What does it look like to leave a place you call home and later return to it, only to find that something isn’t quite the same? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah narrates the efforts of Ifemelu, a woman from Lagos, Nigeria, as she culturally assimilates into early 2000s America. Ifemelu creates a blog that analyzes her experiences as a Nigerian woman amongst both white people and African Americans, recounting day-to-day observations that spell out a wider analysis of what Black identity means both to her and within the American social landscape. Ifemelu’s blog becomes well-established and extremely popular blog, resonating with many Africans across America who have observed similar nuances in their day-to-day life.
Ifemelu’s eventual decision to delete her blog and return to Nigeria is an attempt to return and reintegrate into her initial home. Her Nigerian friends and family mockingly call her an “Americanah,” which Adichie defined in an interview as a Nigerian term for returnees from America who favor Western accents, attitudes, and tastes over their own cultural practices1. Ifemelu’s decision to attend an American university, read American books, and starting a blog that records her observations of Black Americans as an African woman are all absorbed into her identity as an “Americanah.” Upon her return, she feels liberated from the money-hungry, capitalist sentiments that weighed her down. And yet, she still feels the desire to carve out a space for herself in Nigerian society. She attempts to pursue a more creative direction in the magazine she works at, but is met with pushback from her boss and coworkers who care more about beating their competitors. She even attempts to start her own blog but finds that she lacks the enthusiastic readership she once had in America. In short, she attempts to implement American ideals of success outside of America.
Within the context of Shakespearean romance, Stephen Greenblatt discusses the process of reintegration, recovery and return2. This process follows the narrative structure of initial separation, travel and growth, and the culminating homecoming. Greenblatt classifies the romances as having a tripartite structure: integration, disintegration, and reintegration. This pattern can take on many variations and can be mapped onto Ifemelu’s journey, yet it falls apart when we look at the internal nature of her return. Her desire to reintegrate with her Nigerian roots clashes with the effects of her disintegration into American society, such as her Western affectations. Ifemelu’s coworker invites her to joins the The Nigerpolitan Club for Nigerians returning from America but Ifemelu resents the self-righteousness involved. She desires to shed the title of “Americanah” but wonders if it’s possible to fully recover the person she once was before she left her home.
Ultimately, Ifemelu finds freedom in being able to shed her American accent, wear her hair in its natural texture, and let go of her consistent attempts to understand racial dynamics as an outsider. She is able to retain the growth she experienced throughout her disintegration—by starting a new blog and building her own magazine—while also embracing her authentic self and navigating her society effortlessly. In doing so, she lets go of the “Americanah” label, which was largely preventing a seamless reintegration. Adichie uses Ifemelu to chart a new path for migrants that bases success on the process of voluntary return migration, rather than forced return migration or complete cultural assimilation into the Western world at the cost of their own identity. Despite the fact that America has more socioeconomic advantages and better infrastructure, Adichie posits a cultural return as a realistic closure to the migrant’s journey. Given her academic scholarship, her years of study, and her popular blog that landed her many interviews and media features, Ifemelu can be categorized as a successful migrant woman. Her decision to return to Nigeria is motivated by nothing other than the desire to reintegrate, recover her identity, and return home. Adichie framing return immigration as a fully autonomous action is an important literary decision, given the commonplace conception that the Western world guarantees exponentially more opportunities and comforts over developing countries.
- https://www.npr.org/transcripts/195598496 ↩︎
- Greenblatt, Stephen, et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 9th ed., Volume A, The Middle Ages, W.W. Norton & Company, 2024. ↩︎