For a girl who’s far from a football fan, I read an inordinate amount about it online, for the beautiful game seems to make poets of laymen. Once the expletives have let up, the average live tweeter now gushes in choice metaphors, moans like unrequited lovers would and curses like Shakespeare on overdrive. It was to this background score that I picked up Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's third novel Americanah (2013), recently in the news for casting Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o in the forthcoming film version.
Americanah is the story of Ifemelu, a Nigerian girl who migrates to America to escape sheer “choicelessness” back home. As she struggles to realise ‘The American Dream’, juggling odd jobs, strange cultural norms and an education, Ifemelu awakens to a side of herself hitherto unknown in Nigeria:. “Dear Non-American Blacks,” she writes in her blog about race, “When you make the choice to come to America, you become black.” Americanah , which is Nigerian slang for a returnee immigrant, is unabashedly about race, and its numerous ways of thriving and growing in a ‘post-race’ world.
“This will be a World Cup against racism,” announced Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff in early April. She spoke in response to fans’ off-field racist chants of “monkey, monkey” at Brazilian footballer Arouca. A few weeks later, fellow countryman Dani Alves had a banana chucked at him from opposing team supporters. While he calmly took a bite and kept playing, the incident spurred a massive support movement online, fronted by Neymar. In solidarity with Alves, Neymar posted a photograph of himself with a banana, captioned “#Weareallmonkeys”, and the trend went viral.
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Neymar’s own story of coming to terms with race parallels Ifemelu’s. In a 2010 interview, Neymar said he’d never experienced racism: “Not inside nor outside of the soccer field; even more because I’m not Black, right?” In principle, that’s true because Neymar is biracial, but critics have interpreted his straightened and blonde-dyed hair as white aspiration. Ifemelu too tries on an American accent, meets Nigerian men who bleach their faces, and also briefly dates a white man. Just as Neymar now confronts racism headfirst, Ifemelu learns that cultural appropriation only morphs the varieties of racist behaviour she encounters, never erases it. These modern manifestations of racism in
Where Americanah succeeds best though, is in narrating the different experiences of blackness itself. Through the immigration stories of several minor characters, Adiche describes blackness in Europe, blackness and poverty, African-American blackness and much else. In Neymar’s Brazil, where its majority population are mixed-race, black identity has many faces too. Just when German fans with faces painted black are now being investigated for mocking Brazilian religious beliefs, ‘Africa is a Country’ blog has published a series of stories on what identity politics and blackness in Brazil actually means.
From the funk music of mostly dark-skinned, underprivileged ‘favela’ communities, to the blatantly North America-influenced dance styles of the Baile Charme movement, ‘black’ here, too, is a multi-coloured thing.
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