Writing “so raw and true”: Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s <i>Americanah</i>
10.13125/2039-6597/1320
Questo contributo indaga l’intreccio tra produzione letteraria e testualità multimediali nella scrittura postcoloniale attraverso l’analisi del recente romanzo di Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Americanah (2013). Qui la protagonista Ifemelu, trasferitasi da Lagos negli Stati Uniti, apre un blog che si occupa di questioni razziali dal punto di vista di una nera non statunitense. Partendo dalle argomentazioni proposte da Sandra Ponzanesi nel suo The Postcolonial Cultural Industry (2014), l’analisi del romanzo prende in considerazione il recente dibattito sul ruolo pubblico dello scrittore postcoloniale: il blog riflette il ruolo di Adichie nei media e situa il romanzo – non senza fratture – nel panorama globale dell’Afropolitanismo. I post del blog appaiono nel romanzo dall’inizio, e la sua scrittura interseca la fiction contaminandola con un ampio commento sociale. Con il suo intreccio di scrittura creativa e d’opinione, romanzo e blog, Americanah commenta sul ruolo pubblico dello scrittore e la sua presenza ‘virale’ nei media, offrendo un esempio pregnante sul cambiamento delle forme narrative nell’era dell’informazione.
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Serena Guarracino
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Writing “so raw and true”: Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s <i>Americanah</i>
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Intermediality, Transmediality, Fanfiction
2014-11-30
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2014-11-30
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Serena Guarracino
2014/11/30
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Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale"
2039-6597
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en
Writing “so raw and true”: Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s <i>Americanah</i>
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/1320/1173
4
            Writing «so raw and true»:
         Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi
              Adichie’s Americanah*
                           Serena Guarracino


     When the reader meets Ifemelu, the main character from
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s recent novel Americanah, she is going to
have her hair braided as one final act before moving back from
Princeton to Lagos. During the short train trip to the salon, the
protagonist muses about a fellow passenger and how, ‘before’, she
would have started a conversation with him for her blog – before she
decided she wanted to return to live in her home country Nigeria, and
to shut down her anonymous blog on race in the US, «Raceteenth or
Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as
Negroes) by a Non-American Black» (Adichie 2014: 4).1


     *  I would like to thank Enrica Picarelli for her invaluable help and
feedback on this article.
      1 While the novel starts from this moment, its structure moves

relentlessly back and forth in time while telling the story of Ifemelu and,
partially, of Obinze. While doing her hair, Ifemelu goes through a long
flashback (part 1, 2 and 4) on her adolescence in Lagos and her love story
with Obinze, followed by her moving to the US to finish university. Due to
an episode of sexual abuse she falls into depression and cuts off Obinze; the
novel then continues with her life in the US which includes two important
relationships, white upper-class Curt and African-American Princeton
professor Blaine. Some details of Obinze’s current life in Nigeria as an estate
businessman are disseminated in these parts (including his marriage to
Kosi), while part 3 is dedicated to his previous stay in Britain as an illegal


Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)
Serena Guarracino, Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah



     When asked on the “International Author’s Stage” (2014) why she
made her character a blogger, Adichie answered: «I wanted this novel
to also be social commentary, but I wanted to say it in ways that are
different from what one is supposed to say in literary fiction». Blog
writing, or blogging, features prominently in the novel as such a space,
both embedded in but also outside creative writing, and as a place
where social realities of race can be discussed without the trappings of
character and action. Yet, the separation between blogging and fiction
in Americanah is far less clear-cut than Adichie’s remark seems to
imply. Actually, as the novel progresses its social commentary moves
back and forth, from the blog to the novel and vice versa,
contaminating fiction with the drive for elaboration expressed by
blogging but also infusing blog entries of the emotional entanglements
of creative writing.
     Because of this very peculiar structure, Americanah offers a good
case study for some reflections on the role of technology in writing,
and especially on the global resonance of postcolonial writing. The
postcolonial writer has emerged as a conspicuous persona in
contemporary media and literary discourse (see Guarracino 2013a),
and Adichie herself owns a sort of celebrity status: her videos show an
impressive number of online views, making her a ‘viral’ public figure
both inside and outside the traditional boundaries of postcolonial
academic discourse. Americanah exists in an almost seamless continuity
with these media flows by and about Adichie, as she prolongs there the
role of opinion maker she has recently assumed on matters such as
race, gender, and the comparison between Nigeria and the US, her
country of adoption.2 As such, this article maintains that the novel



immigrant. Parts 5, 6, and 7 follow Ifemelu’s return to Lagos and her
renewed relationship with Obinze.
     2
       This emerges from the many interviews on these subjects available on
widespread platforms such as YouTube. Some of these videos are user-
generated content taken off mainstream media, uploaded and titled in ways
that underline the relevance of Adichie’s opinion on the subject referred to,


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represents another instalment of the writer’s public persona; yet it also
elaborates on the issues of shaping public opinion via the Internet by
using a blog as a metanarrative device.

