Microaggressions: Straightforward or Oblique?
Caroline Levine’s article on Americanah presents Ifemelu and Obinze as two characters who learn to defamiliarize themselves from the dishonest and hypocritical social (infra)structures around them. What I’m wondering about, though, is how our own reading practices of a novel like Americanah may prevent us from fully engaging with the de-familiarizing experiences of Ifemelu and Obinze, especially if we haven’t shared those experiences ourselves.
In the first half of the book, Ifemelu experiences a number of disconcerting microaggressions in America. A white guy with dreadlocks tells her on the train that race no longer matters as a social issue; Ifemelu’s first roommates give her snide racialized comments about Africa; the carpet cleaner is hostile when he thinks Ifemelu is the owner of the house she’s babysitting at. In our previous class we talked about the perceived dubiousness or unreliability of microaggressions (i.e. the recipient of a microaggression casting doubt on their own perception), but the point of these racial incidents in Americanah seems to be that they are actually rather egregious: a liberal, reasonably socially aware reader of these passages is in some ways prompted to feel a kind of “shock” or at least a disapproval of what happened, seeing the incident ‘through Ifemelu’s eyes’ as opposed to the oblivious microaggressor. Might the white liberal reader who never experiences microaggressions be trained through this reading experience into a kind of defamiliarization? Or does this reader, in keeping with the unreliable perception of microaggressions, rather cast doubt on Ifemelu’s perception or on perhaps the reliability of the novel itself? I can see a situation where the reader thinks, “These microaggressions are so stereotypical that of course Adichie would put them all into the life of one person so that she can make her point; but we also think it is improbable for someone to experience this level or amount of microaggression within the given time span”).
This kind of reading casts doubt precisely on the “plain language” Adichie uses for her descriptions, associating straightforwardness with a “selectivity” of realist information that distributes attention and resources unequally, in line with Susan Stewart’s critique of realism (Levine, 4). I suppose the suspicion of microaggression could work in line with a Eurocentric modernist reading practice that eschews plain language but likewise fails to defamiliarize readers from deadening habits of ‘color-blind’ perception.
I do realize that I may be invoking this counter-reading without basis, but I also think it is worth bringing up because Adichie’s realism feels in some ways so familiar to us that, from the perspective of modernism, “stereotypes” like microaggressions abound, and as ‘modernist readers’ we are supposed to recognize this stereotypicality and either “make something new” from it (in the traditional modernist sense) or make a performance of it (a la Flarf and conceptual poetry, for example).
