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"A young woman from Nigeria leaves behind her home and her first love to start a new life in America, only to find her dreams are not all she expected"--
Americanah is about a Nigerian woman who moves to the United States for college, separating from her boyfriend Obinze. After 15 years in the US she comes back to Nigeria and has to grapple with the changes in herself as she tries to reconnect with Obinze, who has his own life to deal with following his own brief expatriate experience in London. Supposedly a sweeping love story, this is actually a novel of ideas about race and racism, nationalism, and identity.
I absolutely loved the first half, which covers Ifemelu's secondary schooling in Nigeria and the early years of her move to the United States. In this part, she is ambitious, curious, striving, and likable. But as she succeeds in America, she becomes increasingly self-important, inflexible, snooty, and even cruel. Maybe there is a message in there, but I don't think it was the one intended. When she returns to Nigeria, she brings all these negative qualities with her, so it's not a matter of finding the right place to "be herself." My first major issue with the book was that the character's arc is disappointing. I think we are supposed to see her as strong, blunt, and passionate, growing to be more herself over the course of the book, more confident. But she shows inability to learn from her experiences and increasingly comes off as rigid, rude, and judgmental.
Unfortunately from a plot perspective, the book also gets weaker in the second half. The powerful ideas about race and racism are not an organic part of the plot but are shoehorned in as excerpts from Ifemelu's blog posts and/or rambling conversations that take place at dinners and "salons" held by various east coast American intellectuals, none of whom are individuated. It feels like a cast of hundreds, and they each get to come in and say their 2 lines, and then disappear, never to be heard from again. This is disappointing, and though the ideas were interesting, the method of incorporating them into the story was not. (Also, I feel that maybe these conversations were fresher and more surprising ten years ago when this book came out? But that's my fault for waiting this long to read the book, not Adichie's.)
And finally, without sharing any spoilers, I'll just say that I hated the ending and am firmly on Team Kosi. ( )
Excellent narration for this audiobook. An engaging story about a Nigerian woman who moves to America. It's one of those stories where you really want the characters to succeed and be happy. Do they? Not telling. ( )
Masterful book. Ms. Adichie brings a fresh perspective to race and racism in America narrated through the perspective of a Nigerian emigre first learning what it is to be black. The story is much more than that - a love story as well - but it nevertheless has new observations (to me, a way) I found compelling and thought-provoking. ( )
This was recommended to me by both my regular reading friends and by a Nigerian co-worker and I'm glad they steered me towards this book.
The main story is about the experience of a Nigerian immigrant to America both here and later when she returns to Nigeria. This part of the novel I found extremely entertaining and just like any other good novel.
Interspersed with the story are excerpts from the protagonist's blog on race in America. The blog sections were amazing and uncomfortable in a way all together different from the main novel. While the main story was just a story the blog posts hammered home some uncomfortable truths about race and class that are difficult to read as a white American. It is hard to accept that the things in the blog are true while knowing deep down that they are. It forced me to consider things that otherwise would never cross my mind. I hope that reading these things has changed me and will help change others and maybe make the world more even.
The stories have shifted, too. Nowadays, there’s little angsting about national identity in a post-colonial context or, for that matter, over catastrophe and want. Instead, a bevy of young Africans are shaping the future of fiction, reportage and critique on their continent, and perhaps well beyond.
“It’s beyond an evolution — it’s a revolution,” says Nigerian-American Ikhide Ikheloa, a critic and prominent observer of the scene.
It may have begun in 2003, when Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published — and not just by an American publisher but by a Nigerian one, too. By now, Adichie is the still-young doyenne of the contemporary African lit scene. Her recent novel, Americanah, found a perch on the New York Times list of top 10 novels of 2013 — just weeks before Beyoncé sampled one of Adichie’s TED talks on her new album.
But what makes the book such a good read—despite an anticlimactic ending—is that it's not meant as a cultural criticism, but more as a series of rich observations.
