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    Americanah: A novel
    Americanah: A novel
    Americanah: A novel
    Ebook636 pages8 hours

    Americanah: A novel

    By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    10th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A modern classic about star-crossed lovers that explores questions of race and being Black in America—and the search for what it means to call a place home. • From the award-winning author of We Should All Be Feminists and Half of a Yellow Sun • WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

    "An expansive, epic love story."—O, The Oprah Magazine
     
    One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

    Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be Black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post–9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.

    At once powerful and tender, Americanah is a remarkable novel that is "dazzling…funny and defiant, and simultaneously so wise." —San Francisco Chronicle
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
    Release dateMay 14, 2013
    ISBN9780307962126
    Author

    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

    CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into more than 55 languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and Financial Times. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Half of a Yellow Sun, which was the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction “Winner of Winners” award; Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck; the essays We Should All Be Feminists, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, and Notes on Grief; and Mama’s Sleeping Scarf, a book for children. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

    Read more from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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    Reviews for Americanah

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      This is the One Book, One Lincoln book for this year, and I've actually just finished reading it! I'm not usually so on-the-ball!
      I'm glad this book was chosen... I haven't read the other candidates yet, but this was definitely a great book.
    • 4/5
      Excellent narration for this audiobook. An engaging story about a Nigerian woman who moves to America. It's one of those stories where you really want the characters to succeed and be happy. Do they? Not telling.
    • 4/5
      A story about love and difference between two different cultures, addressing systemic racism.
    • 2/5
      A colleague pointed out that there is a lot of Jane Austen in this novel- it essentially follows the marriage plot, the central conflict being Ifemelu's search for a partner. Luckily, she is sought after by a few rich and handsome suitors in both the US and Nigeria. Americanah is literature of the privileged, with a lot of insight about race but surprisingly tone-deaf about class. Like the Bennett sisters, Ifemelu faces just enough adversity to gain our sympathy, but not enough to dramatically alter her world view.

      The most compelling part of the story is Obinze's travails in London, which feels like a more accurate depiction of the immigrant experience than Ifemelu's fortuitous salvation by rich white people.
    • 3/5
      Read this one for the PBS Great American Read. I enjoyed the fresh perspectives on world and American society, but there wasn't much of a "story" there. Yes things happened, and people came and went, and it was interesting to follow their lives. But there was no particular reason to do so. I started enjoying it about halfway through, reading Ifemelu's blog posts; those were quite entertaining.
    • 4/5
      Would give 3.5 stars if possible. Liked the writing, and I liked the story to start with, but it seemed too long and got really soapy towards the end.
    • 5/5
      "Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it."

      This novel is at its heart a love story – the tale of two Nigerian childhood sweethearts whose lives take different paths when they emigrate to America and England – but it is also a critique of the modern attitudes to race and migration, touching on issues of identity, loss and loneliness.

      This is Adichie's third and probably her most ambitious novel. It tells the story of Ifemelu, a spirited young girl with forthright opinions, and her teenage boyfriend, Obinze, who grow up with romanticised notions of the west. When Ifemelu is offered the opportunity to continue her studies in Philadelphia, she takes it. Some years later, Obinze, goes to Britain in search of a better life.

      In England, Obinze struggles to get hold of an elusive national security number that will enable him to work legally. In America, Ifemelu also finds it difficult to get part-time work whilst her fellow students speak to her as if she cannot comprehend basic English.

      It is at this point that Adichie's skill as an author really begins to shine through. She wonderfully evokes the sense of dislocation felt by both characters in two countries with totally different class structures as seen through the eyes of a group of liberal elite. She is particularly good at challenging the reader's assumptions without getting in the way of the story. When Ifemelu buys a vintage 1960s dress on eBay she realises that when the original owner would have worn it, black Americans would not have been allowed to vote.

      Eventually, Ifemelu starts blogging about her experiences and becomes successful. The blogposts add an extra dimension to the plot, allowing the reader to see how Ifemelu really sees herself and how she wishes to present herself to the outside world.

      Much of the novel is written in flashback split between the two main protagonists and the final section of the book follows Ifemelu's return to Lagos after 15 years in America and her reunion with Obinze who is, by now, a successful businessman and married to someone else. Ifemelu takes up blogging again but this time about Nigerian issues.

      I personally felt that there are a few elements that could have been cut and the ending was a bit rushed but overall this is a gripping human story, you can feel Adichie's passion in virtually every paragraph. A very enjoyable read.
    • 4/5
      “I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America.”

      This book is a combination of coming of age, romance, migration, and social commentary on race. Ifemelu and Obinze grow up in Nigeria. They become childhood sweethearts and each other’s first love. Ifemelu moves to the US and finds herself subject to American racial prejudices she had never before encountered. She feels pressured to conform to American norms. She endures traumatic experiences, eventually graduates from college, and starts a blog addressing racial issues from the viewpoint of a non-American black.

      Obinze moves to England. He overstays his temporary visa and is deported. Each carries a torch for the other, though they do not remain in close contact. Nigerians have their own issues with those returning from abroad, and do not appreciate their air of superiority and complaints about their home country.

      Though I would classify Ifemelu as the primary protagonist, the book is told in shifting perspectives between Ifemelu and Obinze. The writing is strong. Ifemelu is a woman who speaks her mind, and her social commentary on race is thought-provoking. Adichie employs humor and wit in addition to examining serious topics. It would have worked better for me without the recurring romance angle. I was puzzled by the ending – it seemed the characters should have reached a higher level of maturity based on their experiences.
    • 5/5
      I loved every sentence of this book!
    • 4/5
      A book looking at America from a Nigerian point of view. It is refreshing read, looking at things that we take for granted and how someone not from the United States views them. Sometimes it help to read books that do not fit our western point of view.
    • 4/5
      Its a love story and also a book with a purpose. Liked it even as its the book that feels constructed somehow to make you think. Don´t get me wrong there is nothing wrong with books that make you want to think but if you sense the purpose and the book doesn´t do it more elegantly it can feel a bit blunt.
      My two cents
    • 4/5
      While I thought the premise for the book would be an interesting one - a woman from Nigeria who leaves to go the US for opportunity and then returns to Nigeria to find her true self - it lost me sometimes with the circles of her friends and their never-ending opinions. Her interactions with different characters were interesting but each relationship seemed to deteriorate animist with no resolution. It seems quite long but I did think her blog topics were fascinating.
    • 3/5
      Ehhh... Definitely not as hard-hitting as her other work. At times it reads more like a blog post or an opinion piece with characters stuck in, and Obinze's POV does not add much to the story. That being said, Adichie really gets to show how funny she can be in this book.
    • 4/5
      I finally got around to reading this after a library patron/now friend was insistent I read this, and since I send her home with loads of books to read, I realized I ought to at least reciprocate a little. I also decided to sign up for the Audible trial to snag a copy so I could listen on a road trip, and I was quite happy with the reader, Adjoa Andoh. I loved her distinct voicing for the different characters (and was especially tickled by her interpretation of the white characters)--I wonder if I would have sustained momentum if it wasn't for Andoh's delivery.

