In Chapter 27, Obinze visits a bookshop cafe and started focusing on reading American newspapers and magazines, rather than the British ones. The reason was that these, “stoked panic in his chest,” (Adichie 317). Later, a woman on the train was reading a paper that had a title about immigrants. The interesting aspect of this chapter was how lonely Obinze seems as someone who is trying to obtain citizenship, especially with his sentence that stated, “his existence like an erased pencil sketch,” (Adichie 318). It brought up aspects of past British colonization and current immigration. He goes on to say that, “the influx into Britain of black and brown people from countries created by Britain. Yet he understood. It had to be comforting, this denial of history,” which I thought was particularly powerful and I was able to draw parallels between that and what is currently happening in the U.S. in relation to immigration (Adichie 320).
Question: Do you think countries that have colonization in their past should be working harder to address racism, as well as be more open with their borders towards immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers?
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, et al. Americanah. Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, 2017.