Reclaiming the Self: Surviving Hybridity in Short Fiction by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Rose Sackeyfio
Winston Salem State University
Winston Salem, NC 27127
The global village of the 21st century ushers a pathway for empowerment for significant numbers of African women. Nigerian and other African women immigrants are well represented in the African Diaspora as a focal point of migration into transnational space(s). Women are taking advantage of increased opportunities for education, self-actualization, and economic stability available in foreign lands. As a third-generation African writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie adds her voice to a growing body of work by immigrant women writers that chronicles the lives of African women in Western spaces. This paper will interrogate the challenges of ruptured identities, paradoxical realities, and the ways that female protagonists negotiate the path towards empowerment in three of her short stories, “The Thing Around Your Neck”, “Arrangers of Marriage,” and “Imitation” from her short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck.
Early canonical works of African immigrant fiction by women include Buchi Emecheta’s In the Ditch (1994), and Ama Ata Aidoo’s My Sister Killjoy or Reflections of a Black-Eyed Squint (1998), Changes (1993), and in 2013 Diplomatic Pounds. In the exploration of splintered habitats and fractured identities of women living abroad, Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo’s Trafficked (2010) and On Black Sisters Street (2012) by Chika Unigwe examine the lives of African women in Europe who take on new identities as sex workers. Two recent works in this genre by new writers are the critically acclaimed Ghana Must Go (2013) by Taiye Selasi and We Need New Names (2013) by NoViolet Bulawayo. Sefi Atta realistically and eloquently captures the diverse experiences and challenges of diaspora life for African women in her short story collection News from Home (2010) and in her latest novel, A Bit of Difference (2013). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's short fiction collection, The Thing Around Your Neck (2010), and the masterful work Americanah (2013) expand the discursive engagement with hybridity as a 21st-century trope of globalizing forces. Moreover, this brand of literature heralds the extension of conventional themes and motifs such as tradition versus modernity, cultural roles and expectations, and patriarchy that have characterized African women’s writing since the first generation of African female writers commanded new spaces in the African literary world in the 1960’s and 70’s. An important development in African fiction is the recovery of the short story from the margins of literature. In 2013, Ernest Emenyonu dedicated Volume 31 of African Literature Today to the short story genre, acknowledging the robust and dynamic works being published, many of which are written by women.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie displays her creative artistry through a kaleidoscopic array of contested identities of Nigerian women in the diaspora space of America. The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) and the latest novel, Americanah (2013), trace the rocky path to self-development of young Igbo women pursuing American dreams of success and happiness. As a third-generation African writer, Adichie embodies what Molara Ogundipe-Leslie (1987) termed the female writer's commitment to chronicle the lived experiences of women. Adichie’s fictional works are vibrant and dynamic in capturing diverse perspectives of African women’s lives in a globalized arena that may bestow new opportunities as well as posing difficult challenges to survival. Adichie draws upon her personal experiences as an immigrant to America, and her stories convey social realism and expound the challenges of antagonistic realities and identities for women protagonists.
In crafting literature that mirrors the lives of Igbo women emigres, ‘The Thing Around Your Neck”, “Arrangers of Marriage” and “Imitation” unfold the experiences of women that are torn between cultural roles and expectations of their families in Nigeria and the demands of survival in diaspora spaces. The stories examine Nigerian cultural identity and social norms that contrast the charge to assimilate incongruent lifestyles, behaviors, and Western values. In “Tell Our Own Stories,” Heather Hewett confirms that “reading the collection in its entirety reveals the degree to which The Thing Around Your Neck maps the complex experiences of diaspora and migration, the unspoken haunting produced by displacement that can constrict the breath and weigh down the present” (3). Adichie has skillfully woven a tapestry of familiar themes of gender dynamics and the clash of cultures through contemporary fictional accounts of unfulfilled American dreams and dislocated identities. The Nigerian women protagonists are confronted with choices that may or may not lead to positive outcomes as they navigate a splintered existence.
