Americanah: A novel
From the award-winning author of We Should All Be Feminists, Americanah is a must-read modern classic about star-crossed lovers that explores questions of race and the search for what it means to call a place home.
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This book was not for me. I didn't find it funny, I didn't think the romance was compelling, I didn't find the characters likable or interesting, and I didn't find the ideas about race earth-shattering or new.
To be fair, this last point is probably because this book was originally published in 2013. There have been four years now to move the conversation about race along in this country. In between when this novel was published and I am writing this review, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, the Black Lives Matter movement began, and Donald Trump was elected president. I feel we need to talk about race bluntly in this country and I feel like in 2013 this novel was probably a breath of fresh air -- look how open the conversation is about racism -- but I also feel like there are more people now who talk about race like this. I do want to mention that this is how I feel and while my experiences are valid, they are limited to my own perspective. I am not black, I am not African, and I am not African-American and my view, therefore, or race in America and our discussions of it will always be limited and filtered through my own experience. But, at the same time, I think issues in our country have pushed this conversation that this novel was trying to have more into the middle of things. Obviously, too, there are people who still say things like, "Why are you bringing up race when race has nothing to do with it?" etc., and there are (I feel) many more overtly (and covertly) racist people and incidents since Trump was elected president. However, I think more people are saying out loud and loudly, "America has a race problem and we need to deal with it instead of pretending it doesn't exist".
To my other points, I really wish this hadn't been a novel. I read We Should All Be Feminists by Adichie and loved it. It was short, to the point, and interesting. This novel should have been a collection of short stories, of vignettes, instead of a messily sewn together novel where the only thread was race relations. Because having a series of vignettes about race relations is great and would have made a great book. But here, we have characters forced to carry the weight of it around with them through their stories, and their stories suffer because they are not their stories but a vehicle for a dinner party conversation about interracial couples. Thus, also, I didn't like the characters nor the romance.
I felt like Ifemelu was not actually a likable character. She was self-sabotaging and whenever anyone would point it out, she would scoff because "self-sabotaging" was such an "American" thing, like depression. It's cool that you don't think depression is real.... except it is. And scoffing at like, "What an American problem! Who would ever take medicine for such a thing!" is to insult everyone who has suffered at the very real hands of depression and is putting down the people who use medicine to help them deal with their depression. That message feels like the same glib people who chide, "just go outside more" to sufferers of depression who depression is so deep-seated they cannot get out of bed in the morning. And all of her character attributes seemed to be of this style. She was rude but convinced herself she was just "honest". She was easily jealous and irritated, but instead of trying to figure out how to work with her irritation she simply placed blame on the other person for having irritated her and for not trying to mitigate her irritation enough with their actions. She was quick to judge everyone but herself, quick to find fault in everyone but herself. She was super flawed but I felt she never really took any time for self-reflection and never tried to better herself. She just was. And of course she was effortlessly interesting and intriguing and beautiful and all manner of men wanted her: white men, black men, rich men, married men. Even Obinze literally comes running. He makes a charade of being, "It's not about sex for me". Like hell it isn't. I'm sure it's about other stuff, too, but later he makes it pretty clear that he hates having sex with his wife. Even at the end, when he comes to prostrate himself before her in a gesture of selfless love and passion, I feel like I could see Ifemelu staring coldly at him until she decides his performance is good enough for her. Yuck.
It also seemed like all the most important parts of this novel were glossed over. I would have loved to hear more about Dike and his experiences as a child of two worlds. I would have loved to actually hear Blaine and Ifemelu break up, instead of the bullet-points of their breakup neatly summarized and categorized like Ifemelu has everything figured out and, in fact, orchestrated everything about their breakup. It was like that with Curt, too. She was the master of everything in their relationship and it felt like she was playing with him. This book made it seem like she was a fickly goddess who explained her manipulations and movements without actually letting us experience them. Another reviewer aptly said that Adichie doesn't let us come to our own conclusions. They are there, obvious, for us to easily digest. Or, perhaps, not so easily because "race in America is hard for Americans to talk about".
Lastly, this book wasn't very funny. Like someone else pointed out, it's not humorous for me as an American not because I lack a sense of humor or an ability to appreciate a nuanced humor. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is one of the funniest books I've ever read and I really do think that it's meant to be funny but that its humor gets lost in the fact that it's Harry Potter. I'm not an idiot, I do get humor. But this humor was insider humor. This humor was the humor of the African making jokes to another African about Africa and also America and also how Africans negotiate America and how Americans negotiate Africa. That's not very funny to me because I'm not that person. You know what I did find hilariously funny? Her barbs about upper-middle-class white liberals. Those were hilarious. You know why? Because I know those people. I know those friends of Blaine's who drink raw milk and kombucha and only eat organic fruit because "cancer" and who very sternly make scathing comments about "as soon as you watch this video about egg production, you'll never desire another omelet again" (I literally took that last sentence from the Facebook page of one of my acquaintances. Because I know these people and I too laugh self-righteously at their hauteur and their solemnity and I will get laughed at in my turn.) I guess that was also my biggest complaint about the humor in this book. It's always at people, not with people, and it's always in judgment of their faults and literally nobody is exempt. I get it, everyone does something annoying and stupid, but who is exempt? Only Ifemelu, apparently. Because she's perfect and doesn't need to look at her own flaws and is above, always above.
