You Can’t Write an Honest Novel About Race in This Country

Reading for Race
‎
‎Both in terms of style and content, the Washington Times opinion piece resembles Ifemelu’s successful race blog in Americanah. Here, Ifemelu satirizes her initiation into America’s racial order in a blog post titled “To My Fellow Non-American Blacks: In America, You Are Black, Baby” (220). She recounts her bewilderment at an almost indecipherable code – where being asked whether one likes watermelon becomes a covert insult – while admitting to the difficulties of either representing race for Black Americans or talking about race with white liberals or white conservatives. “If possible, make it funny,” she advises the reader (221). This tongue-in-cheek pitch of Ifemelu’s witty blog posts, her equal puzzlement at the notion of offensiveness, liberal sensitivities, and conservative aggression, is perhaps what commentators have often lauded as being so “refreshing,” “eye opening,” and “non-didactic” about the novel – as if Americanah were in fact a humorous blog or a sociological study on race relations in the US. Eva Rask Knudsen and Ulla Rahbek’s interpretation of Americanah, “A Complex Weave,” draws much of its critical content from reading the blog as performed authorship. The authors posit that both Adichie’s and the character Ifemelu’s “pose and prose” can be identified as characteristic of “an Afropolitan demeanour […] that takes a point of departure in the human rather that the ideological aspects of the twenty-first-century African experience in the diaspora” (Knudsen and Rahbeck 2016: 240). This leap of first conflating author and protagonist and then deducting the ontological status of Afropolitanism from these authors’ textual engagements is meant to stress the political and potentially radical purport of digital Afropolitanism. Their claim is that, while Adichie’s novel is inherently political (the authors point out the political dimensions of its major themes hair and love), the novel’s blog is explicitly so, and thus merely a smaller, fictionalized version of Adichie’s self-avowed desire to write a “gritty, taken-from-real-life book […] about race” (Mesure 2013: para. 10).
‎
‎It is surely a delicate act to read Americanah through this lens without reducing it to the ‘race novel’ as which it has been hailed. Indeed, more so than her earlier novels, Americanah partakes in a global conversation on race
‎

‎and the African signifier. In terms of geographical scope, there is an obvious shift from her decidedly national fiction to this transnational novel, even though her short stories and her earlier novels set in Nigeria already signify the Black Diaspora. 64 Thinking through both the significance and the limitations of reading Americanah through race, Goyal writes: “[N]ovels like Americanah are often held to a different standard and required to be ethnography or a sign of resistance, and aesthetic questions are too easily suppressed in favor of expected modes of reading through a rather simple political lens” (2014: xvii). Generally, although race and diaspora are predominant topoi in Americanah, we cannot for example read the blog as sociological testimony to this. This is what Goyal suggests when she notes that, in order to “assess the novel’s realism as a craft, and not simply a given,” it is imperative to distinguish “between the claims of the race blog and those of the narrative itself” (2014: xiii). There is a certain compulsory bluntness, as well as a generic limitation to the blog that the novel both utilizes and navigates.
‎
‎The blog posts are inserted at various points in the narrative, sometimes complementing the action, at other times appearing more random. They are set apart from the main narrative not only typographically, but also in terms of style, embodying the “irreverent, hectoring, funny and thought-provoking voice” her readers have praised. While the function of the race blog’s accompanying and oftentimes commenting on her life could perhaps be compared to that of a choir, the blog is also theatrical in another sense. There is an unequivocal element of performativity to the blog posts, with their frequent use of ad spectatores, rhetorical questions, and an acute awareness of the audience, that culminates in Ifemelu’s feelings of paranoid stage fright and nakedness, of identity layers peeling away. The blog’s most vocal critic is surely Blaine, who accuses it of lacking depth and political zeal (345). But already with the opening chapter, the reader is told how Ifemelu herself is unsatisfied with the way her celebrated race blog has developed. At this point, she has already sold it and remembers how, anxious to impress her ever-growing readership, she had “began, over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the carcasses of people’s stories for something she could use. Sometimes making fragile links to race. Sometimes not believing herself. The more she wrote, the less sure she became. Each post scraped off yet one more scale of self until she felt naked and false” (5).
‎
‎Where the blog only feigns self-assuredness, the novel’s tone is notably poised and confident in its straight-forward realism, displaying an emphatically clear style, an impression heightened by the fact that the main protagonists Ifemelu and Obinze repeatedly fret about misinterpreted, one-sided, or otherwise warped communication, particularly via technology. While mulling over a love interest’s email or text message certainly makes for a good romantic plot device, this kind of exploration of the limits and levels
‎

