I found it interesting
that Ifemelu’s entire life quest seems to be finding where she belongs or fits
in; as she tries desperately to achieve this over and over. This applies to
where she lives, who she is friends with, and who she chooses to have
relationships with. Growing up, she is
encouraged to look towards higher education and eventually towards America to
receive that education, not Nigeria.
However once Ifemelu finally arrives, America is clearly not what she
imagined. She had this idea of America
as a “cold place full of wool coats and snow” (127) and imagines it to be a
place of fantastic people and places and things that will solve all of her
problems. The moment she is off the
plane the only word she repeatedly uses to describe her surroundings is “matte.” Her final destination is now a reality and
yet it seems to fall short of everything she envisioned. America is described with an underlying tone
of criticism as the story continues. She
dislikes everything from Dike’s schooling all the way down to the size of
grocery stores and the taste of fruit (139).
The only thing she really compliments is the fast food. She has a couple
long-term relationships that mirror this general dissatisfaction and always
seem to end as Ifemelu disengages from her partner or continues searching for
her dream life. All in all she doesn’t
feel like she’s been given a new life in shiny America; instead she feels
confused and like an outsider looking in.
Ifemelu wants everything she can’t have and “She ached for the lives
they showed, lives full of bliss, where all problems had sparkling solutions in
shampoos and cars and packaged foods, and in her mind they became the real America”
(139).
Things definitely improve for Ifemelu after she goes to
college and sees more of America than what she was able to at Aunty Uju’s
apartment. Eventually she overcomes the
initial disappointment but never seems to shake the feeling of being an
outsider, and in my opinion feels less complete than before she left Nigeria. I thought that at the point in the story when
Ifemelu returns to Nigeria she would finally feel at home. What actually happened seemed to contradict
what I originally thought. Immediately
after arriving in Lagos Ifemelu says “…she had the dizzying sense of falling,
falling into the new person she had become, falling into the strange
familiar. Had it always been like this
or had it changed so much in her absence?” (475). I think this marks a profound
change in Ifemelu. Now that she’s
returned home she fully realizes how America has changed her, even though she
resisted being influenced by it for so long. She tried American culture,
American relationships, and American schooling, but somehow she still didn’t
feel at home in America. Due to those experiences she now feels somewhat out of
place in her former home Lagos as well, and so her quest to fully feel a sense
of belonging continues.
Morgan, I believe you brought up a very important insight about how the culture of the country in which Ifemelu lives affects so many of her life decisions. Adiche shows, what I believe to be, three stages of Ifemelu: Ifemelu in Nigeria, Ifemelu in America, and Ifemelu after America. Yet Adiche presents and changes Ifemelu’s character in the context of the culture she is involved in, and provides a view of the third world that I had not considered before, “Nigerians don’t buy houses because they’re old. A renovated two-hundred-year-old mill granary, you know the kind of thing Europeans like. It doesn’t work here…Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of the past” (539). I thought this passage tied together Ifemelu’s three stages very well. Before America, in Nigeria, Ifemelu was extremely forward-looking, “She saw herself in a house from The Cosby Show, in a school with students holding notebooks miraculously free of wear and crease” (122). She’s excited to go America because of the exciting new opportunities, she thinks it will provide. I believe this is part of the reason why she disregards Obinze, because continuing to focus on him would be backward-looking, instead she tries dating American men, but she obviously still feels like an outsider, because the First Worlders, with their organic foods and misshapen plates, are not in fact forward-looking at all. She is considered such a novelty in America because of the quaintness and historicalness that Americans think Ifemelu represents. So Ifemelu moves back to Nigeria, but the reader soon discovers that Ifemelu has, at least partially, adopted an American mindset, “‘He can’t believe you’re actually asking for real potatoes,’ Obinze said drily. ‘Real potatoes are backward for him. Remember this is our newly middle-class world. We haven’t competed the first cycle of prosperity, before going back to the beginning again, to drink milk from the cow’s udder’” (548). And when Ifemelu comes back, it is clear that she has adopted a backward-looking attitude to her relationships, as she is now dating Obinze. So Adiche embodies her critique on the first and third worlds and Ifemelu transitions from a Third-World dreamer, to a First-World consumerist.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with your idea of understanding Ifemelu as an outsider in both countries, and I am particularly interested in how she is unable to feel a full sense of belonging in either America or Nigeria. I think this experience might speak to a larger issue the text confronts in examining what home and identity mean in an increasingly global and multicultural world.
ReplyDeleteIfemelu’s return to Nigeria plays an important role in understanding this question, as she is startled by the lack of familiarity she feels with Lagos. Stepping into the city, Ifemelu is overwhelmed by the stimulation and pace of Nigerian life, as word choice such as “assaulted,” “racing”, and “dizzying” suggest an unfamiliar, threatening, and unwelcoming atmosphere (475). In short, the violence and modernism of Lagos represent the increasing globalization of the 21st century world, and pose important implications for Ifemelu’s self.
As you note, Ifemelu’s feeling of home strongly interacts with her identity, in that “She was no longer sure what was new in Lagos and what was new in herself.” (478). This evidence complements your thoughts on how Ifemelu is uncertain whether her perceived changes are a result of her altered world view or the development and modernization of Lagos. This uncertainty develops as Ifemelu experiences an ambivalent sense of home between the two countries. Regarding food, Ifemelu feels, “She loved eating all the things she had missed while away … but she longed, also, for other things she had become used to in America” (503). By using cuisine to speak to larger cultural identities, this passage points to an interesting tension between the two countries, and poses a complication for the traditional understanding of home.
To this end, the presence of Obinze, and their eventual reunification, offers some semblance of home for Ifemelu. After admitting the nature of her sexual acts with the stranger in America, Obinze reacts by comforting her, and Ifemelu feels “between them silence grew, an ancient silence that they both knew. She was inside this silence and she was safe.” (543). The familiarity of this silence contrasts with the unfamiliarity of Nigeria, and the use of the term “ancient” draws on a mythic, prelapsarian state of existence that they long to return to. This passage suggests home is a construct that is more focused on the people that surround you than it is concerned with a geographic location. In turn, it seems this understanding of home reacts to the forces of globalization and modernization that are quickly altering the cultural landscape, and offer an understanding of home that fits into the 21st-century framework.