“A Bitter Americanizing”: Gendered Violence in the Aftermath of Slavery

‎Americanah is part of a discourse that diversifies notions of Blackness in the diaspora. This is what Goyal asserts when she notes that “the novel self-consciously foregrounds its own reception as a new kind of black novel, an exploration of blackness that does not highlight injury or trauma, but focuses on romantic love, hair, and nostalgia” (2014: xiv). It is, quite unequivocally, Adichie’s counterweight to “a single story” of Blackness. However, this does not mean that Adichie is not fully aware of the narrative she sets herself apart from and, in parts, rewrites to make her own. Though the mapping of US America’s racial landscape in Americanah never presents itself as an ahistorical inventory of a messy status quo, slavery appears as an irrelevant coordinate en route to Ifemelu’s Blackness – particularly because she ultimately doesn’t adopt an American Blackness but forges her own, confidently Pan-African Black identity. She nonetheless employs certain tropes and narrative strategies that suggest an engagement with the legacy of slavery. At second glance, and framed through the prominence of gender in Americanah, Ifemelu’s racialization occurs with and through a notion of femininity that is inextricably bound to slavery. In this sense, the epistemological crucible of slavery still remains a central concern for Americanah’s investigation of Blackness, albeit one that is negotiated and ultimately worked through and thus rendered a historical effect rather than an ontological conscription.
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‎Americanah bears the traces of a particular tradition of female, or as Alice Walker would call it, womanist tradition of African-American writers. 68 In the same way that “the specter of lynching” haunts diasporic writing from Richard Wright to Teju Cole, so is rape and sexual exploitation a symbol for Black oppression primarily explored by African American women writers from Harriet Jacobs and Zora Neale Hurston to Toni Morrison and Ntozake Shange. In her study on this field of writers, Reconstructing Womanhood (1987), Hazel Carby plainly states that the “institution of slavery is now widely regarded as the source of stereotypes about the black woman” (20). During an interview at the Washington Ideas Forum, Adichie noted that: “I like to say I’m happily black. […] But in this country I came to realize […] that meant something, that it came with baggage and with all of these assumptions” (Norris 2014: 00:04:34). That this baggage is historically linked to slavery is not spelled out in Americanah, but it is circumscribed in the one thing that initially causes a traumatic break with her past, namely the blunt
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‎‎commodification and sexual exploitation Ifemelu experiences in her encounter with the tennis coach.
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‎Leading up to this scene are several chapters chronicling Ifemelu’s first months in the US, echoing common tropes of immigrant fiction such as culture shock, alienation, financial and legal insecurity. Ifemelu’s later success dwarfs this kind of experience, yet we are forced to witness it with full brunt in Obinze’s failed attempt at gaining a footing in the UK. His illegal residence status ultimately condemns him to a narrative path that runs directly from cleaning toilets to being forcefully deported, crushing his hopes and dreams on the way. Ifemelu, while afforded a more secured legal status, is in turn nearly crushed by the financial weight of living and studying in the US. Because she cannot work on her student visa, she attempts to find a job with another Nigerian woman’s social security number. For fear of being found out, she then starts looking for jobs that pay cash in hand, like the job with the tennis coach and finally the babysitting employment that gets her through college. The enormous economic pressures weighing on Ifemelu cause an increasing sense of hopelessness and despair and determine her particularly precarious social position. Ifemelu’s poverty makes her socially invisible and thus acutely vulnerable. Ironically, it is through the junk mail of a credit card preapproval – a predatory loan if there ever was one – that Ifemelu at one point is made to feel more present and “a little less invisible” (132).
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‎The tennis coach is described as a short, muscly white man from the suburbs, who routinely has inner-city students travel out to him to provide sexual favors for cash. While Ifemelu describes the encounter with him as “sordid” (154), it is particularly the ruthlessly commercial nature of their exchange, his “venal” and “corrupt” air that stands out for her (143). He is, as it turns out, not simply one of “those white men she had read about, with strange tastes, who wanted women to drag a feather over their back or urinate on them” (153). He isn’t motivated by a perverse fetish, but by cold calculation, the type of man who doesn’t like to waste time and says things like “So here’s the deal,” “It’s a great gig,” or “If you want the job you can have it” (143). It is not only because Ifemelu receives money that this encounter is framed by an absolute commodification, from his “mercilessly sizing her up” to the business-like dismissal afterwards. Ifemelu decides to take the job out of utter desperation yet is determined to enter into this transaction on her own terms, applying lipstick and contemplating her personal boundaries beforehand. Once Ifemelu enters his house, she senses that none of her self-determination will change the way that the system is set up against her:
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‎The power balance was tilted in his favor, had been tilted in his favor since she walked into his house. She should leave. She stood up. “I can’t
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‎have sex,” she said. Her voice felt squeaky, unsure of itself. “I can’t have sex with you,” she repeated.
