Americanah is a masterfully written novel about a Nigerian
immigrant woman. It is both a roman a clef (a novel that is a disguise of
actual events – in this and many cases the actual events of the author’s life –
Asymmetry
is a recent example where the author tells of her love affair with Philip Roth
but changes the names) and a bildungsroman (a coming of age novel told by the
narrator in retrospect, after having come of age – To
Kill a Mockingbird is a classic example).
And, I think, its vision is on a par with the great novels (Jeffrey Eugenides’s
Middlesex) and historical works (Alex De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America) that
expose something essential about the American character – in this case about
race.
The Novel interweaves three stories. The first is the story of the moment the heroine,
Ifemelu – decides, after having come to the United States and establishing herself here, to leave the country and return to Nigeria. This is the story that the novel begins with and is
“home base” throughout it. It is the
story of a pivotal moment – the coming of age moment and the owning or
re-owning or defining of the self-moment.
Much of this first story – after we learn that Ifemelu has entered into
rarified American air, becoming a scholar and financially successful blogger
about race, takes place in the confines of a hot, decrepit space where is she
getting her hair braided by other West African immigrants who have not been as
successful as she, and she is listening to the stories of their lives while she
tries to make sense of the story of her own and prepares to return home.
The second story is the story of Ifemelu's history that leads up to the present, transitional moment. Ifemelu’s childhood
in Nigeria takes time to articulate – we are being introduced to a foreign
culture – and then, much later, we follow her arrival in the United States and
her slow, difficult and incomplete acculturation to two foreign cultures –
White American culture, and the culture of the African Americans – those who
were taken generations ago as West African slaves and who now reside in this
their country not as equal citizens, but as a marginalized minority – even when
they are tenured professors at Ivy League Universities.
One the criticisms of the Netflix film adaptation of the
novel Unorthodox
is that the acculturation of the heroine to modern day Germany occurs in the
course of less than a week – a pace that feels impossibly rushed compared to
the real world necessities of making such a transition. Americanah is almost 600 pages long, and so
is able to devote considerable time – on the page and in the life of the
heroine – to the transitions that she makes and fails (or refuses or can't) make. We’ll have to see whether the HBO series from
the book can keep us as enthralled as the text does while immersing us in two
cultures that are so foreign to each other.
The third story is what unfolds after Ifemelu’s decision to
return home. Though this story dominates
the last hundred pages of the novel, it seems to flit past too quickly. Ifemelu doesn’t seem to quite get her feet
under her, or perhaps I didn’t as a reader, before an ending that seemed like
too simple an answer to the questions raised in the book. Of course, the answers will also come from the
life that is led after the book is over, so perhaps I am feeling a bit like the
analyst whose patient has left and who will not be exposed to “the rest of the
story.”
Woven into these three dominant stories are multiple sub
stories – especially the story of Obinze, Ifemelu’s college boyfriend who takes
his own emigrant/return home arc – a journey that, because it lands him in
England, allows for some comparing and contrasting of “foreign” Anglophone
cultures. Obinze, who is known as “Zed”
in college – presumably for the Zee in his name – is a rock steady and loyal character
in a book full of people who are neither.
He, like Ifemelu, is clear in his understanding of the world. This does not mean that he is naïve. Quite the contrary, he is worldly wise and
understands that people are complex and internally inconsistent critters. So, when Ifemelu’s beautiful Aunt Uju’s
boyfriend, who is a married general in the military, is killed, Zed and his
family of academics rally to protect Ifemelu and Uju from the general’s wife’s
wrath, now that wife is no longer restrained by her husband from taking her wrath out on her competitor.
The foreign perspective is essential to the insights that
Ifemelu brings to her blogging about race, and to her (and our dawning)
understanding of American Culture as the book unfolds. As Ifemelu’s African American boyfriend’s jealous
sister says about her, “You know why Ifemelu can write that blog, by the way?...
Because she’s African. She’s writing
from the outside. She doesn’t really
feel all the stuff she’s writing about.
