Faniyi 1

Kayode Faniyi
129013097
Dr. Solomon Azumurana
ENG 894
REFRACTING CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIES AMERICANAH THROUGH A
POST-COLONIAL PRISM
1. Introduction
Respected Marxist critic Frederic Jameson once described every instance of third world
literature as necessarily nationally allegorical (69), an assertion spectacularly assailed by
Aijaz Ahmad (77-82).
But it is possible to close our eyes to Ahmads very valid misgivings and take a birds eye
view of Jamesons assertion: read in reaction to the phenomenon of imperialism, perhaps the
literature of dominated peoples is the literature of self-assertion, however blind to Jamesons
national allegorical (or anticolonial) imperative, and however hybrid. That last expression
might as well be a fair summation of post-colonialism, if we are to escape the various
controversies surrounding the term and more importantly, the chronological trap that can be
sprung by the prefix post(-): post-colonialism is several different instances of asserting a
selfhood denied to dominated peoples by imperial discourse, whether blatantly malevolent as
in Robinson Crusoe or benevolent (insidiously malevolent) as in Heart of Darkness.
Although the locus of post-colonial theory qua post-colonial theory can be located in Edward
Saids Orientalism, it would be a bit disingenuous to suggest that post-colonialism i.e.
transcending the fetters of the colonial (or more precisely, the imperial) began in 1978.
As Childs and Fowler have, postcolonialism

Faniyi 2
[e]merged out of developments within literary studies in the late 1970s as the
revolution in theory was extended to encompass the cultural, political and economic
legacy of empire and its aftermath. (183)
Or as Hellen Tiffin has it,
it has been the project of post-colonial writing to interrogate European discourses and
discursive strategies from a privileged position within (and between) two worlds; to
investigate the means by which Europe imposed and maintained its codes in the
colonial domination of so much of the rest of the world. (95)
In this specific instance, I intend to refract, as my title reads, Adichies 2013 novel
Americanah through the prism of post-colonial theory. But first, I must situate Americanah in
its post-colonial moment.
2. Situating Americanah in the Post-Colonial Moment
Since it is published in 2013, the material reality of Americanah is conditioned, however
distantly it seems now, by the phenomenon of colonialismit is written in English, for
instance. Although published in 2013, the temporality and spatiality of Americanahs
narrative extends backwards to the late 70s when its major protagonist, Ifemelu, was born. As
a child, she witnesses the death by firing squad of that famous robbery kingpin, Lawrence
Anini (148), and lives through coups, coups attempts, strikes and the usual brand of public
dysfunction that still haunts Nigeria, therefore linking its post-coloniality with that decidedly
African

brand

of

introverted,

introspective

post-independence

post-coloniality of

disillusionment exemplified by novels such as Ayi Kwei Armahs The Beautyful Ones Are
Not Yet Born, Chinua Achebes No Longer at Ease and Anthills of the Savannah, and soon
enough with the post-coloniality of globalization (and the neoliberal ideology that has
hijacked it). As we see in the novel, this disillusionment is the animus of her exile. Ifemelu

Faniyi 3
arrives America in 1997, the year in which Kudirat Abiola, activist wife of M.K.O Abiola,
was killed (116). Here, Americanahs post-coloniality takes a new turn. This new turn,
inaugurated by Ifemelus (voluntary temporary) displacement, is what I will describe as
reversing the imperial gaze, which I will discuss as a concept in post-colonialism.
3. Concepts in Post-colonialism as they Pertain to Americanah
We take the matter up from reversing the imperial gaze, for, I will argue, this strategy is
fundamental to framing reactions against imperialism.
Of his book, America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Literature, 1668 to
9/11 and Beyond, Kamal Abdel-Malek says:
A question was that was raised by a Princeton Arabist after one of my talks on the
topic was whether Arab writings on America could be regarded as a case of
Occidentalism, a counter-Orientalism of sorts. In some ways, this book is a reversal of
what Edward Said described as the Wests Orientalist view of the East. One could say
that its stories are an Arab way of saying, We, too, can subjugate you, Westerners, to
our tourist, voyeuristic gaze.
According to Ashcroft et al. in Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, it was the control
of the means of representation [] that confirmed the hegemony (115) of the imperium.
They write further that it was the power of imperial discourse rather than military or
economic might, that confirmed the hegemony of imperialism in the late nineteenth century
(115).
If, following Foucaults sense of the panoptic (1642), the imperial characterisation of the
African was forged from a vantage point, in the smithery of observation, then to reverse that
gaze, the African characterisation of America and of whiteness requires its own vantage
point. The writing of explorers and travellers in the nineteenth century, write Ashcroft et

