This Shared Space of Africanness”: The Hair Salon as Afropolitan Heterotopia

Americanah is a diasporic novel that explicitly negotiates different Black epistemologies. While acceding to the constitutive force of an afterlife of slavery, the novel also investigates other moments of race in/as history, and it proffers other forms of Blackness: communal, diverse, Pan-African. At times, we can detect a strained but nevertheless existent notion of a feminist Pan-African solidarity, in the continental sense of the term, as well as the glimpses of a global frame for Blackness that is contingent upon the contradictory multiplicity of the diaspora. To this effect, it is worth revisiting the first chapter. Opening with the line, “Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing,” Ifemelu travels, imaginatively, to various other places on the East Coast, comparing their various odors to the unmarkedness of Princeton. She is making her way to Trenton to braid her hair because it “was unreasonable to expect a braiding salon in Princeton” (3). Ifemelu is traveling from a culturally white space, with all the privileges it entails, into a Black, feminized space, with all the difficulties it entails.
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‎The journey recounted is reminiscent of Cherríe Moraga’s Preface to This Bridge Called My Back – Writings of Radical Women of Power, a profoundly influential anthology on so-called Third World Feminism that inaugurated a crucial and ongoing paradigm shift in Anglo-American feminist theory. While Adichie has repeatedly stated that she has never read feminist theory, she might have read this text. As Ifemelu transitions from a platform where everyone is “white and lean, in short, flimsy clothes,” to a platform where
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‎most are “black people, many of them fat, in short flimsy clothes,” the reader is introduced to the “irreverent, hectoring, funny and thought-provoking” voice of her blog, a metonymic stand in for Ifemelu’s coming to race consciousness in the US (4-5). Similarly, Moraga describes the journey from “the white suburbs of Watertown, Massachusetts,” to “Black Roxbury” as her own coming-to-terms with privilege, with female and feminist desire (1981: xiii). Encapsulated in these complex realizations is the demand for a “movement that helps me make some sense of the trip from Waterford to Roxbury, from white to Black. I love women the entire way, beyond a doubt” (→Moraga 1981: xiv). Anticipated, at the end of Moraga’s journey are the contours of a hard-won, consciously established kind of sisterhood or feminist solidarity.
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‎Ifemelu’s own feminist journey does not end with her arrival in the Trenton hair salon. While her social mobility has allowed her to transcend the barriers of racialized urban space, once she finds herself among this involuntary community of predominantly Black women, Ifemelu faces other, less tangible boundaries of class, ethnicity, and nationality. During the course of her stay, Ifemelu manages to move from class condescendence to emphatic, ethical solidarity without collapsing these borders through what Chandra Mohanty criticizes as “vague assumptions of sisterhood or images of complete identification with the other” (2004: 3).
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‎Instead, the hair salon solidarity is forged despite and through vast differences, highlighting how the “most expansive and inclusive visions of feminism need to be attentive to borders while learning to transcend them” (Mohanty 2004: 2). In this, the salon becomes something of a test card for a particular Afro-feminist utopia, or, in the sense of Michel Foucault’s heterotopia, an “effectively enacted utopia” (Foucault 1986: 24). It is the kind of real and concrete space that is curiously linked to all sorts of other spaces and times while retaining a somewhat mythical timelessness and placelessness. This deceptively generic African hair salon in Trenton, New Jersey, miraculously bundles the multiple locations and temporalities of the Black Diaspora – including the current contradictions and contestations that mark the moment of Afropolitanism.