My last point (no one is reading, which is nice, but if you are, well done and congratulations. I now give you permission to stop and go get some ice cream). Ifemelu (and the author herself) really enjoy telling other people that their experiences aren't valid. There's a conversation between Ifemelu and a black American with a white boyfriend where the black American says she never noticed race as an issue for herself and her boyfriend and Ifemelu basically tells her that she's an idiot and it's everywhere and she's just blind and dumb. Ifemelu tells her her own experience, brazenly and confidently, because she could never be wrong. Uh-huh. Sort of like how the other day Adichie said that transwomen were essentially still part of the patriarchy because they had been men growing up and received male privilege. Also that she didn't want to use words like "cisgendered" because she didn't think modern feminists should have to have a vocabulary like that. Implying it was silly. Implying she was above it. Implying she could tell transwomen their experiences. Invalidating their experiences. Invalidating their womanhood. I couldn't.
For more, read this article:
https://channel4.com/news/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-on-feminism
Also:
http://vox.com/identities/2017/3/15/14910900/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-transgender-women-comments-apology
And then Laverne Cox's rebuttal:
http://vulture.com/2017/03/laverne-cox-chimamanda-adichie-trans-women-privilege.html
She backs up and says that transwomen's experiences belong to transwomen and women's experiences belong to women and that they're both valid but they're not the same. And, yeah, I guess I get that, but it doesn't sit well with me to phrase it that way. To me, it smacks of explaining other people's experiences to them and that's sort of something we "modern feminists" are trying to avoid. It would be super, duper not okay if I tried to do that as a white woman; it is not okay if Adichie does it simply because she is black. And that's okay too. And maybe it would sit better with me if the main character in her book which is so obviously her hadn't done that to someone else, as well. But then also, am I policing how she expresses her feminism? Probably, when what I really ought to do is sit down and look at my own feminism and ask myself why her saying that made me feel uncomfortable. I have been reading more about this thing and I feel like she's not wrong and Laverne Cox isn't wrong and acknowledging a multiplicity of stories in arriving at womanhood is not wrong so I'm going to leave now.
Sigh. I have many feelings. Mostly feelings of hunger, which I'm going to go quench with a bowl of ice cream.
To be fair, this last point is probably because this book was originally published in 2013. There have been four years now to move the conversation about race along in this country. In between when this novel was published and I am writing this review, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, the Black Lives Matter movement began, and Donald Trump was elected president. I feel we need to talk about race bluntly in this country and I feel like in 2013 this novel was probably a breath of fresh air -- look how open the conversation is about racism -- but I also feel like there are more people now who talk about race like this. I do want to mention that this is how I feel and while my experiences are valid, they are limited to my own perspective. I am not black, I am not African, and I am not African-American and my view, therefore, or race in America and our discussions of it will always be limited and filtered through my own experience. But, at the same time, I think issues in our country have pushed this conversation that this novel was trying to have more into the middle of things. Obviously, too, there are people who still say things like, "Why are you bringing up race when race has nothing to do with it?" etc., and there are (I feel) many more overtly (and covertly) racist people and incidents since Trump was elected president. However, I think more people are saying out loud and loudly, "America has a race problem and we need to deal with it instead of pretending it doesn't exist".
To my other points, I really wish this hadn't been a novel. I read We Should All Be Feminists by Adichie and loved it. It was short, to the point, and interesting. This novel should have been a collection of short stories, of vignettes, instead of a messily sewn together novel where the only thread was race relations. Because having a series of vignettes about race relations is great and would have made a great book. But here, we have characters forced to carry the weight of it around with them through their stories, and their stories suffer because they are not their stories but a vehicle for a dinner party conversation about interracial couples. Thus, also, I didn't like the characters nor the romance.
