Book Discussion: Americanah

Beyonce's ***Flawless Remix is probably on of the best girl power songs ever written and performed in history. Listen to that song and TELL me you aren't ready to go out and conquer... your job interviews, the mean aisles of Wal-Mart, the WORLD... I don't know your life. Regardless, you feel the intrinsic power of WOMANITY coursing through your veins after you listen to this song, thanks to Queen Bey, Queen Nicki, and the fiery speech delivered at the beginning of the song, from Queen Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In 2013, I wrote this speech on a piece of paper and hung it in my room.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the author of Americanah, another book I blindly picked up at Habitat for Humanity for 25 cents. (I don't have any luck with thrift clothing... but I do feel VERY lucky with some of the books I've found.) I thought Americanah was a book of essays a la The White Album by Joan Didion or Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay; after all, I knew her name from ***Flawless where she was giving a speech, and knew she had given some TED talks. In 2013 or 2014, whenever I found Americanah, I wasn't in the mood to read a book of essays. I was in school and I had enough essays and lectures to focus on. So I put it aside, in favor of a novel or a magazine or a fifteen hour marathon of Parks & Rec...

And seven years later I'm liiiikeee... GOD!!! Read the BACKS OF YOUR BOOKS PEOPLE!!! CUZ I WAS WRONG!!!!

A Love Story for the Non-Romantic

Americanah is a novel, a love story that centers around the characters Ifemelu and Obinze. Now if you are like me and have a knee-jerk reaction to run if someone recommends a sappy book to you, don't worry. Americanah is not oozing with romance, by any means; for the majority of the novel Ifemelu and Obinze are separated.

Much like how Adichie's speech on feminism fits seamlessly into a pop song, she works topics like immigration, race, and depression into her "love story," bringing sometimes uncomfortable subjects into the light. These topics are never black-and-white; situations are never black-and-white, and Adichie is a master of the grey areas, making the reader see differently than they did before, through eyes other than their own.

On the back of the book, O (The Oprah Magazine), says that the book is "masterful... pulls no punches with regards to race, class, and the high-risk, and the heart-tearing struggle for belonging in a fractured world." And this is true. The cast is colorful, from all walks of life. No character's flaws are glossed over or buffed out in Americanah; we see the desperation in everyone, the unquenchable thirst to belong, the disdain that people can carry for things they once loved, the shame felt from the most peculiar things... the blatant humanity. The reader finds themselves relating with a bit of something in every character's personality or story, and I think that is something special.

Of course, people are good to each other in the book, too, I just found the darker parts more interesting.

Favorite Things

I usually like to underline passages or quotes in a book that I want to remember, and I'll post them somewhere, but reading this book I just wanted to get really lost in it. And I probably would've been underlining every other sentence because it was so good.

So I'll tell you about some of my favorite things- Ifemelu, of course, is who I want to be when I grow up, though she can be a bit rigid and some of her relationships make me sad. She looks for honesty in everything. She is a blogger, too, and her posts are far more insightful than mine. The blog posts throughout the book are eye-opening and wonderfully written, and they are about being black in America. (NAB and AB- Non African black and African black). Ifemelu's blog changes once she gets back to Nigeria, and there are no actual posts from Nigeria in Americanah, but LOOK! You can read them here: https://www.chimamanda.com/ifemelus-blog/

Obinze will make you fall in love. So will Dike (Ifemelu's nephew). I would like to read a whole spin-off novel starring Dike. I could list a million characters here, so how about you just read it and tell me who your favorites are?

The descriptions of Nigeria, of Lagos, are so rich that you feel as if you are there walking the streets and attending the parties. Really, Adichie has the ability to transport you ANYWHERE she wants, so just enjoy the ride.

In Conclusion

Obinze goes to a book store and reads "contemporary American fiction, because he hoped to find a resonance, a shaping of his longings, a sense of the America that he had imagined himself a part of. He wanted to know about day-to-day life in America, what people ate and what consumed them, what shamed them and what attracted them, but he read novel after novel and was disappointed: nothing was grave, nothing serious, nothing urgent, and most dissolved into ironic nothingness."

I wonder if Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie felt the same things in a bookstore, and it helped compel her to write Americanah. It reminds me of a Toni Morrison quote, "If there is a book that you want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

Americanah is unlike anything I've ever read, and I miss reading it already. Please give this book a read and let me know what you think!

#books #contemporary #literature #chimamanda #america #novel