African Diaspora in the West in Short Stories

Literary Analysis Essay

The Museum and The Thing Around Your Neck

For Shadia, the stress of her situation is the cultural shock of being from Africa learning statistics in a setting in Aberdeen, where she is unprepared and unready. For Akunna, the stress is winning the American visa lottery. She is sent to America to live with the brother of her “father’s sister’s husband” (Adichie 116). He tries to rape her and off she goes on her own into the wide American world. Shadia’s situation is not so dramatic, but it is still similar: both women are like fish out of water; they have been promised that the West is a land of dreams and opportunities, but what they find is the same old land of grifters and hierarchies. They do not fit in or belong. They are immigrants, as Juan at the diner in Connecticut points out to Akunna. They are in a desperate plight as Shadia feels, struggling with her classes in Aberdeen. Ultimately, the stress and anxiety comes from the fact that they are both outsiders in the West: they are not insiders—and they do not want to compromise or give in on their principles, play the give-and-get game that Akunna’s “uncle” says one must do in order to survive in America. If that is America, then America is just a con—a ruse—a vicious game of deceit. The two girls are unwitting victims in that con, which the West has wholly embraced, and which the “third world” appears to have bought into as well. The reality is that life in the West is not founded on anything other that a racket: it is a chisel, and everyone is trying to get his piece of the grift.

Shadia feels the sting every time she looks in the mirror of the public restroom where it is printed on the mirror: “This is the face of someone with HIV” (Aboulela 246). What a horrible experience to have to deal with: it is insulting and abusive, and yet that is the experience that these immigrant fish out of water must deal with in the West, where they are seen as unwelcome guests, insects that have crawled ashore to try to get in on the chisel. There is no sense of charity or kindness; no sense of respect or appreciation; there is only fear in the air, as though the piece of everyone’s pie just got a little bit smaller because the immigrants were now around. That is what Shadia has to deal with.

Akunna, on the other hand, feels the stress of acceptance once she meets the man who understands something of Africa and takes an interest in her. She resists at first because he is condescending (so she feels), but eventually the fear of his not asking overpowers her and she says yes to a date. They become intimate—but in the end, she returns to Africa because, after all, she is only on a visa and is not truly there to stay. What then was the point of their intimacy? What was it all about? The pressure is what she feels about her neck: it is like a noose, and she feels it tightening. What is it? Where does it come from? The title references it, but she cannot pinpoint it exactly. Her anxiety is really the anxiety of identity, of place, of purpose. Who is she? What is she supposed to love? This is what haunts her, even though she does not say so explicitly. Her way of putting it is thus: “You knew by people’s reactions that you two were abnormal—the way the nasty ones were too nasty and the nice ones too nice” (Adichie 125).

Shadia, though, has a rich man at home to whom she is engaged. This is different from Akunna, who has only a poor father. Shadia’s fiancée is condescending though too. She does not like that. She is proud. She gets the class notes from Bryan so that she can understand what is being said in the class and then “became a variable, making her way through discrete space from state ‘I’ to state ‘j’” (Aboulela 248). What does it mean? Again, the same existential crisis plaguing Akunna also plays Shadia. What is the purpose of this life? Are they really just insignificant beings, integers, variables, that have no real meaning?

When Akunna’s father dies, she leaves to go back home and the man asks her if she will come back. She “turned away and said nothing” (Adichie 127). She has nothing to say. She does not know what she would be coming back to or what she would be coming back for: they have been intimate in a way—but for what? Has he proposed marriage? No. Has she developed roots there or a sense of belonging? No. What is the purpose to this life? They are like pinballs bouncing around from one thing to another. She reacts to life as she says, and yet life does not seem to give her any sense of what it is all about. It is thus an existential anxiety that grips her neck.

Shadia’s problem is much the same. Bryan is interested in her, but she thinks being with him “is a steep path she had no strength for” (Aboulela 258). She feels too much like the outsider, like she does not belong in his world, in his future. She feels it all as just too much—just as was the case with Akunna: they are both overwhelmed by the fact that some part of this Western world where everything is a grift could actually take them seriously, see them as partners, see them as something to have and to hold.