      I was mostly drawn to Ifemelu's story. I related so much to her romantic relationships, as a woman as well as when it came to interracial/cross-cultural woes. I loved her discussions on race and looked forward to her blog posts sprinkled throughout. Book-within-a-book (and the like) devices don't usually work for me, but I couldn't get enough of this.

      Obinze's story seemed to disrupt the flow of the novel. It seemed Ifem's story was the primary focus of the novel, and Obinze's--while offering a few interesting social commentary insights in its own right--seemed secondary but long enough to take me out of the flow. Would this have been a stronger book if it had kept to one POV? Ifemelu's character also seemed to be the one with the most depth...the rest felt rather flat, but rarely a detriment to the overall novel.

      In the end, I really enjoyed this, and gratefully so. It is the third Adichie I've read--I feel like I'm an outsider in that I'm lukewarm about her writing, which is why I put off reading this novel for so long. This convinces me to keep with her.
    • 4/5
      I loved this all the way to the end and, then, I wanted to scream. I hate it when books just stop.
    • 4/5
      Americanah relates the story of Ifemelu and Obinze, two young adults growing up in Nigeria. They are in love and plan to flee the military-ruled country together. However, only Ifemelu gets a visa for the United States. Obinze, on the other hand, has to wait and re-apply time and again only to find himself able to escape Nigeria to the UK, where he leads the life of an undocumented immigrant. He is in constant fear of being caught, cannot really take all the jobs he wants and eventually he is detained and has to return back home to Nigeria. While Obinze sets up a new life in Nigeria and becomes very successful, Ifemelu has to deal with her own problems in the US so that the two of them do not stay in touch. Ifemelu finally makes a living with a blog about being Black in the United States and has a few relationships she always ends before they become too serious. Eventually, she wants to escape the life she has made for herself in the US and takes a job as an editor with a Nigerian magazine. After fifteen years abroad, Ifemelu returns home and meets up with Obinze again. Obinze is married now and has a family, but there is still a spark between the two. What will the future hold for them? Will they become a couple again? Will they become friends? Can they re-ignite their former passion for one another?

      Adichie's novel is as much about the relationship between Ifemelu and Obinze as it is about so many other underlying issues that shape their lives. There is the issue of emigration to another country because of the dire situation in their homeland, there are the issues of living life as an undocumented immigrant, there is the issue of being Black in the US (which is further divided into American Black and Non-American Black) and eventually there is the way you are treated in your home country upon returning as an 'Americanah'. The novel explores how to deal with the hard decisions you have to make in your life that are amplified by the underlying question of identity.

      On the whole, I liked Americanah a lot, both for the relationship between Ifemelu and Obinze which kept me wanting to see how it all turns out in the end as well as for the underlying issues the novel explores. 4 stars.
    • 4/5
      Americanah tells the story of Ifemelu and Obinze, a couple in Nigeria whose happily ever after is dismantled when the two have very different immigration experiences, Ifemelu to the United States and Obinze, illegally, to the UK. As Ifemelu plans her return to Nigeria and imagines being reunited with Obinze, the story unpacks their histories. I think this book is Important with a capital I, but as storytelling goes, it fell flat. I appreciated the many insights into our ingrained white American biases presented within the framework of Ifemelu's blog and experience. Much of this was very eye opening. I appreciated, objectively, the high quality of the writing. My biggest problem with the book may have been that I just didn't like Ifemelu. Her social circles in the U.S., both white and black, were irritatingly pretentious. Her self-destructive tendencies were aggravating. I grew weary of the story not seeming so much a story as a message I was supposed to be getting. I think there's a good non-fiction book hiding in this fictional narrative, and I wish that had been the focus. I look forward to reading other books by this author, but this one didn't quite work for me.
    • 5/5
      [Americanah] by [[Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie]]
      I finally got around to reading Adichie's 2013 novel that explores the experiences of Nigerian-born Ifemelu and Obinze, and I'm so, so glad I did. Ifemelu and Obinze grow up comfortably upper middle class in Nigeria, but have to contend with the challenges of living in a developing country. When they are in college and the teachers continually go on strike, they begin seriously looking for ways to leave. As a female, Ifemelu is able to get a visa to America to live with her aunt fairly easily. Getting a work visa is not as easy. Obinze, as a male in the post-9/11 world, is unable to legally emigrate. He ends up briefly in London and then back in Nigeria.

      Ifemelu is the focus for most of the book. She becomes successful in America writing a blog about race. She writes about how she never thought of herself as Black until she came to America - Black doesn't exist in Nigeria. She writes about the differences between Non-American Blacks and American Blacks. Her words are powerful and honest and entertaining - as a good blog should be. I was immediately struck by how her observations line up with [[Isabel Wilkerson]]'s book, [Caste]. Though [Americanah] is a novel, it felt like real life observation of how the American Caste system is implemented and how it affects all of us.

      Amidst these observations and experiences with race in America, the UK, and Nigeria, life happens. Ifemelu has various relationships, jobs, and family drama. Through it all, she thinks about Obinze, her first love. When she moves back to Nigeria, the question is whether she and Obinze will still love each other and whether life will allow them to be together.

      I really loved this novel. For me, the most successful parts were the revelations about race and the immigrant experience. Also about the different lifestyles in Nigeria, America, and Great Britain. I was less interested in the romance between Ifemelu and Obinze. That took just a little bit of the glow off of this novel for me, but I still highly recommend it. I'll read anything [[Adichie]] writes. I think she's a wonderful writer.

      Original publication date: 2013
      Author’s nationality: Nigerian and American (dual citizenship, I believe)
      Original language: English
      Length: 588 pages
      Rating: 4.5 stars
      Format/where I acquired the book: library kindle
      Why I read this: 1001 books, books about Black American experience for category challenge
    • 5/5
      Ifemelu and her boyfriend Obinze grew up in Nigeria. She immigrates to America for college. Obinze is not able to follow her and instead goes to England on a tourist visa that he overstays and winds up deported back to Nigeria.

      Ifemelu becomes a successful blogger while she’s living in America – her blog is called Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. Her blog entries, which are interspersed throughout the book offer biting, darkly humorous takes on race in America from Ifemelu’s point of view as an outsider looking in. At the same time, back in Nigeria, Obinze becomes wealthy, marries and has a child. After living in America for fifteen years, Ifemelu moves back to Nigeria and reunites with Obinze. They find that they must make some tough choices.

