Book title: Americanah

Author: Chimanda Ngozi Adichie

Reviewed by: Musabi Muteshi

In 2013, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book Americanah won one of the most prestigious prizes for literature, The National Book Critics Circle Award (NBCC).

I met Nigeria’s Chimamanda in Nairobi after her first award winning book, Purple Hibiscus. Is this book about love, I had asked, at the student-filled university auditorium. She responded to my question by saying that a Western audience often perceives the book to be about violence; but that she herself wrote it as a book about the love of a young girl for her father, despite the terrible trauma the father inflicts on the family.

Chimamanda in this first novel, spins an emotionally complex tale in a way that becomes characteristic of her ability to tie in culture, politics, African modernity, human emotions and human fallibility.

A speaker at the prestigious TED conference, where other greats like Microsoft’s Bill Gates have spoken, Adichie’s theme and mantra rally against the danger of a single story. By this she means that what we hear, see and read about Africa tends to be viewed through a single lens that often depicts the continent as full of poverty, disease and wars.

It is perhaps this mantra that drives her story telling eloquence in a way that remains global although driven by an African voice, reality and sensibility. In other words, the universality of her themes could easily be transplanted into different cultures. Her stories thus win accolades not only in Africa but globally.

A young writer, she is probably one of the few writers to have managed to acquire a greater number of prestigious global awards than the number of her published books (6).

Americanah tells the story of a Nigerian university student, Ifemelu, in the USA. It recounts her struggles to understand a white American culture that at times encompasses a liberal view of Africans as equals yet at the same time assigns stereotypical roles to Africans as a whole. An incomprehension of the concept of Jews not being seen as white by what she had thought were their fellow white Americans. And also an inability to understand the burden of racism in the precise way that African Americans feel it.

The character, Ifemelu uses a blog to make sense of the world she inhabits. To capture Ifemelu’s commentary, the authour uses a style of writing that cleverly inserts the social media concept of blogging woven into, but outside of, the main text of the on-going story.

The vortex of race aside, Ifemelu, also explores and grapples with love. Her relationships span cross-cultural love as well as the love of a fellow Nigerian, Obinze. Ifemelu displays arguably different, but emotionally true, types of romantic love for each of these men and in so doing challenges our concept of the one-love-only trope that we tend to adopt. The reader is left anxiously wondering which man she will choose, if any.

The book runs the gamut of immigrant lifestyle experiences with low-level work, undervalued selves, identity displacement and the difficulty of fitting into a left-behind culture on return. It also deconstructs and lays bare, in often hilarious ways, the mystique of the African woman’s relationship to hair.

The book is an insightful, easy, authentic, humorous and fulfilling read for anyone with an interest in a well told story about everyday lives and loves be it in Lagos, Nigeria or anywhere USA.

As a footnote, the success of the book was not unnoticed by Hollywood. It may come as no surprise then that Africa’s other female celebrity artist, Oscar winning Kenyan, Lupita Nyong’o purchased the rights to make a Hollywood movie from Americanah. Lupita will produce as well as star in, along with co-celebrity star Brad Pitt, the movie.