Post on 20-Apr-2023
El-Rayis 1
Amel Osman El-Rayis
Professor Randa Khatab
Literature Written in English
11 May 2015
Blogging, in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, is a Way of Writing
Back
I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself
as black and I only become black when I came to America….But we don't talk
about it. We don't even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off
and the things we wish they understood better, because we're worried they will
say we're overreacting, or we're being too sensitive…But we don't say any of
this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal
dinners like this, we say that race doesn't matter because that's what we're
supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable. (Adichie 290-1)
These daring words are spoken up by Ifemelu, the Nigerian protagonist of
Americanah, who has created a blog entitled "Raceteenth or Curious Observations by
a Non-American Black on the Subject of Blackness in America" to write back to
racist America (296). When she confides in her close Nigerian friend about the
mishaps she has been prone to since she came to America because of being black, her
friend suggests that she needs to blog these experiences so that more people could
read them (296). Consequently, Ifemelu has launched her blog as she "longed for
other listeners, and she longed to hear the stories of others. How many other people
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chose silence? How many other people had become black in America? How many
had felt as though their world was wrapped in gauze?" (296).
To begin with, Americanah (Fourth Estate, 2013) is the third novel by the
Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; her first novel is Purple Hibiscus
(2003) which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and her second one is Half of a
Yellow Sun (2006) which won the Orange Prize (Chepkorir 7). Adichie's Americanah
takes place in both America and Nigeria through illustrating Ifemelu's life in Nigeria
before leaving for America. The political and economic conditions in Nigeria are
what drive Ifemelu as well as many other Nigerian youths to leave their country
searching for better opportunities in America. While they are escaping from a class-
conscious Nigeria, they find themselves victims of a color-conscious America.
Ifemelu, who has made it to the top in America, has decided to return home to Nigeria
where she is not black anymore: "Race doesn't really work here. I feel like I got off
the plane in Lagos and stopped being black" (Adichie 476).
What is really noticeable about Adichie's novel is that it takes post-colonial
issues further by not only addressing the trauma of estrangement and exile, but also
pinpointing how race in America is never over as Ifemelu has expressed in her blog:
"the problem of race in America will never be solved" (297). Does it mean that
Ifemelu is Adichie's mouthpiece? Why does Adichie choose blogging as Ifemelu's
way of writing back? Why does she write her blog in English even the one she has
launched in Nigeria after leaving America is written in English although it addresses
Nigerian issues? As long as the title Americanah is a Nigerian expression that
describes a person who becomes Americanized, does it mean that Adichie who
chooses to write in English is Americanah? If she finds American racism unbearable
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why does Adichie live there? All these questions need to be illustrated throughout this
paper.
The Black Write Back
According to Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin in their book,
The Empire Writes Back (Routledge, 1989), race-based literature is a model of post-
colonial literatures:
Another grouping which traverses several of the literatures from post-colonial
societies is "Black Writing". This proceeds from the idea of race as a major
feature of economic and political discrimination and draws together writers in
the African diaspora whatever their nationality –African Americans, Afro-
Caribbeans, and writers from African nations. (19)
These writers differentiate between texts written by White Europeans and those
written by "a Black minority in a rich and powerful White country and those produced
by the Black majority population of an independent nation" (19). Whereas the former
group stigmatizes Blacks with deteriorating stereotypes, the latter writes back,
showing the Whites how prejudiced they are (20). That is to say that Adichie belongs
to the second group of writers as she means to look Americans in the eyes, telling
them how racist they are even if Ifemelu, not Adichie is the one who voices this
statement. Sajna P in her essay, "Unmasking Racism in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's
Americanah" (2014), believes that "Race-in-America is as much a character as
Ifelmelu and her first love, Obinze" (274). That is to say that unlike other writers who
refer implicitly to racism, Adichie does not use subtle way when addressing racism in
her novel, but she rather voices it explicitly.