      Americanah is about many things – love, immigration and race. Its Ifemelu’s observations on race in America really struck me and have stayed with me. She says, “”I came from a country where race was not an issue. I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America.” Throughout her time in America, she finds that she has certain expectations placed on her, good and bad, because she is Black. Like, when in one of her college classes all eyes were on her when the topic was slavery. When Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, she finds that America has changed her and she can’t easily integrate back into her old life. She is forever changed and now inhabits an in-between state – what her Nigerian friends call Americanah. Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      Read for book club.

      I had a bit of a love/hate relationship with this book. I enjoyed the writing most of the time and obviously it was thought-provoking. On the other hand I really couldn't warm to Ifemulu. She just had to be right all the time and was never to blame for anything and was never satisfied. She spent all her time either thinking about her hair or about how American Blacks and Non-American Blacks were treated differently from Whites. I appreciate that the latter was the point of the novel, but a bit more engagement and a bit less observing would have made her a better character. Some times I felt she contradicted herself - she criticizes the perception that Blacks tip badly, but she has already told us that when she first moved to America she found tipping to be 'a forced and efficient bribing system', and then just before she returns to Nigeria, after a day-long and expensive hair appointment, she tips her hairdresser $20...?

      She is unfaithful to Curt because she is curious about her neighbour. This is Curt, who annoys her sometimes because he doesn't understand every aspect of her experience as a Non-American Black, despite the fact that her stated position is that white people should simply ask if they want to know something. Then she lies to Blaine about something very important to him and seems to feel he is overreacting. Finally she returns to Nigeria to split up her former boyfriend's marriage.

      I would have liked to hear more from the perspectives of Obinze and Aunty Uju. On a very minor note, unless I have just been very fortunate, I am not aware that spitting is a particular problem in London underground stations.

      The page on how to determine if you have white privilege really sums up this novel. It has made me think, but I'm not sure I really enjoyed the story.
    • 5/5
      WOW. Can I just read this book over and over and over?
    • 4/5
      I really loved this book. The characters all felt real, with believable flaws and their own truths to tell. It definitely created empathy in me for both the immigrant experience as well as the black experience. While it sometimes felt like an indictment of America, it didn't feel too preachy, and Obinze's experience in England wasn't much different. (for that matter I expect much of the immigrant experience is the same no matter where you go - if you talk with American expats in Japan or Korea you hear entirely similar stories of how they are treated, for example). Pretty much nobody in the book was spared from having their foibles exposed :). And the book was often laugh-out-loud funny. If you enjoyed the feel of this I'd strongly recommend Lauren Wilkinson's American Spy, which covers a lot of the same ground but in the form of a spy novel of sorts. Also very good....
    • 4/5
      I am not entirely sure how to feel about this book. The characters were diverse, nuanced, and well-developed, but none were particularly likable. Their experiences were engaging, but the reader didn't really root for positive outcomes, however those may have been defined. I identified with parts of the story from my own experiences--when Ifem spoke with her Nigerian friends, I could hear my Nigerian friends, when she spoke with the West African hair dressers, I could hear my West African hair ladies, and market ladies, and friends and neighbors. As a result, even though (despite being American), I couldn't relate to much of Ifem's time in America in learning the African-American experience, I had to believe it to be true, despite my discomfort in reading it.
    • 5/5
      just utterly brilliant and epic in scope, maximalist in ideas and imaginative and novelistic force; a real experience a little disheartening to read when attempting to write one's own novel haha, but as a reading experience, top notch. as an examination of american race relations and nigerpolitan identity, unparalleled. both an emotional and political act of education. i loved it.
    • 5/5
      So good! One of the reviews on the cover said that it would lead to many arguments in your own head, and that was true. I love that the narrator's own views on race evolved throughout the book and that side characters challenged her ideas, almost pre-empting any criticisms the author herself might receive. And rather than cheapening the book or making it too "feminine." exploring race through the lens of the narrator's relationships was so illuminating. I liked the narrator's suggestion that inter-racial love is the best way to understand race. Extreme perhaps, but it is difficult to have those kinds of conversations with acquaintances or even friends. In the context of a romantic relationship, I feel like there's more freedom to challenge each other and really get to the bottom of personal experiences.
    • 4/5
      A beautifully written, thoughtful novel.
    • 2/5
      During the stay at home order I've been reading books that have been on my to be read list for awhile. Mainly because I can get these books electronically from the library but, I'm glad. I've missed a lot of good books over the years

      So Americanah tells the story of race in America by a Non American Black. But the books starts in Nigeria and is a love story of two teenagers. One goes to America where she writes the blog addressing race as a Non American Black and the other goes to England, gets deported back to Nigeria and starts making money finally by the usual Nigerian way, knowing someone and maybe a little illegally to start.

      The race discussion seems to be spot on but I am white so maybe I don't really know.

      When she comes back to Nigeria she know longer feels the race issue because everyone is black.

      A good book, I'll be thinking about it for awhile.
    • 3/5
      Ifemelu is a Nigerian who when offered an opportunity to move to America takes it, and moves in with her Aunt. She struggles to find any work at all at first, but she is tenacious enough to keep trying until she establishes herself.

      Her boyfriend in Nigeria, Obinze, tries hid luck in the UK> he has to work using someone else's Ni number, and has a opportunity to marry someone to become a resident, by he is caught and deported by the authorities to Nigeria.

      Ifemelu starts to live the life of the American, she has a white lover, her career is on the rise and she feels happy with her lot. A fling with a neighbour means that she splits with Curt, but soon finds Blaine, and joins the immigrant set. She begins a blog on race and racial comments and slower gains a wider following, and is made a fellow at Princeton. At this career peak she makes the decision to move back to Nigeria. When she returns she finds that Obinze is married with a daughter, and they rekindle their old love.

      Adichie has written a modern story centred around three themes, love, immigration and race.

      The love part is fairly standard, boy a girl fall in love, separate and after a period of time reconnect with each other causing friction with existing partners.

      The immigration parts show just how tough it is coming to another country, finding work, staying in work, and trying to settle and make a home. She highlights how difficult this is in the UK and America with Obinze and Ifemelu's stories of their struggle and their success and failure to do so.

      The final theme of the book is race. Through Ifemelu's blog, Adichie shows that there is still a strong undercurrent of covert racism there, and there is a a hierarchy of skin colour, and that defines your place in society, Princeton fellowship or not.

      It is beautifully written, as was her other book that I have read. She has a way of being able to make these difficult themes accessible to a wider audience.
    • 4/5
      I read this book for the library-sponsored book discussion group that I lead, and as I was reading, I was thinking to myself "however am I going to lead a discussion about this book with a group of middle- and upper-middle class white women without all of us choking on our own hypocrisy?" And I realized that the only possible way was to get that issue out of the way right up front. So we started out our discussion by owning our own perspectives and acknowledging that each of us came to this book with our own set of assumptions.

