November 16, 2016 - 00:05
i forgot how much i liked this book.
i read it this summer, picked it up because it was on the "suggested reads" shelf at my library and because i remember Kamara insisting that i had to read it. i didn't really know what to expect -- and to be completely honest, i don't really remember a specific feeling beyond the fact that i liked it and i found it interesting and i wanted to talk to other people about it.
this time, reading it within the context of our class, i'm thinking about race and foreignness, and how they're different, and how Ifemelu's writing is characterized not only by her blackness but by the fact that she is not American. she mentions this several times -- the "things she had learned not to say aloud in America" (7), the suggestion "that she was somehow irrevocably altered by America" growing "thorns on her skin" (20) and the recurrence of this suggestion (49), Ranyinudo's saying that "next time we see you, you will be a serious Americanah".
i'm also struck by the way she describes her blog (ex-blog?)... "Readers like SapphicDerrida, who reeled off statistics and used words like 'reify' in their comments, made Ifemelu nervous, eager to be fresh and to impress, so that 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" (6). It makes me think about the way that we've discussed race, and the inherently limited ways in which we've discussed it -- not only in terms of black and white, but within the meanings and definitions of race in America.
I remember my grandma being puzzled by the bathroom signs that read "white" and "colored"
I remember kamara telling me, early last semester, how race was "read" differently in the US and in the UK
I remember swati mentioning in the race journals how she was never "raced" until she came back to the US for college after high school. (for reference: /oneworld/comment/28996)
I wonder what we are losing, by discussing it only in the context of the American concept of race. and yet at the same time, isn't that what we are experiencing? after all, it's not as if we can separate our experiences of race, and for most of us that experience IS within America.
that's what i'm thinking about right now.