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Blogging in America as a Way of Writing Back
According to Mary Joyce in her essay, "Blog for a Cause" (2015), "a blog is a great
advocacy tool because it allows any individual with an Internet connection to launch a
campaign for social change with a potentially global reach. It gives ordinary citizens
incredible power to question authority, act as alternative sources of information,
organize supporters, and lobby those in power" (3). Adichie's Ifemelu uses the blog as
a medium to backlash against racism in America after she has encountered personal
experiences through which she realizes that she is black.
1. The Black are Blackened in America
Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America,
you become black. Stop arguing…So what if you weren't "black" in your
country? You're in America now. We all have our moments of initiation into
the Society of Former Negroes… Admit it –you say "I'm not black" only
because you know black is at the bottom of America's race ladder. (221)
This is Ifemelu's first post on her blog where she shows her anger at the fact that she
becomes black in America. She explains that "watermelon" "racist slur" and "tar
baby" are labels that are used to offend black people (221). She also warns the black
of being suspects if any crime is committed (222). Actually, Ifemelu's perspective
reflects Adichie's attitude as she stated in an interview that after coming to America as
a student, she "was suddenly confronted with what it meant to be a person of color in
the United States" (Adichie NPR). She also recalls that she has been labeled
"watermelon" and at that time she did not understand that it is something offensive
(NPR).
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2. Kinky Hair as "Race Metaphor"
One of the things Ifemelu notices about Africans in America is that they try to
relax their hair to assimilate, so she tries to resist this trend by keeping her hair
natural, encouraging others to do likewise by adopting "the coaxing tone of the
proselytizer that she used whenever she was trying to convince other black women
about the merits of wearing their hair natural" (Adichie 12). She even does not mind
the fact that it takes her six hours to braid her hair and she has to travel to a
neighborhood where there is a special hairbraiding saloon for kinky hair (15). That is
why throughout her blog, she ridicules African public figures who relax their hair,
like Byoncé and Michelle Obama: "Imagine if Michelle Obama got tired of all the
heat and decided to go natural and appeared on TV with lots of woolly hair, or tight
spirally curls. She would totally rock but poor Obama would certainly lose the
independent vote, even the undecided Democrat vote" (297). Ifemelu considers hair as
"metaphor for race in America" (297). Ifemelu's stance on the issue of having natural
hair reflects Adichie's view that is expressed in an interview with New African Women
(2013); she states, "there are so many beautiful women with natural hair and that
excites me, and I had to say that because it matters, because there is a new confidence
we have and it's saying, 'this is us, this is what we look like and I'm not going to try
and be what I'm not', and I love that. I think it's fantastic. It's my generation" (Otas
NAW 52). Adichie, herself, wears her hair the African style and dress also in the
African fashion which really stresses how she is proud of her Africanness.
3. Generalization
Adichie stresses how white Americans consider black people homogenous. For
example, Ifemelu's aunt explains that Africans can use each other's identity cards
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because "[a]ll of us look alike to white people" (120). When Ifemelu has used
someone else's identity card and she fails to reply to people who call her with the
other one's name, a friend tells her, "You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal
name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name.
They'll believe all kinds of shit about Africa" (131). Ifemelu feels invisible because
name represents identity and she hopes her name to be spelled correctly. Her name is
Ifemelunamma –in Igbo it means "Beautifully-Made" (69). She has been exhilarated
when she has received a letter with her name on it: "That credit card preapproval, with
her name correctly spelled and elegantly italicized, had roused her spirits, made her a
little less invisible, a little more present" (132). What really annoys her and increases
her sense of inferiority is that for white American, Africa is a place that needs charity:
"Ifemelu wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be from the country of people who
gave and not those who received, to be one of those who had and could therefore bask
in the grace of having given to be among those who could afford copious pity and
empathy" (170). That is to say for white Americans, Africans are poor and are
desperate for help. For example, when the carpet cleaner comes to the house where
she babysits and she opens the door, he feels offended because he thinks she is the
owner of the house: "As far as he was concerned I did not fit as the owner of that
stately house because of the way I looked. In America's public discourse, 'blacks' as a
whole are often lumped with 'Poor Whites'. Not Poor Blacks and Poor Whites. But
Blacks and Poor Whites" (167). Therefore, Ifemelu expresses her anger through her
blog under the title, "American Tribalism", classifying American classes according to
race: "There's a ladder of racial hierarchy in America. White is always on top…and
American Black is always on the bottom" (184). She concludes that "Whiteness is the
thing to aspire to" (205). However, she knocks White Americans with the scientific
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fact that proves that "race is an invention that there is more genetic variation between
two black people that there is between a black person and a white person" (302).