      I'm pleased to report that my tactic of putting it out there allowed us to have a frank and honest conversation about this book, perhaps one of the best book discussions we've had (YMMV). And there's a lot to discuss in this book! Adichie does not pull her punches in describing the thoughts of Ifemelu, her main character, on racism and classism and immigrants and love and going home again. Ifemelu has a blog on which she explores many of these issues, and her blog posts punctuate the narrative, creating a different way of sharing her insights than the typical internal monologue. Ifemelu's reflections may provoke you to examine your own beliefs on these topics. I think she would hope so.
    • 5/5
      Overall, I really enjoyed this book.

      I will admit that when I first tried to read it I put it down after about 120 pages. It felt really slow to me and I kept looking at how long it was and didn't think I could make it through at the pace it was feeling it was going at.

      I picked it up again about a month later and found that it really picked up. I can't say whether I was just in a different place mentally and found it more engaging or whether the plot just took off around the 150 page mark.

      I really enjoy reading about the lives of people (fictional or not) who have very different life experiences from my own. This book was rich in descriptions and the characters were really well drawn. I liked the expanse of the story and the depth that the author went into in order to help the reader really feel like they knew the characters and understand all the twists and turns each person experienced.


      I haven't ever read anything quite like it before and it was well worth reading.

    Book preview

    Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

    INTRODUCTION TO THE

    VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION (2023)

    America fascinated me as America fascinates every newcomer. Nineteen years old and fleeing the study of medicine at my Nigerian university, I longed to be a writer, to live a life of the mind. Yes, it is hackneyed, but America truly was, for me, about chasing and catching my dreams. From my first days, I watched and read and learned. I was struck by the excess and the newness, by the flagrant contradictions, but mostly by how identity as an idea shaped so much of American life.

    America is indeed unlike any other country in the world, not in the kind of triumphalist manner of those who speak of exceptionalism, but because while it was created from violence like many other modern nations, it also claimed plurality, an unusual notion for founding a nation. This plurality, this mix of those voluntarily and involuntarily American, living on land that did not belong to them, gave birth to a churning that magnified rather than diminished identity. In Nigeria, I had often thought about who I was—writer, dreamer, thinker— but only in America did I consider what I was.

    I became Black in America. It was not a choice—my chocolate-colored skin saw to that—but it became a revelation. I had never before thought of myself as Black; I did not need to, because while British colonialism in Nigeria left many cursed legacies in its wake, racial identity was not one of them. Had I been raised in eastern or southern Africa, with their own insidious inheritances of history, perhaps I might have thought of myself in terms of skin color. In Nigeria, I was Igbo and Roman Catholic, and even then, growing up on a genteel university campus, neither had a significant bearing on the way I moved through the world.

    To be Black in America was to feel bulldozed by the weight of history and stereotypes, to know that race was always a possible reason, or cause, or explanation for the big and small interactions that make up our fragile lives. To be Black was to realize that it was impossible for people to approach one another with the simple wonder of being human, without the specter of race lying somewhere in the shadows. To be Black was to feel, in different circumstances, frustration, anger, irritation, and wry amusement, but it also brought the rare wealth of discovering African-American literature, those stories full of such graceful grit. Black American writing instructed and delighted me, and I must have at some unconscious level wanted to contribute to that tradition, but obliquely, as someone standing outside of American culture, a Black person without America’s blighted history.

    Americanah was not the first novel that I wrote in my America—I published two novels, Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun—but it was, I think, the first whose seed was sown. By the time I finally felt ready to write it, something was brewing in me, a literary rebellion of sorts. I wanted an imaginative liberation, to be free of the conventional rules of fiction, which had become inadequate in the face of my urgency. And what was this urgency? To write a book distinct from what I had done in the past. My previous novels meant so much to me emotionally, especially Half of a Yellow Sun, and I had felt that only by being a dutiful daughter of literature, only by bowing to the beautiful and time-tested tradition of literary realism, like Balzac and Trollope, could I honor the story of the Nigerian-Biafran War.

    With Americanah, I felt differently. I wanted to write of an American perspective that I had not seen elsewhere, about Blackness and about Black women’s hair, about immigration and about longing. How could I capture a society that seemed strangely oblivious to history, as though with each new story, history began anew? I wanted to write a novel leavened by ideas, and even by exhortation, which might at the same time help us talk about difficult things. A novel with a female character whose raison d’être is not likeability—and I hoped my readers might be kind to her, as one hopes for kindness without the condition of perfection. (When people have assumed that Ifemelu is me, I consider it a compliment as she is vastly more interesting than I could ever be. Still, she is me in the way that all my characters are me. Obinze, in his questioning dreaminess, is perhaps closer to my internal self.)

    Of all the complicated emotions that animated the conception of this novel, bewilderment was the most present. Why were the ordinary things of Blackness so niche, so unfamiliar, to the American mainstream? American Blackness was fundamental and foundational to America, after all, but Black life appeared not only set apart but unequally so. In college, I once got my hair braided over spring break and, back in class, a non-Black classmate told me, in pleasant surprise, Wow, your hair really grew long. A view promptly echoed by a few others, all in admiration. Mainstream American women’s magazines wrote fluidly of blond and brunette hair, of flat-ironing and keratin treatments. But my classmates knew nothing of braids, one of the most common contemporary hairstyles for Black women.

    Many years later, when I told a writer friend that I wanted to write a novel about Black women’s hair, I did mean hair as just hair, but also as plot device, as descriptor and as metaphor.

    Black women’s hair? Nobody will read it, my friend told me.

    Well, people have written readable novels about baseball, and I think Black hair is just as interesting as baseball, maybe more so, because Black hair has the potential for more surprises.

    I am not sure I actually said this, or merely thought it, or whether I am thinking it now, ten years after Americanah’s publication.

    That friend—and I have always appreciated the honesty of good friends—had a point. Black women’s hair was as unlikely a subject for a novel as any. But it was what I wanted to write, the spirit of the novel was already calling me, and I was prepared that it might be widely disliked. To engage honestly with Blackness in America is to discard with comfort anyway. And so as I began to write, my urgency had an edge of defiance, of stubborn determination. I would not merely make my own music, I would string my own harp.

    Maybe it is why I laughed so often while writing Americanah, that sense of liberation that straddles recklessness. Apart from my mild concern about the appropriateness of laughing at my own jokes, I hoped my readers might sometimes laugh, too. There is an Igbo saying—a sad thing is also funny—and I often found dark humor in the many permutations of the Black experience in America. If humor were to be a literary device, then it is one that, because it is so wonderfully human, can make us better see ourselves.

