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The Thing Around Your Neck And The Arrangers Of Marriage Analysis

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The author Chimamanda Adichi’s, short stories “The Thing Around Your Neck” and “The Arrangers of Marriage found within her fictional book The Thing Around Your Neck, depicts two Nigerian women immigrants living in between two very different cultures, both struggling with identity and trespassing boundaries. Each story conveying a sense of fatalism compiled with feministic empowerment of immigrant of Nigeria affronting their destiny on American soil. America’s welcoming of substandard living conditions, desperation, and unrealistic expectations are central themes featured throughout both short stories, coupled with forced assimilation exemplifies the human tendency of assumption that the grass is greener on the other side. The expectations of a new Nigerian bride prior to her migration to America to meet her new Americanized Nigerian groom (arranged marriage) soon grasped upon her arrival into America, how unrealistic those were when she encountered how inferior the living conditions were. In the “Arrangers of Marriage,” this harsh reality is shown through the descriptive narrative of Agatha Bell, “He had used the word “house” when he told me about our home. I had imagined a smooth driveway snaking between cucumber-colored lawns…a house like those of white newlyweds in the American films that NTA showed on Saturday nights…he turned on the light in the living room where a beige couch sat alone in the middle, slanted, as though dropped there by accident. The room was hot, old,

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