Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In the introduction to the 2023 edition of Americanah, Adichie writes ‘I became Black in America…while British colonialism in Nigeria left many cursed legacies in its wake, racial identity was not one of them.’

Ifemelu, Igbo, Roman Catholic and well-educated in the Nigerian school system, is stifled by the lack of opportunity in Nigeria. All her contemporaries want to seek fulfillment. They talk about it all the time. Where to get it other than America, or maybe Britain? Ifemelu chooses America, leaving behind her family and the love of her life, Obinze.

America brings graduate school, new lovers and a respected job teaching at Princeton, not to mention a highly successful blog. So why is she, at the beginning of the book, planning to abandon all and return to Nigeria?

The planning to return involves the bewildering, at least to me, process of getting her hair braided. Adichie deliberately uses the trope of Black hair to wake up her readers to how little they know about Black women’s lives and concerns. Ifemelu’s hair choices feature large in the book and the point is made that Black hair styles are not featured in fashion magazines, or weren’t in 2013 when Americanah was originally published.

The story ranges back and forth in time, and you gradually piece together Ifemelu and Obinze’s journeys. They are not the easiest of people to like. They make mistakes. They wallow in self-pity. They suffer humiliation and don’t rise above it. They become involved in less-than-moral practices. Yet you will feel for them. You will know their frustration, almost desperation, their dislocation and their failure as they lead you through experiences you never had.

Can you trust Adichie’s descriptions? Is she telling you the truth about this sense of alienation; about what it means to find yourself different in a country?  Are her observations valid?

Well, Obinze doesn’t go to America on a student visa like Ifemelu did. He enters the UK illegally. Here is one of his experiences:

‘It amused Obinze, how keenly the men flipped through their newspapers every morning, stopping at the photo of the big-breasted woman, examining it as though it were an article of great interest, and were any different from the photo on that same page the previous day, the previous week. Their conversations, as they waited for their trucks to be loaded up, were always about cars and football and, most of all, women…’

Now that is all too familiar. Yes, I trust this writer to be telling it as it is.

Adichie writes long, beautifully constructed sentences. The one above carries on for another seven lines. These sentences pull you deep into Ifemelu and Obinze’s thoughts; they draw you into living their experiences. And then suddenly they will be interrupted by action. Just as Obinze’s mind has wandered onto the kind of shorts he wore at school a new paragraph wrenches him back to his present: ‘Roy Snell’s morning greeting to him was a jab on his belly. “Vinny Boy! You all right? You all right?”’

For Obinze the whole experience of working illegally is constant torture, and not just because of the ever nagging fear of being found out but because of the experience of being a sensitive and educated person thrown into a pool of toxic masculinity.

Ifemelu’s experience is quite different. It starts by being refused respectable work and doing, just once, something that is not respectable, something that throws her into a depression. But in many ways she flourishes in America. She even acquires a new boyfriend, a loving man who cannot fathom why she would up and leave.

Ifemelu’s deep feeling of being unsatisfied is only emphasized by her precise observation of the world she is living in. Her blog on her observations about being Black and African in America is her voice crying in the wilderness:

‘Obama Can Only win If He Remains The Magic Negro – His pastor is scary because it means maybe Obama is not the Magic Negro after all. By the way the pastor is pretty melodramatic, but have you ever been to an old school American Black church? Pure theater. But this guy’s basic point is true: that American Blacks (certainly those his age) know an America different from American Whites; they know a harsher, uglier America. But you’re not supposed to say that, because in America everything is fine and everyone is the same.’

She is saying things, using words, in a way that that is pretty outrageous. ‘Negro’ – a word most Americans avoid. White, with a capital letter – grammatically correct, if you give Black a capital letter you should give White a capital letter – but again, not done. She’s pushing the limits, using her privilege as an outsider – and she has a large following. Many others want to hear what she has to say, but being that prophet, all alone, is not sustainable. She gets her hair braided and returns to Nigeria, where yet more alienation awaits.

You can never go back, only start again.