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MULTIVERSO JOURNAL | ISSN: 2792-3681
Volumen 3, Número 4, Edición Enero-junio de 2023
https://doi.org/10.46502/issn.2792-3681/2023.4.8
Cómo citar:
N’Guessan, K.L. (2023). Transculturalism, diaspora and otherness: the quest for a home in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s americana.
Multiverso Journal, 3(4), 93-108.
https://doi.org/10.46502/issn.2792-3681/2023.4.8
Transculturalism, diaspora and otherness: the quest for a
home in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s americana
Transculturalismo, diáspora y alteridad: la búsqueda de un hogar en Chimamanda
Ngozi
Kouadio Lambert N’Guessan
Recibido el 02/12/2022 - Aceptado el 17/01/2023
Abstract
This paper aims to re-evaluate the role of otherness, the true keystone of Americanah which
invites to wonder if it might not be at the origin of certain limits that appear in transculturalism.
The places most likely to welcome transculturalism in Western societies come across as culture
places, where dominant norms are challenged to include otherness. This study reveals that
transculturality facilitates African Diasporas circulation and delineates a field of identifications with
hybrid status. Therefore, hybridity can generate discomfort and a loss of the feeling of being at
home. Suffocation, confinement, the disturbingly familiar strangers are all reasons that tarnish
transculturalism representations by underlining its limits, which seep into homes that lose ability
to offer shelter. The function of home to provide protection is then deterritorialised in relationships
or in professional spaces. The analysis suggests that transculturalism stumbling block is not so
much otherness than othering, that is to say the imposition of another identity on someone based
on appearance, ethnic, cultural background, or sex identity dimensions. Thus, from otherness to
othering, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as a transcultural Nigerian female writer, reveals that
alienation corrodes transcultural characters and generates positive opening discussions and
meetings around new postcolonial relations.
Keywords: otherness, alienation, African diásporas, home and identity, postcolonial and
transculturalism.
Resumen
Este artículo pretende reevaluar el papel de la alteridad como piedra angular del americanismo,
lo que invita a preguntarse si no estará en la raíz de algunas de las limitaciones que aparecen en
Maître Assistant Department of English – Université Alassane Ouattara. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2433-3523.
Email: lamkwadio78@gmail.com
N’Guessan, K.L. / Vol. 2 Núm. 3 (2022) Páginas. 93-108
Multiverso Journal publica bajo una licencia de Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
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el transculturalismo. Este estudio revela que el transculturalismo facilita el movimiento de las
diásporas africanas y delimita un campo de identificaciones con estatus híbrido. En consecuencia,
la hibridez puede generar incomodidad y pérdida del sentido del hogar. La asfixia, el
confinamiento, los extraños molestos pero familiares son motivos que empañan las
representaciones del transculturalismo al subrayar sus limitaciones, que se filtran en los hogares
que pierden su capacidad de acogida. La función protectora del hogar se desterritorializa entonces
en espacios relacionales o profesionales. El análisis sugiere que el escollo del transculturalismo
no es tanto la alteridad como la otredad, es decir, la imposición de otra identidad a alguien en
función de su apariencia, origen étnico o cultural o género. Así se concluye que, de la alteridad a
la otredad, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, como escritora nigeriana transcultural, revela la alienación
que corroe a los personajes transculturales y genera al mismo tiempo debates positivos y
encuentros de apertura en torno a las nuevas relaciones poscoloniales.
Palabras clave: alteridad, alienación, diásporas africanas, hogar e identidad, poscolonial y
transculturalismo.
Introduction
Americanah
(2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie questions a homogeneous conception of
society. Adichie takes a different look at the racial question because being black made no political
sense to her before she emigrated to the United States to continue her studies. She has authored her
first novel,
Purple Hibiscus
(2013) which had a great commercial success. With
Half of a Yellow Sun
(2006) she won the Orange Prize for Fiction [now Women’s Prize] and was adapted for the cinema.
The Thing Around Your Neck
(2009) is a collection of short stories which gave million-view TED
conferences, LLC
12
.
A year before
We Should All Be Feminists
(2014), Adichie authored
Americanah
which recounts
the journey of a young Nigerian woman who emigrates to the United States. It alludes to a country,
though indirectly, through the suffix
-nah
which highlights the influence of America on the main
character from Nigeria. Her most recent books are
Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen
Suggestions
(2017),
Zikora
(2020).
Americanah
is Adichie’s most transcultural novel due to crossovers
and comparisons between Nigeria, the United States and Great Britain, as well as in-depth reflections
on racial issues.
Transculturalism and the understanding of relationships as spaces of refuge make possible
reterritorialisation in relationships, but these cannot always offer a reliable sanctuary. How does
Americanah
unfold transcultural otherness forms in the Western space? How does Adichie use her
transcultural fiction to locate diasporans within
trans-spaces
? To what extent transculturality can be
part of a decolonial praxis and generate a loss of the feeling of being at home? The analysis of
transcultural characters’ relation to space underlines little opportunities available to them: they are
indeed either forced to resign themselves to a positioning at the margin, or pushed to the claim which
sometimes degenerates into a hardening of identity conceptions, either forced to accept in-between
discomfort and otherness constantly projected onto them, even in professional context.
12
Technology, Entertainment, and Design, an American-Canadian media organisation, conceived and co-founded by
Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks in February 1984, in 1984 in California.
