“An Unapologetic Love Story”: Adichie’s Gendered Romance with Africa

“An Unapologetic Love Story”: Adichie’s Gendered Romance with Africa
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‎Adichie herself has called Americanah an “unapologetic” love story, and it is indeed remarkable how extensively it adheres to and inverts the narrative strategies of romantic genre fiction (Sehgal 2013: para. 15). To offer some anecdotal insight, I once overheard two women in a café discussing the book. While the first woman thoroughly enjoyed the novel and its protagonists, the other found it “unrealistic” how romantically popular Ifemelu was, with each successive boyfriend getting “better,” all of them “worshipping the ground under her feet.” I can see how the generic rendering of Ifemelu as a flawed, but nevertheless fairly idealized heroine can be grating to some and deeply pleasurable to others. Yet, as I have argued, the novel employs different generic forms to a political effect, and it is worth examining the function of romantic genre fiction in Americanah beyond questions of ‘high’ and ‘low,’ marketability, or popularity.
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‎‎Where the protagonist Ifemelu may deem Mills & Boon romances “silly” while nevertheless conceding to a “small truth in those romances” (Americanah 58), Adichie is more candid about her early passion for romantic genre fiction, claiming that she must have read “every → Mills & Boon romance published before [she] was sixteen” (2014: 10). Elsewhere, she has called Americanah an “anti-Mills & Boon” novel, and her knowledge of the genre transpires clearly (Smith 2014: 00:21:23). Even without the intertexual and contextual references to romantic fiction, the novel can be linked to the genre of romance simply on behalf of what may be cursorily described as the readerly pleasure it evokes, as well as its form. It is not difficult to see how the “anti” in “anti-Mills & Boon” applies, considering a genre notorious for its reinforcement of traditional, perhaps even anti-feminist gender roles. According to some critics, 20th-century feminist updatings of Mills & Boon or Harlequin novels have proven difficult, if not impossible, due to the genre’s rigid scripting of male-female relationships. For many, the bone of contention is these novels’ emphasis on female dependency. In one study on Mills & Boons fiction, Sandra Engler observes that “[f]emale independence is presented as an extremely undesirable attribute for a woman which prevents her from achieving her ultimate goal -marriage” (2004: 33).
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‎Cursorily viewed, Americanah employs a marriage plot while withholding the marriage. Ifemelu and Obinze are reunited only for a brief period, after which Obinze ends the extramarital affair out of a sense of responsibility to his wife and daughter. Despite the ensuing heartbreak, we are told that Ifemelu, at some point, has finally “spun herself fully into being” (475) by finding a way to connect with and write about Lagos. On the very last page of the novel, Obinze appears on Ifemelu’s doorstep and begs her to “give this a chance,” and Ifemelu finally allows him to come in. Arguably, Americanah forecloses the goal of marriage only in so far that it is projected into an unnarrated future. Yet compared to the preceding account of Ifemelu’s self-knowing, emotional, and financial independence, the ending, while romantic, appears as an anticlimactic afterthought. Though I would suspect most readers to be relieved at Obinze’s reappearance, inviting us to at least imagine their future union, the sense of closure preceding the actual ending does intimate that Americanah may follow the plotline of the conventional love story, yet the only ‘marriage’ that occurs is that of Ifemelu and her sense of self and home.
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‎Simply applied to the script of romantic genre fiction, this sort of rewriting would seem to be a somewhat obvious, unconvincing choice. Deferring the actual marriage and presenting an independent, self-confident heroine in lieu of a dependent bride merely updates this kind of plotting with a similarly clichéd fairy tale ending, namely that of the headstrong, self-reliant woman who defies social conventions and finds love after all. Yet
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‎much of Americanah suggests that not (only) the romantic love for Obinze, but a romantic desire for Africa and Nigeria function as prime motivators or stand-in goals on Ifemelu’s path to self-knowledge.
