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Akala on Britain's inherent xenophobia - Frankie Boyle's Election Autopsy 2015

Why the young and talented are returning to Ghana

For the current generation, moving home has little to do with making parents or grandparents proud. Rather, it reflects a relative lack of opportunity for young people in their adopted home job markets. This repatriation is mirrored in other countries too, such as India, where a whole generation are being lured back driven by waning opportunities for them in developed economies. And despite recent instability, Ghana’s economy continues to draw young professionals back to the country their parents left. The Ghana Immigration Service doesn’t keep statistics on returnees, largely because most have duel-citizenship and don’t need to have visas or register. But, experts say that some returnees who moved to Ghana when it was one of the-fastest growing economies in the world have left as the economy has faltered, and as multinational companies have reined in generous expat compensation packages. Despite this, many have stayed, because they can achieve things in Ghana they wouldn’t have the opportunity to do abroad, and ultimately, they say, it’s still home. For some from the diaspora, moving is ultimately rewarding said Amarteifio. Even if they don’t have much of a connection with the country before they arrive, Ghanaians born and raised abroad arrive with professional skills in high demand in fields like medicine and finance. “Being a change-maker is just so much more plausible in an emerging country,” Amarteifio said. Some ‘returnees’ find that they can start their own businesses or climb the corporate ladder a lot faster than they could in the US or UK.

namrekeya-deactivated20161028

Here’s to the security guards who maybe had a degree in another land. Here’s to the manicurist who had to leave her family to come here, painting the nails, scrubbing the feet of strangers. Here’s to the janitors who don’t even fucking understand English yet work hard despite it all. Here’s to the fast food workers who work hard to see their family smile. Here’s to the laundry man at the Marriott who told me with the sparkle in his eyes how he was an engineer in Peru. Here’s to the bus driver, the Turkish Sufi who almost danced when I quoted Rumi. Here’s to the harvesters who live in fear of being deported for coming here to open the road for their future generation. Here’s to the taxi drivers from Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt and India who gossip amongst themselves. Here is to them waking up at 4am, calling home to hear the voices of their loved ones. Here is to their children, to the children who despite it all become artists, writers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, activists and rebels. Here’s to Western Union and Money Gram. For never forgetting home. Here’s to their children who carry the heartbeats of their motherland and even in sleep, speak with pride about their fathers. Keep on.

-Writer and Poet, Ijeoma Umebinyuo (http://theijeoma.tumblr.com/)

African Immigrants: Highly Educated and Underemployed in America

“Of all immigrant groups, sub-Saharan Africans in particular are having a much harder time integrating into the U.S. workforce, even when well qualified, because of cultural and racial barriers.”

Source: The Root

Further reading & other myths of the H-1B visa

Highly Educated African Migrants Find Themselves Trapped in Cycle of Poverty in America

The New African Diaspora

Angela Davis and musician Nas talk with Dr. James Peterson as part of Lehigh University’s event: “The Incarcerated Justice Series: Civil Rights in the 21st Century.”

WATCH ANGELA DAVIS AND NAS DISCUSS THE PRISON-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, March 18, 2014.

Imperial formations are relations of force. They harbor those mutant, rather than simply hybrid,political forms that endure beyond the formal exclusions that legislate against equal opportunity, commensurate dignities, and equal rights.

Anne Stoler, ‘The Rot Remains,” 8.

#further reading

Further Reading...

Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History

A milestone in U.S. historiography, Haunted by Empire brings postcolonial critiques to bear on North American history and draws on that history to question the analytic conventions of postcolonial studies.

#further reading

The recent success of Americanah should be celebrated, but the politics of cultural production still need to be interrogated.

Its awards season and various “Third-world writers” and “Emerging Artists” have rejected nominations. For instance, the writer Ishtiyaq Shukri (on the left) is done with special prizes for writers from poor countries:

Having spent enough of my life in contrived categories, I uphold the vision of just one world. By this I do not mean some chic Afropolitan ideal celebrating Africa only in so far as it emulates Europe. Consider the following travel advice from the May 2015 edition of a popular Afropolitan magazine to its Afropolitan readers about how to reduce travel stress with an “essential travel list” – a well-packed suitcase, toys for the kids, updated music and reading devices and a range of RESCUE products for gentle stress relief – a list so far removed from the experiences of African migrants being brutally attacked by xenophobic mobs in South Africa and drowning in their thousands in the Mediterranean, as to be obscene. No, I oppose such ghettoised categories because, however euphemistic the terminology and well-meaning the intentions, they overlook the reality that southern countries are already home to artistic brilliance of the best kind – despite their GNI. They simplify a complex world, so that excellence in “developing countries” is rendered as invisible, as rare, and as exceptional as poverty and human rights abuses in supposedly “developed” ones. To contrive “special” categories for artists in poorer countries, and to use their GNI to justify such tokenism is not praise, but diminishment.