It’s quaint and curious to her.
So she can write it and get all these accolades and get invited to give
talks. If she were African American, she’d
just be labeled angry and shunned.” But
I think that, at its core, a person from a country where one’s blackness does
not cause prejudice can experience the shock of this in a way that neither
European Americans nor African Americans can experience. We are oddly bound together by the normalcy
of our racism. By the way that it has
wound its way into our personal and cultural norms so that we cannot take it on
as an object; it is a deeply felt, very subjective part of our very beings.
So Ifemelu inhabits, in America, the space that the analyst
inhabits in the intrapsychic world of the analysand. The analyst enters this world as a
transference object – as a foreign object that gets painted with the
familiar. Just as Ifemelu gets painted
by both black and white Americans as black, something that she is both aware
of, but also not used to as a stimulus that arouses this particular kind of reaction from
others, so the analyst, who is male or female, more frequently white, but occasionally
darker skinned, but more importantly caring at moments and negligent in others,
is able to experience the reaction of the analysand as the analysand welcomes
the analyst to become part of their interpersonal and intrapsychic world as a
member in the way that all other members
are welcomed. The analyst is able to
observe the odd tribal traditions that are part and parcel of that treatment, because of the analysts essentially foreign nature. The analyst can say, as Ifemelu does, isn’t
is strange that you are treating me in this way - and to be curious about that –
rather than to take it as the usual way of doing things and to react in the usual way evoking the usual kind of dance.
Because Ifemelu is African she can feel racism all the more
acutely. Growing up in a culture without
blatant but hidden racism, it assaults her when she is the target of it in the
United States. Another way of saying
what I said in the paragraph above is that part of why analysis is so much easier with two is
that the “foreigner”, the analyst, can feel the power – the weight – of oppression
that is so much part and parcel of the experience of the “native”, that the person who has
borne it for so long, ironically can no longer feel it as an outside force because that weight has become a natural feeling extension of
their being. The analyst, the
therapist, and, I would add, the lover can experience the native experience as
foreign and can question it. This helps the natives with the first of two problems – to recognize the size and scope of the problem – rather than seeing it as just the way things are. The problem is, to give
up something, no matter how problematic, that has worked for us in whatever
ways it has – even though it has also worked against us, is terribly difficult - whether on the couch or in a culture.
To be clear, Ifemelu primarily addresses her observations of
our culture to African Americans (she shortens this to AB for American Blacks
and distinguishes them from NAB – Non-American Blacks), but she is also implicitly
addressing a white audience that is blind to their racism – she is speaking to
the vast liberal white American that Get-Out
was trying to wake. Ifemela works with
an upper middle class white couple, nannying for their children while dating
the mother’s rich cousin. She is
concerned for the woman she works for who doesn’t see how she is being treated
and, I think, she is concerned for the rich cousin who is adrift in his wealth. It is not just the oppressed, but the
oppressors who are blind to their condition and to the costs of them of the condition they are (unconsciously) wrapped up in.
Meanwhile, Ifemela does not just articulate her own
immigrant experience, but she stays in touch with her Auntie Uju, with whom she
can be more candid than she can be with her parents who are tied to the mores
of Nigeria. She is able to watch and
narrate Uju’s struggles as a physician coming to a foreign country, which is
very different – and demeaning in its own way – from Ifemelu’s entrance as a
college student. She is also able to
trace Uju’s son Dike’s growth and acculturation as an immigrant mother’s son in this foreign
country.
At this point, I should remind us that the novel is a different form of writing than the memoir. This novel, which is certainly also part memoir, is told from the third
person, and we are given particularly close access to Ifemela’s internal
experience and it is told primarily from her perspective. But the third person, as opposed to the first
person, allows the author to take some distance – to be a bit of a foreigner
even to her own experience and therefore to have a critical relationship to
it. And we can join the author in the
criticism of the main character, which interferes less, I think, with our identification with the
heroine than if we were reacting to her as she was talking in her own
voice. We become, as it were, allied with the narrator in our criticism, and we feel the way we feel when we are criticizing ourselves, which is, of course, what the author is doing. We see
and criticize, but also forgive.