               The market and the postcolonial
      Before publishing Americanah in 2013, Adichie had already been
hailed as one of the most promising young Nigerian writers: her
career, started while she was attending graduate school in the US,
skyrocketed when she was awarded the O. Henry Prize in 2003. Her
first novel Purple Hibiscus, published the same year, was shortlisted for
the Orange Prize for Fiction, a prize dedicated to women writers in
English, and longlisted for the Booker Prize (see Hewett 2005: 75); she
eventually won the Orange in 2007 with her second novel, Half of a
Yellow Sun.
      Adichie has also been mentioned as part of what recent literary
criticism has defined the ‘third generation’ of Nigerian writers, a
generation concerned with «nomadism, exile, displacement, and
deracination» (Adesanmi and Dunton 2005, 16) more than with
political and anti-colonial struggle. This new generation of writers, also
including Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani and Teju Cole, has recently been
the focus of a large body of scholarship that, as Hamish Dalley
poignantly notes, has in fact produced this definition, opening to
questions such as «what it means for literature to belong to a
generation, and to a nation» (2013: 17). Indeed, the writers
encompassed in the burgeoning corpus of third generation Nigerian
literature do not operate on a national level – if this were ever possible
in a postcolonial context – but necessarily face the many challenges of a
context in which «Nigerian publishers number in the dozens, and
Nigerian readers in the millions» (Griswold 2000: 4), both in Nigeria



as for example in “Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on love, race and
hair” and “Chimamanda Adichie: Beauty does not solve any problem”.



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Serena Guarracino, Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah



and abroad, while the global market, including literary prizes, is still
mostly located in the West and driven by Western economic forces.
      In her recent The Postcolonial Cultural Industry, Sandra Ponzanesi
underlines the role of prizes in creating celebrities and bestowing
literary worth – a role previously played by aesthetic criteria – and
especially mentions the Orange, which «with its system of long and
short lists, has certainly helped to increase the visibility of female
writers and to scout new postcolonial talents such as Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie» (2014: 68). By overviewing the relationship between
literary prizes and postcolonial literary production, Ponzanesi means
to establish that the link between postcolonial studies and the cultural
industry is something that cannot be overlooked when engaging with
works produced in and for this market. This, as I hope to show in my
analysis of Americanah, does not mean they cannot provide insights in
postcolonial elaborations of individual and collective identities. On the
contrary, most of these works show a lucid awareness of the processes
they are participating into: these works relate to the market with a
contrapuntal attitude that both endorses and critiques it, embracing
instead of removing the dichotomy between postcolonialism as anti-
colonial critical practice and postcoloniality as the marketability of
exoticism in commercial as well as academic terms (see Huggan 2001:
6).
      As a consequence, Americanah and similar works call for what
Sarah Brouillette defines as the need for a responsible reading of
postcolonial texts (see Brouillette 2007: 21ff.).3 This responsible
readership is interpelled by postcolonial writing such as Adichie’s,
which produces what Ponzanesi defines «a multi-sited reading which
varies not only across space and time but also according to the
‘postcolonial literacies’ entailed in the decoding» of postcolonial
textualities (2014: 47). Instead of disowning and disengaging with these
novels, the postcolonial reader can claim them against the grain,


      An overview on the argument between Huggan and Broullette on the
      3

ideological implications of the contemporary marketability of the
postcolonial can be found in Ponzanesi 2014: 45-46.


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enacting what Edward Said called a ‘contrapuntal reading’ of their
implications in the global dynamics of cultural production related to
postcolonial countries (see Said 1993: 51).
      Brouillette’s and Ponzanesi’s framework clearly takes into account
recent studies on participatory culture, where audiences, users and
readers are considered not only as consumers but also as producers.
Here the cultural industry becomes a field of interaction shaped by
multinationals of cultural production as well as by what Manuel
Castells calls ‘creative audience’, who actively «carv[e] out its meaning
by contrasting its experience with the one-directional flows of
information it receives» (2009: 132). Blogs, with their foregrounding
and sharing of personal experiences and opinions, belong to this
interactive landscape in which power – cultural and otherwise – is
elaborated on shared platforms. Even when managed by
multinationals – most blogs exist on platforms such as Wordpress or
Blogspot – blogs still need both individual and collective engagement
to be effective. Shared experience is the only one that matters, the only
one that becomes ‘real’ and shapes people’s imaginary and life:
«Everybody and everything finds a way of existence in this
intertwined, multimodal, interactive communication text» (Castells
2009: 136).
      Putting aside the obvious question of the digital divide and of the
very local ways in which ‘everybody and everything’ may have access
to the global network – a question that is of special relevance in
postcolonial countries4 – I want to focus here on how a traditionally
solitary activity such as reading finds its own ‘way of existence’ in the


     4  Although it goes beyond the scope of this essay to assess digital
literacy in postcolonial contexts, it must be mentioned that Nigeria actually
features one of the highest rates of internet penetration: one in two Nigerians
own an internet-connected device (most frequently a mobile phone),
although their use is overwhelmingly concentrated in large urban areas (see
Open Society Foundations 2012). Internet use in Nigeria is also notoriously
related to the so-called 419 or “Nigerian scams”, i.e. online frauds, which are
also mentioned in the novel (see Adichie 2014: 62).