    —

    SHORTLY AFTER THE Black American George Floyd was murdered by a White police officer, a woman told me she had only just read Americanah. You are a prophet, you foresaw this, she said, as if my novel were preparation for a seismic shift in America’s anti-Blackness. A social and cultural reckoning about Blackness did begin as a result of Floyd’s murder. And yet, even though mainstream women’s magazines now include braids in general roundups of style choices, the shift is hardly seismic. Black visibility is yet to be so ordinary that it becomes, as White visibility has for centuries in America, invisible, and therefore the norm.

    I think of literature as my religion and yet I am always newly stirred at the power that stories have. I did not permit myself to have high expectations for this novel, and so when after publication I discovered that Americanah was embraced by so many, I experienced a unique gratitude. (Gratitude, when one does not expect to feel it, has an extra undertone of delight.) I still experience this today. I have heard from Nigerian-American readers who were inspired to move back to Lagos, Black women who—because of Ifemelu—decided to go natural, and more whimsically, women of all nationalities who are keen to meet Obinze!

    I heard from readers whose words I will never forget. A professor who said that Americanah helped his students talk about anti-Blackness in other minority communities and colorism within the Black community. A Black woman who said, quite simply, I felt naked. You really saw me, a bit too much. The white man who said, I had no idea. And the person who said, You told the truth!

    Americanah could not be a story about Blackness from an outsider without also being an African immigration story. It is not the African immigration story with which the world is familiar, of poverty and war, but one familiar to me, the fleeing not from starvation but from discontent, and the reaching for dreams. One discovers oneself through writing, and I saw in this novel my own enduring romanticism, often carefully obscured in cautious reason. The stories we tell leave the reader with a memory not so much of the stories themselves, but of how we look at the world. And here, in this lush love story, lies bare my faith in love, in love undying.

    Part 1

    CHAPTER 1

    Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly. Philadelphia had the musty scent of history. New Haven smelled of neglect. Baltimore smelled of brine, and Brooklyn of sun-warmed garbage. But Princeton had no smell. She liked taking deep breaths here. She liked watching the locals who drove with pointed courtesy and parked their latest-model cars outside the organic grocery store on Nassau Street or outside the sushi restaurants or outside the ice cream shop that had fifty different flavors including red pepper or outside the post office where effusive staff bounded out to greet them at the entrance. She liked the campus, grave with knowledge, the Gothic buildings with their vine-laced walls, and the way everything transformed, in the half-light of night, into a ghostly scene. She liked, most of all, that in this place of affluent ease, she could pretend to be someone else, someone specially admitted into a hallowed American club, someone adorned with certainty.

    But she did not like that she had to go to Trenton to braid her hair. It was unreasonable to expect a braiding salon in Princeton—the few black locals she had seen were so light-skinned and lank-haired she could not imagine them wearing braids—and yet as she waited at Princeton Junction station for the train, on an afternoon ablaze with heat, she wondered why there was no place where she could braid her hair. The chocolate bar in her handbag had melted. A few other people were waiting on the platform, all of them white and lean, in short, flimsy clothes. The man standing closest to her was eating an ice cream cone; she had always found it a little irresponsible, the eating of ice cream cones by grown-up American men, especially the eating of ice cream cones by grown-up American men in public. He turned to her and said, About time, when the train finally creaked in, with the familiarity strangers adopt with each other after sharing in the disappointment of a public service. She smiled at him. The graying hair on the back of his head was swept forward, a comical arrangement to disguise his bald spot. He had to be an academic, but not in the humanities or he would be more self-conscious. A firm science like chemistry, maybe. Before, she would have said, I know, that peculiar American expression that professed agreement rather than knowledge, and then she would have started a conversation with him, to see if he would say something she could use in her blog. People were flattered to be asked about themselves and if she said nothing after they spoke, it made them say more. They were conditioned to fill silences. If they asked what she did, she would say vaguely, I write a lifestyle blog, because saying "I write an anonymous blog called Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black would make them uncomfortable. She had said it, though, a few times. Once to a dreadlocked white man who sat next to her on the train, his hair like old twine ropes that ended in a blond fuzz, his tattered shirt worn with enough piety to convince her that he was a social warrior and might make a good guest blogger. Race is totally overhyped these days, black people need to get over themselves, it’s all about class now, the haves and the have-nots, he told her evenly, and she used it as the opening sentence of a post titled Not All Dreadlocked White American Guys Are Down. Then there was the man from Ohio, who was squeezed next to her on a flight. A middle manager, she was sure, from his boxy suit and contrast collar. He wanted to know what she meant by lifestyle blog, and she told him, expecting him to become reserved, or to end the conversation by saying something defensively bland like The only race that matters is the human race. But he said, Ever write about adoption? Nobody wants black babies in this country, and I don’t mean biracial, I mean black. Even the black families don’t want them."

    He told her that he and his wife had adopted a black child and their neighbors looked at them as though they had chosen to become martyrs for a dubious cause. Her blog post about him, Badly-Dressed White Middle Managers from Ohio Are Not Always What You Think, had received the highest number of comments for that month. She still wondered if he had read it. She hoped so. Often, she would sit in cafés, or airports, or train stations, watching strangers, imagining their lives, and wondering which of them were likely to have read her blog. Now her ex-blog. She had written the final post only days ago, trailed by two hundred and seventy-four comments so far. All those readers, growing month by month, linking and cross-posting, knowing so much more than she did; they had always frightened and exhilarated her. SapphicDerrida, one of the most frequent posters, wrote: I’m a bit surprised by how personally I am taking this. Good luck as you pursue the unnamed life change but please come back to the blogosphere soon. You’ve used your irreverent, hectoring, funny and thought-provoking voice to create a space for real conversations about an important subject. Readers like SapphicDerrida, who reeled off statistics and used words like reify in their comments, made Ifemelu nervous, eager to be fresh and to impress, so that she began, over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the carcasses of people’s stories for something she could use. Sometimes making fragile links to race. Sometimes not believing herself. The more she wrote, the less sure she became. Each post scraped off yet one more scale of self until she felt naked and false.

    The ice-cream-eating man sat beside her on the train and, to discourage conversation, she stared fixedly at a brown stain near her feet, a spilled frozen Frappuccino, until they arrived at Trenton. The platform was crowded with black people, many of them fat, in short, flimsy clothes. It still startled her, what a difference a few minutes of train travel made. During her first year in America, when she took New Jersey Transit to Penn Station and then the subway to visit Aunty Uju in Flatlands, she was struck by how mostly slim white people got off at the stops in Manhattan and, as the train went further into Brooklyn, the people left were mostly black and fat. She had not thought of them as fat, though. She had thought of them as big, because one of the first things her friend Ginika told her was that fat in America was a bad word, heaving with moral judgment like stupid or bastard, and not a mere description like short or tall. So she had banished fat from her vocabulary. But fat came back to her last winter, after almost thirteen years, when a man in line behind her at the supermarket muttered, Fat people don’t need to be eating that shit, as she paid for her giant bag of Tostitos. She glanced at him, surprised, mildly offended, and thought it a perfect blog post, how this stranger had decided she was fat. She would file the post under the tag race, gender and body size. But back home, as she stood and faced the mirror’s truth, she realized that she had ignored, for too long, the new tightness of her clothes, the rubbing together of her inner thighs, the softer, rounder parts of her that shook when she moved. She was fat.

