Exploring Black Consciousness in the Journey of Motherhood in Adichie’s Novel “Americanah”
Author : Nikita Yadav
Abstract :
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah spans three continents and dissects the modern perception towards race. Americanah is essentially a story centered around its protagonist, Ifemelu, a Nigerian woman who moves to the US for better fortune. The paper offers an insight into the psychological aspects of being a migrant and implores the sense of dislocation of being inhabitants of countries with wholly different histories and class structures through critical reading of Franz Fanon's Black Skin White Masks. Also, how the people of black consciousness start impersonating the colonizer's language and mannerisms to become a part of the white society. Adichie is a popular Nigerian writer and is known for writing novels like Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Americanah (2013), the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), and the book-length essay We Should All Be Feminists (2014). Her most recent book, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, was published in March 2017. Ngozi grew up and studied in Nigeria and went to America to complete her higher education. On her arrival in America, she, for the first time, realised what it meant to be a person of color in the US. Ngozi once recounted in her TED talk how her roommate had a one-dimensional view of Africa, seeing only stories of catastrophe. This perspective left no room for recognizing Africans as equals or understanding feelings beyond pity. Ngozi confronts this issue of under-representation and stereotyping of blacks in her work Americanah, whereas In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon combines autobiography, case study, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory to describe and analyse the black psyche in a white world. The aim is to explore psychological feelings of inferiority among blacks, particularly of black mothers who want their child to be brought up and considered as one of them, not the “other”, in American society. The paper also revolves around the desires of natives to become white through impersonating white men and finally, the acceptance of themselves as-Black through Adichie's novel Americanah.
Keywords :
Black consciousness, identity, dislocation, language, motherhood.
