Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

(Book Review)

Started: June 23, 2018
Finished: September 12, 2018

Why I Read This Book
So, I had never heard of this book, or this author, before someone suggested it for our book club.
Everyone else in the bookclub, however, was familiar with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  So perhaps it's just me?  After so many years abroad, I'm out of touch?  I don't know.  (Let me know in the comments what your impression is. How famous is this book?  Should I have heard about it?)

Anyway, point being I would never have read this book if someone hadn't suggested it for bookclub.
The nice thing about a bookclub is that you get exposed to all kinds of books you would never have read otherwise. But it does also mean that I'm reviewing it from a disadvantage.  I've never heard of it before, this isn't usually my type of book, and I probably didn't appreciate it as much as someone in its target audience.  So take my opinions with a grain of salt.  But I'll try and jot down some of my thoughts about the reading experience.

The Reading Experience--Some Spoilers
The good news is that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie can write well.  The prose flows easily, and I found myself effortlessly turning the pages even as I was unsure where the story was going.

For anyone who is as ignorant as I was, I'll give some background: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian who has spent many years living in America.  Although it's unclear how much of the book is autobiographical, the book is about a Nigerian woman living in America during the time of Obama's election.  
The first few pages start off with about what you'd expect--reflections on various conversations about race that the narrator has had with various Americans.
But the setting for the first several chapters (the framing device from which all the flashbacks occur) is a hair braiding salon.  And a lot of the beginning of the book is description about the process of getting hair braided.
At this point, I was worried I was going to get bored with the book.  I mean, how mundane!  And as a white man, what do I care about hair-braiding?  What does this have to do with my life? Where were the politics, big ideas and the epic adventures?

The more I thought about it, however, the more I realized my aversion to the subject matter reflected my close-mindedness as a reader.
The beauty of reading is that it allows you to get inside someone else's skin.  As a white man, I'll never get my hair braided in a hair salon in downtown Philadelphia.  But in the hands of a skilled author, I can feel like I have experienced it.
When we were reading Palace Walk for book club last year (about a middle-class Egyptian family) my friend mentioned the quote "A reader lives a thousand lives.  The man who never reads lives only one."  That quote applies to Americanah as well.  You get to see a completely different side of life by reading about someone else's experience.
What a pity that my initial reaction to hair-braiding was to become bored with it because it had no relationship to my life.  The whole point is that it opens up a world of experiences that were completely alien to me.

In fact, it turns out that throughout the book, hair and hair maintenance are big themes.
I had no idea how much trouble hair maintenance causes black women.  I had assumed that they just woke up in the morning, showered, and walked out the door just like I did.
But it turns out that in order to keep their hair manageable, they have to put lot of chemicals into their hair which are bad for their scalp.   If they just leave it natural, then it grows wild, and invites rude comments from other people about how you've "gone jungle".  Or, they can get it braided.  But if they get it braided, then it looks unprofessional in corporate America.  So if they want to get a serious business job, then they have to deal with a lot of chemicals.
Or at least that's the impression I got from this book.  (Someone correct me if I'm getting it wrong.)
I had no idea before, but now I've learned a lot about what life is like for other people.

I think, however, that a lot of us are like me--we are attracted to books about protagonists who are similar to us, and are suspicious about books about people with different temperaments or experiences.  I'm not sure why this is.  (Some sort of built in evolutionary tribalist tendency?) 
And indeed, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has had a different experience of America than I have-- her impressions of America were different than mine, which sometimes caused me to react with skepticism or defensiveness.  But if you can catch yourself doing this, and try to push past your own close-mindedness, this book can represent a wonderful opportunity to see the world from someone else's perspective.

Okay, sorry for that digression.  Back to the plot.
The beginning of the book is mostly told in flashbacks.
Gradually, the reader begins to realize that the relationships in the present day, and the relationship in the flashbacks, are different.  Something must have happened to cause these relationships to change.  But what?
Once I got hooked on this mystery, this kept me reading attentively for the first half of the book.
However, once the mysteries began to resolve themselves, I began to lose interest in the book again.  It sat for a few weeks on my bookshelf untouched.
Until I had to finish it for bookclub, and then I pulled the book out again, and was able to finish it pretty painlessly in a few days.

Reactions / Impressions

The golden rule of reviewing is that you should never assume the narrator and the author have the same opinions.  But... at the same time, you can't help but wonder.

The narrator of this book is very cynical about everyone.
American conservatives? Of course American conservatives aren't portrayed sympathetically.  But even American liberals are viewed very cynically.
When a young American white liberal girl, Kelsey, gets her hair braided next to the narrator, the narrator immediately views her cynically.

She [the narrator] did not want to start a conversation. Especially not with Kelsey. She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was.

Granted this is probably an accurate description of most American liberals.  (I've noticed this reflexive defensiveness in myself whenever outsiders criticize America).  But it's also the least-charitable lens through which to view Kelsey.  I mean, I'm sure young Kelsey has plenty of good traits as well if you would just give her a chance.
And this is typical of the narrator.  The narrator never has anything good to say about anyone.  Aside from the main character herself, and her love interest, every other character in the novel is always portrayed in the least-charitable way possible.  The narrator is constantly listing all their faults and shortcomings, and never talking about their positive points.

