Expatriate Experiences and Cultural Trauma: A Theoretical Reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Abstract

Americanah is a narrative about emigrants, expatriate experiences and how it feels to come to back to own land feeling nothing more than numbness. The novel deals with the postcolonial elements with themes focusing mainly on migration and alienation of individuals who go in search for a better life in a foreign land and getting affected psychologically, socially and culturally on an everyday basis regardless, however, they try to mingle and blend in. Americanah is considered as a postcolonial traumatic fiction on the basis of cultural trauma in which individual trauma is a subsidiary when considered to cultural collective trauma. Collective trauma differs from the classical traditions of trauma in the sense that it is not based on a single traumatic occurrence. It focuses on daily psychological wounding at a community level where the individual find at a later point that the changes that happened at a foundational level are quite irretrievable.