When a Dream Turns into a Nightmare: Failed ‘Americano’ Masculinities in Unoma Nguemo Azuah’s Edible Bones and Ike Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale

Abstract

This article offers a close reading of Unoma Nguemo Azuah’s Edible Bones (2012) and Ike Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale (2000), illustrating that male Nigerian immigrants presented in the text reconfigure and renegotiate their masculine identities in relation to the desire to achieve the American Dream. Yet, as the text highlights, their settlement in America often belies that dream. Instead, subtle race structures function to impose setbacks that undermine and curtail their efforts to achieve a successful performativity of immigrant masculinity. Conversely, they experience ruptures in their previous understanding of sexuality and masculinity. Such ruptures are undoubtedly precipitated through arduous conscious and unconscious processes of readjustment to the host culture and its socio-economic environment. In this new realignment of masculinities, pre-immigrant masculine and sexual codes coalesce with race, African culture and the American class stratum to engender a masculine identity crisis and sometimes ignominious returns to Nigeria.