Adichie's Americanah: The Natural Hair Movement

With the sudden increase of black women embracing their natural hair, chemical relaxer sales dropped 34% from 2009 to 2014 (Sidibe, 2015). This change is caused by a movement born in the early 2000s known as the “Natural Hair Movement.” The Natural Hair Movement motivates black women to love their curly hair and encourages them not to hide it under wigs or chemically alter it with relaxers. Black hair is more than just a style choice to black women, though; it’s a political statement. Hair symbolizes their opposition to conformity and for the main character in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah, it symbolizes identity. Throughout the novel, Adichie uses the braiding, relaxing, cutting, and regrowing of the main character, Ifemelu’s, hair, to symbolize her identity.

The novel opens up with Ifemelu on her way to get her hair done. At this point in the time, chronologically, she has already experience relaxing and regrowing her hair naturally, which in turn causes her to walk into the salon with a relatively newfound confidence in her hair. An example of this confidence is on

The representation of her hair as he identity shows the most during these moments. When Wambui first convinces Ifemelu to go natural, she says that “relaxing your hair is like being in a prison. You’re caged in. Your hair rules you.” (Adichie 257) This quote embodies Adichie’s message about hair and how when you relax it, you are not the same. After getting her hair relaxed, she didn’t do things she used to do, like running with Curt, for example, as she was afraid to sweat it out. When Wambui cuts her hair, Ifemelu feels horrified by the way she looks and her confidence lowers, to the point where she begins to compare her short, kinky hair to the long and flowy hair of his exes. It is only when Ifemelu begins to grow her hair back, that her confidence returns with