A Short-Meditation on Two Characters

I want to talk about two characters that's been on my mind lately. The title character Sula and the protagonist of Americanah, Ifemelu. 

I read Americanah before I read Sula, but I am curious of how I would feel about the books had I read them in reverse. Sula is an interesting play at the Ubermensch character in literature because it is a black woman as oppose to a white man. Sula is, as Toni Morrison wrote about her, "quintessentially black, metaphysically black which is not melanin and certainly not unquestioning fidelity to the tribe. She is New World Black and New World woman extracting choice from choiclessness." She goes on and says she represents "a modernity that overturns prewar [WWI] definitions, ushers in the Jazz Age (an age defined by Afro-American art & culture), and requires new kinds of intelligences to define oneself." I love that last phrase. She shakes up the black neighborhood where she lives and after her death her legacy is assimilated and gradually phased-out as time passes.

Ifemelu, then, is like the interesting inheritor of this legacy. She's not from the same time or place as Sula, but she has all of the spiritual ingredients and since we know that Ifemelu reads Toni Morrison novels, we can only speculate the influence in-universe. But the difference is where Sula is an Ubermensch respecting no truth but the one she sets or creates, Ifemelu is a Byronic Hero—something that I wasn't expecting to see in a contemporary novel. She goes back and forth between being Sula and Childe Harold. She's not the most like able character in the novel, but she is certainly the most fascinating. Equally fascinating is how Black women across the Diaspora react to her—I'm always intrigued by it. The idea of this character being at once so noble, hypocritical, caring, and heartless is something to watch. Folks are often disagreeing not on how much they like Ifemelu, but how much they dislike her.

In the end, both of these characters are fascinating to watch though I would be weary of getting mixed-up with either of them on a personal-level. By convention we cheer for Nel and
Obinze, but the respective authors are asking us--or rather making us question why we like those two and not their more socially destructive counterparts.