Can Africana ever meet Americana on equal footing?

W.E.B du Bois asserted with some degree of finality that the problem of the 20th century would be the “problem of the colourline”. That is to say race – and here he was referring to blackness – and its cousin racism.

Well, he definitely should have added the 21st century to the equation; for racism hasn’t died at all. It thrives and is big business today. Whether you are still dealing in slaves or running anti-racism NGO or prosecuting cases at the ICC at The Hague, racism will shadow you.

Racism forms a big backdrop to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new book Americanah. The blurb describes the story in the book as spanning “three continents|”. That is an overstatement. The book is set in Nigeria, America and England.

The personae dramatis are Ifemelu – the protagonist and narrator – and Obinze. It is about Africa today. It is about geopolitics. It is a story of love. It is a story of bad politics in Nigeria, migration, racism, return, hopelessness and hopefulness for young Nigerians. It is a story of many told and untold stories.

But the first question I asked myself when I read the title was: why Americanah? I thought that as homage to her mentor, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda would write the novel that captures the spirit of Africa today.

A spirit that I guess would give such a book the title: Africanah. But who am I to expect an author to write a book of my wish? Americanah, therefore, disappointed me right from the title but excited me as well in the two days of reading it.

Americanah is an intensely human story. What I mean by this is that the author, or narrator, is often very forensic in telling about the characters’ lives. There are emotions dripping from every page; one easily feels empathy with the different people in the text.

These days when fiction often reads like academic essays, explaining every term, hinting at “possibilities of meanings”, Americanah often invites the reader to “feel” the story along with the actors on the pages and fill any gaps that the narrator may have left.

So, Ifemelu leaves Nigeria after undergraduate studies to try life in the United States of America. Of course her visa does not allow her to work. She is supposed to attend school.

But, like all such migrants, she tries to cheat the system in order to earn money for upkeep. America shocks her with its racism, its obsession with psychosis, the unfeeling nature of its people, the competitiveness of its society, etc. But America also gives Ifemelu a chance to do something of her own.

Speak authoritatively

In a very postmodernist sense, Ifemelu becomes a commentator on race relations in America – well, even a foreigner can pretend to know enough about local reality as to speak authoritatively about it.

Obviously racism lurks wherever the word “race” is spoken and it provides fodder for Ifemelu’s blog.

There is the entry “Understanding America for the Non-American Black: What Hispanic Means.” Then “Understanding America for the Non-American Black: American Tribalism.” And “Understanding America for the Non-American Black: What Do WASPs Aspire To?” And such other.

One wonders whether the blog is supposed to be the hypertext or, could one say, the under-text? Or in a postmodernist sense the text that hovers about without being around? What is the reader supposed to make of it? What is it supposed to communicate to us? Is it telling us about the ubiquity of the Internet?

Is this some kind of warning that the word written on the paper is soon out of fashion, to be replaced by the cyberspace? Isn’t this argument so old as to be given some more years to become true?

Well, the blog entries are really the usual “outsiders” rants about the waywardness of Americans, their supposed hypocrisy, their seeming self-centredness etc.

Americanah is the standard outsider’s incomprehension of America; disbelief at how such democratic nation can be so racist, how such a literate society can be so ignorant or how such a rich country can live with biting poverty for some of its citizens. So, the story is about a certain kind of pedagogy.

Fabulously rich

Chimamanda is inaugurating an education programme here. For who? For all those Africans who dream of “making it in America, Europe or Asia”. She is probably not the first one to say this, but she does say it with a certain degree of conviction.

The only problem with this story of rejection of the West (America and Britain), return and reintegration is that it is too neat. In many cases it doesn’t work out the way it does for Ifemelu and Obinze.

Fabulously rich

Obinze is deported from Britain, where he had gone after his university education in Nigeria. He comes back home and, in some really unclear way, becomes fabulously rich.

This success story seems more like those Africa-feel-good stories that these days fill the pages of international and local business magazines praising the seeming success and potential for Africa’s economic take-off symbolised by the rising middle class! Don’t talk too much about Africa’s under-development 50 years after colonialism!

Otherwise the rest of the story is really about how the love between Ifemelu and Obinze doesn’t die despite the separation of many years. When Ifemelu returns to Lagos she finds Obinze married but his feelings for her are still alive. Ifemelu rekindles the relationship and eventually Obinze abandons his wife for her.

Well, I am not sure if the Afro-feminists will like this business of one woman destroying another woman’s marriage more so considering Ifemelu’s scattered affairs in America.

Indeed the Americanah in the text is Ifemelu, for the noun refers to a returnee from the USA. The ease with which she settles in, back in Nigeria, and her refusal to join the ever-complaining-returnees is the most overt rejection of the narrative of failed Africa.

Afro-optimists will love this kind of story, especially its ethos of capitalistic pragmatism: you can make a success of your life anywhere, if you’ve got the vim.

The pessimists will probably shake their heads and murmur, “eeh, that isn’t the America that all Africans love to run to; and that isn’t the Africa that we know of from the media stories.”

The writer teaches literature at the University of Nairobi and is a researcher with Native Intelligence.