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For sake of clarity to explore Adichie’s transcultural narrative, this study firstly examines
transculturalism manifestations within African Diasporas. Encounter between political debates and
transcultural writing, while like
Americanah
in this paper, seeks to enhance transculturality of spaces
and quest for a home. To resonate in the world multiple and diverse politics of language, the reflection
proposes to open up to new postcolonial relations through a new transcultural voice including Adichie’s
normalised change perceptions.
Transculturalism Manifestations within African Diasporas
From the very first pages of
Americanah
, the narrative voice comments on the tension between
Ifemelu and Nigerian taxi drivers:
She hoped her driver would not be a Nigerian, because he, once he heard her accent, would
either be aggressively eager to tell her that he had a master’s degree, the taxi was a second job […],
or he would drive in sullen silence, giving her change and ignoring her “thank you”, all the time nursing
humiliation, that this fellow Nigerian, a small girl at that […], was looking down on him. Nigerian taxi
drivers in America were all convinced that they really were not taxi drivers (Adichie, 2013, p. 8).
It is significant that the narrative voice, through internal focus, reports this dissent so early in
the story. On the one hand, taxi drivers are placed at the threshold of the story and not at the core
of the novel: their presence is recognised although they are not part of the main narrative.
On the other hand, in addition to the social tension that opposes drivers to the privileged
young woman, a sexist dimension is added.
But above all, Ifemelu freezes these characters in their role and in their identity as taxi drivers.
They are refused any social mobility and even any identification relating to their common origins.
These few lines thus illustrate the power of the forces which confine certain immigrant men to
marginality positions and reproduce the colonial distribution of space between centre and margin.
Othering that pushes black women, in
Americanah
, to come together in hair salons is more
subtle, but no less direct. In fact, most of Western hairstyle salons do not welcome black women
because hairdressers do not know how to take care of their hair, which requires different care than
white women. Ifemelu is denied access to a spa to have his eyebrows waxed because “they don’t do
curly” (Adichie, 2013: 292), and her furious white boyfriend [Curt] intervenes to take care of her.
African women are therefore obliged to open their own salons, a specific step to reterritorialisation
process.
In Western countries, African hair salons affect the environment by making visible the presence
of transcultural populations and creating a territory for women from African Diasporas. Ifemelu enjoys
having peaceful conversations, without being projected stereotypes onto her: “Ifemelu fanned herself
with a magazine. “It’s so hot,” she said. At least, these women would not say to her “You’re hot? But
you're from Africa!” / “This heat wave is very bad. Sorry the air conditioner broke yesterday,” Mariama
said (Adichie, 2013, p. 11). The simplicity of the exchange and the natural response of Mariama
contrast with the contrived comments Ifemelu is used to receiving, which suggests that in these
trans-
spaces
, communication is easy with spontaneous understanding.
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Results of colonial dichotomy, diasporic places allow their members to occupy part of Western
space, that is to say, to reterritorialise
trans-spaces
. In an attempt to imagine a more inclusive
cosmopolitanism, one that operates ‘from below’, a number of approaches have been formulated to
place minorities and marginalised identities at the centre rather than at the borders of a cosmopolitan
society. In these ways, cosmopolitanism is liable to offer a mode of managing cultural and political
multiplicities.
In this analysis, I refer to community sites in order to investigate the usefulness of
cosmopolitanism as a critical apparatus for understanding the complexities of transcultural interaction.
As appropriate to my focus on cultural praxis, I deploy as a working definition Stuart Hall’s “Political
Belonging in a World of Multiple Identities”. Hall suggests that people are no longer inspired by a
single culture that is coherent, integrated and organic. Instead, the arrival of transnational migrants
has enriched and altered cultural repertoires of many people. As he explains:
It is not that we are without culture but we are drawing on the traces and residues of many
cultural systems, of many ethical systems – and that is precisely what cosmopolitanism means. It
means the ability to stand outside of having one’s life written and scripted by any one community,
whether that is a faith or tradition or religion or culture – whatever it might be – and to draw selectively
on a variety of discursive meanings (Hall, 2002, p. 26).
This widening of consciousness and confrontation with alterity can be found not only on the
streets of cosmopolitan cities, but in the living rooms of more prosaic spaces. Cosmopolitanism
suggests something that simultaneously: (a) transcends the seemingly exhausted nation-state model;
(b) is able to mediate actions and ideals oriented both to the universal and the particular, the global
and the local; (c) is culturally anti essentialist; and (d) is capable of representing variously complex
repertoires of allegiance, identity and interest (Hall, 2002, p. 26).
In
Transnationalism
(2009), Steven Vertovec notes that research on transnationalism emerged
as a reaction to the dominant concept of assimilationist model, suggesting that integration of foreign
origin populations could take other forms than their own culture erasure. These words go in the
direction of the transcultural project, which invites to a crossing and a mixture of cultures with each
other, as the diasporic places highlight in
Americanah
.
Brought together by the multiple expressions of rejection sent back to them by society in
which they live, they put into action another form of transculturalism which materialises first within
African Diasporas and in these diasporic places. Hairdresser in
Americanah
is representative of this
type of phenomenon. From the first pages of the novel, Adichie depicts the familiar and warm lively
atmosphere that reigns:
They displayed bright signboards with names like Aisha and Fatima African Hair Braiding […].
Often, there was a baby tied to someone’s back with a piece of cloth. Or a toddler asleep on a wrapper
spread over a battered sofa. Sometimes, older children stopped by. Tea conversations were loud and
swift, in French or Wolof or Malinke, and when they spoke English to customers, it was broken, curious,
as though they had not quite eased into the language itself before taking on a slangy Americanism
(Adichie, 2013, p. 9).