Faniyi 4
al., who adopted the motif of monarch of all I survey gives the clearest evidence of the
panoramic nature of the imperial gaze, but it may be found also in the description of interiors
or in accounts of the surveillance of the body (209). The strategy then was to asymmetrically
hold up their experience of African peoples and cultures to a European system of values
assumed to be the norm and against which Africa and Africans could only emerge as deficient
and or exotic.
We remain with Ashcroft et al., who assert that
[t]his concept of the gaze becomes important for post-colonial discourse because such
surveillance, which corresponds to and confirms the gaze of colonial authority, may
be reversed... where the observer becomes the observed The metaphoric displacing
and returning of the imperial gaze is a fundamental operation of appropriation of
imperial technologies, discourses and cultural forms. The colonized subject not only
alters these to local needs but uses them to direct the gaze upon the colonizer and thus
reverse the orientation of power in the relationship. (209)
Therefore when in the framework of Americanah Ifemelu embarks upon that journey from
the periphery of imperialism/globalisation (Nigeria) to the centre (the USA), she appropriates
this power to represent an otherness on its own turf, to refract another, different place through
her own system of values. Which is hugely subversive and belongs snugly under postcolonialisms warm embrace. Consider for instance, the manner in which, as Americanah
opens, Ifemelu organizes American cities according to an idiosyncratic system of olfactory
values: Princeton smells of nothing (3); Philadelphia of the musty scent of history (3), New
Haven of the smell of neglect (3). Baltimore smells of brine (3), and Brooklyn, of sunwarmed garbage. (3). If we also consider Ifemelus surveillance of the white body (3 4),
and the point becomes clearer.

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But isnt otherness a category perpetually inscribed with the dominated? How is it possible
then that Ifemelu can other the American self-image and whiteness when she is supposed to
herself be the other? Post-colonial theory can at times seem to posit the imperium (America
and whiteness, in this case) as some sort of universal unalterable self against which
everything else is irrevocably otherothering describes the various ways in which
colonial discourse produces its subjects (156), and according to Tyson, is the practice of
judging all who are different as less than fully human (420). And it does this because
whiteness can seem a transcendent or absolute pole of address (Boons-Grafe 1992 qtd in
Ashcroft et al. 155) which can characterise but requires no characterisation itself.
Although Race has been a dominant feature of social construction since the late
eighteenth century it is significant that whiteness as a defining racial category has
only recently emerged in the rage of chromatic ideas of human difference. Since
European and later American races occupied the dominant pole in the binaries of race
in the post-slavery era and African, Asian and Amerindian peoples were the majority
constituents of the subaltern pole, the category white was effectively occluded,
naturalized as an always already-given category against which other races could be
distinguished and so not needing to be constituted in a specific way as a separate race
grouping. (220)
Since we are in the spirit of reversing the imperial gaze however, (nothing) (is) the absolute
other (Spivak xx). In fact when we chase the concept of otherness back to the simple
meaning of other, or perhaps back to Aristotles much-maligned laws of identity (Habib
45), difference is simply difference, not perpetual asymmetry.
Knowing a thing in and of itself was the ruling passion of Aristotles laws of identity, which
is an understandable turn of analysis when one is faced with Platos imprecations against

