Favvy_Okwans🖤

On today's story review of The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, we're looking at story 5 titled On Monday of Last Week. This story was a quiet one, but it left me thinking. It follows Kamara, who recently moved to America to reunite with her husband after six years apart. Only, when she finally gets there, things don't quite feel the way she imagined. While waiting for her green card, she takes up a babysitting job and meets Josh, an adorable four year old, his overly anxious father Neil, and Tracy, Josh's artist mother. Now, Tracy fascinated me. The first time she really spoke to Kamara, it was with so much warmth and attention that Kamara couldn't help but feel special. And honestly, I understood it. There are some people who make you feel seen in a way you haven't felt in a long time. As the story went on, I found myself wondering if Kamara's feelings toward Tracy were admiration, a crush, or a little bit of both. Then came the moment t...

On today's story review of The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, we're looking at story 4 titled Ghosts. I won't lie, this story confused me at first. Going in, I thought I was about to read something supernatural. The title certainly didn't help sef, for a while, I kept wondering if the narrator was hallucinating or imagining things. But the more I read, the more I realized that this isn't really a ghost story. The story follows a retired professor reflecting on his life during and after the Biafran War. He has lost his daughter, he has lost his wife, he has watched his country, his university, and even old friendships change beyond recognition. Then one day, he encounters Professor Ikenna, a colleague everyone had assumed died during the war, and that's where the story got interesting for me. Because the "ghost" isn't a ghost in the horror movie sense. It's the way the past keeps showing up when you think you've left it ...

On today's story review of The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, we're looking at story 3 titled "A Private Experience". Wow. Just wow. This particular story felt so personal, like I was literally in that tiny dusty store with Chika and the woman. The story follows an experience Chika had when she and her sister, Nnedi, travelled to Kano to visit their aunt. A riot breaks out in the market, chaos erupts, people start running, and in the confusion, Chika loses her sister. Luckily, she encounters a kind Hausa Muslim woman who takes her somewhere safe. What follows is my favourite part of the story. In that tiny store, two strangers from completely different backgrounds spend the night together worrying about the people they love. Chika is worried about Nnedi. The woman is worried about her daughter, Halima, who had gone out hawking earlier that day. There was something beautiful about the bond that formed between them. Just two women sharin...

"Oyibo people are like that, if you do something in a different way, they'll think you're abnormal as though their way was the only possible way." Story 2: IMITATION On today's story review of The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, we're looking at story 2 titled Imitation. I really enjoyed the dynamic of the story. It started off with the end. Classic Chimamanda. She takes us through the annoying phone call that completely shatters Nkem as she discovers that her husband, her rich Nigerian husband who lives in Nigeria and only visits her and the kids in suburban Philadelphia for two months in a year, has a mistress. Then the story takes us to the very beginning. How she went from being an ordinary girl to a big man's wife, and how this life once felt like a dream. And how the news of his cheating didn't surprise her as much as I expected it to because she had at some point dated a married men herself.  I really liked the re...

You guyssssssss, I'm doing a daily review of each of the stories in the book The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This book is a collection of 12 short stories, much like the moonlight folktales we read in primary school. Each story, no matter how short, is deeply emotional and easily relatable. Here's what I have to say about Story 1. Story 1: Cell One I loved how descriptive it was. It felt like I could feel the underlying emotions. The story centres around a lecturer's family in Nsukka, particularly their son, Nnamabia, who was the favourite child. He was charming, handsome, popular, and the kind of kid who got away with a lot of things. He wasn't a cultist, but he was arrested alongside some of his cultist friends when they were drinking past curfew, and that's how he ended up in a cell. At first, he didn't seem shaken by the conditions. He played smart, became a favourite among the inmates, and generally appeared to be doing o...

For someone who has been directly affected by this, I will always say there is a thin line between admiration and idolization. Every case of idolization starts off as admiration before gradually transcending into fixation. One of the major side effects of idolizing a person is that you forget they are human too. You forget that they have flaws, that they can be wrong, and that they are capable of making mistakes. This is dangerous because, as I once read somewhere, "When you look up to somebody, you tend to become vulnerable to an extent." It was Eric Guaaga who profoundly said, and I quote: "Don’t put yourself in a position where you are at the mercy of someone else’s intention and they don’t have the capacity to do right by you." This is one of the dangers of making idols out of the people we look up to. The vulnerability that comes with idolization places you in a position where you are at the mercy of another person's intentions. For instance, if Chimamanda ...