The presence of babies and children, the faded furniture and the multiplicity of spoken
languages create a feeling of intimacy and familiarity even more so for American clients are excluded
if they do not understand Wolof or French. While the lack of English language proficiency often
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contributes to crowding out transcultural characters, in African hair salons, it is not English that is a
marker of belonging but rather the knowledge of African cultures.
African Diasporas that evolve in these places come off as homogeneous but Adichie affirms
their transcultural dimension through cultures variety represented in the hairdresser where Malians
and Senegalese work, a sign of a cultural mix. Thus, barely installed Ifemelu, Aisha, the hairdresser,
immediately asks her if she knows the actors and actresses of the Nigerian film which is broadcast. A
short time later, while Ifemelu does not participate in the gossip of hairdressers, she knows she is
accepted despite everything:
They looked at Ifemelu for her agreement, her approval. They expected it, in this shared space
of their Africanness, but Ifemelu said nothing and turned a page of her novel. They would, she was
sure, talk about her after she left. That Nigerian girl, she feels very important because of Princeton.
Look at her food bar, she does not eat real food any more. They would laugh with derision, but only
a mild derision, because she was still their African sister, even if she had briefly lost her way (Adichie,
2013, p. 103).
Ifemelu manifests a haughty attitude and stands out from certain signs she does not hesitate
to show. The fact that she integrates herself into a higher social class resides in the novel Ifemelu
reads, the cereal bars that serve her as a meal and her studies at Princeton. The hairdresser remains
a space where characters’ Africanness is a shared identity in the diasporic context. Adichie clarifies
this observation in the excerpt where women share cultural relations, although their economic status
is different and they are not from the same African country: Ifemelu is Nigerian and English-speaking
while the hairdressers are Senegalese and French speakers (Adichie, 2013).
Avtar Brah explains that the concept of diaspora can be understood as a matrix of economic,
political and cultural relations, from which arise the commonalities between members of different
diaspora groups. He writes: “The concept of diaspora delineates a field of identifications where
‘imagined communities’ are forged within and out of a confluence of narratives from annals of
collective memory and re-memory.
“It is important to stress that diaspora is a panic concept” (Brah, 1996, p. 193). Despite,
therefore, notable differences between young women, their belonging to African Diasporas connects
them to a relationship with intimate dimensions and makes the hairdressing salon a place where a
sense of security dominates and where benevolent transcultural exchanges are made possible.
In addition, Brah claims that, “Border crossings do not occur only across the
dominant/dominated dichotomy, but […], equally, there is traffic within cultural formations of the
subordinated groups, and […] these journeys are not always mediated through the dominant
culture(s)” (Brah, 1996, p. 206). In this respect, Adichie echoes African Diasporas’ abroad experience.
While staging Ifemelu, the author intends to depict the protagonist’s Africanness.
That is, if Ifemelu is initially annoyed by her hairdresser whom she finds strange, she ends up
feeling compassion for her, because of her personal situation. Moreover, the reader can realise that
the only exchange through which a tension is actually happening is the one that takes place between
Ifemelu and an American client who has come to have braids done, and who, talking about literature
with Ifemelu, offers a stereotypical vision of transcultural characters within
trans-spaces
.
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Woven into relationships within diaspora, transculturalism therefore manifests itself as a
reterritorialisation of cultures in diasporic places and attests to the fact that these are not anchored in
a single space, which would be country of origin. Culture as travel, as movement, such is the proposal
of Adichie’s novel, echoing James Clifford who, in “Travelling Cultures”, defines it like “a site of travel”
(Clifford, 1992, p. 110). Individuals carry culture inside of them, in their heart of hearts, and it is their
reterritorialisation in diasporic spaces that initiates public space’s transculturalism. While highlighting
these processes,
Americanah
as a transcultural novel, echoes comments by Avtar Brah who, evoking
cultural groups from Diasporas in United Kingdom, writes:
My argument is that they are not ‘minority’ identities, nor are they at the periphery of
something that sees itself as located at the centre, although they may be represented as such. Rather,
through processes of decentring, these new political and cultural formations continually challenge the
minoritizing and peripheralising impulses of the cultures of dominance (Brah, 1996, p. 206).
Brah suggests that for African Diasporas who may feel they are losing their identity while
migrating, returning home is not the solution because their identity, whatever it may have been, is
altered by the foreigner’s experience which is somehow “transculturalised”. The transcultural
dimension of the characters turns out to be a state of permanent alterity that manifests itself in the
impossibility of returning “home” to a localised place. African descent from diaspora is sometimes
willing to return to their country of origin.
However, returning home raises questions about the place of these Africans abroad as full
citizens. From this perspective, Adichie seeks to posit the return of Africans from all over the world to
Africa in a broader framework which is the struggle for the liberation of the continent from the colonial
yoke. In the light of these returns to the countries, it appears transcultural condition’s inescapable
and inevitable characteristics. In 1994, Iain Chambers called upon to develop the meaning of the term
“home” as mobile:
It means to conceive of dwelling as a mobile habitat, as a mode of inhabiting time and space
not as though they were fixed and closed structures, but as providing the critical provocation of an
opening whose questioning presence reverberates in the movement of the languages that constitutes
our sense of identity, place and belonging. There is no one place, language or tradition that can claim
this role (Chambers, 1994, p. 4).