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‎”Oh no, I don’t expect you to,” he said, too quickly. She moved slowly toward the door, wondering if it was locked, if he had locked it, and then she wondered if he had a gun. (153)
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‎While fear definitely plays a role in Ifemelu’s compliance, what ultimately breaks her is the man’s complete assuredness about her acting in a certain way. It seems as though she has entered a ritualized transaction that forces her to comply with the rules of the game. While Ifemelu feels “defeated,” he already seems to know “she would stay because she had come. She was already here, already tainted” (154). Afterwards, she feels most ashamed and repulsed by the fact that her body had responded automatically. While critic Seth Cosimini interprets this as a subtle investigation of the question of consent, the way it connects with both character and story development suggests otherwise. Ifemelu experiences a pronounced disconnect between her motive will and her body. Thrice announcing her dissent (“She did not want to be here, did not want his active finger between her legs, did not want his sigh-moans in her ear”), her body nevertheless responds with a “sickening arousal,” as if it “no longer belonged to her” (154). Her body’s ‘mechanical’ reaction leaves Ifemelu feeling dehumanized and thing-like.
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‎While the scene is far from equivocal, the point is not whether her desire or consent are conflicted but that, in effect, Ifemelu suffers from this encounter. It becomes the most dehumanizing and scarring experience she makes in the US. Across the Atlantic, Obinze’s utterly negative experience in the UK equally culminates in the objectifying experience of being “removed” from the country: “That word made Obinze feel inanimate. A thing to be removed. A thing without breath and mind. A thing” (279). Yet in Ifemelu’s case, the dynamics of class, race, and gender converge in a very distinct form of objectification and vulnerability. Ifemelu finds herself in a situation where the simple fact of her body turns against her, where the commercial objectification of her body is directly linked to the way it is marked, the facade of equal transaction notwithstanding. In finding herself in the tennis coach’s house, placed in and subjected to a particular network of power, she is “already tainted.” This dynamic resembles the one Hartman describes in a discussion of a young Black girl’s pornographic photograph in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: “[H]er body was already marked by a history of sexual defilement, already branded as a commodity. Its availability to be used, to be hurt, was foundational to the prevailing set of social arrangements, in which she was formally free and vulnerable to the triple jeopardy of economic, racial, and sexual violence” (2019: 29).
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‎Ifemelu’s enhanced vulnerability as a Black woman, her multiple entanglement in what Patricia Hill Collins has coined the “matrix of domination,” leads to a complete commodification and dehumanization and poses a sustained threat to her sense of self (Hill Collins 2000: 18). While, in the larger context of Adichie’s writing, objectifications, sexualized violence, and discrimination are seen as global issues, there is a level of “sordidness” to her utter dependency that pushes Ifemelu over the edge. 69 Her strange sense of complicity and powerlessness emphasizes how Ifemelu finds herself thrust into structures that vastly exceed her range of autonomy -economic and social structures disastrously interacting with a deep and entrenched repository of stereotypes about Black womanhood.
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‎Throughout the novel, Ifemelu’s experience as a Black woman in the US ranges from blunt objectification, oversexualization, and fetishization to not being considered female at all. Various levels of visibility, invisibility, and hypervisibility combine with distinct stereotypes, all of which can be traced to “scientific” racism in general and slavery in particular. The sexualized transaction with the tennis coach most poignantly highlights the reverberations of what Adrienne Davis has termed the “sexual economy of slavery,” where legal and political arrangements “systematically expropriated black women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity for white pleasure and profit” (2002: 105). Writing about the emergence of the African American woman writer, Carby elaborates on the long lasting impact of sexualized violence under slavery. She notes that while “rape has always involved patriarchal notions of women being, at best, not entirely unwilling accomplices, if not outwardly inviting a sexual attack,” the alleged complicity of Black women in the subordination of Black men has rendered institutionalized rape a less powerful symbol for racial oppression than the spectacle of lynching (1987: 39).
