Independent Women Romance, Return, and Pan-African Feminism in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

‎”Since I must not all the same allow you to look at the future through rose coloured glasses, you should know that what is arising, what one has not yet seen to its final consequences […] is racism, about which you have yet to hear the last word. Voilà!”
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‎Jacques Lacan
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‎”The desire of the text (the desire of reading) is hence desire for the end, but desire for the end reached only through the at least minimally complicated detour, the intentional deviance, in tension, which is the plot of narrative.”
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‎Peter Brooks
‎: Not That Kind of #BlackGirlMagic?
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‎What presents itself as a subtle balancing act in Open City emerges more formally and overtly in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s best-selling novel Americanah (2013). Here, the ability or desire to voice the different ways in which members of the Black Diaspora view “history through skin color”
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‎(Forna) extends well beyond the novel’s themes and also manifests itself in the manner in which the novel appears to straddle two ostensibly opposed genres at once, rendering it a soothingly utopian romance that also aspires to “gritty,” real-life realism. Americanah spans three continents and is set at various locations in Nigeria, England, and the US. It follows the lives of high school sweethearts Ifemelu and Obinze, who, unsatisfied with the dismal situation under Nigerian military rule, make their way to the American East Coast and London, respectively. After undergoing quite different immigrant experiences, both eventually return to Lagos. Told predominantly from the perspective of Ifemelu, who has only recently made the decision to return and nurtures the hope of reuniting with the now estranged Obinze, most of the novel’s seven parts are told in flashbacks that trace her initial difficulties and then steady success in the US. Inserted into the otherwise plot-driven and decidedly romantic narrative are several short passages that tackle the subject of US-American racism from the perspective of an African immigrant and are taken from Ifemelu’s successful blog Raceteenth – or Various
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‎Observations About American Blacks (Those formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black.
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‎This chapter argues that Adichie’s novel is highly conscious of how these different positionalities may be pitted against each other and that its depictions of uneasy intradiasporic encounters in deeply racist US-America are ultimately offset by its Pan-African aspirations. While most commentators have read Americanah as a contemporary realist novel, it also historicizes several impactful periods, such as a post-independence Nigeria under military rule, the postcolonial melancholia of pre-Brexit Britain, and, crucially, Barack Obama’s election in the US. The novel paints the Afropolitan moment as precisely this split or potential turn, and it does so by deftly handling temporal devices such as memory, foreshadowing, and the nostalgic yet future-oriented thrust of romance, while reflecting on the multitemporality and historicity of race and racialization. Likewise, I would argue that much of the novel’s ambivalence – and its success – lies in the way that it aims to be both gritty and real, and fancifully romantic. Couching realism in romance allows the novel to signify doubly, as in contradictorily, and to signify both, as in the ‘absent-presence’ or ‘not yet’ of utopia.
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‎The novel’s peculiar, double-faced nature also crucially affects the level of reception, as it effectively addresses particularly broad yet differently positioned audiences. By far the most popular novel discussed in this study, the key to its success may lie in its ability to signify strongly – if multiply, 62 Like any text, the novel does not allow unequivocal readings, even though it offers the right amount of accessibility for readers to engage easily, and the right amount of ambiguity to address many. While inseparably linked, these attributes may equally befit its author, who has developed an almost brand-like persona in public discourse. Prior to Americanah’s publication, Adichie had already received numerous accolades with her novels Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), as well as regularly publishing short stories in publications such as Granta or the New York Times Magazine, many of which were collected in The Thing Around Your Neck (2009). Following the publication of Americanah, and ever since Beyoncé sampled parts of Adichie’s TED Talk We Should All Be Feminists on her eponymous album later that year, Adichie morphed from popular writer to pop icon.
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‎Today, it seems as though she has organically grown into the role of the world-famous writer of whom many people might have heard (even if they have never read her), who is both asked to comment on international politics and lauded for her fashion sense, and whose whimsically illustrated quotes circulate the web in meme-like manner. Yet, without discrediting any of her literary and/or cultural achievements, there is certainly more to her fast ascent and fame than mere merits. Many, if not all of these commentaries and quotes relate to issues of race and gender, and this also reveals the
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‎discursive realm in which both her status as literary writer and her role as a public intellectual most strongly overlap.