And we are willing to forgive in part because we are held in
such capable hands. We are shuttling
back and forth between the three stories (and many subplots) which means that we
are moving backwards and forwards in time.
This is momentarily disorienting – but only momentarily. The narratives are woven together so that
they form the kind of integration, the kind of clarity that occurs when a
person tells their own story in the way that it occurs to them (here I am
referring to the process of free association in psychoanalysis but also of a parent telling the
story of their life to a child) but, because we can’t ask questions to help
orient us, Adichie has made the connections for us. I have quoted before Stephen King’s concern
about the wheels falling off in long books like The
Goldfinch. Suffice it to say, there
is no such fear here.
Ifemelu remains solidly grounded throughout this book, which
is a bit of a puzzle. Almost everyone
else in the book is off balance. Partly
they are off balance because of Ifemelu.
She does not play games. Her
observations bubble out of her like an out of control burp. She can’t keep from accosting people with
what she thinks about them and the situation they are in together. Blogging becomes a natural outlet for
her. Her posts are short, pithy, and filled
with wit. By the time she makes her
decision to return home, she seems to have found the reins to these thoughts –
and she seems to be more and more to be on top of her game in articulating them. She becomes more and more self-sufficient
while staying connected with a world that she cares deeply about, feeling for
it, but remaining open to the contradictions that are central to it.
I spoke earlier about being disappointed by the ending of the book. If you don’t want a spoiler, skip to the next
paragraph. Ifemelu ends up finding, or
rediscovering, her soul mate in Zed at the end of this book. On one level, this is disappointing because it
follows the tried and true girls meets boy, girl loses boy, girl finds boy
arc. However much this may reflect
reality – and however much Zed may, in real life or in the mind of the novelist
(not the memoirist), reflect what would or did happen in the lived life of
Ifemelu, I am less distressed by this ending as I realize it is also a symbolic dream
ending, if you will. That is, Zed is not
just a flesh and blood character, but he is also a representation of who it is
that Ifemelu actually is. Discovering
him – returning to Nigeria to find him – becomes less about a lovesick girl’s
dream of reuniting with a lost lover and more about a person coming of age by
discovering and connecting with her true nature. Her mirror self has – as she herself has –
strayed from who it is that that they were – but these mirror selves are both
tuned to the vagaries of development – they get that living is complicated –
and they are able to reunite – to square themselves with the insults of having
been foreigners both abroad and then, inevitably, when they have returned
home. To discover home is not a passive
act – it is the activity of creating the home space that we deserve. Whether we are doing that within the walls of
our own home – or within the walls of the country that we want to own as our own,
we have to not take it as it is, ultimately, but make it into what we want it
to be.
I am grateful for the recommendation of this book to a French Analyst who mentioned it in a podcast about Covid. I was struck by the parallels between this book and the Frenchman De
Toqueville’s Democracy in America, as I mentioned before, but I did not
remember that book well, having read it 40 years ago. So I pulled it down from the shelves and
leafed through it. I found the yellowed
translation to be quite accessible and modern.
But the most surprising piece was that De Toqueville devoted fully half
of the first book (he ultimately wrote two volumes) to the issue of race. His position was that, as much as we had been
able to create a country that had the potential to balance equality of
opportunity with personal freedom, we had failed to do this with the African
American and the Native American populations.
He concluded that the oppressed (the African Americans, who were largely
enslaved in the 1840s) had it worse than the marginalized (the Native Americans
who were pushed off their land and out of the consciousness of the
majority). But his position was that we,
as a nation, had the reckoning with these two populations as our major
unfinished business. Almost two hundred
years later, another foreigner, Adichie, helps us see that this is still the
case.
To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here. For a subject based index, link here.
For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter, John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.
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