“An American Pathology”: Reading Americanah as Quest Romance

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‎As Adichie remarked in an interview about the novel: “I am more or less expected, or maybe permitted, to write about African pathology, but I don’t think I am expected to write about American pathology” (Sehgal 2013: para. 21). At this point, it may be useful to distinguish what the novel’s turn toward realism accomplishes, and where it resorts to the form of romance that, as Goyal summarizes, marks a “shift outside of realism into the sphere of the marvelous rather than the mundane, often organized around the
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‎motif of a quest into unknown territories (both physical and the uncanny zone of the self)” (2010: 13). If racism is America’s pathology, what is the function or effect of the novel’s engagement with it? Is it a means of diagnosis or does it, in part, even suggest a cure? And as such, does it fashion its cure as an antidote or a miracle?
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‎On the one hand, Adichie paints her story from a particularly complex angle of America’s racial landscape, at a particularly complex moment in time. Set at the onset of a proclaimed post-racial age in the US, it is written at a time when this very same proclamation serves as foil to the true shape of American racism. While, from a certain point of view, the US appears to be caught in the lock of a history wrought by slavery, Blackness never stays the same. The narratives, models, and modes of being Black change and multiply, both globally and in the US. Ifemelu, a “Bourgie Nigerian” (177) predominantly moving through “Postbourgie” (414) Black America, nevertheless witnesses first-hand how a certain, most dehumanizing form of Blackness refuses to leave the equation.
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‎Therefore, the novel’s realist description of America’s racial landscape renders Ifemelu’s hard-won experience of becoming Black in the US an exercise in attaining the informed, self-consciously metahistorical positionality of Afropolitanism. Her perspective allows her, while not to transcend it, at least to distance herself enough to not only see Blackness in this country, but to know its name. Analogous to her increasing class privileges, this positionality does not make her immune to racism, but it enables her to disassociate herself from it, at least partially, in order to critique it.
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‎In some ways, the distance Ifemelu has gained speaks to the “psychological distance” Richard Wright detects between African Americans and their country, directly resulting from the experience of violent subjugation and slavery (1995: 81). But Ifemelu’s position is, of course, different from such established models of race consciousness. One could say that Ifemelu is behind the veil but not of it and that this may allow her to not “really feel what she is writing about,” to ward off the pathological danger of American racialization. Neither (merely) ‘second-sight,’ nor ‘double consciousness,’ the insights Ifemelu has gained only structurally resemble those of African Americans. 71 Regarding her own, intensely felt instance of racialized gendered objectification, Ifemelu has apparently worked through her grief and exited the circling movement of melancholia. As such, the realism of the novel presents racism as a problem to be solved, or cured, at least for a character like Ifemelu.
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‎However, it is altogether possible to frame Ifemelu’s transformation in less realist and more fantastical terms in the same way in which race and racism can be rendered both real and tangible, and magically abstract. Similarly, as Brent Hayes Edwards notes in the introduction to The Souls of
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‎Black Folk, Du Bois’s usage of the term “veil” suggested a move away from race as a purely sociological category toward a more mythical, obfuscated presence better described in the “spiritual vocabulary of German Romanticism” (Du Bois and Hayes Edwards 2007: xiv). Americanah also foregrounds its literary rather than sociological purport by couching its diagnosis of American racism – and Ifemelu’s realist Bildung – within a romantic gesture toward Pan-Africanism and the logic of a fantastic quest-romance. The latter becomes particularly apparent both in the way that the subject of racialization connects to the novel’s narrative structure, and in what I would describe as the novel’s tone, which assumes a particular naiveté in order to voice a more ‘truthful’ image of American racism.
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‎Despite its ostensive realism, Americanah formally functions like a romance, not only in the sense of genre fiction, but also in terms of the particular romance paradigm described by Northrop Frye. Identifying romance as indeed the “structural core of all fiction” (1976: 15), Frye’s entry in The Harper Handbook to Literature defines it as “a continuous narrative in which the emphasis is on what happens in the plot, rather than on what is reflected from ordinary life or experience” (1997: 403). Besides its plot-driven narrative, Americanah is also characterized by what Frye describes as the mode of romance in Anatomy of Criticism (1957). As Fredric Jameson notes, Frye understands romance as “a wish fulfillment or utopian fantasy, which aims at the transfiguration of the world of everyday reality” (1975: 138). Interpreting Americanah as not only popular romance, but also as quest-romance, the novel thus turns “our attention to those elements in the ordinary world which must be transformed, if the earthly paradise is to reveal its lineaments behind it” (-Jameson 1975: 138).
