THE HETERONORMATIVE BEHAVIORS OF WOMEN IN TRADITIONAL SOCIETIES IN “THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK”BY CHIMAMANDA ADICHIE

Claire Thompson

The short story entitled “The Thing Around Your Neck” by Chimamanda Adichie stands as a thoughtful look into the societal expectations and pressures felt by women to perform heteronormative behavior, especially for those from traditional societies such as the Igbo people in Nigeria. Published as the title story of her collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, we can see clear connections to the pressures her main character in the title story feels and the pressures felt by her more obviously queer characters in this collection of stories. One of the main focuses in this collection by Adichie is a focus on the stigmas against queer people, the way they love and how it is seen by society and traditional communities as some sort of “other” rather than just a normal way of loving like that of a heterosexual orientation. While never voiced outright in the story, we can see clear indicators of compulsive heteronormativity in the main character of “The Thing Around Your Neck” throughout as it relates to the expectations of her native culture. In “The Emergent Queer: Homosexuality and Nigerian Fiction in the 21st Century” by Lindsey Green-Simms, we see an in depth look into other works of Adichie’s. Green-Simms does a wonderful job of summing up how Adichie portrays queer people in her work saying she “neither names nor stigmatizes the desire” which I find to be extremely prevalent in “The Thing Around Your Neck”. Throughout this analysis I will be using a lens of Queer Theory to dissect the relationship between Akunna and her love interest and how it aligns with Adichie’s common theme of queer representation in her writing.

In Adichie’s title story, we follow a Nigerian immigrant named Akunna who won a visa lottery and moved to the United States to live with her uncle’s family. They do well to help her at first, giving her a place to stay and helping her start school and find a job, but it quickly turns sour as her uncle forces himself on her in the middle of the night with Adichie telling us “Until your uncle came into the cramped basement where you slept with old boxes and books and pulled your breasts, as though he were plucking mangoes from a tree, moaning.” (Adichie, 2) In this interaction, we find one of many uncomfortable interactions with men setting the tone for the rest of story. As well, there is a bit of a foreshadowing for this moment right before when Akunna is first picked up from the airport by her uncle. Adichie tells us of the interaction, saying “He picked you up at the airport and bought you a big hot dog with yellow mustard that nauseated you. Introduction to America, he said with a laugh.” (Adichie, 1) To acknowledge the clear possibility of an inuendo in this interaction, her uncle feeding her a hot dog upon her arrival and her becoming nauseated by it can stand as a metaphor for an unconscious distaste for men, or more likely an unsafe future with the new men in her life.

While the assumption that Akunna takes no interest in men is an unlikely stretch, I want to add the possibility of this idea included in the hot dog inuendo because of the views had toward homosexual relationships in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. In an article titled “Dire Straights in Nigeria” by Rudolf Pell Gaudio, we learn about the visibility of queer people in Nigeria as he tells us openly gay or bisexual people are virtually nonexistent in this part of the world, so most Nigerians have never met someone of that orientation. He said in his article that they even go as far as believing queer people don’t exist in Nigeria because the anti-same-sex marriage laws seemingly suppress them enough to the point no one knows they are there. (Gaudio, 61-62) Understanding these views is important to further understanding our main character, Akunna because it tells us that the idea of being with someone other than a man likely never occurred to her, so her distaste for hot dogs and the possible further underlying distaste for men it could represent could go completely unnoticed by both the character and the readers as it is never presented as an option.

As the story progresses, after she left her uncle’s house and found herself in Connecticut working at a restaurant, she meets a man who takes interest in her. She entertains the interest because he’s the first man who treated her like a normal person and took genuine interest in her, despite his occasional ignorant comments, but after a few days it becomes clear he’s taken to a romantic interest in her. She doesn’t like the forwardness, saying “He brushed your hand when you placed the coffee down. The fourth day, you told Juan you didn’t want that table anymore. / After your shift that day, he was waiting outside, leaning by a pole, asking you to go out with him because your name rhymed with hakuna matata and The Lion King was the only maudlin movie he’d ever liked.” (Adichie, 5) This sentiment of how he seemingly makes her uncomfortable is an extremely important indicator for the idea that her interest in him is because of a subconscious feeling of obligation. It seems that she only takes interest in his affections before they turn romantic, after which she attempts to shut him out, ultimately failing as his persistence becomes overwhelming and she gives in. Whether she ultimately ends up falling in love with him or not we can interpret this interaction as a clear form of compulsive heteronormativity unconsciously felt from her obligation to her culture. In Grace Eche Okereke’s article titled “The Birth Song as a Medium for Communicating Woman’s Maternal Destiny in the Traditional Community” we can see that the women in Igbo communities are raised to believe their soul purpose is to marry and have children, saying “In traditional Igbo society, when a female child is born, it is in the back of everybody’s mind that she will grow up, and eventually get married and bear children. Marriage is seen as the high point of a girl’s life, but it is only when she bears a child (preferably male) that she is deemed to have come of age.” (Okereke, 1) This tells us that the women in these cultures, whether they want to or not, are likely to feel a compulsion toward heterosexual relationships because they’ve understood that as their destiny for the vast majority of their lives. Because of this idea, we can see that while Akunna is clearly capable of caring for herself, she seems to have a tendency to submit to the wishes of the men around her when it is the most comfortable outcome, even if it isn’t something she initially wanted.