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‎It is probably safe to say that, particularly among a younger demographic, Adichie is the most popular African writer living today. And this is probably not due to the fact that she is repeatedly dubbed as Chinua Achebe’s heir, but because she is actually not like him, that she embodies a new, female, and glamourous generation of African writers apart from eminent forefathers like Soyinka, Achebe, Ngũgĩ, or Farrah. In a way, Adichie is the poster child of the agency and autonomy associated with both Afropolitanism and what some call either third-wave pop-feminism or neoliberal post-feminism; she is the perfect (post-)independent woman writer. While, as Sisonke Msimang writes in “All Your Faves are Problematic,” Adichie occupied “a unique place in contemporary black women’s thought and literature for at least a decade before the phrase black girl magic was coined as a hashtag,” her rise to celebrity cannot be tethered from an era in which this hashtag has become “the motto for a new generation’s struggle for recognition and self-love” (2017: para. 6).
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‎As a popular representation of #BlackGirlMagic, Adichie has become a spokesperson for a range of contemporary feminist issues, along with the potential pitfalls that accompany such discourses. When Adichie attracted heavy criticism for her comments on trans women, Msimang wrote a takedown not necessarily of her, but of what she called the “trap of #blackgirlmagic.” For the purpose of my argument, articles like “All Your Faves are Problematic” are less instructive on the specific dynamics of fan idealization or call-out-culture but indeed reveal how much Adichie has become not only a global or African, but a specifically Black feminist icon. As Msimang writes:
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‎Adichie is African of course, but because she began writing in a world that was more global than it had ever been, because she traveled so frequently between Nigeria and America, she was easily claimed as a member of a much larger global African diaspora. She may technically belong to two countries, but she is collectively seen as a daughter or a sister to Black people in a broader sense. (2017: para. 7)
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‎Yet Adichie was able to simultaneously signify something entirely different, too, allowing for multiple projections, as all highly visible figures do. While, on the one hand, Adichie’s achievements were tagged with #BlackGirlMagic and her novels filed under “Black Woman Writers” reading lists, she was also able to signify as not Black, or at least as not that Black, and as disassociated from Blackness. 63 How was she able to signify both? For one, Adichie’s coming to fame in the moment of Afropolitanism is marked by this moment’s ambiguity, signaling both an alleged post-racialism and an intense
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‎re-signifcation of political Blackness. As such, the novel must be placed within a literary context that functions “as a space to explore the contradictions and paradoxes of race in a putatively ‘post-racial’ age” (Schur 2013: 252).
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‎On the other hand, Adichie’s novel demonstrates what Goyal calls “a new discourse about race being conducted in African novels” – yet an additional or supplementary one, rather than one that advances a usurping or disassociated kind of Blackness (Goyal 2014: xvii). Placing this discourse “alongside the frame of the black Atlantic” rather than above it means being attentive to the manner Adichie conducts her investigations of intradiasporic difference or intra-racial divides in Americanah. It means asking for a level of nuance that is usually not employed by post-racial pundits or those inclined to stress diasporic rifts, fissures, or an Afropolitan divestment of Blackness. With her protagonist Ifemelu, Adichie shares the often-quoted narrative of becoming Black in America, of not considering herself Black in her home country Nigeria and ‘not getting’ the concept of race. Yet if one views the novel through the lens of its popular reception, particularly in respect to how the author and protagonist tend to be conflated, that narrative is surprisingly often truncated in editorials on Americanah and interviews with the author, rendering it a static truism rather than the dynamic process Adichie goes on to describe. While Adichie in fact historicizes and ‘provincializes’ a hegemonic, Euro-Atlantic notion of Blackness, many commentators ignore the latter part of the narrative and somewhat eagerly latch onto the notion of Adichie simply rejecting an overblown American race discourse.