The women characters in “The Thing Around Your Neck,” “Imitation,” and “The Arrangers of Marriage” are bound by patriarchal constrictions and the clash of cultures motif that frames much of post-colonial literature by African women writers. The stories are also linked by the resilience of the women protagonists, who assert their autonomy and self-determination and reconstruct their identities as women. The women characters navigate a maze of confusing realities such as racialized identities, gender dynamics, and alienation in the foreign space (s) of America. The stories convey the pitfalls of acculturation in diaspora spaces as women characters are cast against the harsh underbelly of the American dream. For African women migrants, acculturation translates to confused identities and various forms of double-consciousness and female subjectivity.
The lead story from the collection, “The Thing Around Your Neck,” is a poignant rendering of the experiences of Akunna, a young Igbo woman from Lagos whose success is painfully shattered by the alienating and hostile environment of America. The story is emblematic of the stark reality of failure and her downward spiral into otherness. Akunna narrates her story in third person to unfold her journey into crippling solitude and lonely sojourn in Connecticut. She has won the American visa lottery and hopes to complete her education as a route to upward mobility. Akunna’s awakening to a sense of otherness and hybridity occurs in the disconnection to home and family in the small white town in Maine. In narrating important contemporary themes in African literature, Adichie recounts the protagonists’ response to alienation in Americanah when Ifemelu, the female at the center of the story, develops severe depression and a sense of hopelessness.
Akunna is enrolled in a community college where cultivating a sense of belonging is virtually impossible, as she is constantly bombarded with abrasive encounters that question her identity as an African woman. Students ask her:
Where you learned to speak English, and if she had real houses back in Africa and if you’d seen a car before you came to America? They gawped at your hair. Does it stand up or fall down when you take out the braids? They wanted to know. All of it stands up? How? Why? Do you use a comb?” (116).
Her uncle, with whom she lives, calls this a “mixture of ignorance and arrogance,” and these kinds of experiences create a deep sense of unbelonging and foreignness that is fueled by racial stereotypes that are prevalent in Western spaces. One of the jolting realities that Nigerian and other African immigrant women (and men) face for the first time in America and Europe is race. The author’s uncomfortable experiences with racial dynamics are laced throughout her fiction, and in an interview on March 13, 2015, called I Wanted to Claim My Own Name Adichie recalls that “ I only became black when I came to America,” and she reiterates that in America, her experience “is always shaped by race.” Similar to her treatment of this subject in The Thing Around Your Neck, Yogita Goyal notes that in Americanah Adichie inaugurates an important and long overdue conversation about the specificity of a Nigerian experience of racialization in the US and UK, tying it firmly to both class and gender” (11). These new perceptions of racialized identity constructed by the people around her are represented realistically in “The Thing Around Your Neck”. Newly arrived African immigrants inherit the legacy of America’s ugly and deeply troubled history of racial division, prevailing stereotypes and rejection of diversity that poses a challenge to feelings of self-worth, confidence and success for African immigrants. With reference to contemporary African fiction, Louis Chude-Sokei corroborates the reconfiguration of African immigrant identity as follows: “The space between nations and continents is rendered secondary in these fictions to the newly racialized spaces within the country in which they have arrived” (57). Later on in the story when Akunna is working at a restaurant she is asked “when you had come from Jamaica because they thought that every black person with a foreign accent was Jamaican. Or some who guessed that you were African told you that they loved elephants and wanted to go on a safari” (119). With rattled nerves, she thinks to herself that she is sick of how people respond to the meaning of her name (father’s wealth), by saying “You mean, like, your father will actually sell you to a husband?” (120). In Nigeria and throughout the African world, ethnic names inscribe one’s identity through cultural specificity and affinity that confer belonging, social bonding, and the creation of one’s unique membership in the group. The image of Africa, her people, culture and environment remains essentially monolithic in the projection of negative distortions of poverty, war and hopelessness.
In addition to enduring the racially charged incidents that jar her sensibilities, Akunna is challenged by her vulnerability as a female when she faces sexual harassment from her “Uncle who is really a brother of her father’s sister’s husband, not related by blood “(116). He tells her that he can do many things for her and that smart women back home in Lagos and even in New York did it all the time (117). She refuses, moves out, and is completely alone in the uncomfortable environment of yet another small white town in Connecticut.
Akunna is barely able to survive by working as a waitress, and she can no longer attend college. Her isolation is debilitating, and she describes how “Sometimes she felt invisible and tried to walk through her room wall into the hallway, and when she bumped into the wall, it left bruises on her arms” (119). The emotional brutality of her alienation is traumatic because she feels invisible not only to herself but to others who fail to acknowledge her as a person. This amounts to a form of dehumanization since her Nigerian ‘self’ is unacceptable, unworthy of recognition, and completely set apart from the white world of normalcy. Akunna’s experience of navigating cultural dissonance and the impossibility of reconciling her Nigerian identity with hostile encounters contest her sense of self. Adichie employs the metaphorical expression “the thing around your neck” to convey the idea of Akunna’s Nigerian identity being stifled, muted, choked off, and effectively silenced by the white world around her amidst crushing loneliness.
“The Thing Around Your Neck” poses the central question of reclamation or assertion of Akunna’s Nigerian identity as a conscious act of resistance against otherhood status in her life. Akunna’s hybridized existence and isolation is neutralized through romantic involvement with a white male who loves and respects her despite cultural differences. For the first time she begins to feel comfortable in her own skin when, through genuine friendship, she is recognized and accepted as a Nigerian woman. As the relationship deepens, her emotions begin to shift so that gradually, “the thing that wrapped itself around her neck, that nearly choked her before she fell asleep, started to loosen, to let go” (125). Although her loneliness is relieved by her newfound love, her boyfriend’s status as a privileged white male underscores the clash of cultures, wealth disparity, and glaring racial inequality that she faces every day.
Akunna’s need for acceptance gradually gives way to emotional thawing, but ironically, the fact that they are from two different worlds raises more questions about her identity. She is surprised to learn that her new friend has traveled to Africa, and is knowledgeable, and that unlike a former professor, “he didn’t shake his head in the superior way” (120) or “have that expression of a person who thought himself better than the people he knew about” (120). These revelations allow Akunna to let down her guard and be herself.
The new relationship has a humanizing and centering effect on Akunna, although the issues of race, income disparity, and class differences intrude upon their friendship and heighten the tension between conflicting realities. For example, a Chinese waiter makes her uncomfortable when he suggests that she could not possibly be the girlfriend of a white male because she is African. Akunna is conflicted over the inequality of wealth and privilege in America and experiences disbelief when her boyfriend gives her expensive gifts that have no practical value, something unthinkable in her life in Nigeria. She and her boyfriend argue because he wants to visit Nigeria and from her perspective, he only wants to “gawk at the lives of poor people who could never gawk back at his life” (124). As an interracial couple, Akunna recalls that she:
knew by people’s reactions that you two were abnormal-the way the nasty ones were too nasty and the nice ones too nice. The old white men and women who muttered and glared at him, the black men who shook their heads at you, the black women whose pitying eyes bemoaned your lack of self-esteem, your self-loathing. Or the black women who smiled swift solidarity smiles; the black men who tried too hard to forgive you, saying a too-obvious hi to him; the white men and women who said “What a good looking pair” too brightly, too loudly, as though to prove their own open-mindedness to themselves (125).
The microscopic lens of constant scrutiny and failed acceptance of her Africanity drive home the impossibility of happiness in America. Her Nigerian identity is questioned, held up to inspection, and ultimately rejected in the cauldron of race and ethnicity in America. Ojaide notes these transformations when he observes that “while migration to the developed West is a relief from the economic discomfort of Africa, it burdens the individual with psychological, spiritual, and other problems” (46).
The story suggests that achieving success in America is a far-off mirage that is unattainable for a Nigerian female immigrant living alone in a hostile environment. She has no support system, and unfortunately, when she does write to her family, she learns that her father died 5 months ago. She is jolted into reconnection to familial roots and says goodbye to her lover in a way that marks a rite of passage to recovering her Nigerian cultural identity. When her boyfriend offers to not only buy her a ticket home and to accompany her as well, she refuses. The entrance and exit of a white male in Akunna’s life demarcate the contrasts between black and white experience, class divisions and culture, and the unresolvable dilemma it poses for her future. Stuart Hall, in his groundbreaking book The Black Atlantic, highlights ethnic absolutism and the language of “race” and “ethnicity” as cultural assemblages, which informs the antagonistic constraints at the center of Akuna’s affair with a white male (1-2). The story ends on a sad and uncertain note as to whether she will return to America. Akunna’s plight is a recountal of the unpredictable and lonely journeys in alien lands that may frustrate one’s dreams of success. Although the door of opportunity opened for her in America, incongruent realities, her vulnerability as a female, and crushing alienation shatter her dreams of happiness and success.
The “Arrangers of Marriage” is a brilliantly crafted story of culture shock filled with paradoxical situations, ironies, and ridiculous extremes of incompatibility in the life of Chinaza, whose odyssey into America is arranged by her aunt and uncle back home. In this story, Adichie skillfully unveils the false sense of reality and impossibility of achieving the American dream through a complex web of gender dynamics, hybridity, and appearance versus reality. Before she arrives at the home of her new husband, she expects “a house like those of the newlyweds in the American films that NTA showed on Saturday nights” (167). Instead she is greeted by a small and sparsely furnished space in a shabby neighborhood that “turns out to be a furniture-challenged flat” (168). Her husband’s character is a finely sketched portrait of a failed American dreamer and hybridized immigrant who pretends to be something he is not. He misrepresents himself as a successful doctor who has climbed the ladder of success. Chinaza remembers the hype and exaggerated descriptions of her husband- to- be by her relatives …“A doctor in America! It is like we won the lottery for you! (170). His character is laughable, and Adichie playfully develops his confused identity into a colorful and vivid portrait.
The day after her arrival commences a string of hilarious instances when he (Emeka) attempts to assimilate Chinaza into American behaviors that, according to him, will guarantee success in America. He wants Chinaza to change her name to Agatha and in place of Emeka he renames himself Dave Bell. He tells her to “say Hi to people here”(172) when a middle-aged neighbor greets her. Such greetings are unacceptable in the Nigerian cultural context because respectful behavior towards elders is the norm. He chides her by saying, “You don’t understand how it works in this country. If you want to get anywhere, you have to be as mainstream as possible. If not, the roadside will leave you. You have to use your English name here.” (172). Splintered identity among African immigrants is never more apparent than when people change their names to accommodate the difficulty of pronunciation by others and essentially attempt to fit in. For immigrants, this represents an important shift in identity, and Stuart Hall succinctly articulates the absence of a unified self in his conception of post-modern subjects. In discussing shifting identities:
The subject previously experienced as having a unified and stable identity is becoming fragmented; composed of, not a single but of several sometimes contradictory or unresolved identities…Identity becomes a “moveable feast”: formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems, which surround us (598).
When Chinaza is taken grocery shopping, they ride an air-conditioned bus, and he shows her how to pour in her coins and how to signal to the driver that she wants to get off. He tells her, “This is not like Nigeria, where you shout out to the conductor,”, he said, sneering, as though he was the one who had invented the superior system (173). The constant reminders, instructions, and criticism are almost endless, and one of the most colorful anecdotes in the story is her husband pointing out immigrants who retain their language. He tells Chinaza … “to look at the people who shop here; they are the ones who immigrate and continue to act as though they are back in their countries”. He gestured dismissively toward a woman and her two children, who were speaking Spanish: “They will never move forward unless they adapt to America. They will always be doomed to supermarkets like this” (175). Chinaza is taking in the contradictions and uncomfortable contrasts to Nigeria while noting the low-income neighborhood they live in. Her alienation is similar to Akunna in “The Thing Around Your Neck” when she thinks to herself…” I felt as though I were in a different physical world, on another planet. The people who pushed past us, even the black ones, wore the mask of foreignness, otherness, on their faces” (176). When they eat at McDonald’s in the mall, she considers it “humiliatingly public, as something lacking in dignity, about this place, this open space of too many tables and too much food” (176). To Chinaza, the food court is a “sea of people,” and she recalls that “Uncle Ike would be horrified at the thought of eating here; he was a titled man and did not even eat at weddings unless he was served in a private room” (176). Akunna’s new and confusing environment is incomprehensible as Chinaza attempts to make sense of the disjointed behaviors demanded by her husband. Patriarchal control is a stronger element in “Arrangers of Marriage” than in “The Thing Around Your Neck,” and Chinaza is psychologically dependent on her husband. Her Nigerian cultural identity is muted by his control and misguided advice as he forces her to adapt. Unlike “The Thing Around Your Neck”, hybridized existence is vividly conveyed in the affectations of her husband rather than demeaning racial encounters. Chinaza’s world of strangeness, contradiction, and superficiality begins to crumble through friendship, new revelations, and a sense of agency to control her life.
Another layer of irony unfolds through Chinaza’s new friend, an African American woman named Nia, who lives in the same building. When she asks her name, Chinaza gives both her Igbo and American names as though acknowledging her splintered identity. Nia has taken a Swahili name, and Chinaza is shocked that “she, a black American, had chosen an African name, while her husband made her change hers to an English one” (180). The final assault on her dignity comes when Chinaza learns that her husband has been married before in order to acquire a green card. He reveals this very casually, and something begins to stir inside her. Finally, Dave admits to her that, “I wanted a Nigerian wife … I was happy when I saw your picture … you were light-skinned. I had to think about my children’s looks. Light-skinned blacks fare better in America”. Chinaza is outraged and commits her first act of rebellion when she packs her bags and goes to Nia’s apartment. As she contemplates her future, the “world outside seemed mummified into a sheet of dead whiteness” (186). Nia supports her by laying out a feasible plan of escape that will provide her economic independence. She tells Chinaza to wait until she has her papers, and then she can leave her husband. She says,” You can apply for benefits while you get your shit together and then you’ll get a job and find a place and support yourself and start afresh. This is the U.S. of fucking A. for God’s sake” (185). The inclusion of an African American character is rare in the literature of African writers, and in “The Arrangers of Marriage,” the women are bonded in solidarity. It is interesting to note that the legacy of struggle for racial equality and economic survival in America is integral to the black experience, and though African immigrants enjoy substantial privilege and greater respect from whites, an African American woman in the story serves as a beacon of hope in solving Akunna’s dilemma.
Chinaza’s decision to gain her independence and chart her own destiny represents the evolution of her sense of agency to succeed, her feminist consciousness, and the realization of her own self-worth and identity. In developing Chinaza’s character, Adichie has portrayed a female protagonist who does not give up and who displays the will to survive the harsh realities of subordinate status and the vagaries of life with her husband in America. The story illustrates that although life in the United States may be an alienating experience that challenges an individual’s sense of identity, there are possibilities for survival, personal growth, and independence.
Unlike Akunna in “The Thing Around Your Neck” and Chinaza in “The Arrangers of Marriage”, the female protagonist in the story called “Imitation” is a young Igbo woman for whom the American dream is handed to her on a silver platter. Her name is Nkem, and she is married to Obiora, known as one of the Fifty Influential Nigerian Businessmen. Over time, he develops a long-distance marriage between Nigeria and America as a transnational subject. Adichie’s use of symbolism in the title and references to the Benin mask is artfully woven throughout the story to convey the conflicts between tradition and modernity, the past and present, and the imitation of Western life that contrasts with her Nigerian cultural heritage. Nkem must somehow negotiate these conflicts if her marriage is to survive. Her sense of Nigerian identity is at stake as she awakens a new consciousness of herself as a woman whose destiny in America is uncertain.