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Serena Guarracino, Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah



communication age. A novel can be considered as a product which
acquires meaning as it finds its way to more and more readers: this
happens via a network of power relations including publishers, prizes,
the writer’s public persona, but also through platforms such as
Amazon reviews and individual blogs as well networks of user-
generated content such as Goodreads and aNobii.
     Contemporary Nigerian writers are part and parcel of this cultural
and commercial landscape, as they hover between the role of the
storyteller of local – albeit cosmopolitan – life and that of the native
informant, elaborating ‘Africa’ for Western understanding and
consumption. The term ‘native informant’ comes from ethnography,
where it defines “a figure who … can only provide data, to be
interpreted by the knowing subject for reading” (Spivak 1999: 49).
Spivak has notoriously appropriated the term to define “the limited
access to being-human” of the postcolonial subject (30), and can be
recognized in the risk run by Adichie and other postcolonial writers to
become interpreters of their own land of origin for a mainly Western
and English-speaking audience:

         Writing fiction is the contemporary analogue to telling tales in
      the moonlit village, and Nigerian novelists see themselves as
      storytellers. They tell stories of a particular kind and with a
      particular intent, however, for these writers understand
      themselves to be bearing witness to Nigerian social experience.
      (Griswold 2000: 3)

     This appropriation of the ‘native informant’ persona is also
endowed with the will and agency to redress and rewrite media
representations of postcolonial countries, as ‘bearing witness to
Nigerian social experience’ often means to challenge and overturn
representations of Nigeria and Africa broadcasted by the media.5 In a


      5A limit in the use of the ‘native informant’ paradigm to understand
contemporary postcolonial fiction also resides in the often contrasting
positions sustained by different writers, as emerges from the debate of
Afropolitanism I discuss in the following paragraph which also shows the


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widely quoted TED talk titled “The Danger of a Single Story” (2009),
Adichie has confronted the issue by commenting, in classic
postcolonial rhetoric, on the power of stories to influence people’s
elaboration of reality: «Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories
have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be
used to empower and to humanize». ‘Stories’, here, indicate literary
fiction but also a wider range of activities – including lecturing,
especially when lectures are peopled with characters and anecdotes as
in Adichie’s case. Her most viewed and popular lecture, a TEDxEuston
lecture titled “We Should All Be Feminists” (2013), is filled with stories
featuring herself and others, such as her first encounter with the word
“feminist” through a friend’s comment, or her being prevented to be
class monitor in primary school – although she had scored better than
all the other pupils – because the class monitor was supposed to be
male.
      The anecdotes are told in a variety of tones, but always with a
good deal of humour and the right timing to draw laughter and
applause from the audience. Part of the lecture has been sampled in
Beyoncé’s 2013 single “***Flawless”, thus making this video even more
popular, with a record of 1.193.590 views and 9.908 comments on
YouTube.6 Stories travel then, not only via the more traditional
medium of novels and creative fiction but also through a more
disseminated network: Adichie can thus be considered as part of a
wide social network which articulates a continuous flow of framing
and counter-framing involving a collectivity of participating subjects.

              Americanah: an Afropolitan novel?
     This phenomenon can be surely considered part of the landscape
of global marketing of exotic commodities Ponzanesi describes, where
writers become ‘brand names’ contributing to «a cosmopolitan culture


heterogeneity of both ‘Western’ and ‘African’ audiences engaged by
Adichie’s work.
     6 Data referring to August 25th, 2014.




                                                                               7
Serena Guarracino, Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah



of distinction, through which the consumption of postcolonial
products is not just a sign of exoticism but also of worldliness and
intercultural sophistication» (2014: 4). What Joel Whitney calls
‘immigrant fiction’ is surely a prominent feature of the book market, as
the many prizes garnered by postcolonial writers both sustain and
witness: «how to be your own doppelganger, culturally speaking, is
the great subject of the global age – how to be at odds with yourself as
you toggle between cultures» (2010: 20). Americanah is paradigmatic in
this respect by having its two main characters Ifemelu and Obinze
struggling with the many identities they have to wear, both as
Nigerians and as migrants in the US and in Britain respectively.
However, while tapping into well-known tropes of postcolonial fiction
such as dislocation and plurilinguism, their experience also mirrors
that of a new readership, the Nigerian urban youth who enjoy
postcolonial cultural products: their practices are remindful of the ones
Ponzanesi discusses in relation to South Asian young elites and their
appropriation of Indo-chic, where «the consumption of ‘postcolonial
products’ is also done by the so-called upper-middle postcolonial
classes that are demographically young and urban in location, but
cosmopolitan in orientation» (Ponzanesi 2014: 35).
     This African young and urban upper middle class has recently
been coalescing around the neologism ‘Afropolitanism’, which has
acquired currency – and criticism – both in the academia and in the
wider cultural commentary.7 In his preface to Negotiating
Afropolitanism, Simon Gikandi underlines the attempt of contemporary
debate on Africa to «overcome the malady of Afro-pessimism – the
belief that the continent and its populace is hopelessly imprisoned in
its past, trapped [in] a vicious circle of underdevelopment, and held
hostage to corrupt institutions» (2011: 9). This vision has been recently


      7The following does not mean to be a comprehensive overview of
scholarship on Afropolitanism and its role in contemporary cultural
commentary, but responds to the need to place it within the wider debate on
the postcolonial cultural market and the role of the media in literature
consumption.


