Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie

Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie

Americanah, by Chimamanda Adichie

Alfred A. Knopf, 2013, $15.48, ISBN 978-0307271082

 

“She (Ifemelu) began, over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the carcasses of people’s stories for something she could use. Sometimes making fragile links to race. Sometimes not believing herself. The more she wrote, the less sure she became. Each post scraped off yet one more scale of self until she felt naked and false.”

And so begins Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah. Within the novel’s first few pages, Adichie explains her protagonist’s reason for abandoning her popular race blog. This brief explication may well serve as Americanah’s epigraph, a glimpse of what to expect for the following 600 pages; clear, often beautiful prose, a self-concerned protagonist, and an honesty that sometimes touches upon the novel’s own weaknesses.

Americanah tells the story of Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman who moves to Philadelphia to attend university. After several traumatic years of financial insecurity, confusion, and depression, Ifemelu starts a blog called Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. Throughout Ifemelu’s blogging success and romantic relationships, the memory of her first love, Obinze, constantly hovers. But this love story is only a part of the book’s larger discussion on immigration, identity, and race.

Ifemelu is a complex character. Strong-willed and opinionated, Ifemelu seems like both Adichie’s creation and Adichie herself. While fictional characters often share experiences with their author, the most compelling characters feel separate from their creators, even if they retain a sense of duplicity. Adichie does not always accomplish this with Ifemelu. There are moments in Americanah when Ifemelu feels more like Adichie’s mouthpiece than a character, as in the following blog post: “Don’t say your grandfather was a serf in Russia when slavery happened because what matters is you are American now and being American means you take the whole shebang, America’s assets and America’s debt, and Jim Crow is a big-ass debt.” And so on. In these essay-like sections, fiction is sucked dry and we are left with a sort of didactic lecture. This is not Ifemelu writing to us; it is Adichie writing at us.

 

And Yet…

Americanah is filled with moments of very “human” beauty. Here, for instance, is an example of Adichie’s skillful, evocative use of prose. Obinze, now living as an immigrant in Britain, is at a dinner party attended by people who “all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness.”

Adichie’s prose is not covered in the overly literary-the tendency to submerge sentences in unnecessary adjectives, descriptors, and excess. Her prose is not a rejection of or inattention to style. Rather, it’s a careful choosing of words, a respect for clarity in language. This simplicity gives her language a vulnerability and nakedness she does not always allow her characters.

Still, Adichie sometimes grants small apertures into the contrived exteriors of her characters like when Obinze, upon being deported back to Nigeria after over extending his visa, felt as if “the last shard of his dignity was like a wrapper slipping off that he was desperate to retie.” Or Ifemelu, whose days were “stilled by silence and snow” during a bout of depression. These scenes stand out not only for their language, but because they reflect Adichie’s emotional acuity and sympathy for her characters. She pushes aside general platitudes about “the immigrant experience” and crafts moments that feel both universal and personal.

This sympathy, though, is rarely given to other characters in Americanah. On the contrary, characters seem stringently divided into two groups: the flawed enlightened (Obinze and Ifemelu) and the hopelessly ignorant (everyone else). From white liberals to social-climbing Nigerians, no one is spared from Adichie’s critical, but often keenly observed, magnifying glass. Most of Ifemelu’s experiences are filtered through a racial lense and we are reminded (or made aware) of nuances that sometimes only an outsider looking in can identify. Reading Americanah is like looking into the most unflattering of mirrors.

However, essential storytelling components are often neglected for the benefit of Adichie’s “messaging.” The novel wavers in places, and Adichie forces plot and character motivations as racially connected. But these connections are often thinly constructed. Adichie seems to be aware of this and acknowledges it in the text, like when Ifemelu’s American boyfriend, Blaine, tells her to add more “depth” to her blog posts. “It has enough depth” Ifemelu says, “but with the niggling thought that he was right.” Blaine often plays the role of Ifemelu’s sceptic. He “combs through” Ifemelu’s words, disagreeing with “their sweep and simplicity.” Blaine feels like the hesitant, though observant, reader. He notices that Ifemelu’s (or rather, Adichie’s) commentary does not invite discussion- it presents observation as fact, sometimes without providing much substance.

Americanah is, at times, a frustrating novel. We are brought into the main characters’ lives only to be pushed out by Adichie herself. The beauty of the details and insights are clouded by a question of authenticity and voice. Adichie notices (and has the confidence to write about) the subtle and not-so-subtle ways race and racism permeate our society, but these moments are often harshly observed and come off as caustic. Americanah tries to be a “book of ideas,” but its unsympathetic tone leaves little room for question or discussion. Ultimately, the heart of the novel lies in the small moments, not the fleeting scenes glazed over in narration and proselytizing discussions on race, but in the fissures when Adichie removes herself from the novel and lets her characters be characters. Without these moments we would be left with a beautifully written, sharply observed, catalogue of problems.

Magdalena Mora. Graduated from Macalester College and currently lives in Austin, Texas.

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