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‎At the core of the novel’s carefully crafted realism and its quest-romance-like structure lies a romantic gesture that makes it “an unapologetic love story” and allows Adichie to write about Africa in unexpected ways. Told in the language of everyday life, Americanah is a romantic love story, but it is also a romance in the fanciful and marvelous way that renders the heroine Ifemelu’s quest for self-knowledge pleasurably unrealistic. Ifemelu’s already fairly charmed existence in the Unites States is surpassed even by the happy ending Nigeria provides, where Ifemelu is able to quit a safe but boring editor’s position in favor of writing a blog that eventually reads “like poetry.” Only utopian fantasy could equip a protagonist with the arguably least lucrative literary occupation and still suspend disbelief. The blog, as the sole vehicle of Ifemelu’s success and independence, notably evolves from the engagé American race blog that threatened to strip Ifemelu of her identity, to a grounded and grounding, ‘authentic’ representation of life in Nigeria. The Nigerian incarnation of her blog, titled The Small Redemptions of Lagos, initially features posts that maintain her “provok [ing]” (415), “self-righteous” (435) style of social commentary. With time, she begins to write about Lagos as it presents itself to her. Still suffering from the breakup with Obinze, Ifemelu almost therapeutically writes her new self into existence.
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‎The opening chapter of Americanah already highlights the significance of Nigerian soil for Ifemelu’s sense of identity. Voicing her creeping dissatisfaction with American life, Ifemelu describes her homesickness as a “dull ache of loss” causing “amorphous longings, shapeless desires” (6). Indistinguishable from the fact that it is also where Obinze is, Nigeria becomes for her “where she was supposed to be, the only place she could sink her roots in without the constant urge to tug them out and shake off the soil” (ibid.). When Ifemelu returns after being away for over a decade, she needs time to adapt to the dazzling urbanity of Lagos, a place so overpowering and energetic that the US, particularly her former life in Princeton, seems bucolic in comparison. Yet whatever processes of maturity she has undergone in America, this is where her new self is truly hatched: “Here, she felt, anything could happen, a ripe tomato could burst out of solid stone. And so she had the dizzying sensation of falling, falling into the new person she had become, falling into the strange familiar” (385).
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‎Lagos is shown to be a dynamic, ever changing place that is nevertheless home. It becomes the desired locus for a fluctuant self’s need to be in touch with itself, know itself, and find an authentic voice. In this respect, the novel clearly rehashes a notion of Africa as rejuvenating and rooting and of diasporic return as an authenticating experience. However, by stressing the
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‎vibrancy of Lagos, along with the “dizzying” sensation of falling and “sp[inning] herself into being,” Adichie is careful to distinguish this familiar diasporic trope from the kind that aligns Africa with the idea of a stable, traditional, and unchanging essence. Careful not to perpetuate a certain romantic desire for Africa, at this point in particular the realism of the narrative is asked to bear the weight of Americanah’s romantic thrust.
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‎The change that Ifemelu has undergone, while rendering her more ‘authentic,’ mirrors Nigeria’s pulsating and unpredictable potential, that of a literally young country on the cusp of a new era. Katherine Hallemeier reads the novel as a challenge to the assumption that the United States remains “at the center of economic and cultural geopolitics,” because, for her, “Americanah presents an alternative, utopic vision of global power in which the United States stands as a foil to the promising future of late Nigerian capitalism” (2015: 231). While Adichie’s careful observations of class relations in Euro-American and Nigerian contexts indeed point toward an image of Nigeria as a socioeconomically distinct, if not rivaling hub, of global capitalism, I would still want to retain the unavoidably hegemonic role the United States takes on in the racial discourse that structures Americanah in as many and perhaps more important ways than economic or class discourses.
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‎Compared with vibrant and young Nigeria, America is represented as bucolic and sleepy and appears downright archaic in its tribalism and racist lore. For the novel’s predominantly ‘Western’ reader, contemporary Nigeria thus appears as strange but familiar locus, driven by the creative destruction of capitalism rather than being pulled back by the feudal mythology of racism. Here, the novel employs the alleged “archaism and fantasy of racism” that Bhabha detects in prominent writings on modernity by Foucault and Anderson (2004: 358). Yet the novel moves it from the colonial site in which Anderson sees it being acted out to the alleged endpoint of Western progress itself – America. Reversing the script, Nigeria emerges as the supremely rational nation state, and the fateful ties of racism and capitalism appear consciously, and wishfully, uncoupled. Framed though the temporal discourse of race and progress, the novel’s ending thus becomes even more crucial, relying heavily on the hopeful, futuristic thrust of romance and signifying a decidedly progressive, alternative historical arc.