The characters who have migrated are the most likely to understand that only one place is not
enough to develop a belonging and identity feeling. Diverse and secular, African Diasporas form both
an extension of the continent and a legacy of Africa to the rest of the world. The aesthetics of
Diasporas could appear as a resolution of the tension between Africa invented by the Afrocentric
imagination. In this vein, Ian Chambers expresses pessimism about of African Diasporas’ returning
home as they are constantly trapped by the West:
Post-colonialism is perhaps the sign of an increasing awareness that it is not feasible to
subtract a culture, a history, a language, an identity, from the wider, transforming currents of the
increasingly metropolitan world. It is impossible to ‘go home’ again (Chambers, 1994, p. 74).
Migration experience reveals the impossibility of conceiving time and space as “closed and
fixed structures”, since
Americanah
’s transcultural characters take a bit from their “home” to their
country of destination and bring back a bit from the host country on their return, whether it be an
American passport, a mode of writing, a way of behaving. Most of the time, characters who are
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disoriented by a set of unfamiliar elements in their new environment.
Sometimes Adichie depicts this
“
new environment
” as a dreary, cold place, without light or social interactions; representations of the
city can even become phantasmagoric in the eyes of the disturbingly familiar strangers.
Enhancing Transculturality of Spaces: A Quest for Home?
From open spaces and unbridgeable boarders’ standpoint, transculturality can be defined as
the ability to navigate from one culture to another thanks to a good knowledge of cultural and social
codes, verbal language and non-verbal, signs of belonging, behaviour. If it was self-sufficient, this
transcultural quality would make it possible to transcultural circles and to move from one to another
without suffering from any form of othering.
My discussion therefore aims to analyse the ways one may feel at home otherwise than in
the home’s fixed and material place. The issue of setting in motion is often accompanied by a return
to the country of origin, which is not the miracle solution it claims to be. Moreover, the frequency with
which women leave family household in the
Americanah
invites the reader to consider the way they
seek a home outside the home.
The narration’s homogeneity, sliding from Ifemelu’s internal focalisation to hairdressers’ free
indirect discourse, illustrates the continuity of their relationship. In this closed and secure place, far
from white gaze and judgement, characters’ Africanness takes on a palpable dimension, and their
bond remains sororal despite social differences. In
Americanah
, the narrator accounts for the city
hardly susceptible to be more hospitable when Ifemelu discovers Baltimore:
[S]he thought it forlorn and unlovable. The buildings were joined to one another in faded
slumping rows, and on shabby corners, people were hunched in puffy jackets, black and bleak people
waiting for buses, the air around them hazed in gloom (Adichie, 2013, p. 206).
The semantic field draws a desolate portrait of the city: “forlorn”, “unlovable”, “faded slumping
rows”, “shabby”, “bleak”, and again a sense of unease is liable to emerge from both buildings and
individuals, as shown by the alliteration “black and bleak” whose sounds echo the name of the city,
“Baltimore”. These two examples show how the cities in which the transcultural characters move is
inhospitable but warm.
Sometimes the uncannily familiar feeling caused by the coldness and grayness of urban
landscape can be transformed into a real phantasmagoric vision where everyday life scenes are
distorted and may be disturbing. Adichie thus describes the first time that Ifemelu sees the snow:
That night, it snowed, her first snow, and in the morning, she watched the world outside her
window, the parked cars made lumpy, misshapen, by layered snow. She was bloodless, detached,
floating in a world where darkness descended too soon and everyone walked around burdened by
coats, and flattened by the absence of light. The days drained into one another, crisp air turning to
freezing air, painful to inhale (Adichie, 2013, p. 155).
In the middle of a depressive episode, Ifemelu perceives the snow as an agonising burden.
The intrusive presence of “snow” appears three times in the first sentence appear to be affecting
Ifemelu’s resentment in “bloodless”, “detached”, “floating”, as if she herself had become as immaterial
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and insignificant as a snowflake. These utterances offer an agonising and distressing vision that
generates a disturbingly familiar impression. Ifemelu feels the same distress after her relationship
breakup with Curt: “For weeks, Ifemelu stumbled around, trying to remember the person she was
before Curt. […S] he no longer knew who she had been then, what she had enjoyed, disliked, wanted”
(Adichie, 2013, p. 299).
In view of the foregoing, the reader notices that the total loss of identity during love
relationship leads Ifemelu to seek a stable identity and a safe harbour or “home” elsewhere than in a
concrete place because the private home has lost its quality of refuge and has become suffocating.
Characters’ displacements and setting in motion in
Americanah
lead to a re-examination of the concept
of “home” as a fixed place. This home is therefore especially welcoming for the man who finds inside
the housing a familiar atmosphere, a “taste” of his country of origin, which compensates for the
marginalisation he experiences abroad.
Besides, considering home in motion and home as movement, otherness frequently takes
precedence over openness qualities and mutual understanding that transculturalism is supposed to
help develop. When confinement, claustrophobia and misunderstanding invade home, it can no longer
be perceived and lived as such, as a
home
.
When racial tensions and otherness invite themselves into home, characters who suffer the
most from it leave the place and look elsewhere for “home” they miss. As characters cope with
discomfort in transcultural position within the host country, otherness sudden appearance is at the
very core of home. Adichie gives the reader an account of strategies of return to the home country.
However, this return is not always accompanied by a relief or a resolution of transculturality problems
protagonists have trouble with.
Other types of difficulties, even disappointments, beset characters upon their return to the
home country. This idea appears to be suggesting a step backwards, if geographically possible, does
not make it possible to ignore the lived experience as transcultural characters. Cogently, Iain
Chambers writes: “the promise of a homecoming – completing the story, domesticating the detour –
becomes an impossibility” (Chambers, 1995, p. 5).
