Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care.
The label ‘black’ is at the heart of Americanah, just as it is at the heart of so much modern political discussion. These human labels that have made their way into our everyday rhetoric are under continual scrutiny. But Americanah marks the beginning of a new way to talk about race. The interlaced and overflowing racial conversations in Americanah are held together by the slowly unravelling love story of Ifemelu and Obinze. Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love as teenagers in a Nigeria that is under military dictatorship, but their love story comes to a halt when life throws them into two different directions—Ifemelu begins a new life in America, whilst Obinze stays in Nigeria and eventually attempts to start afresh in England.
Oscillating between conversations about black experience in Nigeria, England and America, Adichie’s Americanah follows the direction set by Justin Simien’s 2014 film Dear White People in which the necessity for a conversation about intersectionality is mirrored by the intersection of narrative styles in the finished artwork. Echoing the seamless transitions between Hollywood film scale production and personal video-blogging in Dear White People, Americanah weaves together cutting blog posts and—overheard-on-public-transport—observations with its compelling wider narrative.
Adichie successfully sits close to the vivid minutiae of how race impacts the protagonists’ daily lives while drawing the reader’s attention toward the enveloping discussion of how this impacts the ways in which the entire world chooses to use the word ‘black’. The characters are sensitively constructed and bursting with human contradictions: insight and ignorance; passion and apathy; a desire for change and desire for stasis. All of this works together to create a novel that resonates with the reality of living within societal constructs out of our control and attempting to forge an identity in a world determined to tell us who we are.
Ifemelu asks the reader, in a throwaway line, “Why did people ask ‘What is it about?’, as if a novel had to be about only one thing.” Race is undoubtedly at the centre of the novel, but the characters we meet also create a generally nuanced insight into the ways in which humans, all humans, relate to one other and what it means to communicate. Americanah is daring, beautiful, darkly funny and undeniably real. It is Adichie’s most astonishing novel to date.
