Forum for

World Literature Studies

Vol.14, No.1, March 2022

Editors in Chief
Nie Zhenzhao, Zhejiang University, China
Charles Ross, Purdue University, U.S.A

Associate Editors in Chief

Yang Gexin, Zhejiang University, China
Angelique Richardson, University of Exeter, UK

Editorial Assistants
Su Chen, Zhejiang University, China
Ma Xiaoli, Zhejiang University, China
Xue Ranran, Zhejiang University, China

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Immigration, Inferiority Complex and Identity
in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing
Around Your Neck
Mohammed Senoussi
Department of Letters and English Language
University of M’sila, Algeria
Email: [email protected]

Abstract This paper puts flesh on the bones of questions concerning identity
deformation of Nigerian immigrants in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s collection of
short stories The Thing Around Your Neck (2009). Adichie tries to understand the
drastic effects of immigration on those who are living on the crossroads of cultures.
Indeed, African contemporary literature is preoccupied with immigration and iden-
tity that are among the most important formative experiences of our era. Therefore,
using Adichie’s short stories as a guide and a focal point, the paper attempts to
analyze and examine the cultural mixture that shapes the identity of postcolonial
African immigrants in the USA. The study attempts also to offer an inside insight
into the complex and often sad reality of modern-day Nigerian immigrants, and how
they are transformed into fragmented hybrid individuals torn between two worlds
in their struggle for belongingness. Frantz Fanon’s theory of inferiority complex,
Homi Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and mimicry, Stuart Hall’s cultural theories
and others are quiet significant to show how postcolonial immigrant subjects define
themselves according to the American cultural values giving way to a hybrid form
of identity through a process of mimicry and self-alienation and inferiorization. The
paper concludes that immigration causes characters’ metamorphosis and deperson-
alization. It is like an initiation into a limbo territory where immigrants are adrift.
Keywords Immigration; identity; complex of inferiority; hybridity; mimicry
Author Mohammed Senoussi is lecturer at the University of Mohamed Boudiaf
in M’sila, Algeria. His research interests include literature with a focus on cultural
contact, the political community in Africa and the Middle East, human rights, ter-
rorism, post-colonialism, history and language. He is the author of four articles that
tackle the relationship between literature, dictatorship and terrorism.
 Immigration, Inferiority Complex and Identity / Mohammed Senoussi 37

Introduction
The rate of immigration from African countries to America has increased
significantly during the last century. Mostly, these people leave their countries
seeking better life conditions or escaping wars and turmoil. Thus, in this study, our
focus is on the impact of displacement on the lives of those African immigrants who
have left their countries for better living conditions and now are entangled in the
hybridization of diasporic identity.
Among the variety of African immigrants, many Nigerians have left their
countries to other parts of the world for numerous reasons notably the quest for bet-
ter education, commerce, political asylum and other socio-economic factors. Indeed,
many Nigerians believe that the European or North American countries are the most
ideal places of the earth to live in (Oroskhan & Zohdi 302-03). The French author,
Laurent Gaudé, describes immigration fantasies it in his novel El Dorado (2006).
He states that Africans, similar to the Spanish Conquistadors, believe once they
reach the Western lands, they will make wealth easily and realize their dreams as if
they are in the mythical Latin city of El Dorado which is full of gold beyond imagi-
nation.
The “African Dream” thus leads people to construct this fantasy that life in a
western country will be easier and filled with opportunity. Nearly always, such high
expectations are never met and often a new set of problems becomes a reality for
the migrants. Moreover, Hollywood films, the internet, television and popular cul-
ture have enhanced these perceptions encouraging immigrant to engage in a fruitless
trek. Also, those Africans who have travelled to Western countries return home with
a misleading impression of the foreign countries. They confirm the impression that
there are better schools, abundance of good food and better housing. Undoubtedly,
the social and material conditions of life in more developed countries are better than
some African countries like Nigeria (Oroskhan & Zohdi 303). However, they should
notably deal with external problems such as unemployment and unhomliness but
also should cope with some inner problems like the syndromes of identity deforma-
tion.
Other African authors like Laila Laalami in her novel Hope and Other Danger-
ous Pursuits (2005) also attempts to capture the Moroccans journey of clandestine
immigration in their quest of a new identity which is essentially located in the prom-
ised land beyond the border, and to wear that particular identity. Likewise, Boualem
Sansal, the Franco-Algerian novelist, in his novel Harraga (2007) presents immi-
grants burning their identity papers to seek asylum in Europe. The term ‘Harrga’
38 Forum for World Literature Studies / Vol.14 No.1 March 2022

