My Analysis On My Favorite Book Ever _ Americanah

There was nothing subtle in author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie attempt to write about race in Americanah, a novel centered on female protagonist Ifemelu, a Nigerian immigrant turned popular blogger in America. The story was mostly narrated by Ifemelu and follows her journey from Nigeria to America, where she notices the different issues surrounding race, in how it is never really talked about, or how when talked about it is obscured in a coded language. This would later be the main subject of her popular blog. There is so much to talk about in Americanah, but race is the biggest theme. The book shows that we still have a long way to go when it comes to racism in America.

It is interesting how some of Ifemelu’s blog post made up part of the book. She named the blog Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. She began blogging a few weeks after she deliberately cheated on Curt her White boyfriend, and they broke up. Curt had called an Essence Magazine racially skewed for featuring only black women, this was really upsetting to Ifemelu who went on to show him what was actually racially skewed and why Magazines like Essence exist by driving him to the bookstore to flip through pages of women’s magazines in search of black women. After this exercise, Curt reluctantly saw her point, “So three black women in maybe two thousand pages of women’s magazines, and all of them are biracial or racially ambiguous, so they could also be Indian or Puerto Rican or something. Not one of them is dark”, said Ifemelu. The author uses this little incidence in the book to show how White people could be sometimes oblivious to racism.

After the bookstore exercise, Ifemelu wrote a long questioning email to Wambui, her Kenyan University friend who responded by saying the email is raw and true and more people should read it. But telling Wambui what was not enough for Ifemelu who wondered how many other people chose silence and how many other people had become “black” in America. She signs on to Word Press, her first blog post which was about Curt was titled “The Hot White Ex,” Ifemelu called it a “better-punctuated version of the e-mail she had sent to Wambui”. Raceteenth, what began as a reaction to a comment about Essence Magazine being racially skewed, later became a popular race blog that made Ifemelu famous in the blogging world, and earned her enough money to buy a house. This goes to show how big an issue race is in America.

Ifemelu’s blog even got her invitations to diversity talks, most of which were pretentious. She mentions a particular one for a company in Ohio where she had been invited to give a presentation titled “How to Talk About Race with Colleagues of Other Races,” Ifemelu had wondered who the employees would be talking to, since they were all white. I find this particularity humorous, although that may or may not have been the author’s intention, since race is a serious issue. Ifemelu’s presentation however ended with leaden clapping and an email later that evening that reads, “YOUR TALK WAS BALONEY. YOU ARE A RACIST. YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL WE LET YOU INTO THIS COUNTRY,” in capital letters. Ifemelu found the email a revelation, they had not read her blog, and they had only invited her because they heard she was a leading blogger about race. I find the pretense of the so called diversity talk troubling because as Ifemelu mentions, it is not to inspire any real change but rather to make people feel good about themselves.

She gave many other diversity talks in which she began telling people what they wanted to hear, none of which she would ever write on her blog. The internet provided her with a freedom and anonymity to say what she truly wanted to say. In the diversity talks, she would say something like “America has made great progress for which we should be very proud,” while on her blog she would write, “Racism should never have happened and so you don’t get a cookie for reducing it.”  I find this really funny too. I laughed quite a lot reading Americanah, even some parts about race were quite humorous to me. But this all proves we still have a long way to go in America when it comes to talking about race.

I found it difficult to separate Ifemelu’s character from the author because some of Ifemelu’s experiences are real. I would describe Ifemelu as being sarcastic without even trying, she naturally has a very interesting sense of humor, which I believe is very much like that of the Adichie. Adichie does draw some comparison between herself and Ifemelu, in her interview with Terry Gross, on Fresh Air, she said “…When I first came to the U.S., much like Ifemelu, I just didn’t think of myself as black,” and cited a particular instance in undergraduate class in which the subject of watermelon came up and a an African-American classmate was offended by a student’s comment. Adichie said, “I remember sitting there thinking, ‘but what’s so bad about watermelons? Because I quite like watermelons.” There is a blog post in Americanah that hints at this anecdote, which is why I believe the blog posts in Americanah are completely the voice of Adichie taking over.

