So I just finished reading Adichie’s third novel, Americanah and I get this sudden urge to write something about it. It can be called a review for those who love terminology or the naming of things.
My desire to read the novel became irresistible when I read angry comments on the social media, about “Adichie saying black women who wear weaves are insecure and suffer from low self esteem.” I gushed with a keen fascination. I found it interesting that someone would choose to write about the subject especially in this age of Brazilian, Peruvian, Indian and what have yous hairs. Not that I’m advocating for everyone going kinky afro. I don’t see myself doing that at present and I also don’t feel totally harmonious with putting another person’s hair on my head. The tales of spirits chasing people in dreams and shouting “give me my hair” are sort of spooky and melodramatic. So, I feel more comfortable with the synthetic stuff.
When I read the novel Americanah, I realised it was about much more than hair. Yes, Adichie holds a fundamentalist view that black women should keep their natural hair but I did not see an outright campaign against straight hair or condemnation of the users of weaves in her novel. I think the crux of people’s protests is in the fact that they feel slighted that someone would think their “fashionable, trendy and costly hairs” belies their self acceptance. Therefore, Adichie’s preference for natural hair in Americanah seems like an effrontery – to question the African woman’s embrace of modernity.
I have always thought of Adichie as a star-studded writer, she came into the literary world riding on the crest of international prizes and encomiums which made local, (uh, sorry, the word ‘local’ may be considered derogatory) I mean native Nigerian writers experience conflicting feelings of envy and admiration. All the same we all love her, you will often hear the expression our Wole Soyinka, our Achebe and so we have our Adichie.
For those who have not read the novel, I will quote part of the synopsis on the book’s cover and my own summation: “As teenagers in Lagos, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are fleeing the country if they can. The self-assured Ifemelu departs for America. There she suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Thirteen years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a blogger. Ifemelu returns to a Nigeria that has changed in societal nuances and landscape. She experiences the returnee’s conflicting feelings of loss for the America she has left behind and love for the homeland which feels everything but homely to her at first. Ifemelu begins to work for a lifestyle magazine but soon tires of its vapidity and starts another blog. In the end, she reconciles with Obinze, who leaves his hapless marriage.”
At the beginning of the novel, I felt impatient to get into the heart of the story. I was tempted to skip pages as I read the elaborate descriptions of a summer in Princeton that smelled of nothing or the long explanation of the idea of black and fat in American lingo. I almost found the descriptions tedious and even complained to a friend, that it must have been an editor’s effort to overstretch the narration. But as I continued the reading, I relaxed and began to enjoy the minutest detail of every description. I particularly liked the food descriptions:
“Mariama returned carrying oil-stained brown paper bags from the Chinese restaurants, trailing the smells of grease and spice into the stuffy salon.”
“It was also her summer of eating. She enjoyed the unfamiliar – the McDonald’s hamburgers with the brief tart crunch of pickles… the wraps Aunty Uju brought home, wet with piquant dressing, and the bologna and pepperoni that left a film of salt in her mouth….”
I could visualise and almost taste the foods off the pages of the book. Food fanatic, you say?
I found the dipping back and forth narrative technique enjoyable. Life isn’t lived on a straight line; there are so many curves and turns, so why should our stories be told with an artificial straightness?
Then, to the things I did not like or thought did not work. I found the secondary school romance between Obinze and Ifemelu very exaggerated. After reading a section of their conversation, I had to go back a few pages to check, if I had made a mistake and that they were already grown up and at the university. This is a part of one of such conversation:
“He said, Ifemelu is a fine babe but she’s too much trouble. She can argue. She can talk. She never agrees. But Ginika is just a sweet girl.’ He paused, then added, “He didn’t know that was exactly what I hoped to hear. I’m not interested in girls that are too nice.”
“…I thought you were so fine, but not just that. You looked like the kind of person who will do something because you want to, and not because everyone else is doing it.”
I mean, who idealises love at this philosophical level in secondary school? My point is not that children in Nigeria do not experiment with love or the sexual version of it early, of course they do. In my words to a friend, I said “Yes, in Nigeria, many school-age children depending on their exposure tend to start relationships and sexual experimentation early. So I agree they love but they don’t philosophise about loving….” Well, you could call it precociousness, since the educated elite status of Obinze’s childhood was clearly spelt out. However, such precociousness seems out of place in a juvenile relationship scenario. I also felt the same way about Aunty Ifeoma’s children in Purple Hibiscus, but in that circumstance it appeared more realistic.
