Religious Expression in Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck Dina Rabie College

Adichie’s collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, is a powerful testimony of Nigerian culture as resonated within each and every Nigerian in their homeland and in America. Intertwined with several aspects of culture, she explores the idea of faith and religious expression in well-educated, “Americanized” Nigerians as compared to the long-established conventions of religious practice in traditional Nigerian culture. The stories “A Private Experience,” “Ghosts,” and “The Shivering,” characterize Americanized Nigerians’ attempts to understand the role of faith, superstition, and expression of religion in their lives.

In all three stories, the protagonists are well-educated, or pursuing a higher education, and struggle to perceive the religious traditions of their people as anything but antiquated. Like the professor in “Ghosts,” they are “Western-educated” and “[are] supposed to have armed [themselves] with enough science to laugh indulgently at the ways of [their] people.” (57) The retired professor describes the superstitious practice of grabbing handfuls of sand from the ground and throwing it at somebody presumed to be dead when he encounters Ikenna Okoro; in “The Shivering,” Ukamaka (who is working on her...