‎”True from Experience”: Reception and the Realness of Racialization

‎Writing about the 19th-century realist novel in The Bourgeois, Franco Moretti argues that “description as a form was not neutral at all: its effect was to inscribe the present so deeply in the past that alternatives became simply unimaginable” (93). One could argue that Americanah employs realism in an effort to document the facticity and pervasiveness of race in/as history and counters its grip by resorting to romantic flights of fancy. Yet this neat binary
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‎would obscure the novel’s self-aware acknowledgment that realism, like reality or history, is far from neutral but always preordains a certain viewpoint or positionality. Clearly, serious tensions arise when this kind of relativism rubs against the hard realities of racism. That this is a central concern for the novel can be seen in two distinct scenes, one set in supposedly Cool Britannia, the other in the US at the cusp of the Obama era.
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‎Shortly before he will be deported, Americanah’s second protagonist Obinze experiences a moment of racial splitting, or double consciousness, that interpellates him as an index of the causal course of history and, at the same time, conscripts him into the ontological timelessness of the racialized, eternal ‘other.’ On a train to Essex, Obinze finds himself travelling in, but not part of, a group of Nigerians. All of a sudden and only “for a moment,” he perceives the “unfettered non-white foreignness of this scene through the suspicious eyes of the white woman on the tube” (259).
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‎As an instance of racialization, this scene recalls the often-quoted passage in Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness,” where he discovers his “blackness, [his] ethnic characteristics” and “above all historicity,” becoming “responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors […]. [B]attered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin'” (2008: 84-85). As Bhabha describes it in The Location of Culture, Fanon’s phenomenological performance illustrates what it means: “To be amongst those whose very presence is both ‘overlooked’ – in the double sense of social surveillance and psychic disavowal – and, at the same time, overdetermined – psychically projected, made stereotypical and symptomatic” (2004: 339). Obinze’s realization in Americanah is ominously contextualized with a reflection on how a xenophobic headline in the woman’s evening newspaper is “echoed” not only by so many others like it, but also by “the radio and television, even the chatter of some of the men in the warehouse”:
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‎The wind blowing across the British Isles was odorous with fear of asylum seekers […], as though the writers lived in a world in which the present was unconnected to the past, and they had never considered this to be the normal course of history: the influx into Britain of black and brown people from countries created by Britain. (258-259, emphasis added)
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‎Seeing himself through the eyes of a woman who most likely perceives him as a threat, Obinze becomes a marker of “non-white foreignness,” his identity reduced to both a group and a historical moment that are, curiously so, overdetermined by history and at the same time not historicized at all. Obinze knows that the influx of Black and brown people, if not even the very
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‎existence of these racialized others, is a historical fact made by Britain. Yet what appears to be a simple fact of history, indeed its “normal course,” is a disruptive anomaly to those who seem to live “in a world in which the present was unconnected to the past.” As Gilroy writes in Postcolonial Melancholia (also published as After Empire):
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‎The immigrant is now here because Britain, Europe, was once out there; that basic fact of global history is not usually deniable. And yet its grudging recognition provides a stimulus for forms of hostility rooted in the associated realization that today’s unwanted settlers carry all the ambivalence of empire with them. […] Indeed, the incomers may be unwanted and feared precisely because they are the unwitting bearers of the imperial and colonial past. (2005: 100)
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‎This strange coupling of known unknowns, of conscious disavowal, or active forgetting, is not easily parsed. Yet it speaks to exactly the temporal conscription that Obinze experiences, who is an “unwitting bearer” of both too much and not enough history. For Gilroy, that sense of historical disruption rather than continuity, and the manner in which this is connected to the immigrant body, bespeaks Britain’s “inability to disentangle the disruptive results supposedly produced by an immigrant presence from the residual but potent effects of lingering but usually unspoken colonial relationships and imperial fantasies (Gilroy 2005: 100). Attached instead to a fantasy of lost imperial greatness, expressed by postcolonial melancholia, Britain is unable to connect the causal effects of this complicated past to the present moment. Rather than work through the complexities and ambiguities of Britain’s colonial past, as Gilroy notes, “that unsettling history
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‎was diminished, denied, and then, if possible, actively forgotten” (2005: 90). This scene also conveys that there are two incompatible metahistorical views on Britain’s present and that Obinze is able to glimpse both by seeing himself through the eyes of the white woman – a classic example of double consciousness. The notion of fundamentally different, yet parallel historical timelines – one a liberal notion of history as progress that may also entail an active forgetting, the other a more pessimist notion of deadlock or constant return – is also encapsulated in the novel’s rendering of the Obama election.
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‎Here, the novel’s particular use of realism also comes to the fore. In a 2017 article, scholar Alexander Manshel invokes the genre of the “recent historical novel,” describing it as a “literary phenomenon invested in the very near-term process of making historical memory” (2017: 1). Among the most conventional historical events recently fictionalized, he lists “9/11 and its aftermath, […] the 2008 financial crisis […], and even the early career, election, and inauguration of Barack Obama,” citing Americanah as an example for the latter (ibid.). One distinct feature of the recent historical
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‎novel, according to Manshel, is its preoccupation with contemporary “news and its narrative” not merely as “mediating experience” but as actually “constituting experience entirely” (2017: 6). In contrast, albeit clearly indebted to literary postmodernism’s concerns with mediation, these novels express neither “jest” nor “bemusement,” but rather a “deep uncertainty about the limits of historical experience in the context of contemporary media saturation” (ibid.).
