BOOK REVIEWS: Americanah – Adichie

Throughout the novel, Ifemelu’s Africanness waxes through a hybrid self that troubles both essentialisms: Nigerian culture and African-American stereotypes. Author Tayie Selasi (who coined the term “Afropolitan”) describes this conflict in her 2005 essay, Bye-Bye Babar, as an “effort to understand what is ailing in Africa alongside the desire to honor what is unique.” Such a dynamic is what makes Americanah an unapologetic celebration of blackness and, more specifically, black female Afropolitanism, which finds its due representation in the authorial voice of a black female blogger.

Adichie Reviewed

Ucham & Jairos Kangira, in their 2015 study, suggest that Afropolitans must construct an identity on three levels: “national, racial, cultural — with subtle tensions in between,” as proposed by Tayie Salasi. They suggest a need for the acceptance of the cultural multiplicity depicted in the novel, in both global and local African societies. Katherine Hallemeier (2015) writes about the “function and failures of the representation of “Africa” and ‘”Africans” in Euro-America broadly and the United States specifically.” She ascertains that the advent of cyberspace has contributed to the production and consumption of debates on African identity within Anglophone literature, and that while these discussions have raised questions of class, which are central to Adichie’s novel, the text also presumes that the United States stands at the center of economic and cultural geopolitics. “Self-centeredness and self-awareness are the purview[sic] not of Americanah’s Americans, but of its Nigerians,” and the object of Adichie’s sympathy is not Nigerians, but Americans. Hallemeier surmises that Americanah is a utopic future global vision where the “United States stands as a foil to the promising future of late Nigerian capitalism.” Guarracino, in his 2014 analysis of Americanah, explores the public role of postcolonial writers, juxtaposing Ifemelu’s blog in the novel with Adichie’s media activism within the larger domain of Afropolitanism. He explicates this interlacing of fiction with social and political commentaries through the device of the blog, framing it as a “mutation of narrative forms in the information age.”

Gender in Americanah

Adichie belongs to that group of writers who are deeply aware of their ethnic history with its particularity, and in the globalized world. However, she is also a subject whose privileged position is placed at the borderlines of a highly patriarchal society in Nigeria, along with a racist society in America; and for Ifemelu, “intraracial coalition-building does not mitigate Black male dominance” (Batsa). So in Americanah, Adichie takes up the responsibility of not only representing her Nigerian community and speaking up for it but also negotiating her female subjectivity in Nigerian society. In a 2018 paper, Teteh Batsa notes that Adichie’s female Afropolitan protagonist roots for a “Pan-African” alliance with African Americans. But she does not surrender her agency as a bargain for an “alliance with men, even those obligated by bonds of race, or a shared Non-Americanness,” and enjoys a reprieve from gender discrimination.

It makes sense to read Americanah through the lens of Tayie Selasi’s concept of Afropolitanism. However, the protagonist, Ifemelu, could also be placed in Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza 1987 as a minority subject. Though other works, such as On the Postcolony, 2000-2001, by Achille Mbembe and his descriptions of “indifference,” or Homi K. Bhabha’s characterization of “ambivalence” in his book The Location of Culture, 1994, were not sufficiently found in the narrative of Americanah. Therefore, Americanah is perhaps the very definition of Afropolitanism, described succinctly as: Diversity of individual Afropolitan identities.

Adichie uses the polyvocal space of Ifemelu’s blog titled “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black,” as a rhetorical device to unpack the baggage of cultural essentialism weighing upon American and non-American blacks, which is an alternative to occupying non-hierarchical cyberspace. For example, (Adichie 187) problematizes the silencing of black migrants in the face of tight-lipped racism, which remains a major organizing principle of ‘American tribalism’, rendering race as a class in America. Ifemelu’s blog aims to provide a “safe space” to these “Zipped-up Negros” by laying bare the chasm between their personal experiences and hegemonic migrant narratives.

British-Jamaican writer Zadie Smith, in her lecture “Speaking in Tongues,” discusses the need to create languages to speak in for various environments and listeners. She begins a lecture by asking, “What does it mean when we speak in different ways to different people? Is it a sign of duplicity or the mark of a complex sensibility?” Smith also states that it would be impossible to speak in the language she used at Cambridge for the things she had to say at home to her family (Smith 2008). When Ifemelu relocates back to Nigeria, she begins writing her new blog under the title “The Small Redemptions of Lagos” (Adichie 406), and such language changes are unmistakable when she is writing from Nigeria, about Nigeria. Related to this topic is Ronke Oke’s 2019 research, which challenges the perception that Ifemelu’s return to Nigeria is counterintuitive, arguing that her decision only confirms the normative “phenomenologies” of African identity. He translates Ifemelu’s reverse migration as a counterpoint to “Afropolitanism’s emphasis on extra-continental travel.” In another research published in 2020, Razinat Talatu Mohammed (2020) presents “Afropolitan literature as a minority discourse in contemporary African literature,” arguing that the shift in the diasporic identities is “imposed” on migrants. While in Nigeria, Ifemelu’s sense of anger, is replaced by sadness; and the persistent sharpness of expression with agitation, which comes from a sense of alienation in America, mellows down to a sense of rendezvous and beauty, “She was at peace: to be home, to be writing her blog, to have discovered Lagos again. She had, finally, spun herself fully into being” (461). Here, Ifemelu’s African identity does not fully align with Mbembe’s idea of Afropolitanism, who writes that “Insofar as African states are total inventions, and recent ones at that, strictly speaking, there is nothing in their essential nature that can force us to worship them.” While Ifemelu is unapologetically critical of the unjust norms in her society, she is also certainly in love with it.

Written by: Sidra Ali Shah