The Thing Around Your Neck

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2009

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“Ghosts”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“Ghosts” Summary

The narrator, a retired professor named James Nwoye, is trying to collect his pension check when he sees a man, Ikenna Okoro, who he knows to be dead. James first stops to talk to Vincent, James’s old driver from when James was dean of the faculty. They discuss James’s deceased wife, Ebere, and his daughter, who lives in the US. James, who the others all refer to as ‘Prof,’ buys the other men there some food, and listens to their conversation for a while before leaving. As he leaves, he sees Ikenna Okoro. Ikenna calls out to him and James tentatively greets him.

James remembers how everyone knew Ikenna, how he refused to wear a tie to lectures and kept wearing colorful tunics, how he argued for better conditions for non-academic staff at the university. James asks how Ikenna is alive, remembering that he had not escaped on July 6th, 1967, when the Nsukka campus was shelled. Ikenna tells him he got out the next day and was able to get on a Red Cross plane to Sweden; because his whole family had died, he had had no reason to return. James tells Ikenna about briefly living in the US. Ikenna asks about James’ first daughter Zik, and James tells him she died in the war. Ikenna is greatly distressed by this and tells James he did what he could. He and James discuss the war and their families, and James tells Ikenna that Ebere’s ghost visits him, but Ikenna is distressed by this. They discuss the problems with the university currently and the wider problems in the community.

James reflects on his daily activities and offers for Ikenna to come back to his house to talk, but Ikenna says he must continue on. James goes home and thinks about Ebere’s ghost. He considers his house, his memories, and his future, and sits in his study.

“Ghosts” Analysis

James and Ikenna, the two main characters of interest in “Ghosts,” show the impacts of conflict and violence on individuals. James has in many ways come to peace with the tragedies he has suffered. He credits this with the continued presence of his deceased wife, thinking while watching the news “I was not offended, not as egregiously as I would have been if Ebere did not visit” (65). Ikenna on the opposite end of the spectrum, seems desperate to justify his choices and actions after leaving Nigeria. When Ikenna begins to list everything he tried to do from abroad, James thinks that he “was not sure that Ikenna was speaking to [him]. It seemed that he was saying what he had said over and over to many people” (58). Ikenna’s apparent need to justify his decision to stay abroad shows a different form of The Immigrant Experience than has thus far been explored in The Thing Around Your Neck—one of guilt. The dichotomy between James’s and Ikenna’s reactions to memories of stress and tragedy seem to show the difference between running away from tragedy and managing it. James’s haunting by his dead wife shows a connection between him and the events and people within his life that Ikenna seems to lack.

The peace that James has achieved seems to be at least in part because of his embrace of the past. He does not try to lie to himself about what has happened, nor does he try to justify his choices or understanding of the world. He instead accepts where he is, who he has lost, and the passing of time. This is shown in his exchange with his daughter living abroad: “‘Is it a good life, Daddy?’ Nkiru has taken to asking lately on the phone, with that faint, vaguely troubling American accent. It is not good or bad, I tell her, it is simply mine. And that is what matters” (64).