The Thing Around Your Neck

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2009

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“The American Embassy”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“The American Embassy” Summary

A woman waits in line outside the American Embassy in Lagos for a visa appointment. She is trying not to think of her four-year-old son Ugonna’s recent death. On the street a soldier begins to beat an older man with a whip. The people in line complain about General Abacha’s government and discuss tips for the student visa interview. The woman thinks about how only a few days before her life was normal, and now her son is dead and she had to smuggle her husband out of the country. She remembers the soldiers coming to look for her husband because of a story he had published in a newspaper and how when Ugonna ran to her, the soldiers shot him.

The man in line behind her offers her some oranges, which she refuses. She thinks of how the soldiers argued over whether they had to kill her too; while they argued, she jumped off the balcony. The man behind her in line offers advice about the visa interview. She wonders if he knows of her husband, a pro-democracy journalist. She thinks of how driven her husband was for his cause and how this was a kind of selfishness. Her husband’s recent story was picked up by the BBC, which is what led the soldiers to their door. When she is finally let into the embassy, the interviewer asks her for details about Ugonna. She realizes she cannot bring herself to discuss her son’s death, which she will need to do to get a visa. The interviewer tries to press her for more information, but the woman is lost in memories of her son. She gets up and leaves the embassy.

“The American Embassy” Analysis

The main character of “The American Embassy” is a woman who’s life has been destroyed in a matter of days. She thinks about how “in the space of a few days, [she] would no longer recognize her life” (115). She is experiencing the world in extremes, having just buried her child and helped her husband flee the country; and now she is attempting to flee herself. These extremes, however, have forced her into the mundanely cruel setting of a line for an embassy appointment. The desperation of her situation and the traumatic nature of her circumstances are highlighted by the dismissive, perfunctory nature of the process to obtain a visa. Moments when many of the people standing in line are suddenly dismissed or when her interviewer grows disinterested because she won’t disclose the details of her son’s murder show the cruelty of a system that bureaucratizes people’s lives and traumas.

The woman’s refusal to be a part of this system is the key to the story, an assertion that there are some things not worth compromising, no matter the cost. She has experienced the reality of the political conflict, and she knows the dangers far more intimately than most others. When she embodies The Rejection of Societal Expectations by questioning whether men like her husband should be considered selfless and brave and admired for their actions, she faces rejection. She could embrace these easy narratives—the brave political dissident husband, the bloody tragedy of her son’s death, her own bravery in escaping with her life. Instead, she rejects them, holding on to her memories, unwilling to compromise the reality of her experiences and her love for her son by turning them into trauma theatre.