In
Americanah
, Adichie mentions a paradoxical disorientation and changes in self-perception.
This disorientation relates to Ifemelu’s return to Nigeria which is accompanied by an almost total loss
of bearings, as evidenced in the below paragraph which opens the seventh and last part of the novel:
At first, Lagos assaulted her; the sun-dazed haste, the yellow busses full of squashed limbs,
the sweating hawkers racing after cars, the advertisements on hulking billboards […] and the heaps
of rubbish that rose on the roadsides like a taunt. Trade thrummed too defiantly. And the air was
dense with exaggeration, conversations full of over-protests. One morning, a man’s body lay on
Awolowo Road. Another morning, The Island flooded and cars became gasping boats. […] And so,
she had the dizzying sensation of falling, falling into the new person she had become, falling into the
strange familiar. Had it always been like this or had it changed so much in her absence? […] She had
grown up […] understanding the cryptic codes of conductors and the body language of street hawkers.
Now she struggled to grasp the unspoken. When had shopkeepers become so rude? Had buildings in
Lagos always had this patina of decay? […]
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“Americanah” Raniyundo teased her often. “You are looking at things with American eyes. But
the problem is that you are not even a real Americanah. At least if you had an American accent, we
would tolerate your complaining!” (Adichie, 2013, p. 385).
These descriptive paragraphs transcribe accumulation of all that assaulted Ifemelu in the first
months of her arrival. The narrative voice moves from environment description to questions
disoriented character is asking. To the city’s aggressiveness is added Ifemelu’s inability to understand
communication codes she never had to learn, and her childhood friend’s teasing. The following
utterances “squashed limbs”, “a man’s body”, “heaps of rubbish”, “the sweating hawkers” produce
the same effect as the snow and the rubbish that made the first agonising American cities where
Ifemelu resided.
Pell-mell references to shops, advertisements, crowded buses, “full of over-protestation”
conversations create an impression of suffocating and deafening chaos, and result in a vertigo
sensation communicated by the repetition of the verb “falling” in “the dizzying sensation of falling […],
falling […], falling”.
Successive description of American cities, which transforms more common visions in
tormented and terrifying scenes where a feeling of “unhomely”, thus reflect the inner state of
characters without geographical, cultural or emotional landmarks. These descriptions, which could
symbolise disillusion, overturn Ifemelu in “the disturbingly familiar stranger”, back home, her bearings
are so jostled that the “unhomely” can be perceived as “the new person she had become”.
Her friend’s sarcasm ends up placing Ifemelu in some in-between uncomfortable state. While
she consciously decided to lose her American accent, which disturbed her identity “[s]he had taken
on, for too long, a pitch of voice and a way of being that was not hers” (Adichie, 2013: 175), and that
she is no longer sure who she is after her return, her friend believes that she is not a “serious”
Americana.
The thirteen years that Ifemelu spent in the United States have changed her so much that
Lagos comes off as familiar but strange to her, and that she herself doubts her own identity. However,
Ifemelu has not changed enough as her boyfriend Obinze expected, to be qualified as “serious
Americanah”, and hence one can understand a form of asserted, proud and hybrid identity which is
not plagued by doubt as Ifemelu is. Before she left, Obinze was looking forward to seeing Ifemelu
change as he intentionally laughed at her “next time we see you, you will be a serious Americanah”
(Adichie, 2013: 100). Ifemelu and Obinze’s romance offers another striking example of territorialisation
in a relationship when they never really recover from their love breakup.
When Ifemelu, back in Nigeria, reconnects with Obinze, whom she had shut out of her life in
the result of a paid sex relationship. This traumatic experience alienates her from her boyfriend Obinze,
with whom she feels unable to share the shock, shame and horror from her paid sexual intercourse.
When Ifemelu tells Obinze about this rape event she experienced, both find themselves in a silence
that speaks volumes insofar as “He took her hand in his, both clasped on the table, and between them
silence grew, an ancient silence that they both knew. She was inside this silence and she was safe
(Adichie, 2013: 440).
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When the other is courted not for their identity, in the case of Ifemelu and Obinze whose
feelings survive a thirteen-year separation and silence, but for what it represents in terms of culture,
social class and racial affiliation, relationship sincerity is questioned and otherness runs the risk of
becoming alienation. Thus,
Americanah
does not question the possibility of establishing healthy
relationships in a transcultural dimension but rather suggests transcultural characters must overcome
otherness.
Transcultural characters can benefit from a freedom their dual identity gives them, but this
freedom does not come without discomfort. If some manifest a more assumed transcultural identity,
which may suggest a hope of seeing transculturalism effectively foster exchanges with others, most
suffer from nagging feelings of uncertainty, or even incompleteness, put in light through writing and
language use.
The
Politics of Language in Postcolonial and Transcultural Voice
In
Americanah
, tension that arises around the issue of language use and parent’s alienation
feeling vis-a-vis the bilingual child attests that alienation persists long after colonisation and
decolonisation. The emergence of otherness within homes does not only thwart relationships parents-
children. Misunderstandings and quarrels also interfere in couples, especially when they are bi-racial.
Adichie stages a couple that [can] separate owing to racial or linguistic diversity. From the outset,
Ifemelu’s aunt, a Nigerian refugee in the United States where she is raising her son, uses Igbo to
threaten the latter. The narrator subtly puts:
The last time Ifemelu visited, Aunty Uju told him, ‘I will send you back to Nigeria if you do that
again!’ speaking Igbo as she did to him only when she was angry, and Ifemelu worried that it would
become for him the language of strife (Adichie, 2013, p. 171).