means ‘to burn,’ Algerian immigrants thus go on an existential journey to Europe

without an identity trying to find meaning for their lives. However, the real image of
these African immigrants living abroad is rarely examined vividly in literature. It is
in recent fiction that there has been some attempt to explore the negative side of this
ever beautiful image.
Therefore, in the selected short stories, “The Thing Around Your Neck,” “The
Arrangers of Marriage,” and “Imitation,” Adichie attempts to broaden our under-
standing of Nigerian immigrants identity formation and deformation. The stories
present the nebulous hybrid nature of diasporic identity. Her stories are a vibrant
testimony of immigrants’ lives. She tries to put flesh on the bones of questions re-
garding postcolonial immigrant subjects developing an inferiority complex which
leads them to define themselves according to the American cultural values giving
way to a hybrid form of identity through a process of mimicry and self-alienation.
Therefore, new identity formations found their genesis during these cultural
encounters. Immigration is indeed one of the most formative experiences of our
century that shape identity. Both immigration and identity are regarded to be the
chief preoccupation of most African writers. The immigrant experience is wide-
spread, and it requires understanding as people struggle to maintain their sense of
themselves and their values while adapting to new cultural environments.

Theoretical Background
“Identity is one of the false friends. We all think we know what the word means and
go on trusting it, even when it is slyly starting to say the opposite” (Maalouf 09).
We shall use Adichie’s short stories as a focal point and guide to understand
the formation of immigrants’ identity and the hybridization process on many levels.
Identity is indeed a nebulous elastic term as Amin Maalouf puts in the epigraph
above that deserves academic investigations.
Adichie’s characters are torn between two cultures and belongings without
any stable base for their identity. Consequently, it is shown how this cultural
amalgamation has caused a hybrid identity. Indeed, over the past few decades and
with the invasion of social and psychological theories and the domination of the
so-called post-colonial criticism, there emerge many theories in the study of man’s
nebulous complex identity (Oroskhan & Zohdi 300). Among these notions one
may refer to Homi Bhabha’s mimicry, hybridity and Fanon’s inferiority complex.
Therefore, we shall use these concepts to analyze the post-colonial phenomenon
of immigration. It goes without saying that there is much to be learned from the
examination of immigration, culture and identity within literature itself.
 Immigration, Inferiority Complex and Identity / Mohammed Senoussi 39

First, with the rising tide of the migratory movements in a globalized era,
Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born British cultural theorist, argues that the post-modern
immigrant has no fixed or stable identity since identity has become a “moveable
feast” made of many components in a constant formation and transformation in
relation to the ways we are portrayed, perceived and addressed in different cultural
systems (Hall, Minimal Selves 46). As an immigrant, Hall sees identity as a socio-
cultural product not a biological one.
Theoretically speaking, immigrants live on the crossroads of cultures torn
between whether being assimilated and accepted in their host country or preserving
their origin culture. Once they reach the United States, they exist in what Homi
K. Bhabha, the Indian post-colonial theorist, calls ‘Third Space.’ That is to say,
the term ‘hybridity’ has been most recently associated with the work of Bhabha,
whose analysis of colonizer/colonized relations stresses their interdependence and
the mutual construction of their subjectivities. Bhabha contends that all cultural
statements and systems are constructed in a space that he calls the “Third Space of
enunciation” (The Location of Culture 56). Further, Homi Bhabha brings the term
hybridity and links it to the so-called “Third Space” where the one lives between
two spaces and two different cultures which bring a person a merged identity. For
him “The importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments
from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is “The third Space” which
enables other positions to emerge” (“The Third Space” 212).
One of the most disputable terms in postcolonial context is hybridity which
refers to the cultural exchange. According to Peter Barry, hybridity is “the situation
whereby individuals and groups belong simultaneously to more than one culture”
(198). By means hybridity stands in a situation where the one is caught between two
different cultures, when the one leaves his/her native language, costumes, religion
and goes to another. This can be applied to some African immigrants as we shall see
who are culturally polyvalent.
The concept of hybridity is fundamentally associated with the emergence
of post-colonial discourse and its critiques of cultural imperialism. It is characterized
by the study of the effects of mixture (hybridity) upon identity and culture. The
principal theorists of hybridity are Homi Bhabha, Néstor García Canclini, Stuart
Hall, Gayatri Spivak, and Paul Gilroy, whose works respond to the multi-cultural
awareness that emerged in the early 1990s.
Besides, mimicry is always present in the discourse of displacement and
immigration. It has been always a crucial theme for many theorists and thinkers
who view this concept as a fully imitation of others in various aspects. From a
40 Forum for World Literature Studies / Vol.14 No.1 March 2022

