Identity and Belonging in Aboulela's and Adichie's Stories
This literary analysis essay examines two African female protagonists—Shadia from Leila Aboulela's "The Museum" and Akunna from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "The Thing Around Your Neck"—as parallel figures navigating displacement, cultural shock, and existential anxiety in the Western world. The paper argues that both women experience the West not as a land of opportunity but as a system of exploitation and exclusion in which they remain perpetual outsiders. Drawing on close textual evidence, the analysis explores their struggles with romantic relationships, identity, and purpose, ultimately concluding that their anxiety stems from profound internal insecurity compounded by isolation and the absence of community or guidance.
- Two Women, Two Worlds: Parallel Displacements: Shadia and Akunna introduced as displaced outsiders
- The West as Grift: Disillusionment and Exclusion: The West portrayed as exploitative and unwelcoming
- Romance and Resistance: Intimacy Under Pressure: Both women navigate fraught romantic relationships
- Existential Anxiety and the Search for Meaning: Characters question identity, purpose, and belonging
- Conclusion: Insecurity and the Weight of Isolation: Root anxiety traced to isolation and internal insecurity
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay builds its argument through sustained parallel comparison, tracking both protagonists across the same thematic questions rather than treating each story in isolation.
- It integrates direct quotations from both texts as evidence, grounding interpretive claims in specific language from the stories.
- The paper moves from external social critique (the West as a system of exploitation) to internal psychological analysis (insecurity and existential anxiety), giving the argument a clear arc.
Key academic technique demonstrated
This essay demonstrates comparative close reading across two primary texts. The writer identifies a shared theme—displacement and anxiety in the West—and uses textual evidence from each story to illuminate that theme from different angles. The technique of juxtaposing character experiences (Shadia's engagement and academic struggle versus Akunna's assault and romantic uncertainty) allows the paper to make a broader argument about immigrant experience without losing sight of each character's individuality.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by introducing both protagonists and establishing the shared premise of Western disillusionment. Subsequent paragraphs alternate between the two characters, using each to reflect on or amplify the other's situation. The analysis deepens progressively from social critique to romantic complexity to existential questioning, before arriving at a synthesizing conclusion that locates the root of both women's anxiety in internal insecurity and isolation rather than external circumstance alone.
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.
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.
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