The use of Igbo in anger moments shows how Uju feels helpless, as if English lacks power to
communicate threatens’ seriousness. Just as in society in general, through this example of an
immigrant and bilingual family, language issue expands to include an implicit and insidious power
relationship.
In
Americanah
, a bi-racial couple, Ifemelu and Curt are corroded by racial tensions. Curt’s
inability to understand Ifemelu’s loneliness and helplessness resides in the fact that: “There were,
simply, times that he saw and times that
he was unable to see
. She knew that she should tell him
those thoughts, that not telling him cast a shadow over them both. Still, she chose silence” (Adichie,
2013, p. 294, italics mine).
Ifemelu’s relationship with Curt, who, by his whiteness and economic power, represents all
that is the most privileged, is interspersed with minute tensions that end up keeping Ifemelu away.
Even when she shows him American society’s racist biases, Curt’s response reveals how abstractive it
all sounds to him: “Okay, babe, okay, I didn’t mean for it to be such a big deal,” he said (Adichie,
2013: 295). Winding up the discussion with as much indifference, Curt pushes Ifemelu to write to
someone who can understand her, and brings to light his own compassion limits.
The racial question is not the sole problem Ifemelu encounters in her partnership life. When
she starts dating Blaine, an African-American who teaches at Harvard University, the different ways
they experience their skin colour also contribute to keep them away from each other. After a
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demonstration in front of the university, to which Ifemelu did not want to participate, Blaine
reproaches her the following:
You know, it’s not just about writing a blog, you have to live like you believe it. […]’ She
recognized, in his tone, a subtle accusation, not merely about her laziness, her lack of zeal and
conviction, but also about her Africanness; she was not sufficiently furious because she was African,
not African American (Adichie, 2013, p. 345).
For Blaine, very committed to racial equality struggle, Ifemelu writes her blog with too much
nonchalance and not enough conviction. These deep disagreements and misunderstandings stem from
the fact that, unlike Ifemelu’s African-American male/female friends, “race was not embroidered in
the fabric of her history” (Adichie, 2013: 337). As an African woman, Ifemelu does not experience
racial question similarly with her African-American male and female friends. She does not see so many
causes of revolts and anger in racial issue. Moreover, when Blaine expects from Ifemelu this level of
commitment, she cannot but walk away from him.
Such a situation of misunderstanding, which
Americanah
reports on, can compromise cultural
exchanges emergence, which appears to be modulating transcultural theory promise that celebrates
the freedom to move between cultures. Postcolonial criticism, as Homi Bhabha explains, accounts for
these principles of representation:
Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation
involved in the context for political and social authority within the modern world order. Postcolonial
perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of
‘minorities’ within the geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South. They intervene in those
ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic ‘normality’ to the uneven
development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities,
peoples. (Bhabha, 1994, p. 171)
Americanah
is written decades after postcolonial studies’ founding texts, but they nevertheless
retain certain specificities, while going beyond the framework. In an article on
Africa and the Black
Atlantic
, Yogita Goyal argues that
Americanah
can be read as an inverted postcolonial literary creation.
Accordingly, he evokes that:
The novel may, in fact, be placed within a larger tradition of postcolonial writing – reversing
the heart of darkness narrative, where rather than Europeans or Americans going to Africa to find
themselves, an African character travels to the heart of the West, only to find darkness there (Goyal,
2014, p. XII).
From this perspective, postcolonial literature aims to give voice to the subordinates and to
distinguish itself from the ancient imperial centres, especially through language, as explained Ashcroft,
Griffiths and Tiffin:
One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over language. The imperial
education system installs a ‘standard’ version of the metropolitan language as the norm, and
marginalizes all ‘variants’ as impurities. […] Language becomes the medium through which a
hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and the medium through which conceptions of ‘truth’,
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‘order’, and ‘reality’ become established. Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effective post-
colonial voice (Ashcroft
et al
., 2002, p. 7).
If post-colonialism aims to undermine European culture domination, and is therefore part of a
form of resistance to it, transcultural novels generally pursue this demystification endeavour by
multiplying perspectives and placing otherness at the core of their writing. Unlike postcolonial writers,
Adichie is not part of [the same] fight appropriation and/or language subversion. However, if English
use is never questioned, the language can become a factor of instability. This language that Adichie’s
Nigerian characters have always used with insurance and whose certain elements are now redefined
becomes a source of instability and perplexity.
This is for example the case at the beginning of chapter 14 of
Americanah
, when a young
American, Cristina Tomas, during the welcome day for foreign students, speaks to Ifemelu with
deliberate slowness in case she does not understand English. The chapter opens with these words:
“And then there was Cristina Tomas (Adichie, 2013: 133), which announce the decisive content of the
meeting. By assigning a first name and a surname to a passing character, Adichie underlines the long-
term consequences of this moment for her protagonist. Shocked that Cristina Tomas assumed her
English was mediocre, Ifemelu “shrinks”:
Ifemelu shrank. In that strained, still second when her eyes met Cristina Tomas’s before she
took the forms, she shrank. She shrank like a dried leaf. She had spoken English all her life, led the
debating society in secondary school, and always thought the American twang inchoate; she should
not have cowered and shrunk, but she did. And in the following weeks, as autumn’s coolness
descended, she began to practice an American accent (Adichie, 2013, pp. 133-134).