    She said the word fat slowly, funneling it back and forward, and thought about all the other things she had learned not to say aloud in America. She was fat. She was not curvy or big-boned; she was fat, it was the only word that felt true. And she had ignored, too, the cement in her soul. Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine—You are the absolute love of my life, he’d written in her last birthday card—and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness. She scoured Nigerian websites, Nigerian profiles on Facebook, Nigerian blogs, and each click brought yet another story of a young person who had recently moved back home, clothed in American or British degrees, to start an investment company, a music production business, a fashion label, a magazine, a fast-food franchise. She looked at photographs of these men and women and felt the dull ache of loss, as though they had prised open her hand and taken something of hers. They were living her life. Nigeria became where she was supposed to be, the only place she could sink her roots in without the constant urge to tug them out and shake off the soil. And, of course, there was also Obinze. Her first love, her first lover, the only person with whom she had never felt the need to explain herself. He was now a husband and father, and they had not been in touch in years, yet she could not pretend that he was not a part of her homesickness, or that she did not often think of him, sifting through their past, looking for portents of what she could not name.

    The rude stranger in the supermarket—who knew what problems he was wrestling with, haggard and thin-lipped as he was—had intended to offend her but had instead prodded her awake.

    She began to plan and to dream, to apply for jobs in Lagos. She did not tell Blaine at first, because she wanted to finish her fellowship at Princeton, and then after her fellowship ended, she did not tell him because she wanted to give herself time to be sure. But as the weeks passed, she knew she would never be sure. So she told him that she was moving back home, and she added, I have to, knowing he would hear in her words the sound of an ending.

    Why? Blaine asked, almost automatically, stunned by her announcement. There they were, in his living room in New Haven, awash in soft jazz and daylight, and she looked at him, her good, bewildered man, and felt the day take on a sad, epic quality. They had lived together for three years, three years free of crease, like a smoothly ironed sheet, until their only fight, months ago, when Blaine’s eyes froze with blame and he refused to speak to her. But they had survived that fight, mostly because of Barack Obama, bonding anew over their shared passion. On election night, before Blaine kissed her, his face wet with tears, he held her tightly as though Obama’s victory was also their personal victory. And now here she was telling him it was over. Why? he asked. He taught ideas of nuance and complexity in his classes and yet he was asking her for a single reason, the cause. But she had not had a bold epiphany and there was no cause; it was simply that layer after layer of discontent had settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled her. She did not tell him this, because it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.

    Take the plant, he said to her, on the last day she saw him, when she was packing the clothes she kept in his apartment. He looked defeated, standing slump-shouldered in the kitchen. It was his houseplant, hopeful green leaves rising from three bamboo stems, and when she took it, a sudden crushing loneliness lanced through her and stayed with her for weeks. Sometimes, she still felt it. How was it possible to miss something you no longer wanted? Blaine needed what she was unable to give and she needed what he was unable to give, and she grieved this, the loss of what could have been.

    So here she was, on a day filled with the opulence of summer, about to braid her hair for the journey home. Sticky heat sat on her skin. There were people thrice her size on the Trenton platform and she looked admiringly at one of them, a woman in a very short skirt. She thought nothing of slender legs shown off in miniskirts—it was safe and easy, after all, to display legs of which the world approved—but the fat woman’s act was about the quiet conviction that one shared only with oneself, a sense of rightness that others failed to see. Her decision to move back was similar; whenever she felt besieged by doubts, she would think of herself as standing valiantly alone, as almost heroic, so as to squash her uncertainty. The fat woman was co-coordinating a group of teenagers who looked sixteen and seventeen years old. They crowded around, a summer program advertised on the front and back of their yellow T-shirts, laughing and talking. They reminded Ifemelu of her cousin Dike. One of the boys, dark and tall, with the leanly muscled build of an athlete, looked just like Dike. Not that Dike would ever wear those shoes that looked like espadrilles. Weak kicks, he would call them. It was a new one; he first used it a few days ago when he told her about going shopping with Aunty Uju. Mom wanted to buy me these crazy shoes. Come on, Coz, you know I can’t wear weak kicks!

    Ifemelu joined the taxi line outside the station. She hoped her driver would not be a Nigerian, because he, once he heard her accent, would either be aggressively eager to tell her that he had a master’s degree, the taxi was a second job, and his daughter was on the dean’s list at Rutgers; or he would drive in sullen silence, giving her change and ignoring her thank you, all the time nursing humiliation, that this fellow Nigerian, a small girl at that, who perhaps was a nurse or an accountant or even a doctor, was looking down on him. Nigerian taxi drivers in America were all convinced that they really were not taxi drivers. She was next in line. Her taxi driver was black and middle-aged. She opened the door and glanced at the back of the driver’s seat. Mervin Smith. Not Nigerian, but you could never be too sure. Nigerians took on all sorts of names here. Even she had once been somebody else.

    How you doing? the man asked.

    She could tell right away, with relief, that his accent was Caribbean.

    I’m very well. Thank you. She gave him the address of Mariama African Hair Braiding. It was her first time at this salon—her regular one was closed because the owner had gone back to Côte d’Ivoire to get married—but it would look, she was sure, like all the other African hair braiding salons she had known: they were in the part of the city that had graffiti, dank buildings, and no white people, they displayed bright signboards with names like Aisha and Fatima African Hair Braiding, they had radiators that were too hot in the winter and air conditioners that did not cool in the summer, and they were full of Francophone West African women braiders, one of whom would be the owner and speak the best English and answer the phone and be deferred to by the others. Often, there was a baby tied to someone’s back with a piece of cloth. Or a toddler asleep on a wrapper spread over a battered sofa. Sometimes, older children stopped by. The conversations were loud and swift, in French or Wolof or Malinke, and when they spoke English to customers, it was broken, curious, as though they had not quite eased into the language itself before taking on a slangy Americanism. Words came out half-completed. Once a Guinean braider in Philadelphia had told Ifemelu, Amma like, Oh Gad, Az someh. It took many repetitions for Ifemelu to understand that the woman was saying, I’m like, Oh God, I was so mad.

    Mervin Smith was upbeat and chatty. He talked, as he drove, about how hot it was, how rolling blackouts were sure to come.

