Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I’m rather late to the party, but Americanah by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the book “about Africa” that we’ve needed to read. The inverted commas should already suggest that this book is as much about the contemporary African continent as Jane Eyre is about nineteenth-century Europe – as any reader of this timeless classic will immediately understand, it indeed is, in the largest possible sense, but to reduce its wealth of thematic expression to a rather restricted spatial and temporal setting would be a rather grave and unforgivable simplification.

Americanah tells the story of Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman emigrating to the United States to seek education, work, and yes, love. What makes this book a unique and, for white feminists as myself who try to avoid being White Feminist™, eye-opening read, is the much-needed counter-discourse it presents in the cacophony of Facebook pictures and tumblr posts of young, predominately Western European and US-American volunteers/charity workers posing amidst what can only be described as a sea of indistinguishable, malnourished black children (also known as “Voluntourism”). Adichie manages to convey a nuanced and highly empathic portrait of contemporary Lagos, young African womanhood, and what it means to pursue happiness as a Non-American Black in a culture obsessed with racial distinctions. Readers accustomed to sensationalist news stories about West Africa, depicting a country covered in flies and garbage, divided by tribal tensions and governed by guerilla war lords, shackled by diseases and economic stagnation, will be surprised, yes indeed shocked – and shocked I was, at my own ignorance as much as at the distorted media images that we lazily and almost comfortably accept as our reality. 

In its essence, though (as much as I detest the term), Americanah is an intelligent and moving love story about a woman finding her way – and her voice – in an oftentimes confusing, overwhelming world that is still (and I am now referring as much to the African as the American and the European continent) tightly arranged in and controlled by patriarchal terms. Coming to think of it, the initial comparison with my all-time favorite proto-feminist read Jane Eyre doesn’t appear far-fetched at all…