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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No other book has made me question, think, and self-reflect on my own Vietnamese American identity then this book. A.must.read!
I thoroughly devoured Americanah, mesmerized by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's masterful exploration of a young Nigerian woman's journey to America. The author's poignant portrayal of self-discovery, love, and cultural identity resonated deeply.
Adichie's remarkable skill in capturing the unique perspectives of each character brought the narrative to life, making me feel fully immersed. Her writing style is exquisite, and this book has inspired me to explore more of her works, as well as authors who share similar storytelling sensibilities.
I'm utterly enamored with Adichie's writing, and Americanah is a true masterpiece.
Really beautiful story about love, race and the difficulties of living abroad. Would highly recommend.
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!
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