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Americanah

Author	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Language	English
Series	Ala Notable Books for Adults
Genre	Fiction novel, Bildungsroman
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf
Publication date	May 2013
Publication place	Nigeria
Media type	Print (Hardback, paperback), ebook, audiobook
Pages	496 pp.
ISBN	978-0-307-96212-6

Americanah is a 2013 novel by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, for which Adichie won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Fiction award. Americanah tells the story of a young Nigerian woman, Ifemelu, who immigrates to the United States to attend university. The novel traces Ifemelu's life in both countries, threaded by her love story with high school classmate Obinze. A television miniseries, starring and produced by Lupita Nyong'o, is also currently in development.

Summary

Americanah centers on two young lovers, Ifemelu and Obinze, who migrate to the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively not because of the familiar stories of fleeing from natural disaster, war or poverty, but because they are running away from what Adichie terms the “lethargy of choicelessness” in the novel (p. 276). Both Ifemelu and Obinze belong to the Nigerian (upper) middle class where the need to migrate is not induced by poverty but by the quest to experience choice and something new somewhere else. This battle against choicelessness is clearly projected to the reader through Obinze’s mind while attending a dinner.

The story then sees Ifemelu attend university in the US where she faces numerous issues in starting a new life and career in the new country before becoming a successful blogger. The narrator fully reports her love and sexual life, which she constantly critically observes while denouncing racist and sexist episodes. Along with the description of her present story and Nigerian past, the narrating voice reports also the story of her previous Nigerian boyfriend Obinze, who experiences similar difficulties in leaving Nigeria to look for better career opportunities in the UK after Ifemelu’s departure; in doing so, the narrating voice puts the emphasis on Obinze’s migrant experience and subsequent return to Nigeria, when he becomes a successful business man and starts a family with another woman. Both the main characters, although with different timings, thus end up going back to Nigeria and finally meet again after a long separation to become lovers again.

The newness of the path of Americanah as a migration story becomes even more conspicuous in the decision of Ifemelu to return to Nigeria after spending thirteen years in the United States not because she is a failure, but out of a strong desire to return home. With Ifemelu’s deliberate return migration to Nigeria, her homeland, she chooses to be identified as an Americanah rather than as an American. For many migrants, the term “American” indicates the privileged possession of the nationality of that enormous world power nation that many immigrants are desperate to acquire, while Americanah defines an identity based on previous experience of living in America.

Characters

• Ifemelu- Ifemelu is the protagonist of Americanah. She is born in Lagos, Nigeria, where she is raised in a small apartment by her mother and father. Her mother gets taken in by a fanatical  evangelical church and begins an unhealthy habit of fasting until she gets sick. Ifemelu's father loses his job at an unnamed government agency, and the family struggles to make ends meet. In spite of all these obstacles, Ifemelu excels in school, where she meets the love of her life, Obinze. Intellectually, the two are equals, but Obinze has had a more refined upbringing, thanks to his mother. Ifemelu feels drawn both to his body and his mind, and during their first sexual encounters she's so overcome with emotion that she's unable to see the ceiling even with her eyes open (this is the source of her nickname for him, "Ceiling"). Ifemelu commits to Obinze as a young woman, but is unprepared for a long distance relationship. Soon after arriving in America, she stops responding to Obinze's letters. She falls into a deep depression, which she refuses to think of as "depression" because she doesn't believe in the American habit of diagnosing every feeling as a kind of mental illness. Nevertheless, Ifemelu becomes Americanized. She starts picking up the slang, puts on weight, briefly straightens her hair, and experiences true racism for the first time. As a result, she's forced to identify as a non-American black and to contend with the racism she sees around her and in the media. While in college, Ifemelu works as a nanny in the suburbs, where she meets Curt, her boss's cousin. Though initially wary of his wealth and connections, she allows him to set up a job interview for her at a public relations firm in Baltimore. Soon after, they move in together, but in spite of his well-meaning and "progressive" views, Curt, who is white, still harbors some racial bias. This leads Ifemelu to break up with Curt and to get together with Blaine, an African American professor whose politics more closely align with hers. Ifemelu grows dissatisfied with their relationship, however. This is a pattern in Ifemelu's life: dissatisfaction and the yearning for something she can't identify or explain. Eventually, she moves to Nigeria, where she reconnects with Obinze, finding fulfillment at last.