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                                     Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



counteracted by a «hermeneutics of redemption» (id.), of which
Afropolitanism is part. A portmanteau of ‘African’ and ‘cosmopolitan’,
this term has been first devised by Achille Mbembe as a way to
overcome Afrocentrism and the ensuing conflict between
internationalism and nativism in cultural productions from and about
Africa: Afropolitan, in Mbembe’s intention, is «a way of being ‘African’
open to difference and conceived as transcending race» (2008).
      This neologism hence identifies what it means to be rooted both
in Africa and elsewhere. This rhetoric values hybridity, Whitney’s
“toggling between cultures” so prized by the postcolonial cultural
industry, as clearly emerges from Gikandi’s own definition of the
Afropolitan:

        Afropolitan is to be connected to knowable African
     communities, nations, and traditions; but it is also to live a life
     divided across cultures, languages, and states. It is to embrace and
     celebrate a state of cultural hybridity – to be of Africa and of other
     worlds at the same time. (2011: 9)

The language of Afropolitanism celebrates movement and syncretism,
and aims at complicating African identities as featured in global media
by focusing on migrant subjects. Among the cultural narratives pivotal
to this shift in representations of the African continent, J.K.S. Makokha
mentions the «parameters of literary criticism» (2011: 17), thus electing
literature as the locus for the elaboration of new African identities.
Together but also in some way before and against popular culture and
the media, literary fiction appears as a fertile ground for Afropolitan
cultural elaboration.
      Although its concerns are shared throughout the African
intellectual community, Afropolitanism itself has been subject to a
wide range of criticism. In a review of Negotiating Afropolitanism, South
African poet and scholar Raphael d’Abdon notes how «the idiom of
Afropolitanism refers to a small minority of Africans who are
nonetheless intellectually and culturally (and thus politically) relevant
within the academia and the arena of arts» (2011: 149). Kenyan writer


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Serena Guarracino, Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah



Binyavanga Wainaina has also addressed the issue in an ASAUK 2012
address titled “I am a Pan-Africanist, not an Afropolitan”, where he
denounced Afropolitanism as yet another cultural commodification of
African culture, quoting the South-Africa-based magazine The
Afropolitan and the shopping website The Afropolitan Shop as examples
(see Bosch Santana 2013). However, although media and fashion
appear as major players in creating a market for ‘the Afropolitan’
Wainaina – as, in different terms, Makhoka before him – focuses on
literature as one of the main vehicles for the spread of a commodified
Afropolitanism: as Bosch Santana comments, «overall, a spirit of
Afropolitanism has led to texts that are product, rather than process
focused, a trend that can perhaps be changed as more and more
literature goes digital» (2013; italics in the text).
      Adichie’s career, started in 2003 and peaked in 2007 with the
Orange Prize, is coterminous with the rise and fall of Afropolitanism
both as theoretical framework and cultural market. Her notion,
expressed in the already quoted 2009 lecture “The Dangers of a Single
Story”, that new stories are necessary to redress the representation of
Africa in the media sounds distinctly Afropolitan, as do the episodes
she relates to support her claim: for example, her first US roommate –
and many other people she met in the US – experience Nigeria and
Africa as «a single story of catastrophe» which excites «patronizing,
well-meaning pity» but «no possibility of a connection as human
equals» with her. The need for new stories of Nigerian migrants is
equally addressed in Americanah: here Obinze, only son of a university
professor, who grows up reading only American novels and watching
only American films, just manages to go to Britain, and on a temporary
visa; his attempt to obtain a European passport through a sham
marriage miserably fails. During his stay in Britain, he muses:

         all understood the fleeting from war, from the kind of poverty
      that crushes human souls, but they would not understand the
      need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness.
      They would not understand why people like him, who were
      raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction,



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                                    Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



     conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally
     convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were
     now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave,
     none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but
     merely hungry for choice and certainty. (Adichie 2014: 341)

      However, although some analogies are evident and maybe
somewhat inevitable, Adichie has never identified herself as
Afropolitan, and has actually rejected the term in a recent Globe and
Mail interview: «I’m not an Afropolitian. I’m African, happily so … I’m
comfortable in the world, and it’s not that unusual. Many Africans are
happily African and don’t think they need a new term» (Barber 2014).
She also never uses the term in the novel; yet her public persona and
her work have been appropriated by the Afropolitan global
community: for example, the blog The Afrolibrarians identify her as
“The Afropolitan Anthropologist”, and she features multiple times on
a Pinterest board titled “Stylish Afropolitan Woman”.
      The term also surfaces in reviews for Americanah: in Under the
Neem Tree Ndeye Sene Mbaye couples the novel with Taiye Selasi‘s
Ghana Must Go as «the Afropolitans [sic.] books everyone is talking
about» (2014);8 while Edem Torkornoo in Ayiba, an online magazine on
contemporary Africa, writes: «Americanah may be about a Nigerian
character but it ends up echoing the story of the afropolitan» (2014). I
believe this happens because Americanah is (among other things) a
story that self-consciously engages with the tropes of Afropolitanism in
its own arena, social media, by having its character writing a blog not
just on Nigeria or the US, but on race as a global discourse.



     8It must be noted here that, differently from Adichie, Tayie Selasi has
embraced and even pioneered Afropolitanism since her 2005 article “Bye Bye
Barbar”, where she unequivocally claims the term for her generation of
(upper) middle class African professionals: “They (read: we) are Afropolitans
– the newest generation of African emigrants, coming soon or collected
already at a law firm/chem lab/jazz lounge near you” (Selasi 2005).