postcolonial perspective, Ashcroft et al states, “mimicry therefore locates a crack

in the certainty of colonial dominance, an uncertainty in its control of behaviour
of the colonised” (155). By means the colonial discourse is the responsible for
the imitation of the colonized to the colonizer, when the colonized wants to be
exactly like the colonizer by adopting his cultural institutions, values, habits
and assumptions; the result would be extremely “blurred copy” as the so-called
mimicry. This can be applied also to African immigrants who tear their souls apart,
change their names, language and so on in order to be accepted in the host country.
Immigrants believe that the Western culture is superior, that is why they wear the
western mask at the first encounter with the host culture, it is as if they are using
camouflage technique as Lacan puts it:

Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be

called an itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is camouflage.... It is
not a question of harmonising with the background, but against a mottled
background, of becoming mottled - exactly like the technique of camouflage
practised in human warfare (Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man” 125).

Furthermore, in colonial and post-colonial contexts, mimicry is most commonly

seen when members of a colonized society (say, Indians or Africans) imitate the
language, dress, politics, or cultural attitude of their colonizers (say, the British
or the French). In the context of immigration, mimicry is seen as an opportunistic
pattern of behavior: one copies the person in power, because one hopes to have
access to that same power oneself. Presumably, while copying the master, one has to
intentionally suppress one’s own cultural identity, though in some cases immigrants
are left so confused by their cultural encounter with a dominant foreign culture that
there may not be a clear pre-existing identity to suppress (Singh).
In addition to that, in 1952, Frantz Fanon published Black Skin, White
Masks, which offers a potent philosophical, psychological, literary and political
analysis of the deep effects of racism and colonialism on the experiences, lives,
minds and relationships of black people and people of color. In his book, Fanon
uses his personal experience of Caribbean immigrants in France to show how the
relationship between colonized and colonizer is normalized as psychology, resulting
in emotional damage to both (Custódio).
Perhaps most importantly, Fanon’s opening gambit introduces the central
concept that of the “zone of non-being” (02) The zone of non-being is the “hell”
(Ibid), as Fanon puts it; it describes the psycho-existential dilemma the African
 Immigration, Inferiority Complex and Identity / Mohammed Senoussi 41

suffers from. In short, Fanon reflects on why he chooses to write Black Skin, White
Masks. He argues we must ask what “the black man” wants (01). Fanon intends to
comprehend the relationship between white and black people, and argues that both
groups are trapped within their own racial identities. He argues that psychoanalysis
is a useful tool for understanding the black experience, and that, through analysis,
it is possible to “destroy” the enormous psychological complex that has developed
as a result of colonialism (Seresin). All in all, a Fanonian approach is suitable to
understand the inferiority complex of modern-day Nigerian immigrants.

“The Thing Around Your Neck”

Adichie first narrates in “The Thing Around Your Neck” the challenges that Akunna,
a young lady, faces once she wins the visa lottery. The story portrays how the young
lady is excited to live in the land of plenty opportunities, they told her: “right after
you won the American visa lottery… In a month, you will have a big car. Soon, a
big house. But don’t buy a gun like those Americans” (115). Later, she is depicted
being completely alone, aching but unable to tell her family what is happening to
her. Adichie paints a sad picture of Nigerian female immigrants in the Eldorado.
While Akunna tries to embrace her Igbo origin and traditions, her uncle forces her
to adopt the westernized ways of life as her only option. But once again, the Amer-
ican Dream becomes a hurtful disappointment when she discovers that America is
very different from her naïve view (Pereira 53).
The African dream gradually falls apart and Akunna starts feeling something
hanging around her neck. Culture shock and the failure of getting integrated into the
American society, the feeling of being the Other is choking her: “At night, some-
thing would wrap itself around your neck, something that very nearly choked you
before you fell asleep” (119).
The symbolism of ‘The Thing Around Your Neck,’ signifies the battles faced
by women to find a sense of belonging and an identity. Adichie is symbolizing the
burden African women face when migrating to western nations. It also symbolizes
what Bhabha call “unhomeliness.” In his important essay insightfully entitled “The
World and the Home” Homi Bhabha claims that “in the House of Fiction you can
hear, today, the deep stirring “unhomely” (141). Fiction, for the most part, forms
a compelling ground that sensitizes us to the melancholy voices and moving com-
plaints of unhomely selves. It goes without saying, unhomeliness is an admittedly
somewhat different from homelessness. The latter, one may say, has to do with the
point of not owning a home to shelter you, whereas the first is not to sense at home
despite the fact that in the lived reality you are at home (Gouffi & Kaid 555). In a
42 Forum for World Literature Studies / Vol.14 No.1 March 2022