The fact that she ultimately gives in to the man’s pressures can shed some light on important details that add to the idea that she only likes him due to cultural pressures because, coming from a patriarchal society it is easier and safer for her to go along with it rather than push back which is something she likely knew to be normal from a young age. There are moments in the story when it does seem like she may genuinely like him as she describes physically or emotionally intimate interactions, but to counter these I’d like to point out the fact that we never learned his name. While she spends months in an intimate relationship with this man, she never once thinks to mention his name to us which tells us he is unimportant to her. To back this up she leaves at the end of the story leaving no room for him to hope for her return saying “He asked if you would come back and you reminded him that you had a green card and you would lose it if you did not come back in one year. He said you knew what he meant. Would you come back, come back? / 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.” (Adichie 8-9) These interactions that tell us she may feel affection toward him, but not in a romantic sense, could be for a few reasons. The most obvious is the idea that they are from different worlds and as an immigrant only in the United States to work, she was fully aware their relationship wouldn’t work out, so she never got attached. I think this definitely plays a role in her lack of love for him, but I think it is also heavily influenced by her culture as well as her experience as a black immigrant. She mentions multiple times throughout the story that the way she talks and looks heavily effects how she is treated and she finds the treatment to be quite annoying. The only person who seems to not make snap judgements of her in this way is him, which might have led to an immediate comfort she felt around him. In the article “Africa and the Black Atlantic” by Yogita Goyal we find that Adichie often includes the nuances of immigrant experiences in her work and how the United States’ troubled history with the treatment of black people with issues like slavery and segregation still affects the lives of black people today, including and especially the lives of people who are not native to the United States. (Goyal) This idea that Akunna was going to be treated negatively from the get go absolutely contributes to the likely feeling of relief she felt when the man she met in the diner and dated treated her like a normal person, showing seemingly genuine interest in her as a person. Because of this, and accompanied by the man’s uncomfortable persistence we can see that Akunna only ended up with him because it was the easiest route for her given her circumstances.

Finally, I want to get into the title of Adichie’s story and associated collection as well as a reoccurring theme throughout which is “The Thing Around Your Neck”. Multiple times throughout the story we hear of this intangible thing choking Akunna, but what it truly is, is never addressed. It is brought up often in the story with mentions like “Once, Juan asked if you had a man that hit you because he would take care of him and you laughed a mysterious laugh. At nights, something wrapped itself around your neck, something that very nearly choked you before you woke up.” While it is clear that this idea is meant to be widely interpreted, I believe one of the ways it should be interpreted is the force of her cultural expectations toward heteronormative behavior. In “Radical Feminism, Lesbian Separatism, and Queer Theory” by Kathy Rudy, she shares an excerpt from “The Woman-Identified Woman” by a group called Radicalesbians, specifically in regards to lesbian women, but I also think it applies here. It reads “These needs and actions, over a period of years, brings her into a painful conflict with people, situations, the accepted way of thinking, feeling and behaving, until she is in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually with her self. She may not be fully conscious of the political implications of what for her began as a personal necessity, but in some level she has not been able to accept the limitations and oppression laid on her by the most basic role of er society-the female role…” (Rudy (Radicalesbians), 196-197) I think this quote perfectly describes Akunna and her frame of thinking throughout the story because she is only in the United States through obligation, only living her live on minimum income through obligation, and only dating this man through a sense of obligation, both to her culture and to him.

As laid out, Adichie’s “The Thing Around Your Neck” stands as an interesting exploration of the expectations for heteronormative behavior put on women in traditional societies and how they might struggle internally with living up to them. Through Akunna’s journey, Adichie confronts the ways in which cultural norms and gender roles shape a woman’s life and the negative ways in which it can effect her. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Chimamanda Adichie offers a compelling portrayal of the expectations and pressures women face coming from traditional backgrounds like the Ibgo community in Nigeria and by looking at the story through the lens of Queer Theory, Adichie explores the complexity of gender, sexuality, and their associated behaviors influenced by cultural norms and expectations, revealing how the protagonist’s experience reflects the deep rooted influence of compulsive heteronormativity.

Works Cited

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Thing Around Your Neck.” Prospect Magazine – Britain’s Leading Monthly Current Affairs Magazine, Prospect Publishing Limited, 19 June 2004, www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/books-and-literature/fiction/59001/the-thing-around-your-neck.

Gaudio, Rudolf Pell. “Dire Straights in Nigeria.” Transition, no. 114, 2014, pp. 60–69. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2979/transition.114.60. Accessed 9 May 2024.

Goyal, Yogita. “Africa and the Black Atlantic.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 45, no. 3, 2014, pp. v–xxv. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.45.3.v. Accessed 9 May 2024.

Green-Simms, Lindsey. “The Emergent Queer: Homosexuality and Nigerian Fiction in the 21st Century.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 47, no. 2, 2016, pp. 139–61. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.47.2.09. Accessed 9 May 2024.

Okereke, Grace Eche. “The Birth Song as a Medium for Communicating Woman’s Maternal Destiny in the Traditional Community.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 25, no. 3, 1994, pp. 19–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3819843. Accessed 9 May 2024.

Rudy, Kathy. “Radical Feminism, Lesbian Separatism, and Queer Theory.” Feminist Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 2001, pp. 191–222. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178457. Accessed 9 May 2024.