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Serena Guarracino, Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah



     The title of the novel itself is a mock epithet for been-tos, as
emerges from its first mention in the novel. As Ifemelu’s high-school
friend Ginika is leaving for the US and is distributing her clothes to her
friends:

         “She’ll come back and be a serious Americanah like Bisi,”
      Ranyinudo said.
         They roared with laughter, at that word “Americanah,”
      wreathed in glee, the fourth syllable extended, and at the thought
      of Bisi, a girl in the form below them, who had come back from a
      short trip to America with odd affectations, pretending she no
      longer understood Yoruba, adding a slurred r to every English
      word she spoke. (Adichie 2014: 156)

As Ifemelu is moving to the US thanks to a university scholarship, she
also enacts the ritual division of clothing, and the word resurfaces
again: «Ifem, you know you’ll have any kind of dress you want in
America and next time we see you, you will be a serious Americanah»
(123).
     Here the word emerges more markedly as attributed not only to
language – a dear theme of postcolonial fiction – but also to clothing
and more generally to ‘style’: an ‘Americanah’ can be markedly
distinguished by her speaking affectations as well as by her choice of
clothes which marks her new affluence and her knowhow on up-to-
date fashion trends. The subject of fashion, clearly resonant of the
debate about Afropolitanism as commodity culture, recurs in the novel
and especially in Ifemelu’s blogging, which is often concerned with the
different cultural codes embedded in sartorial practices, as when
Ifemelu’s first experience of partying in the US forces her to confront
the dressing policies of her new country.9 This experience will be then
retold in her blog, where the surprise and feeling of not fitting in of the
young expatriate is parenthetically elaborated into a judgmental
opinion of American dress codes:

      For a comprehensive analysis of fashion as social and cultural signifier
      9

see Calefato 2004.


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                                    Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



        (Years later, a blog post would read: When it comes to dressing
     well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only
     disregarded this courtesy of self-presentation, but has turned that
     disregard into a virtue. “We are too superior/busy/cool/not-
     uptight to bother about how we look to other people, and so we
     can wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall.”) (157)


          From writing to blogging – and back again
      This is a typical example of how blogging emerges early in the
novel. As I have already mentioned, Ifemelu’s story starts in flash-
forward – at the time when, after thirteen years in the US, she closes
her blog and decides to move back to Lagos. A long flashback follows,
telling the story of Ifemelu’s early years in Lagos and then in the US,
where the reader is also told about her experience as a blogger. Yet
blog entries appear far earlier than the blog’s own inception in the plot.
These posts, often introduced by the adverbial “years later”, upset the
chronology of the storyline by projecting it flash-forward to the
moment when Ifemelu’s life will be processed by writing. The
chronological shift allows for a double take on many of the character’s
experiences as a black migrant in the US, so that the reader confronts
the young Ifemelu’s sense of bewilderment and emotional pain
together with the older Ifemelu’s more distanced elaboration of the
same episodes and issues. Her dealing with depression is symptomatic
of this double chronology:

        Depression was what happened to Americans, with their self-
     absolving need to turn everything into an illness. She was not
     suffering from depression; she was merely a little tired and a little
     slow. “I don’t have depression,” she said. Years later, she would
     blog about this: “On the Subject of Non-American Blacks Suffering
     from Illnesses Whose Names They Refuse to Know.” (194)10



      A similar double chronology emerges for the post «Sometimes in
     10

America, Race Is Class» (205), dedicated to the white workman who


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Serena Guarracino, Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah



      Through the more and more persistent presence of blog entries in
the novel, Americanah describes the main character’s coming to writing
– not to creative writing, though, but to blogging as a hybrid form that
brings together storytelling, reportage, and emotional value. In his Blog
Theory, Jodi Dean expands on the peculiarity of blog authorship: «blogs
offer exposure and anonymity at the same time. As bloggers we expose
ourselves, our feelings and experiences, loves and hates, desires and
aversions» (2010: 72). Bloggers here looks like the uncanny double of
the brand writer in the contemporary cultural market: they are
anonymous where published authors experience extra-visibility; their
writing is specifically concerned with their own “feelings and
experiences” against the fiction of creative writing. These elements are
all highlighted in Ifemelu’s blogging experience; and the novel exalts
the potentiality of critique literature exerts on these forms of writing by
staging how it is elaborated, produced and disseminated. Without
creating any hierarchies, blog writing is enfolded in the novel, hosting
most – if not all – social commentary. At the same time, as the
discrepancy among the different chronological planes of the novel
begins to thin down, the novel starts to absorb elements of blogging in
its third-person narrator’s growing social comments.
      The birth of the blog is narrated about half-way in the novel in a
moment of heightened chronological complexity. The tale is part of a
long recollection inserted in the wider flashback frame of the novel:
after Ifemelu splits up with her white boyfriend Curt, she starts
musing about why she had needed to spoil the apparent happiness of
their relationship. A series of anecdotes from their life together show
racial issues and Ifemelu’s deep dissatisfaction, which she shares with
her university fellow Wambui in a long e-mail. It is from this young

sympathizes with her the very moment he realized she is not the landlady
but only the babysitter in the opulent house where he has come to clean
carpets; as well as for her meeting with a taxi driver in Baltimore who
advised her that «You have to be very careful or America will corrupt you»,
who ‘years later’ features in the entry «On the Divisions Within the
Membership of Non-American Blacks in America» (255).



