Across the novel Americanah, many characters choose to lie,
be inauthentic, or otherwise withhold the truth. At almost every turn, this kind
of deception always turns out to have negative consequences – yet they are always
chosen in the face of a significant moral quandary. The importance of these
moral quandaries is amplified by the impact of racial tension in the US and Europe,
and when not amplified, only exist because of it.
Starting with simple lies, when Aunty Uju doesn’t tell Dike
about his father, the General, it becomes one of the leading factors that Dike eventually
tries to commit suicide. Aunty Uju justifies her decision, saying that she “didn’t
want him to start behaving like [African-American] people and thinking that
everything that happens to him is because he’s black,” but Ifemelu points out
that the suicide attempt occurred because, while Dike has to deal with racism
for being black, he still doesn’t have an identity which helps him make sense
of it: “You told him what he wasn’t but you didn’t tell him what he was,” (470).
Because Dike doesn’t know who his father was, or why his father isn’t with him
and his mother in America, he possesses no cultural safety net.
When Obinze lives in England, in order to get a job and stay,
he has to get a fake ID, and tries to pull of a green card marriage. He does
this so that he can get away from Nigeria and function in white-Western society,
but when both of these “lies” don’t pan out, he’s forced to return home, and he
determines that neither lie was worth the loss of living honestly and the
hardship it took to pull either off. So strongly is this hammered down, that it’s
what motivates Obinze to leave Kosi: “I always knew that something was missing…
I’ve been pretending all these months and one day she’ll be old enough to know
I’m pretending. I moved out of the house today,” (588).
Both Aunty Uju and Obinze both have to deal with the results
of racism/cultural alienation, and their initial solution of deception is met
with disastrous results. The significance of pointing out the racial role,
however, is that they are problems that white natives of their countries don’t
have to deal with.
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