Some will think me sensitive. I am. Consider the meaning of emergent: fledgling, embryonic, infant, in the early stages of development. Is the implication that in creative terms we are children? Is that what the broken egg shell on their website is meant to signify which – let us note in passing – is not how human beings are born, but oviparous animals like insects, birds and reptiles? I ask because metaphors are important in an artistic award. We have heard our male elders called ‘boys’ and our female elders ‘girls’, and to me, the language of this prize is reminiscent of that. Call a writing competition for school children “emergent” if you must, but we are men and women who have already received global accolades in the same global arenas as our European and North American counterparts. Why, given the evidence, this insistence on classifying us as “emergent”?

Source: Africa is a Country

Home as Colony and Utopia: Gender, Race and Empire from the Brothel to the Living Room or Reflections on a Semester in the Third Space

5/6 - Jesse Sanchez

“It is also a part of morality not to be at home in one’s own home.”

Theodor Adorno (2006)

I revisit Adorno’s remark after we considered the concept of home in what is unfortunately our second to last day of Gender, Race, and Empire. It seems that the ongoing conversation that occurred the past semester will never feel complete. As I reflect upon this semester of complication, it appears the ultimate takeaway is positioning ourselves in the third space, while also realizing that the imagined first and second spaces may not actually exist. A dear literature professor once suggested I complicate my idea of what the utopia means in my attempts to discuss whether such a space exists in Maria Irene Fornes’s play Enter the Night. As we discuss the concept of transnationalism and diaspora and Adichie, it is of importance to recognize the spaces in which we witness the colony and resistance.

Walking past houses on one of my frequent walks along the streets of Salem, I thought I had an epiphany about the possible functions of each home. Do the occupants have a good family life? Is their structure patriarchal? Is the family multiethnic? Then my naive undergraduate self realized I was probably just coming to a conclusion arrived at by many postcolonial scholars before me. Home spaces function as both a manifestation of the colony, as well as a blueprint for the utopia as José Esteban Muñoz might call it. The home is the one space where we can keep out or invite in the police state. It’s the space where the gender and sexual revolution actually occurs. Disrupting notions of family and community happen where people live. This semester, we’ve encountered a number of homes that ask us to question where the performance of identity happens. Levine brought us prostitutes resisting the colonial system that bound them through forming communal brothel spaces in spite of their poverty. The sometimes awkwardness of a diasporic position reveals itself as Said navigates home across ages with family and language, and the definition of what it means to have a home becomes complicated. Adichie brings us similar questions when we literarily witness her grapple with patriarchy and assimilation while meeting the resistance of those who held expectations for the diasporic experience without realizing their is an individual with their own sense of home behind it. We see this experience in romantic encounters occurring in living rooms. Shah complicates the stability of a conceptual home with constructing narratives of vagrant life, and the work to push sexualities into the containment of a conventional home. We should not be at home in our own homes because the colony exists everywhere. We live in a colonial world, but looking to Muñoz’s definition of the utopia as a space between the prison house and the ideality gives us an idea of how to exist and resist right where we are.

#jesse sanchez #unit5 #submission

5/6 - Phoebe Wagner

Throughout Americanah, the correlation and symbolism of food with each of Ifemelu’s relationships is a subtle and intriguing view into the characteristics of the couple’s dynamics. Particularly throughout Ifemelu’s relationship with Blaine, Adichie uses food and eating as a mirror to the inner workings of the couple.

When Ifemelu spends time with Blaine’s friends, it is almost always around a table at a dinner party. As Ifemelu struggles to fit in with the cultural and behavioral norms of his friend group, particularly between Blaine and his ex-girlfriend Paula, the cultural differences that Ifemelu feels are illustrated through fried chicken, as Ifemelu states, “The fried chicken that you eat is not the fried chicken I eat, but it’s the fried chicken that Paula eats.” Blaine responds by pointing out the shared cultural connection represented by food, and asks, “Do you realize how loaded fried chicken is as a metaphor here?” (Adichie, 330).