similar vein, Lois Tyson confirms that “being ‘unhomed’ is not the same as being
homeless. To be unhomed is to feel not at home even in your own home because
you are not at home in yourself: your cultural identity crisis has made you a psycho-
logical refugee, so to speak” (421). Bhabha goes further to argue: “to be unhomed is
not to be homeless, nor can the unhomely be easily accommodated familiar division
of social life into private and the public spheres” (141). Unhomeliness mark is stark-
ly evident; an agony that pushes the unhomely immigrant to alienation, Akunna’s
feeling of being choked is caused by the failure to achieve a sense of belonging with
her new American home. First, she first felt happy in the house of her uncle because
they share the same culture, it sounds like home. But, the feeling of unhomeliness is
worsened as she is sexually abused inside the same home. She left the home direct-
ly after that incident. Immigration is indeed a difficult experience for a young lady,
identity and spaces in the story are deformed in the context of immigration. She
realises that this man who is supposed to be her uncle is not offering her a home for
free; she says “America was give-and-take” (116). Akunna adds:

You laughed with your uncle and you felt at home in his house; his wife called
you nwanne, sister, and his two school-age children called you Aunty. They
spoke Igbo and ate garri for lunch and it was like home. Until your uncle came
into the cramped basement where you slept with old boxes and cartons and
pulled you forcefully to him, squeezing your buttocks, moaning… You locked
yourself in the bathroom until he went back upstairs, and the next morning,
you left… (Ibid).

Concerning racial hybridity, it is portrayed when Akunna gets to know a man in the
restaurant who she believes to be different. He is white American, and his culture is
different from hers, but they could start a relationship. But this relation does not last
long despite the struggle, she says: “You knew by people’s reactions that you two
were abnormal” (125). One may see that Americanness is about whiteness, as it is
the racist assumption of a shared white experience and supremacy. Hybrid relations
between white Americans and black foreigners are perceived as something peculiar
menacing the whiteness of America. Yet, this mixed race relationship is the only
way that gives Akunna a feeling of belonging, it is only through a hybrid interracial
encounter that “the thing that wrapped itself around [her] neck, that nearly choked
[her] before [she] fell asleep, started to loosen, to let go” (Ibid).
Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks theorizes interracial sexuality, sexual desire,
and the effects on racial identity. Fanon’s theorizations return to one and the same
 Immigration, Inferiority Complex and Identity / Mohammed Senoussi 43

theme: interracial desire as a form of self-destruction in the desire to be white or to

elevate one’s social, political, and cultural status in proximity to whiteness. In that
sense, all depictions of interracial sexuality (exclusively heterosexual) are for Fanon
fundamentally pathological. The black woman who desires a white man suffers un-
der the delusion that his body is a bridge to wealth and access. Mayotte Capécia’s
novel I Am a Martinican Woman (1948) guides Fanon’s analysis and he takes her
book to be exemplary of the black woman’s psyche and of the limits of interracial
desire (Drabinski “Frantz Fanon”). In the same vein, Akunna interracial relationship
could be a bridge to get fully assimilated within the host country, but alas the society
in the story perceived this relationship as something menacing and strange. In short,
under American eyes, Akunna’s interracial relationship is seen as a deformity.

“The Arrangers of Marriage”

