Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, doesn’t have a sub-head for its title, but it re-wrote itself in my head to include one. It might as well have been called Americanah: A Novel About Race, so much are our faces rubbed into the theme. Its immigrant Nigerian protagonist, Ifemelu, encounters racism wherever she goes in the United States. An Asian woman at a beauty salon turns her away when she goes to have her eyebrows waxed. “We don’t do curly,” the woman says. Ifemelu is asked to comment on black experience in class at university because she is black, and is patronised in different ways by well-meaning but stupid white people. Moreover, she finds that she cannot connect with the black American narrative (“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”). She makes several statements about race and history, and often sounds like she’s quoting straight from a textbook or a college essay. When she’s not doing that, she rants on in a blog, which I suspect is a convenient device for observations that would have otherwise had a hard time as dialogue.
The blog has an annoying title — “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black” — which is not incompatible with the declamatory style of this novel, the plot of which seems incidental to Ifemelu’s growing irritability and discontent with everyone and everything. Dissatisfaction is the inevitable result of following the dream for the Africans in this book. In a parallel story, Ifemelu’s boyfriend, Obinze, finds himself in London cleaning toilets and installing kitchens, and Ifemelu’s aunt has an awful time of it as she holds down three jobs while trying to pass her medical exam. Ifemelu herself slides into a depression, is left with almost no money and is driven to the brink of prostitution, before fortunate chance rescues her.
Americanah begins in Princeton, as Ifemelu makes her way to a braiding salon, where she sits for six hours getting her hair done while the story of how she came to be in America is recounted in various flashbacks, until we reach the present, whereupon — her hair done — she moves back to Lagos, after 15 years in America, and the novel has its coda. At the hair salon, we meet the ghosts of boyfriends past, the first Nigerian one — Obinze — being the one who lives most significantly in Ifemelu’s mind, perhaps her true love, whom she started seeing in high school. Adichie has a tendency to glorify at least one mythical, perfect heterosexual relationship in her books, and in this one Ifemelu and Obinze had something perfect going on in Lagos.
The other two lovers are both Americans: one black and one white, and neither relationship ever quite lives up to the Nigerian one. At one point, Ifemelu insists to a Haitian poet who has a white partner that race will always be an issue in inter-racial relationships. I don’t doubt that there’s no escaping it in the United States, where centuries of prejudice have culminated to a point when “race” has much less to do with appearance than with culture, history and bloodline, but I felt for the Haitian when, with bulging eyes, she asks Ifemelu, “You’re telling me what my own experience is?” While one may indeed encounter people in life who are always right, it’s very difficult to turn them into sympathetic characters in a novel. In this book, Adichie has abandoned the interiority of experience for statement and judgement, and Ifemelu mostly drifts through everything except when she’s opening her mouth to lecture people on how clueless they are.
As a result of this heavy-handed approach, I found myself feeling unexpectedly sympathetic towards the white characters in the book. None of them is given the slightest chance. They trip up in every conversation they have with our heroine, and unmask their inherent racism almost every time they open their mouths (or do anything at all). Ifemelu even delivers a mini-lecture on Naipaul to a stunned white woman in a hair-braiding salon. (The woman makes the mistake of saying she thought A Bend in the River was the best book she’s read on Africa.)
The salon, with its pan-African hair-braiders, holds a significant place in the novel, as a place where racism is encountered directly on the body. Readers who don’t know already learn that women with curly, crinkly hair prefer to use bottles of “relaxer” to straighten it, and attach shining straight-hair extensions to their natural non-straight hair. It is expensive, painful (you can get scalp burns) and temporary at best. Sooner or later you’ll be back in the braiding salon, and Ifemelu looks on the whole terrible business with mocking, critical distance. She prefers natural hair, having already learnt her hard lessons about race in America. Hair could indeed have been a wonderful motif used to both comic and tragic effect, but it would have worked better if Ifemelu had, however briefly, been tempted by the Beyonce look. It’s not as if the whole hair thing has never been done before — perhaps most memorably in the misadventure with “conk” (explain, pls) in Malcolm X’s autobiography. The moment when his head caught fire and he ran to plunge it into the washtub was wonderful for its sad and funny human fallibility, the deep desire — however flawed — to be a bit whiter than one was.
There are flashes of Adichie’s great and undeniable talent in brief sections in the book. She is at her very best when writing about Nigerian society, and its hierarchies, hustling and power games. Here there are no stereotypes, just recognisable people, warts and all. The description of the Harmattan in Nsukka, and the intimate and leisurely rhythms of life there are wonderfully evocative. And there’s a very memorable dinner party in London, where Ifemelu’s ex-boyfriend Obinze is working illegally, perhaps the only place where the book pulls off what it’s trying to do, which is to say that America and Britain are still deeply racist countries, and their liberalism and “political correctness” is little other than polite noise, while an elephant ambles around the bedroom. This book would have worked better if leavened with a bit of self-critical humour and humanity: I think of Andrea Levy’s Small Island, and its characters, both black and white, one lot imagining a white paradise of plenty, the others the fabulous blackness of “Africa”.
Adichie’s last two novels — Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun — were excellent. Americanah is a poor third in this reckoning. Still, no one can really doubt Adichie’s great gifts as a writer. So I’m still looking forward to her next one.
Anupama Chandra is a film editor and bibliophile
Links:
[1] http://103.241.136.51/books/beaten-black-blue-race-bat-073