• Obinze – Raised in Nsukka. Nigeria. His mother, a professor at Nsukka University, taught him how to cook (a rare thing among Nigerian men) and fostered his love of books. His upbringing opens many doors for him, and his refined beliefs and mannerisms attract Ifemelu to him all the more. His social status, however, doesn't help him secure a visa, and when he can't join Ifemelu in America he goes to Great Britain, where he lives and works as an illegal immigrant. Like many Nigerian immigrants, Obinze is at the mercy of governments and immigration authorities that think nothing of his education. When a treacherous man tips off the police, Obinze is arrested and deported. This experience shames him. In the end, however, it works out in his favor because he falls into a lucrative business in Lagos, where he becomes a wealthy man. Throughout all of this, he never forgets Ifemelu, and when she returns to Nigeria he's forced to choose between her and his wife.

• Obinze's Mother- Obinze's mother is a professor at Nsukka University. When Ifemelu and Obinze first meet, a rumor is circulating that his mother attacked a fellow professor. In fact, that professor (a man) slapped her in a meeting because he couldn't bear to be accused of professional wrongdoing by a woman. This caused a scandal at Nsukka University, and the response from the university students—that the man should never have struck her, not because she's a person but because she's a widow—irritated her. She decided to take a much-needed vacation in Lagos, which put Obinze in the right place at the right time to meet Ifemelu. His mother's sudden illness leads him and Ifemelu to change their college plans and enroll at Nsukka University together. His mother's death is a particular blow to him.

• Ifemelu's Mother and Father- Ifemelu's mother is a devout Christian and a member of Pastor Gideon's evangelical church. Ifemelu is ten years old when her mother comes home one day, convinced that she must fast in order to drive the Devil out of her family's life. Ifemelu's father is powerless to stop her. He unexpectedly loses his job at a federal agency because he won't call his female boss "Mummy." Much later, he finally gets a new job and is able to support his family, but this doesn't happen until Ifemelu has already moved to America. That she doesn't know this until well after the fact indicates just how far apart Ifemelu and her parents have grown.

• Aunty Uju- When we're first introduced to Aunty Uju, she's the General's mistress and lives in style. On at least one occasion, she asks him for money to help Ifemelu's parents pay their bills. Her relationship with the General lasts several years, until finally Aunty Uju decides to have a child, Dike. She hopes that the General will take responsibility for their son, but he disowns Dike instead and throws Aunty Uju out, refusing to support her. Aunty Uju moves to America, where she continues the medical training she began in Nigeria. It isn't easy, however. She's a single mother in a foreign country and often has to work three jobs in order to make ends meet. Eventually, however, she passes her medical exams, and she moves to Massachusetts with her boyfriend. She partners with a local doctor and enrolls her son in school but decides to transfer him after he's bullied by the other kids. When Dike is a teenager, he attempts suicide. Aunty Uju is devastated. Her devotion to Dike further proves that she's a fierce, loving mother.

• Dike - Dike is Aunty Uju's son. His father, the General, disowns him, refusing to take responsibility for Aunty Uju and their child, financially or otherwise. Dike is just a child when his mother moves him to the United States in search of a better life. He lives first in New York, then Massachusetts, where he's bullied in school by the white children. His suicide attempt devastates his family and emphasizes the difficulty immigrant families face when trying to integrate into American society.

• The General- The General is Aunty Uju's "mentor," as Obinze's mother euphemistically calls him. In truth, Aunty Uju is the General's mistress, and he keeps her living in comfort—that is, until their illegitimate son, Dike, is born. Shortly after the birth, the General throws Aunty Uju and Dike out, and the two move to America, where Aunty Uju pursues a career as a doctor.

• Curt - Curt is Ifemelu's first American boyfriend and Kimberly's cousin. Ifemelu and Curt meet while she works as a nanny for Kimberly. At first, Ifemelu doesn't think of Curt as dating material, in part because he's white. Later, after he dives into some bushes after a lost frisbee, Ifemelu reconsiders. He uses his family's considerable business connections to secure her a job interview at a public relations firm in Baltimore. This isn't a selfless act on Curt's part. He's trying to impress Ifemelu and wants her to move from Philadelphia to Baltimore so that they can see each other more often. Their relationship is kind and supportive but ultimately unfulfilling for Ifemelu. Curt can sense this. One day he snaps, "I don't want to be a sweetheart. I want to be the fucking love of your life." When she breaks up with him, he's heartbroken, but it doesn't take him long to get used to the idea.

