What is it, to be an Americanah? That’s the question at the core of this wonderfully rich story, along with other such essential questions, such as what is it to be foreign in America or Britain? What hold does a country have over prospective immigrants, how is it perpetuated? How are different cultures and races valued? And of course, as at the heart of any great novel, how does love work?
Ifemelu is in a hair salon in America when we meet her. It’s not easy to find a good place to get braids. She’s left her American boyfriend and is on her way back to Nigeria and her family. Sitting restlessly in the chair, arguing hair with her braider and chatting with the others in the salon, she thinks about her past and future. She tells them she is going home to marry her childhood sweetheart. This is not true. She has just broken up with an American boyfriend and not seen Obinze in years.
Obinze, like Ifemelu, is primed for us to love him. He’s an independent thinker with a strong moral compass and is good, gentle. Ifemelu met him at a school party when he was new in town. He was being set up with her friend, but his eyes strayed to Ifemelu and hers to him and they both know that this is the one. This is love. They become inseparable through high school.
Obinze is a fan of America. All the good ideas come from America, it’s where a person can get ahead. Many of the well educated in Nigeria look abroad for higher education after graduation, and among them and their friends there is a rush for visas. Ifemelu gets America. Obinze doesn’t. They don’t like to part, but agree it wont be for long. Later Obinze gets a visa for the United Kingdom.
The central part of the story is the experience of black immigration. Invariably, both Ifemelu and Obinze send home good stories: all is well, they have jobs, are studying. But the truth is different. An early incident for Ifemelu, when she has no money for rent, throws her self-esteem to the devil and she cuts off contact with Obinze as she tries to bring herself back.
I won’t give too much away plot-wise. The plot is secondary. For me the really interesting story here was the differences between black experiences abroad and those I have experienced, as a white woman.
‘There IS an oppression olympics going on. American racial minorities—blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Jews —all get shit from white folks, different kinds of shit, but shit still. Each secretly believes that it gets the worst shit.‘
There is no one ‘black’ experience, of course. Ifemelu is a non-American black, but there are layers of American blacks and a hierarchy among them all. She begins writing a blog post called Understanding America for the Non-American Black and lets us know that tribalism is alive and well. She discusses the hierarchy of class, ideology, religion and race. When you’re higher up the pyramid, you might be aware this exists, but it doesn’t bite you every, single day. The blog posts cover: Traveling while black; Michelle Obama’s hair; Romantic black love in America; genetic variations of race; upwardly mobile ‘Zipped-up’ Negroes; Peurto Rican, Brazilian, and Arab Blacks. Lots of other topics, and mostly things I never though about much before.
There’s a lot about hair, and I have come across this before with black writers, but never with quite so much detail, or sense that it is such a social indicator. Would Obama lose the independent vote if Michelle ditched the straighteners and showed up with woolly hair? The pains of going straight are extreme. There’s big hair, tight affro, little spiral curls, cornrows, braids, dreads. It’s a choice a woman has to make. Wool is almost never OK. For a job interview ‘professional means straight is best but if it’s going to be curly then it has to be the white kind of curly.’ Lots of these musings go on in the hair salon as Ifemelu considers her trip back home.
Meanwhile, Obinze gives us the experience of being a non-British black immigrant in England. He is a well educated and middle-class Nigerian but falls to the bottom of the social pyramid, and when his visa runs out things become desperate. He has lost Ifemelu and doesn’t understand why.
Ifemelu has lovers in America. None with the sure love of lost Obinze. Of one she says: ‘… her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.‘ The writing is full of observations like this, pin prick perfect.
When Ifemelu makes it back to Nigeria, there is an immigration officer at the airport. ‘He had not merely said “welcome” but “welcome back”, as though he somehow knew that she was truly back. She thanked him, and in the grey of the evening darkness, the air burdened with smells, she ached with an almost unbearable emotion that she could not name. It was nostalgic and melancholy, a beautiful sadness for the things she had missed and the things she would never know.’
This is the lovely theme of so many stories, the pull of going home, of finding the place where you belong. And along with the place to which Ifemelu returns, it is this man, Obinze, who defines her, who is her heart’s home. But he has returned from England and rebuilt his life without her, is a successful man with a beautiful wife and children. So what happens now?
This is not a light read, by any means – it’s a big, multi-layered world Ifemelu and Obinze negotiate and there are strong side characters – an aunt with a powerful General as a patron, tricksters, family, friends and lovers. But the thing that holds the thing together, that ties all the new ideas with a story as old as life, is the love story of Ifemelu and Obinze. It’s a classic.
Cristina Sanders' blog 