₦airaland Forum

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's accomplished
third novel is a subtly provocative exploration
of oppression and the idea of home

Alex Clark
After 13 years in the United States, Ifemelu
is about to return to Lagos; but first she must
go to the hairdresser's. So far, so run-of-the-
mill, for who doesn't want to look their best
to greet a crowd of people they haven't seen
for a long time? But for Ifemelu, this
essential piece of personal maintenance is
not exactly straightforward. First, she must
take a train out of Princeton, where the few
black people she has seen are "so light-
skinned and lank-haired she could not
imagine them wearing braids", then she must
take a cab to an unfamiliar salon, her usual
hairdresser being unavailable because she has
returned to Ivory Coast to get married; then
wrangle over the price; then sit in baking
heat for many hours, during which she will
be asked repeatedly whether she knows the
Nollywood stars on the television and, more
alarmingly, whether she can intercede on her
Senegalese braider Aisha's behalf to persuade
either of her Igbo suitors to marry her.
Hair is a big deal in Americanah (the slang
term that Ifemelu's Lagos friends will use to
describe her when she goes back to Nigeria).
"Why don't you have relaxer?" asks Aisha, to
which she replies, "I like my hair the way
God made it", meaning that she refuses to
straighten her hair by means of chemicals
and smoothing irons; but it is also a
statement made ironic by its context, given
that the pair are in the midst of a
disagreement about what colour hair
extensions Aisha should use to weave into
Ifemelu's braids. "Colour one is too black, it
looks fake," Ifemelu tells her, but Aisha
merely "shrugged, a haughty shrug, as though
it was not her problem if her customer did
not have good taste".
What is real, what is fake, how many layers
of history and culture it takes to construct a
national, or racial, or personal identity, and
how contingent that identity is on its
immediate surroundings are all questions that
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie poses in her third
novel; but her real talent is to make those
questions seem as if they cannot be
contained by neat, orderly language, and
instead to animate them, to embed them in
messy, difficult lives that are filled with
idiosyncrasy and complication and
compromise.
Ifemelu has herself created a life based on
observing the weirdnesses – mostly painful,
sometimes comical – that emerge when
different groups of people live together in a
system shaped to maintain the dominance of
one group over others. Her blog, Raceteenth
or Various Observations About American
Blacks (Those Formerly Known As Negroes)
by a Non- American Black, created so that
she could voice her various puzzlements and
conclusions about what she saw around her,
has become a huge success, managing to
keep happy both the kind of readers who
routinely use the word "reify" and those who
want to chat in more laidback fashion about
their experiences. In posts such as Badly
Dressed White Middle Managers From Ohio
Are Not Always What You Think, about a man
who has adopted a black child and finds
himself shunned by his neighbours, she
chronicles her unexpected discoveries; in
more didactic mode, she counsels her fellow
immigrants in unabashedly straightforward,
no-nonsense terms. Stop telling Americans
you are Jamaican or Ghanaian, she writes in
To My Fellow Non-American Black: In
America, You Are Black, Baby, because
"America doesn't care": "You must nod back
when a black person nods at you in a heavily
white area. It is called the black nod … If you
go to eat in a restaurant, please tip
generously. Otherwise the next black person
who comes in will get awful service, because
waiters groan when they get a black table.
You see, black people have a gene that
makes them not tip, so please overpower
that gene."
In the process, Ifemelu has gone from being
broke, depressed and alienated to being a
condo-owning Fellow at Princeton. She would
not wish to return to her early student life in
America, when she was forced to help a
sports coach to "relax" so that she could pay
her rent; when she was utterly bewildered by
the customs of the country. But nor is she
quite at home with her life as it is; and a
kind of weariness, a build-up of "amorphous
longings, shapeless desires" has led her to
this point of departure.
There are also more concrete reasons:
perhaps the example of her Aunty Uju, a
doctor who came to America following the
death of the military high-up who kept her in
fine style as his mistress, but who has found
herself incrementally diminished by it; or
Ifemelu's failure to find a definitively
comfortable fit with her painstakingly moral
and politically fastidious boyfriend Blaine; or
by the knowledge that she herself feels a
disconnect in what she is doing. "You know
why Ifemelu can write that blog, by the
way?" asks Shan, Blaine's jealous and
unpleasant sister. "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 labelled angry and
shunned." The tension between these two
characters has simmered for some time, and
this is an explosive moment. But Ifemelu
barely reacts, saying only "I think that's fair".
And there is also Obinze, the childhood
sweetheart – indeed, once her future
husband – whom she left in Nigeria and who
shares, as a lesser partner, the narrative.
Obinze's experience of emigration has been
less successful than Ifemelu's; a brief stint in
London sees him working under a false name
and paying over the odds for an arranged
marriage, only to be arrested on his way to
the ceremony and later deported from a
country "odorous with fear of asylum
seekers". He has also seen friends from
home in decidedly elevated circumstances:
Emenike, who has married a wealthy lawyer
and subsequently "cast home as the jungle
and himself as interpreter of the jungle",
invites him to a dinner party in Islington, at
which Obinze is struck by the unmatched
artisan plates that would never be used for
guests in Nigeria. More unbridgeable,
though, is his fellow guests' inability to
understand he is not a refugee: "They would
not understand why people like him, who
were raised well-fed and watered but mired
in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to
look towards somewhere else and eternally
convinced that real lives happened in that
somewhere else, were now resolved to do
dangerous things, illegal things, so as to
leave, none of them starving, or raped, or
from burned villages, but merely hungry for
choice and certainty."
Obinze's enforced return to Nigeria brings
power, albeit through chance connections, so
that when, towards the end of the book,
Ifemelu arrives in Lagos as an awkward
outsider, he is very much part of the new
establishment. Whether they are able to
retrieve their former intimacy, or whether it
has been chased away by the transformations
wrought in them by their travels, provides a
tentative resolution.
But it is also slightly unsatisfactory, because
Americanah is a book that works better when
it is in transit, detailing people and situations
who are in the act of becoming. Its structure
is complex and sometimes unwieldy; there is
much looping backwards and forwards in time
as Ifemelu sits in the hair salon, and one
feels slightly lost once her braids are finished
and the narrative has moved on. Similarly,
some characters are glimpsed too fleetingly
to make a lasting impression; in the case of
Ifemelu's parents, for example, this neatly
mirrors their daughter's fading memories of
them, but it is also tricky for the reader.
Nonetheless, this is an impressive novel –
although very different from Adichie's
Orange prize-winning Half of a Yellow Sun, it
shares some of its freewheeling, zesty
expansiveness. But that should not disguise
its delicacy; it is also an extremely
thoughtful, subtly provocative exploration of
structural inequality, of different kinds of
oppression, of gender roles, of the idea of
home. Subtle, but not afraid to pull its
punches. We all wish race was not an issue,
says Ifemelu, talking about inter-racial
relationships at a polite Manhattan dinner
party, the day after Obama becomes the
presidential candidate: "But it's a lie. I came
from a country where race was not an issue,
I did not think of myself as black and I only
became black when I came to America."
m.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/11/americanah-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-review