Quest for Home in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah: Reversing the Push-Pull Conditions

Abstract

In migration studies, the trajectory of motion that often finds people in spaces other than their original habitat has always been demonstrated to be prompted by nauseating factors in the homelands and amplified by the perceived attractive factors in the foreign land of interest. Such factors are regarded as the push and pull factors of migration as enunciated by Everett Lee. In the bid to escape such nauseating conditions in the homelands, migrants engage in a voyage of quest for greener pastures at the pulling destinations. The direction of this movement has always appeared to be linear – from the Global South to the North, no thanks to the ugly history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade of the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and the colonial experiences of most African countries with their subsisting neo-imperialistic influences. But much of diaspora literature has always culminated in what many scholars have dubbed as return migration, whereby most migrants eventually begin to yearn to return to their homelands as a reaction to the many oddities they begin to experience abroad. This present work seeks to explore those complexities that usually occasion such quests for return migration through a textual analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. Hinging on Lee’s push-pull factor theory of migration as its framework, this work discovers that such a quest usually takes the shape of some sort of reversal of the push and pull conditions that initially orchestrated the migration in the first place.