Americanah

The immigrant experience in America has long been the stuff of fiction, as each wave of newcomers has inspired their own literature, from the Irish right up to the present day, when Africans who come of their own accord have added to the discussion. With Africans, of course, comes the discussion of race. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie points out in her excellent novel, Americanah, Africans from countries who have little racial diversity, such as Adichie's Nigeria, don't think of themselves as black until they come to America, where it is then thrust in their faces.

The novel is something of a throwback, a romantic comedy of manners of a sort, but with the added layer of racial politics. Ifemalu is a girl in Nigeria who is in love with Obinze. They both seek to go to America to go to college, but only Ifemalu gets the visa. She leaves, and experiences a whole new world, not only of the strangeness of the place: "it was the commercials that captivated her. She ached for the lives they showed, lives full of bliss, where all problems had sparkling solutions in shampoos and cars and packaged foods, and in her mind they became the real America."

Obinze travels to England, where he must work under a false name, at menial labor. He cleans toilets and drives a truck. "The wind blowing across the British Isles was odorous with fear of asylum seekers, infecting everybody with the panic of impending doom, and so articles were written and read, simply and stridently, as though the writers lived in a world in which the present was unconnected to the past, and they had never considered this to be the normal course of history: the influx into Britain of black and brown people from countries created by Britain."

Ifemalu gets a job as a nanny, has a relationship with a white man, and starts a blog, detailing her observations as a non-American black: "Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care. So what if you weren't 'black' in your country? You're in America now. We all have our moments of initiation into the Society of Former Negroes. Mine was in a class in undergrad when I was asked to give the black perspective, only I had no idea what that was. So I just made something up."

I enjoyed the blog posts, which also detail the frustrations of dealing with American blacks who talk about Africa as the mother land. Eventually she will have a relationship with an American black professor, who will balk at her decision to return to Nigeria.

Much of the story, before she returns to Nigeria, is told in flashback as she is having her hair done. As it is becoming more apparent in mainstream (white) culture, hair is important to black women, African or not.

Americanah (the term is one used by Nigerians to describe a person has come back after living in the U.S., bringing the accent and Western attitude with them), is a fantastic novel, charming and angry and with its heart on its sleeve. The "will they get back together" plot of the two leads is the least interesting thing about it, and the ending was a bit of a let-down, but no bother. What was more interesting to me, especially as an American, is finding out what people of other countries feel about us. I'd say Adichie was pretty close to the mark. Her comments on racial politics in the U.S. were particularly keen: "Racism is about the power of a group and in America it's white folks who have that power. How? Well, white folks don't get treated like shit in upper-class African-American communities and white folks don't get denied bank loans or mortgages precisely because they are white and black juries don't give white criminals worse sentences that black criminals for the same crime and black police officers don't stop white folk for driving while white and black companies don't choose not to hire somebody because their name sounds white and black teachers don't tell white kids that they're not smart enough to be doctors and black politicians don't try some tricks to reduce the voting power of white folks through gerrymandering and advertising agencies don't say they can't use white models to advertise glamorous products because they are not considered 'aspirational' by the 'mainstream.'"