Chimamanda’s Americanah was a deep second read that would continue to get deep I’m sure, no matter how many times I read it. The unending depth is what makes Chimamanda an unusually gifted writer for me.
Americanah was a racy – in many forms (sex, language, attitude, characters, dialogue, politics, religion) – novel about race that I found to be honest and raw.
It was sometimes subtly cheekily biased but mostly boldly and brutally unbiased. Even knowing that Chimamanda is a full-blooded Igbo woman with fierce love and affinity for her eastern ethnicity and cultural roots could not help me decide whose side she was on whenever she ever so smartly mentioned the peculiar tendencies and nuances of the Yorubas, Hausas and the Igbos.
I mean, she would mock all of these tribes; her beloved Igbo tribe included, so conveniently and praise whichever one whenever she deemed fit without caring if she was making any other tribe or hers for that matter, look bad, with equal weight and confidence.
It was definitely an intriguing, amusing, awesome experience for me.
Chimamanda extended the same high degree of unbiased estimations and comparisons as she submerged us into Ifemelu’s deeply observant thoughts about life home and abroad (within and of itself). She was as honest, straightforward, objective, blunt and emotionally intelligent as she needed to be for one to regard her opinions highly, whether they were slighting or not.
Her unabashed objectivity ran throughout and the only place you would ever find her showing just the right hint of cheeky bias was when anyone; whether high, mighty, foreign, native or anyone in-between was displaying obnoxious superiority or refinement against the integrity of her different yet special homeland, Nigeria.
A good example is one of those elite gatherings Ifemelu regularly attended where Nollywood was being ridiculed by certain supercilious attendants. Even though she is well aware of our movie industry’s many and sometimes, hilarious deficiencies, she still made sure to point out that Hollywood produced some bad movies too only with “better lighting”.
Dang!
Oh, how I loved her for this ‘cause she is damn right.
Now really, down to business:
Americanah follows the journey of two secondary school sweethearts, Ifemelu and Obinze as they navigate through their fantasies of the white man’s land and what their realities turned out to be on landing there. Set mostly in America and Britain, Chimamanda narrates what Nigerians truly face in obodo oyinbo (a white man’s land) in their quest for credible green cards, for a better life when their country seems to be failing them.
OBINZE
Compared to the novel’s protagonist, Ifemelu; Obinze was a character that I really liked. He was dignifiedly humble and quiet. He was an intellectual yet he thought more than he ever spoke. And even through all the embarrassing and anxiety-laden ordeals he underwent in Britain in the hands of some so-called friends and colleagues just to get a valid card proving authentic British citizenship, he never lost his quiet dignity and mellow aura. I was drawn to him just as he so effortlessly, easily caught the eyes of other characters in the book. And the way that he loved Ifemelu was just so unconditional. He loved her deeply and no other woman could ever suffice. It was a trait that I found really manly and dignified. A trait true to him.
IFEMELU
As for Ifemelu, let me just lay it straight: I didn’t like her. To be honest, I found her to be too arrogant, inflexible and insolent in all her opinionated glory. But then again, I don’t think Chimamanda really created Ifemelu to be an easily liked character. She spoke through Ifemelu to discuss race so bluntly and heavily so it only makes sense that Ifemelu was highly critical and inflexible to orthodoxies.
Ifemelu had to be the intuitive, defiant lady that did extreme analysis of situations and different people as they came so that norms, labels and perceptions are not easily glided over, overlooked, or butt-licked for peace and normality to reign. Ifemelu was a character created to make a lot of people feel uncomfortable; the White man, the American African, the African American, the African and the Nigerian. Ifemelu and her race blog were used to prove cases, accuse, defy and educate.
Even though there’s justification for Ifemelu’s brazen and sometimes, conceited character, I still wished that I liked her in that form. But I didn’t. Not because I always disagreed with her opinions but because of the proud and sometimes condescending person she came across as when expressing them.
And did I mention that I hated how impulsive she was? With her words and that unnecessary sexual encounter with the unkempt looking neighbour? But then again, I think the latter act had to do with how unknowingly still broken she was at that time. I know that but still I wished she hadn’t been so rash and slutty after being in several meaningful relationships and that one soiling act with a stranger that left her stained, full of self-hatred and separated from Obinze, her great love.
On the positive side, I was able to connect with the vulnerable side she rarely showed and her journey through making peace with her inner self and staying connected to her roots.
I was able to empathise with her when she fell into depression and self-loathe. Watching her being forced to sell her body to steady the feet that were stumbling so hard in an unfamiliar land, just to end up falling in a way that was even more soiling and soul-damaging was so poignant.
I could also relate to how she had vague and varying interests very similar to mine (media-related practices) and couldn’t pin-point what it was exactly that she wanted to do on graduating college.
When I graduated university, I was sort of faced with the same dilemma. Different interests here and there sometimes with a firm shape and sometimes with curves. Even now, I’m still navigating. Writing is definitely my core talent. I’m great with short stories, scripts, feature stories, reviews and content marketing. I have this family of writing gifts so it’s sometimes difficult to go about fully flexing each without feeling like I’m sacrificing one for the other. Seeing Ifemelu face similar problems really soothed me.
I loved that she studied communication too as I did. I loved that she loved blogging too and got successful with it because I love blogging too and dream of my blog being as successful as hers was.
I loved her take on the natural African hair too even though it sometimes seemed heavy-handed and how she opened my eyes to a lot of facts about the prejudices against African hair that I wasn’t conscious of and sometimes even guilty of. The more she talked out the varying uniqueness in the beauty of African hair, the more she made me want to wear a natural hair. And I recently started wearing one before rereading Americanah but it’s really hard keeping it. My hair is so dense and thick and can look so unkempt and untidy at times. Geez.
Not really what I envisioned my natural hair to look like. But I’m going to keep trying to grow and maintain it because in my experience and what Chimamanda so rightly pointed out in the book, RELAXERS are LEHAL to the scalp. I don’t want to go through excruciating pain almost every two months again and become a slave to what was hurting me just because I want to wear that sleek hair.
But hey, who knows? Two months or five years from now, I might give in to relaxers but that won’t be because I want to appeal to the standards of formality or achieve the sophistication and chic of the white lady, but because I want to truly soften my dense hair and relieve myself of stress. But then again, I might keep on choosing the stress of taking care of a natural hair over the pain of undergoing hair relaxation and scalp damage. It’s going to be MY choice made for me and not for pleasing others.
All in all, reading Americanah gave me hopes about attaining success abroad and enjoying certain domestic privileges I might otherwise not enjoy but it mostly bashed a lot of my lofty, silly, luxurious ideas about living abroad and exposed me to how wrong I was about a lot of my thoughts and perception about America and its people (the supposed neatness, the seeming nonexistence of rats and cockroaches in their ‘cool’ apartments, the seeming capable college counselors who can figure you out and just the right jobs to bring your dreams to life).
Chimamanda took me to America and showed me what it really was, literally – all the good and the ugly of living in obodo oyinbo as a Nigerian or as they call us there ‘Black’.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Chimamanda was unrestrainedly honest.
But thankfully, she never lost that underlying sentiment, that feeling that no matter how rough one’s home is or how comfortable or relatively fortunate life is away from it (in America or any other white man’s land), it could never feel as natural and belonging as home.
RATING: 80%