Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Title: Americanah
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Published: 2013
Type: Fiction
Pages: 588
“The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable.”
In Brief:
Another amazing book by Adichie – I was obviously way behind the hype, but it still lived up to everything. Incredible characters/relationships, engrossing plot, incisive insight into the African immigrant experience. Loved it just as much as Half of a Yellow Sun.
Rating: 4.7
Synopsis:
“Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion—for each other and for their homeland.”
Where I’m At:
It’s been a theme – I read this book in the summer, at the height of recent racial tensions in the US. I was (and am) trying to listen more actively to Black voices, to understand their experiences and my role. This book, with its explicit examination of what it means to be Black in America, was particularly timely.
I’ve lived in America, as a white person, pretty much my entire life. That said, this book sort of reminded me of the time I lived in the Caribbean. While there, my whiteness and its meaning was front and center – not to say I hadn’t thought about it before, but now it was inescapable. Obviously, the two are very different – despite being a “minority,” the power of my whiteness was apparent when I was abroad, while Ifemelu and Obinze face struggles due to the color of their skin. But I could also relate to the strange feeling of being thrown into an entirely different culture, where you clearly don’t belong, and where the world just feels somewhat upside-down. Early in her time in America, one of Ifemelu’s friends comments:
“You know at home when somebody tells you that you lost weight, it means something bad. But here somebody tells you that you lost weight, and you say thank you. It’s just different here.”
I sort of laughed and circled the paragraph, remembering how particularly lost and lonely I felt in St. Vincent on the near-daily comments on my weight from my community. Ah, Miss, you look so thin! or Miss, you been eating a lot? I never knew what was good or bad, never knew how to respond.
I also read Americanah in the beginnings of a new relationship, which probably made me especially partial to the romance in it. Obinze reminded me of my new partner – and I know that when you have a crush everything makes you think of that person, but it still made me like the character more than I might’ve otherwise. My partner and Obinze share a sort of understated confidence, a mannerism that’s gentle and intelligent and wryly funny. It’s admittedly not the type of man I’ve previously been drawn to, but I’ve found it happy and warm and frankly exciting. So I felt like I really understood the attraction, rooted for Obinze and Ifemelu’s relationship as I cautiously explored my own.
Getting Into it:
This book is so many things. It’s a romance, it’s a Bildungsroman. It’s about racism, immigration, internet culture, politically-correct intellectualism, mental health, class, Blackness in America, the UK, Nigeria. I could go on, and won’t be able to cover it all. Yet it’s all woven together so tightly and flawlessly you have to take a step back to recognize all the different things that it covers, that blend together yet speak out loudly. You cannot help but be in awe of Adichie. I’ve said it before, but she’s one of the best writers of this time. On my own list, she’s up there with Whitehead, Gyasi, and Lahiri.
Anyways. I’ll start with the romance, because I’m cheesy and love a good love story. One thing that struck me was how incredibly Adichie was able to describe the chemistry between Obinze and Ifemelu. I don’t think that’s easy to do in words. When I think of chemistry, I think of actors on a screen – Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar Jones as Connell and Marianne in Normal People, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Andrew Scott as Fleabag and the Hot Priest in Fleabag, Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh as Villanelle and Eve in Killing Eve, etc. But just the way Adichie describes the interactions between Ifemelu and Obinze made me breathless:
There was a moment, a caving of the blue sky, an inertia of stillness, when neither of them knew what to do, he walking towards her, she standing there squinting, and then he was upon her and they hugged.
The world stops when they see each other. Yet Adichie puts it in a way that’s much more visceral, much less cliche.
And the flirting! Dialogue is hard on its own, yet Adichie somehow manages to convey the rapid-fire music of flirtation between two people with undeniable chemistry, the delicate balance of wit and flattery and bravado and teasing and fun. (Side note: I love flirting.)
Finally, their relationship was just… good. It wasn’t easy by any means, they each hurt each other in different ways, yet it maintained a wholesomeness that made my heart ache. The way they always thought of each other, always returned to each other, always supported and wanted the best for each other.
She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size... It seemed so natural, to talk to him about odd things. She had never done that before. The trust, so sudden and yet so complete, and the intimacy, frightened her.. But now she could think only of all the things she yet wanted to tell him, wanted to do with him.
They are comfortable with each other, complete. They make each other better. But again, without the cliche.
