Silenced Voices in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘Americanah’
I spent my entire life living in in-between spaces. Not fully belonging to where I lived nor to my presumed identity. Growing up in different countries and never really living in the country my parents were from, led me to believe that I was unrooted. Lost.
Living in-between spaces led me to Adichie’s Americanah, a beautiful book recommended by a stranger I met at the Migration Museum in London.
Adichie’s Americanah discusses the life of two Nigerians, Ifemulu and Obinze and their journeys of migrating to the US and England for better work opportunities and education. The experience of how it feels to be out of place. However as I dived deeper into the book, I realised that not everyone’s voice was being heard. The voices of Efemulu and Obinze were given the stage. However, I would like to discuss the silence of a young boy, named Dike.
First, let me summarise the book real quick. There are two protagonists, Ifemulu and Obinze. They both dated through high school and the beginning of university. However, university strikes faced them to emigrate from Nigeria. Ifemulu applies and gets a fellowship from Princeton and Obinze gets a position as a research assistant at a university in Britain. He then uses a friend’s national ID to work as he is an illegal worker in the UK. He is then deported on the day he decided to get married to a national.
Later in the novel, Ifemulu’s friend, Aunty Uju tells her about the life she had in Nigeria with her son Dike, before they also immigrated to the US after her husband died.
While reading, I noticed that the entirety of the novel was written in the third person. Some chapters focused on Efemulu and others focused on Obinze. When Dike moves to the US with his mother, he, too, faces racism and an identity crisis. However, Dike’s thoughts and emotions are communicated to Ifemulu. In fact, his suicide attempt as a teenager is communicated by a phone call between Ifemulu and his mother Aunty Uju.
‘He took an overdose of pills and went down to the basement and lay down on the couch there!” Aunty Uju said, her voice cracked with her own disbelief.’ (358)
Reporting a sudden suicide as a mere phone call conversation made me feel that the plausibility of the suicide was somehow shaken. A suicide attempt is a grave issue that in my opinion, could have been elaborated on further. Chapters written about Dike’s experience as an immigrant in the US could have given the suicide more credibility. The novel was going in a direction where Dike was making more friends, fitting in more at school, getting good grades, excelling in soccer, and also identifying with a Black American president. The suicide seemed so sudden.
I would have enjoyed the novel further if I saw an equal representation of the voices of all the characters. Children experience the same things as adults, their perceptions and interpretations might be different, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be able to add valuable insight into Ifemelus’s observations of race and identity.
Americanah is a beautiful read filled with descriptive narratives of racism and identity. Incorporating a blog offered it a modern touch and an easy-going structure to read through. However, every novel is subject to flaws.