“Americanah” examines blackness in America, Nigeria and Britain, but it’s also a steady-handed dissection of the universal human experience — a platitude made fresh by the accuracy of Adichie’s observations.
This book is for our next generation, nda na-abia n'iru: Toks, Chisom, Amaka,
Chinedum, Kamsiyonna and Arinze
For my wonderful father in this, his eightieth year
And, as always, for Ivara.
First words
Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and Ifemelu like the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately shops and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly.
Quotations
...her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.
How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives that we have imagined.
She was taking two sides at once, to please everyone; she always chose peace over truth, was always eager to conform.
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.
She liked how he wore their relationship so boldly, like a brightly colored shirt. Sometimes she worried that she was too happy. She would sink into moodiness, and snap at Obinze, or be distant. And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though looking for an opening to fly away.
Depression was what happened to Americans, with their self-absolving need to turn everything into an illness.
But he might be satisfied with suggestiveness alone; he would flirt outrageously but not do more, because an affair would require some effort and he was the kind of man who took but did not give.
Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking academese instead of English and they don't really know what's happening in the real world.
There was something in him, lighter than ego but darker than insecurity, that needed constant buffing, polishing, waxing.
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 choice and certainty.
Nathan had told her, some months earlier, in a voice filled with hauteur, that he did not read any fiction published after 1930. "It all went downhill after the thirties," he said.
"You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy."
Race matters because of racism. And racism is absurd because it's about how you look. Not about the blood you have. It's about the shade of your skin and the shape of your nose and the kink of your hair.
"One of the things I've learned is that everybody in this country has the mentality of scarcity. We imagine that even the things that are not scarce are scarce. And it breeds a kind of desperation in everybody. Even the wealthy."
But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of the past.
She had thought of them as "big," because one of the first things her friend Ginika told her was that "fat" in America was a bad word, heaving with moral judgment like "stupid" or "bastard," and not a mere description like "short" or "tall."
She had read many of them, because he recommended them, but they were like cotton candy that so easily evaporated from her tongue's memory.
He was no longer sure, he had in fact never been sure, whether he liked his life because he really did or whether he liked it because he was supposed to.
There was something immodest about her modesty: it announced itself.
For months, the air in their flat was like cracked glass.
Ifemelu imagined the writers, Nigerians in bleak houses in America, their lives deadened by work, nursing their careful savings throughout the year so that they could visit home in December for a week, when they would arrive bearing suitcases of shoes and clothes and cheap watches, and see, in the eyes of their relatives, brightly burnished images of themselves. Afterwards they would return to America to fight on the Internet over their mythologies of home, because home was now a blurred place between here and there, and at least online they could ignore the awareness of how inconsequential they had become.
They said "soon" to each other often, and "soon" gave their plan the weight of something real.
Sometimes, while having a conversation, it would occur to Ifemelu that Aunty Uju had deliberately left behind something of herself, something essential, in a distant and forgotten place.
Ifemelu saw women on the sidewalks going to lunch from work, wearing sneakers, proof of their American preference for comfort over elegance, and she saw young couples clutching each other, kissing from time to time as if they feared that, if they unclasped their hands, their love would dissolve, melt into nothingness.
In her honors history seminar, Professor Moore, a tiny, tentative woman with the emotionally malnourished look of someone who did not have friends, showed some scenes from Roots, the images bright on the board of the darkened classroom.
Ifemelu sensed, between them, the presence of spiky thorns floating in the air.
They reminded Ifemelu of television commercials, of people whose lives were lived always in flattering light, whose messes were still aesthetically pleasing.
He looked people in the eye not because he was interested in them but because he knew it made them feel that he was interested in them.
But Kimberly's unhappiness was inward, unacknowledged, shielded by her desire for things to be as they should, and also by hope: she believed in other people's happiness because it meant that she, too, might one day have it. Laura's unhappiness was different, spiky, she wished that everyone around her were unhappy because she had convinced herself that she would always be.