I felt like Ifemelu was not actually a likable character. She was self-sabotaging and whenever anyone would point it out, she would scoff because "self-sabotaging" was such an "American" thing, like depression. It's cool that you don't think depression is real.... except it is. And scoffing at like, "What an American problem! Who would ever take medicine for such a thing!" is to insult everyone who has suffered at the very real hands of depression and is putting down the people who use medicine to help them deal with their depression. That message feels like the same glib people who chide, "just go outside more" to sufferers of depression who depression is so deep-seated they cannot get out of bed in the morning. And all of her character attributes seemed to be of this style. She was rude but convinced herself she was just "honest". She was easily jealous and irritated, but instead of trying to figure out how to work with her irritation she simply placed blame on the other person for having irritated her and for not trying to mitigate her irritation enough with their actions. She was quick to judge everyone but herself, quick to find fault in everyone but herself. She was super flawed but I felt she never really took any time for self-reflection and never tried to better herself. She just was. And of course she was effortlessly interesting and intriguing and beautiful and all manner of men wanted her: white men, black men, rich men, married men. Even Obinze literally comes running. He makes a charade of being, "It's not about sex for me". Like hell it isn't. I'm sure it's about other stuff, too, but later he makes it pretty clear that he hates having sex with his wife. Even at the end, when he comes to prostrate himself before her in a gesture of selfless love and passion, I feel like I could see Ifemelu staring coldly at him until she decides his performance is good enough for her. Yuck.
It also seemed like all the most important parts of this novel were glossed over. I would have loved to hear more about Dike and his experiences as a child of two worlds. I would have loved to actually hear Blaine and Ifemelu break up, instead of the bullet-points of their breakup neatly summarized and categorized like Ifemelu has everything figured out and, in fact, orchestrated everything about their breakup. It was like that with Curt, too. She was the master of everything in their relationship and it felt like she was playing with him. This book made it seem like she was a fickly goddess who explained her manipulations and movements without actually letting us experience them. Another reviewer aptly said that Adichie doesn't let us come to our own conclusions. They are there, obvious, for us to easily digest. Or, perhaps, not so easily because "race in America is hard for Americans to talk about".
Lastly, this book wasn't very funny. Like someone else pointed out, it's not humorous for me as an American not because I lack a sense of humor or an ability to appreciate a nuanced humor. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is one of the funniest books I've ever read and I really do think that it's meant to be funny but that its humor gets lost in the fact that it's Harry Potter. I'm not an idiot, I do get humor. But this humor was insider humor. This humor was the humor of the African making jokes to another African about Africa and also America and also how Africans negotiate America and how Americans negotiate Africa. That's not very funny to me because I'm not that person. You know what I did find hilariously funny? Her barbs about upper-middle-class white liberals. Those were hilarious. You know why? Because I know those people. I know those friends of Blaine's who drink raw milk and kombucha and only eat organic fruit because "cancer" and who very sternly make scathing comments about "as soon as you watch this video about egg production, you'll never desire another omelet again" (I literally took that last sentence from the Facebook page of one of my acquaintances. Because I know these people and I too laugh self-righteously at their hauteur and their solemnity and I will get laughed at in my turn.) I guess that was also my biggest complaint about the humor in this book. It's always at people, not with people, and it's always in judgment of their faults and literally nobody is exempt. I get it, everyone does something annoying and stupid, but who is exempt? Only Ifemelu, apparently. Because she's perfect and doesn't need to look at her own flaws and is above, always above.
My last point (no one is reading, which is nice, but if you are, well done and congratulations. I now give you permission to stop and go get some ice cream). Ifemelu (and the author herself) really enjoy telling other people that their experiences aren't valid. There's a conversation between Ifemelu and a black American with a white boyfriend where the black American says she never noticed race as an issue for herself and her boyfriend and Ifemelu basically tells her that she's an idiot and it's everywhere and she's just blind and dumb. Ifemelu tells her her own experience, brazenly and confidently, because she could never be wrong. Uh-huh. Sort of like how the other day Adichie said that transwomen were essentially still part of the patriarchy because they had been men growing up and received male privilege. Also that she didn't want to use words like "cisgendered" because she didn't think modern feminists should have to have a vocabulary like that. Implying it was silly. Implying she was above it. Implying she could tell transwomen their experiences. Invalidating their experiences. Invalidating their womanhood. I couldn't.
For more, read this article:
https://channel4.com/news/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-on-feminism
Also:
http://vox.com/identities/2017/3/15/14910900/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-transgender-women-comments-apology
And then Laverne Cox's rebuttal:
http://vulture.com/2017/03/laverne-cox-chimamanda-adichie-trans-women-privilege.html
She backs up and says that transwomen's experiences belong to transwomen and women's experiences belong to women and that they're both valid but they're not the same. And, yeah, I guess I get that, but it doesn't sit well with me to phrase it that way. To me, it smacks of explaining other people's experiences to them and that's sort of something we "modern feminists" are trying to avoid. It would be super, duper not okay if I tried to do that as a white woman; it is not okay if Adichie does it simply because she is black. And that's okay too. And maybe it would sit better with me if the main character in her book which is so obviously her hadn't done that to someone else, as well. But then also, am I policing how she expresses her feminism? Probably, when what I really ought to do is sit down and look at my own feminism and ask myself why her saying that made me feel uncomfortable. I have been reading more about this thing and I feel like she's not wrong and Laverne Cox isn't wrong and acknowledging a multiplicity of stories in arriving at womanhood is not wrong so I'm going to leave now.
