WHEN DREAMS CRUMBLE: THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAN DREAM IN CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE’S “THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK”

J. Hobbes stack

Three faces of one dream are what is faced in this story; the father who never dared dream, the boyfriend who has never known no, and Akunna who was led to believe that America is the land of big houses, big cars, and excess. What happens when the curtains are pulled back revealing the medal at the end of the tough times that made Akunna who she was passed. If she will just full circle sell herself out for the American ideal. Does this straightforward way out invalidate all that she has suffered through in a promised life? IS she a kept woman on the whims of another, trapped between what she wants and knows and what society tells her is her role as a shadow in life. Who says what she can be? Western Society, her boyfriend, the big fish tales all immigrant children learn? Or deep down the driving force that till questioned a second time in her life seems to say is this what you really want?

“The Thing around Your Neck” is an exploration of how one can dream a big dream only to have it crumble. The main character Akunna is a simple girl who sees a golden light at the end of the tunnel in America. Only to slide superseded into the hands of an abusive uncle who is not so closely related, and then homeless and hopeless she winds up working in a diner where she catches the eye of a up and coming blue blood and gets what she wants only to see that everything has a cost, some worse than others. The story scrapes back the thin skin layer and looks at how life has layers, how we gloss through life on the surface. Even as she is leaving the relatives in the safety of Africa, the reader should not envy her in the sense of wanting to start new lives or to tell her how they will miss her. Instead, telling what they want when she goes to the land of gun toting luxury. She has stars in her eyes when she leaves on the visa in awe and fear of. Full of hope to come to a distant relative’s home to become his toy. Welcome to America. To look between the lines where the noose lies patiently in wait. She was let down from the moment she arrived having expected little and gotten less, not an isolated story.

The dream of American theme overwhelms reality because no one ever tells those back home the truth. That is too depressing, so it continues the psychobabble ideation that the golden life is at the end of a visa. Whereas the immigrants’ lives are more crowded with less and longer hours to scrimp and save. There is an ideal that cannot be achieved from the first sentence where an everyday unspoken occurrence sets her story apart as it brings it to light. What there is, is a portrayal deeper than the hard but their stereotype of what they live like which absolves the viewer of pity or humanity. Hence the noose. Tugging at the neck as a nuisance till it is pulled tight and the immigrant wants to return home for a lesser life or they like a matchstick burn out trapped.

When she was with him, she knew that she didn’t belong and he never tried to convince her otherwise, merely to romance her with subtle gloats that showed her the life that she could have with him. If she was willing to not be called girlfriend and be willing to waste what she did not need as if it was a right. She could not see a gift as just a bauble or trinket like him in his worldly ways. He liked being exotic at the pinnacle of showing where he has been and what he has, he liked being seen whereas she is more comfortable in the shadows fitting with him nicely.

In the story the closest to his level, the most likeable being his parents who sought betterment for the finance and had high assumptions of their over indulged son. He chased them away, never complaining about the trips, money or respect that came with it. He thought that he loved her, he loved the idea of her. She couldn’t love him the same though, she had her morals and limits having been raised with opposite standards of existence.

This story, as has already been asserted is showing only one side of the two sides of a coin. He was raised with money and could never appreciate the real value of a dollar. He could not even appreciate his parents’ money which came at as close a cost as it could. And the main character who knew the value of an empty belly and sore muscles. Never the two shall meet. They try to make the relationship work, but she does not want to be part of a collection and he does not want to be serious about costs. His hands smooth, hers coarse and worn. She avoided writing home till she met him for a reason. She did not see the American dream when she arrived. She could not write home and tell them how hard or how much worse her life was that is like writing a soldier and telling them how much everything they miss is a sham or deviance. But when she met him, she found her voice as he was living the American dream and offered her a coattail. He had money, privilege, and could do no wrong, he was accepted and went out of his way to fit in, whereas she was simply a reflection on the outside of social circles so easily overlooked. She did not have poise or power. Every time he could share with her like in the African shop incorporating, but he ignored her as other than a passive audience. she was not like him; she was nothing like the American dream and knew honestly that she never would be, no more than her father ever could.

All at once the opposition subverted and installed context to the story because she came from nothing, having nothing, but for the want of a better dream in a new country. Told by relatives what to get as if money grew on trees and all through the story, we see her suffer to get even little things like food and residence. In part because in the beginning she would not sacrifice her soul and body for the wills of the new world. Leaving her first American home worse off than when she landed. Further disenfranchised then again as she realized that she could not afford even the least of the American universities, her assured ticket to a great life. Looked down upon by the great issuers of power and knowledge that led to wealth. By chance or maybe it was opposites attracting that she meets him. The man who seems immediately to be the devil, too good to be real especially to be interested in hardened effaced her. He was the perpetual spring to her fall seasons. Wit, life, and love are all shallow and fleeting but there without effort or further sacrifice. A man, afforded to travel and return to the American dream without loss or delay. He is what she wanted and thought that she could get going to America, but at what cost? He seemed to require none unlike every other aspect of her life.

She left home to come to America to come to her relative’s American dream just to find a nightmare of different form than the one that she left. Her love though, he was different, he knew languages and did not eat meat because of the fear hormone unlike most people of wealth who ate the best steaks. Before then she had fantasies of having meat, she even got sick when she ate it due to it being more than she had ever had. He could select how he interacted with his family; she had no choice but to leave them behind. He was what she thought she wanted, but if it meant selling out to the degree that was required to achieve the dream it would mean sacrificing all that made her who she was. It is often said that those who have never questioned what they lack with any character lack character and the main male character is a personification of this.

