Connections Between News Today and "A Private Experience"

     One of the stories in Adiche’s The Thing Around Your Neck that really resonated with me was “A Private Experience.”  It was such a powerful story and pertained to events and tragedies occurring in our world today.  In the story, there has been a riot in the market and innocent people have died and others have been injured.  Chika and another woman are hiding in a store together trying to stay safe.  This story is very similar to stories we hear on the news today in Europe and Middle Eastern countries, whether it be riots, bombings, or other terrorist attacks.  This story was so powerful to me, though, because as we watch the news coverage on events such as the one Adiche wrote about, all the viewers see in those instances are the facts and the loss of human life.  This story took us deeper and showed us something we rarely see on the news.  Adiche showed the reader compassion and comradery between two women that were polar opposites: one a doctor and the other selling onions at the market, one Igbo and the other Hausa, one Christian and one Muslim.  They have two things in common though, they are both women and both are experiencing loss.  Despite their differences and the fact that society says they should be afraid of each other and dislike one another, they come together because they are both afraid and are able to look past the other’s religion and nationality.  In a world where terrorist attacks and religious groups fighting make up a majority of the news, this story gives people hope that maybe there are more people out there like Chika and the other woman who can forgive and come together to help another human being.  A line that stuck with me and one that I think everyone needs to hear is this, “She will look at only one of the corpses, naked, stiff, facedown, and it will strike her that she cannot tell if the partially burned man is Igbo or Hausa, Christian or Muslim, from looking at the charred flesh” (Adiche 53).    


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