I suppose it reveals something about me that I only became annoyed at this when the narrator was doing it to white Americans.  But then once I became annoyed at this, I realized it had been a theme all throughout the novel.  During the flashbacks to Nigeria, the author had been criticizing corrupt Nigerian generals and naive Nigerian church-goers.  During the sections on America, the narrator complains about everyone.  She complains about black Americans, white Americans, and African expats.  She complains about all the annoying habits of Nigerian businessmen living in America, and all the annoying habits of her teenage Nigerian girl friends at college.  She complains about the expectations and affectations of the Nigerian returnees in Lagos, and also at the vapidness of Nigerian housewives who stayed behind, and the corruption of Nigerian businessmen, etc, etc, etc.

"What a hyper-critical person Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is," I thought to myself.  "I'd hate to be friends with her.  She'd always have an eagle-eye open for everyone else's faults."

But perhaps this is more of a personality preference.  Another member of our bookclub said, "I'm super cynical myself, so I actually loved the way the narrator was always tearing people down."

If the beauty of reading is that it gets you into other people's skins (as I said above), then perhaps that's true for personality types as much as it is for life experience.  Perhaps it's valuable to get inside the mind of a super-cynical person, even if it's different from your own personality.

But there are also hints that the author is not the narrator.  At one point, another character accuses Ifemelu (the main character) of being too judgmental:

"...you are such a judgmental bitch?" Doris screamed. ... "You sit there and judge everyone," Doris was saying. "Who do you think you are? Why do you think this magazine should be about you? It isn't yours. Aunty Onenu has told you what she wants her magazine to be and it's either you do it or you shouldn't be working here?"

Is that the author calling her narrator out?  Maybe.  Although Doris is portrayed so negatively through the book (everyone is portrayed negatively) that I get the impression we're supposed to sympathize with Ifemelu against Doris.

Other Reflections

In no particular order, here are some other random thoughts I had about this book.

Culture Shock
This is a book about culture shock.  It's a story of a Nigerian who comes to America, experiences severe culture shock, and then goes back home and experiences reverse culture shock.
As someone who's lived for many year in multiple countries (8 years in Japan, 1 year in Australia, 4 years in Cambodia, 3 years in Vietnam), I'm very familiar with the culture shock cycle.  I know that when you live for a long time in a foreign, you start to become  hyper-critical of a lot of the habits and customs of the native people.
It seems to me that much of the frustration of the narrator is culture shock.
Where the book becomes complicated is that it's also about race.
And disentangling the one element from the other is where things get a little bit tricky.

Non-American Blacks in America 
Years ago, when I stuck my nose into the Mosaic Floor controversy at Calvin College, I remember an African student came to talk to me afterwards about the whole thing.  To quote myself from my previous blogpost:

One African student thanked me for writing the letter. He said, in what was becoming a familiar story, that he had signed up for the Mosaic floor simply because he thought as a black student he didn’t have a choice. Then he had found the endless discussions on racism a bit patronizing, because as an African, and not an African American, he did not feel that his identity was defined by being an ethnic minority. He had ended up asking to transfer out of the Mosaic Floor.

This was actually a theme in Americanah as well--how non-American blacks resented finding themselves thrust into in the middle of America's discussion of racism, because they didn't regard their identities as being defined by racism back home.

American Dress
When I lived in Cambodia, one of the things that surprised me there was how concerned young Cambodians were about dressing stylishly.  There were no hippies or grunge fashion in Cambodia.  Everyone wanted to dress as flashy as they could.
I then realized that the ability to dress like a slob is itself a type of middle class privilege--you are so secure in your middle-class status that you don't have to worry about how people will treat you if you dress slovenly.  It doesn't exist in developing countries.  (As a teenager, I once told my mother I wouldn't wear nice clothes anymore because it was a type of bourgeois respectability.  But as it turns out, I got it exactly backwards.  Wearing nice clothes is what the poor people have to do, and the ability to dress slovenly clothing is what is bourgeois.)
The same reflection is in Americanah.  The narrator comments on American fashion on her blog:

When it comes to dressing well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only disregarded this courtesy of self-presentation, but has turned that disregard into a virtue.  "We are too superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother about how we look to other people, and so we can wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall."

Other Conversations from Book club
Apparently my own criticism of this book, the fact that the narrator was too critical of everyone, has been echoed a lot by other people.  At least that's what someone told me at book club--when I brought up the point, they said that a lot of Americans had made that complaint.
She said that in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's native Nigeria, apparently the main criticism of the book was it's portrayal of marital infidelity.
We got into a brief discussion/debate at book club as to whether the boyfriend made the right choice.  I argued that he should have stayed with his wife and child.  If there had been big problems in the marriage, that would have been different.  But his wife was causing him no problems, so he had no reason to leave her.  This whole "one true love" stuff is for teenagers.  When you become an adult, you have responsibilities to your family.
Someone else argued that it was better to get out of a loveless marriage.

Someone else suggested that both the main character and her boyfriend were essentially selfish people.  Neither thought about the other people in the various other relationships they had been in.  So maybe they deserve each other.
This was something that hadn't occurred to me.  (I thought that in each of these other failed relationship, the reader was meant to sympathize with the main characters, and sympathize about how their needs weren't being meant.  But maybe we were supposed to be kind of repulsed by this selfishness all along?)

Blogging
The main character in the novel makes her living by writing a blog.
Do people actually make livings by writing blogs?  And if so, where do I sign up?  (I've been working on this blog for 15 years now, and haven't gotten a dime for it.)

Video Review
Video review HERE and embedded below:

Link of the Day
Jeremy Scahill interviews Noam Chomsky: The State of the Empire