If you haven’t read the book, expect a few spoilers! :)
The third novel by award winning Nigerian writer Chimamanda
Ngozie Adichie, blew me away! The best novel I’ve read in 2014 so far. She takes
what could have been an ordinary story about love and transforms it into a
social commentary on race, discrimination, immigration, displacement.
The story opens in Princeton and we meet our main
protagonist Ifemelu who has to travel by
train to another surburb (one with more black people) to braid her hair for her upcoming move back to
Nigeria. And as her hair is braided in a dirty, rundown hair salon in a more
diversely populated and less affluent part of town, her story is unfolded to us
in flashbacks and sometimes from the point of view from the man she has loved
since secondary school Obinze.
We follow as they fall for each other in secondary school
and go to university together. There are numerous strikes at the Nigerian
university and Ifemelu finds her way to Philadelphia to attend school on a
partial scholarship and struggles to find a job to pay the rest of her tuition.
She breaks off contact with Obinze when she falls into depression due to an incident
where she allows herself to be debased in order to earn money. Obinze is unable
to acquire a visa to America due to more stringent security protocols and
instead heads to the UK and lives on an expired permit as he tries to arrange a
marriage of convenience but is instead deported. Deported! I read that scene at
least three times because it was just so harrowing and I had grown so attached
to him.
Ifemelu, however is the central character of this story, our
‘Americanah’, which describes a person who has been to America and comes back
changed. A humurous example is of when she arrives home and experiences the humidity and heat she exclaims to her
cousin “I cant breathe!” which leads her
cousin to uncontrollable laughter and she calls her an ’Americanah’. Because
the phrase is so foreign to Africans. In America she had found success in her
online blog that she used as a platform to share her observations as a “non American
black”. But even ‘making it’ in America cannot staunch her desire to go back to
her native Nigeria. Her family and friends do not understand why she would
choose to go back, but Adichie describes it so aptly, that if you have ever
felt a longing for a place to belong it is easy to relate:
“..there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a
while, an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought
with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other
lives she could be living, that over the months had melded into a piercing homesickness.
”
The rest of the story brings as back full circle to Ifemelu
and Obinze, who is now a wealthy property developer, married to someone else, and with a daughter (oh no! where is the happy ending?),
back in Nigeria again, as they try to find their way back to each other despite
personal misgivings and societal expectations
Once again Adichie has weaved a tale that engrosses the
reader completely and leaves you asking for more. Her prose is rich and her ability
to articulate her observations on how race is an almost tangible thing in the
way people interact with one another in countries where people of colour have
been oppressed is astounding. I recommend this book for anyone who has ever
immigrated to a place that is not your ‘home’ or for anyone who finally finds
their way back to Africa. Whether you observed or were affected by racial
prejudice and have strong views on the subject or whether you have never
experienced it and always felt like it was an abstract social construct that
did not really affect you directly (like me), I urge you to read this book and
experience a different point of view. It is more than a story on displacement,
it is a story about love. And I'm a sucker for a good love story :)
Have you read it? What did you think?
