READ THIS BOOK - Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Americanah is a story about wealth and privilege, war and peace, love and the shields that deflect its arrows, whites and blacks, African-Americans and Non-American Blacks, poverty and riches, the United States and the world, and finally, Ifemelu and Obinze. It's a story of many competing themes that never seem to trip over each other; instead, they weave together seamlessly.
Ifemelu is a Nigerian girl who emigrates to the United States after high school to attend college. She begins to blog about her experiences in America, and the blog posts alone are worth the price of admission for this novel. Obinze, Ifemelu's boyfriend and love from high school, has his own travails as he grows into a man. The novel follows both of them with an amazing depiction and vantage point of the lives and countries they see and live.
Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who is also a Nigerian, captures these characters in all of their humanity. All of them are flawed, and the ones that mask their flaws behind their pride prove to be the most insecure and miserable. The many characters that briefly pass through Ifmelu and Obinze's life are also incredibly well drawn. For example, one description of a corrupt politician, "Ferdinand, a stocky acquaintance of Chief’s who had run for governor in the last elections, had lost, and, as all losing politicians did, had gone to court to challenge the results. Ferdinand had a steely, amoral face; if one examined his hands, the blood of his enemies might be found crusted under his fingernails."
Most impressive was Adhichie's ability to succinctly describe the ease that wealth and privilege enable while the burdens of poverty and "choicelessness" (as she puts it) disable so much. I wanted to provide some of my favorite passages in regards to this in the hopes that a few of you would read this book! (I included a link at the bottom if you have a Kindle and/or want to buy from Amazon).
1. "There was a certain luxury to charity that she could not identify with and did not have. To take 'charity' for granted, to revel in this charity towards people whom one did not know - perhaps it came from having had yesterday and having today and expecting to have tomorrow. She envied them this…Ifemelu wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be from the country of people who gave and not those who received. To be one of those who had and could therefore bask in the grace of having given, to be among those who could afford copious pity and empathy."
2. "She liked, most of all, that in this place of affluent ease, she could pretend to be someone else, someone specially admitted into a hallowed American club, someone adorned with certainty."
3. "The stories of his wealth made her assume he had changed more than he possibly could have. People often told him how humble he was, but they did not mean real humility, it was merely that he did not flaunt his membership in the wealthy club, did not exercise the rights it brought – to be rude, to be inconsiderate, to be greeted rather than to greet - and because so many others like him exercised those rights, his choices were interpreted as humility. He did not boast, either, or speak about things he owned, which made people assume he owned much more than he did. Even his closest friend, Okwudiba, told him how humble he was, and it irked him slightly, because he wished Okwudiba would see that to call him humble was to make rudeness normal. Besides, humility had always seemed to him specious thing, invented for the comfort of others; you were praised for humility by people because you did not make them feel any more lacking than they already did. It was honesty that he valued; he had always wished himself to be truly honest, and always feared that he was not."
4. "His friends were like him, sunny and wealthy people who existed on the glimmering surface of things… He was always thinking of what else to do and she told him that it was rare for her, because she had grown up not doing, but being."
5. "Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor."
6. "Alexa, and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty."