Women Navigating Minority Status in Selected Stories in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s "The Thing Around Your Neck"

Abstract

This paper provides an intertextual reading of three stories purposely selected from Chimamanda Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neckagainst the theoretical backdrop of her feminist treatise ‘A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions’. The ‘Manifesto’ is her theoretical attempt to condense the practical application of African feminism into the modern context within which her stories are set. In this paper, I distil the practical implications of Adichie’s postulations on a feminist manifesto through a reading of selected stories in The Thing Around Your Neck. I rely on a close reading of the text, in which key concerns and aesthetic approaches of African feminism are identified and critically assessed. Through the three short stories from the collection, namely ‘Imitation’, ‘The Arrangers of Marriage’ and ‘The Headstrong Historian’ Adichie demonstrates her feminist philosophy: In ‘Imitation’ and ‘The Arrangers of Marriage’, for example, she tells the stories of two women who are both physically and psychologically uprooted from their cultures and forced to struggle for their identities and place in society by circumventing the patriarchal order. They embrace sisterhood as one of the strategies to overcome their segregation. These women also refuse to be defined by society and instead choose to assert their identities and value. They are more than just mothers or wives of rich Nigerian men. In ‘The Headstrong Historian’, Adichie dramatizes the story of a woman who, despite living in a traditional and highly patriarchal society where women have no voice, is able to rise and confound men (both native and foreign). Therefore, the most engaging feature in Adichie’s writing is how she uses marriage as a dramatic stage to test out her theories on feminism and gender issues and to demonstrate how women navigate their minority status.