One of my favorite blog posts in the book is “To My Fellow Non-American Blacks: In America, You Are Black, Baby” In which Adichie talked about how in America, African or Caribbean immigrants are black regardless of whether or not they identified with this back in their countries. Stating that the only reason why they don’t want to be black is because black is at the bottom of America’s race ladder.  It was in this blog that she wrote about watermelon, “You must show that you are offended when such words as “watermelon” or “tar baby” are used in jokes, even if you don’t know what the hell is being talked about— and since you are a Non-American Black, the chances are that you won’t know.”  I find this to be the most interesting blog post in the book, maybe because as an African immigrant, I have had similar experiences of having to be offended by histories I don’t quite share with African Americans. But there is something universal about human suffering that it doesn’t really matter if my great grandparents were never slaves, I could still empathize with African Americans not because I’m black but because I’m human.

When Ifemelu met the students of the African Student Associate at her school and felt right at home with them, I can identify with that experience too, “they mimicked what Americans told them: You speak such good English. How bad is AIDS in your country? It’s so sad that people live on less than a dollar a day in Africa,” the generalization and negative reinforcement is a common experience amongst African immigrants. I find this line poignant, “And they themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again,” I believe Adichie captures the longing of African immigrants in America, the longing to see a better Africa. This brings me to Bye-Bye Babar the essay written by African author, Taye Selasi in which she talks about what an Afropolitan is. She writes,

“For us, being African must mean something. The media’s portrayals (war, hunger) won’t do. Neither will the New World trope of bumbling, blue-black doctor. Most of us grew up aware of ‘being from’ a blighted place, of having last names from to countries which are linked to lack, corruption. Few of us escaped those nasty ‘booty-scratcher’ epithets and fewer still that sense of shame when visiting paternal villages. Whether we were ashamed of ourselves for not knowing more about our parents’ culture, or ashamed of that culture for not being more ‘advanced’ can be unclear. What is manifest is the extent to which the modern adolescent African is tasked to forge a sense of self from wildly disparate sources. You’d never know it looking at those dapper lawyers in global firms, but most were once supremely self-conscious of being so ‘in between’. Brown-skinned without a bedrock sense of ‘blackness,’ on the one hand; and often teased by African family members for ‘acting white’ on the other – the baby-Afropolitan can get what I call ‘lost in transnation’” (Selasi). This is a more comprehensive summary of the experiences of the students in the African Student Associate in Americanah.

Hair was a big deal in Americanah. Ifemelu talks about hair a lot and seem to notice people’s hair a lot too, for example Kimberly with her golden hair, the white man with matted hair, straw haired freckled girl and so on. the story began with Ifemelu at Princeton Junction station were Ifemelu was waiting on the platform for a train to Trenton to braid her hair for her trip back home to Nigeria, after thirteen years in America. The book cast hair and race in a light in which I’ve never seen both before. Ifemelu wrote a particularly interesting blog post about Michelle Obama, titled “A Michelle Obama Shout-Out Plus Hair as Race Metaphor” stating that if Michelle Obama decided to go natural, “she would totally rock but poor Obama would certainly lose the independent vote, even the undecided Democrat vote,” she may be absolutely right.

The book was written prior to, and during Obama’s election as president, so there was quite a lot written about him on Ifemelu’s blog. I particularly find this blog post interesting, “Obama Can Win Only If He Remains the Magic Negro,” Magic Negro meaning “the black man who is eternally wise and kind. He never reacts under great suffering, never gets angry, is never threatening….” There was also a post that alludes to the fact that Obama is a different kind of black so American hasn’t made that much progress, this was based on a discussion she had with Blaine’s friends. Obama featured a lot in Ifemelu’s relationship with Blaine the African American academic who “expected her to feel what she did not know how to feel,” because even though she wrote a very successful blog about race and was black, she was not an African-American, so she was still an outsider in a sense.

Her relationship with Blaine had a different type of challenge compared with her relationship with Curt. She met Curt through babysitting for Kimberly whose face turned misty when she spoke about Africa, and whose sister, Laura had a white superior attitude and said thing like “privileged Africans who are here in this country.” This was Ifemelu’s first real job in America, after many months of job seeking with the name and Id of a person that looks nothing like her. When Ifemelu raised this point to her aunty whom she calls Aunty Uju, she said, “All of us look alike to white people”,  sharing an anecdote about cousins that looked nothing like each other that had used the other cousin’s Id and nobody noticed.