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‎From a diasporic perspective, one that addresses a diasporic audience and is located within the already alternative spatio-temporal mappings of the Black Atlantic, Americanah’s ending serves yet another purpose. Its invocation of the fantasy of return, along with the promise of rootedness and self-knowledge, performs a similarly “compensatory” function to that of the fantasy of unconditional love Janice Radway identifies in typical romantic genre fiction (1984: 88-95). Yet the gendered emphases of this genre also allow the novel to remove its rose-tinted glasses with regards to gender equality and sexism, showing instead the multiple ways in which Nigerian
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‎before her. In defining African feminism, Nnaemeka stresses how “it is not to Western feminism but rather to the African environment that one must refer. African feminism is not reactive; it is proactive. It has a life of its own that is rooted in the African environment. Its uniqueness emanates from the cultural and philosophical specificity of its provenance” (1998: 9).
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‎Nnaemeka’s position might also help to contextualize Adichie’s skepticism toward feminist theory. While cautioning against an uncritical rejection of “theory per se” and a “stance that is so staunchly antitheory that it leaves no room for any engagement with theory” (2004: 358), Nnaemeka also asserts the practical, grassroots dimension of African feminism, or what she calls nego-feminism, meaning negotiation, “no ego” feminism (2004: 357-385).
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‎Regarding other prominent African feminists, it is striking how similar many of Adichie’s positions are to those of Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo. Aidoo, whom Adichie has repeatedly called a literary role model, has often pointed to the existence of feminist structures in African societies, prior to or outside of Western influence. Asked about the prominent role of outspoken female protagonists in her work, Aidoo insists: “If the women in my stories are articulate, it is because that is the only type of women I grew up among. And I learnt those first feminist lessons in Africa from African women” (Frías 2003: 27). Likewise, when Adichie distances herself from the term womanism, perhaps as a theoretical stand in for African American feminist theories, we can hear an echo of Aidoo distancing herself from the term in conversation with Alice Walker. And, the commonplaceness of the statement notwithstanding, even the title of Adichie’s TED Talk seems to reiterate Aidoo’s definition of feminism: “When people ask me bluntly every now and then whether I am a feminist, I not only answer yes, but I go on to insist that every woman and every man should be a feminist – especially if they believe that Africans should take charge of African land, wealth, African lives, and the burden of African development” (1998: 39). The latter half of this quote is an important qualification that further aligns the two author’s political positionalities.
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‎Having been intellectually raised during the vibrant era of African independences, Aidoo is very much a product of her time and an outspoken Pan-Africanist. In contrast to preceding intellectual movements such as Négritude, Aidoo eschews a “romanticisation of Africa’s past as some exotic golden age,” as Victor Odamtten notes in The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo (1994: 10). Instead, Aidoo dedicates herself to the concrete political advancement of her home country and continent – to the point of becoming Ghana’s Minister of Education in 1982. Adichie too, has referred to herself as politically Pan-African, stating that, “for me, that means I care about what’s happening in Kenya, I care about the people in Bahia, Brazil […] I’m interested in Afro-Colombia […] because there’s a familiarity there to something I feel connected to” (2017a 00:38:27).
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‎Aidoo’s Pan-African politics are inseparable from her commitment to feminism, and Adichie’s purportedly global feminism is also affected by Pan-African sensibilities. Yet it is in their fictional works that these concerns are most organically interwoven and the analogies between Adichie and Aidoo are particularly striking. Since the late 1960s, Aidoo has become one of the most renowned female African writers, with plays such as Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) and Anowa (1970) or short story collections such as No Sweetness Here (1995) or Diplomatic Pounds (2012); narratives that, similar to Adichie’s work, focus almost exclusively on the lives of young African women. Her most read work to this date, however, remains Our Sister Killjoy, published in 1977.
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‎The novel traces the European travels of its protagonist Sissie, who dissects the former colonial center with biting precision, reversing the gaze, as it were, through the particular optic of a “Black-eyed Squint.” Our Sister Killjoy, written a decade before its publication, obviously denotes a different historical constellation. The waned importance of England as the colonial mother country – yielding to the increased cultural and economic allure of the US in Americanah – is only the most apparent marker for the passing of time. However, the structural and thematic similarities between Americanah and Our Sister Killjoy are ample. There is the notion of the inverted colonial travel narrative, as well as the rejection or reversal of racialization, where, as Cheryl-Sterling notes, “Sissie’s response realigns the specular burden, for now Africa looks back and finds that the Western world too is lacking” (2010: 136). Yet the two novels are equally critical of homespun ills, such as political mismanagement, corruption, or the effects of the African brain drain to the West. Where the term ‘Americanah’ mocks the haughtiness of a particular type of Nigerian returnee, Our Sister Killjoy exposes the phoniness of the “been-tos,” who speak of the “wonders of being overseas, pretending their tongues craved for tasteless foods” (Aidoo 1977: 90).
