Published in 2013, this is by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She was born and raised in Nigeria, and is of Igbo ethnicity. (Her family suffered considerably in the Biafran War, and her grandfather, a man of status, died in a refugee camp, and is buried in a mass grave.) She did her tertiary education in the US, and now divides her time between there and Nigeria. She's an extremely interesting and insightful woman, and I'm definitely planning to look out some more of her work.

The TL;DR version here is that this is a fabulous book. Engaging, entertaining, educational, it's the whole package. Totally recommended.

Definitely get the audio-version. It is read -- brilliantly, brilliantly -- by Adjoa Andoh, whose virtuoso range of ethicity-, class-, and nation-appropriate accents is utterly awe-inspiring.

It's a book that makes an excellent contribution to two threads represented on The Velvet Cushion: The "adjusting to America" theme that I visited in Wherever You May Be, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Martyr!; and the economic migrant theme, good examples of which are The Year of the Runaways and Amnesty.



Americanah is the story of Ifemelu and Obinze, both Nigerians. They fall in love while they're still at school, but are driven apart by their diverging migration paths. Ifemelu gets the chance to go and study in Philadelphia. Despite various trials, she ends up doing well; she gets jobs, boyfriends, and the coveted right to stay in America. But when we first meet her, she is planning, after 15 years of absence, to return to Nigeria.

There, she may or may not become an Americanah. This is a very telling slang term, pronounced with an exaggeratedly extended fourth syllable, for a returnee who tends to complain and act superior. This blogger gives a good overview of its subtleties: "Many of Ifemelu’s friends long to travel to the United States, where everyone has perfect teeth and nice clothes. Those who manage to get there are forever after christened 'Americanah' due to the superior habits they acquire... The tacit understanding is that America irrevocably changes those who visit it, supposedly for the better. It is both a joke, a way to make fun of those who travel to the United States and return with haughty airs and strange affectations, but also a term of reverence that acknowledges the assumed prosperity of those who manage to make it to the ultimate first-world nation."

Preparing to return, Ifelmelu travels many miles to visit a hair salon, run by women from various African states, and vignettes from this hot, dilapidated locale are punctuated by flashbacks that tell the story of Ifemelu's up-and-down stay in the US.

It has definitely not been easy. A new student with a partial scholarship, she needed to work to support herself at university. But work is elusive. One humiliating sex job, taken on when she's absolutely desperate, sends her spiralling into depression. It's at this point that she breaks off communication with Obinze. Eventually, she gets a job as a nanny with a family that spans the full gamut of racial attitudes. Kimberley, the mum, is overly sweet (all black people are "beautiful"); her sister is adept at stereotyping, and caustic in her reactions to Ifemelu's push-backs; her brother, Curt, starts to date Ifemelu. In all these different guises, and in so many more, racism is a phenomenon that Ifemelu encounters on a daily basis. Sometimes it's deliberately hateful; sometimes it's just casually thoughtless. Either way, it's always there, like the air she breathes.

Fairly early on in her career in the US, Ifemelu starts a blog: Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known As Negroes) by a Non-American Black. The inclusion of many of the posts in the narrative, verbatim, offers a helpful gloss on the social intricacies she is navigating.

Race has become such a knot of vipers... On the one hand, you have whites who really don't get it. At one point, Ifemelu (who is nothing if not feisty) responds cogently to a woman who claims that race is not important in her bi-racial relationship: "The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. 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. But we don’t talk about it. we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway?"

There are a range of fact-based slapdowns -- often via the blog -- for the kind of people who resist affirmative action, or insist that the slogan should be "all lives matter", or accuse others of "playing the race card". It's powerful.

And there are tough analyses: "Oppression Olympics is what smart liberal Americans say to make you feel stupid and to make you shut up. But there IS an oppression olympics going on. American racial minorities -- blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Jews -- all get shit from white folks, different kinds of shit but shit still. Each secretly believes that it gets the worst shit. So, no, there is no United League of the Oppressed. However, all the others think they’re better than blacks because, well, they’re not black."