Faniyi 6
imaginative literature, imprecations that resulted from muddling different categories of
endeavour. As Hegels Master-Slave dialectic shows, identity is not always cast in stone. Both
Master and Slave were once at par, and down the line, the unfolding of the dialectic restores
at least some degree of parityNow, however, he destroys this alien negative moment,
posits himself as a negative in the permanent order of things, and thereby becomes for
himself, someone existing on his own account (635), or at least creates an ambivalent Third
Space (Ashcroft et al. 53) of enunciation (108-9), where identities contain traces of other
identities. Homi Bhabha derives his notion of hybridity more closely from the workings of
Lacans petit and grand autre (109), but this undeniable unescapable syncretism, ambivalence
and mutual inclusivity is the crux of Homi Bhabhas post-essentialist hybridity. The point is:
despite Fanons insistence that there is no new entity born of colonialism (102), it is
impossible to posit America in complete opposition to Ifemelu when long before Ifemelu
comes to America, her identity has been partly shaped by the cultural productions of
America: she has watched several episodes of Tom and Jerry, which Dike is only just
beginning to discover piecemeal in America; she has watched The Cosby Show (99), which
incidentally, presents an airbrushed image of America that contact will shatter (107)case in
point: the correction of her illusion of American weather as ever temperate (103). She uses
the English language (although this is a leftover from Britains imperial adventures).
Ifemelu is a different brand of hybrid from her posse of friends in her Lagos school. They all
watch American shows (and quite a number travel frequently), but Ifemelu was not invested
in the culture surrounding their production (the shows) as Obinze and the rest seemed to be
(67). And in early Obinzes case, his besottedness with America (68), his America-centrism
(67), indicates a psychopathology consistent with the experience of imperialism. For Tyson,
This feeling of being caught between cultures, of belonging to neither rather than to
both, of finding oneself arrested in a psychological limbo that results not merely from

Faniyi 7
some individual psychological disorder but from the trauma of the cultural
displacement within which one lives, is referred to by Homi Bhabha as unhomeliness.
(421)
Crucially (in terms of Obinze) however,
Being unhomed is not the same as being homeless. To be unhomed is to feel not at
home even in your own home [as that Beyonce song goes] because you are not at
home in yourself: your cultural identity crisis has made you a psychological refugee,
so to speak. (421, brackets added)
Mimicry has been given a positive, destabilising spin by Bhabha. In Bhabhas sense, the
colonizeds mirroring of the colonizers culture and value systems constitutes both mockery
of, and menace to, that oppressive culture (Ashcroft et al. 125). Which is substantiated by
Ifemelus reversal of the imperial gaze to subvert a previously transcendent pole of address.
But the way V.S. Naipaul presents mimicry in his The Mimic Men is Fanonian, can be read as
mocking the colonizeds deformed anglicization. Fanon argued that colonized people,
forced to abandon traditional notions of selfhood and national identity, learn to mimic their
colonial masters (Castle 317).
This Fanonian sense of mimicry is the substance of Joyce Carys Mister Johnson where the
colonized is both invited (metaphysically) to yearn and is (discursively) mocked for yearning.
In Heart of Darkness, the lone African who seemed to possess some manner of technical
education is mocked by Marlow. As Lois Tyson puts it, many [colonized individuals] tried
to imitate their colonizers, as much as possible, in dress, speech, behaviour, and lifestyle
[which] postcolonial critics refer to as mimicry (421). And Adichies characterization of
Ifemelus father follows this latter model. Ifemelus father is the stock mimic man, the sum of
his longings always outside his context. He had not been able to get a university education,