    This is the kind of heat that kills old folks. If they don’t have air-conditioning, they have to go to the mall, you know. The mall is free air-conditioning. But sometimes there’s nobody to take them. People have to take care of the old folks, he said, his jolly mood unfazed by Ifemelu’s silence.

    Here we are! he said, parking in front of a shabby block. The salon was in the middle, between a Chinese restaurant called Happy Joy and a convenience store that sold lottery tickets. Inside, the room was thick with disregard, the paint peeling, the walls plastered with large posters of braided hairstyles and smaller posters that said QUICK TAX REFUND. Three women, all in T-shirts and knee-length shorts, were working on the hair of seated customers. A small TV mounted on a corner of the wall, the volume a little too loud, was showing a Nigerian film: a man beating his wife, the wife cowering and shouting, the poor audio quality jarring.

    Hi! Ifemelu said.

    They all turned to look at her, but only one, who had to be the eponymous Mariama, said, Hi. Welcome.

    I’d like to get braids.

    What kind of braids you want?

    Ifemelu said she wanted a medium kinky twist and asked how much it was.

    Two hundred, Mariama said.

    I paid one sixty last month. She had last braided her hair three months ago.

    Mariama said nothing for a while, her eyes back on the hair she was braiding.

    So one sixty? Ifemelu asked.

    Mariama shrugged and smiled. Okay, but you have to come back next time. Sit down. Wait for Aisha. She will finish soon. Mariama pointed at the smallest of the braiders, who had a skin condition, pinkish-cream whorls of discoloration on her arms and neck that looked worryingly infectious.

    Hi, Aisha, Ifemelu said.

    Aisha glanced at Ifemelu, nodding ever so slightly, her face blank, almost forbidding in its expressionlessness. There was something strange about her.

    Ifemelu sat close to the door; the fan on the chipped table was turned on high but did little for the stuffiness in the room. Next to the fan were combs, packets of hair attachments, magazines bulky with loose pages, piles of colorful DVDs. A broom was propped in one corner, near the candy dispenser and the rusty hair dryer that had not been used in a hundred years. On the TV screen, a father was beating two children, wooden punches that hit the air above their heads.

    No! Bad father! Bad man! the other braider said, staring at the TV and flinching.

    You from Nigeria? Mariama asked.

    Yes, Ifemelu said. Where are you from?

    Me and my sister Halima are from Mali. Aisha is from Senegal, Mariama said.

    Aisha did not look up, but Halima smiled at Ifemelu, a smile that, in its warm knowingness, said welcome to a fellow African; she would not smile at an American in the same way. She was severely cross-eyed, pupils darting in opposite directions, so that Ifemelu felt thrown off-balance, not sure which of Halima’s eyes was on her.

    Ifemelu fanned herself with a magazine. It’s so hot, she said. At least, these women would not say to her You’re hot? But you’re from Africa!

    This heat wave is very bad. Sorry the air conditioner broke yesterday, Mariama said.

    Ifemelu knew the air conditioner had not broken yesterday, it had been broken for much longer, perhaps it had always been broken; still she nodded and said that perhaps it had packed up from overuse. The phone rang. Mariama picked it up and after a minute said, Come now, the very words that had made Ifemelu stop making appointments with African hair braiding salons. Come now, they always said, and then you arrived to find two people waiting to get micro braids and still the owner would tell you Wait, my sister is coming to help. The phone rang again and Mariama spoke in French, her voice rising, and she stopped braiding to gesture with her hand as she shouted into the phone. Then she unfolded a yellow Western Union form from her pocket and began reading out the numbers. Trois! Cinq! Non, non, cinq!

    The woman whose hair she was braiding in tiny, painful-looking cornrows said sharply, Come on! I’m not spending the whole day here!

    Sorry, sorry, Mariama said. Still, she finished repeating the Western Union numbers before she continued braiding, the phone lodged between her shoulder and ear.

    Ifemelu opened her novel, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and skimmed a few pages. She had been meaning to read it for a while now, and imagined she would like it since Blaine did not. A precious performance, Blaine had called it, in that gently forbearing tone he used when they talked about novels, as though he was sure that she, with a little more time and a little more wisdom, would come to accept that the novels he liked were superior, novels written by young and youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness. She had read many of them, because he recommended them, but they were like cotton candy that so easily evaporated from her tongue’s memory.

    She closed the novel; it was too hot to concentrate. She ate some melted chocolate, sent Dike a text to call her when he was finished with basketball practice, and fanned herself. She read the signs on the opposite wall—NO ADJUSTMENTS TO BRAIDS AFTER ONE WEEK. NO PERSONAL CHECKS. NO REFUNDS—but she carefully avoided looking at the corners of the room because she knew that clumps of moldy newspapers would be stuffed beneath pipes and grime and things long rotten.

    Finally, Aisha finished with her customer and asked what color Ifemelu wanted for her hair attachments.

    Color four.

    Not good color, Aisha said promptly.

    That’s what I use.

    It look dirty. You don’t want color one?

    Color one is too black, it looks fake, Ifemelu said, loosening her headwrap. Sometimes I use color two but color four is closest to my natural color.

    Aisha shrugged, a haughty shrug, as though it was not her problem if her customer did not have good taste. She reached into a cupboard, brought out two packets of attachments, checked to make sure they were both the same color.

    She touched Ifemelu’s hair. Why you don’t have relaxer?

    I like my hair the way God made it.

    But how you comb it? Hard to comb, Aisha said.

    Ifemelu had brought her own comb. She gently combed her hair, dense, soft, and tightly coiled, until it framed her head like a halo. It’s not hard to comb if you moisturize it properly, she said, slipping into the coaxing tone of the proselytizer that she used whenever she was trying to convince other black women about the merits of wearing their hair natural. Aisha snorted; she clearly could not understand why anybody would choose to suffer through combing natural hair, instead of simply relaxing it. She sectioned out Ifemelu’s hair, plucked a little attachment from the pile on the table, and began deftly to twist.

    It’s too tight, Ifemelu said. Don’t make it tight. Because Aisha kept twisting to the end, Ifemelu thought that perhaps she had not understood, and so Ifemelu touched the offending braid and said, Tight, tight.

    Aisha pushed her hand away. No. No. Leave it. It good.

    It’s tight! Ifemelu said. Please loosen it.

    Mariama was watching them. A flow of French came from her. Aisha loosened the braid.

    Sorry, Mariama said. She doesn’t understand very well.

    But Ifemelu could see, from Aisha’s face, that she understood very well. Aisha was simply a true market woman, immune to the cosmetic niceties of American customer service. Ifemelu imagined her working in a market in Dakar, like the braiders in Lagos who would blow their noses and wipe their hands on their wrappers, roughly jerk their customers’ heads to position them better, complain about how full or how hard or how short the hair was, shout out to passing women, while all the time conversing too loudly and braiding too tightly.

    You know her? Aisha asked, glancing at the television screen.