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‎Both novels also exhibit the kind of generic experimentation that has left critics unsure about the mimetic relation between its literary form, the novel’s diegesis, and the authors’ politics. Where Americanah clearly distinguishes blog posts from the main narrative, in Our Sister Killjoy the already fairly lyrical, third-person chronological account of Sissie’s travels is interspersed with a highly poetic choric commentary. While Odamtten suggests that the text’s heavily ironic inflections hinder the kind of reading that would allow for a conflation of author and text, Sterling interprets the multilayered narrative structure of Our Sister Killjoy as a self-conscious performance of political discourse, pitting itself “against constructions of subjectivity, primacy and power” (Sterling 2010: 134). Yet similar to the way that Americanah’s blog posts allow for an ambiguous reading of performed authorship, Sterling concedes that “we are left to wonder if the voice is an externalization of Sissie’s interiority, a psychic venting of the colour-coded frustration generated in her journey or a device Aidoo improvises from the
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‎oral tradition […] or even if Aidoo is blatantly embedding her own political position into the text” (-Sterling 2010: 134).
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‎Where the commentary of the chorus often puts Sissie’s confident and sarcastic, and at times essentializing and condemning, voice into question, Americanah creates a similar effect by having the prose action displace the authority of the blog posts. In her reading of Aidoo’s novel, Goyal explores the split between the two textual voices as an ambiguous and tense attitude toward Africa and its diaspora (Romance 2010: 188-92). While one denotes a historically linear trajectory that places (Pan-African) hope in the nation state and views diaspora as loss, the other expresses a more expansive and more pessimist view on the global effects of racism and colonialism and frames migration as transhistorical inevitability. In Americanah too, we find conflicting yet distinct attitudes toward the African Diaspora, the most obvious one represented by the novel’s romantic arc. As I have argued, it is Ifemelu’s return home and ability to see and write truthfully, past race and “like poetry” that functions as the novel’s final dénouement. Not only Ifemelu’s new blog, The Small Redemptions of Lagos, but also the narrative itself reads like a complicated but dedicated love letter to Africa. This is another aspect the novel shares with Our Sister Killjoy, the fourth and final section of which is titled “A Love Letter.”
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‎Here, the narrative voice changes from the previous, poetically punctuated travelogue to an epistolary farewell written by a finally returning Sissie and addressed to her African lover in Europe. While abounding with romantic terms of endearment, most of the letter’s content revolves around various disagreements, in particular the scene of their first meeting, where Sissie engages in a lengthy argument with a group of expatriate Africans at a student union. Sissie chides them for their self-exile and urges that “instead of forever gathering together and victoriously spouting such beautiful radical analyses of the situation of home, we should simply hurry back” (121). While, as – Goyal notes, at this point Sissie clearly holds a “cultural nationalist view of diaspora as betrayal” (2010: 199), we are also presented with her interlocutors’ contrary positions, including that of her lover, as well as Sissie’s own doubts and reservations.
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‎This multiplicity of voices does not quite perform the same destabilizing role of the choir in the book’s other parts, where the authority of Sissie’s position is undercut by a broader view of history. When her lover attests her an “anti-western-neurosis” (119) or accuses her of being melancholically locked in time (113), these arguments are oftentimes echoed and countered by Sissie’s self-reflective stream of consciousness. Sissie appears aware of the potential presumption of her “righteous anger” (121) and, when imagining a pre-colonial idyll where she and her lover could have met, she stops herself short of becoming lost in “nostalgia and sentimental nonsense” (115). The final iteration of Sissie’s knowledge quest is thus
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‎characterized by the kind of commitment to Africa that requires her physical return. Interpreting Our Sister Killjoy’s ending as an unequivocal Pan-African celebration of return, Sterling notes that, “since her true love is Africa, Sissie is intertwined in its history and its destiny” (2010: 148).
