Love Stories and So On (Book Post and More)

It took me a little longer than usual, but I've finally finished Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie's Americanah. A bit of a feast, really:

This is a big book. A book of lives lived and those left to wither, a book about love and superficial - or maybe not - romance, a book that left me full of more questions than answers, a book about race in America and life in Nigeria, a book that made me feel nice and full. It took me four days to read it, which is forever for me, but I didn't mind, because there's plenty to think about and the writing is good. It's long, but it's tight - the story doesn't meander and it doesn't fade. Once I let go of my idea that the book was about the immigrant experience in America and life in the post-9/11 West, which it's not although the back cover marketed it as such (bastards) - Adichie made efficient use of my time. Since I'm neither black nor an immigrant, I can't really say for certain whether she truly "got" the African experience in America, but it seemed to me that she nailed it.

The plot itself is pretty simple. We follow the story of a middle-class Lagosian female, Ifemelu, as she comes of age in Nigeria and then moves to the United States. She leaves behind her young love, Obinze, and suffers from a variety of hardships, finally landing on her feet and embarking on romances with several different men. She winds up with a fellowship at Princeton - not too shabby - and a feeling of disillusion and distaste. So, after 15 years, she decides to go home to Nigeria, but upon arrival, she discovers that you can't really go home again - or can you? The ending is tied up with a big, beautiful bow, if you like those kinds of endings. Not surprisingly, the plot generally follows the life experiences of Adichie herself. 

So. The plot is nothing special. And now that I'm thinking it over, many of the characters - aside from Ifemelu - didn't really spring to life on the page; they remained rather flat. Sometimes, this approach supported the points she wanted to make, but sometimes, not so much. But! What made this book especially notable for me was Adichie's ability to confront uncomfortable details and incorporate them into her work without blinking. She challenged me to think about race and its meaning in America, to closely consider what love is, to recognize how we humans adopt and then discard identities with surprising and somewhat shameful ease. Her careful eye for detail also works wonders as she's developing the settings in which Ifemelu and others find themselves. 

In the end, although this book is big, Adichie excels at the small - the small gesture, the small conversation, the small observation - and those smalls create for us, the readers, something larger than the sum of its parts. I recommend Americanah to anyone looking for a big, well written book; people interested in the meaning of race in America; those who want to know more about Nigeria than oil spills, email scams, and Boko Haram; and love stories. Because it is a love story most of all, although I'd say it's a love story about learning to love one's self (or not) rather than the more obvious kind.

This book has almost nothing to do with me at all. I'm an academic (and a blogger), but I'm white, I'm American, I'm a lot closer to 40 than I am to 20, a mother...the list goes on. Much of what Adichie discusses was pretty new to me - who knew that some people bond over ingrown chin hairs? - but in some ways, it was all very familiar. The ways, for instance, in which we find people to love, and hold on for dear life. The realization that our parents are real people rather than demi-gods (I fear the day my kids discover this, and fear it will be here long before I'm ready), that the world isn't all that disconnected after all, that there's much more going on behind the casual, carefully constructed facade of someone's public face...those resonated with me now and today. The last one in particular. People are unknowable, unknown to us. Sometimes - who am I kidding? - oftentimes, even to themselves. 

Over the past year, my hand has been forced and I've had to confront my own identity. (That sounds so self-centered.)  I've had to strip myself down and assess what really matters. And I've had to decide, sometimes very deliberately, which is not the way things usually go, what the public "me" looks like. Who the virtual me represents. What my written words might mean to people I adore should I not be around to explain myself later. And I've had to decide what stays inside - inside a group of confidantes, and then inside a tinier group of family that isn't just family, and then inside the safety of my home, and then, finally, inside myself.  Fascinating and unexpected, the ripples that the rock of critical illness creates.