Faniyi 8
but yet his English was formal, elevated, a defensive affectation (47; 48). Ifemelu, we learn,
prefers it when he speaks Igbo because only then did he seem unconscious of his own
anxieties (48).
Looking at him as he sat on the sofa, she thought how much he looked like what he
was, a man full of blanched longings, a middle-brow civil servant who wanted a life
different from what he had, who had longed for more education than he was able to
get. (47)
Following Naipaul and Cary, Adichie also mocks the Mr. Agbo Voice,
the mannered, overcareful pronunciations she had learned during debate meetings in
secondary school when the bearded Mr. Agbo, tugging at his frayed tie, played BBC
recordings on his cassette player and then made all the students pronounce words over
and over until he beamed and cried Correct! She would also affect, with the Mr.
Agbo Voice, a slight raising of her eyebrows in what she imagined was a haughty
foreigner pose. (175)
A third, more contingent sense of mimicry involves the acts of appropriation that result in
the social construction or performance of identity (317). This appropriation is seen in action
when Ifemelu acquires an American accent in an attempt to forge an American identity
(Adichie 133), which she would come to feel shame for when a telemarketer tells her she
sounds totally American (175). Ifemelu mocks Bartholomew, who speaks with an American
accent filled with holes, mangling words until they were impossible to understand (115),
represents a special pathological combination of Fanonian mimicry and this third sense of it.
Ifemelus preference that her father speak Igbo is perhaps nationalistic is character.
Nationalism, especially in the struggle for independence and immediate post-colonial era,
constituted a potent beach-head against colonialism. According to Ashcroft et al., anti-

Faniyi 9
colonial movements employed the idea of a pre-colonial past to rally their opposition through
a sense of difference (Key Concepts 139). As Ngugi writes in his The Language of African
Literature, I believe that my writing in the Gikuyu language, a Kenyan language, an
African language, is part and parcel of the anti-imperialist struggles of Kenyan and African
peoples (290).
At Chiefs party, Kosi, Obinzes wife, Obinze himself, Mrs Akin-Cole and another unnamed
woman get in a conversation about Obinze and Kosis child, who is about to attain school
age. To the suggestions that French schools and complete British curricula are the civilized
things to consider, the more grounded Obinze responds: Didnt we all go to primary schools
that taught the Nigerian curriculum? (29). Which highlights the principal tension between
neo-colonialisma new imperialism that is not necessarily a physical presence but fog-like
in its cultural, economic, social and psychological dominationand true decolonization of
the vintage Ngugi prescribes in his aforementioned essay. Obinze is alive to the psychical
uncertainties this predilection with foreign accents and experiences inaugurates in the
dominated, for he had come to sense an unvoiced yearning in them, a sad search for
something they could never find. He did not want a well-educated child enmeshed in
insecurities (29). However, the notion of psychical and psychological insecurity attached to
the cosmopolitan African is what the novelist Taiye Selasi has sought to undermine in her
influential 2005 essay, Bye-Bye Babar (this title seems a phonetic and symbolic pun on
Homi Bhabha but merely only plays on the title of an Eddie Murphy film, Hello, Babar).
Where Bhabha mournfully sees unhomeliness, where Ifemelu sees home for the likes of
Bartholomew as a blurred place between here and there (115) Selasi triumphantly sees afeeling-at-home, in however many homes (Selasi), (although admittedly, one struggles to see
how Bartholomew, a man who wears his khaki trousers pulled up high on his belly, would fit
into the characteristic hipness of Selasis Afropolitans). Her Afropolitans, the newest

Faniyi 10
generation of African emigrants (Selasi) are proper Africans of the world (Selasi), and
revel in this identity: And if it all sounds a little self-congratulatory, a little arent-we-thecoolest-damn-people-on-earth? I say: yes it is, necessarily (Selasi). Selasi explicitly
names Adichie as one of the exemplars of this redefined African identity. Ifemelu does not
conform religiously to Selasis genealogy of the Afropolitanchildren of a 1960 1975
wave of African emigrants born/bred in Africa or overseas (Selasi). However, Ifemelu was
born and bred in Africa to in-place Nigerians and then shipped to the West for higher
education (Selasi).
But Selasi postscripts this revelry with a sense of mission. For all our Adjayes and
Adichies, she writes, there is a brain drain back home (Selasi). Most Afropolitans could
serve Africa better in Africa than at Medicine Bar on Thursdays (Selasi). Ifemelu spends
thirteen years in Americacopping a Green Card and a Princeton fellowship along the way
before she decides to return to Nigeria (16). Her motives may be more complicated than
simply developing a sense of missionand now she was chasing something she could not
articulate clearly, even to herself (190), but she does return, to the consternation of many.
Neoliberalism or economic globalization refers to the theory and practice of an unfettered
liberalization of market forces (Ashcroft et al. 148) which is key for post-colonial theory
because it has become the most obvious medium of neo-colonial/neo-imperial
domination (148). Two of its key underpinnings are the belief that the fairest and most
efficient way to drive economies (and thus the lives of people) is to allow market forces work
themselves out free of state intervention, and a belief in free trade, which, as the disavowals
of trade deals (NAFTA, TTIP) in this years presidential election cycle in the US
demonstrates, is fundamentally flawed, unfree, and perpetuates the economic domination and
exploitation of the world by what is not now simply the West but a global corporate elite