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‎At the same time, the systemic rape of enslaved women occurred outside and against a notion of white Victorian womanhood, rendering these violations not only morally permissible but also literally unspeakable, as Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and its contemporaneous circulation and instrumentalization illustrate. As Ulla Haselstein notes, it is precisely the glaring contradictions emerging from the moral charges of the sentimental novel and their inapplicability to its utterly vulnerable protagonist that render Jacob’s narrative a potent indictment of slavery (2000: 133). Nevertheless, the text foregrounds its inability to adequately represent the trauma of slavery within the symbolic order of white culture by simultaneously veiling and unveiling the sexual economy of slavery (Haselstein 2000: 143). The only way that these extralegal violations could be framed, both by white women and antebellum courts, was through the perpetuation of what Saidiya Hartman identifies as the “discourse of seduction,” further obscuring “the primacy and extremity of violence in
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‎master-slave relations and in the construction of the slave as both property and person” (1996: 538).
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‎The “powerful ideological consequences” of these implicit accusations feed into common assumptions about the corruptible and corrupting sexuality of Black women, oscillating between images of lascivious Jezebels and emasculating matriarchs and reifying in studies like the infamous Moynihan report (Carby 1987: 39). It is the latter’s attempt at pathologizing African American family relations that serves as the starting point of Hortense Spillers seminal essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” from 1987. Here, Spillers explores the impacts of an anti-Black discourse routed in slavery, particularly in regard to female subjectivity. From a discussion of the mid-60s report, Spillers moves on to discuss notions of gendering and ungendering as the prelude to a “bitter Americanizing for African persons” (2003: 216). While the “quintessential ‘slave,” she notes, “is not a male but a female” (215), Spillers focuses particularly on how the “zero degree of social conceptualization” (206) that accompanies enslavement effectively eradicates gender difference, severing “the captive body from its motive will, its active desire” and turning it into totally objectified, ungendered “flesh” (2003: 67). Afro-pessimist thinkers have extensively picked up on this notion of barred subject positions, arguing that slave subjectivity exists prior to or outside of the symbolic realm. Where Frank Wilderson specifically focuses on the process of ungendering through what he calls “gratuitous violence,” I would hesitate to prematurely dispose of the category of gender in the context of racialization (Wilderson 2010: 34). Surely, Spillers’ text requires one to recognize that slavery and its aftermath render the question of African-American womanhood more vexed than it is cursorily understood. The problematizing of gender in African American family relations, she concludes, mustn’t result in the desire of “joining the ranks of gendered femaleness,” but instead might allow one to imagine “a radically different text for female empowerment” (2003: 229).
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‎In The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief, Anne Anlin Cheng notes how the “contemporary American attachment to progress and healing, eagerly anticipating a colorblind society, sidesteps the important examination of racialization: How is a racial identity secured?” (2001: 7). In many ways, Americanah is an exploration of precisely this process, and equally from the pronounced intersectional perspective that Cheng identifies in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior. In all of these texts, “reading race is a prerequisite to reading femininity […]. [They] show how femininity (what it means to be a girl) comes to acquire its social and aesthetic values under the signs of racial difference” (Cheng 2001: 19). Of course, Americanah cannot be neatly placed within a genealogy of Black feminist thought. Rather, it
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‎signals Adichie’s individual, post-independence African engagement with issues of race and gender. There is, Adichie, acknowledges, a particular coming to being (or non-being, as Afro-pessimists like Wilderson would argue) of Blackness that cannot be unhinged from slavery, and that takes on a defining centrality in the US. Yet Americanah deftly illustrates how Blackness is also affected by issues of locality, class and, above all, gender. As such, the scene signals how it is one thing to become Black in America and another to become a Black woman. The novel’s frank and realist description of Ifemelu’s particular vulnerability could be read as Adichie’s exploration of the historicity of racial and gendered scripts and the socio-economic structures keeping these histories alive.
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‎The way that Ifemelu’s experience of extreme poverty intersects with race, gender, and citizenship thus highlights the kind of distinction Nancy Fraser draws between exploitation and expropriation. Arguing against the infamous Marxist notion of “side contradictions,” or, for that matter, any political proposition that neglects an anti-racist critique in favor of a purportedly more basal critique of economic structures, Fraser warns against obfuscating “capitalism’s deep-seated entanglement with racial oppression.” She proposes a three-tier model that expands the concept of exploitation, itself a corrective to a limited model of exchange, with the historically even more obfuscated aspect of expropriation (Fraser 2016: 166). While exploitation may still operate under the guise of contractual agreements, expropriation entirely dispenses with this legal tenet, substituting contracts with conscription and confiscation. Considering the historical roots of capitalism, such as the primitive accumulation of colonialism or the unwaged labor of New World slavery, Fraser points toward the close correlation between expropriation and racial subordination that leads her to schematize this relation not only historically, but also structurally. In an interview with George Yancy she summarizes her argument as such:
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‎Capitalism harbors a deep-structural distinction, at once economic and political, between exploitation and expropriation, a distinction that coincides with “the color line.” I can also state the point in a different way: the racializing dynamics of capitalist society are crystalized in the “mark” that distinguishes free subjects of exploitation from dependent subjects of expropriation. (2016: 172)
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‎Apart from its structural entrenchedness in capitalism, Fraser identifies the ongoing legacy of slavery and colonialism mostly through its institutionalized forms such as segregation or Jim Crow, or the unequal exchange with, and unjust “structural adjustments” demanded of, post-independent African states. Without entirely unraveling this complex node of history and lived
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‎experience, her usage of the term “mark” also points toward the insidious way racialization harks back to and inhabits the body, the skin, the self: Fanon’s racial epidermal schema.