Sigh. I have many feelings. Mostly feelings of hunger, which I'm going to go quench with a bowl of ice cream.
Excellent writing & story telling! Definitely Book-of-the-Year on my list. This was perfect timing for me, as the events in Charlottesville unfold and racism is revealed, once again, in our Country. Interwoven with a beautiful love story that kept me turning pages. I will be adding this book to my top ten favorites, for sure!
I read this book back in 2013 for book club, and my new book club has chosen it for our September discussion, so I'm trying to retroactively put down my thoughts. A lot of the time, other reviewers have said what I was thinking, but much more eloquently.
I know that I did not love this book, and I wouldn't recommend it. While it passed my "100 page" rule, and some parts were interesting, I didn't buy Ifemelu's motivation.
Story: There certainly was enough "I wonder what will happen next." in order for me to have gotten through this book. While the "African in black America" angle was novel, it wasn't enough to sustain this novel. And one of the reviewers pointed out that this was more of a political novel than a love story - I would agree with that. There are parts of the novel (the whole creepy old man story line), that seemed superfluous and gratuitous.
Writing: Alas, I don't remember - which means that it was neither great nor bad.
Characters: As I mentioned above, I just didn't get/buy into Ifemelu's character. As an Amazon reviewer said, "I also found it difficult to like the central character, who blundered blindly through her own life and that of others, causing all manner of havoc, while at the same time supposedly sustaining a perceptive critical analysis of race politics."
Learning: I did learn about Nigeria, and I was exposed to some new thoughts regarding race politics, but, given my agreement with the statement that this was more of a political novel, I would have expected to learn more.
Ending: I remember liking the ending. There was an ending, and it was not all wrapped up - which is fine with me. I didn't particularly like what was happening, but that's more of a reflection of the whole book vs. the ending.
Entertainment: I wan't to say n/a here, but really, we read to escape or to be taken to a different place, and I found this novel more depressing than entertaining.
I know that I did not love this book, and I wouldn't recommend it. While it passed my "100 page" rule, and some parts were interesting, I didn't buy Ifemelu's motivation.
Story: There certainly was enough "I wonder what will happen next." in order for me to have gotten through this book. While the "African in black America" angle was novel, it wasn't enough to sustain this novel. And one of the reviewers pointed out that this was more of a political novel than a love story - I would agree with that. There are parts of the novel (the whole creepy old man story line), that seemed superfluous and gratuitous.
Writing: Alas, I don't remember - which means that it was neither great nor bad.
Characters: As I mentioned above, I just didn't get/buy into Ifemelu's character. As an Amazon reviewer said, "I also found it difficult to like the central character, who blundered blindly through her own life and that of others, causing all manner of havoc, while at the same time supposedly sustaining a perceptive critical analysis of race politics."
Learning: I did learn about Nigeria, and I was exposed to some new thoughts regarding race politics, but, given my agreement with the statement that this was more of a political novel, I would have expected to learn more.
Ending: I remember liking the ending. There was an ending, and it was not all wrapped up - which is fine with me. I didn't particularly like what was happening, but that's more of a reflection of the whole book vs. the ending.
Entertainment: I wan't to say n/a here, but really, we read to escape or to be taken to a different place, and I found this novel more depressing than entertaining.
Read for my book club, which was canceled. :-(
Very moving and powerful story about Ifemelu and Obinze, two young lovers growing up in Nigeria, who find themselves on different paths in life. Ifemelu heads to the States to study and chase the "American dream" that Obinze had wanted for both of them, only to be confronted with racial issues for the first time in her life. She starts a blog to talk about race and racism in America, becoming wildly successful but moving further and further away from Obinze, whose life took unexpected turns when he was not able to get to America.
After years in the States, Ifemelu decides it's time to return home, and their reunion is bittersweet and complicated.
Very moving and powerful story about Ifemelu and Obinze, two young lovers growing up in Nigeria, who find themselves on different paths in life. Ifemelu heads to the States to study and chase the "American dream" that Obinze had wanted for both of them, only to be confronted with racial issues for the first time in her life. She starts a blog to talk about race and racism in America, becoming wildly successful but moving further and further away from Obinze, whose life took unexpected turns when he was not able to get to America.
After years in the States, Ifemelu decides it's time to return home, and their reunion is bittersweet and complicated.
I loved the characters! Ifemelu was a very different main character that was fascinating in her untraditional viewpoints. Aunty Juju another example of this. It was refreshing to hear a middle class African perspective that is not steeped in the narrative of African poverty that is so prevalent.
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