Women in "The Thing Around Your Neck"

     A majority of the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck have to do with gender, race, and religion.  Specifically, I homed in on how Adiche depicts women in her stories and their status in relationships, especially between brothers and sisters.  I noticed that in almost every story, the main female character is depicted as the inferior person in the relationship, and overall, the relationship is not a strong one.  In the first story “Cell One”, the sister of Nnamabia is the narrator of the story who gives her opinions throughout.  What I got from her opinion is that she thought her brother does more negative things than her parents know or want to believe.  Their relationship as brother and sister is not strong, and Nnamabia definitely looks down upon his sister as if she is inferior to him.  For example, she wants to know for sure if he is in one of the cults at school, and when she asks him, his physical and verbal responses are this, “The only time I asked him if he was in a cult, he looked at me with surprise, his eyelashes long and thick, as if I should have known better than to ask, before he said, ‘Of course not.’  I believed him” (Adiche 8-9).  The way he looks at her made it seem as though she has no right to ask him that or talk to him that way.  Another example of the sibling relationship is in “Tomorrow is Too Far”.  The sister is inferior to Nonso, but Adiche uses perfect symbolism in this chapter with the avocado tree.  Nonso is always the one that climbs the tall avocado tree, which leads to his death when he falls from it.  The symbolism here is the tree being superiority over the sister and Nonso being physically higher up during most of the chapter.  Lastly, I noticed that in most of the chapters where the woman is inferior in a relationship, she rarely has a name.  I feel like this is Adiche’s way of getting a point across that in societies today, women are basically treated as if they have no name and no power.  Even in “A Private Experience” where it is two women, the one who has the less prestigious job as a market vendor does not have a name, yet the doctor does.  Similarly, all of the husbands and brothers in the stories have names, and in order to explain the relationships in the story, Adiche stems them from the husband or brother.  She is able to convey a powerful message, and while this form of overt male chauvinism may not be as common in America, we need to remember that it is a way of life for some women in other countries. 



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