americanah

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In a surprise twist to my life, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie just turned up at my doorstep today. I ordered it on Flipkart more than three months ago, so it was quite an unexpected treat. What should be of no surprise to anyone is that I just spent the past seven hours eating this book right up. 

It's a remarkable book, to say the very least. (Aside - I've been mulling over using phrases like it's a remarkable book, or it's an alluring piece of work, or she's an attractive woman. So I'm remarking its remarkability? Being allured by its alluring quality? Getting attracted to her attractiveness? These are such vague things to say! It's like describing something as "interesting". But I remember reading someone recently who wrote about the use of the word "interesting" in a long academic sort of book in which she spends laborious amounts of space talking about it as an "aesthetic category.") But anyway, it's a remarkable book. Absolutely brilliant, in what it sets out to do, what it manages to achieve, how much it manages to say and how easily.  

What I have always loved about Adichie is how political her writings are. She writes in such a self-aware manner, rich and complex, bold and brave. This book is nothing different. While in Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, she wrote about Nigeria and Biafra, about the politics of being a girl, a child, a woman, sexual, Igbo, rich, privileged, poor, African; in Americanah, the book is about being Black, African and Diaspora. It is self-consciously about race: the main character writes a blog called 'Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known As Negroes) By a Non-American Black'. It is about politics of identity, and how these politics colour everything.

I gave myself a snarky little smile when Adichie brought up a grouse I often have with people I talk to or read.  At some point in the book, while Ifemelu is getting her hair done, she has a conversation about a book with a white woman (whose race I'm emphasizing because the book does). The woman says, "It's just so honest, the most honest book I've read about Africa." But Ifemelu doesn't agree with her, and gives her a "mini-lecture" about how she doesn't think the book is about Africa at all. It is, she argues, about "Europe or the longing for Europe." 

The woman then replies - "Oh, well, I see why you would read a novel like that."

"And I see why you would read it like you did," Ifemelu says. 

Adichie then goes on to say "...this girl (who) somehow believed that she was miraculously neutral in how she read books, while other people read emotionally."

Somewhere along the way, I had a thought about the content of the book - it isn't historical or political in an overt and obvious way like her previous two books. But it's more grown up, so much more layered, just, so much more. It might be a reflection of my own growing up (the first time I read Adichie was six whole years ago!), but I would really like to think that it's also Adichie who's writing better than before now.

But essentially, this book is a long, beautifully written (to the point of making me cry) love story. It is the story of longing, loss and seperation. It is a story of love for a person, a country, a feeling; one that is so full of life and vibrancy that even in its dark moments, it makes you want to hold on to a sense of a happy ending.  This is a new and enjoyable feature of Adichie's writing - one of resolution. In Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun (actually, in most of her short stories as well), the endings are often ambiguous, leaving much to your own reading of the story. This one isn't like that - it ends well, and happily (which I loved) and this also works for its love-story-esque quality.

I just read this - and I feel like I'm talking about Adichie more than I'm talking about the book itself. Which is just so, because that's what the book felt like in so many ways. My very first thought about the book at the very first sentence of the book, which is about the smell (or lack thereof) of Princeton, was - is this something Adichie felt herself when she was in Princeton? For me, this is one of the reasons why this book works so well. It's because she puts herself squarely in her book - she makes it about her. 

I'll leave you with this description of loneliness and depression that I have now read for the fourth time in the past nine hours:

"She woke up torpid each morning, slowed by sadness, frightened by the endless stretch of day that lay ahead. Everything had thickened. She was swallowed, lost in a viscious haze, shrouded in a soup of nothingness. Between her and what she should feel, there was a gap. She cared about nothing. She wanted to care, but she no longer knew how; it had slipped from her memory, the ability to care. ... Her days were stilled by silence and snow."