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‎Barbara Fuchs, in her concise monograph on the subject, also identifies romance as a fundamental stratum of narrative, not necessarily in the archetypical sense proposed by Frye, but as narratological device or strategy of form and content. In line with Peter Brooks’s assertion that the meaning of narratives may only be discernible “because we read them in anticipation of the structuring power of those endings that will retrospectively give them the order and significance of plot” (1984:94), Americanah’s ending crucially informs its quest romance plot. Examining the implications of Americanah’s romantic return to Nigeria in terms of narrative strategy, it is worthwhile to focus also on the detours that make such a resolve possible. As Fuchs notes, most critics of romance “emphasize its ultimate wish-fulfillment while disregarding the often complex picture of suffering and subjugation that precedes the resolution” (2004: 29). If we look at Americanah’s ending according to the logic of a realist Bildungsroman as well as that of a quest romance, Ifemelu emerges not only as romantically and intellectually matured heroine, but also as someone who has undergone the arduous social process of ‘becoming Black’ in a foreign land. Tried and tested,
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‎Ifemelu thence returns to Nigeria, where she is allowed to step “off the plane in Lagos and [stop] being black” (475). Rather than reading this only as a rekindling of redemptive diasporic return or a disassociation of Blackness, this perspective on the novel’s ending might draw attention to the “suffering and subjugation” Ifemelu has undergone in the US: she has been racialized.
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‎Like the hero of a classical romance adventure, Americanah’s protagonist ventures into the dangerous, dreamlike realm that is US America, only that instead of witches and ogres she encounters the particularly stupefying, spell-binding power of what Karen and Barbara Fields, in their eponymous essay compendium on US-American race relations, have coined “racecraft.” Both witchcraft and racecraft, they write, “are imagined, acted upon, and re-imagined, the action and imagining inextricably intertwined” (2014: 19). Pointing toward the particular pervasiveness of racism, its stubborn “efficacy” beyond rational realizations of race constructedness, they draw attention to the analogous relation between the two concepts, their mutual reliance on “circular reasoning, prevalence of confirming rituals, barriers to disconfirming factual evidence, self-fulfilling prophecies, multiple and inconsistent causal ideas, and colorfully inventive folk genetics” (- Fields and Fields 2014: 198). And so, in Americanah, the “pervasive belief” in and of racecraft becomes the “mental terrain” that Ifemelu too must learn to navigate (ibid. 18).
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‎This also affects the novel’s particular tone and, for some, allows a reading of Ifemelu as voicing purportedly unheard of and never-noticed truths. Applied to the novel and its generic conventions, Ifemelu’s stance toward US race relations adheres to the narrative tropes of romance, where “the hero’s dominant trait is naiveté or inexperience” and his “most characteristic posture is that of bewilderment” (Jameson 1975: 139). Furthermore, the pose of the naïve and bewildered outsider is of course predetermined by the novel’s generic anchoring in romance. Like the hero of romance, who is at first more of “an observer, a moral spectator surprised by supernatural conflict,” Ifemelu too is “gradually drawn in, to reap the rewards of victory” (-Jameson 1975: 139).
