americanah

The unsettling similarities between Nigeria and Brazil surprisingly found in Americanah

When reading Amerianah, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the second novel I've read of her (the first, Purple Hibiscus, I must confess I haven't finished yet. I had to pause it due to its intensity), my mind could not help to see the similarities between the main character's upbringing in middle class Nigeria and our upbringing in the same middle class here in Brazil, both colonized countries with deep historical wounds that have yet to scar.

I won't dwell on the actual American experience of the character, for it is not my own. The racial disparities in the United States are the core of the book, and I won't pretend, like most whites in Brazil do, that because of the racial miscegenation of our country we are any less racist, because statistics won't lie: 78% of people killed in police operations are black and poor. But those two adjectives are the characteristics I want to focus this musing on.

I, as most people in my country, have little to no experience in Nigerian culture. We grew up learning whatever old African and Asian history we needed to understand what was actually deemed important: European history, and later on, the importance of the United States. The history of my own country, thought in my upper middle class school, only began when the Portuguese arrived on our shores. Before that, there was nothing worth mentioning (forget the natives, Europe hadn't arrived yet!). So Nigeria, a country among the fifty-four that compose the African continent, was never mentioned. If you think about it, Africa is spoken of like one enormous country, and not the diverse, multicultural and multilingual continent it actually is.

" When Chimamanda writes about how Ifemelu's friends devoured European and American writer and the characters everlasting dream of owning an American visa or living in England it reminded me of what we call 'stray dog' mentality in Brazil, and it derives from this ill perceived notion of inferiority which is established in us from a very young age."

And still, so many things are the same. From a very young age we are fed American culture, music, music, lifestyle. These reflect on the way we see the world. When Chimamanda writes about how Ifemelu's friends devoured European and American writers, and the characters everlasting dream of owning an American visa or living in England it reminded me of what we call 'stray dog' mentality in Brazil, and it derives from this ill perceived notion of inferiority which is established in us from a very young age. So we crave these places and to feel like we belong we consume their culture even more, to the point of kicking our own.

Obinze, Ifemelu's great love, experiences the most common outcome of such crave. He manages a visa to England, traveling with his mother, but he soon realizes every idealistic notion he had picked up from his novels fell short on reality. What usually happen when we migrate to these countries (and here I say we because Brazilians are seen around the world as an exotic, funny and happy group of people, but when it comes down to brass tax, we are second class citizens in a first world country just like any other colonized people would), we have to deal with what's expected of us, that we put ourselves in our place and prove we are worthy of the gift that is that visa. If this is not your experience as a migrant coming from a third world country, chances are you are either from a "passible" color or you had enough money to buy yourself a place there, but trust me darling, you are not one of them. And in the book, as Obinze returns home frustrated and disappointed and gains importance within his native society, he still lacks the critical thinking to understand why some things are the way they are.

He speaks of how services are precarious in Nigeria, how waiters and construction workers are lazy and take advantage of clients by performing bad at their jobs while charging too much money, but all that without speaking for a minute why this is, leaving the writer to think about it (or not). And why? Service jobs in ascending countries are badly paid, people who work them see little to no chance of escaping that reality, it is repetitive and dull and they last for too many hours (usually more than what is legal, but leave it to the State to change laws to accommodate that). Obinze also speaks of scarcity mentality and how Nigerians, both poor and rich live inside it, not in a critical, understanding way, but in an ironic one, but if people have a mentality around scarcity is because scarcity is or was a reality, not so long ago. A brilliant character, for he personifies and voices actual real thinking.

People in Nigeria and in Brazil have in the past (and still have, especially now with our far right government dead set on killing the poor and ending our middle class to transform all of us below the super rich line into blue collar workers) dealt with severe lack. Lack of job security, lack of minimal wages that can actually pay bills, lack of health security and the bare minimum to survive. It wasn't so long ago we lived in a dictatorship, and not even that long ago when our economy rose, just to go downhill shortly after. Our social economic standing is faulty and our country is currently being sold out, and not even to the highest bidder. The state is pocketing what it can before elections and there will be little left to rebuild after they are done. How can a whole country believe and understand abundance when it seems to be restricted only to those who can afford it.

Desperation to survive shapes a society

Both in Nigeria and in Brazil we look outward when all we see around us is hardship. We crave the new, as Chimamanda beautifully puts it when she describes a scene where Obinze talks about how the Nigerian middle-class doesn't buy old houses to refurbish, and all their furniture must be new. But unlike Obinze, (and Chimamanda, perhaps? Sometimes we lend our characters our thoughts and through them we voice our beliefs), I don't believe we do because we are looking ahead and the past becomes fetiche, as he put it. What we are is mirroring someone's culture. Through Instagram and Pinterest we have access to what American and European's middle class consume, how they live, style their homes, for middle class America doesn't have enough money to buy old and expensive and renew, they have to buy new and cheap and mortgage, but that doesn't translate in social media. What does are those modulated kitchens with white fake marble tops and those flat suburban homes decorated in dull pale colors that all look the same. And I won't tell you how many times I have integrated those in my designs as an architect in Brazil (yes, I'm an architect graduate with a writer's heart). I don't have to stretch my imagination to think that's the kind of thing Nigerians would want either.

" And it is not just the beauty of us that is lost when we are constantly looking outside ourselves for cultural what is what. It makes it that much easier for other countries to take whatever they want, under the false pretense of 'managing it better'."

I loved understanding and perceiving a whole new world through Chimamanda's eyes, but it saddened me that some of us see part of our teenage and young adult years through other culture's lenses. I, myself, at thirty three have only began to find out how amazing and vast the culture of my own country is, a continental country with so many different accents and customs if we didn't all speak Portuguese you'd feel you crossed a border somewhere. And it is not just the beauty of us that is lost when we are constantly looking outside ourselves for cultural what is what. It makes it that much easier for other countries to take whatever they want, under the false pretense of 'managing it better'. Make no mistake, cultural and social capital are just as important as financial and political ones. Embrace your culture.