Why this 'Americanah' Cover is an Attempt at Erasure of Black Women

This cover popped up on my Instagram this morning and I was immediately taken aback. It gutted me and I went on a fact finding mission to find out where this was published. After some checking, I found out that it is the Italian edition of Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie published by Super ET (an Italian Press) in 2017. Noticeably, it’ll take you a while to find it on a google search of the different iterations of the book cover. Americanah has since publication been reprinted numerous times and has multiple covers.

Why is this triggering, you ask?

I’ll admit that this is more personal than anything but also, I know it speaks to thousands of black African women who like me, Americanah was, and still remains a very pivotal encounter that changed so much of my life. I have given my story a million times so I will summarise.

Americanah was the first book I read where I saw a woman like me centred in literature. It was originally published in 2013 by Alfred A. Knopf and I was in my mid 20s at the time – how sad that it took 25 years of reading to see someone who resembled me and my reality in books. 25 years. Sit on that for a minute.

The reason this book resonated with me was not just because, Ifemelu the protagonist, was a dark skinned African woman, but because this was the first time I saw a contemporary African woman centred in books. From a girl growing up in a middle-class African family, one who fails, dusts off and gets up so many times, falling in love, making mistakes, succeeding and wanting so so much more out of life. A complex and nuanced African woman with agency who defied the stereotypical and archetypical description of an African woman.

I took such pride in this book. I advocated for it fiercely and shared it with as many people as I could. There’s something about how this book made me feel seen and validated. It gave me permission to exist as I AM. I wanted this feeling to last and so I set out to find even more books that would inspire the same. This set me on the path I am currently on, advocating for readership of literature from the continent.

Back to the cover – I understand that this cover is marketed to a primarily white/European audience and therein lies the problem. There has been a continued erasure of dark skinned black women in mainstream media where Black is now almost equal to Biracial or racially ambiguous or very fair skinned black. And this is everywhere you look – Black shows will have an all biracial/racially ambiguous cast, music videos will only have fair skinned women as stars, advertisements will feature fairer skinned people and increasingly, this is becoming the mainstream representation of Black - A ‘Black Lite’ that is deemed less threatening or more appealing. And as usual, darker skinned black women are relegated to the back burner – as the help, never the star.

This kind of erasure and colourism is brutal for dark skinned black women and girls because it makes you feel unseen, unheard, small, undeserving, unworthy, ugly. It distorts how you see yourself and how big you think you can dream and the heights you can reach because some dreams are too big and out of reach for you.

“The voice of a Black woman should always be HERSELF ...

No edits - no erasure - no pressure - no expectations - no additions - no intruders”

― Malebo Sephodi

On the cover of this Italian edition, the woman has freckles on her face, has hair whose curl pattern is very typical biracial and has facial features that are deemed ‘softer’. None of the characters in this book are presented in this manner. Ifemelu was a dark skinned black African woman with kinky hair.

I must pause here and ask, Isn’t this also a disservice to white people reading Americanah? Did the publisher assume that the white readers does not have the breadth to visualise dark skinned women as intended by the book? Did they assume that for white people to be empathetic, characters have to look like them or at least as close as possible? And so this idea is to “Whiten” characters so make them more palatable for white audiences? This just goes to show how little faith these publishers had in their readers.

Picking up this book, it sets you up for the kind of ‘Black’ you expect to encounter in the story. And because as readers we visualise and then create characters in our head as we read, placing this woman on the cover psychologically tricks you into creating Ifemelu or other female characters in this way – as light skinned, racially ambiguous or biracial, and because the book also intensely focuses on black hair - as women with a typical biracial curl pattern. The Ifemelu Chimamanda wrote about becomes distorted in the reader’s mind and is replaced by this cover girl.

This is a very intentional (and wrong) kind of erasure and it’s very gutting. This framing and distortion goes against the very thing this book is about – giving agency to a black woman and allowing her to exist as a complex, nuanced individual in a world that continually refuses to acknowledge her existence. It attempts to rob us of this agency. I reject it so vehemently.