Americanah: Allusions 6 key examples

But Heart of the Matter grows on the novel despite Obinze’s dismissal. Greene’s novel shares the story of Scobie, a British inspector stationed in Sierra Leone who languishes under the country’s oppressive heat and humidity. Trapped by boredom, he enters an affair with another woman, gets tangled up in blackmail, and commits sacrilege to his Catholic faith. Unable to leave his wife but unwilling to give up his love affair, he ends his doomed double romance with suicide.

Greene’s novel resonates with Americanah for its reflection of British colonial occupation and race relations, but even more for its romance plot. Obinze—the same child who once dismissed the story—ironically ends up in the same position as the love-torn Scobie when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria and reawakens his desire. Unlike Scobie, though, Obinze makes a choice. Forced to decide between Kosi and Ifemelu, he turns to his childhood lover.

To potentially ironic effect, Ifemelu brushes aside what might be the novel’s most relevant literary work yet. Twain’s satire is a touchstone of American race relations, whose use of the Black dialect and unsettling plot powerfully examine southern culture’s hypocrisies and social landscape. Huckleberry Finn—the novel’s titular protagonist—flees the grip of his abusive father and sails down the Mississippi River with a runaway enslaved man named Jim. The pair’s misadventures acquaint them with charlatans, romantic feuds, and slave catchers.

Jim becomes one of the novel’s focal points. The journey stops abruptly when Jim gets sold into slavery, though Huckleberry comes to his rescue. But more troubling yet, Jim gets tricked by Huckleberry’s own friend, Tom Sawyer, as they lead him to freedom. Tom Sawyer deliberately conceals the news that Jim is already a freedman, and only admits that he had invented all their obstacles after their escape. The whole journey toward freedom had been made in jest. In his manipulative illusions of freedom, Tom Sawyer’s cruel joke strikes eerie resonance with the country that Ifemelu depicts.

Here, Kelsey trots out V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River as a badge of her cultural appreciation for Africa—and, as Ifemelu soon reveals—her pathetic ignorance. Though set in an unnamed African country, the novel shares a fundamentally pessimistic view of the independence movements across the continent. Its protagonist, Salim, sets up shop in an abandoned village after its freedom from the colonizers. And yet the country is a far cry from a stable, functioning society—A Bend in the River dwells on the hopelessness and chaos that persist. Corrupt dictators establish themselves in the vacuum left by the colonizers and quash rebellions while violence erupts across the country. Often read as an allegory of post-colonial Congo, Naipaul’s novel holds out little hope of African autonomy—if anything, it “[longs] for Europe” more than it celebrates Africa. The complexity of the novel merely underscores the crude simplicity of Kelsey’s cultural appreciation, the superficial ways in which White American tries to affirm its support for Black culture.

The reference to the former Member of Parliament is one of the only that the novel offers with respect to British politics. Blunkett appears in the news and graces Emenike’s dinner table conversations. But he provides some helpful historical context to the British attitudes underlying immigration. Becoming Home Secretary in 2001, Blunkett presided over a migration surge that prompted widespread unrest and social debate. He adopted a mixed set of policies, toughening asylum and citizenship requirements but also trying to attract skilled workers through new initiatives. He enters the crosshairs of political debates, and provides a window into the UK’s national circumstances.

As America’s first Black president, Obama becomes a rightful throughline for the work and a fitting theme across Ifemelu’s blogs. Perhaps more than any other figure, he embodies the particular challenge of representing a historically marginalized people. He is a reminder of the difficulty of appealing to the American mainstream and achieving more radical change. Obama becomes the archetypal subject of Ifemelu’s “Magic Negro” theory, in which she criticizes how Blacks must bend to White expectations of propriety. Placed under Ifemelu’s critical eye, his half-White ancestry, wife’s hairstyle, popularity, and campaign promises all get scrutinized.

And yet for all the novel’s half-joking skepticism, Obama kindles a rare sense of promise. The idea of him restores Ifemelu’s love affair with Blaine, fills her with hope, and lingers over her life like “an unspoken prayer, a third emotional presence.” On the night he gets elected, Ifemelu and her friends break out into delirious happiness—the living room becomes “an altar of disbelieving joy.” Obama gives shape to the hope America might take a step away of its centuries of racism and out toward something more beautiful.

Americanah’s mention of Emmett Till insinuates a brutal violence into this misunderstanding. Emmett Till—the Black teenager mutilated and murdered for catcalling a White woman—sparked the American civil rights movement with his death. Till captured the public imagination by becoming a symbol of the country’s horrific treatment of Black people. And though his murder contributed to the nationwide cause for political change, its injustice lingered on even after. As if adding insult to injury, Till’s murderers would eventually be acquitted. More than a century later, he hangs over Mr. White’s arrest as a reminder of racial injustice’s lingering presence and terrifying gravity.