Nevertheless, she believes that in America, racism is a disease, calling it "Racial
Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this
syndrome: mild, medium, and acute" (315).
Nevertheless, I could argue that while Ifemelu accuses Americans of
generalization, considering all blacks to be homogenous, she is doing the same by
accusing all white Americans of being racist. Denying racism is not right, yet calling
all Americans as racist is questionable.
4. A Black President
Ifemelu, like all Africans, has been excited about having Obama as a president.
An old African woman expresses her happiness for having a black man as a
candidate: "I didn't think this would happen even in my grandbaby's lifetime" (355).
However, white Americans have been totally against having a black president and
they post insults on the Internet: "How can a monkey be president? Somebody do us a
favor and put a bullet in this guy. Send him back to the African jungle. A black man
will never be in the white house, dude, it's called the white house for a reason" (353-
4). Ifemelu has been so flabbergasted that she writes back to them: "Many
abolitionists wanted to free the slaves but didn't want black people living nearby. Lots
of folk today don't mind a black nanny or black limo driver. But they sure as hell
mind a black boss" (351).
Although all blacks supported Barack Obama, he let them down through his
speech when he equated black grievance with white fear of blacks (357). That is why
when Ifemelu, like all black people, was disappointed in Obama, she invites black
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people to pour their anger through her blog: "This is for the Zipped-Up Negroes, the
upwardly mobile American and Non-American Blacks who don't talk about life
Experiences That Have to Do Exclusively with Being Black. Because they want to
keep everyone comfortable. Tell your story here. Unzip yourself. This is a safe space"
(307).
Needless to say, Ifemelu's blog becomes successful: "The blog had unveiled itself
and shed its milk teeth; by turns, it surprised her, pleased her, left her behind. Its
readers increased, by the thousands from all over the world" (303). She also receives
requests to lead diversity workshop, to lecture and to be hosted on programs to talk
about race (304). As she has been praised, Ifemelu has been criticized by both White
and Black Americans. For example, a white reader accuses her of being racist and
ungrateful to the country that hosted her (305). Besides, one of her African friends,
Shan, declares that Nigerians, like Americans, are racist, reminding her that Nigerians
call black Americans "acata" which means "wild animal" (319). Shan also accuses
Ifemelu of being a hypocrite because she writes about race in America from the
perspective of an outsider: "Because she's African. She's writing from the outside. She
doesn't really feel all the stuff she's writing about…If she were African American,
she'd be labeled angry and shunned" (336). When Ifemelu's African-American
boyfriend asks her to attend a protest that defends the right of a black man who has
been suspected of a crime because he is black, she never shows up. Her friend accuses
her of being biased: "You know, it's not just about writing a blog, you have to live
like you believe it. That blog is a game that you don't really take seriously, it's like
choosing an interesting elective evening class to complete your credits" (345). She
recognizes that he means that she is not interested in what happens to African
Americans as much as she cares about Africans (345).
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That is to say that Adichie voices her opinions through Ifemelu and at the same
time she is aware of the criticism she may receive from Africans and African
Americans alike. As for writing the blog in English, it is inevitable since Ifemelu
seeks listeners from all African countries as well as Africans all over the globe. Since
Africans speak diverse languages even within Nigeria itself, the blog has to be written
in a language that unifies all these diverse groups. Besides, despite writing in English,
Ifemelu resists speaking in an American accent (173). She speaks in Nigerian English
where they add an o at the end of the sentence; for example, "I don't even really watch
any o" (388).
