Written by JJ Singh Kapur Early on in Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I couldn’t help but sympathize with the protagonist Ifemelu: a Nigerian woman living in America. Adichie often highlights the struggles Ifemelu faces to blend in with the crowd. Wherever Ifemelu goes, she always seems to stick out like a sore thumb. Even among her African counterparts in a predominantly white Princeton, New Jersey, Ifemelu has had trouble finding a friend-base. For instance, she initially justifies the lack of braiding salons in Princeton, noting that “the few black locals she had seen were so light-skinned and lank-haired she could not imagine them wearing braids.” (page 3). Life Ifemelu, I have also experienced problems trying to understand my complex identity. I am a first generation American: my father is from Singapore and my mother is from India. I am also a Sikh. In the United States, what my social studies teacher calls the melting pot of cultures, I never felt like I exactly blend in with the crowd. In my elementary school days during lunchtime at school, while all my friends talked about baseball and ate hot dogs, and I talked about cricket and ate chicken curry, I became known as a FOB: Fresh Off the Boat, even though I can’t swim. At the family dinner table while everyone chatted away in their native language Punjabi, while I could only speak English—in what they thought was the most Americanized accent possible—my family called me an ABC: American Born Confused. And at Indian parties while everyone would dance the traditional bhangra (a lively dance originating in the northern province of India known as Punjab) and I would rather breakdance, everyone ran out of three letter acronyms to call me so they went with a fruit, I became the coconut...brown on the outside, and white on inside. Honestly the one day of the year I felt that I fit in was Halloween, because everyone just assumed I was a genie and left me alone.
Today we live in a fit-in society, where everything from what we wear to what we believe is shaped to fit in with the norm. We, without-much-thought, sacrifice our unique differences in order to conform with the crowd, in order to be normal. Everyday, I am reminded that we must all recognize the danger of fitting in, and the importance of embracing our complex identities.
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AuthorSirena Backham Archives
August 2017
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