Faniyi 11
that includes individual Africans as well. In this passage from Americanah, Chief presents a
critique of the neoliberal ideal of the free market:
They said the National Farm Support Corporation is bankrupt and theyre going to
privatise it. Do you know this? No. How do I know this? Because I have friends. By
the time you know it, I would have taken a position and I would have benefitted from
the arbitrage. That is our free market! (26)
It is possible to use this cantankerous submission by Chief to critique the idea of free trade. I
will go about it by way of analogy, but first, the idea of free trade, like the idea of the free
market espoused above, presupposes that there is some sort of a level playing ground
between the worlds elite countries and the subaltern countries such as Nigeria. The
analogy of economic globalisation: Real Madrid are awarded five goals against Alaves in a
football match that is only to begin at the 80-minute mark and end on 90 minutes (plus added
time) as all football matches must do. There will always only be one winner in that scenario.
In essence, countries that have only emerged into the industrial limelight are expected to
compete on much the same terms with countries who have had centuries to perfect their
industrial productive capacities. There will only always be one winner in that scenario.
To posit Americanah as an instance of African literature and an instance of American
literature is relatively straightforward. To say it is an instance of African American literature
is a different, complicated kettle of fish. However, like much African American literature (or
all African American literature, as Jameson might say it), Americanah participates in
undermining American exceptionalism (countering its discourse, as Hellen Tiffin might say
it), the myth upon which the American self-image is founded, and founders.
Interestingly enough, Donald Trump has in a manner of speaking reversed roles with Hillary
Clinton vis--vis American exceptionalism. Trump does not like the term, because it is

Faniyi 12
disrespectful to other nations (Sargent), and on this score he is in agreement with Barack
Obama of the 2009 vintage at least. For Clinton, the United States in an exceptional nation
(White); that its not just that [the United States has] the greatest military, or that [its]
economy is larger than any on Earth, but that its also the strength of [its] values (White).
Therefore, Clinton submits, our power comes with a responsibility to lead (White).
In Donald Peases formulation, while the [American] state was constituted in explicit
opposition to monarchical rule and was resolute in its rejection of feudalism, its relation to
colonialism was decidedly more complicated (204). Furthermore,
the psychological processes of disavowal and forgetting that exceptionalism
facilitated might as a consequence be understood as efforts to produce the absences in
which the doctrine is grounded. These and other related forms of denial reconstituted
US citizens adherence to the nations exceptionality by excluding historical [and
sociocultural] facts that might disconfirm that belief. (204, brackets are mine)
In defining, supporting, transmitting, administering, and reproducing the US national
identity, the doctrine has manifested in three discursive registers, as a normative
presupposition, as an historical paradigm, and as a national narrative (209).
Americanah subverts the hypocritical silences perpetuated by Americas image-making and
highlights the race question, a direct consequence of US colonialism and imperialism, which
alone is as eloquent as any critique of, to borrow Peases terminology, the doctrinal limits
of the notion of American exceptionalism. As SapphicDerridas eulogy to the impending
death of Ifemelus anonymously run blog reads, she has used her irreverent, hectoring, funny
and thought-provoking voice to create a space for real conversations about race (5).
Princeton, for instance, is almost exclusively white and what blackness Ifemelu sees is so
high-yellow and lank-haired they may as well be white (3). At Trenton where Ifemelu goes to