There is another tidbit detail that felt so obviously out of place – this occurred in the novel, when Aunty Uju, a medical doctor is distressed by the news of a failed coup especially when she cannot contact the general, her sugar daddy. Due to her distress, an asthmatic attack is triggered. Adichie wrote: “Her panic had turned into an asthma attack. She was gasping, shaking, piercing her arm with a needle, trying to inject herself with medicine…” This popped out to me as highly unusual. The most handy medication to curb an asthma attack would be an inhaler! This, a medical doctor should know! Although, the depiction of drops of blood staining the bedcovers seemed very picturesque and arresting, it was misinforming and unrealistic.
That being said, there is so much to love about this novel. At first when I started reading, it had that teeniest feeling of chick lit (one of my friends said, Adichie would faint if she heard me call her novel chick lit, lol. Anyway I didn’t say so. I said it felt like it at first.) That feeling wore off, as I started reading the treatise on the thingification of blackness – how Africans do not consider themselves black until they get to America and are painted black.
The blog excerpts that kept appearing here and there in the narrative imbued it with a kind of spice, an originality that sailed above fiction. I felt like I was reading something that Toni Morrison or Bebe Moore Campbell would have written about ‘blackness’ in America from an African-American perspective in the 21st century. I loved this part:
“In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here’s the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not…”
I also think the academia characterisation and dialogues helped to press the literary fiction stamp on the novel. Though, I’m beginning to think that for your novel to be considered as literary fiction, you must make sure you refer to real writers and poets, especially from the English tradition – Graham Greene, Samuel Coleridge and other prize winning ones like the Caribbean Derek Walcott. You must show the readers, that you have a literary mind, not so?
I don’t know whether it was just me or something about the voice of Ifemelu. I found myself going back to the cover page to look at Adichie’s photo every now and then, especially when Ifemelu made some cryptic statements about the issue of race in America or the deplorable state of affairs in the Nigerian polity. I felt the force of authorial intrusion in those moments.
And I must say this, I enjoy Adichie’s kind of humour – it’s a strange kind, not too obvious in its sarcasm, sometimes it needs to be turned in the hand, rolled on the tongue and chewed before its full import sinks in, resulting in deep mirth. For instance, sections like this:
“She called Ranyinudo, and was about to tell her what happened, when Ranyinudo said, “Ifem, I’m so depressed.” And so Ifemelu merely listened. It was about Ndudi. “He’s such a child,”… “If you say something he doesn’t like, he will stop talking and start humming. Seriously humming, loud humming. How does a grown man behave so immaturely?”
I also enjoyed how the novel zeroed on the recent past, sidling through American politics, the novelty of a black president in America and the birth pangs of democracy in Nigeria. So many Nigerian books are staunched in that “glorious” fast-dimming past of the Nigerian Civil War and the era of military coups, so much that it has almost become a compulsory motif in Nigerian novels – if it does not appear in it, such a writing is considered flawed. It is not my opinion that our history as a people and a country is unimportant. We all need a sense of the past to get a true bearing of the present but when we get stuck in the past, the progression into the future is often a sluggish movement.
One of my favourite parts in the novel should be this, when Obinze talks about the Nigerian fascination for the new and stylish: “…we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is yet ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of the past.” I want this to be a truism on the lips of all Third Worlders – that we truly desire newness in all spheres of life. That we absorb newness because we are tired of the sameness of corruption and low living standards that permeates from our long tradition of acceptance and stolid silence.
I also liked the frank expose of the ‘going-abroad’ syndrome, showing how most of the Americanahs and Londoners truly fare over there. These are common stories we have all heard, of toilet washing and street sweeping, and Adichie has brought this out vividly in this novel. I wish one or two desperate hustlers will read Americanah and have a rethink and hope for a Nigeria where one can earn gbemu like Obinze did. Or maybe they would have to first go on the sojourn abroad and be deported before they can experience the ‘fictional’ largesse like Obinze.
Evidently, there is a moral shift in our realities. I found myself willing a comeback for Obinze and Ifemelu towards the end of the novel. I wanted him to choose ‘true love’ over ‘for better and for worse’ and I did not sympathise with Kosi, the abandoned wife. Maybe, this was the author’s intent, to make us question conventionality in its form – to query the sacrificial stance that Nigerians (or possibly most Africans) have towards marriage. “You’re married! So you’re doomed to remain in misery. It’s for the children; please don’t leave your marriage, etc.”
Readers of Americanah may choose to interpret the message inherent in the last two words in the novel, “Come in,” as a welcoming; an openness to freedom, to make choices above cultural and religious stereotypes.
It was an airy reading – fresh yet familiar.
Tags: African Literature, Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Farafina, Nigerian Literature
Nike Campbell-Fatoki was born in Lvov, Ukraine. She is the second of four children born to Nigerian medical doctors in the old Soviet Union. A graduate of Economics with a minor in Political Science from Howard University. She also has a Master’s degree in International Development.
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