‎of written communication is noteworthy in a novel whose prose, according to the author, aspires to Orwell’s dictum of being “like a windowpane” and whose main protagonist and author hold a degree in communications (Smith 2014: 00:14:54).
‎
‎I would argue that Ifemelu’s self-conscious doubts concerning the performativity of the race blog are negotiated through recourse to other, ostensibly more ‘authentic’ or meaningful literary genres. The various notions of literariness exercised in Americanah are striking, as pronounced distinctions are made in respect to newer communicative forms such as the blog post, the email, the text message and the either more enduring or simply more personal reading experience of novels and poetry. An example of this self-reflective meditation on authenticity, literary genre, and form is the scene of Ifemelu and Blaine’s initial encounter. Having only just decided “to stop faking an American accent” (173), Ifemelu feels confident and “truly” like herself when she meets the handsome African American Yale professor on a short train ride to Massachusetts. They instantly lapse into a mild flirtation, with Ifemelu holding forth, somewhat flippantly, about academese-speaking academics “who don’t really know what’s happening in the real world” and Blaine replying: “That’s a pretty strong opinion.” “I don’t know how to have any other kind”, Ifemelu retorts (179). During their brief encounter, she also experiences a bout of self-consciousness when she watches him reading a hardcover and the New York Times, while she is reading a glossy women’s magazine. Suddenly, she feels the “unreasonable urge to tell him how much she loved the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa” (178).
‎
‎Although the novel offers much critique of the kind of intellectual sparring and cultural cachet that attaches itself to some texts and not others, poetry does play a significant role in Ifemelu’s coming of age narrative. While the course of the narrative suggests that Ifemelu is also evolving as a writer, the final incarnation of her blog garners the highest praise when someone, possibly Obinze, comments that a blog post reads “like poetry” (474). Apropos the deliberate forthrightness of the blog, the bluntness of strong opinions, and the ostensive immediacy and authenticity of realist prose, Americanah, it seems, also advocates for the circumspectness of poetry. The poet Komunyakaa himself has commented on the necessary indirectness of his work: “Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It’s a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full-frontal assault” (2000: 135). Like Ifemelu reading a women’s magazine while actually thinking about and eventually writing like poetry, the novel also somewhat defiantly adopts the libidinal economy and glossy surface of romantic genre fiction while suggesting that there is some kind of ‘real’ poetic truth beneath the surface.
‎
‎Accordingly, I would also argue that Americanah’s most profound meditations on race do not occur through the bluntness of the blog, but
‎

‎through the medium of genre. Or, more accurately, the key to understanding the novel’s treatment of the Black Diaspora lies in the way these themes are embedded in, or strategically deployed through, genre. In this approach, I follow Goyal’s reminder that to “assume that genre is not pertinent to the study of race is to suppose that the minority text exists as itself, without institutional identity or pressures” (2010: 11). As such, it is important to contextualize the vexed question of authenticity and the dialectic relation to literary realism for African as well as African American fiction. One need only recall Jameson’s national allegory argument, according to which the third world text necessarily expresses “daily reality” because, even if it assumes genres distinct from “traditional realism,” it “must be situational and materialist despite itself” (1986:85-86). As Gikandi notes, “Adichie is certainly engaged in the production of the realistic cultural narrative, but at the same time she wants to do this without necessarily confirming our desire for a certain kind of Africa” (2016: 56). In the historical context of African American fiction, as scholar Gene Andrew Jarret notes, the relation between race and authenticity has often been negotiated via the genre of “racial realism,”, a term that, he writes,
‎
‎pertains to a long history in which authors have sought to re-create a lived or living world according to prevailing ideologies of race or racial difference. Intellectuals in the past seldom used the term to describe African American literature, though […] Alain Locke came closest in 1928, when he called ‘modernist’ black authors ‘race-realists.’ Rather, they employed other words to measure the degree to which literary representations of the race gravitated toward public expectations of realism. The words included ‘real,’ ‘true,’ ‘authentic,’ ‘objective,’ ‘bona-fide,’ ‘genuine,’ ‘original,’ ‘creative,’ ‘curious,’ ‘novel,’ ‘spontaneous,’ and ‘vigorous.’ (-Jarrett 2011:8)
‎
‎Notably, rather than employing a modernist or postmodernist aesthetic, or modes of estrangement that foreground its literary rather than its documentary purport, Americanah displays a pronounced skepticism toward these kinds of literatures, or, more accurately, toward the people excessively valuing such forms over all others. Upon meeting a journalist and former English major at a party, Obinze notes with regret that, for him, “a book did not qualify as literature unless it had polysyllabic words and incomprehensible passages” (31). Ifemelu, reflecting on her failed relationship with Blaine, notes his predilection for “novels written by young and youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness” (12). Neither skimming emotions nor dumbfounding readers
‎

‎with opaque prose, Americanah appears to embody its own gold standard. Yet despite its confident narrative poise, the novel expresses an ambiguity toward its realist status, self-consciously foregrounding “its own reception as a new kind of black novel,” as well as expounding the difficulties in writing about race (Goyal 2014: xiv). As Blaine’s sister Shan notes:
‎
‎If you write about how people are really affected by race, it’ll be too obvious […]. So if you’re going to write about race, you have to make sure it’s so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn’t read between the lines won’t even know it’s about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy. (335-336)
‎
‎Squared with the novel’s critique of the blog, this statement appears to be arguing for a somewhat circumspect nuance and a direct simplicity that need not complicate or obscure race. This ambiguity may also be discernible through its recourse to other, notably gendered and less obviously racialized genres such as ‘chick lit’ or romantic genre fiction. Indeed, the novel may wittingly announce its own, inevitable failure through the character of Shan: “You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country” (335). At the same time, rather than fully accepting this defeat, the novel’s accentuated realism leaves just enough room for believing that it might be up for the challenge, that it may indeed be that “honest” and authentic representation of American race relations. Perhaps, this openness may also account for its particularly wide appeal. As Gikandi argues, “part of the realism of her works emerges from the assumption that she is just presenting people as they are. Americanah has great moments of ordinariness, but there are also moments where it seems to want to be going out of its way to attract a certain kind of readership” (2016: 59). Without suggesting that the different generic forms structuring Americanah can be neatly separated and mapped, the following sections explore when and to what effect the novel employs realism or romance, and what the stakes may be in prioritizing one over the other.
‎