Decolonized Trauma: Narrative, Memory and Identity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Abstract

Even though literary works serve as excellent media for bearing witness to trauma, postcolonial and diasporic literary texts are often dismissed for their falsified accounts of traumatic life experiences. Recent studies on African American literature have stressed the need for a decolonized conceptualization of trauma that would not only disrupt the long-existing white Global Northern perspectives but also recognize feelings of empathy and solidarity among members of the community in these literary corpora. The present study adopts a hybrid analytical framework to examine the representations of trauma in the Nigerian American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013). Specifically, we draw upon Gérard Genette’s narrative levels, Ron Eyerman’s collective memory, and Jeffrey Charles Alexander’s collective identity to argue that the novel defies conventional forms of narrative by depicting postcolonial and diasporic identities as volatile and dynamic constructs. The findings indicate the multiple ways in which the story presents diasporic Africans – that is, the female protagonist Ifemelu and her male lover Obinze – as capable of overcoming the adverse effects of traumatic memories by chronicling an authentic record of their experiences. The study also reveals that the leading female character, like the novelist Adichie, creates an empowering platform for migrants of various ethnicities to speak up about their traumatic experiences, and thereby establish what is called ‘cross-cultural solidarity’ in reconstructing a new community.