Blain and Ifemelu’s relationship progresses against the backdrop of only healthy, fair trade, and all organic food, as Blain dictates what that they choose to eat and buy. After Ifemelu and Blaine have their first big fight, Ifemelu’s emotional release from the constraints formed by their relationship is shown through her buying ten chocolate bars from the train station after she leaves their apartment. While eating them consecutively, she feels pleasure from eating the “cheap bars filled with sugar and chemicals and other genetically modified ghastly things” (Adichie, 348). Aunty Uju, however, is appalled and points out the divergence from Blaine’s norms, asking “Since when do you eat regular chocolate? I thought you and Blaine eat only organic, fair trade” (Adichie, 348).

When Ifemelu reconnects with Blaine and they decide to reconcile over dinner, the meal is once again centered on Blaine’s way of cooking and choice of recipes and ingredients. The importance of food preparation with Blaine is also noted, as he criticizes her way of “always over-spic[ing] the chicken” (Adichie, 350). With Blaine, his righteous feelings towards determined correct and incorrect ways to prepare and eat food illustrate his set path in the way each part of his life is enacted.

Although Ifemelu’s diet is restrictively healthy and nutritious while dating Blaine, she finds herself gaining weight and noticing the fat around her body, as well as the “cement in her soul” (Adichie, 6), as her physical and emotional stagnancies reflect her uneasy living situation.

The importance of food as a symbol for cultural and personal constructions is seen in Cecile Emeke’s web series ackee & saltfish. In episode five, titled “deception”, roommates Olivia and Rachel are confronted by an issue of trust and cultural appreciation when Rachel’s boyfriend, Daren, deliberately gives them ackee and white rice without any saltfish. The connection between this episode and Ifemelu’s relationship with Blaine was illustrated by the deeper undertones within the dynamic of food in relationships. Just as Blaine’s affinity with food mirrored larger dynamics within his interactions with Ifemelu, so does the lack of saltfish in Daren’s meal symbolize a disregard for Olivia and Rachel’s lifestyle norms. As Olivia proclaims, “He’s basically just spitting on our culture” (2:08).

#phoebe wagner #unit5 #submission

How are we defining racism? And who gets to decide?

5/6 - Emily Thimesch

In Adichie’s novel Americanah the main character Ifemelu, while in America, writes a blog about race. These posts engage in many conversations about what it is to be a different race in America, what it is to black in America, what it is to be a Non-American black, and American tribalisms in general. One particular post that struck me was one titled “Job Vacancy in America – National Arbiter in Chief of “Who Is Racist.” This blog post ended with the following:

“If you’re not a bloodsucking monster, then you can’t be called a racist. Somebody has to be able to say that racists are not monsters. They are people with loving families, regular folk who pay taxes. Somebody needs to get the job of deciding who is racist and who isn’t. Or maybe its time to just scrap the word “racist.” Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium, and acute.” (p. 390)

At first my mind jumped to another “mental illness” post on what a syndrome like “Racial Disorder” could be and how it probably wouldn’t be accepted or considered real by many. But the more I thought on it I realized there is a good point behind this message: how do we define a racist? Better yet, can we consider racism as just one broad category at this point? Do different people fall under different “levels” of racism? Or is it all just blatant racism no matter the degree?

I do recognize that maybe I have the privilege, in being white, to even ask questions like this, and that the answers maybe are not clear to me because of this. But I do feel there are larger implications behind the message of the blog post. How many people ‘get away’ with racism, by claiming that, “it isn’t racism” or how many people are accused of being racist when they truly do not mean to be?

Cultural appropriation for example is classified as adopting aspects of the culture of another group of people and is commonly expressed to be an adoption of the culture of an oppressed group of people by a dominant group of people. Cultural appropriation perfectly brings in this question of what really is and should be considered racism.

