2024/162: Americanah — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

2024/162: Americanah — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[the dinner party guests] 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. [p. 341]

The novel opens with Ifemelu getting her braids redone: she's going home to Nigeria after fifteen years in America, where she's gone from being broke and depressed to becoming a Fellow at Princeton. She's the author of a popular blog, 'Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black' (excerpts from which are peppered through the novel) and a perceptive observer of racism and Black culture in America. But now she's going home, to a country where race isn't an issue.

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