Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Thing Around Your Neck” (2009) and xenophobic urban legends about immigrants eating pets and wild animals

In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "The Thing Around Your Neck", the title story of her 2009 short-story collection, Nigerian immigrant Akunna hears from her "uncle" what his neighbors in a town in Maine once suspected about his family: "Your uncle [...] told you how the neighbors said, a few months after he moved into his house, that the squirrels had started to disappear. They had heard that Africans ate all kinds of wild animals." I remembered this moment in Adichie's story when I heard the urban legend spread by Republican Vice Presidential candidate J. D. Vance and other xenophobic politicians that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, have been eating their neighbors' cats. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 September 2024)