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‎The multilocality of the salon in Americanah is self-evidenced by the way it links the various routes and roots of the people inhabiting it. It also transpires through the fact that – in countless cosmopolitan cities around the world – there are spaces just like it, mapping the coordinates of the diaspora as what it truly is: “the shape of the globe” (Wright 2013: 15). It also, crucially, reveals the historicity of transnational Black culture, linking what is thought of as “traditionally African” styles with modern fashions, and rendering Afropolitanism a constellation through which both the effects of 1960s ‘Black is Beautiful’ movements and contemporary African migration become visible. While these salons aren’t new phenomena, they do bear a heightened significance in their relation to the contemporary ‘Natural Hair
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‎movement,’ as an expression of transnational Black culture. As Julie Iromuanya writes:
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‎Because the movement and its associated industry have been disseminated globally in fashion magazines, television, film, and other forms of commercial media, the Natural Hair movement is as much a political orientation and industry as it is a representation of the
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‎preeminence of global black popular culture.” (2017: 168)73
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‎As a subplot framing the novel’s primary narrative, the hair braiding salon takes on a distinct metadiegetic significance. Whilst Ifemelu’s and Obinze’s life stories unfold over decades and continents, the chronotope of the salon remains more or less unchanged, a spatiotemporal constant. The salon is described as a fairly dilapidated, crowded little shop, confirming nearly all of Ifemelu’s preconceptions:
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‎[I]t would look, she was sure, like all the other African hair braiding salons she had known: they were in a part of the city that had graffiti, dank buildings and no white people, they displayed bright signboards with names like Aisha and Fatima African Hair Braiding, they had radiators that were too hot in the winter and air conditioners that did not cool in the summer, and they were full of Francophone West African women braiders, one of whom would be the owner and speak the best English and be deferred to by the others. (9)
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‎In fact, the salon is so badly ventilated – the air sticky and thick and “seething with heat” (103) – that time itself appears to congeal and move more slowly and Ifemelu’s six-hour stay frays into a delirious, dreamlike haze. While Ifemelu’s mind wanders in and out of her memories, the literal weaving of strands converges with the weaving of narrative strands, signified in the distinctly gendered metaphor of hair. Launching the temporal porosity of the salon chronotope, hair is the Proustian madeleine that triggers Ifemelu’s memory of her mother’s hair and her Nigerian childhood. Where, before, Ifemelu had been vaguely pondering her future in Nigeria, anxiously interpreting any positive projection of Nigeria as “an augury of her return home” (13), her braider Aisha’s comment on her supposedly hard, unrelaxed hair strikes a delicate nerve and fully transports Ifemelu back to Lagos, where she “had grown up in the shadow of her mother’s hair[…], blackblack, so thick it drank two containers of relaxer at the salon” (41).
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‎Merging different “slices in time” (Foucault 1986: 26), the hair salon is open to the kind of narrative heterochrony that links the future, past, and present of Ifemelu’s life in particular, and the African or Black Diaspora in general. As a heterotopic space fusing the private and the public, the hair
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‎salon is also fully permeated by the “hidden presence of the sacred” (-Foucault 1986: 23). Here, Ifemelu remembers how her mother, caught up in fundamentalist religious fervor, had one day cut her bounteous hair off and burned it “where she burned her used sanitary pads” (41). When Ifemelu later describes how she and other Black women involved with the online natural hair movement talk about hair in quasi-religious terms, admitting that she “had never talked about God so much,” the link between femininity, religion, Blackness, and hair is further established (213).74
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‎Hair is the common denominator bringing together women from all rungs of society in a way that confronts Ifemelu with the oftentimes stifling yet cozy expectations of “shared Africanness” and her own admission of the “perverse pleasure” gained from classist self-exaltation (103). The hair salon also stages the somewhat stereotypical tensions between African American and African women, as well as the prejudices prevailing amongst different African nationalities and ethnicities, and the power imbalance behind the one white middle class customer’s “aggressively friendly” confidence and the shop owner’s submissive, immigrant eagerness (189). The same character lectures Ifemelu on the quaintness of Things Fall Apart and the aptness of Naipaul’s A Bend in the River in showing “how modern Africa works” (ibid.). Ifemelu is particularly irritated by her purported belief “that she was miraculously neutral in how she read books, while others read emotionally,” drawing up well-established battle lines between ‘Africa’ and the ‘West.’ In many ways, the hair braiding salon contains a space of conflict and contradictions, where the contours of each individual strand remain visible despite and through the ostensive harmony of the braid.