Hip-hop music is a perfect instance. Let’s say a white male in America, the dominant being in our society, has grown up listening to hip-hop his whole life. He relates to it, he enjoys it, and it is part of who he is. Now part of him listening to hip-hop involves saying things like the “n-word,” but he does so only in the privacy of himself or close friends. But then a black American male becomes aware of the white males listening to hip-hop and use of the “n-word.” He is extremely bothered by it and offended, to the point where he says the white male is a racist. Is this cultural appropriation? Is it racism?

Here is where Ifemelu’s blog post hits the nail on the head. Who is to decide if this is truly racism? Is this example a form of mild racism, or is it the whole essence of racism itself?

With this example I can say that I, as a white female, have no clue what the answer is, or who is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. I do feel that maybe racism is at the core determined by an individual and if someone feels oppressed, offended, or unsafe no matter the intention of the other, that could still be racism. But maybe intention behind things is how we should define the lines of racism? But again… you then have those who are ignorant and then whose job is it to educate those people? The questions go on and on, and I think they are important to ask and need to be asked. The blog post above in Adichie’s novel challenges what it is to define racism and the possible ways it is easily or not so easily applied to people and situations. And I think cultural appropriation is at the core of this debate. Where does the blending of cultures between oppressed and non-oppressed become okay, if only in some ways or even at all?

#emily thimesch #unit5 #submission

What's love got to do with it?

5/6 - Natasha Parekh

Reflecting back on the beginning of this novel, there has always been a common thread back to love. Beneath all the commentary on transnational experience, dual identities, the migrant’s conundrum, and the feminist struggle across cultural lines the theme of love stands out starkly as the backbone of this novel. It opens with a flashback to Ifemelu’s and Obinze’s love story and continues to unpack along the borders of romantic relationships. After relationships with Curt, Blaine, & a myriad of less significant men, Adiche ends the novel with the reunion of Obinze & Ifemelu, “Ifem, I’m chasing you. I’m going to chase you until you give me a chance” (Adiche 588). While the politics of love and human emotion make Adiche’s work extremely relatable these instances serve as more than just a sappy storyline to engage the hopeless romantic. Adiche utilizes love as tool to characterize the transnational experience through relationships across borders. Writing this novel in a way that splices together Ifemelu and Obinze struggle with emotion & love provides the reader with direct moments of contrast between migrant experiences even within the same cultural context.

While Ifemelu flourishes in the US, Obinze faces a myriad of dilemmas with his UK experience. The two lovers grow deeply apart during this time, showing how the chances of reaching the American Dream for a migrant has little to do with their experience & qualifications. Both were from similar academic background and both came from similar cultures. If anything, Obinze with mother who was a progressive professor should have perhaps had the upper hand over Ifemelu’s much more conservative and modest upbringing. While those differences had been constantly in the back of Ifemelu’s mind while she was dating Obinze in Nigeria, these sentiments were truly solidified upon their separation into different countries. Success seemed inevitable for the couple until the dilemmas of the transnational experience interfered with their love story. Along with the natural progression of growing up and Obinze & Ifemelu’s transition from adolescence to adulthood their separate experiences with the same idea of migration manifested quiet differently. What makes a qualified partner for love is reconfigured in the migrants experience because success in the foreign country is what matters and dictates status. We see this in the episode between Aunty Uju and her first boyfriend, a man who she would never have dated back in Nigeria. Similarly, Obinze lack of visa & status in the UK reconfigured how Ifemelu viewed him and how qualified he was to be in a relationship with her, a successful migrant. In this way Adiche is able to bring up serious and important issues about the struggle for identity in foreign countries and the ramifications it can have through the vehicle of love.

While we can analyze every intention the author may or may not have had in her inclusion of love in this story and its central positionality, it is important to address Adiche’s actual thought process. In an interview with Vogue Adiche says,

“I have for a very long time wanted to write an unapologetic love story,” “But one that is very much set in a practical world affected by things like getting a visa and paying rent.”

In this sense the novels focus on love can be seen as simply a matter of genre-but upon reading it that seems to be a great oversimplification. Adiche has written a modern love story, a story that speaks to hundreds of thousands dealing with long distance relationships complicated by problems specific to the transnational community. She has attempted to bridge a gap that the literary world is greatly lacking and disrupt the more common narrative of the overseas love story. This leads me to Adiche’s TED Talk, “The Dangers of a Single Story”.