I’ll drag myself away from the romance and get to the heavier stuff, namely race and immigration. As with other books, I don’t feel that I’m in a position to make a critique, and I think Adichie’s writing speaks best for itself (in other words: read the book). But she takes a really detailed, nuanced look at the differences (and lack thereof) between being African-American, and a Non-American Black in America, in a way that I hadn’t honestly thought much about. She explores Ifemelu’s experiences and reactions in a way that feels real, not subtle but also not melodramatic, a buildup of interactions big and small. Ifemelu is called on in class and expected to speak for all Black people. Her hair is badly damaged when trying to relax it. She struggles with dating a white man. In a small moment that moved me nearly to tears, she decides to start speaking with an American accent:
Ifemelu shrank. In that strained, still second when her eyes met Cristina Tomas’s before she took the forms, she shrank., She shrank like a dried leaf. She had spoken English all her life, led the debating society in secondary school, and always thought the American twang inchoate; she should not have cowered and shrunk, but she did. And in the following weeks, as autumn’s coolness descended, she began to practice an American accent.
Ifemelu later decides to drop her American accent, which made me glad, but I would have understood if she didn’t. Overall, her time in America is a mix of misery and success, in a way that felt pleasingly balanced, a counter to the typical immigrant narrative where you try hard, achieve the American Dream, and are forever grateful. She doesn’t find success easily, nor does she struggle forever. She doesn’t return to Nigeria because she couldn’t make it, she just wanted to.
There is also a comparison of Ifemelu’s experience in America and Obinze’s in the UK, but I found that to be a bit lopsided. Perhaps I was biased towards Ifemelu as a woman, and because her American setting was more familiar/pertinent to me, but I found Obinze’s chapters and the exploration of his experiences in the UK much less insightful and compelling. I did think his chapters were revealing for bluntly exploring the way he and Ifemelu are “different” immigrants compared to those in popular imagining.
Alexa and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for for choice and certainty.
Lastly, I have to praise Adichie for her sheer writing prowess. She’s both tart and empathetic, always deeply self-aware. While in America, Ifemelu becomes famous for writing a blog about race, which then becomes a useful tool for Adichie to say her point directly, without being preachy and while still focusing on the characters. A couple of examples:
If you’re telling a non-black person about something racist that happened to you, make sure you are not bitter. Don’t complain. Be forgiving. If possible, make it funny. Most of all, do not be angry. Black people are not supposed to be angry about racism. Otherwise you get no sympathy. This applies only for white liberals, by the way. Don’t even bother telling a white conservative about anything racist that happened to you. Because the conservative will tell you that YOU are the real racist and your mouth will hang open in confusion.
Of course we’re all prejudiced… but racism is about the power of a group and in America it’s white folks who have that power. How? Well, white folks don’t get treated like shit in upper-class African-American communities and white folks don’t get denied bank loans or mortgages precisely because they are white and black juries don’t give white criminals worse sentences than black criminals for the same crime and black police officers don’t stop white folk for driving while white and black companies don’t choose not to hire somebody because their name sounds white and black teachers don’t tell white kids that they’re not smart enough to be doctors and black politicians don’t try some tricks to reduce the voting power of white folks through gerrymandering and advertising agencies don't say they can’t use white models to advertise glamorous products because they are not considered “aspirational” by the “mainstream.
Adichie’s descriptions are also just glorious, quick and astute and somehow visceral. Another couple of examples:
“[They were] sunny and wealthy people who existed on the glimmering surface of things.”
His was the coiled, urgent restlessness of a person who believed that fate hd mistakenly allotted him a place below his true destiny.
The only criticisms I can really give is that 1) I still stand by my less-than-400 rule. There were some extra scenes that didn’t add much to the narrative, and as tight as it was, they could have been cut. 2) Adichie did a funny thing with timeline, like Half of a Yellow Sun, which I didn’t find very necessary. Much of the story is told in a flashback as Ifemelu gets her hair done before returning to Nigeria, which sort of creates a forced foreshadowing – we know she and Obinze broke up but how? What happened? I get the need for suspense, but I think the story was good enough that it could have just been told straight, and it would’ve saved some confusion.
I absolutely recommend this book, if it wasn’t obvious. I don’t think my words can do it justice, and Adichie deserves all the praise in the world.