Although Ifemelu's blog has succeeded and become lucrative to the extent that she
has bought a condominium, Ifemelu decides to let go of everything and go back to
Nigeria where she is no longer black.
Blogging in Nigeria as A Way of Educating Americans
Adichie presents the demeaning economic and social conditions in Nigeria which
cause many Nigerians to leave for America or England. For example, Ifemelu's aunt,
Aunty Uju expresses her agony before leaving for America:
You know, we live in an ass-licking economy. The biggest problem in this
country is not corruption. The problem is that there are many qualified people
who are not where they are not where they are supposed to be because they
won't lick anybody's ass, or they don't know which ass to lick or they don't
even know how to lick an ass. (Adichie 77)
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Nigerian instable conditions are expressed through demonstrations, demanding
essential things, like water and light (91). As a result, everyone is leaving the country
behind:
Strikes now were common. In the newspapers, university lecturers listed their
complaints, the agreements that were trampled in the dust by government men
whose own children were schooling abroad. Campuses were emptied,
classrooms drained of life. Students hoped for short strikes, because they
could not hope to have no strike at all. Everyone was talking about leaving.
(98)
Hoping to find better life in America or England, young people head there: "Nigeria is
chasing away its best resources" (100). These young people have long been obsessed
with the American dream; for example, Ifemelu mistakenly thinks that America is
what she watches in movies and commercials:
[B]ut it was the commercials that captivated her. She ached for the lives they
showed, lives full of bliss, where all problems had sparkling solutions in
shampoos and cars and packaged foods, and in her mind they become the real
America, the America she would only see when she moved to school in the
autumn. (113)
Hypnotized by this ideal image, once in America, this image gets shattered when
Ifemelu and others sense their inferiority which is brought forward by Americans who
take it upon themselves to alienate Africans through racism and through urging them
to be grateful to the west for helping them. For example, Obinze –Ifemelu's true love
–explains that westerners, who show that they understand that people from restless
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and poor countries take refuge in the west, do not really understand the real situation
in these countries:
[A]ll understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed
human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the
oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people
like him, who were raised well-fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction,
conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced
that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do
dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped
or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty. (276)
Regardless of all these conditions, Adichie gives her characters the choice between
the class-based society and the race-based society and both Obinze and Ifemelu
choose Nigeria:
I think class in this country is in the air that people breathe. Everyone knows
their place. Even the people who are angry about class have somehow
accepted their place. A white boy and a black girl who grow up in the same
working-class town in this country can get together and race will be
secondary, but in America, even if the white boy and black girl grow up in the
same neighborhood, race would be primary. (275)
Therefore, Ifemelu comes back to Nigeria after being in America for thirteen years.
She decides to continue her blog, but she wants to write about Nigeria, promoting her
culture. She ridicules exiles who use the Internet to write nostalgically about their
hometown after a short visit: "they would return to America to fight on the Internet
over their mythologies of home, because home was now a blurred place between here
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and there, and at least online they could ignore the awareness of how inconsequential
they had become" (117).