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‎The story line of Ifemelu’s race blog is particularly instructive here. At first, the blog is presented as a positive force in her life, a literalized transformation of her observational quest that gives her financial independence and amplifies her voice. As a textual medium, it also foregrounds the utopian promise of generating a feminist or subaltern counterdiscourse. While, in this fast-paced digital word, there is something quite dated about a literary character whose livelihood subsists in writing a successful blog, during the mid-2000s the notion of blogging arguably marked the idea, or rather ideal, of a new public sphere along with the hope for a theretofore-unknown inclusion of marginalized voices. In its ostentatious presentation as a platform for disenfranchised or structurally
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‎silenced voices, online discourse in the novel thus embodies the “counterpublic” or “alternative public spheres” envisioned by feminist scholars such as Rita Felski (1989) or Nancy Fraser (1990). Embodying the feminist dictum that the private is political, Ifemelu’s observations on matters of race and racism are, with few exceptions, drawn from everyday life and personal experience. Mimetically, the main narrative of Americanah, Ifemelu’s life in America, relates to the blog in a manner that also reveals the former’s status as quest romance. For example, when Ifemelu writes about her relationships, she presents her partners as cultural tropes, referring to Curt as “Hot White Ex” and Blaine as “Professor Hunk.” In the ‘real life’ of Americanah’s diegesis, the names Curt for her courteous, rich, WASP and Blaine for her black, Jazz-loving, political-science-teaching boyfriend also read like cyphers. As each of her partners opens up a new window into American race relations, they function as formulaic figures in her ‘racial adventure story.’
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‎Encapsulated in the somewhat naïve claim that Ifemelu came “from a country where race was not an issue” is the assumption that she had to “come to America” to ‘become Black’ and also to become the acclaimed race blogger leading a charmed financial existence. Ironically, the ability to see and name race, while allowing her to monitor and measure racist aggressions, ultimately enables her to transcend her dismal economic situation and social dependency. Set in the gold-digging era of digital content, Ifemelu’s blog signifies the promise that a Black woman, and a non-citizen as such, can add her voice to the choir of public discourse, be individually heard, and eventually join the ranks of America’s intellectual elite. This particular riff on the American Dream obviously draws much impetus from the post-race era in which it is set, but it also draws on an established immigrant narrative. Ifemelu’s almost mythical journey from impoverished African student, living in a moldy apartment, to Princeton fellow, traveling the country on speaking gigs and owning a condominium, is as unrealistic as it is economically aspirational. It also renders her decision to leave this life behind, to sell both her lucrative blog and her condo in the midst of an unfolding, and unmentioned, financial crisis and leave the US for Nigeria, all the more interesting.
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‎If racial capitalism is also “the process of deriving social and economic value from racial identity,” then, paradoxically, Ifemelu can generate capital from performing a certain kind of Black racial identity, one that slots into the context of corporate diversity trainings and neoliberal multiculturalism (Leong 2013: 2189). In a sense, Ifemelu’s later career runs on the currency of what Gilroy has described as “racial Americana” – a mode of talking about and indeed marketing race that, while repeatedly provincializing itself, simultaneously asserts its global reach (Fisher 2014: 210).72 Clearly, the blog’s financial success and political impact are not enough to sustain Ifemelu’s sense of victory, of having successfully countered the evils of
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‎racecraft. On the contrary, this racial performance eventually appears to stump her character development and forestall her quest. As noted above, her sense of accomplishment regarding the blog eventually sours, rendering it “inconsequential” (354), and leaving her feeling “naked and false” (5).
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‎In addition, the novel’s plot and structure preordain its happy ending in a particular way, necessarily eclipsing a hopeful romance with America. The break with Obinze, caused by Ifemelu’s experience of sexual exploitation and signaling the ‘darkest night’ of her adventure, prompts the major detours in her romantic quest. It is the plot point the novel has anticipated and worked toward. Set within the novel’s frame narrative, which promises the imminent reunion of these star-crossed lovers, everything following the event triggers the kind of genre-typical, libidinous reading pleasure that arises from knowing that each and every detour will only bring the narrative closer to the inevitable end – a romantic climax made even sweeter by its deferral. Concerning the novel’s ambiguous straddling of different genres, it is worthwhile to consider what their employment enables and what kind of conclusions it predetermines. Fundamentally, Americanah is a tale about a female heroine’s move toward self-knowledge; it’s a classic romantic adventure with a happy ending. It is also, as Adichie herself has claimed, “a gritty, taken-from-real-life book […] about race.” How do these aspects go together? How can there ever be a happy ending in race? The answer is, obviously, by having race end. Asked whether she continues to write about race in her Nigerian blog, Ifemelu replies: “‘No, just about life. Race doesn’t really work here. I feel like I got off the plane in Lagos and stopped being black” (476).