The second selected short story “The Arrangers of Marriage” tells a story of
Chinaza, a newly wedded young wife, who finds that her arranged marriage to a
Nigerian medical student in America is not as she had dreamt. Her hopes begin to
fall apart and dreams to wither away.
Chinaza, the protagonist, talks of her Aunty Ada who compares the fact of
finding “ezigbo di! A doctor in America! It is like we won a lottery for you!” (171).
This powerful comparison, especially the choice of the word “lottery,” reveals the
state of poverty of the place in which the speaker lives and the people’s expectations
to migrate to America to improve their standards of living.
Chinaza’s husband, the main character Dave (Ofodile) epitomizes the
deformed hybrid African who insists on penetrating the American society and
American culture by sacrificing everything and abandoning his own culture. He
believes that Americans are superior in everything, his complex of inferiority leads
to the formation of a hybrid identity. He believes that the only way to fit in America
is to “talk like Americans, eat like them, drink like them, use their words and
erase any cultural differences” (172). Adichie presents characters changing their
names altogether. Ofodile changes his name into Dave Bell and his wife’s name
from Chinaza into Agatha Bell to look more American, or as he says, “to be as
mainstream as possible [and] not left by the roadside” (Ibid). Adichie thus presents
hybrid deformed identities as something unavoidable. Dave forces Chinaza to go
by her English name, Agatha, though she does not like it, “my English name is just
something on my birth certificate. I have been Chinaza Okafor my whole life” (172).
This brings to mind our Algerian immigrants, a lot of them want to look
more French or European rejecting their original names. Abdelkader turns into
44 Forum for World Literature Studies / Vol.14 No.1 March 2022

Kader, Zine el-dine into Zizou, Fatima into Fati and so forth. Changing one’s
name is deformation par-excellence, a name is cultural marker, it carries culture
and identity. James Ngugi, the Kenyan novelist, changed his name into Ngugi Wa
Thiong’o which is purely African, he advocates the decolonization of the mind. For
him, carrying the names that were imposed by the colonizer is like perpetuating
colonialism. In the same line, post-colonial immigrants are portrayed as deformed
and rootless characters, they are in Stuart Hall words the last colonials (Familiar
Stranger 03), dark strangers and travellers in unfamiliar territories (153). Maria
Gripe puts is as follows:

Preferably you should have the right to be nameless until you find your own
name. Names are not something that should be given out light-handedly. A
name can be too light, but also too heavy for a person to carry. And it will
always be a shackle. It can be dangerous temptation or it can create self-con-
tempt. Your own name can turn into a myth which you fall victim of. It can
split your character and determine your fate. (Bendicta 280)

From a post-colonial perspective, Adichie’s focus on this matter suggests that names
can be a heavy burden for people; this is due to the fact that a name is a vital part
of one’s identity; because it conveys enormous information about one’s gender,
culture, and even it gives a sense of uniqueness to one’s personal identity. Elsdon
Smith defines names as “one of the most permanent of possessions . . . [which] re-
main when everything else is lost; it is owned by those who possess nothing else”
(Heynmann 385). In a matter of fact, names are a core segment of our identity since
they carry a conceptual, cultural, and identical weight. Post colonial critics highlight
the importance of labels as indicators of identity. In this matter, Albert Memmi de-
clares that “another sign of the colonized’s depersonalization is what one might call
the mark of the plural. The colonized is never characterized in an individual man-
ner; he is entitled only to drown in an anonymous collectivity (“They are this.” “They
are all the same”)” (129). In fact, Camus’ L’Etranger (1942) (Stranger or Outsider)
was strongly criticized because of the unnamed Arab characters. Critics suggest that
Camus denies the existence of an Algerian identity through the denial of names to
his Arab characters, unlike the European ones who are granted the dignity of names.
Indeed, even when the protagonist Meursault kills the Arab, readers would not feel
that Meursault has murdered a man; he has done nothing wrong, for it was just an
Arab. This sense of inhumanity is reinforced with voicelessness of Arabs who are
painted as blocks of stones. Gordon Allport, an American psychologist and theo-
 Immigration, Inferiority Complex and Identity / Mohammed Senoussi 45

rist, emphasizes the importance of names and proposes that our names are the focal
point around which we build a personal identity (Bendicta 275). Therefore, Adichie
presents this bestowal of new names as the beginning of metamorphosis and deper-
sonalization. One may call it also as an initiation into a limbo territory where immi-
grants are adrift.
Furthermore, linguistic hybridity and the deformation of language are clear in
the story. Dave forcing his wife to mimic the western ways created a hybrid short
story full with untranslated words in Igbo language. Adichie africanized and hybrid-
ized English language in her story; through her characterization, she expresses the
migrant soul with a migrant style by making migrants speak different languages as
a result of their hybridity. The result is a strange hodge-podge immigrant language
with no linguistic elegance, natural rhythm or oral authenticity. Chinaza language
in this context of immigration is a linguistic travesty. Besides, in “The Arrangers of
Marriage,” the new husband teaches American English to his new wife which he
thinks is a sign of civilization:

