Hello, hello, hello!
One of the things I have always thought most valuable about books is their ability to put you squarely in someone else’s shoes. As a reader, you have the opportunity to live in many places, in many times and see the world through other people’s eyes. I think readers are naturally curious and books fulfil our desire to know, “what would it be like …?” Reading makes us more empathetic, more aware of the experiences of others whose lives do not mirror our own. And this makes our world bigger and our vision clearer. That is how I felt reading Americanah.
The novel traces the experiences of Ifemelu as she moves from her native Nigeria to the United States and back again. Adichie deals with themes that are ever-present in the modern world: she explores how race, class and beliefs about immigration shape our identities. Adichie is a powerful writer. When I told someone recently that I was reading Americanah, she responded with “whoa, that is a serious book!” It is serious, but not in the sense that the writing is dense or the narrative is overly complex. Ifem’s experiences make the reader reconsider their own cultural contexts. At one point in the novel, when Ifem says she wasn’t black until she came to America, it made me think about how so much of how we see ourselves and how we are understood by others is shaped not only by our character or actions but also how the broader culture perceives people who look like us. In Nigeria, almost everyone is black so it is not race, but more often ethnicity or class that become the dividing lines and Adichie explores these divides throughout the novel.
One of my favourite aspects of Adichie’s writing is her ability to address serious issues like gender inequality, race or class-based prejudices both in Nigeria and the US but still make them feel immediate to the character’s life and therefore to the reader. Ifem blogs about what it is like to be black in America as an outsider to the African-American experience; her choice of hairstyle (whether to relax, cornrow or go natural) becomes a statement of how she sees herself as a black woman; her relationships with boyfriends come to echo her search for the American Dream and then ultimately her return to her roots in Nigeria.
Adichie’s themes are increasingly relevant in the face of the shifting political rhetoric we are witnessing on the world stage lately. Her writing is compelling and Americanah is worth reading because it pushes readers to think and feel beyond their own contexts and to consider the world from another point of view. And maybe as readers we are able to build deeper understanding along the way.
Little Ms Word Smith 