ABSTRACT

This chapter analyzes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah, a coming-of-age story about a young Nigerian woman, Ifemelu, who moves to the United States hoping to achieve an American education and an American career. It shows that Adichie and Lahiri draw from their personal experiences as women writers living in diaspora. The chapter argues that their protagonists develop and display a relationship with their immediate environs while still mythologizing an unattainable homeland that they left, either in the search of better opportunities, or while escaping trauma caused by political factors. It deals with literature on space and place and interwoven it with Avtar Brah’s seminal theory on diaspora space. The homeland thus becomes a specific place bounded in history and geography that functions as a marker for identity and as a site for political engagement and contestation. In Adichie's works interactions, a space of equality is created based on the gendered experiences of women living away from home.