Fictional representation of facts: Memory and indictment in Chimamanda Adichie’s <i>Americanah</i>

Abstract

Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah has received a wide range of criticisms from feminist, postcolonial, even from psychoanalytic perspectives, etc.,  but not really from the New Historicist evaluation which usually offers the opportunity for a panoramic historical interpretations of literary texts.  Such interpretations usually enable readers to have a broader understanding of some vital actual historical developments being fictionalized in a  literary text to learn from the mistakes of the past with regard to certain actions of individuals and institutions in society. In an attempt to achieve  this, the study establishes the relationship between the characters, settings, incidents, and even some discourses created and represented in the  novel with factual historical and contemporary political figures and issues related to them. The crystallizing issues from the author’s literary  searchlight in this regard principally border on former President Obasanjo’s controversial privatization programme, General Babangida’s political  and economic maradonism, particularly his IMF/SAP-inflicted economic sores and sufferings and the historically suspicious plane crash under his   administration, as well as several other sensitive and indicting issues associated with dictatorship, ethnicity and racism, among others. The study  maintains that as an insightful creative writer and a reminder of history, Adichie dutifully stands on the watchtower of society, remembering and  making certain significant indictments with the instrumentality of her novelistic art in focus, and that such representations can only be said to be  fruitful or serve their cardinal intent when individuals in society learn from them and avoid recurrences.