“Cookies. Americans call [biscuits] cookies.” …

“Yes, but [Consultant] is called Attending here, an Attending Physician.”
“Biko, don’t they have a lift instead?” I asked. …
“Speak English. There are people behind you,” he whispered…
“It’s an elevator, not a lift. Americans say elevator.” (174-176)

Three languages—British English, American English and Igbo—have been used

here and they express the reality of a change in modern society in which people
speak many languages. The social identity itself begins then to take on a hybrid
nature and can create difficulties to non-hybrid readers. The latter may find it
difficult to understand a hybrid text in which many languages are mixed with no
glossary.
Yet, hybrid readers, such as the Americanahs, may enjoy such migrant
literatures. Writing about migration literature, Combe has shown that such double
belonging to two cultures and speaking two languages are a source of creation
from the artist and express at the same time an identity that is schizophrenic and
deformed (Kaboré 15). Bhabha quoted from Bakhtin to clarify such hybridity of
language and culture that characterizes Adichie’s characters:

The…hybrid is not only double-voiced and double-accented…but is also

double-languaged; for in it there are not only (and not even so much) two
46 Forum for World Literature Studies / Vol.14 No.1 March 2022

individual consciousnesses, two voices, two accents, as there are [doublings

of] socio-linguistic, consciousnesses, two epochs…that come together and
consciously fight it out on the territory of the utterance….It is the collision
between differing points of view on the world that are embedded in these
forms…such unconscious hybrids have been at the same time profoundly
productive historically: they are pregnant with potential for new world views,
with new ‘internal forms’ for perceiving the world in words. (cited in Bhabha,
“Culture’s In-between” 58)

Again, Chinaza is now on the crossroads of cultures and languages, she is in

Bhabha’s words in-between, she exists in the Third Space. The presence of the
‘double-languagedness’ in the story helps in the creation and generation of new
world views as seen in the quote above. Chinaza is indeed at the initial stage of
learning a language, to think in that language. This is the first stage of hybridization.
Adichie’s immigrant characters thus offer a clear view into the processes of identity
formation illuminating Bhabha’s notions of hybridity and the third space, they
epitomize what happens in-between cultures.
The husband forces her to use some words instead of others, like “cookies” not
“biscuits” and “elevator” instead of “lift,” he warns her from cooking Nigerian food,
instead he encourages her eating pizza. The wife describes her husband complex of
inferiority vis-à-vis Nigerian food and culture as follows:

The next day, he came back with a Good Housekeeping All-American Cookbook,
thick as a Bible. “I don’t want us to be known as the people who fill the building
with smells of foreign food,” he said. I took the cookbook, ran my hand over the
cover, over the picture of something that looked like a flower but was probably
food.“I know you’ll soon master how to cook American food”. (179)

In short, the husband believes that mimicry is a necessity, his wife must do this to
survive—at least until she has her green card Ofodile is not interested in hybridi-
ty—only in mimicry. And with it, as Bhabha says, he normalizes the ‘colonial state’
(The Location of Culture 123). Ofodile (Dave) does not want to be the Other; other
immigrants, who refuse mimicry, are the Others—they are the ones who are infe-
rior. He forces Chinaza into mimicry: she must be Agatha Bell, she must always
speak American English. Chinaza says also: “He sounded different when he spoke
to Americans: his r was over-pronounced and his t was under-pronounced. And he
smiled, the eager smile of a person who wanted to be liked” (176). Indeed, in a pro-
 Immigration, Inferiority Complex and Identity / Mohammed Senoussi 47

cess of mimicry, the immigrants’ complex of inferiority leads to the emergence of

double, deformed and hybrid identities. Fanon questions the origin of immigrants’
personality change? What is the source of this new way of being? The fact that the
African who adopts a language different from that of the group into which he was
born, changes his name, his culture and customs is evidence of a dislocation, a sepa-
ration (14).
Pr Westermann says that the inferiority complex is particularly intensified
among the most educated, who must struggle with it unceasingly. Their way of
doing so, he adds, is frequently naive:

The wearing of European clothes, whether rags or the most up-to-date style;
using European furniture and European forms of social intercourse; adorning
the Native language with European expressions; using bombastic phrases in
speaking or writing a European language; all these contribute to a feeling of
equality with the European and his achievements. (qtd in Fanon 15)