The polyptoton of the verb “shrank” / “shrunk” illustrates just as much the consternation, the
discomfort and bewilderment than Ifemelu’s anger. The comparison to falling “dried leaf” and
“autumn’s coolness” image symbolise the fact that owing to this misunderstanding, something goes
out of Ifemelu, undermining the high school student’s confidence, formerly a talk-show host. Cristina
Tomas plays a fundamental role because she is the first to project such otherness on Ifemelu that she
transforms her speaking way, like Ginika before her. Ginika, Ifemelu’s friend who arrives in the United
States a few years before the latter, constitutes a striking example. During their homecoming, Ginika
speaks Nigerian English which, she no doubt, rarely uses, and in this language use which,
paradoxically, is likely to be unnatural, Ifemelu detects a lack of trust:
Ginika had lapsed into Nigerian English, a dated, overcooked version, eager to prove how
unchanged she was. She had, with a strenuous loyalty, kept in touch through the years […]. And now,
she was saying “shay you know” and Ifemelu did not have the heart to tell her that nobody said “shay”
any more (Adichie, 2013, p. 123).
In Ginika’s eagerness to show that she has not changed can be read her positioning
uncertainty: after several years in the United States, she no longer knows the expressions to fashion
in Nigeria, while refusing to admit that a long separation can take her away from her friends. Her
Nigerian English, in a rather intense emotion moment, aims to point out her emotional closeness to
her long-time girlfriend but has the opposite effect. Ifemelu has been on American soil for a few
minutes when Ginika, by this clumsiness, shows her transcultural positioning complexity. Quickly
forgetting his desire to show herself unchanged, Ginika does not take long to alert Ifemelu to semantic
and cultural differences:
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If you see how they laughed at me in high school when I said that somebody was boning for
me. Because boning here means to have sex! […] And can you imagine ‘half-caste’ is a bad word
here? […] So now I say biracial and I’m supposed to be offended when somebody says half caste
(Adichie, 2013, pp. 123-124).
‘You’re thin with big breasts.’
‘Please, I’m not thin. I’m slim.’
‘Americans say ‘thin.’ Here ‘thin’ is a good word. […] [H]ere somebody tells you that you lost
weight and you say thank you’ (Adichie, 2013, p. 124).
Repeated quotation marks in the above excerpts, the anaphora of the adverb “here” and the
fact that the conversation is constantly diverted by these differences in meaning underline the
uncertainty that they suddenly cause. Uncertainty arouses temporal, geographical and cultural
diversion in the characters due to transculturalism when they settle in
trans-spaces
and their identity
is gradually divided between the home country and the host country.
Ginika hijacks the initial conversation by explaining that the word “thin” is positively connoted
in the United States. The repeated presence of inverted commas in the excerpts above, the anaphora
of the adverb “here” and the fact that the conversation is constantly diverted by these differences in
meaning underline the uncertainty that they suddenly cause. This fix, however, only brings short-lived
relief as it generates even more uncertainty: “It took an effort, the twisting of the lip, the curling of
the tongue. If she were in a panic, or terrified, or jerked awake during a fire, she would not remember
how to produce those American sounds (Adichie, 2013: 173).
To produce “those sounds”, the demonstrative “those” signifying affective distance from this
accent, Ifemelu must provide a technical effort, i.e., “the twisting of lip, the curling of tongue”: in this
formulation, the absence of definite article or possessive personal pronoun before “lip and “tongue”
underlines the exercise’s abstractive characteristics, as if her lips and tongue no longer belonged to
her. All is not without effect on her personality. When Ifemelu resumes her Nigerian accent, she is
delighted to find a fairer identity: “This was truly her” (Adichie, 2013: 175).
Thus, in order to compensate for suffering from othering owing to her national and racial
belonging, Ifemelu works an accent which, if it allows her to pass for an American, undermines her
identity and makes her oscillate between two personalities. English duplication engenders uncertainty
which generates instability identity, prompted by the protagonist’s transcultural position.
In a 2004 interview between Adichie and Dan Wickett, the journalist asks the writer about the
insertion of passage in Igbo and Adichie answers: “I use Igbo words or phrases to remind the reader,
from time to time, that the characters are not speaking English” (Adichie, 2020, p. 8). A foreign
language use in a novel written in English amounts to carrying out a linguistic transfer, a
translation
,
a cultural crossing, which reminds the reader of a linguistic otherness and can put him in the front of
misunderstanding, otherness at its acme.
Adichie’s writing style is impressive in this sense that she always facilitates
Americanah
’s
reading by inserting translations or reformulations into the text, as in this extract where Ifemelu and
Obinze, both teenagers, exchange proverbs as soon as “[He] switched to Igbo. ‘
Ama matu inu
. I even
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Página 106
know proverbs.’ / ‘Yes, the basic one everybody knows. A frog does not run in the afternoon for
nothing” (Adichie, 2013, p. 61).
In this conversation, proverbs’ meaning is always transmitted, either by a literal translation,
or by characters’ commentary. However, Adichie sprinkles dialogues with Igbo terms without taking
the trouble to translate them, as in
Purple Hibiscus
: “Amaka,
o gini
? I do not like that tone!” Aunty
Ifeoma said (Adichie, 2013, p. 122).