Neither of them sees that their view is wrong as she wants and is willing to accept the shortcomings for a better life. He never notices a flaw such as how much she suffers. So wrapped up in his shallow world, that he hardly notices her slip away till she is leaving him to go home to tend to her father’s affairs and for the first time he realizes that there is not some thing that he can buy with money and that scares him for the first time all story. Something money cannot control; her.

“What do these women do when the ‘rock’ on which they rely on becomes unreliable? From the text, such ones take consolation in the absurd. It is no wonder however, that Nkem rejects her dream world and Ukamaka, we are told, begins “to walk aimlessly” (ibid). Research has proved that most women lose their mental faculties in such situations and that about 80 percent of women in mental homes find themselves there as a result of such situations. (pg 10)” (Denkyi-M)

He shows humanity enjoying the comfort of relating to others in their native languages and sharing customs that he only glossed over when in her presence, he is human being for a change. Deep down in a surface kind of way she made him want to be a better person, to want more. He made her worse as she stopped noticing so much as to have what she had been told that she wanted. She was an adjective to him, a descriptive shown in how he never spoke up for or included her with vendors or his parents, but it did not seem as if he meant a lot to her either. It was not love but mutual gain. He was a symbol, a word of caution. She did not question, she accepted, she let him passively guide her. They are shades of what is right so thin and barely opaque that we see what we want to see. The African woman who is lost in a world nothing like she was told it would be. What every immigrant is taught America is, and he a stereotype. If you read between the lines, you see how each one is gasoline on the fire. He was making her him, but she had so far to go to be a thoughtless consumer.

To use without thought or cause, she was making him exposed to loss and being without new emotions for bot, only then something unexpected happened, her father died. He was the only man poorer than her love. He was the absolute zero between the lovers. He had no pride, no ego, no will for more. He was the opposite point to her lover who had nothing and took it for granted always figuring that there could be less to be had. Her father though he shamed her was more than that he was the aspect that she was trying to avoid at all costs. He would be her, if she gave up on her dreams, if she never left Africa, or maybe if she returned having not learned enough to return.

“ Backdropped by such responses to Gilroy, specifically I would like to examine what emerges when we look at a selection of contemporary African fiction, in this case, short stories by women, through a framework that is alert to home, gendered labour, and sexual and reproductive economies. Further, not only does this recent writing often feature an interrelation between the global and the local, but, as reflected in the terms of my title, it also enables an exploration of the interlinks between the domestic and global capital.’ “ (Terry, J)

The language of the poem is simple and flows with no large words or uncoordinated words causing stuttering or jarring. She is treated better the more she has from the beginning to the end although her language becomes more passive as the story goes on as if she is assimilated into the tale, her male companion’s language not in what is spoken but in how it is spoken shows an increase in self- importance until the end where he pauses in his narrative and asks if she will come back used to having her there a little less shallow learning that to have is to have in all senses and takes work and sacrifice. When he asks if she is coming back, we see fear in his words the same fear from inaction that her father showed when he was released after hitting the other car. The fear only comes out at peak transition moments. such to as when she changes sections and waits for him outside for him to not show casting herself as the underdog.

The heroine of the novel keeps a passive tone till she is asked to come home suddenly having power. Her transportation never her own. We do not know how she got the visa, but it was for a lie, a disillusionment, a false context the whole story. She is subservient from the beginning like a swimmer tossed in the middle of the lake and finally coming to the surface, she is not till the end in control in a slave kind of way. post-colonial because her journey follows the path of choiceless emigrants to the Whiteman’s America. She goes from downtrodden and enslaved by poverty to enslaved by molestation, to enslaved by lack of resources, to not being worldly enough or having a sense of value that does not cause pain. At last, she gets a deep breath and for the first time there is no force on her, she has the choice to go on or back each with a cost that only she can calculate. A life that her ancestors fought for an opportunity at. It is the journey of the colonist to walk up hill under goals and guises till it is established peak allows them to make the choice of the free unguided by heritage or expectation.

We feel the way anyone feels for her pity, some understanding of lineage, no one wants to root for the father and secretly most relate to the boyfriend as he lives the rarified American dream, where as most of us really get up for jobs that don’t appreciate us, we have family who dream for us as if our imaginations are not big enough. This is a tale that on its surface is about a poor immigrant her rich lover and her broken father. Deeper down it is about dreaming what we want to dream and knowing that will can only take you so far. To remain humble and worthy of what you have, or life loses value, mostly though not to settle for what the world tells us we deserve. The author gives a glimpse into one of hundreds of lives in America every year hoping for a better life with unrealistic ideals till one day we wake up and look around and to quote the talking heads. “This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife, how did I get here?” After all the end can be the beginning not always the end of things but a fresh start having dreamed and awoken. “You turned away and said nothing and when he drove you to the airport, you hugged him tight, clutching at the muscles of his back, until your ribs hurt. And you said thank you.” (C Adichie) She is a wake, a self-made woman with her own thoughts no longer burdened by the noose and its cost.

Works Cited

Dawson, Emma. “The Thing Around Your Neck.” World Literature Today, vol. 83, no. 5, Sept. 2009, pp. 61–62. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.cwi.idm.oclc.org/10.1353/wlt.2009.0149

“Beyond the Golden Door.” Kirkus Reviews, vol. 87, no. 17, Sept. 2019, p. N.PAG. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=138322467&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Terry, Jennifer. “‘It Was a Departure of Sorts’: Glocal Homes in Recent Short Fiction by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Efemia Chela, Chibundu Onuzo and Lesley Nneka Arimah.” Cultural Studies, vol. 37, no. 2, Mar. 2023, pp. 224–42. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.cwi.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2104894. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/books-and-literature/fiction/59001/the-thing-around-your-neck

Denkyi-Manieson, Gladys Agyeiwaa. “Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun and The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: A Thematic Study.” Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, Dec. 2017, pp. 52–65. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=129997834&site=ehost-live&scope=site.