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‎When Ifemelu ‘becomes Black’ in America, it is not only, but crucially so, through an experience that couples a distinct historical with a distinct physical configuration – an experience wrought by race in/as history. It is a situation that reveals the disproportionate viability of certain bodies to expropriation, and it also expounds the problematic historicity of Black American womanhood. In sum, Americanah’s narrative emphasis on the encounter with the tennis coach scene is anything but coincidental but marks an engagement with Black American racialization from a particularly gendered perspective. Americanah’s more or less subtle investigation of Black subjectivity, as a carefully constructed exercise in intersectionality, affirms how class, gender, sexuality, and nationality all play into Ifemelu’s experience of Blackness.
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‎Although I would not want to extend the analogy too far by comparing Ifemelu’s experience to the rape of enslaved women, mapping her narrative onto Harriet Jacobs’s or suggesting that this incident signals something akin to her personal Middle Passage, I would still contend that, within the logic of the romance narrative, it indeed operates as a violent, traumatic break with her past that engenders an initial loss of self through the circling movement of racial melancholia. Crucially, however, this moment is followed by an almost cathartic route to self-affirmation and rebirth as soon as she stops trying to assimilate and confidently voices her own Africanness. Toward the end of the novel, Ifemelu finally tells Obinze about her traumatic experience. She opens with, “”I hated myself. I really hated myself. I felt like I had, I don’t know, betrayed myself’,” and concludes with the words: “I remember it, but I don’t dwell on it,” claiming that she has passed from melancholy to mourning (439).
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‎Before this is allowed to happen, however, Ifemelu experiences this “bitter Americanizing,” characterized by the loss of home, her sense of identity, and her voice. After the incident, she is unable to reach out to Obinze. In fact, Nigeria and Obinze conflate, leaving her utterly uprooted:
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‎”She no longer read the news on Nigeria.com because each headline, even the most unlikely ones, somehow reminded her of Obinze” (159). In a way, this conscious forgetting of Obinze mimics the Americanization of enslaved Africans in what Homi Bhabha has referred to as the “syntax of forgetting” inherent in nation building (2004: 160). It is precisely this traumatic break with her past that forces her to grapple with America in a way that is distinct from both the “lost” generation of immigrants, who are fighting “on the Internet over their mythologies of home, because home was now a blurred place between here and there” (117), and the flexible, young Nigerians like
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‎Dike or Ginika, who have ‘mastered’ American culture simply because it has “seeped into [their] skin” (125).
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‎Directly following her experience with the tennis coach, Ifemelu experiences her first snow, 70 announcing her ensuing depression:
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‎That night, it snowed, her first snow, and in the morning, she watched the world outside her window, the parked cars made lumpy, misshapen, by layered snow. She was bloodless, detached, floating in a world where darkness descended too soon and everyone walked around burdened by coats, and flattened by the absence of light. The days drained into one another, crisp air turning to freezing air, painful to inhale. Obinze called many times but she did not pick up her phone. She deleted his voice messages unheard and his e-mails unread, and she felt herself sinking, sinking quickly, and unable to pull herself up. (155)
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‎When she emerges from this depression, two chapters on, she has found her voice. And it is on the same day she decides to “stop faking an American accent” that she meets Blaine. Even though their paths will not cross again for years to come, Ifemelu is sure of the “significance to her meeting this man on the day she returned her voice to herself” (180). At this point, she considers herself to be better at distinguishing African Americans from other American Blacks, claiming that she has learned to detect “the fine-grained mark that culture stamps on people.” Right away, Ifemelu “knows” that Blaine is “a descendent of the black men and women who had been in America for hundreds of years” (176). Perhaps this knowledge is gained through a certain aloofness, the kind of outsider’s perspective that is perhaps the most salient aspect of the Afropolitan, that is: a subject position unencumbered by the ‘not white – not quite’ impasse, the impossible assimilation of the postcolonial or immigrant subject, but characterized instead by her own, insular sense of self that is perhaps best described as a global, Pan-African identit