The blog creates a place of self-expression and identity creation for Ifemelu. The posts are in first-person, written directly to the reader, offering Ifemelu's perspective. While the blog is mentioned with its title and the title of its posts from the beginning of Americanah, the first blog post does not show up in the reading until Chapter 17, after Ifemelu is well-established in America at university. While she has not started the blog at this point in the timeline of, this is the point where Ifemelu is finally able to articulate and reflect on the intricacies of race in America. In this first blog post, she says, “...the longer you are here, the more you start to get it [in reference to race]” (Adichie 228). This shows just how intricate race is in America, in comparison to Ifemelu’s experience in Nigeria as a child and young adult.
Furthermore, the blog allows Ifemelu to express herself in a way that she is not allowed to in her relationships with both Curt and Blaine. Ifemelu starts the blog after breaking up with Curt in Chapters 31 and 32, and it becomes an outlet for all of her observations about race during and after her relationship with Curt. Later, when she is dating Blaine, she takes his advice for the blog in Chapter 34, but realizes that it is no longer her voice–the post does not show her identity and her observations, but has rather morphed to meet Blaine’s expectations. “Then she began to resent it [Blaine’s advice]...I don’t want to explain, I want to observe” (Adichie 386). Ifemelu changes herself to match the person she is dating; it's almost as if she is consumed by her relationships with men. However, the blog allows her to create her own identity outside of them. It is not until she reunites with Obinze towards the end of the book that a man she is in a relationship with understands the necessity of the blog as a place for Ifemelu to express herself and reflect on the world around her. Obinze enjoys reading both the archives of her first blog, and the first posts of her new blog. Obinze says, about her first blog, “but your blog also made me proud” (Adichie 534). In reference to her second blog, he says, “...it’s a fantastic blog. It’s brave and intelligent” (Adichie 538). Obinze understands Ifemelu in a way that Curt and Blaine were unable to, and he especially understands her need to express herself and observe.
The blog is, in a sense, a site for self-expression and identity creation for Ifemelu throughout the entirety of Americanah.
Ifemelu’s relationship with her blog is heavily tied to her relationship with men. Each relationship explores how her identity interacts with the identities of men: Curt, a white, wealthy man; Blaine, a politically-oriented African American man; and Obinze, a Nigerian man whose experiences resemble her own.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, when dating Curt, Ifemelu posts that “when you make the choice to come to America, you become black” (Adichie 220) and that “there is an oppression olympics” (Adichie 205), signifying how perceptions and social hierarchies in America result from ignorant attitudes, particularly those of white, wealthy Americans.
Additionally, Ifemelu and Blaine’s relationship revolves around shared values on race politics. As Ifemelu questions on her blog whether “race is an invention” (Adichie 302), she encourages “the upwardly mobile American and Non-American Blacks . . . [to] tell [their] story” (Adichie 307). Through her blog posts, Ifemelu expresses frustrations over her racial identity–something she never experienced in Nigeria but had forced on her in America. As the election ends, the breakup between Blaine and Ifemelu symbolizes the disconnect between her identity and her American experience.
Ifemelu’s return to blogging signifies her rediscovery of this lost identity, as well as of Obinze. Before going to America, she never questioned her identity, but in America Ifemelu experiences a forced, foreign identity until she returns to Nigeria, where “[spins] herself fully into being” (Adichie 475) as a person “with dreams in her pocket” (Adichie 421). Ifemelu’s blogs therefore ultimately use self-expression to examine and document the identity as a process.