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                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



Kenyan woman activist, a role model for the main character
throughout the novel, that the idea of a blog eventually emerges:
«Wambui replied to say, “This is so raw and true. More people should
read this. You should start a blog”» (366).
      The starting of the blog hence coincides with Ifemelu’s breakup
with Curt, shaping a wider moment of racial self-awareness of which
the blog is the elaboration in writing. However, this “raw and true”
quality, the emotional side of blogging as Dean highlights, becomes
more and more questioned as both the blogging and the novel
progress. In a later exchange with her boyfriend Blaine, aka “Professor
Hunk” as she refers to him in the blog, Ifemelu notes: «I don’t want to
explain, I want to observe» (386). Here the character shows the
presumption of being able to give objective (true) and unprocessed
(raw) accounts of what happens to her. On the other hand, Blaine
remarks what has already emerged in the aforementioned post about
depression: blogging implies an elaboration of (more or less remote)
past experiences, which are also shaped by her exchange with her
readers and their comments: «Remember people are not reading you as
entertainment, they’re reading you as cultural commentary. That’s a
real responsibility» (id.).
      At this point blog entries have started to appear typographically
separated by the main body of the text. This first happens for a post
related to the definition of race in the US and the meaning of the
classification «Hispanic» (128-129). From its entrance into the storyline
of the novel in part 4, blog entries become chronologically unmarked,
far more frequent and situated at the end of every chapter. In some
cases the correlation between what happens at that point in the novel
and the topic of each entry is explicit: the moment of epiphany when
Ifemelu, after years of fighting, finally “falls in love” with her naturally
kinky hair is followed by a post on «Why Dark-Skinned Black Women
– Both American And Non-American – Love Barack Obama», where
the president-to-be’s success is attributed to his having married «one of
their own», thus breaking a pattern that values lighter skin, especially
in women (264). Some other cases, though, are less easy to pinpoint:
the crisis resulting by her nephew Dike being refused sunscreen by his


                                                                               15
Serena Guarracino, Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah



teacher because «she said I didn’t need it» (203) is followed by a post
titled «Understanding America for the Non-American Black: American
Tribalism» (227); and when Ifemelu applies for her first regular job –
and painfully decides to straighten her hair for the interview – the
following entry elaborates on «Understanding America for the Non-
American Black: What Do WASPs Aspire To» (253).
      Leaving readers to figure out the relation severs the self-
referential back-and-forth from novel to blog by introducing an
“audience”, an active element in the creation of the text. Blog readers –
which may or may not be considered a proxy for readers of the novel –
are always a relevant presence in Ifemelu’s blogging, and allow for
some interesting insights on the process of writing in the presence of
immediate and continuous feedback. And while these insights may not
be intended to be part of a wider reflection on writing as a
collaborative art form in the digital age, such considerations slowly
become more and more relevant, especially as the blog becomes a
source of revenue. This is a central element in blogging, as Dean
highlights while commenting on the successful Whateverlife.com:
started by teenager Ashley Qualls as a place «to express herself
creatively» (2010: 62), the blog started as a community for girls with
useful free tips to devise MySpace pages, but shortly developed an ad-
related revenue of over a million dollar a year. The relationship
between affective flows and money flows becomes apparent here:
blogs «produce affective spaces where [bloggers] express themselves,
share their feelings, and reach out with a little hope that someone will
be touched and reach back. … With a little luck, we could even earn
revenue on ads accompanying each and every heartfelt expression.
Feelings can be profitable» (63).
      For Ifemelu this shift is accompanied by the uncomfortable feeling
of being dispossessed of her own writing:

        e-mails came from readers who wanted to support the blog.
      Support. That word made the blog even more apart from her, a
      separate thing that could thrive or not, sometimes without her and
      sometimes with her. (375)



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                                    Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



As the novel proceeds, Ifemelu’s separation from the results of her
labour soon leads to a deeper feeling of subordination and
annihilation: «Now that she was asked to speak at roundtables and
panels, on public radio and community radio, always identified simply
as The Blogger, she felt subsumed by her blog. She had become her
blog» (330). Readers and their comments are discussed at length,
showing their influence of blog as a place of social commentary and –
not always polite – cultural debate, thus suggesting that the blog
becomes more and more a shared space where the blogger has only
limited agency.11
      This situation may partially account for the unease that befoul
Ifemelu’s otherwise agreeable life in the US: «Her blog was doing well,
with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning
good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a
relationship with Blaine … and yet there was cement in her soul»
(Adichie 2014: 7). As the novel proceeds in its idiosyncratic starts and
stops, it emerges that it is Ifemelu’s own predatory attitude towards
the world, fuelled by blogging, which makes her uncomfortable. The
“raw and true” writing that had fist prompted her to open the blog has
slowly become an exacting job, leaving her in constant search for new
material:




11 For example, the aforementioned post on depression also discusses a
comment from one of the readers, reflecting the collective elaboration of
experience the blogosphere allows against the isolation experienced by the
migrant subject: «A Congolese woman wrote a long comment in response:
She had moved to Virginia from Kinshasa and, months into her first semester
of college, begun to feel dizzy in the morning, her heart pounding as though
in flight from her, her stomach fraught with nausea, her fingers tingling. She
went to see a doctor. And even though she checked “yes” to all the
symptoms on the card the doctor gave her, she refused to accept the
diagnosis of panic attacks because panic attacks happened only to
Americans» (Adichie 2014: 194).



