Kinga's Reviews > Americanah

Adichie and I seem to share sensibilities and I often mention her as one of my favourite authors, even if I often think she lets herself off too easily. Which is another thing we seem to have in common, as I tend to let myself off too easily too. What I mean by that is that I wanted more, let’s call it, ‘epicness’. Adichie is a wonderful writer and she can churn out a great book without really trying. I want to know what would happen if she really tried.

Americanah is really Race 101 and you would think America doesn’t need Race 101 because they should be doing AP courses by now. And yet, reading some of the reviews I was shocked to realise even this basic message went over some people’s heads.

Other than race and hair, this is really a story of love of two people who feel so real you almost want to be friends with them (and I know I never say anything about characters ‘likeability’, but I did like these people despite their flaws. I must say I was more involved with Obinze’s story – not because parts of it were more tragic, but because there was something raw about it. Maybe I just had a crush on the guy. Apart from Ifemelu and Obinze, the rest of the characters might seem a bit cardboard, her other boyfriends were ‘types’ more than people. But in a way that’s what we do in our memory. We reserve complex portraits for our true love and all the other old flames eventually get reduced to ‘the one whose mother hated me’, ‘the one who took his guitar everywhere, even the bathroom’, etc.

What Adichie excels at is the social observations, all those everyday scenes, strips of dialogue, that reveal so much about the topics that interest her, like immigrants and class. It was very interesting to read an immigrant story with the class aspect thrown into the mix. Immigrants usually exist outside of class (especially at first), they are in the class of their own, because the locals can’t tell where to place them – their accents are just foreign accents, their education usually means nothing and neither does their family background. When Ifemelu arrives in the US from Nigeria, her middle class identity is taken away from her and she is given a new one – that of a black person. From now, whether she likes it or not, it would be her first identity, anything else will come after that. This is mostly what this book is about.

It’s also about the usual immigrant woes – loneliness and disconnection. Even if you return you won’t be home, you’ve been changed and you’re destined to always miss something, some part of your life that is elsewhere. Trust me, I’m an immigrant.