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‎However, Sissie’s candid reflections on the conflicts shaping her romantic relationship represent a conflicted relation to Africa and the diaspora. Her love letter is framed by two short sections that further suggest that the actual addressee and subject matter of Sissie’s love letter is Africa and that this message is also important for its diaspora. The opening passage reads like an anecdote, a common joke even in its vagueness, describing the encounter of a visiting African professor and a young African American student, eager to hear of Africa’s, notably Egypt’s, past glories in an attempt to refute what he must see as the root cause of racism: The Western denigration or conscious erasure of Africa’s role in world history.
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‎Yet in his earnest desire to set records straight, he threatens to reduce Africa to a mere symbol once again, if not of lack then of monolithic essence.
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‎Hence, the professor’s answer:
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‎My dear young man […], to give you the decent answer your anxiety demands, I would have to tell you the detailed history of the African continent. And to do that, I would have to speak every day, twenty-four hours a day, for at least three thousand years. And I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but who has that kind of time? (111)
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‎As a prologue to Sissie’s love letter, this exchange reads like a refusal to offer finite and limited positions in a nevertheless encompassing Pan-African stance, while setting the tone for a difficult intradiasporic conversation. The very last passage of the novel reverts to the previous third-person narrative and describes how Sissie, her plane approaching the continent of Africa, decides never to post the letter:
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‎There was no need to mail it. It was not necessary. […] Besides, she was back in Africa. And that felt like fresh honey on the tongue: a mixture of complete sweetness and smoky roughage. Below was home with its unavoidable warmth and even after these thousands of years, its uncertainties. ‘Oh, Africa. Crazy old continent […].’ (133)
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‎Like Adichie, Aidoo is wary of perpetuating romantic notions of Africa. As Goyal notes, Sissie is “careful to articulate both her resistance to the West and her commitment to Africa without invoking a pre-colonial idyll” (2010: 202). At the same time, Sissie’s bird’s eye view of Africa, “huge […], certainly warm and green” (OSK 133), evokes the mythic image of a pastoral, fertile
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‎African soil, the place where Ifemelu in Americanah longs to “sink her roots.” Similarly, the strong sensory imagery in Our Sister Killjoy’s final paragraphs could easily collapse into the kind of romantic idealization that links Africa to physicality and affect and harks back to Négritude thinker Senghor’s notion of the reciprocal relation between African soil and culture, resulting in the “physio-psychology of the Negro” that renders him [sic] “the man of Nature […], sensual, a being with open senses” (1956: 52). Yet Aidoo counters such readings, which emphasize an eternal and essential “primacy of intuitive knowledge,” with Sissie’s understanding of the very unknowability of a vast continent in motion, the sheer potentiality of which surpasses, and perhaps even overwhelms, any attempt at sensual or intellectual mastery (ibid.).
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‎The ending of Our Sister Killjoy, culminating in a romantic return that forecloses a romantic union with a lover, is notably similar to Americanah’s final part in Lagos. Equally similar are the protagonists’ representations of Africa as a virtually unpredictable, vibrant space of possibilities that defies various historical scripts, not only the Eurocentric model of Africa’s eternal backwardness, or the Afrocentric fixation with some form of pre-modern innocence, but also the pessimist gloom of the immediate post-independence era that equally locks the continent in a deterministic limbo. At the same time, Adichie and Aidoo are not in the business of rebranding Africa simply to up its market value, as their political love letters to Africa are engaged in complicating the continent while committing to its futures, not its predetermined destiny.
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‎To this end, it is worthwhile to reconsider Ifemelu’s description of Lagos: “Here, she felt, anything could happen, a ripe tomato could burst out of solid stone. And so she had the dizzying sensation of falling, falling into the new person she had become, falling into the strange familiar.” On the one hand, the passage stresses the abovementioned dynamism and unpredictability of contemporary Nigeria in a defamiliarizing imagery that converges both stability and insecurity, newness and oldness. At the same time, the passage echoes another text by Aidoo, namely her 1970 play Anowa. The play centers on the eponymous heroine and her husband Kofi Ako and is set on the Gold Coast circa 1870, a period characterized by the effects of the Bond Treaty of 1844 that granted Britain exclusive trading rights in the area today known as Ghana and that fatally allied Fante slavers and British colonialists in the transatlantic slave trade. Anowa, who has married Kofi against her parents’ will and was hence expelled from her family and community, becomes increasingly estranged from and dissatisfied with her husband and his role in the trade. She empathizes with the enslaved people he deals with, euphemistically referred to as “wayfarers.” Using the term for herself, she asks Kofi: “What is the difference between any of your men and me? Except that they are men and I’m a woman? None of us belongs” (Anowa: 97).