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‎In one of her earliest non-fiction texts on race in the US, a Washington Times opinion piece from 2008, Adichie describes her unease at being called “sister” in a Brooklyn store. Having recently come from Nigeria, a country that may have been colonialized, but, as Adichie quips, thanks to its mosquitos never experienced the racial hierarchy of a settler colony, race had remained an “exotic abstraction” to her, something of a fiction: “It was Kunta Kinte,” – Adichie writes, followed by the candid reflection: “To be called ‘sister’ was to be black, and blackness was the very bottom of America’s pecking order. I did not want to be black” (2008: para. 2). She then goes on to recount an almost Fanonian moment of being interpellated by a little white boy: “‘She’s black,’ he said to his mother and stared silently at me before going back upstairs. I laughed stupidly, perhaps to deflate the tension, but I was angry” (Adichie 2008: para. 3). Following this personal exposition, Adichie snidely dissects the different deflecting attitudes toward racism that represent “how mainstream America talks about blackness” (para. 5).
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‎However, in the same way that Adichie’s narrative of ‘coming to America’ goes beyond the mere bewilderment at an obtusely coded racial discourse
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‎ the ‘foreignness’ of race as outdated ideology, so does Americanah reflect a much more complex coming to terms with, rejecting, and embracing of different notions of Blackness. Like Ifemelu, Adichie has eventually learned to be Black. This ‘learning of Blackness,’ however, is represented quite differently in the novel. For one, it is book knowledge, such as Ifemelu devouring The Fire This Time and then “every James Baldwin title on the shelf” (Americanah 135). At other times, it is lived, and actually quite intensely felt experience, angering or frustrating Ifemelu in a similar way to – Adichie’s memory of the little boy – a truly primal scene. In a 2013 interview, Adichie expands on how, eventually, her “resentment turned to acceptance”:
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‎I read a lot of African American history. And if I had to choose a group of people whose collective story I most admire today, then it would be African Americans. The resilience and grace that many African Americans brought to a brutal and dehumanizing history is very moving to me. Sometimes race enrages me, sometimes it amuses me, sometimes it puzzles me. I’m now happily black and now don’t mind being called a sister, but I do think that there are many ways of being black. (-Segal 2013: para. 25)
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‎In Americanah, the journey from rejection to nuanced celebration of Black consciousness is spurred by a certain diasporic desire, a Pan-African subtext marked by varying degrees of over- and dis-identification. Generally, while Americanah offers plenty of scenes that illustrate the irritating and harmful effects of racism in a majority-white society, there are just as many that highlight the uneasy negotiations between diasporic identities of old and new, where racial solidarity and imagined community are measured with the finely calibrated scales of class and gender. Ifemelu feels hurt when she is accused of not feeling “the stuff she’s writing about,” and she senses disdain toward her “Africanness,” apparently rendering her “not sufficiently furious” (345). And, when confronted with the earnest zeal of her Black American partner Blaine, she drifts toward a francophone African scholar named Boubacar, with whom she shares a playful condescension for American culture, while sensing Blaine’s resentment at “this mutuality, something primally African from which he felt excluded” (340). However, as a self-identified Non-American Black, Ifemelu does employ Blackness as grounds for solidarity, even though she eschews both the somewhat outdated Pan-African scripts of old and the linear spatiotemporal trajectory of a Middle Passage that eclipses Africa.
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‎Instead, the novel develops the notion of denaturalized, historically contingent Black identities – in Ifemelu’s case an African and Black identity -that are more akin to Stuart Hall’s notion of cultural identity as a “matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being.” In “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” – Hall
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‎famously stresses the necessary historicity of cultural identities while drawing attention to the way they are articulated and developed apropos historical constellations (1994: 394). This dynamic process is performed both by Adichie and Americanah, but because it is mediated differently, it is also important to distinguish the levels and modes through which this “continuous ‘play’ of history, culture, and power” is articulated in the historical constellation of Afropolitanism (Hall 1994: 394).
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