Journeys of Becoming: hair, the blogosphere and theopoetics in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah

Abstract

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel "Americanah" provides provocative reflections on intertextuality and becoming by exploring the potentially transformative power of ‘blog-writing’. Through a combined reading of Mayra Rivera’s "Poetics of the Flesh" and Adichie’s "Americanah", this article details intersections between the virtual and the material; writing in the (imagined ‘other-wordly’) blogosphere about the organic matter of hair. The narrator of the novel, Ifemelu, establishes a blog after she shares her story to decide to stop using relaxants and to allow her hair to be natural, via an online chat-room; she refuses to go through ritual performances in order to succeed as a migrant in America. In this article I argue that Adichie’s detailing of Ifemelu’s relationship with her hair explores the way in which creative practice, or poetics, is intimately connected to the journey of our flesh; social history is marked on our bodies. The blog becomes a confessional which details the demeaning effect that social constructions of race have had on her body. But the blog ultimately becomes self-destructive. It is only when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria that she embodies the transformative and cathartic power of contemporary modes of story-telling, and where she is finally able to ‘spin herself into being’.