The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: Yes, this is a serious book but it is also a brilliantly entertaining and well-written one that is difficult to put down unfinished. THERE are so many things about Americanah to enjoy, appreciate and admire that it is tricky to know where to start. On the enjoyment level there is the pleasure of a bitter-sweet love story charted with sensitivity and conviction, not a schmaltzy Hollywood-style girlie pic kind of a love story but one in which both characters are grounded in daily life with all its pleasures and travails. More aesthetically, it would be a blunted reading that did not intuitively appreciate that Adichie writes beautifully – elegantly and poetically when needed and more brutally when not. And finally, my admiration knows few limits for the fierce intelligence with which the author explores and exposes the issue of race in America with such devastating effectiveness without once losing sight of the fact that a novel is the creation of a fictional world and not simply a platform from which to preach or spout one's "pc" credentials. To take the love story first, Ifemelu is a young Nigerian woman in America who, when the book opens, is having her hair braided in preparation for her return to her home country. As she sits in the salon, wiling away the hours this cosmetic process takes, she reflects on the events of her life so far, including her relationship with Obinze. School friends and then lovers, they are separated when Ifemelu goes to America and Obinze is unable to follow her. Settled in America, Ifemelu has a number of more or less meaningful relationships but none have the capacity "to make her feel like herself" and the memory of Obinze stubbornly refuses to go away. To say that they are soulmates sounds trite but it is true. One way or another, this is a relationship that needs fulfilment or closure and resolution. If Ifemelu and Obinze are the clear drivers of the book, there are a host of minor characters that flesh it out, for this is in every sense a big book of almost epic scale. To take but one, Obinze's mother is a university professor, a thoughtful and compassionate woman. In one beautifully written scene that occurs quite early in her son's relationship with Ifemelu she leaves them alone in the house watching a DVD and returns to find them watching the same scene as when she left. Correctly assuming that this means that they have taken advantage of her absence to disappear into Obinze's bedroom together, she takes Ifemelu to one side and, after establishing that they have "done nothing serious together", advises her to wait: "You can love without making love. It is a beautiful way of showing your feelings but it brings responsibility, great responsibility, and there is no rush. I will advise you to wait until you are at least in university, wait until you own yourself a little more." Ifemelu, in response, "felt the absence of shame. Perhaps it was Obinze's mother's tone, the evenness of it, the normalness ..." For both characters their experiences in foreign countries accelerate the process of "owning themselves a little more". Obinze goes to Britain where he does a series of dead end jobs, a number of which he does illegally without a National Insurance number. Eventually, despite trying every trick in the book to stay and paying heavily in the process, he is deported back to Nigeria. His distressing attempts to find work are echoed by those of Ifemelu in America. Despite being eminently qualified and doing well at interviews, she becomes more and more desperate and humiliated as she is turned down time after time. The reason? She has run headlong into the issue of race and being black in America. Adichie is very good at American dinner parties and uses their social platform to instigate discussions of race and to expose the shallowness of even the most apparently liberal attitudes. At one of them, a black author talks about the publication of her new book and reacts against the advice offered by her: "My editor reads the manuscript and says, 'I understand that race is important here but we have to make sure the book transcends race, so that it's not just about race'. And I'm thinking, "But why do I have to transcend race? You know, like race is a brew best served mild, tempered with other liquids, otherwise white folk can't swallow it." Americanah is a book about race but it is not preachy and it presents a far more intelligent, compassionate and complex picture of what being black in a white culture actually means than anything else I have read so far. A device that Adichie uses very successfully is to make Ifemelu the writer of a blog called Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known As Negroes) By A Non-American Black. These "observations" are sometimes light-hearted in tone but are also bitterly effective, none more so than one devastating piece entitled What Academics Mean By White Privilege, or Yes It Sucks To Be Poor And White But Try Being Poor And Non-White. Americanah is that rare thing, a book that actually changes your world view. If that sounds rather heavy, it really isn't. Yes it is serious, but this is also a brilliantly entertaining and well-written book with characters and a storyline to keep you reading well past your bedtime. It is a very fine achievement by an extremely gifted writer and I shall count myself lucky to read anything better this year. |
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