Igbo words like
‘abi’
,
‘kwa’
,
‘kedu’
, “
sha
”, “
nkem
”, “
nno
” punctuate characters’ exchanges and
the reader should independently try to figure out what these mean on his/her own. Given that
Americanah
is mainly set in the United States, Igbo language is less present than in Adichie’s first
novels set in Nigeria. Through Adichie fiction, foreign words often refer to food. For example, in
Half
of a Yellow Sun
(2006), Adichie purposely uses words such as: “
jollof rice
”, “
arigbe
”, “
garri
”, “
chin-
chin
” or “
okpa
” to describe meals.
Where Adichie chooses italics, she gives these words a typographic relief and thus doubly
signalling their otherness. Although characters would try to recompose typical dishes in their host
countries, they often lack ingredients which force them to settle for approximations with local
products. Thus, they would prepare transcultural dishes at the same time Adichie puts forward
“tensions between the global and the local”.
In an article on transculturation phenomena in Adichie’s fiction, Elena Rodríguez-Murphy
suggests that “[t]he reader can appreciate a tension between the global and the local, a negotiation
between global and local identities, in the use of Nigerian linguistic and cultural markers within the
text” (Murphy, 2017, p. 99).
Still with regard to Adichie, Homi K. Bhabha establishes the observation next: although her
books are written in English, Adichie manages to register ‘cultural difference’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 60)
in her texts through a specific language use. Therefore, it may be said that the stories are a result of
a creative type of “cultural translation” through which “hybrid sites of meaning open up” (Bhabha,
1994, p. 163) and an extensive cultural background is skilfully conveyed (Murphy, 2017, p. 99).
Americanah
does not only settle for immigrant populations’ life depiction in Westerner
countries, it also carries the “cultural background” into the text; foreign words use, especially when
referring to items such as food, makes catch a glimpse of another contained culture, almost concealed
by English but nevertheless detectable.
As Homi Bhabha writes in “Dissemination”: “Designations of cultural difference interrelate
forms of identity which, because of their continual involvement in other symbolic systems, are always
‘incomplete’ or open to cultural translations” (Bhabha, 1994, pp. 162-163). Adichie’s transcultural
writing does not present characters with “incomplete” identities, but rather in the making; likewise,
writing itself is not so much “incomplete” as invested with a will and a “cultural translation” power
from a symbolic system to another.
As I have shown, cultural translation is not always accompanied by a linguistic translation,
which precisely allows a different symbolic and cultural system to breathe in the text, and otherness
to be part of a transcultural system that continues to convey meaning. Cultural difference has an
ideological decisive role. According to Homi K. Bhabha, “The aim of cultural difference is to rearticulate
Página 107
the sum of knowledge from the perspective of the significant position of the minority that resists
totalization – the repetition that will not return as the same” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 162).
The contamination – I dare not refer to “colonisation” – of English language by foreign words
affirms a position from which characters see the world and transmit it. In
Americanah
, the terms
Adichie does not translate but simply transposes them in the English text belong to affective domain,
which is difficult, if not impossible, to find the exact equivalent in another language. Instead of
proposing a translation which would come across as strange as foreign, Adichie leaves the terms in
its original language, thus allowing otherness that contributes to novel’s transcultural dimension.
Conclusion
To cap it off, this study has questioned the possibility of seeing the production of encounters
between individuals who speak the same language but do not share the same culture, which can
generate positive openings but can also generate distrust, even dissension. The first part of this study
has attempted to clarify how transculturalism fits into various Western spaces, whether public or
private, as extensive as countries or more restricted, such as homes. It has brought to light the fact
that transculturalism depends on a social organisation and that it has not yet divested itself of a
colonial dimension which limits exchanges and encounters with those who are visibly others.
Since otherness comes off as the reason why transculturalism is far from African Diasporas’
lived reality within
trans-spaces
, this notion has formed the breadcrumb trail of the second part which
has delved into modalities by which Adichie makes it visible in writing. This reflection has led the
reader to analyse stylistic and literary processes that appear to be characterising transcultural writing,
which would then be defined not only by reasons for crossing borders and the multiplicity of
represented cultures, but also by an ethical dimension.
It finally emerges that, in the third part,
Americanah
as a transcultural novel finds itself at an
intersection between fiction and politics that enters into a particular resonance with contemporary era
and zeitgeist. Instead of responding to literary canons, as postcolonial works used to do,
Americanah
investigates [reworks] them while developing other perspectives and opens up the possibility to
ascend to canonical works’ rank. Even as Adichie’s fiction underlines transculturalism limits in the
Western spaces, the fact that it circulates in diasporic spaces allows the author to become rooted in
these spaces and to give the novel a more transcultural dimension.
Bibliographic References
Adichie, C. N. (2013). Purple Hibiscus, London, Harper Perennial.
Half of a Yellow Sun. (2006). London, Fourth Estate.
Americanah. (2013). London, Fourth Estate.
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (2002). (eds), The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in
Postcolonial Literature. London, Routledge.
Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. London, Routledge.
Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London, Routledge.
Chambers, I. (1994). Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London, Routledge.
Clifford, J. (1992). “Travelling Cultures”, Cultural Studies, Eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and
Paula Treichler, pp. 96-116, New York, Routledge.
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Goyal, Y. (2014). “Africa and the Black Atlantic” Research in African Literatures, 45(3), pp. v-xxv.
Hall, St. (2002). “Political Belonging in a World of Multiple Identities”. In Conceiving Cosmopolitanism:
Theory, Context and Practice, eds. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, pp. 25–31. Oxford,
Oxford University Press.
Rodriguez-Murphy, E. (2017). “New Transatlantic African Writing: Translation, Transculturation and
Diasporic Images in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s the Thing Around Your Neck and
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