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‎The salon is also the space that allows us to glimpse diasporic pasts, presents, and futures and where, magically, a moment of true solidarity seems possible. Immediately after Ifemelu leaves the salon, she learns about Dike’s attempted suicide. While this may appear as the novel’s most tragic incident, I would argue that the preceding scene is much more emotionally rendered, and perhaps infinitely more tragic. In the beginning, Aisha hadn’t been more much more to Ifemelu than blog fodder for an imagined post on “How the Pressures of Immigrant Life Can Make You Act Crazy” (18). Aisha is rendered strange, irrevocably different and a little repulsive even with her flaming skin condition. While Ifemelu does not want to be “dragged further into Aisha’s morass,” toward the end of the braiding session she is moved to feel with and acknowledge Aisha’s plight (354).
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‎On an intellectual level, Ifemelu already understands the very concrete differences between them, including the fact that she owns a green card and financial independence whereas Aisha does not. But her overall “irritation dissolve[s]” into “a gossamered sense of kinship,” and she emotionally connects with Aisha’s fear of never seeing her sick mother again (363). Ifemelu promises to help by speaking to the Igbo boyfriend with green card
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‎papers who refuses to marry Aisha. For a moment, we are led to believe that Ifemelu will wield her personal influence in favor of a stranger. Then, however, Aunty Uju calls with the bad news about Dike, and Aisha is permanently forgotten. This fragile moment – marked by one woman’s silent collapse “into despair” and another’s inability to “get up and leave” – limns the shape of a Pan-African feminist solidarity that is yet to come (364). It remains limited to the minor cosmopolitan or Afropolitan space of the hair salon, similar to Farouq’s internet café in Open City. The novel’s rendering of the hair salon as a somewhat surreal, effectively utopian space works toward experiencing this stunted plotline as neither particularly jarring, or dissatisfying, nor morally reprehensible on Ifemelu’s part. Depending on the angle, Ifemelu has either woken from a utopian dream or awoken into the nightmare of a racist reality.
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‎The communality circumscribed in the utopian diasporic space of the hair salon also serves as a buffer to Ifemelu’s individualized success story, which could easily lend itself to the post-racial and post-feminist claims of the neoliberal subject. Already, these claims are frequently projected onto the lives of the Afropolitan, metropolitan, or “Nigerpolitan” – as Americanah dubs them – elites of post-Independence African nations. Despite the arguably fantastic element to Ifemelu’s economic success, Americanah does offer a nuanced investigation of gendered labor and the heightened, systemic vulnerability of certain bodies, particularly female and particularly Black or of color. At the same time, this vulnerability can become a condition for feminist solidarity. As a testing ground for the limits of empathy, the hair braiding salon has already provided Ifemelu with the bitter realization that some subject positions are rarely challenged in their assumptions of objective normativity, a character trait that is particularly noteworthy because Obinze had once ascribed it to Ifemelu herself. Given her propensity for “thinki[ng] everyone is like [her],” Ifemelu’s experience in racially stratified and relentlessly racializing American society is all the more insulting to her sense of selfhood (92). In her review of the novel, Ruth Franklin notes the novel’s foregrounding of Ifemelu’s potential to be “a privileged white woman who does not notice another’s agony” (2013: 42). Yet through the novel’s privileging of race and the analogy of racialization
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‎and Americanization, Ifemelu is never quite allowed that kind of ethical lapse. Without neglecting class, this view complicates the assumption made in the very first chapter, where she meets a white dreadlocked man who tells her that “black people need to get over themselves, it’s all about class now” (4). Put blandly, this view reiterates the permeability of class boundaries and the fixity of race, but it also advances this kind of truism by highlighting the mutual imbrications of race and class, their global dimension and local specificity.
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‎While it might be difficult to argue for the fact that this subtle sense of solidarity also mirrors a concretely realized sense of unity and collectivity in the present, the novel’s diasporic desire clearly anticipates this. Its generic status as both romance with and love letter to Africa speaks to its Pan-African or diasporic sensibilities, but in a way that is unmistakably gendered and anchors itself more in the present or future rather than the Black Diaspora’s painful pasts. Recalling Jameson’s contentious notion of the third world novel’s natural inclination toward national allegory, Americanah projects “a political dimension” by being not only “seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic,” but empathically so (→Jameson 1986: 69). Not only is the private political, but clearly a love story is not apolitical if the object of the love object is both a political unit and the projected antidote. In this sense, the hair braiding salon conveys con Adichie’s, and by extension Afropolitanism’s, commitment to representing the ordinary, the day-to-day, the particular normalcy of the present moment. It revisits not the exceptional historical moments of Pan-Africanism, but the quotidian encounters of humans on different historical trajectories, whose paths routinely converge and ought to affect our understanding of diaspora and Blackness.
