Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

 Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the third Adichie novel I've read, after Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. This book is long, clocking in at over 600 dense pages, but if you have patience and time, I think it's worth a read.

It's the story of Ifemelu, a Nigerian born woman who eventually finds her way to the United States.  We watch as she attempts to navigate the cultural waters of a new place, with crappy jobs leading to better ones, a love life frequently in a state of complacency, and a confusing identity as not an American and not really a Nigerian.  The one that got away is Obinze, the love of her young teenage self, but they're not in the same country and eventually he gets married and has a baby.  Meanwhile, Ifemelu starts a blog, first commenting on her observations on race in the US from an outsiders perspective and then daily observations on life in Nigeria.

I thought it was a good book, but I didn't find it comedic the way Adichie seems to think I will.  This is almost certainly because I am a white liberal who finds the topic of race to be fraught and difficult and almost impossible to laugh at.  I also really just wanted Ifemelu to spend some time alone, without a guy, and determine what is she really wanted. If this was a romance novel, I would throw my hands up in despair at how terrible all the romantic leads were.  

There's not much of a plot here. We're just wandering around living life as Ifemelu does. Sometimes that means there's a lot going on all at once and sometimes it means we have forever scenes of her getting her hair done.  I kind of like that since it reflects actual life, but it also means that there are portions of the novel that are not nearly as arresting as the others.  There's also a lot of discussion of politics and race, which is fine by me and I thought was interesting, but I could see turning off some people.

The best part of this book, as far as I'm concerned, is Ifemelu's uncertain identity. In some ways, she really is caught between two worlds very far apart with her nationality.  She might hold an American passport at a certain point in her life, but she was born and raised in Nigeria and she holds conflicting feelings about both places. It's an interesting perspective since most of what I read is about the children of immigrants and this book takes us beyond the worldview of someone who knows that he or she will stay in the United States.  The feeling of being torn in multiple directions is well drawn and crystalized in this novel. 

Lines of Note:

"The man standing closest to her was eating an ice cream cone; she had always found it a little irresponsible, the eating of ice cream cones by grown-up American men in public." (page 4)

I did laugh at this line. Maybe this is the humor Adichie speaks of.  

"The more she wrote, the less sure she became." (page 6)

Right? Even as I write this post, I find myself wavering. Maybe I liked this book more than I think I did.  Maybe less?  

"...found it infuriating that she lived with a man who refereed on his blog to friends as 'cats'..." (page 23)

I mean, who wouldn't find this infuriating?

"He was no longer sure, for 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."  (page 26)

Co-signed.

"She had always got along with Ifemelu's mother, the easy relationship between two people who carefully avoided conversations of any depth." (page 64)

I feel like I should take heed of this line in light of the family reunion that I'm going to be attending next weekend.

"She spent her free time in the library, so wondrously well lit; the sweep of computers, the large, clean, airy reading spaces, the welcoming brightness of it all, seemed like a sinful decadence." (page 166)

Libraries are marvelous things.

"Professor Moore, a tiny, tentative woman with the emotionally malnourished look of someone who did not have friends..." (page 167)

Ha! Another line I laughed at.

"'...I'm worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialects of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking academese instead of English..." (page 220)

I was a bit of a prig for a period of time in grad school.  

"He was upbeat, relentlessly so, in a way that only an American of his kind could be..." (page 242)

You can almost picture this guy with his blond hair and moneyed family.

"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. 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." (page 359)

External factors are the doom of so many relationships.

"Most of the people who attended her first diversity talk, at a small company in Ohio, wore sneakers. They were all white. Her presentation was titled 'How to Talk About Race with Colleagues of Other Races,' but who, she wondered, would they be talking to, since they were all white?" (page 377)

Ugh.

"The point of diversity workshops, or multicultural talks, was not to inspire any real change but to leave people feeling good about themselves." (page 377)

I hope this isn't true.  

"American Blacks, too, are tired of talking about race. They wish they didn't have to. But shit keeps happening." (page 404)

Preach it.

"In America, you don't get to decide what race you are. It is decided for you." (page 419)

Amen.

"'...young black folk don't really do code switching anymore. The middle-class kids can't speak Ebonics and the inner-city kids only speak Ebonics and they don't have the fluidity that my generation has.'" (page 424)

I think this is probably quite a controversial statement.  I wonder if it's true?

"...a few years ago, they were attending weddings, not it was christenings, and soon it would be funerals." (page 574)

There's nothing like constant reminders of your own mortality, is there?

"'...many of us didn't marry the woman we truly loved. We married the woman that was around when we were ready to marry." (page 582)

Again, I hope this isn't true.

Things I Looked Up:

Lawrence Anini (page 183) - A notorious Nigerian armed robber from the 1980s who was captured and executed for his crimes.

419 scams (page 200) - Scams that involve someone overseas offering you a large sum of money or payment on the condition that you help them transfer money out of the country. The first wave of these scams came from Nigeria and the '419' part of the names comes from the Nigerian Criminal Code that outlaws this practice.  

paper-bag test (page 265) - A colorist discriminatory practice that was used within the African-American community in the 20th century, in which an individual's skin tone is compared to a brown paper bag. The test was used to determine what privileges an individual could have; only those with a skin tone that matched or was lighter than the bag would be afforded admission or membership privileges.

igwe (page 305) - A royal title or method of addressing traditional rules that control autonomous communities in Igboland.

oyinbo (page 307) - Nigerian word used to refer to Caucasians. Generally used to refer to a person of European descent or people perceived to be not culturally African.