Americanah: Perceptions and Positions of Legality

"He sat on the stained seat of the noisy train, opposite a woman reading the evening paper. Speak English at home, Blunkett tells immigrants. He imagined the article she was reading. There were so many of them now published in the newspapers, and they echoed the radio and television, even the chatter of some of the men in the warehouse. The wind blowing across the British Isles was odorous with fear of asylum seekers, infecting everybody with the panic of impending doom, and so articles were written and read, simple and stridently, as though the writers lived in a world which the present was unconnected to the past, and they had never considered this to be the normal course of history; the influx into Britain of black and brown people from countries created by Britain. Yet he understood. It had to be comfortable, this denial of history. The woman closed her newspaper and looked at him. She had stringy brown hair and hard, suspicious eyes. He wondered what she was thinking. Was she wondering whether he was one of those illegal immigrants who were overcrowding an already crowded island?" (Adichie 320)

This is a passage from a novel I began on the fourth of July this summer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah. In this work, Adichie describes struggles of all kinds around the lives of her main characters. The above text is from the point of view of the character Obinze, who has immigrated illegally from Nigeria to the U.K. after being raised on Western books and media, and dreaming of the goodness of the West. He quickly learns about the shortcomings of his dream, the demanding and dangerous menial labor he does on less than minimum wage, under exploitation for fake papers, and constant job insecurity as well as racism from his coworkers.

I felt this passage was especially important and relevant to what we spoke of in class for a number of reasons. Adichie's description of the "wind blowing across the British Isles [...] odorous with  fear of asylum seekers, infecting everybody with the panic of impending doom" is disturbingly reminiscent of the kind of phrasing and the imagery of the Coolie in "A Statue for OUR Harbour". The use of diction illustrates the ways in which the bodies of immigrants and just people of color who could be immigrants are tainted by prejudice, and positioned as threats to the "native" workforce, and ideals of society. They are positioned immediately as the stranger, and it is made clearer through the use of the newspaper as a medium. Adichie's description of the numerous articles as "simple and strident" illustrates the ways that immigration becomes an issue both oversimplified and conflated with false meaning. It hits on the different temporalities people must live in to continue their biases and violence against people deemed "illegal". An inability or unwillingness to connect the dots between the groups of people now immigrating and the Western intervention which caused them to.

The character remarks, "it had to be comfortable, this denial of history". An exact opposite of the temporarily of fear and constant connection to news and history that he must embody in order to keep himself safe. In viewpoint of the "illegal", just like the viewpoint of the Black American, there must be a sense of double consciousness, an ability to see what others project on you. He understands how the news and the woman across from him pathologize his existence, even the "speak English at home" illustrates a censure on language that ignores systematic issues only to address the oddity and supposed deficiency of the other.

Reading this novel on the Fourth of July was important. It made me think of the different types of nation building, the required binaries of it. The need for a national fervor, excitement, and pride, paired with unwavering xenophobia and a vague but effective fear of the other. This passage felt especially integral in that to me because it illustrates all of the different perceptions and weaving of assumptions that position another human as illegal. The temporal dissonance required on a large scale, the forgetting of trauma, the fear mongering, the creation of an atmosphere of insecurity both for the considered legal and illegal persons, and the use of media to spread it in an uncritical way.