Today, I'm going to talk about a couple of short stories by a Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. One called You and America, published in 2001 and the other entitled My American Jon, published 2007. In each of these stories, Adichie creates characters that move from Nigeria to America and she describes her experiences and struggles as Africans in America. Adichie is a relative newcomer to Nigerian fiction, but has published a series of award-winning novels, and most recently with her book, Americana. In her fiction, Adichie uses her real-life experiences as a Nigerian immigrant to America to write insight-fully about how black Africans struggle with the racial system in America. Therefore, although I'll be talking about fictional characters and situations today, they allow us to think about the real challenges and concerns that African immigrants face in the United States, and their prospective of America through foreign eyes. This follows on our discussion in chapter five, of Sudanese immigrants, that came to the US as refugees. And the struggles that they faced as they attempted to fit into and understand American life. Adichie's stories are about people from Nigeria, a vast populous country in west Africa. And while many of her characters struggle with financial and other burdens in the United States, they are not refugees and often not from very rural areas in Africa. Many of these characters grew up in big cities in Nigeria like Lagos, and are familiar with the global world. Building on our discussions about Sudanese immigrants in America, Adichie's characters allow us insights into the struggles that many African immigrants face with racial issues. I want to first highlight some of the moments in the short stories where Adiche's characters are most effective at describing the strangeness of American life. In her story You and America, the narrator Akuna a young Nigerian woman trying to make a life for herself in Connecticut, describes what she finds striking about Americans. She is shocked by how open Americans are with her, telling her about personal illness and other intimate struggles, that Nigerians would only share with family members. As a waitress, she also finds the wastefulness of Americans disconcerting, leaving lots of food on their plates to be thrown away. And finally, she can't believe the way American parents tolerate insolent children, who would be swiftly disciplined in Nigeria. Ocuna is also frustrated with the way that white Americans conflate African in other countries. For example, she describes how Americans tend to think that all black people with accents are Jamaican. And even those people that guessed that she was from Africa would then ask if she knew some person from a distant African country like Kenya or Zimbabwe, as if the continent of Africa with it's 54 countries and 1.1 billion people were a single community where everyone knew each other. This annoys Akuna, and she feels disdain for white Americans, and finds their associations with Africa condescending. They either were too in to Africa, or couldn't be bothered about understanding it. Some of the most revealing points of the Adiche's stories, are about problems that female, Nigerian protagonists face in their relationships with white American men. It is not surprising that biracial couples are a context in which both social and personal challenges emerge. The challenges that Adichie's characters face are pressures from outside their relationships, parents, friends, strangers who find these relationships problematic. And from those inside, were misunderstandings about the meaning and importance of race in America abound. The unspoken context of many of the problems that Adichie's Nigerian female protagonists face is that they come from a country with very few white people. In Nigeria, there are less than 100,000 white residents in a country of 150 million. It is not surprising then that these Nigerian characters struggle to understand the reactions that bi-racial couples incite in both white and black Americans. For example, Acuna describes how old white men would sometimes mutter and glare at her white boyfriend, while at other times they would compliment them a bit too loudly, as though to prove their own tolerance to themselves. But biracial couples are not only a problem for white people, the reactions of black Americans were also highly variable and abnormal. Black men would shake their heads at Acuna for dating a white man, or alternatively tried too hard to forgive her. Black women would shoot her pitiful glances, and bemoan her perceived self loathing or lack of self-esteem for dating a white man, or alternatively, try to show solidarity with Akuna. These reactions all key into the complex racial world in America, where black women who date white men can be loathed by other black men and women. And white people are uncomfortable with racial issues to an extent that they deny they exist or try to overcompensate. In this way Adichie uses bi-racial couples as a crucial nexus for thinking about and revealing racial issues in America. These issues can also be seen in the story, My American Jon. The main character, Amaka, describes what happened when she met her white boyfriend's mother. Amaka was surprised that the mother talked about seemingly unrelated things with her, Kenyan safaris, Nelson Mandela, Harry Belafonte. All things that are notionally related to Africa, but are actually cliches that are often invoked when Americans think about Africa. Amaka felt that this was about race, about the mother's unease with their son's black girlfriend. But the boyfriend, Jon, disagrees, saying it was more complex and not really about race. He said that his mother was just hyper aware of difference, and was thus too eager to bridge it. He saw this as a good thing and not something that reflected his mother's unease with race. Amaka is upset by Jon's reaction and accusation that she was overly concerned with race. She thinks that Jon does not recognize that her experiences as a black woman in America are dramatically different than his, precisely because she is black. For Amaka, the problem was not simply that she was being forced to navigate the American racial world, which was itself difficult. The problem was also that she's never sure when situations are defined by racial issues or not, and that this was a type of baggage that Jon would never have to endure. The crucial insight here, and of great importance to the topic we're covering in this course, is that this racial world was not the one she grew up with in Nigeria. But in America, because of the color of her skin, she's expected to live and understand this complex set of issues. These are the struggles of African immigrants as they try to have relationships with white partners. It is often the pressures of how other people perceive their bi-racial relationships that cause the real problems. And these ultimately take their toll on their relationships. And the couples in both stories eventually split up. Although the pressures of American attitudes towards race surely contributed to the demise of these relationships, Adichie's stories are never that simple. Many other issues were involved in the problems that they faced including financial disparities and other more personal desires. Toward the end of the story, My American Jon, Jon is shocked that Amaka suggests that race is one of the causes of their breakup. Amaka tells Jon that he was actually trying too hard to prove that her blackness didn't matter. But the only time it didn't matter it seems is when they were alone together, outside of the prying eyes of society. When they sat side by side and watched a film or laid side by side and pass sections of the newspaper to each other. Such personal insights are what make Adichie's writing so incredible, and teach us much about the complexity of lives of African immigrants in US. In chapter seven and eight, we'll begin a new section. In these two chapters, we'll be reversing the movement of people and discuss the influences and experiences of African Americans as they travel to African countries and how Africans view these African American visitors.