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‎Americanah does reflect on contemporaneous news and media cycles in the context of Obama’s election campaign. Here, it becomes particularly interesting how the novel relates its most prevalent example of mediality, its formal and thematic engagement with the blogosphere of the late 2000s, to the news coverage of more established, mainstream media. Analogous to her relationship with African American Yale professor Blaine, the protagonist Ifemelu’s excitement over the post-racial promise of Obama’s presidency eventually sours. His election is depicted as a highly mediated and communal event: MSNBC’s live coverage interspersed with comments of Blaine’s friends and a text message from Ifemelu’s Cousin Dike: “I can’t believe it. My President is black like me” (360). At this particular point in time, Ifemelu’s romance with America and Blaine appears intact – we are told that “there was, at this moment, nothing that was more beautiful to her than America” (361). Yet her disenchantment with both is already anticipated when, leading up to the election, Ifemelu scours the internet “seeking information and reassurance” and inevitably finds the blunt racism of the chat rooms. The crude and violent comments on Obama, written “under monikers like SuburbanMom231 and Norman Rockwell Rocks” (354), upset Ifemelu to the point of tears and make her successful race blog “feel inconsequential, a comedy of manners, a mild satire about a world that was anything but mild” (354).
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‎The parallel media world of the chat rooms entirely undermines the surface glamour of, for example, MSNBC’s official news coverage, its “searing, sparkling liberal rage” (360), thus conveying another, uglier and ostensibly more realistic image of America. 65 In its representation of the mediation of Obama’s election, the novel aspires to impart something of a realist truth about the US that differs from the “ironic nothingness” its characters find in “contemporary American fiction” (256). As – Manshel distinguishes the recent historical novel’s relation to postmodern fiction, “mediation here smacks less of simulacrum than of a particularly contemporary form of realism” (2017: 6).
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‎In the context of the narrative, Obama’s election, a symbol of hope and liberal progress not merely for the US but for a wider global and diasporic imaginary, becomes the lifeline for a relationship that is destined to fail. Thus, while Manshel cites “the narrative satisfaction of historical telos” (2017: 11) as a key feature of the recent historical novel, Americanah also
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‎employs the melancholic historicism tethered to Obama’s presidency – the realization that it does not symbolize progress but stagnation and constant return. Here, realism really pertains to the realness of racism, as a true representation of a messy status quo too easily overlooked, glossed over, or disavowed.
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‎How does this connect to the novel’s reception? In a widely cited New York Magazine review, Kathryn Schulz credits the novel’s appeal to how, rather than serving as an “exotic” window into Nigeria or the immigrant experience, it “endotically” reflects back cultural idiosyncrasies to US-American readers (2013: para. 8). That being said, the novel clearly ‘does’ different things for differently positioned audiences. When Ifemelu tells her effusively sensitive white employer Kimberly, “You know, you can just say ‘black.’ Not every black person is beautiful,” this frankness is described as “the moment they became, truly, friends” (Americanah 147). One wonders how much of the mainstream appeal of the novel relied on the perceived taboo breach of bluntly looking at US race relations from the perspective of a purportedly removed yet participating observer: A Non-American Black who doesn’t take racism quite so personally. Or, as one character notes about Ifemelu: “She’s writing from the outside. She doesn’t feel all the stuff she’s writing about” (336).
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‎Another poignant example of the novel’s self-conscious exploration of parallel worldviews is the scene of the dinner party that Ifemelu attends with Blaine, where she accuses another guest, a stylish Haitian poet, of merely professing colorblindness in order “to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable” (291). A little drunk, feeling “overpowered” by words tumbling out of her mouth, Ifemelu exposes the “lie that race is not an issue,” sharing what she knows to be “true […] from experience.” The other dinner guests, of whom an aging white man had just confessed his belief that “Obama will end racism” in the US, appear to be strangely fascinated by Ifemelu’s candor. Sensing the kind of contained taboo break that makes for unforgettable dinner parties, they keep “their eyes on Ifemelu as though she was about to give up a salacious secret that would both titillate and implicate them” (291). That this level of reception is already folded back into the narrative seems to speak to the fact that Americanah indeed is this carefully crafted genre picture of contemporary American society, and that Adichie is well aware of the potential effects its content may have on certain readerships. I would argue that the novel provides an informed glimpse into these parallel worldviews but also allows itself to be received as “a mild satire about a world that was anything but mild.” It is able to hold a slightly satirical mirror to differently positioned audiences without seriously offending any one of them, while also offering somewhat cathartic moments that purportedly cut through the charade.
