What is the difference between an African-American and an American-African? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's new novel Americanah gives you much fodder for thought if you have never stopped to think about such detailed distinctions on your own.
Although the book tells the story about the love and lives of its two central characters Ifemelu and Obinze, Americanah is essentially a book about race, the way race is perceived and the way it exists in today's modern and globalised world.
Ifemelu and Obinze meet in high school and fall head over heels in love. They come from very different backgrounds. Ifemelu's father is a former civil servant out of work and her mother is a middle class woman blinded by her prejudicial faith in God and His miracles. She encompasses everything that happens around her in the light of the lord, creating explanations that only serve her deep faith, without much touch with reality.
This is modern day Nigeria in the eighties where the military reign seeps into everyday life and Ifemelu's mother changes her church to one which is supported by the generals. When her husband's distant cousin Uju (who has come from a small village to live with them in Lagos) decides to become the kept woman of a married, much older general, Ifemelu's mother terms it a 'miracle of God'.
Here Ifemelu grows up, with a general distrust for the obvious. Right in the beginning of the story, Adichie makes it clear that Ifemelu and Obinze are not easily bought into the conventional. They ask, prod and try to find their own ways to deal with things around them.
When the general is killed, Aunt Uju manages to cross continents to make her way to the USA with the general's illegitimate son. Ifemelu too finds herself in the USA soon thereafter, winning a scholarship for higher studies. The harrowing experiences that follow are the making of Ifemelu. All her experience or idea about the land of opportunities is from such glossy TV shows as the Cosby Show. Facing a reality that is nothing like the obscure shiny images in her mind, Ifemelu eventually lands on her feet, but not before she manages to destroy her now long distance relationship with Obinze.
Ifemelu's self-consciousness and awkwardness turn into pride; she also finds herself distancing herself from her own kind who she feels are too desperate to blend in, like her Aunt Uju. Someone who once appeared full of practicality and wisdom and smartness now stinks of desperation. Uju herself faces the harsh reality of earning a livelihood instead of being kept by someone.
Adichie very eloquently describes this falling out between Ifemelu and her once mentor as Uju tries to blend into being a American. Ifemelu finds a long term relationship with a white boy and discovers the depths of patronising from others on issues of race and colour. White American women, almost clueless about how to deal with a dark skinned girl, call her a 'beautiful woman', in tones that actually mean 'ordinary-looking black woman.'
Adichie weaves this racial awakening of Ifemelu through a subtle input of events that expose the protagonist to her own identity. Adichie's characters are not all black, they are more multi coloured so to speak. They are in fact 'sable' or 'gingerbread' or 'caramel'. At one point Adichie describes one coloured woman as someone with 'skin so dark it has an undertone of blueberries.'
Ifemelu deals with her increasing frustrations through her blog titled "Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black". She eventually wins a fellowship at Princeton, something Adichie herself won. The writer has said that many of Ifemelu's experiences are her own.
Meanwhile, Obinze finds himself in the UK but ends up as an illegal immigrant. His experiences are really a world away from Ifemelu's more sophisticated problems with finding respect. Obinze is just looking for a day he can feel 'free' as he walks down the streets of London or Essex, cleaning toilets and putting up with crude racial encounters as he tries to make it on his own.
Chimamanda Adichie is a wonderful observer of human nature, of qualities and the finer, grainier, subtle things that become the reasons for a person to become who he becomes. She captures human interactions superbly in this book. Ifemelu's extended visit to a New Jersey hair salon, where each hairdresser is justifiably 'correct' in the way she sees America as opposed to Ifemelu's own, is one of the first and most captivating such scenes in Americanah. African hair itself represents a political statement as the writer has said in most of her interviews. Promoting this book takes up some space in explaining how deep the roots of racial treatment has seeped into people's cultures.
Ifemelu feels free after she stops hiding her Nigerian accent under an American one. She refuses to straighten her hair even when African-Americans ask her, 'You ever wonder why he likes you looking all jungle like that?" on observing her long term relationship with a white man.
Perhaps it is this dignity and pride in her own ethnicity which is also her authenticity that allows Ifemelu to survive. Obinze struggles and fails and is shortly deported back to Lagos.
Eventually, though, Obinze thrives in his own country, gets married to a high aspiring woman and again gets caught up between the values of wanting to be 'his own' or a 'wanna-be'. Ifemelu also returns to Nigeria and the rest of the novel very predictably returns to the unfinished love story between the two main protagonists. However, here too it is the writer's strong story telling capability that shows the reader the world that Nigeria is; the reason why Ifemelu or Obinze are who they are. The proud, home grown generation has no time for such nonsense as 'Americanahs' who seem to be returning home to just belittle and deride their own kind.
Americanah is not just a simple novel. It deals with issues. It is a story of the new world, where immigrants are of a new kind. Ifemelu or Obinze are not the old world sixties' or seventies' immigrants; they are smart, capable, intelligent and educated middle class protagonists, who are forced to emigrate not because of ambition, or conflict or poverty but by "the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness".
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2006 Orange Prize winner Half of a Yellow Sun was a complex book about the experiences of Igbo civilians during the Biafran war. The story was about history and politics and people. In Americanah, Adichie subtly tones her writing down one notch to deal with something that is far more complex than a war and history - she deals with identity and race in the modern age while explaining the present day socio-cultural and political background that makes people who they are.
However sudden or rushed, the ending of the novel feels as if it is emphatic, rich, real, perceptive and of course, hugely entertaining.
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From the Publisher
About the author
Looking at America through the lens of an educated and informed Nigerian woman
'Americanah' is a kind of snide term directed to, and sometimes at, Nigerians who have spent time living in America before returning, with an assumed superiority complex. The deeply passionate university sweethearts Ifemelu and her boyfriend Obinze, like many of their peers always had their eyes on migrating to the West, as they saw scant opportunity under the military ruled Nigeria. With alternate chapters but very much focusing on Ifemelu we follow their time in the West, she in the United States where she gets to feel 'Black' (= other) for the first time; and him in UK struggling to get papers so that he can stay and prosper legally. But frankly this book is all about Ifemelu for me, already one of my fave characters in fiction, so well realised, so awe inspiring yet so authentic feeling. I love everything about this book as it tells the reader how middle class Africans (in this case Nigerians) see the world, how essentially different they are, or how different their condition is to African-Americans and Caribbean peoples. This is very splendidly written; includes multiple authentic characterisations of people from numerous backgrounds; has a super sound interpretation of even the minutiae in the United States, the UK and Nigeria; and as ever Adichie captures the intricacies of modern relationship dynamics so much better than most of her peers, but... But what pushes this work in to the genius sphere is how it uses looking at race through the lens of a Nigerian in America, to really truly talk about race, really getting into it, and it's done so powerfully because it's around the culture shock of a Nigerian coming across systematic and widespread anti-Blackness for the first time...where for the first time in her life she could classify herself as 'Black'. It is also has interesting and educational(!) snippets on Black hair, skin tones, American racial hierarchy and bi-racial relationships; as well as post 9-11 America, post-military rule capitalist Nigeria, the Liberal elite; diversity programmes, blogging and the coming of Obama; and if that wasn't enough the entire book is written around the idea of 'true love' and the compromises we make in life and/or with ourselves to grasp/deny it? In case you need me to spell it out, this is a Five Star Read
Top reviews from United Kingdom
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 April 2013
Top reviews from other countries
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Cliente KindleReviewed in Brazil on 8 August 2024
Envolve, emociona e faz refletir.
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MelanieReviewed in Germany on 4 July 2021
Eine Liebesgeschichte und ein kulturell unglaublich interessantes Buch in einem