• Blaine - Blaine is Ifemelu's second American boyfriend. Blaine and Ifemelu first meet on a train while she's living with Curt but reunite several years later at a conference in Washington, D.C. He's an assistant professor at Yale and writes a blog about race and popular culture. Ifemelu moves to New Haven to live with him and continue writing her blog. His sister, Shan, makes fun of Ifemelu's blog at a party, but this is just her nature. She's a highly critical person, both of herself and others, and is devastated when her book is panned by critics. Blaine softens Shan's criticism, making suggestions for Ifemelu's blog rather than giving a critique, but it's clear that he has strong opinions about how the blog should look. His politics sometimes get in the way of his relationship with Ifemelu, and they don't always see eye to eye, as when she initially supports Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. Her failure to attend a demonstration Blaine organizes signals problems in their relationship. Ifemelu withdraws, and eventually they break up. This is just one in a string of very similar breakups for Ifemelu.

• Shan- Shan is Blaine's sister, whom he describes as being capable of and doing everything. She's also a writer but is hypercritical of other writers, including Ifemelu. She subtly puts down Ifemelu's blog at a party only to have her own book (a memoir about race) panned by critics.

• Kosi- Kosi is Obinze's wife and the mother of his child. Obinze doesn't love Kosi but stays with her out of a sense of obligation to his family. Their marriage is comfortable without being passionate, and it's clear that Kosi is more invested in the relationship than her husband. She frequently becomes jealous and even institutes a rule that no single women are allowed to visit their home. Eventually, Obinze leaves Kosi for Ifemelu, but he makes it clear that he still wants to be a part of his daughter's life.

• Buchi- Buchi is Obinze and Kosi's only child. Little is said about her except that her parents dote on her.

• Ginika - Ginika is one of Ifemelu's childhood friends. She moves to the United States before Ifemelu and gets established in Pittsburgh, where she later helps Ifemelu acclimate to American life. Ginika is the one who gets Ifemelu an interview with Kimberly, the woman who hires Ifemelu as a nanny. Ifemelu and Ginika remain good friends throughout the novel.

• Mariama -Mariama is the owner and proprietor of the hair salon Mariama African Hair Braiding.

• Aisha -  Aisha is one of the stylists at Mariama African Hair Braiding. She has large pink sores on her arms that disgust Ifemelu. Aisha also has two Igbo boyfriends. She asks Ifemelu's advice on how to make one of them marry her; she doesn't care which one.

Themes

Americanization

Americanization is one of the biggest themes in Americanah. In the context of the novel, America itself is a symbol of hope, wealth, social and economic mobility, and, ultimately, disappointment, as Ifemelu learns that the American Dream is a lie and that the advantages she enjoys there often come at a great price. Her Americanization is slow but distinct, and she gradually picks up the slang, adapts to her surroundings (for better or worse), and adopts American politics. Her views on gender and race change because of this, and her blog is devoted to exploring the issue of race as a non-American black in America. She's called Americanah when she returns to Nigeria, having picked up a blunt, American way of speaking and of addressing problems. She resists this label, but it's obvious to the reader that Ifemelu's years in America have changed her.

According to Idowu Faith, “no valid statement can be made on Americanah without deconstructing the term “Americanah” which, more or less, reveals the thesis of the narrative as well as the preoccupation of Adichie in the text.” In Nigerian parlance, the term “Americanah” is an identity term that is premised on a person’s previous experience of living in America. In an interview, Adichie defines Americanah as a Nigerian word that can describe any of those who have been to the US and return American affectations; pretend not to understand their mother tongues any longer; refuse to eat Nigerian food or make constant reference to their life in America.

From this understanding, it is clear that Ifemelu’s decision to return home without worrying about being identified as an “Americanah”, establishes the fact that Adichie is proposing and charting a path for a new kind of migration story whose quintessence is return migration.

RACE

You may recognize Adichie's voice and name from Beyonce's song "Flawless," which featured an excerpt of a TED talk Adichie gave titled "We Should All Be Feminists." Adichie was born in Nigeria and when she came to the U.S. to attend college, she quickly discovered that being an African in America doesn't necessarily mean you know what it was like to be an African-American. She found white and black people projecting things on her she didn't understand, and she was confused by the coded language that was often used to talk about race.

