# The Thing Around Your Neck

The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a short-story collection by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, first published in April 2009 by Fourth Estate in the UK and by Knopf in the US. It received many positive reviews, including: "She makes storytelling seem as easy as birdsong" (Daily Telegraph); "Stunning. Like all fine storytellers, she leaves us wanting more" (The Times)

## Quotes

* She could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs
* You wanted to feel disdain, to show it as you brought his order, because white people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same—condescending
* How can you love somebody and yet want to manage the amount of happiness that person is allowed?
* Is it a good life, Daddy?” Nkiru has taken to asking lately on the phone, with that faint, vaguely troubling American accent. It is not good or bad, I tell her, it is simply mine. And that is what matters.
* She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rare disease that they had just read about, made them think that they had the right to protect their child from disappointment and want and failure. A sated belly gave Americans the luxury of praising themselves for being good parents, as if caring for one’s child were the exception rather than the rule.
* She imagines the cocoa brown of Nnedi's eyes lighting up, her lips moving quickly, explaining that riots do not happen in a vacuum, that religion and ethnicity are often politicized because the ruler is safe if the hungry
* You knew you had become comfortable when you told him that you watched Jeopardy on the restaurant TV and that you rooted for the following, in this order: women of color, black men, and white women, before, finally, white men—which meant you never rooted for white men.
* He used to make me feel that nothing I said was witty enough or sarcastic enough or smart enough. He was always struggling to be different, even when it didn’t matter. It was as if he was performing his life instead of living his life.
* The war took Zik," I said in Igbo. Speaking of death in English has always had, for me, a disquieting finality.
** James Nwoye, "Ghosts," p. 108
* Later, Chika will read in The Guardian that "the reactionary Hausa-speaking Muslims in the North have a history of violence against non-Muslims," and in the middle of her grief, she will stop to remember that she examined the nipples and experienced the gentleness of a woman who is Hausa and Muslim.
** Narrator, "A Private Experience," p. 92
* But I am a Western-educated man, a retired mathematics professor of seventy-one, and I am supposed to have armed myself with enough science to laugh indulgently at the waves of my people.
** James Nwoye, "Ghosts," p. 96
* And although Nkem knew many Nigerian couples who lived together, all year, she said nothing.
** Narrator, "Imitation," p. 43
* The trick was to understand America, to know that America was give-and-take. You gave up a lot but you gained a lot, too.
** Narrator, "The Thing Around Your Neck," 198
* Nsukka campus was such a small place—the houses sitting side by side on tree-lined streets, separated only by low hedges—that we could not but know who was stealing. Still, when their professor parents saw one another at the staff club or at church or at a faculty meeting, they continued to moan about riffraff from town coming onto their sacred campus to steal.”
** (“Cell One”, Page 8)
* “Nnamabia was staring at his yellow-orange rice as he spoke, and when he looked up I saw my brother’s eyes fill with tears—my worldly brother—and I felt a tenderness for him that I could not have explained had I been asked to.
** (“Cell One”, Page 17)
* Nkem imagines the proud young men, muscled, brown skin gleaming with palm kernel oil, graceful loincloths on their waists. She imagines—and this she imagines herself because Obiora did not suggest it happened that way—the proud young men wishing they did not have to behead strangers to bury their king, wishing they could use the masks to protect themselves, too, wishing they had a say.”
** (“Imitation”, Page 23)

## External links

* The Thing Around Your Neck
* Goodreads
* gradesaver
* super summary