Americans, whether "smart liberal" or just middle-class, generally come in for a lot of stick in Americanah. Ifemelu skewers the condescension she encounters, and the way these people emphasize the charities they're supporting, and the superficiality of people's understanding of Africa. (And, of course, we know that it's not just Americans who are at fault here. We see similar things all over the Western world.)


I'm including pictures from our stay in Cote d'Ivoire not because it gave us any answers, but because at least it taught us some of the right questions...

To non-American blacks, Blogger Ifemelu has this to say: "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. So what if you weren’t 'black' in your country? You’re in America now." And, she will add, if you don't understand what gives African Americans a uniquely difficult situation in the US, you soon will.

Hair is a symbolically recurring theme. It's no accident that we first meet Ifemelu in a hair salon. After years of being told to "relax" her African hair, so that it appears less African, she decides she has had enough of this nonsense, and she'll do braids and weaves and "normal" African from now on. Something similar happens with her accent. As Americans insist on responding to her fluent but Nigerian-accented English by talking to her as though she is an imbecile, she starts to adopt an American accent. But eventually she thinks: No, that's not who I am. And she goes back to her true Nigerian voice.

Most of the novel recounts Ifemelu's American experience, but in the closing sections of the book we see her back in Lagos, trying to negotiate the world of the returnee. Again, it's a nuanced account; it rings very true.

This is Ifemelu's book. There's nothing wrong with that. But the only fault I have to find with Americanah is that Obinze is a little short-changed. We have enough about him to make us empathize and engage; he's definitely not a bit part. But various elements in his trajectory are truncated, and I would have liked to know more.

Obinze is planning to follow Ifemelu to the US, but by the time he is ready to go, 9/11 has happened, and "the Americans are now averse to foreign young men," as his mother puts it. So he goes to Britain, on a temporary visa, overstays, and uses various illegal routes to carry on working there. But Britain is in one of its periodic panics about immigration, and the authorities pick him up just before he's about to go through with a sham marriage. He is deported.

His sojourn is again well depicted. Again, we see a black character facing a range of attitudes, from the frankly hostile to the patronizingly chummy. Again, when it comes to race, we see the supposedly educated showing themselves to be barely more aware (and sometimes less compassionate) than their working-class compatriots.

But by the time Ifemelu returns to Lagos, Obinze is married, has a daughter, and works for a Big Man who provides lots of money in exchange for largely unspecified services. All this could have benefited by being fleshed out more, especially as -- spoiler alert -- Ifemelu and Obinze end up getting together again.

This conclusion is left very much up in the air, and you do very much wonder how this revived relationship is going to play out. We've heard a lot about the elements of Nigerian society that wear their religion on their sleeve. Surely there will be stigma about a divorce? How will that affect their careers and their life together?

But maybe Adichie is planning a sequel? That would be good.

So that's my only quibble. And when your problem with a book is that you wanted more of it, that can only be a good thing.


The Baoule lady who stayed with us for many years

I think Americanah is particularly effective on two issues.
One is identity and loneliness (intimately connected). As Elizabeth Day puts it: "The sense of dislocation felt by both characters in two countries with wholly different histories and class structures is expertly rendered." Adichie interrogates that ambivalent designation of Americanah by showing that "the effect of Americanization on black immigrants in particular is more often fraught with tension, discrimination, and loss of identity".

And, sometimes, the answer has to be return. As Kathryn Schulz pinpoints, Americanah has a different arc from the stories we generally read about immigrant adjustment to their host societies: "In the end, Ifemelu goes back to Nigeria, not because she didn’t succeed in America, not because of any crisis back home, but simply because she wants to... Adichie challenges the end point of the journey. That makes Americanah a new kind of migration story, one that reflects a political shift and suggests a literary one."

The other issue that is very clearly articulated is the rationale for migration, and the need for a bit more honesty. Invited by a social-climbing friend to a dinner-party in the UK, Obinze reflects of his fellow-guests: "They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty."

Choice and certainty. Who doesn't want those things? How can we continue to vilify and reject people who put their lives on the line to search for them?