Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fast Facts
- One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year
- 496 pages, hefty but still impossible to put down
- Like Ifemelu, the protagonist, Adichie grew up in Nigeria
- I will never look at getting my hair done the same way again
Premise
The novel starts in the present in Princeton, New Jersey, where the protagonist, Ifemelu, is planning to go back to Nigeria after over a decade in America. Ifemelu gets her hair done at an African beauty parlor, and after a series of flashbacks, and hundreds of pages, we seem to keep ending up at the salon - an ode to the hours spent and pain endured by many black women to style their hair.
(Aside - I went with my friend Mel once to get her hair braided. Meaning, I stayed with Mel for a few minutes, then went shopping and ate multiple meals, and came back, and her beautiful braids STILL weren't done. This was a mind-boggling lesson in patience to me, and I feel shame when I think that I can barely manage to get an up-keep 15-minute haircut every 6 months.)
Anyhow, we learn about Ifemelu's relatively rosy and privileged childhood in Nigeria - her religious mother, her government servant father who suffers a difficult layoff, her aunt's precarious affair with an army official known as The General. And, most importantly, the beginning of her love affair with Obinze, the boy everyone in high school loved.
Ifemelu and Obinze's stories eventually split. During college, after a series of teacher strikes that constantly closed universities in Nigeria, Ifemelu is able to obtain a student visa and moves to Brooklyn, and then Philadelphia, and then Baltimore, and finally to Princeton for her studies and (fantastically told) relationships. (I still want to meet her red-headed boyfriend, Curt.)
Meanwhile, Obinze, who had always been obsessed with American literature and life, was denied an American visa due to terrorist concerns, and spends some time in England. Ifemelu and Obinze's experiences overseas show a cruel reality for immigrants in America and England, even those with huge financial and educational advantages. This window into immigrant life was eye-opening, fascinating, and disturbing to me.
Overall, the plot is well-paced and throughout the novel, you're faced with the dangling carrot presented in the beginning: will the star-crossed lovers reunite? Where will Ifemelu ultimately call "home"?
(Aside - I went with my friend Mel once to get her hair braided. Meaning, I stayed with Mel for a few minutes, then went shopping and ate multiple meals, and came back, and her beautiful braids STILL weren't done. This was a mind-boggling lesson in patience to me, and I feel shame when I think that I can barely manage to get an up-keep 15-minute haircut every 6 months.)
Anyhow, we learn about Ifemelu's relatively rosy and privileged childhood in Nigeria - her religious mother, her government servant father who suffers a difficult layoff, her aunt's precarious affair with an army official known as The General. And, most importantly, the beginning of her love affair with Obinze, the boy everyone in high school loved.
Ifemelu and Obinze's stories eventually split. During college, after a series of teacher strikes that constantly closed universities in Nigeria, Ifemelu is able to obtain a student visa and moves to Brooklyn, and then Philadelphia, and then Baltimore, and finally to Princeton for her studies and (fantastically told) relationships. (I still want to meet her red-headed boyfriend, Curt.)
Meanwhile, Obinze, who had always been obsessed with American literature and life, was denied an American visa due to terrorist concerns, and spends some time in England. Ifemelu and Obinze's experiences overseas show a cruel reality for immigrants in America and England, even those with huge financial and educational advantages. This window into immigrant life was eye-opening, fascinating, and disturbing to me.
Overall, the plot is well-paced and throughout the novel, you're faced with the dangling carrot presented in the beginning: will the star-crossed lovers reunite? Where will Ifemelu ultimately call "home"?
Love me a good love story
I can't resist a good love story, and as love stories go, Americanah is so, so great. I don't want to short-change Adichie, who took on serious racial identity questions, problems, and experiences, and somehow taught a wide breadth of lessons on being black in America without sounding cliche, tired, preachy, or pedantic. But the thing that kept me reading, obsessively, with the final sprint in bed on a Saturday till 3pm because I hadn't finished yet and I just had to, was finding out how Ifemelu's Obinze story would end. You can't help but root for these characters individually, but what you really want is for them to be together at all costs, because it's hard to think of a couple as sexy and two-halves-of-a-whole as these two.
Nitpicking
Despite how much I loved the book, I have to admit that Adichie was pedantic sometimes. One of Ifemelu's lovers, Blaine, is a Yale professor with the preachiest group of friends and family ever, and sometimes their rants on race were about as subtle as a club over the head. This can be forgiven, given how enjoyable it was to learn about Ifemelu's experiences and to read her blog entries on race that were delivered with more aplomb.
If you could have cut out the Blaine relationship entirely, really, and in particular their insufferable dinner parties with his horrible sister, the book would have been even better, in my opinion. Being with Blaine gives Adichie an outlet to talk about what Obama meant to her characters, and most importantly, an African-American counterpoint to Ifemelu's African-in-America views. And having had an annoying ex-boyfriend, I suppose their irritaitng relationship made Ifemelu a fuller and more real person to me. But good lord, I hoped with every page turn that they would break up!
If you could have cut out the Blaine relationship entirely, really, and in particular their insufferable dinner parties with his horrible sister, the book would have been even better, in my opinion. Being with Blaine gives Adichie an outlet to talk about what Obama meant to her characters, and most importantly, an African-American counterpoint to Ifemelu's African-in-America views. And having had an annoying ex-boyfriend, I suppose their irritaitng relationship made Ifemelu a fuller and more real person to me. But good lord, I hoped with every page turn that they would break up!
Ifemelu, can I be your clueless but adoring white friend?
I have seen a lot of films and articles and media analysis delving into the subject of what it means to be African American in this country, but this novel is driven by a different, but related, topic: what it means to be an African immigrant, seeking love and stability in America and England.
I've never been to Africa, and my knowledge of regional conflict there and the immigrant experience is limited to representing a client from Guinea, and asking my friend Dani, who is doing public health work in Liberia, a thousand questions. Despite my narrow perspective, one of this novel's biggest achievements is that I still couldn't help but feel that its protagonist, Ifemelu, was so very relatable.
Ifemelu writes a blog called "Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known As Negroes) by a Non-American Black" - by turns hilarious, scathing, educational, and like its title, a mouthful. One of the best entries focuses on her clueless but adoring white friends, and having just finished this novel, I would love to count myself among these friends - I'm already deeply missing spending time with Ifemelu.
I've never been to Africa, and my knowledge of regional conflict there and the immigrant experience is limited to representing a client from Guinea, and asking my friend Dani, who is doing public health work in Liberia, a thousand questions. Despite my narrow perspective, one of this novel's biggest achievements is that I still couldn't help but feel that its protagonist, Ifemelu, was so very relatable.
Ifemelu writes a blog called "Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known As Negroes) by a Non-American Black" - by turns hilarious, scathing, educational, and like its title, a mouthful. One of the best entries focuses on her clueless but adoring white friends, and having just finished this novel, I would love to count myself among these friends - I'm already deeply missing spending time with Ifemelu.
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