Nkem lives with her children in an upscale neighborhood on Cherrywood Lane in a beautiful suburban home. She is living the American dream and remembers how proud she felt because she “married into the coveted league, the Rich Nigerian Men Who Sent Their Wives to America to Have Their Babies league….And she liked it that she had become part of yet another league, the Rich Nigerian Men who owned Houses in America league”(26). As her marital relationship evolves, she envelops herself in comfort while her husband returns to Nigeria. She is passive as her children are placed in a private school because she had never imagined that her children sit side by side with white children whose parents owned mansions on lonely hills …”(27). Her husband’s monthly visits to America diminish to only once a year in the summer.
A friend who has just returned from Nigeria and who knows Nkem’s husband informs her that he has a much younger girlfriend. One reason the story is called “Imitation” is that the protagonist makes a shallow attempt to imitate her rival's youthful appearance in Nigeria. In addition, the symbolic elements in the title accentuate the superficiality of Nkem’s failed American dream and an empty and meaningless marriage. Imitation also suggests that wealth and material comfort does not always bring happiness. For Nkem, living in America engenders loss of connection to her people and confusion over her cultural identity. Her splintered identity is evident when she thinks to herself that: “she really belonged to this country now, this country of curiosities and crudities, this country where you could drive at night and not fear armed robbers, where restaurants served one person enough for three “…. America has grown on her, snaked its roots under her skin” (37). Nkem’s admissions to herself convey conflict because in the next breath, she recalls that:
she does miss home, …her friends, the cadence of Igbo and Yoruba and pidgin English spoken around her. And when the snow covers the yellow fire hydrant on the street, she misses the Lagos sun that glares down even when it rains. She has sometimes thought about moving back home, but never concretely (37).
Her admission of a fractured but comfortable life is suggestive of double consciousness posited by W.E.B. Dubois in his classic The Souls of Black Folk, a theoretical framework that elucidates the torn psyche of Black people cast as the other within the racially polarized environment of America.
Despite Nkem’s love affair with America, she reflects on the ambiguous relationships with whites in her neighborhood:
Her neighbors on Cherrywood Lane, all white and pale-haired and lean, came over and introduced themselves, asked if she needed help with anything-getting a driver’s license, a phone, or a maintenance person. She did not mind that her accent, her foreignness, made her seem helpless to them. She liked them and their lives. Lives Obiora is often called “plastic.” Yet she knew he, too, wanted the children to be like their neighbors’, the kind of children who sniffed at food that had fallen on the dirt, saying it was “spoiled”. In her life, her childhood, you snatched the food up, whatever it was, and ate it” (24).
Nkem is seduced by the material comfort, lifestyle, and values of upper-class suburbia. She is passive and uncritical of her life, submerging her identity in the anonymity of America. Secretly, she misses her family and seeks a deeper awareness of her identity as a Nigerian woman. Nkem asks a Nigerian woman she knows whether she planned to move back and the woman is incredulous. She responds: “how can I live in Nigeria again?...When you’ve been here so long, you’re not the same, you’re not like the people there. How can my children blend in?” (29). These questions lie at the heart of the immigrant dilemma, and there are no easy answers, but Nkem understands. Acculturation is a fact of diaspora life as immigrants struggle to balance conflicting demands of multi-locality in the 21st century.
Reality finally kicks in, and when her husband makes his yearly visit, she suddenly announces that she is moving back to Lagos. Obiora is shocked, and “she knows that he has never heard her speak up, never heard her take a stand. She wonders vaguely if that is what attracted him to her in the first place, that she deferred to him, that she let him speak for both of them” (41).
