Book review: 'Americanah'

Book: Americanah
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Pages: 477
Price: Rs399

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels are becoming steadily more political which is a tough feat for a fiction writer, but she pulls it off. Her Man Booker long listed first novel Purple Hibiscus concentrated on a family’s dynamics in a postcolonial Nigeria plagued with political instability and economic problems. Her Orange Prize winning Half Of A Yellow Sun (2006) was about the Nigerian-Biafran war and illustrated the impossibilities of keeping any type of balance between the personal and political in a war-torn region. Her latest novel takes the question of race to the western world where there may be a recent history of domestic peace, but Adichie reveals the simmering undercurrent of racial disharmony that lies under.

A few pages in, its apparent that Americanah is a platform to discuss the issue of race, primarily in America, fleetingly in England, while also offering a comparative with the pros and cons of life back in the home country Nigeria. Fortunately, however, Adichie’s story telling is able to keep up with her arguments, and we follow the story for its luminescent Nigerian heroine Ifemelu who remarks that she never felt black until she came to America. Always on the periphery even when not in Ifemelu’s life is Obinze the romantic soulmate whose tryst with the western world is disillusioning.

The story opens with Ifemelu on the eve of her return from America to Nigeria, quietly grateful for her recently acquired US citizenship — a feeling that she is self-conscious and guilty about having. It moves both forward in time as she moves to Nigeria, and back in time to the events that led her to America in the first place. We are treated to a vivid recapitulation of the flaming teenage romance between Ifelemu and Obinze that also sets the tone for the reunion they have at the end of the book. This is a love story with an unusual path and while the final events that lead to the climax seem a little rushed, the journey is a good one. 

Meanwhile, there are other men and other things for Ifelemu to think about and her blog posts offer an interesting counterpart to her interactions with and discussions with fellow academics and friends. She is the anonymous writer of a successful blog titled “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black”. She keeps a sharp eye for the nuances of ethnic and racial bias. What is the difference between an American African and an African American? What are the politics of a black woman’s hairstyle in a parlour or in the boardroom? Just what does a blonde upper class woman mean when she enthuses that an average looking black woman is, “beautiful.”

While the Americanah part of the book is a through exposition into the racial comedy of manners as experienced by Ifelemu in increasingly refined circles and liberal society (she dates a blonde playboy, and then an African-American academic), the British section has Obinze on the lowest rung of the social ladder. After his American visa application is summarily rejected, Obinze’s path is that of the illegal immigrant who overstays his welcome in the UK. It is obviously ironic when Obinze, the son of an academic with a good cultured background, ends up cleaning toilets and doing manual labour.

The class divide is a lot harder to cut through in England than it is in America, even though the racism appears less starkly defined. Through her twin storylines, Adichie is able to show the contrasting racial issues in two countries with different histories. The portions set in Nigeria illustrate how much the western world sets the clocks when it comes to lifestyle and aspirations.

Americanah provides an in-depth perspective into the functioning of three different countries and reflects the idiosyncrasies of each land with insight but not criticism. It is this quality that makes Adichie’s writing so enjoyable and lets her epic length novel breathe. The narrative makes the reader pause to reflect without judgement, and yet causes him to care with some urgency about the fate of the different characters.

For the most though, Adichie makes it work. Americanah is styled and modelled on this very quality of self-consciousness. It is a local term applied to Nigerians who return to home and give themselves airs, fancy accents, and even form social clubs by virtue of how they stand apart from the common Nigerian. Adichie takes the self-consciousness that comes with an experience of foreignness and turns it into a wholly immersive world.