Thus, she decides to launch a blog about Nigeria, calling it "The Small Redemption of
Lagos" (418). She writes about positive and negative things. For example, she
describes how unfair it is for the government to demolish the hawkers' shacks:
They destroy the shacks, reduce them to flat pieces of wood. They are doing
their job, wearing "demolish" like crisp business suits. They themselves eat in
shacks like these, and if all the shacks like these disappeared in Lagos, they
will go lunchless, unable to afford anything else. But they are smashing,
trampling, hitting…But now the shacks are gone. They are erased, and nothing
is left, not a stray biscuit wrapper, not a bottle that once held water, nothing to
suggest that they were once there. (475)
Proud of the African costume, Ifemelu has written about a fashion show where "the
model had twirled around in an Ankara skirt, a vibrant swish of blues and greens,
looking like a haughty butterfly" (474-5). Her blog is immersed in Nigerian culture:
She wrote about the announcers on radio stations, with their accents so fake
and so funny. She wrote about the tendency of Nigerian women to give
advice, sincere advice dense with sanctimony. She wrote about the
waterlogged neighborhood crammed with zinc houses, their roofs like
squashed hats, and of the young women who lived there…Still, she was at
peace: to be home, to be writing her blog, to have discovered Lagos again. She
had, finally, spun herself fully into being. (475)
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Does it mean that Ifemelu becomes Americanah? Instead of addressing the problems
of Nigerians, she idealizes her culture, showing what makes it her "home". She writes
from the point of view of an outsider who appreciates the exotic nature of the
Nigerian culture. If she is a Nigerian, like the ones who have never left home, she
would be able to see the conditions which drive people to leave. There is a difference
between how Ifemelu has seen her country before leaving for America and after
coming back, rich and famous.
Ifemelu refutes being labeled "Americanah"; she claims being a hybrid, having
features of both cultures:
I like America. It's really the only place else where I could live apart from
here. But one day a bunch of Blain's friends and I were talking about kids and
I realized that if I ever have children, I don't want them to have American
childhoods…I don't want a child who feeds on praise and expects a star for
effort and talks back to adults in the name of self-expression. (458)
Besides, she writes her blog in English, not in Igbo which raises a question mark. She
writes to address American readers, not Nigerians. She aims at educating the west
about Nigeria, showing them that even if her hometown is not perfect, it defines her;
it is part of her Africanness. It is a way of resisting the fact that Nigerians leave their
countries and take refuge in the west; Ifemelu reverses this image by taking refuge in
her own country with all its defects and she chooses to write positively about her
culture. If she writes a blog for Nigerians, she would certainly write it in Igbo and she
would address the problems that hinder Nigeria from developing.
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This could be Adichie's belief as, like Ifemelu, she was "born in Nigeria but now
living both in her homeland and in the United States" (Peed 11). Does it mean that
Adichie aims at mediating between both cultures?
Adichie as a Translator between Two Cultures
Needless to say, in Americanah, Adichie acts as a mediator or translator to
bridge the gap between two different cultures: America and Nigeria, explaining one to
the other. According to Eva C. Karpinski, in her book, Borrowed Tongues (Wilfred
Laurier University Press, 2012), "Translation has become reconceived as part of the
process of cultural representation and interchange, an interactive textual practice of
transcoding and constructing meanings and selves cross-culturally…[It] opens up a
'third space' between the extremes of pure difference and universal sameness" (11).
Translation here does not mean linguistic translation from one language into another,
but Karpinski means cultural translation through narrative. For Kathy Mezei, writing
is considered a translation –"the translation of thoughts, images, concepts, silence into
words" (qtd. in Karpinski 4).
For Adichie to act as a cultural mediator, she needs to "construct her
difference as transmissible, making it accessible to her readers from 'mainstream' and
ethnic communities alike" (24). That explains why Adichie uses Standard English,
non-standard english and Nigerian english. The whole novel is written into English,
yet she transliterates some Igbo words and expressions into non-standard english,
providing translation. For example, "kedo ebe I no?" means where are you (21). A
Nigerian proverb that says in Igbo, "E gbuo dike n'ogu uno, e luo na ogu agu, e lote
ya" means "If you kill a worrier in a local fight, you'll remember him when fighting
enemies" (62). As for the title, it is Nigerian english –Nigeria was colonized by
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Britain and thus English was the official language, yet as a form of resistance, they
speak Nigerian english; therefore, they say "Americanah" instead of "Americanized"
when they describe a person who becomes uprooted.