Faniyi 13
make her hair, no whites are about; the platform is crowdedyes, crowdedwith blacks (5).
Nowhere in Princeton would you find rundown buildings and the advertisement of plebeian
financial services such as quick tax refunds (16). Princeton (and Trenton) therefore becomes a
critique of integration and equality, a situation so hilariously dramatized in Black-ish, a hit
TV sitcom created by Kenya Barris in 2015. Why, for instance, should Ifemelu not find a
place to braid her hair in Princeton? (3)
Everyone standing beside her on the platform at Princeton Junction station is white and lean,
in short flimsy clothes (3). Upon the closest to her she turns her imperial gaze. He is
irresponsible for eating an ice-cream in public, and he is comical, because he has swept what
remains of his hair forward in a(n) (hypocritical) attempt to disguise his bald patch (4).
Throughout the novel, Ifemelu replicates this throwaway reduction of whiteness to mostly
uncomplimentary qualifiers.
But Ifemelus relationship with America is ambivalent. She loved Princeton as well,
particularly for its tranquil air (3), and also because it bestowed upon her some sort of status
like Africas post-independence bourgeoisieover and above other less privileged
Africans like Aisha and Mariama.
You live here in Trenton?
I live in Princeton.
Princeton. Aisha paused. You student?
Ive just finished a fellowship, she said, knowing that Aisha would not understand
what a fellowship was, and in the rare moment that Aisha looked intimidated, Ifemelu
felt a perverse pleasure. Yes, Princeton. Yes, the sort of place that Aisha could only
imagine, the sort of place that would never have signs that said QUICK TAX
REFUND; people in Princeton did not need quick tax refunds. (16)

Faniyi 14
This ambivalencesubversion and embraceis a major organising principle of her entire
sojourn in the United States.

4. Works Cited
Abdel-Malek, Kamal. The Reverse Orientalist: Kamal Abdel-Maleks Writing Life Interview
by

Matt

Rees.

Matt

Rees,

May

2011,

http://www.themanoftwistsandturns.com/2011/05/08/the-reverse-orientalist-kamalabdel-malek%E2%80%99s-writing-life-interview/. Accessed 25 Oct. 2016.

Adichie Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. Farafina, 2013.
Ahmad, Aijaz. Jamesons Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory. The PostColonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft et al. Routledge, 2003.
Bill Ashcroft et al, editors. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, 3rd ed. Routledge, 2007.
Castle, Gregory. Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory. Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
Childs, Peter and Roger Fowler. The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms, 3rd ed., New
York, 2006.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Sparklesoup Studios, Inc., 2004.
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Wordsworth Classics, 1995.
Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution. Grove, 1988.
Foucault, Michel. From Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch. W. W. Norton &
Company, 2000, pp. 1636-1647.
Habib, M. A. R. A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present. Blackwell, 2005.

Faniyi 15
Jameson, Frederic. Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism. Social
Text 15, 1986, pp. 65-88.
Pease, Donald E. US Imperialism: Global Dominance without Colonies. A Companion in
Post-colonial Studies. A Companion to Post-colonial Studies, edited by Henry Schwarz
and Sangeeta Ray. Blackwell, 2005, pp. 203-20.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1979.
Sargent, Greg. Donald Trumps revealing quote about American exceptionalism. The
Washington

Post,

June

2016,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-

line/wp/2016/06/07/donald-trumps-revealing-quote-about-american-exceptionalism/?
tid=a_inl&utm_term=.740cb7a6eb11. Accessed 11 Oct 2016.
Selasi,

Taiye.

Bye-Bye

Barbar.

The

Lip

Magazine,

March

2005

http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76. Accessed 11 Oct. 2016.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Foreword: Upon Reading the Companion to Postcolonial
Studies. Schwarz and Ray, pp. xv-xxii.
Tiffin, Helen. Post-colonial Literatures and Counter-discourse. The Post-colonial Studies
Reader. Bill Ashcroft et al., pp. 95-8.
wa Thiongo, Ngugi. The Language of African Literature The Post-colonial Studies Reader.
Bill Ashcroft et al., pp. 285 90.
White, Daniel. Read Clintons Speech Touting American Exceptionalism. Time, 1 Sept
2016, http://time.com/4474619/read-hillary-clinton-american-legion-speech/. Accessed
11 Oct 2016.