An Americanah takes on Race and Class in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie latest novel

Americanah has received a beating from cranky white American reviewers in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and elsewhere. And while I think the critics have some valid points, the most negative western reviewers, some of whom also make careless errors about details indicating that they only skimmed the book, miss the point […]

Americanah has received a beating from cranky white American reviewers in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and elsewhere. And while I think the critics have some valid points, the most negative western reviewers, some of whom also make careless errors about details indicating that they only skimmed the book, miss the point of a novel that is both opinionated and ambivalent. Adichie anticipates such critiques, and embeds responses to them in the dialogue. An African American writer Shan, for example, describes the trouble she had with the editor of her novel who wanted to change details that she had based on true life stories: “somehow my mom’s experience is suddenly unnuanced. […] You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it’ll be too obvious. […] you have to make sure it’s so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn’t read between the lines won’t even know it’s about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy.”
Contrasting with such fuzzy aesthetics, the most striking parts of Adichie’s novel are her sharp observations about the hypocrisies, neurosis and contradictions of elite classes on both sides of the Atlantic. Adichie sometimes typecasts her characters, writing with more satire than nuance. Nevertheless, I recognize every character as someone I have met in real life (another reviewer compares Adichie to Jane Austen): The Lagos housewife for example, who calls older women of her social class “mummy” but is mean to her maids and suspicious of single women, even formerly close friends; or the well-meaning blonde American woman Kimberly who hires Ifemelu as a babysitter and who, Ifemelu notices, uses the word “‘beautiful’ in a peculiar way. ‘I’m meeting my beautiful friend from graduate school,’ Kimberly would say, or ‘We’re working with this beautiful woman on the inner-city project,’ and always, the women she referred to would turn out to be quite ordinary-looking, but always black.”  Adichie reveals with a hard-edged honesty what people hide behind political correctness, skewering the pretentions of American and British liberals and Nigerian elite alike.
After Adichie’s second novel Half of a Yellow Sun won the Orange Prize in 2007 and was placed on book club lists and class syllabi, it gained an enthusiastic readership of middle class Americans who know little about Nigeria. As I read Americanah, I felt that the novel was partially a barbed response to ignorant book club fans like the woman at a literary event in Madison, Wisconsin, whom I heard ask Adichie about all the “violence in Africa.” In Americanah, after speaking about race to all white audiences, Ifemelu realizes that “The point of diversity workshops, or multicultural talks, was not to inspire any real change but to leave people feeling good about themselves. They did not want the content of her ideas; they merely wanted the gesture of her presence.” While Ifemelu pities her nervous blonde employer Kimberly and dates Kimberly’s wealthy cousin Curt for several years, she writes sarcastically on her blog about what “American Non-Blacks” should not say to “American Black” people:“don’t put on a Let’s Be Fair tone and say ‘but black people are racist too.’ Because of course we’re all prejudiced […], but racism is about the power of a group and in America it’s white folks who have that power.” Ifemelu’s forceful posts come out of the racial poisons she has discovered in America and which she sees slowly killing the spirit of her charming cousin Dike, who has grown up in an all-white neighborhood in Massachusetts.
Yet, despite Ifemelu’s protestations that liberal Americans too often avoid race by talking about class, the novel is not only about race in America, but also about class among Nigerian immigrants and returnees as well. At a meeting of the “Nigerpolitan Club” in Lagos, Ifemelu finds herself in conversation with other returnees complaining about the lack of low-fat soya milk, good customer service, and vegetarian dining in Nigeria: “she caught the righteousness in her voice, in all of their voices. They were the sanctified, the returnees, back home with an extra gleaming layer.” One man who coyly says he spent time in “Boston,” an insider’s code for Harvard, tells her about a restaurant where they “have the kind of things we can eat.”  Ifemelu’s old secondary school friend Ranyinudo points out the self-righteousness of her blog post criticizing the “many young women in Lagos with Unknown Sources of Wealth.”  “Who are you to pass judgment?”  she asks Ifemelu. “Stop feeling so superior.” Ifemelu’s ambivalence throughout the novel undermines her abrasive certainty.
Of course, the novel is not without its flaws. As other reviewers have noted, the blog posts often seem to be oddly placed and sometimes go on for too long. I had a hard time seeing (from the excerpts included) how the blog could have brought her so much fame and wealth, though I thought the posts written in Nigeria were much more lyrical than those written in America. The novel also focuses mostly on a cosmopolitan Nigerian elite, faintly mocking those with village backgrounds or religious devotion. Ifemelu and Obinze, despite temporary struggles abroad, end up with wealth that makes their lives seem effortless. Unlike her father who suffered unemployment for years after being sacked for refusing to call his boss “mummy,” Ifemelu seems to have no problems maintaining her Ikoyi lifestyle after quitting her job.  Obinze somehow becomes a Big Man without losing his thoughtfulness or decency. Despite Adichie’s social critique of class, the idealization of Ifemelu and Obinze’s love affair encourages her readers to ignore ways in which they behave badly. By ridiculing Obinze’s wife as a boring, brainless beauty queen, Adichie perhaps unfairly manipulates the sympathies of the reader to cheer on his desire to cheat with Ifemelu.
That said, the portrayal of Obinze’s marriage is also tragically recognizable.  As one of his old university friends tells him:  “many of us didn’t marry the woman we truly loved. We married the woman that was around when we were ready to marry.” Ultimately, while I am uncomfortable with demeaning a wife to idealize adultery, I did like that Adichie does not settle for a bittersweet “literary” status quo but advocates for more truthful relationships.
Finally, I am thrilled that Adichie used her international clout to release the book with Farafina in Nigeria on 21 April, weeks before its American release on 14 May (although the UK release preceded both.) While American newspapers seem to be ahead of Nigerian ones in releasing early reviews (perhaps because Western publishers tend to send more complimentary copies to reviewers?), Adichie’s earlier Nigerian release prioritizes action over discourse, consistent with the politics of her novel, and gives a new power to Nigerian readers who no longer have to order advance copies from the West.
Ifemelu notices early on that Americans over use the word “excited.” Since I am an American, let me perform the role: “I’m EXCITED about this book!”