In addition to linguistic translation, Adichie provides cultural translation. For
example, she pinpoints the difference between giving someone money as a gift in the
Nigerian and Western ways; in the western way, the person who gives money asks the
receiver to count it and "watch[es] with power in his gaze" (266). However, "To be
given money in the Nigerian manner was to have it pushed into your hands, fists
closed, eyes averted from yours, your effusive thanks –and it had to be effusive –
waved away, and you certainly did not count the money, sometimes did not even look
at it until you were alone" (266). Another example that shows the difference between
cultures is the dress code. Being invited to a party, Ifemelu dresses up, but she is
taken aback when she sees her classmates dressing down: "When it comes to dressing
well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only disregarded this courtesy
of self-presentation, but has turned that disregard into a virtue. 'We are too
superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother about how we look to other people" (129).
Losing weight also highlights the difference between both cultures: "You know at
home when somebody tells you that you lost weight, it means something bad. But
here somebody tells you that you lost weight and you say thank you" (124).
Furthermore, throughout the novel, the use of Nigerian names makes the
readers feel the presence of the Nigerian culture: Ifemelu, Obinze, Ginika, Aunty Uju,
Ranyinudo, Emenike, Bartholomew, etc. At the beginning, the names are
unpronounceable, yet, eventually, they become familiar. By using Nigerian names,
she forces the western readers to get used to these names, making these names
pronounceable and visible. Adichie shows how her characters consume western and
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national literature alike. For example, Obinze's mother is interested in Graham
Greene's The Heart of the Matter; young Ifemelu has been interested in Jean Toomer's
Cane (11). She also refers to Nigerian authors and singers, like Kelechi Garuba and
Onyeka Onwenu (69-318). She mentions Nigerian songs, "Yori, Yori" and "Obi Mu
O" (441-3).
That is to say that Adichie tries to translate both ways, explaining the Nigerian
culture to American readers and deciphering the American culture to Nigerian
readers. That is to say that Adichie "domesticates" rather than "foreignizes" her text:
"A domesticating translation increases the appeal of the foreign text to a target
audience…Its goal is to produce a translated text that is immediately intelligible to the
receiving readership and that can be easily consumed in the cultural marketplace"
(Karpinski 70). However, other writers prefer to "foreignize" their text to force the
American readers to admit the presence of other cultures, respecting their richness,
exoticism and individuality. For example, Gloria Anzaldua expresses her resistance to
translate her culture:
Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself…Until I
am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having to translate,
while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak
Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather
than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. (Quoted in
Karpinski 25)
While Adichie prefers translating foreign words and Anzaldua refutes it, the Nigerian
academic Francis Abiola Irele is totally against writing in English; he believes that
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authors who write in English address the western readers and the elite of their own
culture while ignoring the majority of their own people:
How does the writer reach this audience if he or she writes in a language
foreign to them? Because few Africans can read English or French or
Portugese. That is what Ngugi means when he advocates the use of African
languages for our literature. He is thinking primarily of the revolutionary
potential of literature and the urgency of getting the message across, making it
accessible in the language of the people. (Quoted in Rorigues 10)
Nevertheless, Chinua Achebe disagrees with both Ngugi and Irele; he believes that in
Nigeria, three different languages are spoken, so using English is the better solution
for this plurality:
English is a world language in a way that Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo are not. There
is no way we can change that. Now that is not to say that we should therefore
send these other languages to sleep. That's not what I'm saying. I am saying
that we have a very, very complex and dynamic multilingual situation, which
we cannot run away from but contain and control. (15)
Besides, Achebe stresses the point that most Nigerian people are illiterate and do not
read; he explains his point further by using the metaphor of a singer who finds out that
the majority of his audience is deaf; this singer is left with two options: either to sing
to the minority or to dance: "Now, although our performer may have the voice of an
angel, his feet are as heavy as concrete. So what should he do? Should he proceed to
sing beautifully to only a quarter or less of the auditorium or dance atrociously to a
full house?" (20). Nevertheless, it is argued that if Nigerian authors write in English,
does it make them Nigerian or Westernized: "If writers continue to ignore the deaf,
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will they ever be part of the community? Is it fair for the deaf to be permanently
excluded? If not, who is thus responsible for their inclusion in a community that
'shares a destiny, and moves towards the future?'" (21).
