Her father called it a crown of glory” (Adichie 41). Describing the process, Adichie proceeds to narrate that it took Ifemelu “two containers of relaxer at the salon, (…) two hours under the hooded dryer, and, when finally released from pink plastic rollers, sprang free and full, flowing down her back like a celebration. In Nigeria, Ifemelu recalls the times when she was forced to relax her hair in order to look beautiful.

To get to Trenton, Ifemelu is needed to take the train, since the hairdressers in Princeton are not well-accustomed to black women’s hair, or any hair that is of equivalent thickness. A large portion of Americanah is set in a hair salon at the metropolitan area of Trenton, New Jersey, where Ifemelu frequently visits to get her hair styled. Much of the novel takes place between Nigeria and the United States, where Ifemelu, the protagonist, decides to take her bachelor’s degree at Princeton University. Americanah includes recurring scenes where the topic of textured hair is repeatedly - both at hair salons and online - being brought into the conversation, and it is evident that it symbolizes the issues that involve race and identity when being a black woman in the United States. In 2013, Adichie published Americanah, a bestselling novel that is renowned for its involvement in tackling themes on race, identity, and most importantly, the deconstruction of the essentialist views that are enforced on black women. Reading his works, she thought, made her feel that people with the richness of her skin and the coil of her hair can exist in literature, and as a result of that, she said it created a “mental shift in my perception of literature” (“The Danger of a Single Story,” 00:02:15–00:02:36). It was not until she started to read the works of Chinua Achebe that she began to feel seen. Growing up in a university campus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was intellectually molded through reading literature at a young age. A Postcolonial Feminist Reading of Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah: The Sociopolitical Symbol of Textured Hair

Chimamanda adichie americanah