It had become a routine of Ifemelu's visits: Aunty Uju collected all her dissatisfactions in a silk purse, nursing them, polishing them, and then on the Saturday of Ifemelu's visit, while Bartholomew was out and Dike was upstairs, she would spill them out on the table, and turn each one this way and that, to catch the light.
He talked about himself with such gusto, as though determined to tell her everything there was to know, and all at once.
Ifemelu sometimes sensed underneath the well-oiled sequences of Kimberly's life, a flash of regret not only for things she longed for in the present but for things she had longed for in the past.
In London, night came too soon, it hung in the morning air like a threat, and then in the afternoon a blue-gray dusk descended, and the Victorian buildings all wore a mournful air.
When Shan walked into a room, all the air disappeared.
Their mutual dislike was a smoldering, stalking leopard in the room.
"The idea of interviewing someone and writing a profile is judgmental," Ifemelu said. "It's not about the subject. It's about what the interviewer makes of the subject."
Lagos became a gentler version of itself, and the people dressed in their bright church clothes looked, from far away, like flowers in the wind.
Back home, she heard the hollowness of her steps as she walked from bedroom to living room to verandah and then back again.
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.
"I realized I could buy America, and it lost its shine."
She should bring it up, she owed him that, but a wordless fear had seized her, a fear of breaking delicate things.
"When I started in real estate, I considered renovating old houses instead of tearing them down, but it didn't make sense. Nigerians don't buy houses because they're old. A renovated two-hundred-year-old mill granary, you know, the kind of thing Europeans like. It doesn't work here at all. But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past."
She would not cry, it was ridiculous to cry after so long, but her eyes were filling with tears and there was a boulder in her chest and a stinging in her throat. The tears felt itchy. She made no sound. He took her hand in his, both clasped on the table, and between them silence grew, an ancient silence that they both knew. She was inside this silence and she was safe.
...who had run for Governor in the last elections, had lost, and as all losing politicians did, had gone to court to challenge the results.
"A young woman from Nigeria leaves behind her home and her first love to start a new life in America, only to find her dreams are not all she expected"--
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Book description
As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are leaving the country if they can. Ifemelu - beautiful, self-assured - departs for America to study. She experiences defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and friendships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race.
Obinze - the quiet, thoughtful son of a professor - had hoped to join her, but post 9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Years later, he is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. But when Ifemelu decides to return home, she and Obinze will face the toughest decisions of their lives.
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3
I absolutely loved the first half, which covers Ifemelu's secondary schooling in Nigeria and the early years of her move to the United States. In this part, she is ambitious, curious, striving, and likable. But as she succeeds in America, she becomes increasingly self-important, inflexible, snooty, and even cruel. Maybe there is a message in there, but I don't think it was the one intended. When she returns to Nigeria, she brings all these negative qualities with her, so it's not a matter of finding the right place to "be herself." My first major issue with the book was that the character's arc is disappointing. I think we are supposed to see her as strong, blunt, and passionate, growing to be more herself over the course of the book, more confident. But she shows inability to learn from her experiences and increasingly comes off as rigid, rude, and judgmental.
Unfortunately from a plot perspective, the book also gets weaker in the second half. The powerful ideas about race and racism are not an organic part of the plot but are shoehorned in as excerpts from Ifemelu's blog posts and/or rambling conversations that take place at dinners and "salons" held by various east coast American intellectuals, none of whom are individuated. It feels like a cast of hundreds, and they each get to come in and say their 2 lines, and then disappear, never to be heard from again. This is disappointing, and though the ideas were interesting, the method of incorporating them into the story was not. (Also, I feel that maybe these conversations were fresher and more surprising ten years ago when this book came out? But that's my fault for waiting this long to read the book, not Adichie's.)
And finally, without sharing any spoilers, I'll just say that I hated the ending and am firmly on Team Kosi. (