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‎In this sense, the novel’s performative labor of ‘giving voice to’ or ‘unveiling’ uncomfortable truths relays another function of its (race) realism. For example, in “The Strange Familiar: Structure, Infrastructure, and Adichie’s Americanah,” Caroline Levine focuses on the defamiliarizingly realist descriptions of structural racism and infrastructural electricity, showing how the novel utilizes “longstanding realist traditions” in order to render strange or noteworthy what is commonly taken for granted or disavowed (2015: 588). Here, she follows an understanding of realism as not only reaffirming and reifying (predominantly of bourgeois social structures), but as also potentially startling and alienating. She writes: “Does description confirm the old or introduce the new? At its best, I will argue, it does both: it asks us to perceive anew what we thought we already knew but did not perceive well enough” (Levine 2015: 589).
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‎In order to analyze the intricate layering and complex relations of social structures and their straightforward and familiar ubiquity, Levine advocates “a descriptive and defamiliarizing alertness” and finds this in Americanah’s prose, its avowed dedication to render concrete and authentic what it sees elsewhere obscured. Certainly, the novel seems to foreground its opposition to obscurity – be it the opaqueness of academic jargon, the linguistic acrobatics of highbrow literature, religious bigotry, political correctness, or the moral bankruptcy of the postcolonial state – in the form of its outspoken and plainspoken protagonist Ifemelu.
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‎Yet while conscious of the way privilege makes certain structures “easy to naturalize or take for granted to those who are benefiting from them” (2015: 600), Levine’s argument – at least where it pertains to Americanah’s ability to render racism strange – seems to rest on very similar assumptions. Indeed, the entire premise of defamiliarization works only for those who can actually be startled into recognizing the ubiquity of racism, thus suggesting the privilege of considering oneself an unmarked norm. Interestingly, Levine draws on two passages from classical realist texts, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to show their alignment with Americanah’s prose, their particular rendering “unusual” and noteworthy of what is otherwise habitual. However, the passage Levine selects from Bleak House is striking in more ways than Levine suggests. For her, it exemplifies Dickens’s interest in making “the ordinary feel shocking but also to make shocking the fact that it feels ordinary” (Levine 2015: 591). Levine quotes the passage in which the narrator presents the death of crossing-sweeper Jo as resulting from poverty. This poverty, in turn, is proffered as a wider effect of social neglect, embodied, in this case, by Mrs. Jellyby. While not commented upon by Levine, Mrs. Jellyby is satirized in Bleak House as an philanthropist wholly consumed with “Africa” and engaged in numerous charitable activities that channel her wealth and attention away from her immediate surroundings and into this “Telescopic Philanthropy. “66 The
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‎passage quoted by Levine, its musings on how Jo isn’t “a genuine foreign-grown savage; he is the ordinary home-made article,” marked by filth, parasites, sores, and “native ignorance, the growth of English soil and climate,” does not only code the “homely” as the overlooked habitual, as → Levine claims (2015: 591). It also permits a fairly obvious, and much more troubling, double meaning.
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‎To the reader intimately familiar with racialization, colonialism, or indeed with the not only Victorian habit of racializing the poor, this passage conveys more than a meditation on the ordinariness of tragedy and indeed communicates an all too familiar logic which – not despite, but precisely because of its ordinariness – never ceases to make “the ordinary feel shocking.” As with Levine’s notion of racism defamiliarized by Americanah, it begs the question of who is allowed to become habituated, willfully or ignorantly so, and who is forced to repeatedly experience the habitual return of the same old. But perhaps this is exactly Levine’s point, as she lauds the way that “Ifemelu’s bluntness about the ordinariness of race and racism repeatedly startles white Americans out of their usual responses” (594). Her reading of the novel indeed illuminates the way Americanah tackles the parochialism of American race discourse, “endotically” reflecting back to a white liberal audience. But in its blind spots, Levine’s reading also reveals the very double-faced nature of the novel. Levine rightly notes how the novel sets out to voice uncomfortable truths, yet it is more or less up to the reader to determine which kind of notions are able to “jolt […] us into a new alertness to a world we thought we knew” (603) and which represent blatantly obvious social facts, knowable to anyone, constantly endured by some. Put differently, what enables one to see the overt racism or blunt race talk engendered by the era of Obama as progressive change and who is left see a still ugly present, inseparably tethered to the past? Such is the ambiguity of these conflicting levels or ambitions in the novel that even Levine’s nuanced appraisal of the novel’s defamiliarizing realism may convey the very myopia that the novel purportedly heals.
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‎It is important to understand that Americanah is not merely positioned toward a liberal, white audience – even though it seems to specifically touch a nerve here – but is also celebrated and claimed by a wider diasporic or Pan-African imaginary, for example when the indelible Binyavanga Wainaina blurbs Americanah as “the Africa of our future. Sublime, powerful and the most political of [Adichie’s] novels.” Perhaps it is the politics of voicing and thus confirming everyday racism that draws particularly Black audiences to the novel and that also feeds into the celebration of Adichie as an
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‎”intellectual rock star” (Msimang 2017: para. 12).67 In this sense, the novel’s ‘truth telling’ also appears to hold a cathartic promise for Black audiences. Yet its positioning as a ‘Black novel’ for a Black audience can be best understood in its negotiation of the category of Blackness itself, as an
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‎account by a Non-American Black claiming a Blackness apart from a hegemonic American history.
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