Book Review: Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
[Note: I found this unpublished blog post in my drafts file. It is from November 13, 2015. It was fascinating to see my writing from five years ago. While I found the writing somewhat clunky, with too much narrative, I decided to leave it in its original form.]
I didn't have a choice about whether to read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's new book Americanah. NPR did not give me one. For, if one happened to be listening to the radio the day Terri Gross interviewed Adichie on Fresh Air, as I was, then he or she would have heard her read the first few pages of the novel--about the lack of hair braiding facilities in Princeton, NJ. And if one heard Adichie's lyrical voice reciting those at times searingly short sentences ("She was fat." p. 7), then one soon found oneself reading Americanah, as I did.
The entire novel is a joy. It tells the story of a Nigerian woman's life as she grows up surrounded by others who desire to leave Nigeria and live in Europe or America. Her high school sweetheart, Obinze, most exemplifies this desire. He knows everything there is to know about America. Ironically, she is the one who has the opportunity to live in the US. The book narrates her experiences of despair, of being defined by her skin color for the first time in her life, her relationships with boyfriends, friends, other Nigerians abroad and her family. But ultimately the book is a love story, and the reader is left to wonder for a good part of its nearly 600 pages whether she and Obinze will ever reunite.
Adichie addresses painful issues with a refreshing directness. Racism is called what it is. Both subtle and not so subtle experiences of it punctuate Ifemelu's life in America and Obinze's time abroad. But the most effective commentary on race is the frame for the book: "I only became black when I came to America," Ifemelu explains.
Adichie is such a careful observer of human conduct and motivations that the insights of her characters are at times hard to believe. In particular, the two main characters, Ifemelu and Obinze, understand other people's intentions with such certainty that I found myself wondering if there was something wrong with me. Should I understand the motives of another at the exact moment in which he or she is insulting me? or snubbing me? or belittling me? Adichie's characters not only know why other characters do what they do, they know in the exact moment of the slight. Are there human being so lucky that they understand without a moment's reflection what is going on in the mind of those around them? Or is this what makes these two characters remarkable, why we ought to read a novel about them, because of their ability to see their own experiences with such clarity? These are questions that each reader must decide for him or herself. For me, it was the characters' perception that made the novel worth reading.
I reflected most on these questions in the sections that describe the relationship of one of Ifemelu's American boyfriends, Blaine, to his sister, Shan. I knew I did not like Shan immediately (even though I promised myself years ago that I would abandon the idea of liking or disliking other people). There is something so needy about Shan, so cloying, that I dismissed her almost immediately. But Ifemelu could penetrate a layer beyond me in her analysis of Shan's behavior: "Shan glanced at Ifemelu and smiled and in that smile was the possibility of great cruelty" (p.418).
This is the also the first novel in which I have seen an author successfully incorporate blogging as a means of experiencing a character's thoughts. Ifemelu maintains a blog on her experiences as a "non-American black," during her time in the US. Between the blog and the references to Barack Obama, one feels that this is a very contemporary novel, that will be read decades from now by those who want to know what America was like at this time. The novel certainly merits such a designation. I highly recommend it.