#natasha parekh #unit5 #submission

The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union: A Transatlantic Story of Antiracist Protest by Stephen Tuck (Author), Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Foreword)

#further reading

Kendrick Lamar and Black Resistance

5/6 - Theresa Martin

Disclaimer: There is so much that can be said, investigated and contested when it comes to the work that Kendrick Lamar is doing with his recent albums, Good Kid M.A.A.D. City and To Pimp A Butterfly. However, I will be focusing on just one element of his track, “King Kunta” and its stakes in contemporary America.

Kendrick Lamar’s latest album To Pimp A Butterfly streams a narrative of black resistance stemming from his journey from Compton to fame and back home again. The fame, money and power he has acquired leaves him in contemplation about his role in the movement, as a nostalgia for the things that were and the things that may come leave him in a state of restlessness. His songs on the album are from the perspective of multiple personas: a friend back home criticizing how he has changed, lessons from his mother, the devil, “Lucy” trying to tempt him, as well as a conversation with Tupac at the end of “Mortal Man” revealing the multiple selves of a third generation black man in America. To Pimp A Butterfly is at once a socio-economic and political critique, a self-reflection, and a call to action, illustrating how rap can be an accessible form of resistance.

In his song titled “King Kunta”, Lamar references the legend of Kunta Kinte, a slave who would not accept a slave name, a man who would not be castrated literally and metaphorically by his white oppressors. Kendrick Lamar utilizes the legend of Kunta Kinte and his stubborn defiance for his true identity to represent a history of black resistance that is still unfolding.

Kendrick Lamar’s extremely specific diction is the work of a practiced poet. Like other loaded words and allusions Lamar uses, the term yams is full of symbolism through references to popular culture and literature. When it is first iterated in “King Kunta”, the back-up singers ask, “What’s the yams?”and Kendrick replies, “The yam is the power that be/ you can smell it when I’m walking down the street.” This is a reference to Ellison’s Invisible Man recalling notions of nostalgia that Quayson and Daswani engage with.

In the 1952 book Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison creates a first person account of a black man in New York. In it, yams symbolizes an extension of home, as well as the liberation of not having to conform to the notion of respectability politics. Induced with nostalgia of his past and heritage, the narrator buys a baked yam and feels liberated to not be embarrassed doing a stereotypically black man behavior in the street. Where at first his life of a model minority left him to refuse to eat pork ribs and grits in public, the narrator feels unashamed to eat a traditional black food in the street, “I walked along, munching the yam, just as suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of freedom” (Ch. 13). This type of resistance is subtle, but considering the rejection of respectability politics, I see Lamar using this allusion to exemplify the trials of assimilation and nostalgia and to show that resistance happens on multiple levels, large and small, but never insignificant.

Simultaneously a notion of nostalgia, yams also represents power and addiction. In the few lines that Lamar uses the term yams, he is packing it with multiple meanings. The references to Richard Pryor and Bill Clinton draw an interesting parallel to the corruption of power and addiction in separate spheres, black entertainer and white politician. Pryor, a comedian whose fame led to drug addiction, and Clinton whose power clouded his judgement: “The yam brought it out of Richard Prior/ Manipulated Bill Clinton with desires.” While critiquing these figures, Lamar uses To Pimp A Butterfly as a platform to critique himself. A threaded narrative weaved throughout the entirety of the album illuminates the conflictions felt within when one internalizes the oppressors’ thinking. The stakes of recognizing our faults while still loving ourselves proves to be a subtle form a resistance and yet, in the face of hate, to love oneself seems to be the only place to start.

#theresa martin #unit5

It is money?

5/6 - Angela Turpen

Adichie does great work in Americanah disrupting the traditional narrative of citizens of Africa and other third world countries who come to American for a better life, never wanting to leave. From the perspective of whiteness, both in the United States and Britain, there are too many immigrants coming to the country looking of a better life and “cheating the system”. Through her depiction of Obinze in Britain, who is fighting to work, always looking over his shoulder and hiding in corners to avoid being noticed, we get to see how “green card” marriages are viewed from the perspective of desperation and fear that one feels when searching for one. Ifemelu’s time of finding work in the United States also disrupts a commonly told story immigrants are “stealing” our jobs. The maintenance of their presence is enough to realize that it is no cake walk.

