“She was right, I could not leave yet.”
-Chinaza (Adichi 186)
In many of Adichi’s stories in her novel The Thing Around Your Neck, there is an uncertainty within the protagonist entering a new environment and/or learning to adapt in-or understand- a world that is different than the one they grew up. These women (and men) then must decide whether they will choose the hard, known world that they live in and the lonely unknown world they can choose to go to. Though they all suffer difficult choices, the story about Chinaza named, “The Arrangers of Marriage” I related to on a personal level the most. Chinaza’s first time in America reminds me of my freshman year at college. She talks about the difficulties of moving to a new environment away from everything she knows and trying to conform, holding onto a relationship that no longer holds the same weight it used to, and later deciding to cut those bonds and change.
Starting off with the new and unknown environment, Chinaza traveled to an unknown country because she knew that it was expected and needed. She traveled to this apartment where she was alone with no knowledge of the “proper” etiquette of the area. She has different ways of interacting with people and different ways of living. The injustice of the inequality even between African Americans and African immigrants- of a system that seems to favor a specific ethnicity. Even if that …show more content…
We both traveled to new societies and tried to adapt, all the while holding onto the bonds of our past, only to realize that those we “trusted” may be more apathetic than we thought. So, we cut them off from our life. Chinaza grew as a person, she was no longer the person she was when she meekly left for America, however, she had the strength to resist the people that told her that she had to conform completely to society the way they
-Chinaza (Adichi 186)
In many of Adichi’s stories in her novel The Thing Around Your Neck, there is an uncertainty within the protagonist entering a new environment and/or learning to adapt in-or understand- a world that is different than the one they grew up. These women (and men) then must decide whether they will choose the hard, known world that they live in and the lonely unknown world they can choose to go to. Though they all suffer difficult choices, the story about Chinaza named, “The Arrangers of Marriage” I related to on a personal level the most. Chinaza’s first time in America reminds me of my freshman year at college. She talks about the difficulties of moving to a new environment away from everything she knows and trying to conform, holding onto a relationship that no longer holds the same weight it used to, and later deciding to cut those bonds and change.
Starting off with the new and unknown environment, Chinaza traveled to an unknown country because she knew that it was expected and needed. She traveled to this apartment where she was alone with no knowledge of the “proper” etiquette of the area. She has different ways of interacting with people and different ways of living. The injustice of the inequality even between African Americans and African immigrants- of a system that seems to favor a specific ethnicity. Even if that …show more content…
We both traveled to new societies and tried to adapt, all the while holding onto the bonds of our past, only to realize that those we “trusted” may be more apathetic than we thought. So, we cut them off from our life. Chinaza grew as a person, she was no longer the person she was when she meekly left for America, however, she had the strength to resist the people that told her that she had to conform completely to society the way they