This argument is endless, but I believe that what is being narrated entails the use of
certain language more than the other. If the subject is to write back to the west,
foregrounding issues like racism, English is the language needed to advocate this
message. To put it in other words, language is a mere means of communication, yet I
agree with the Moroccan author, Abdelfatah Kilito in his book, I Speak All Languages
But in Arabic (2013), who believes that the author could use any language but he/she
could not efface the traces of their mother tongue from the text (29). The fact that
Adichie writes in English, does not make her Westernized and does not make her less
African either. Besides, she dedicates her novel to the new generation, not to the old
generation who were colonial subjects: "This book is for our next generation, ndi na-
abia n'iru" (1). That is why Ifemelu criticizes her father when he speaks English; she
would rather have him speak Igbo: "Sometimes Ifemelu imagined him in a classroom
in the fifties, an overzealous colonial subject wearing an ill-fitting school uniform of
cheap cotton, jostling to impress his missionary teachers…She preferred it when he
spoke Igbo; it was the only time he seemed unconscious of his own anxieties" (47-8).
How can we blame a new generation that has been raised by a colonial subject who
believes in the superiority of the west and western culture?
Nevertheless, it is undeniable that Adichie's main characters: Obinze and
Ifemelu decide to come back to Nigeria to help reform the country; Ifemelu tries to
promote her culture through her blog and Obinze decides to help his own people: " I
do what rich people are supposed to do. I pay school fees for a hundred students in my
village and my mum's village" (438).
El-Rayis 19
All in all, Adichie's Americanah goes beyond post-colonial issues; it is a novel
that resists racism in America. The subject of the text assigns the language used to
convey the salient message in a clear-cut way.
Conclusion
There are few of us who are not protected from the keenest pain by our
inability to see what it is that we have done, what we are suffering, and what
we truly are. Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance
only. (Butler 34)
This quote is excerpted from Samuel Butler's novel Erewhon (1872) in which
he criticizes the Victorians with all their follies. One of their follies is their belief in
the White Man's Burden to civilize "the other", dividing the World into "us" and "the
rest of the world". Butler aims at mirroring their follies, pinpointing how they have
caused the suffering of the colonized nations while exploiting them. That is why
Butler criticizes the Erewhonians (Victorians): "they were really a very difficult
people to understand" (6). Likewise, Adichie aims to show Americans that they are
not living in a democratic country as they claim. Injustice towards the Black is one of
the things that deflate the American Dream.
An example of racism is the latest incident of what happened to the twenty-
five black Freddie Gray who was suspected to be a criminal just because he is black:
Gray, 25, was taken into police custody in Baltimore on April 12, [2015] and
sustained a spinal injury during that time that required medical attention. He
went into a coma several days later and died a week after his apprehension.
Police have never said why they took him into custody in the first place,
El-Rayis 20
noting only that he ran from officers, and they have not publicly explained
how Gray received the spinal injury. (Keneally ABC News)
While reading Americanah, I felt that Adichie is exaggerating as racism is a past, but
Gray's case acts as an eye-opener to those who think that America is a superior
country where democracy prevails. What adds insult to the injury is that America has
a black president, Barak Obama who lets down the black people's expectation as he
does not want to be biased in favor of blacks: "if he wins, he will no longer be black,
just as Oprah is no longer black, she's Oprah. So she can go where black people are
loathed and be fine. He'll no longer be black, he'll just be Obama" (Adichie 357).
All in all, instead of pigeonholing Adichie, to prove whether she is
Americanized or not because of the use of her language, it is rather more important to
evaluate the message she means to convey through her writing.
El-Rayis 21
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