'The Thing Around Your Neck' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Thing Around Your Neck - Displacement and Alienation

"The thing around your neck" instead of standing up for a physical thing, holds a metaphorical meaning specifically referring to the protagonist's anxiety or worry. Adichie highlights Akunna’s experience of moving to America where she gets feelings of displacement and alienation. In America people would constantly ask her ‘where you learned to speak English and if you had real houses back in Africa and if you’d seen a car before you came to America.’ The girls that thought Akunna did not have a real house back in Africa, obviously had a very western picture of Africa, one that is in reality very common through television and western literature. Akunna’s displacement and alienation is further shown when people gawped at her hair asking her ‘Does it stand up or fall down when you take out the braids?’ ‘All of it stands up? How? Why?’. The best way to describe the way she felt is by using one of Adichie’s quotes; “I wasn’t black until I came to America. I became black in America”. She was excluded from the American society and it was that time in her life where she realized that race does make a difference in the way people treat you worldwide. When she had finally found a person caring for her, a Chinese man had assumed that she could not possibly be his girlfriend just because of their different races. People's comments contributed in developping her feelings of displacement and alienation as well as making her think how badly she had failed adapting into the new American community when, in fact, it is America that has failed her.