Communion in "The Thing Around Your Neck"

I can often sense when an author is implying more beyond the words printed on pages between my fingers, however I’ve never known how to decipher what, exactly, the author is trying to convey. Now, after having read How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster, I have been trying to apply what I’ve learned to analyzing literature more thoroughly.

I found the chapter “Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion” in How to Read Literature Like a Professor very interesting. I’ve never been a religious person, so when I read, “whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion” (Foster, 8) I was slightly thrown off. However, as I read on, I realized that in literature, and in life, meals are indeed acts of sharing and peace. As Foster mentioned, people are very particular about whom they break bread with. 

As I was reading The Thing Around Your Neck, I noticed that when characters would share meals they would often make a connection. In the chapter “The Shivering,” after news of the plane crash, Ukamaka and Chinedu bonded not only over faith, but also over food. Eventually, Ukamaka would “wait for Chinedu to visit so she could offer him rice or pizza or spaghetti” (Adichie, 154), as if sharing meals had become a routine. Later, when Chinedu mentioned that he was fasting, Ukamaka still asked him to stay with her as she ate. For Ukamaka and Chinedu, eating together was the foundation of their friendship.

Of course, not all meals are communions and can actually foreshadow conflict. In How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster writes, “If a well-run meal or snack portends good thing for community and understanding, then the failed meal stands as a bad sign” (Foster, 11). In the chapter “The Arrangers of Marriage” of The Thing Around Your Neck, newlyweds “Dave” and Chinaza ate at the shopping mall food court. Chinaza, horrified, thought to herself, “There was something humiliatingly public, something lacking in dignity, about this place, this open space of too many tables and too much food” (Adichie,176). The setting of the meal was not intimate, not a communion, but rather made Chinaza feel more distant from her husband.