Ifemelu and Obinze occupied two different trajectories in their journeys from immigration to homecoming. While initially struggling to get a job, Ifemelu had a more stable position to stay in the United States. While most people believe that migrants come to a new country and immediately find jobs waiting for them, both from a narrative spread in their home country as well as propaganda within the country of migration, Adichie shows that this is harder than it seems. Ifemelu cannot seem to be hired by anyone who she interviews with, no matter what the position was. In contrast, Obinze had no trouble finding work but he did have a lot of trouble finding a way to make it “legal”, which made him fear for his life in a way much different than Ifemelu.

But when they are reunited in Nigeria, Obinze has grown to realize that nothing is that great when it can be swayed by money. Often times we think of the people who are displaced or migrate, are poor and in need of saving. When in there is a certain sense of money that comes with a visa, the more money you have the more easily you can obtain one. Obinze notes this when he tells Ifemelu he no longer dreams of America. She on the other hand did not get to America with money but rather for education, but was soon exposed to the same world of travel when she was dating Curt, suddenly traveling and obtaining a visa was no big deal. This shifts not only my thinking of what it means to be an immigrant of the United States, but who exactly is allowed to be one. How does this, however, affect feelings of diaspora? And in what ways can this inform the transnational identity?

#angela turpen #unit5 #submission

Give me one good reason why I should get married

5/6 - Gabby Klein

“Give Me One Good Reason to Marry a Japanese Man” by Hiroko Hirakawa reminded me of Obinze, Kosi and Ifemelu’s situation. This article and Americanah got me thinking about how different societies and global trends dictate appropriate relationships, as well as designate value to certain types of relationships over others. For Ifemelu and Obinze, the romantic relationship they begin again upon Ifemelu’s return to Lagos immediately troubles both of them. But their friends and family surrounding them don’t seem to care too much about the moral aspect of their liaison. Rather, Obinze is reminded that leaving ones wife because he does not love her is just not done in Lagos or Nigerian society. And Ifemelu calls him a coward for not addressing her straightforwardly about the aspects of their relationship in their new context. It struck me that both Ifemelu and Obinze are uncomfortable with the moral aspect of lying, when it seems like in Lagos life lying is just another thing you do to survive. You gotta hustle.

Throughout Obinze’s inner struggle about staying with or leaving Kosi, I recognized a certain pragmatism within the Lagos characters. For his cousin and Kosi, it is strange to them why Obinze would leave a perfectly faithful and devoted wife solely on the notion of love. When Emily said in class “Westernized romance is an imperial formation” it struck me that it is not just Nigerians who form relationships pragmatically, out of convenience, without any necessary emotional attachment, marriages and relationships like Obinze’s and Kosi’s exist everywhere. So then how does this idea of Westernized romance infiltrate such relationships? Within my research on contemporary Japanese women debating ideal lifestyles, the romantic failings of Japanese men were one of the top issues discussed. Many women found faults within Japanese men as they dubbed them as selfish, childish, feudalistic, and backwards. This is in comparison to what the contemporary Japanese women I studied considered to be an ideal relationship—an egalitarian, caring, gentlemanly “ladies first,” progressive Western man.

I thought about these binaries of West over East, and the “progressive” “modern” world over the “developing world” as I wrapped my brain around Emily’s words: “Westernized romance is an imperial formation.” For me, if this is the case, then it follows that pragmatism too is an imperial formation. It is a luxury to choose love on a whim. To choose to marry your whimsical love.

I’ve struggled with this idea of Westernized love since I came back from Japan. I saw my host parents’ marriage as a marriage of status, and I had trouble relating to the idea that one does not need to depend on family for emotional gratification—such as the case for many Japanese children who grow up largely without the presence of their father in their household due to his work schedule. This is hard for me to understand due to my own relationship that is 100% based on the concept of romantic love. The idea that love is more valuable/more precious than anything—love over money, love over food, love where “we could live in a cardboard box but as long as I have you everything would be okay.” Would that be the case? In my own hierarchy of needs, does love really rest at the top? Would I still have love for my partner if we were starving and/or homeless?

I’m glad that Ifemelu asks Obinze to come inside at the end of the book. I think the discursive terrain that relationships are built on wherever/whoever you are is challenging enough. If you get a chance to be with someone who you can relate to, who you love, then go for it. Ironing out the situational imperfections can’t always happen (if ever?), and I am grateful for Adichie’s realism.

#gabby klein #unit5 #submission

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