Bayou Pages | “Americanah” By Chimamanda Ngoni Adichie

Review By Meredith Mckinnie

Adichie’s layered novel opens in an African barbershop in Trenton, New Jersey, where Ifemelu has traversed several trains to have her hair braided, a luxury/burden in America. While enduring the multi-hour process, Adichie emails her old boyfriend Obinze that she is moving back to Nigeria. After immigrating to America ten years prior, Ifemelu found modest fame with a blog detailing critiques of American culture. The country she idealized in her youth afforded her the opportunities she imagined, yet left her longing for familiarity.

  Back in high school, Ifemelu and Obinze clicked in the way of old souls who had finally found one another. Adichie writes, “She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.” They experimented with one another; explored language, literature, and culture; and they dreamed of leaving Nigeria for places advanced enough to satisfy their big dreams. They dreamed of going together. When Ifemelu gets a chance in Philadelphia and Obinze in London, the couple agrees to stay in touch, but the interactions fade, until Ifemelu’s email a decade later. Now wealthy, married, and back in Nigeria, Obinze fears the return of his one true love.

Adichie has constructed a phenomenal love story, but also a cultural critique, an American autopsy of sorts, with a unique perspective on America’s original sins. Adichie examines the struggle of legal immigration, even when one is invited to the country, the ever present reality of race, and the gendered expectations that follow an African American who’s only tell is her Nigerian accent. Also an American immigrant, Adichie dissects America from the outside in, exposing its flaws while honestly portraying the flaws of those who flock to America for salvation, redemption, or simply a turn of events. She showcases Ifemelu’s intense desire to become as American as possible even when the faults of America consume her. 

Adichie centers identity, the longing for one to be defined, both from where one comes and where one lands. She explores the roots of desire, the challenges that desires evoke with reference to one’s sense of self and perceived goodness. She unwraps America’s idealized individualism, tapping into what’s lost in America’s abandonment of the collective, the communities we shun to become our “best” selves. If it sounds complicated, it is, beautifully complicated and yet a luxurious read, layered with whimsical language, intellectual discourse, and social critique. Adichie’s book is a masterclass in the craft of writing disparate worlds into the heart of one character. Adichie’s previous novels Purple Hibiscus and Half a Yellow Sun won esteemed awards, and her book-turned-TedTalk We Should All Be Feminists is regarded as a defining piece of feminist literature. 

“And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though looking for an opening to fly away.