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‎In conclusion, I want to suggest that the stark contrast between the novel’s depiction of race realism and its happy-go-lucky love story is balanced by its posing as quest romance – in which American racialization is presented as the one obstacle, the dragon Ifemelu needs to slay – and, at the same time, appears somewhat unreal, even fanciful. Positing the fallacy of race, Ifemelu’s escape from a dangerously regressive America to a race-less, futuristic Nigeria reflects the kind of Pan-African wish fulfilment that nevertheless draws attention to the very real nightmare of racialization. An only slightly different reading, however, would draw entirely different conclusions from this kind of estrangement, wielding the fictitiousness of race as proof of post-racialism or a refutation of Blackness. Moreover, the view that race and ‘politically correct’ race talk are archaic residues of the past that need to be surpassed easily obscures the fundamental role racism plays in capital accumulation. In this sense, the novel’s ambiguity could actually be read as a compromise, in keeping with what Moretti considers the “deepest vocation” of not only 19th-century novels, but literature as a whole: “forging compromises between different ideological systems” (2007: 93).
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‎Indeed, Americanah is as much an indictment of racism as it is a diasporic auto-critique. Be it Obinze’s faded infatuation with Black American culture or Ifemelu’s ill-fated romance with Obama, Americanah’s gradual “f[alling] out of love” with America suggests not only a reckoning with the pathology of racism but also with the epistemic hegemony of the Middle Passage (434). Where earlier diasporic texts, most notably Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, were able to extract a soothing balm of cultural identity from the pressures of slavery
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‎and the Middle Passage, Americanah exposes this particular Euro-Atlantic notion of tradition as a very limited model for a global Black identity. Understanding the narrative wish fulfillment of her novel as romantic,
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‎basically utopian fantasy also allows us to interpret the somewhat naïve, and perhaps even problematic notion of ending or transcending race as Adichie’s insistence that slavery is not the only coordinate en route to becoming Black. In Americanah, the most tangible legacy of slavery emerges as a system of labor, one that marks certain bodies as viable for expropriation rather than exploitation, but a system of labor nevertheless, not an epistemology, not an axiom.
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‎While the novel indeed navigates the rifts and misunderstandings between old and new diasporas, I wouldn’t go so far as to see “black Americans merely lurk in the background like expectant ghosts or persons displaced from a narrative of race they used to own,” as Chude-Sokei suggests in his reading of Americanah and other new diasporic novels (2014: 68). Instead, the novel again performs a twofold labor: On the one hand, it highlights the differences between these two groups, or at least showcases the distinctness of the African or Nigerian immigrant experience. At the same time, it also offers the kind of Pan-African historical awareness that may generate bonds beyond the limited national framework of an American Blackness. This historical awareness can also serve as a bulwark against external divisions. At one point, for example, Ifemelu counters the “simplistic comparison” behind the proposition that Africans are the better American Blacks because they don’t have all these “issues” with the simple historical fact that “[m]aybe when the African American’s father was not allowed to vote because he was black, the Ugandan’s father was running for parliament or studying at Oxford” (168). Acknowledging the difficult feat of satirizing race or provincializing the Middle Passage without trivializing their effects, the novel’s diasporic desire engenders a notion of Pan-African solidarity built to contain the Black Diaspora’s contradictions. While Adichie has recently admitted to not yet having the language to write about the deadly way racism renders people subhuman in the US, she has also stressed how Black culture began in Africa, not on the slave ship (-Adichie 2017a: 00:37:50).75 Americanah’s romantic return and Pan-African utopia implies that there is much to gain from an at least metaphorical return to Africa that does not repeatedly stage the pain of separation nor freeze in a mythical limbo but allows its contemporary voices to intervene into a hegemonic race discourse.
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