Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care.I've read a few books by Africans, a few books about the African-as-immigrant experience, but Americanah feels like a fresh and unique reading experience, and although it may not perfectly work for me as a novel, it did achieve the significant result of allowing me to see the world through its author's eyes, and that was a powerful experience.
As teenagers, Ifemelu and Obinze -- both the children of educated, urban, middle-class Nigerians -- met and fell in love. Obinze was fascinated by everything American -- from literature to lifestyle -- and dreamed of one day sharing in the American Dream. The pair eventually attended university together, and when prolonged strikes threatened to derail their education, it was Ifemelu who was offered a visa and a scholarship for a small American university. With the blessings of her parents and Obinze, Ifemelu emigrated, but although the young couple had hoped to eventually reunite in America, the borders suddenly closed to young men after 9/11. They became estranged, and while Ifemelu attempted to navigate the pitfalls of class and race in her adopted homeland, Obinze eventually made his way to England, where he faced his own challenges.
With this storyline, author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is able to present many points of view: a middle class Nigerian childhood; the experience of an African in America; the experience of an African in Britain; and after Ifemelu and Obinze separately return to Nigeria, the experience of the Americanahs -- returning Nigerians who, while disappointed that time didn't stand still while they were gone, will attend social events with other returnees to complain about the lack of vegetarian restaurants, paninis, and the unrelenting humidity.
Ifemelu had always been known for her blunt honesty, and while in America, she was put into many situations (usually involving academics or white liberals) where her frank assessments disrupted the "accepted" parameters of racial discussions. For example, a wealthy white woman compared the disgruntled African American students from her university days to a more likeable Ugandan student, saying, "She didn't have all those issues." Ifemelu replied, "Maybe when the African American's father was not allowed to vote because he was black, the Ugandan's father was running for parliament or studying at Oxford." The woman didn't like being confronted with this truth, and in order to save her babysitting job, Ifemelu was forced to apologise. Eventually, in order to honestly (and anonymously) share her observations about race, Ifemelu started a blog -- “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black” -- and within a short while, its popularity became her source of income. As a literary device, Adichie is able to have Ifemelu participate in some back and forth discussions with the liberals and academics and also have more stinging observations put into the blog posts (many of which are included in the book). Ifemelu's blog got her invited to conventions and workshops, but she soon learned that those who invited her expected her to be entertaining only:
The point of diversity workshops, or multicultural talks, was not to inspire any real change but to leave people feeling good about themselves…During her talks, she said: "America has made great progress for which we should be very proud". In her blog, she wrote: Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it.I googled to see if this Raceteenth blog has a real-life presence on the internet (it doesn't) but I was delighted to see that the second blog (that Ifemelu starts after returning to Nigeria) does exist, and is apparently ongoing as The Small Redemptions of Lagos. I clicked around in it and was intrigued in particular about a post about Ebola from October 24/14: Apparently, according to The Washington Post, Nigeria was Ebola-free thanks to Doctors Without Borders and the American CDC. According to The New York Times, the containment was due to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the CDC. But according to WHO (and Adichie), it was the actions of the Nigerian medical system itself and their government that recognised and contained the first infected patient, and unlike elsewhere in Africa(where Doctors Without Borders, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the CDC still have yet to control the epidemic), Nigeria pretty much solved its own problem. And if I had a complaint about Americanah, it's that I wish this optimistic view of Nigeria made it into the book.
When Obinze first returned to Nigeria, he quickly realised that to succeed he would need to join the kleptocracy; shmoozing the local Big Man and engaging in shady deals. Everyone expects bribes, electricity is sporadic even in Lagos, and the government is more concerned with tearing down hawkers' stands than filling pot holes. When Ifemelu returned, she faced much the same situation, and as her friend (a "kept woman" whose greatest ambitions were to get a jeep and force one of her boyfriends to marry her) said, "We all have some 419 in us." After the basic decency of their parents' generation, Obinze and Ifemelu's Nigeria is presented as a grasping and illicit society.
So does all this work as a novel? While the points of view were really fascinating to me, the plot felt contrived: Ifemelu and Obinze were both put into many dinner parties and workplace situations where everyone sat around discussing race and class (and black women's hair), and the blog posts on top of these debates felt heavy handed. I thought that the love story between the main characters was sweet in the beginning, but as they separated along the way, I had no investment in seeing them ever meet again. And Ifemelu, while smart and honest, was not a very likeable character; forever judging and evaluating and sabotaging her relationships. I understand that this book is based on many of Adichie's own experiences in America, so she may have felt compelled to recreate many of her most personal epiphanies about race, but perhaps she was too close to the material to filter it successfully through the lens of fiction -- it might have worked better as a straight out memoir. On the other hand, I enjoyed reading Americanah very much, believe I understand what Adichie was trying to teach me, and I couldn't in good conscience give it less than four stars.
