Transculturalism, Otherness, Exile, and Identity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’S Americanah

Matatu 49 (2017) 386–399 brill.com/mata Transculturalism, Otherness, Exile, and Identity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah Augustine Uka Nwanyanwu University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria [email protected]; [email protected] Abstract Today African literature exhibits and incorporates the decentred realities of African writers themselves as they negotiate and engage with multifarious forms of diaspora experience, dislocation, otherness, displacement, identity, and exile. National cultures in the twenty-first century have undergone significant decentralization. New African writing is now generated in and outside Africa by writers who themselves are products of transcultural forms and must now interrogate existence in global cities, transnational cultures, and the challenges of immigrants in these cities. Very few nov- els explore the theme of otherness and identity with as much insight as Adichie’s Americanah. The novel brings together opposing cultural forms, at once transcend- ing and celebrating the local, and exploring spaces for the self where identity and otherness can be viewed and clarified. This article endeavours to show how African emigrants seek to affirm, manipulate, and define identity, reclaiming a space for self where migrant culture is marginalized. Adichie’s exemplary focus on transcultural engagement in Americanah provides an accurate representation of present-day African literary production in its dialectical dance between national and international partic- ularities. Keywords transculturalism – Adichie – identity – otherness – exile – displacement © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/18757421-04902008Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 03:39:14AM via free access transculturalism, otherness, exile, and identity 387 Introduction The post-independence period in Nigeria during the 1980s and 1990s was mark- ed by massive economic and academic emigration to the stable and prosper- ous West (notably the usa and the uk). While the situation has been widely debated in the media and society, there have been few literary representa- tions of the experiences of those contemporary emigrations. The theme of contemporary emigration effectively entered Nigerian literature in 2013 with the publication of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, a novel defined by its transcultural concerns. Adichie’s third novel takes us into the fleeting dwelling-places of her female protagonist Ifemelu and other young Nigerians trying to escape the absence of choice in Nigerian society in the 1990s. This paper discusses the novel’s presentation of its agenda: namely, its concern with emigration/exile and its traumatic effects on the emigrants’ lives and identities, the discourse of ‘otherness’, and how these concerns can be understood via the concept of transculturalism. The Cuban scholar and anthropologist Fer- nando Ortiz coined the term ‘transculturation’ in 1940 in the context of New World slave culture and the plantation economy; since then the concept has entered literary discourse. Ortiz used the concept to interrogate the complex transformation of cultures brought together in the crucible of colonial and imperial histories. Homi Bhabha has argued in The Location of Culture that “the discourse of colonialism is a paradoxical mode of representation.”1 Oth- erness represents disorder, the flux of re-ordering, and, for some, degeneracy. The events depicted in Americanah are traumatic and emotional; the narra- tive captures imaginatively what it means to be an exile, an economic migrant “merely hungry for choice and certainty.”2 This is because, in theme and struc- ture, Americanah lends itself to a reading according to the framework of the transcultural, for it offers the chronicle of a contact zone where American, European, African-American, and African diaspora experiences, histories, and cultures meet, merge, and, with varying intensity, engage. Adichie’s novel is, in another respect, a forceful interrogation of the state of affairs prevailing in the postcolonial era. Migration is the consequence of postcolonial malfunctions or what Achille Mbembe calls “discontinuities” and “entanglement.”3 This is what one of Adichie’s characters, Obinze, identifies as “the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness” (317). 1 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 94. 2 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (Lagos: Kachifo, 2013): 318. Further page references are in the main text. 3 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: u of California p, 2001): 14. Matatu 49 (2017) 386–399 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 03:39:14AM via free access 388 nwanyanwu The text imaginatively captures what it means to be an exile, an illegal migrant in an alien yet magnetically attractive Western culture. In this connec- tion, Jeff Lewis clarifies thus the concept of transculturalism: By its emphasis on the problematic of contemporary culture, most par- ticularly in terms of relationships, meaning-making and power formation […] transculturalism is as interested in dissonance, tension and instability as it is with the stabilizing effects of social conjunction, communication, and organization. It seeks to illuminate the various gradients of culture and the ways in which social groups “create” and “distribute” their mean- ings […]. Transculturalism seeks to illuminate the ways in which social groups interact and experience tension. It is interested in the destabiliz- ing effects of non-meaning or atrophy.4 Here Lewis identifies many elements of transculturalism. Lewis’s concept of tension or atrophy holds special interest in this work, for I hope to show how Americanah offers a compelling commentary on this point. Transculturalism is a vision of how the world is coming together and breaking boundaries and geographical barriers. By examining the marginal fissures of emigration, Adichie shows how flexibly her characters serve to comment on international relations and contemporary global politics and considers ways in which emigration can sometimes, in surprising ways, transgress geographical boundaries and connect, rather than simply challenge. Migration has served to connect peoples and cultures in the twenty-first century. Studies addressing issues of ‘otherness’,identity, and ethnicity have provided some of the most innovative contributions to recent scholarship. Adichie’s Americanah represents a new discourse in the emerging dialogue about the importance of borders on a global scale, as well as depicting the exploration of hybrid identities and diasporic experiences across national boundaries. In fact, Adichie’s novel involves a general acknowledgement of Nigeria’s relationship to an increasingly globalized world and Nigerian literature contributes to the debate about the continuing history of racism and the discourse on ‘otherness’, exile, and identity in America—a history in which Adichie’s novel has played a constitutive role, as the product of racial tensions and anxieties, both within and beyond national boundaries. In American culture, ‘otherness’ is configured and inscribed as black. 4 Jeff Lewis, “From Culturalism to Transculturalism,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 1 (2002): 44, http://www.uiowu.edu/~ijes/issueone/lewis.htm (accessed 25 April 2016). DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 386–399 03:39:14AM via free access transculturalism, otherness, exile, and identity 389 As I have stated, Americanah explores the ways in which ‘otherness’ is constructed. One of the mechanisms operating across ethnically determined boundaries is migration. Movement into geographical territories can generate the traumatic experience of otherness. For Americanah’s Obinze, the moment of ultimate trauma comes in the uk, before the marriage for papers can be contracted with Cleotilde, the girl from Portugal: A policeman clamped handcuffs around his wrists. He felt himself watching the scene from far away, watching himself walk to the police car outside, and sank into the too-soft seat in the back. Americanah 320 Obinze’s crime, the policeman later tells him, was that “Your visa has expired and you are not allowed to be present in the uk” (320). Secondly, it produces a keen awareness of exclusion from the mainstream culture which only invigo- rates another form of ‘otherness’, establishing different issues of exile, identity, and migration. Adichie’s novel contextualizes history and memory as trauma and as the challenge, in emigrant experience, to redefine identity in spaces of otherness. The image of traumatized immigrants held at rehabilitation facilities in the uk awaiting deportation is recalled with a sense of anguish by Obinze: He was led into a room, bunk beds pushed forlornly against the walls. Three men were already there. One from Djibouti, said little, lying and staring at the ceiling as though retracing the journey of how he had ended up at a holding facility in Manchester Airport. Two were Nigerians. The younger sat up on his bed eternally cracking his fingers. The older paced the small room and would not stop talking. Americanah 322 In detention, Obinze “felt raw, skinned, the outer layers of himself stripped off” (323). In Americanah the concept of the transcultural is linked to postcolonial issues of economic mismanagement, imbalances of power and agency, and the disorientation experienced by Africans (mainly Nigerian) emigrating to the usa and the uk in search of opportunity. Nevertheless, distinctions are drawn, as already indicated in the African-inflected

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