Indeed, Dave is an educated man yet his acts resemble one who has a deep
complex of inferiority. Dave is proud and ready to wear the white mask as Fanon
puts it; donning white masks over black skins resulting in a duality, and living in
a schizophrenic atmosphere. He is like an ‘oreo’ cake in the American slang that
describes this type of personality, white from the inside and black from the outside.
Thus, the syndromes of inferiority occur in post-colonial immigrant groups both as
a result of conscious moments of cultural suppression, or when the immigrant forces
himself to ‘assimilate’ to new social patterns by destroying and condemning himself.
All in all, one may deduce that for Adichie, cultural hybridity is negative and
has no assimilationist sense. Hybridization in Adichie’s discourse of immigration
means decline through the loss of identity. For her, hybrid identities are a result
of globalization. She further clarifies it as the American neighbor talks to Chinaza
about being adrift in a postmodern society that has no culture: “It smells really
good. The problem with us here is we have no culture, no culture at all.” She turned
to my new husband, as if she wanted him to agree with her, but he simply smiled”
(190).

“Imitation”
“Imitation” is set in Philadelphia and focuses on Nkem, a young married woman
with two children. Nkem’s husband, Obiora, a rich Nigerian businessman, moved
them from Nigeria to the United States as a sign of status, and so that their children
48 Forum for World Literature Studies / Vol.14 No.1 March 2022

could have American citizenship; however, he does not join them full time and only
visits her and their two children two months a year. Nkem learns later through a
friend that Obiora has moved his mistress into their home in Nigeria.
In “Imitation,” the wife expects to rise from grass to grace, i.e., from poverty
to riches. Nkem, the protagonist

was pregnant when she first came to America with Obiora. (…) [they] live in a
lovely suburb near Philadelphia, she told her friends in Lagos on the phone...
Her neighbors on Cherrywood Lane, all white and pale-haired and lean, came
over and introduced themselves, asked if she needed help with anything—get-
ting a driver’s license, a phone, a maintenance person. She did not mind that
her accent, her foreignness, made her seem helpless to them. She liked them
and their lives. (24: 2009)

Fanon, in his book Black Skin White Masks, describes this concept of Americaniza-
tion or Europeanization of the Black African immigrants who become truly évolué
and take their place in the metropolis. They are mesmerized by the Western culture,
the complex of inferiority is intensified when the African encounters the western
culture. The immigrant evolué like Nkem, desires not merely to be in the place of
the White neighbors but compulsively seeks to look back and down on herself from
that position. Nkem’s admiration of her American neighbors lives, their whiteness
and supremacy is exactly what Fanon describes in his book. These syndromes of
inferiority are the legacy of colonialism and the direct results of living under the
shadows of imperialism. Fanon anatomizes the colonial and post-colonial immigrant:

Every colonized people—in other words, every people in whose soul an inferi-
ority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural orig-
inality—finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that
is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his
jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural stan-
dards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle. (09: 1986)

Besides, Obiora prefers Nkem’s hair long, as “[it] is more graceful on a Big Man’s
wife” (40). He wants their children to be Americanized, so he enrolls them in
schools in the U.S. and is proud of their “big-big” English, and that they are “Amer-
icanah” now acting like their American peers (38). Fanon again examines language,
he argues that speaking a language is to take on a world, a culture. The Negro or the
 Immigration, Inferiority Complex and Identity / Mohammed Senoussi 49

black, who wants to be white, will be the whiter as he gains greater mastery of the
cultural tool that language is (25). In the same line, Obiora believes that his chil-
dren’s mastery of American English is a sign of high social status. Ngugi also high-
lighted the issue of language adopted by immigrants as a self-imposed amnesia:

Immigrants into new societies, especially those who are escaping their own
histories, have been known to consciously and deliberately refuse to teach
their children their own language, the language of the country and history from
which they are in flight, so as to facilitate their assimilation into the country
and culture of adoption. Erasure of memory is the condition of such assimila-
tion—whether forced, induced, or willing—and the new language becomes a
screen against the past that they do not want their children to face. (62)

Obiora is proud of his children growing up in hybridity, in a cultural mix between