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‎As in her previous play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, Aidoo explores Ghana’s role in the slave trade as a haunting and uncomfortable feature of diasporic estrangement. In Anowa’s most notable scene, the childless Anowa recounts having dreamed of being “a big big woman,” out of whom “poured men, women and children” (106). In her dream, she embodies “Mama Africa” losing her children to the “boiling hot” sea and its pink-faced lobster people, who seize and violently destroy them. Finally, she concludes: “Any time there is mention of a slave, I see a woman who is me and a bursting of a ripe tomato or a swollen pod” (107).
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‎Coincidently or not, the unusual imagery of the bursting tomato links both authors’ aspirations to depict Africa in its defamiliarizing complexity, and to engage in a Pan-African or diasporic conversation that holds up to its conflicting contemporary and historical trajectories. To this effect, Aidoo’s intentional usage and subtle reworking of the figure of the African mother is a pronounced feature of her writing, not only in Anowa but also in Our Sister Killjoy, where Sissie mocks the African self-exiles’ sentimental mobilizing of “the mother thing” in order to justify their foreign stay (122).
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‎No metaphor for Africa is more overused than that of the African mother, simultaneously standing in for the proverbial motherland and the genealogy of its people. Our Sister Killjoy’s protagonist Sissie equally makes use of this image when she angrily rebukes: “Of course she has suffered, the African mother […]. Just look at what’s happening to her children over the last couple of hundred years.” She then recounts the ill fate of Africa’s children on both sides of the Atlantic (123). In her discussion of the novel, Goyal comments on this passage as follows: “Sissie extends the particular, local situation to a broader, diasporic one, seeing black history as a global one. Invoking the global history of the diaspora, she recalls the pain of slavery, rape, poverty, service in colonial armies, and cultural alienation” (2010: 201). It is quite significant, Goyal notes, that Sissie ends her litany of historical atrocities with the image of the “been-to” grandchild, who is so alienated from Africa that it cannot even speak its (grand) mother tongue. This decidedly critical view of migration is not absent from Americanah, despite the novel’s generally more migratory and cosmopolitan sensibilities.
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‎While Ifemelu is, of course, herself an Americanah, a modern day ‘been-to,’ there is one character who firmly embodies both the critical stance and the maternal stereotype: Obinze’s mother, a university professor and single parent. Ifemelu is not only impressed with her knowledge and independence but indeed with her African femininity. Upon their first meeting, her image and that of a popular Nigerian singer conflate in Ifemelu’s imagination, causing Ifemelu to swoon at her “full-nosed, full-lipped beauty, her round face framed by a low Afro, her faultless complexion the deep brown of cocoa” (68). As a child, Ifemelu had already “guiltily fantasize[d]” about her father being married to the beautiful singer instead of her mother (69). Now,
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‎Obinze’s mother becomes an equally idealized maternal figure, the kind of African mother who is deeply connected to her cultural heritage, who cooks garri and soup asks Ifemelu to translate her Igbo name, but who is also strongly committed to the future of her country, particularly the future of its girls. It is Obinze’s mother who, similar to Aidoo’s Sissie, repeatedly mourns the brain drain to the West and issues a particular warning to Ifemelu about not jeopardizing her education through an unwanted pregnancy.
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‎Both critical and loyal toward the nation state, Obinze’s mother also displays a Pan-African or diasporic commitment. When an old Jamaican woman in London calls Obinze “brother,” he wants to call his mother and tell her about it (255). Similarly, in the US, when Ifemelu experiences conflicting processes of ‘becoming Black,’ she remembers watching Roots at Obinze’s house, and also how “she had felt lacking, watching Obinze’s mother, and wishing that she, too, could cry” (137). Almost to the point of cliché, Obinze’s mother embodies Mother Africa weeping for the loss of her children, now and then. Yet it is her matured sense of solidarity in a global Black imaginary that also inspires Ifemelu’s own process of maturity.
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