Today, for the first time, I am going to talk about a book! This book was chosen for September by the local DA Abroad book club. In my time here I have only managed to attend three meetings, all of which – completely coincidentally – covered books by Black authors. The first two were nonfiction essays by American men and were reflections on being Black Americans. In contrast Americanah is a novel by Nigerian writer and woman Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The beginning and end of the main character’s story are in Nigeria. However, as is obvious from the title, a large portion of the book takes place in the west, or the West, and is partially about being Black in America. Or, as the main character, Ifemelu, puts it, a non-American Black.
The Americaness of the novel, makes it easier for Western, particularly American, readers to more easily connect with Ifemelu’s story. Though I am going to focus on Ifemelu’s time in the US, I did want to mention how the group I was in reacted to the author’s description of Ifemelu’s life growing up in Nigeria. Particularly her living conditions at home and while away at university. When I read it I didn’t see the way she lived as particularly rough. Ifemelu comes from a family that teeters on the genteel edge of deprivation but never quite plunges into it. Other than having a viscerally negative reaction to the descriptions of the toilets on her college campus Ifemelu’s world didn’t seem that off-putting to me. The other people in the group spoke of Ifemelu’s living conditions in Nigeria with absolute revulsion.
In comparison the poverty Ifemelu endured in America was both real and fleeting. They were the desperate struggles of students and those destined to do better. Her aunt’s fight to pass the medical boards so that she could at last practice medicine. Her own months-long job search culminating in saying yes to something she would infinitely regret. It’s the kind of hardship that, when you are in it, feels and is overwhelming. It has impact. But it’s not the kind that defines you. When going through this kind of deprivation you know that, if you can just get through this time, things will get better. And you know it because you are surrounded by people who are doing it and who have done it. This is very different from being born into, raised in, and surrounded by poverty.
As an expat, as a Black woman, and as an American, the thing that struck me most about the main character’s time in the US, is that her viewpoint as a non-American Black seems more non-American than Black. Such as the way the book deals with race while only lightly touching on class ignoring, or simply not seeing, how intricately entwined the two are in America. Almost every Black person she encounters, with the exception of a boyfriend and his extended circle, is an immigrant of some kind. Most are of a lower class. They are taxi drivers and hair stylists who work in shops on the wrong side, the Black side, of town. Her aunt’s neighbors in the ghetto. She speaks little of her fellow foreign students. Of all the girls who are able to get jobs while she searches in vain. Of the African student leader who said that it may be easier to befriend other internationals than to befriend local Black Americans, something both true and, from my expat perspective, obvious. While Ifemelu breezes past interactions with fellow non-American Black students and she details her interactions with the hair braiders, the taxi drivers, the neighbors. However, it is something she does from a distance and without intimacy.
This is a sprawling book about painful, foul, and often unstated realities about race and its differing contexts in Western and African societies. As an outsider for whom her Blackness was not a thing until it is bestowed upon her by the US, in many ways this makes Ifemelu the perfect character to observe the differences between Nigerian and American attitudes that might go unseen by those of us habituated to them. For instance, one area in which I think that Ifemelu’s position as an outsider allowed her to see more deeply into America’s Black and white race issue is on the subject of being a Black person isolated in white spaces. At the same time where Americanah has difficulties with perceptions of race in America, it’s because Ifemelu, and perhaps Ngozi Adichie, did not come of age steeped in the very specific sort of racism that is the American experience.
Early on in Americanah Ifemelu reunites with her friend Ginika. Mixed race with a white American mother and Black Nigerian father Ginika was envied in Nigeria for lighter skin and more loosely curled hair. In America, she tells Ifemelu, “I’m supposed to be offended when someone says half-caste. I’ve met a lot of people here with white mothers and they are so full of issues, eh. I didn’t know I was supposed to have issues until I came to America.” Ngozi Adichie leaves the conversation here without going into any of the history and therefore implying to the reader that these American Blacks are simply overly sensitive. Later in the book Ifemelu tells her boyfriend’s sister she gets “a lot more interest from white men than from African-American men.’’ The sister, Shan, responds that it’s probably because of Ifemelu’s “exotic credential, that whole Authentic African thing” which leaves Ifemelu feeling uncomfortable without being able to articulate why.
These exchanges show that her time in the States may make Ifemelu familiar with some of the check boxes of American racism: being Black, but not really Black, yet more authentically Black, based on your background and behavior, but because of her outsider status Ngozi Adichie cannot make Ifemelu intimate with them, if indeed the author herself has this knowledge. A while back I read an essay by Eritrean American hiker and writer, Rahawa Haile. In it she writes of an encounter she has with a white man while both are walking the Appalachian Trail. He voices surprise to find a Black person on the trail because, his words, Blacks don’t hike. Upon discovering that her parents are Eritrean he announces that she is not “really Black”. His perceptions of what Black people do and do not do remain undisturbed. As she puts it “He has categorized me, and the world makes sense again.” Rahawa Haile is an American, an African, and an American Black. This is evident in her deep and thorough parsing of race in America throughout the article.
The West, whiteness, has at best a crude and vapid relationship with Africa. To the extent that we Americans make the consistent mistake of referring to it as a single country. This one dimensional view of what is in fact a varied and storied land of dozens of countries containing peoples of thousands of cultures and languages can be viewed in the way that we tend to look to one African writer to somehow explain it all to us. At this time that writer is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It gives her perspective on American society a certain level of gravitas. Especially to the white elites for whom Ngozi Adichie has become so deservedly celebrated. This is not always a good thing.
In the end, however, I will allow Ifemelu to have the last word: “…race is not biology; race is sociology. Race is not genotype; race is phenotype. Race matters because of racism. And racism is absurd because it’s about how you look. Not about the blood you have. It’s about the shade of your skin and the shape of your nose and the kink of your hair.”