought-after American visa and goes to live with her uncle; but he molests her, and she ends up working as a waitress in Connecticut. She ends up meeting a man whom she falls in love with, but, along the way, she experiences cultural difficulties with him.
The title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected. Although falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to re-examine them.
The history based in Lagos and USA, and deals about prejudices and difficulties in accepting the pre-established cultural differences and prejudice of sex, ethnicity, macho and white dominant culture, and many difficulties to get a visa.

QUESTIONS

According to the family, what things do you have to get when you are in the USA, and what you don’t?

Personal question: What things do you usually buy as souvenirs when you go away?
They call “America” the USA. Is that correct?

Where is Maine? What kind of place is (or was) it? And Connecticut?
“They were desperately trying to look diverse” (where her uncle is working): What is your opinion about positive discrimination?
The story is told in the second person singular (you). Why?
In Maine they asked her about her hair: What is the best way to deal with “different” people?
Why did she leave her uncle’s house? Was he really her uncle?
How did her boss Juan treat her in her first job?
According to the protagonist, how is life back in Nigeria?
What were the brown envelopes for?
What stories did she want to tell her family about “America”?
What were the usual clichés about black people?
What things did her future boyfriend (the white costumer) know about Africa?
Why did the protagonist say white people were always “condescending” with Africa?
Talk about professor Cobbledick.
The fortune strips of paper she got in the Chinese restaurant were blank. What does it mean for the story?
Can you remember the story of her father in the raining day in Lagos?
She cooked dinner for her boyfriend: how did he like it?
What kinds of presents didn’t she like?
What do people think of them as a couple?
What behaviour and what decisions of her boyfriend didn’t she understand?
Why does she go back to Nigeria?
In your opinion, is she going to go back to the USA then?
What does the title mean?

VOCABULARY

visa, to get in one’s feet, self-tanner, gawp, Greyhound bus, community college, course syllabi, hawk, preemie, shantytown, maudlin, Jeopardy, root for, throw up, MSG, Nawal El Saadawi