Discuss how hair styles symbolise and reflect identity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘Americanah’

The tight curls of natural African hair are deemed somehow inferior to the long, straight locks of white American women. The narrator has to book a very long appointment to have her hair extensions and intricate plaits created. She writes a blog about her struggle to come to terms with and accept the way her hair naturally grows.Growing up in Nigeria she didn’t interrogate her blackness, but after arriving in America she has to ‘perform’ her identity and her blackness to the satisfaction of the black people she meets AND contrastingly, to satisfy the white people also. By the end of the book she returns to Nigeria and wears her hair naturally, abandoning the elaborate hairstyles that she felt compelled to wear in the USA. This act mirrors her acceptance of herself without a need to perform her identity to others.