These events mark a positive transformation toward agency in her life, as an expression of feminist awakening, and the reconnection to home as a place of refuge and the restoration of Nigerian cultural identity. The story ends on a positive note as the pseudo-American dream life collapses. Adichie’s portrayal of Nkem’s imitation of life, false security and hollow existence in America is a realistic and vivid account that illustrates how easy is to lose one’s identity in the pursuit of happiness. The symbolism of the Benin mask is a powerful metaphor that represents layered constructions of Nigeria’s cultural heritage and the importance of authenticity. The significance of the mask heightens the story’s theme of potential loss of cultural heritage through appropriation of false identity. In changing her appearance, she assumes that her marriage will be saved through a new “look “that is similar to her husband’s girlfriend back in Nigeria, which connects to the story’s title “Imitation”. Finally, the mask symbolizes the idea of being true to oneself on a personal level. By the end of the story, Nkem realizes the futility of her empty existence as a privileged “wife “in America. Her decision to return “home” has multiple meanings because of the implications for Nkem’s personal growth as a woman, recovering from her marriage, connecting to her roots, and reclaiming her Nigerian cultural heritage. By the end of the story, the protagonist has come full circle, with a new sense of empowerment and feminist consciousness, as she is no longer a mere “imitation” but a fully awakened Igbo woman at peace with herself.
In conclusion, the age of globalization has ushered in increased opportunities, along with uncomfortable challenges to success in foreign spaces of the American landscape. The pursuit of education and opportunity in the USA becomes a seductive enterprise, replete with unrealistic expectations to uplift and support individuals and their families back home in Nigeria. Although the American Dream does bear fruit for many immigrants from all over the world, the Igbo women characters in “The Thing Around Your Neck”, “The Arrangers of Marriage”, and “Imitation” experience the intersection of race, socio-economic factors, clash of cultures, gender dynamics, alienation, and identity conflict. These factors invariably enmesh the characters in a complex web of subjectivity, forcing them to constantly negotiate their existence. Uncomfortable realities lay bare the rocky road to education, marital success, and happiness. Each of the women protagonists faces a crisis of identity and a rude awakening to diaspora life, serving as a powerful and compelling subtext of the works. Chimamanda’s artistry vividly captures the women’s awakening to the murky side of the American dream. Akunna, Chinaza, and Nkem must navigate “otherness” as marginalized subjects thrown into the landscape of failed hopes and dreams in America. The paradox of racial barriers in the land of equality emerges as a cogent theme that drives home the awareness of their status as African women in a white world.
In addition, neither of the women is supported by the males in their lives, so that gender is yet another layer of marginality. The women must surmount the dilemma of freedom and autonomy in their relationships with men. Their identity within love relationships and marriage challenges their inner strength and self-worth as they struggle to find their own voice(s) and chart their own destiny in a hostile environment. For Akunna in “The Thing Around Your Neck” and Nkem in “The Arrangers of Marriage”, the way out is to find their way back home. For Chinaza, in “Imitation,” the path to survival is to remain in America and eventually become economically independent and empowered. The message of all three stories exposes harsh realities of Western life as tangible and viable for some immigrants, but for others, especially women, a journey that is risky and uncertain. The unpredictable path to success in America places African women at risk of compromised identity, alienation, and failed hopes for a bright future.
More importantly, the short stories’ endings provide a workable template for millennial transnational African female behavior that amplifies the works' subtext. The decision to return to homespace in Africa is positive and healthy, reflecting spiritual renewal and reconnection to African cultural moorings for diaspora subjects. It is interesting to note that the idea of return appears in leading contemporary African novels by women such as Adichie’s Americanah, Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference, and Taiye Selasie’s Ghana Must Go. Migration into new spaces creates new and clashing identities, and new forms of double consciousness is inevitable when worlds collide and intersect. The idea of reconnection to Africa is more than a romantic or nostalgic impulse in the lives of voluntary migrants in the 21st century. The search for meaning in life and belonging to a unique cultural space creates wholeness, reintegration of the rhythms of African life, and a place of refuge for diaspora subjects maligned as the other.
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