She didn't get it, but eventually she did. Those experiences formed the basis of her novel "Americanah,"

Americanah is the melting pot where love and romance collide and comingle with hair politics and the shifting meanings of skin color, Adichie employs migration as the window through which these issues are projected. Beyond Adichie’s juxtaposition of binary migratory terms of “Americanah” and “American” and her protagonist’s choice of the former, the novelist’s preoccupation is to critically engage international migration theories, and to chart a new migration story, where return migration is the quintessential closure.

  GENDER

American Pop star Beyoncé sampled Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TEDx talk , We Should All be Feminists in her song titled  “Flawless”. Beyoncé using an excerpt from Adichie’s lyrics talks about the stereotypes linked to women and gender misrepresentations, by entering into the  conversation about the issues that black women face, the singer goes into a rigorous dance movement and is immediately cut off in her routine as the voice of Adichie cuts into the vocal and performance rendition:

We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls "You can have ambition but not too much, you should aim to be successful but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man." [...] Because I am female I am expected to aspire to marriage I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don't teach boys the same? [...] We raise girls to each other as competitors not for jobs or for accomplishments which I think can be a good thing but for the attention of men. we teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. [...] feminist: the person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.  (Adichie 2014: 27-34)

This went immediately viral, also thanks to the above-mentioned Beyoncé’s hit and when the motto ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ subsequently featured on T-shirts in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s debut Dior show (Yotka 2016); furthermore, its adaptation into essay is today a well-acclaimed feminist manifesto, which has been chosen by the Swedish Women’s Lobby as one of the books that every 16-years-old girl of the country receives in order to foster gender equality (Flood, 2015). Also, the author's issues of gender construction in the Nigerian society mirrors the issues she talks about in her other manifesto Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, as it

focuses on gender and sexuality in the Nigerian context and in its related migrant experiences. Adichie's findings on sexual education and the perception of sex among youngsters in Nigeria plays a fundamental role in the bildungsroman journey of Ifemelu exploring her sexuality as an adolescent in a puritan post-colonial society.

MIGRATION

While many of the migratory experiences in the novel work within migration theory, Adichie simultaneously transcends the borders of international migration theories by introducing a new factor that both influences migration and projects a new perspective on return migration. According to Dustmann and Weiss (2007:237), lack of economic opportunity and escape from natural disaster/persecution are two main reasons individuals migrate throughout history. While identifying the need to flee “choicelessness” as the main reason for much of the migration in the twenty-first century Nigerian setting of the novel, Adichie uses literary dimensions to shake up the foundations of theory. Consequently, the direction of this type of migration, how it affects the bonds of love, how it changes personalities and cultural views, and how it reinterprets identity become the novelist’s major theoretical engagements. In addition, Adichie is concerned with how migration debases and elevates, how it barters and fulfills and, most significantly, how it reinvents.

Reception

The Guardian's review called it Adichie's third and most ambitious novel – her first, Purple Hibiscus, was long listed for the Booker prize and her second, Half a Yellow Sun, won the Orange prize. A highly acclaimed 2009 collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, cemented her position as one of the most promising African writers of her generation. She was awarded a prestigious MacArthur "Genius" grant and in 2010, the New Yorker featured her in its list of the 20 best authors under the age of 40.

The final section of the book follows Ifemelu's return and her reunion with Obinze who is, by now, married to someone else. It is to Adichie's immense credit that such a sprawling, epic book remains so tightly structured. There are, perhaps, one too many of Ifemelu's blogposts and a few extra scenes here and there that could have been cut, but part of Americanah's appeal is its immense, uncontained and beating heart. You can feel Adichie's passion and belief pumping beneath every paragraph.

Americanah is a deeply felt book, written with equal parts lyricism and erudition. More than that, it is an important book – and yet one that never lets its importance weigh down the need to tell a truly gripping human story.

Critic Jennifer Reese says that Americanah is indeed a novel about being black in the 21st century — in America, Great Britain and Africa, while answering a want ad, choosing a lover, hailing a cab, eating collard greens, watching Barack Obama on television — but you could also call it a novel of immigration and dislocation, just about every page tinged with faint loneliness.

"Through various circumstances shaped by political and social factors, Ifemelu travels to the US for a university education and ends up staying. It’s a familiar situation for most post-colonial third worlders—inevitable, practically—this idea that some form of the good life must be found outside the borders of their corrupt and backward birth country: preferably in the West, in the lands of plenty, where years of imperialism and colonialism have enabled its subjects to enjoy Freedom™, drinkable tap water, and partake of a seemingly unlimited bounty of foodstuff in grocery stores and supermarkets."

External Links

An interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talking about Americanah