Like Maggie, I am also intrigued by Ifemelu’s “automatic blogging impulse“. “>And what seems interesting to me is that, Ifemelu’s blog-writing is, like that of most bloggers on the internet, an audience-oriented activity. That is to say, she writes with anticipation of provocative/inspiring/ amusing effects that her article may generate among her audience, and cares about the comments, so much so that she can clearly recall the number of comments one of her article once received. She is concerned with the readers of her blog, who “had always frightened and exhilarated her”(5). As Rettberge says in his essay, nowadays “the authority of blogs might not to be tie simply to who can write them, but also to who can read them”(48). And Ifmelu’s “automatic blogging impulse” seems to me like an automatic impulse to impress, or even to please.
One of the most interesting scenes I found in Americanah is when Ifemelu glances at a stranger, “surprised, mildly offended, and though it a perfect blog” and she would file it under the tag ‘race, gender and body size (6). I don’t think, according to the story about her life in Nigeria, that “gender”, “race” or “body size” are issues in the culture where she grows up, at least not in the same way Americans speak of them; and as she admits in her blogs, she learns to be sensitive to racism only after she has come to the United States. And what I see here is that Ifemelu is dissecting her experience into something that her audience in America, who are familiar with “issues”, can easily grasp. She may have been accustomed to taking race or gender or body size as lenses to view her life, given her 13 years in America, but still it seems to me that by doing that she is making personal experience into something her audience will be trilled to talk about.
I can’t tell what makes Ifemelu’s blog popular, but I sense in her narrative an emphasis on her identity as a “non-American”. It is actually demonstrated in the title of her blog: “Various Observations about American Blacks by a Non-American Blacks.” And when she says “to my fellow non-American black”(265), it seems to me that she’s not so much addressing her fellow blacks as demonstrating her own identity as a non-American black. And I suspect this is the commercial value that the Letter Magazine sees in Ifemelu’s blog: a foreigner’s perspective. I doubt her blog would be as popular if it was not about observations of the America society. Here’s my imagination of how her blog is read: for American readers, Ifemelu’s blog satisfies their curiosity of how foreigner think of them(“do they envy us?”), or resonates with their dissatisfaction toward the society, and for non-Americans, Ifemelu’s blog speaks for them. But in both cases Ifemelu seems to be reduced to only a perspective, through which people view their lives. And though as a non-American I emphasize a lot with Ifemelu, I feel it kind of frustrating that to be visible and to be heard, you may need to emphasize on your position as an outsider.
