Rethinking Post-Independent Nigerian Quagmire in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah

Abstract

The discourse of the wobbly state of the Nigerian nation is aptly captured in literary works. Previous studies on literary texts about the Nigerian state have largely identified bad leadership and the roles played by the masses in aggravating the nation’s problems. However, not much attention, in the magnitude intended in this paper, has been paid to Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah using discursive strategies of postmodernism in exploring the myriads of challenges facing the Nigerian state. This paper, therefore, attempts an examination of Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, highlighting features of Postmodernism the novel embodies, even as it explores numerous problems plaguing the nation and how they have forced many Nigerians to embrace migration as an escape route. Using the sociological approach and adopting a content analysis method, the paper ascertains that the problems facing the country have their springboard in bad governance and corruption, even as it establishes that Adichie’s Americanah succinctly links poor educational system, joblessness, economic stagnation, bad governance and corruption, among others, in Nigeria to migration. It, nevertheless, highlights how migration has not completely exonerated Nigerians from the nation’s woes. It concludes that although Adichie fails to arrive at any sort of coherent theory of salvation for the postcolonial impasse in the country, the author demonstrates that factors causing underdevelopment and stagnancy are still part of the nation’s historical trajectory and that migration is not panacea for the country’s socio-political and economic quagmire.