The Thing Around Your Neck

“Nsukka campus was such a small place—the houses sitting side by side on tree-lined streets, separated only by low hedges—that we could not but know who was stealing. Still, when their professor parents saw one another at the staff club or at church or at a faculty meeting, they continued to moan about riffraff from town coming onto their sacred campus to steal.”

The way the community ignores and even accepts the smaller-scale problem of boys stealing mirrors the way the community also ignores and accepts the abuse in the prisons. The parents of the boys can choose to blame their crimes on someone else, just as the police can later blame the crimes of others on the innocent.

“Nnamabia was staring at his yellow-orange rice as he spoke, and when he looked up I saw my brother’s eyes fill with tears—my worldly brother—and I felt a tenderness for him that I could not have explained had I been asked to.”

Nnamabia has changed due to his time in prison, and for the first time the narrator is able to recognize this. The disdain the narrator has had for her brother’s actions up to this point falls away in the face of his new understanding.

“Nkem imagines the proud young men, muscled, brown skin gleaming with palm kernel oil, graceful loincloths on their waists. She imagines—and this she imagines herself because Obiora did not suggest it happened that way—the proud young men wishing they did not have to behead strangers to bury their king, wishing they could use the masks to protect themselves, too, wishing they had a say.”

Nkem, in contemplating the past, is hung up on the moral questions in the scenario, whereas Obiora feels pride. Nkem, feeling powerless and hurt, connects to her cultural identity through these feelings.