Nigerian and American, and equally wants his wife to form a hybrid identity.
However, when it comes to his own life Obiora stays in Nigeria; a hybrid identity
in America does not gain the same level of success and respect as mimicry does in
Nigeria.
Fanon describes immigrants like Obiora, who while he is in Nigeria, is
regarded as a demigod. Many immigrants, after staying of varying length in
metropolis, go home to be deified. The most eloquent form of ambivalence is
adopted toward them by the native, the one- who-never-crawled-out-of-his-hole,
the bitaco. The African immigrant who has lived in the West for a length of time
returns radically changed. To express it in genetic terms, his phenotype undergoes
a definitive, an absolute mutation (10). In a word, when these African immigrants
return to their homeland they are treated as superior, which encourages them to act
in a haughty manner.
Furthermore, Nkem’s American house is a hybrid, border and marginal space.
A hybrid space since it is a house in a modern western context, that of America,
but it accommodates African antiques as well Nigerian and American lifestyles
exemplified by Nkem and her Nigerian maid on the one hand, and the Obiora
children on the other one (Sharobeem 31). In addition to that, although she feels
homesick, she cannot go back to Nigeria. She has to preserve her social position,
“America has grown on her, snaked its roots under her skin” (37). Thus, she lives
on the border; she neither belongs to America nor to Nigeria. She is a tormented
immigrant living in a hybrid, deformed, marginal, border space.
Again, Adichie highlights the deformation of identity in relation to hair.
50 Forum for World Literature Studies / Vol.14 No.1 March 2022

Nkem is informed of Obiora’s infidelity as one of her American neighbors told her.
She describes the girl in this way: “Her hair is short and curly—you know, those
small tight curls” (22). After this, Nkem decides to cut her hair short just like her
husband’s mistress, but Obiora does not like it and asks her to let it grow back “You
should grow it back. Long hair is more graceful on a Big Man’s wife” (40). The hair
incident indeed reveals the two-dimensional identity and personality split of Obiora.
It is clear that Obiora behaves differently in America and Nigeria. When he is in
Nigeria, he tries to look American and spends his time with a mistress whose hair is
short and curly à la Americana. However, while he is in America, he wants his wife
with a long hair. In short, Obiora’s identity is ruined with mimicry and hybridity, he
sounds schizophrenic.
Similarly to Nkem in “Imitation,” Chinaza in “The Arrangers of Marriage”
learns that Nia, their Afro-American neighbor, and Ofodile had sex before Chinaza
married him; a clear indication of his hypocrisy and two-dimensional personality
or identity. Ofodile married Chinaza because he wants a virgin wife from Nigeria
as a traditional tribal marriage. But in America, he is different, he does not care
about virginity, he is open-minded vis-à-vis sex before marriage. In the discourse of
immigration, it is worth noting that hybrid identity and mimicry turn into a malady.
A lot of African immigrants’ characterization in literature indeed resembles the
medical discourse about schizophrenia.
As a matter of fact, there are numerous psychiatric studies that provide
tentative frameworks to highlight specific interactions between personality
disorders, migration processes, and cultural factors. In other words, they examine
the relationship between immigration and culture from a psychopathological
perspective. Najjarkakhaki and Ghane for instance offer suggestions on how
immigration processes could resemble several ‘Personality Disorder’ traits, how
certain (latent) vulnerabilities could be manifested in a post-migratory context, and
how pre-existing personality pathology could be aggravated. Additionally, they offer
suggestions on how several cultural dimensions could resemble or mask personality
pathology (“The Role of Migration”).
In short, the African immigrant’s mindset is worthy subject of academic
investigation within the realm of literature. The psychology of Adichie’s immigrant
characters resembles psychiatric discourse of traditional studies like Fanon and new
medical discourses as well.

Conclusion
To sum up, displacement and immigration are important formative experiences that
 Immigration, Inferiority Complex and Identity / Mohammed Senoussi 51

shape the lives of people. Literature is indeed a laboratory in which we can easily
explore the impact of these experiences on identity. Indeed, the African fictive
landscape and postcolonial thought have been preoccupied by the nebulous nature
of identity, unlike Marxists who think that identity is not important.1
Adichie’s selected stories portray the cultural encounters between the African,
who believes he is inferior, with the West. The post-colonial African immigrant,
through his journey, is always looking for his identity, because for centuries the
colonizer devalued and effaced the colonized past, regarding his pre-colonial era as
a pre-civilized limbo, or even as a historical void. The stories revealed that in the
process of self-alienation and mimicry, hybrid and sometimes deformed identities
emerge in the context of immigration.
In short, Adichie looks conservative when it comes to identity; she regards
immigration, hybridity and displacement as loss. The intermingling, amalgamation
and transformation of identities in the context of immigration are impure. Even if
a character, like Akunna, who does not built defensive walls to protect her identity
and does not feel threatened by diversity that are epitomized in her interracial
relationship, fails at the end. Therefore, Adichie’s selected short stories attempt to
teach us about the dynamics of this new process of identity formation.

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