Identity and Belonging in Aboulela's and Adichie's Stories

Two Women, Two Worlds: Parallel Displacements

For Shadia, the stress of her situation is the cultural shock of being an African woman studying statistics in Aberdeen, where she is unprepared and unready. For Akunna, the stress begins with 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 nonetheless 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 stem from the fact that they are both outsiders in the West: they are not insiders, and they do not want to compromise their principles or play the give-and-get game that Akunna's "uncle" insists one must play 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 women are unwitting victims in that con, which the West has wholly embraced and which the so-called third world appears to have bought into as well. The reality is that life in the West is not founded on anything other than a racket: it is a chisel, and everyone is trying to get his piece of the grift.

The West as Grift: Disillusionment and Exclusion

Shadia feels the sting every time she looks in the mirror of the public restroom, where it is printed: "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 precisely what these immigrant fish out of water must contend with in the West, where they are seen as unwelcome guests, as interlopers who have crawled ashore to try to get in on the swindle. There is no sense of charity or kindness, no sense of respect or appreciation—only fear in the air, as though everyone's piece of the pie has grown a little smaller now that the immigrants have arrived. That is what Shadia has to deal with, and it reflects the broader experience of African diaspora communities navigating hostile host cultures.

Romance and Resistance: Intimacy Under Pressure

Akunna, on the other hand, feels the stress of acceptance once she meets a man who understands something of Africa and takes an interest in her. She resists at first because he seems condescending, but eventually the fear of his not asking overpowers her and she agrees to a date. They become intimate—but in the end, she returns to Africa because she is only on a visa and was never truly there to stay. What then was the point of their intimacy? What was it all about? The pressure is what she feels around her neck: it is like a noose, and she feels it tightening. The title references this sensation, 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: "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 wealthy man at home to whom she is engaged—a circumstance that distinguishes her from Akunna, who has only a poor father. Yet Shadia's fiancé is condescending too, and she does not like that. She is proud. She obtains the class notes from Bryan so that she can understand what is being said in the lectures, and then "became a variable, making her way through discrete space from state 'I' to state 'j'" (Aboulela 248). The same existential crisis plaguing Akunna also afflicts Shadia. What is the purpose of this life? Are they really just insignificant beings—integers, variables—that have no real meaning? The themes of postcolonial literature are clearly at work here, as both women internalize the dehumanizing logic of a world that refuses to see them as fully human.

Conclusion: Insecurity and the Weight of Isolation

Ultimately, however, the anxiety they feel—the fear they hold in their hearts—stems from their own insecurities. They are not safe on their own. They lack guidance and support. They do not have friends in whom they can confide. They have no confessor. They are like lost children from the third world, having wandered for some inexplicable reason into the so-called developed world, and there they go, peering in the windows and wondering how to make their lives work in this strange setting. They do not feel a part of it, and yet they attract interest from some who seem to wish them well, who seem to mean well by them.

Yet what can any of this mean? That is the struggle they face—the big question, the big anxiety. They have no way to make meaning of this situation. They have no way to locate the meaning or the strength to persevere in the face of this challenge. They have only a sense of their own weakness, and that is what overwhelms them.

Works Cited

Aboulela, L. "The Museum." The Anchor Book of Modern African Stories. New York, n.d.

Adichie, C. The Thing Around Your Neck. Knopf, New York, 2009.