Ifemelu’s lack of job shows the challenges some African immigrants go through in America. It had even pushed her to performing a sexual act with a man for money, this had led to depression and then breaking up with Obinze, her boyfriend back in Nigeria. But when she met Curt, it all changed, Curt is Kimberly’s cousin. With Curt, “she became, in her mind, a woman free of knots and cares, a woman running in the rain with the taste of sun-warmed strawberries in her mouth,” she became a privileged woman when her fellow international student, Wambui was working 3 jobs so she could do an arrange marriage to get American papers. The major challenge of this relationship although they both cheated on each other, was that Curt because he’s white, did not quite understand racism, as proven by the Essence magazine incidence.

Her relationship with Blaine on the other hand is different. From her conversation with Blaine’s friends, Ifemelu gleaned meaningful substances she could write on her blog. But she felt vaguely lost amongst them. Sometimes she watches them in amazement wondering if they were serious for being enraged about imported vegetables that ripened in trucks, and how they would not buy cloths made by unpaid workers in Asia. Ifemelu describes them as looking at the world with an impractical, luminous earnestness that moved her, but never convinced her.

Blaine thought she needed more depths and details in her blog, to which Ifemelu responded, “I don’t want to explain, I want to observe,” he said she was being lazy, a word he uses for students who did not hand in work on time.  Sometimes Ifemelu felt his disappointment that she had not learned enough from him. Their relationship eventually became shaky when Ifemelu choses a farewell party over a protest Blaine organized, but Ifemelu believes Shan, Blaine’s sister was really the root of the problem. It was Shan who slighted Ifemelu’s blog, by saying “Because she’s African. She’s writing from the outside. She doesn’t really feel all the stuff she’s writing about. It’s all quaint and curious to her. So she can write it and get all these accolades and get invited to give talks. If she were African American, she’d just be labeled angry and shunned.” Shan is right, but Ifemelu still felt embittered by the words. So the major conflict in her relationship with Blaine was that although Ifemelu was black, she was still an outsider.

I loved how the story goes back and forth between the past and present, between Ifemelu and Obinze (the other protagonist in the book), between Nigeria, the United Kingdom and America, but mostly between Nigeria and America, and finally the story ended in Nigeria when Ifemelu returns from America. I love how the book is divided into parts, this was done also in Adichie’s other novel Half of a Yellow Sun. Americanah is divided into seven parts, each part featuring different stages of the characters’ lives. Every chapter is centered on one of the characters in the book, mostly Ifemelu and Obinze. But other characters were fully talked about too and having a chapter dedicated to them gave their characters more depths and identity.

What really makes Americanah a love story is Ifemelu and Obinze’s relationship which started in high school in Nigeria, ended at some point in America and resumed when Ifemelu travelled back to Nigeria. At some point in the book, Obinze had travelled to the United Kingdom where he was deported back to Nigeria after an attempt at a fake marriage. Obinze’s story captures the bitter experience of undocumented African immigrants abroad. When he returns to Nigeria however, his lot became better. He was introduced into real estate and he became rich, he got married to Kosi and had a daughter named Buchi. Obinze describes Kosi as lacking in intelligence, an obvious comparison to Ifemelu who stimulated his mind.  When Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, he divorces Kosi to be with Ifemelu. Morally I do not condone this, but I really cannot bring myself to criticize their relationship either, it was a love story.

When Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, she worked for a magazine for a while and then started a blog named, “The small redemption of Lagos” where she writes about her new experiences in Lagos. In a conversation with Curt, she said “I feel like I got off the plane in Lagos and stopped being black”,  this was in reference to the fact that race was not really an issue in Nigeria.

I love the book so much! Ifemelu is such a great character. I believe the book did a great job of talking about race, a very touchy subject. But I agree with the point that it is much easier for an outsider to talk about it than it is for an African American. It would be real progress indeed if an African American can talk about race without being labeled angry and racist.

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