                                                                                17
Serena Guarracino, Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah



          she began, over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the
      carcasses of people’s stories for something she could use.
      Sometimes making fragile links to race. Sometimes not believing
      herself. The more she wrote, the less sure she became. Each post
      scraped off yet one more scale of self until she felt naked and false.
      (6)

     The formal and narrative cannibal drive of blog writing comes to
an abrupt end at the final chapter of part 4, when Ifemelu is reached by
the news that her nephew has attempted suicide, thus delaying her
leaving for Nigeria. The remainder of the novel sees a waning of blog
entries as Ifemelu copes with Dike’s suicide attempt and then finally
moves to Lagos. Here, with blogging temporarily disappeared from
the texture of the novel and the chronology and narrative finally
coinciding, the novel moves between Ifemelu’s perspective and
Obinze’s.
     Differently from Ifemelu, Obinze will never become his would-be
Afropolitan self: his story is a bitter parody of her trajectory, as only
when deported back to Nigeria will he obtain the money and social
status that will allow him to live comfortably. He also attains
economical and social success by the help of a shady character called
“Chief” – his cosmopolitan Africanness deeply embedded in the
criminality and corruption that Afropolitanism means to reverse.
Obinze’s Chief is the later version of Chief Omenka, a rich scammer
who financed Ifemelu’s school earlier in the novel, and also of the
General, the ‘patron’ of Ifemelu’s aunt Uju in Nigeria and father of her
nephew Dike. Their insidious presence emphasize the conspicuous
absence in Ifemelu’s blog of any reference to her own earlier life in
Nigeria: her ‘non-American black’ self is at the centre of an imaginary
where Africa features as freely kinky hair or the otherwise enriching
experience US racial dynamics offer from a foreigner’s point of view.
On the other hand, these ‘Chiefs’ embody a Nigeria of corruption and
criminality: these characters live outside blogging, and represent the
bottom ground of Nigerian culture that Afropolitanism cannot
elaborate. They are not part of Ifemelu’s blogging persona, yet their


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                                  Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



presence in the novel shows how they will not be pushed out of the
picture altogether. On the contrary, they appear at the beginning and
at the end of the novel as framing references for the Afropolitan dream
that cannot really be.
      Back in Lagos, the reader is introduced to new social
environments where the metanarrative dialogue between blogging and
fiction is staged with far more evidence than previously in the novel:
Ifemelu’s high-school friends Raniynudo, Tochi and Pryie, but also her
colleagues at Zoe magazine all represent an occasion to comment on
the ways and habits of contemporary Lagos. Against this background,
at first Ifemelu plays the enlightened cultural commentator against her
interlocutors’ mostly myopic views about Nigeria: this clearly emerges
during her visit to the ‘Nigerpolitan Club’, where returnees meet to
exchange experiences and complaints about their country. Here a long
discussion on Nollywood films takes place in which Ifemelu – who in
an earlier time declared not to like them (Adichie 2014: 16) – endorses
the genre to express her willful distancing herself from the
Nigerpolitan crowd:

       [Fred:] “Nollywood is really public theater, and if you
    understand it like that, then it is more tolerable. …” He was
    looking at her, soliciting her agreement with his eyes: they were
    not supposed to watch Nollywood, people like them, and if they
    did, then only as amusing anthropology.
       “I like Nollywood,” Ifemelu said …. The urge to be contrarian
    was strong. If she set herself apart, perhaps she would be less of
    the person she feared she had become. (504)

     Ifemelu’s upsetting experience in the company of other returnees,
with whom she shares the dissatisfaction with the complexities of
Nigerian life, prompts her to start blogging again in order to project
these emotions onto another writer/blogger persona: titled The Small
Redemption of Lagos, the new blog features an entry on the Nigerpolitan
Club, which reprises what the reader has already experienced through




                                                                              19
Serena Guarracino, Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah



Ifemelu’s words but in a different register, with irony taking the place
of emotional turmoil.
      Yet blogging in Nigeria proves different from blogging in the US,
as the relational nature of writing here becomes explicit and
unavoidable, and the separation between blogger and character far less
secure. This becomes evident when Ifemelu writes an entry on «young
women in Lagos with Unknown Sources of Wealth» (521) inspired by
the life of her friend Ranyinudo, whose lover finances her home and
lifestyle. Eventually, though, she decides to take down her post after
Ranyinudo’s violent reaction as she finds herself the unnamed central
character of the entry. In Lagos, it is not possible for the blogger to
claim only “to observe”, as Ifemelu had previously asserted: by
underlining the parallels between Ifemelu’s life and her own,
Rayinudo’s retort shows how the character’s detachment from the
things she writes is just a fiction created by blogging: «How is it
different from you and the rich white guy in America? … You need to
stop this nonsense. Stop feeling so superior!» (521).
      The novel does not make clear if Ifemelu stops feeling superior:
she certainly refuses to become Obinze’s mistress, and at the very end
of the novel he leaves his wife to be with her. This romantic ending
puts Ifemelu’s newly-started writing career suddenly in the
background, yet the novel devotes some effort in showing how
blogging has now taken a more emotional and relational quality – as
for example when, during a short break in their relationship, the blog
becomes a way to at least imaginarily keep in touch with Obinze: «She
wrote her blog posts wondering what he would make of them» (585),
the intimate relation with her reader substituting for the fear of the
many anonymous, unknown readers of her previous blog.
      The main character’s return to blogging shows that the novel’s
critique to the modes of cultural production in the global, internet-
driven market is not all-encompassing; on the contrary, the interaction
of different modes of writing expands on the complex relations among
different experiences, and also an awareness of the wider debate on
Afropolitanism as one of the main global discourses on African and
African-American cultural production today. Ifemelu’s trajectory does


20
                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



not disown the Afropolitan need to rewrite Africa’s catastrophic and
pitiable narrative, yet it does not embrace the possibility of doing so by
marketing the experience of privileged migrants as the new global
fashion trend. Among the entries on fashion shows and Nigerpolitan
attitudes, a more entangled, less self-satisfied sensitivity to social issues
emerges: «We are just one step away from this life in a slum, all of us who
live air-conditioned middle-class lives, she wrote, and wondered if Obinze
would agree» (585). Obinze’s counterpoint signals the presence of the
Nigeria of Chiefs and locally-based businessmen alongside that of
intellectual migrants with foreign PhDs: and it is in this ongoing
dialogue that the blog becomes finally and acknowledgedly Ifemelu’s,
one of the backbones of a new identity emerging out of homecoming,
discovery, and blogging: «She was at peace: to be home, to be writing
her blog, to have discovered Lagos again. She had, finally, spun herself
fully into being» (586).

            Coda: The Small Redemptions of Lagos
     On August 27, 2014 (just a few days after this article was first
submitted) the first entry of a blog was published, titled The Small
Redemption of Lagos. Here, among comments on Nigerian and global
contemporary issues (in the section “Problem and Solution”) as well as
on lipstick and vaginal douches (“Style”), Americanah characters spill
out into the blogosphere, as the first person blogger posts about “Ifem
& Ceiling” (nicknames for Ifemelu and Obinze from the novel) and
their life in Nigeria: «Ceiling and I have been spending a lot of time in
Enugu. I love Enugu, the sense of restfulness; it has a certain ambition
about it – the mall, the new roads – but it retains a small-town feel»
(“Ifem & Ceiling 1”).
     Blog entries have been posted on the Adichie’s Facebook page
(managed by her publisher Alfred A. Knopf), yet the blog features no
mention of Adichie or of the novel from which the characters are taken
except in its Internet address (http://americanahblog.com). This
marketing strategy achieves heightened visibility and circulation for
the book, as characters from the novel keep expanding beyond its


                                                                               21
Serena Guarracino, Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah



finished confines; yet it does so by endorsing the invisibility of the
blogger and/as writer. Hence, the distinction between writer and
character, person and persona, becomes more and more a dangerous
territory where traditional signposts are displaced by the specificities
of blog writing. Posts about “Ifem & Ceiling” as well as those about
Ifem’s friends, which include personal care tips under the name
“Aruidimma” (from «aru idi mma, the wellbeing of your body»,
“Aruidimma 1”), actually sound like a traditional first-person
narrative; yet in Adichie’s public persona emerges in comments on
articles from the UK Telegraph (“Problem and Solution 2”) or on the
obituary for Kenyan professor Ali Mazrui by The New York Times
(“Problem and Solution 8”).
      The interstices among these posts – and between the blog and the
novel – highlight the criticalities regarding the question of authoriality
and authorship in contemporary writing, postcolonial and otherwise.
This writing requires Ponzanesi’s ‘multi-sited reading’ (mentioned at
the beginning of this article), as fiction reacts creatively to the
intersections between traditionally published literature and the
growing field of writing in the digital sphere. This field is still mostly
uncharted territory for literary criticism: works such as Adichie’s
prompt the critic to devise new tools for cultural analysis, tools able to
account for the overlap between technology and new articulations of
literary writing.




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Serena Guarracino, Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah



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Serena Guarracino, Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah



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                                   The author
Serena Guarracino

       Serena Guarracino’s research interests encompass performance
studies and postcolonial literature, gender and cultural studies, with a
particular focus on the relationship between literature and
performativity. She received her PhD from the University of Naples
“L’Orientale” in “Literatures, Cultures, and Histories of Anglophone
Countries” in 2005. She recently authored La primadonna all’opera.
Scrittura e performance nel mondo anglofono (2010), and Donne di passioni.
Personagge della lirica tra differenza sessuale, classe e razza (2011), which
deals with contemporary rewritings of Carmen and Madama Butterfly
from a postcolonial perspective. She also edited with Marina Vitale a
double issue for the journal AION Anglistica (www.anglistica.unior.it)
titled Voicings: Musica across Borders (13.1-2, 2009). She is currently
teaching a course on English Literature from the 18th and 19th centuries
at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”.

       Email: serena.guarracino@gmail.com




26
                                 Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)




                             The paper
Date sent: 30/08/2014
Date accepted: 30/09/2014
Date published: 30/11/2014



                    How to quote this paper
Guarracino, Serena, “Writing «so raw and true»: Blogging in
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah”, Tecnologia, immaginazione e
forme del narrare, Ed. L. Esposito, E. Piga, A. Ruggiero, Between, IV.8
(2014), www.betweenjournal.it




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