    What?

    Aisha repeated herself, and pointed at the actress on the screen.

    No, Ifemelu said.

    But you Nigerian.

    Yes, but I don’t know her.

    Aisha gestured to the pile of DVDs on the table. Before, too much voodoo. Very bad. Now Nigeria film is very good. Big nice house!

    Ifemelu thought little of Nollywood films, with their exaggerated histrionics and their improbable plots, but she nodded in agreement because to hear Nigeria and good in the same sentence was a luxury, even coming from this strange Senegalese woman, and she chose to see in this an augury of her return home.

    Everyone she had told she was moving back seemed surprised, expecting an explanation, and when she said she was doing it because she wanted to, puzzled lines would appear on foreheads.

    You are closing your blog and selling your condo to go back to Lagos and work for a magazine that doesn’t pay that well, Aunty Uju had said and then repeated herself, as though to make Ifemelu see the gravity of her own foolishness. Only her old friend in Lagos, Ranyinudo, had made her return seem normal. Lagos is now full of American returnees, so you better come back and join them. Every day you see them carrying a bottle of water as if they will die of heat if they are not drinking water every minute, Ranyinudo said. They had kept in touch, she and Ranyinudo, throughout the years. At first, they wrote infrequent letters, but as cybercafés opened, cell phones spread, and Facebook flourished, they communicated more often. It was Ranyinudo who had told her, some years ago, that Obinze was getting married. Meanwhile o, he has serious money now. See what you missed! Ranyinudo had said. Ifemelu feigned indifference to this news. She had cut off contact with Obinze, after all, and so much time had passed, and she was newly in a relationship with Blaine, and happily easing herself into a shared life. But after she hung up, she thought endlessly of Obinze. Imagining him at his wedding left her with a feeling like sorrow, a faded sorrow. But she was pleased for him, she told herself, and to prove to herself that she was pleased for him, she decided to write him. She was not sure if he still used his old address and she sent the e-mail half expecting that he would not reply, but he did. She did not write again, because she by then had acknowledged her own small, still-burning light. It was best to leave things alone. Last December, when Ranyinudo told her she had run into him at the Palms mall, with his baby daughter (and Ifemelu still could not picture this new sprawling, modern mall in Lagos; all that came to mind when she tried to was the cramped Mega Plaza she remembered)—"He was looking so clean, and his daughter is so fine," Ranyinudo said—Ifemelu felt a pang at all the changes that had happened in his life.

    Nigeria film very good now, Aisha said again.

    Yes, Ifemelu said enthusiastically. This was what she had become, a seeker of signs. Nigerian films were good, therefore her move back home would be good.

    You from Yoruba in Nigeria, Aisha said.

    No. I am Igbo.

    You Igbo? For the first time, a smile appeared on Aisha’s face, a smile that showed as much of her small teeth as her dark gums. I think you Yoruba because you dark and Igbo fair. I have two Igbo men. Very good. Igbo men take care of women real good.

    Aisha was almost whispering, a sexual suggestion in her tone, and in the mirror, the discoloration on her arms and neck became ghastly sores. Ifemelu imagined some bursting and oozing, others flaking. She looked away.

    Igbo men take care of women real good, Aisha repeated. I want marry. They love me but they say the family want Igbo woman. Because Igbo marry Igbo always.

    Ifemelu swallowed the urge to laugh. You want to marry both of them?

    No. Aisha made an impatient gesture. I want marry one. But this thing is true? Igbo marry Igbo always?

    Igbo people marry all kinds of people. My cousin’s husband is Yoruba. My uncle’s wife is from Scotland.

    Aisha paused in her twisting, watching Ifemelu in the mirror, as though deciding whether to believe her.

    My sister say it is true. Igbo marry Igbo always, she said.

    How does your sister know?

    She know many Igbo people in Africa. She sell cloth.

    Where is she?

    In Africa.

    Where? In Senegal?

    Benin.

    Why do you say Africa instead of just saying the country you mean? Ifemelu asked.

    Aisha clucked. You don’t know America. You say Senegal and American people, they say, Where is that? My friend from Burkina Faso, they ask her, your country in Latin America? Aisha resumed twisting, a sly smile on her face, and then asked, as if Ifemelu could not possibly understand how things were done here, How long you in America?

    Ifemelu decided then that she did not like Aisha at all. She wanted to curtail the conversation now, so that they would say only what they needed to say during the six hours it would take to braid her hair, and so she pretended not to have heard and instead brought out her phone. Dike had still not replied to her text. He always replied within minutes, or maybe he was still at basketball practice, or with his friends, watching some silly video on YouTube. She called him and left a long message, raising her voice, going on and on about his basketball practice and was it as hot up in Massachusetts and was he still taking Page to see the movie today. Then, feeling reckless, she composed an e-mail to Obinze and, without permitting herself to reread it, she sent it off. She had written that she was moving back to Nigeria and, even though she had a job waiting for her, even though her car was already on a ship bound for Lagos, it suddenly felt true for the first time. I recently decided to move back to Nigeria.

    Aisha was not discouraged. Once Ifemelu looked up from her phone, Aisha asked again, How long you in America?

    Ifemelu took her time putting her phone back into her bag. Years ago, she had been asked a similar question, at a wedding of one of Aunty Uju’s friends, and she had said two years, which was the truth, but the jeer on the Nigerian’s face had taught her that, to earn the prize of being taken seriously among Nigerians in America, among Africans in America, indeed among immigrants in America, she needed more years. Six years, she began to say when it was just three and a half. Eight years, she said when it was five. Now that it was thirteen years, lying seemed unnecessary but she lied anyway.

    Fifteen years, she said.

    Fifteen? That long time. A new respect slipped into Aisha’s eyes.

    You live here in Trenton?

    I live in Princeton.

    Princeton. Aisha paused. You student?

    I’ve just finished a fellowship, she said, knowing that Aisha would not understand what a fellowship was, and in the rare moment that Aisha looked intimidated, Ifemelu felt a perverse pleasure. Yes, Princeton. Yes, the sort of place that Aisha could only imagine, the sort of place that would never have signs that said QUICK TAX REFUND; people in Princeton did not need quick tax refunds.

    But I’m going back home to Nigeria, Ifemelu added, suddenly remorseful. I’m going next week.

    To see the family.

    No. I’m moving back. To live in Nigeria.

    Why?

    What do you mean, why? Why not?

    Better you send money back. Unless your father is big man? You have connections?

    I’ve found a job there, she said.

    You stay in America fifteen years and you just go back to work?

    Aisha smirked. You can stay there?

    Aisha reminded her of what Aunty Uju had said, when she finally accepted that Ifemelu was serious about moving back—Will you be able to cope?—and the suggestion, that she was somehow irrevocably altered by America, had grown thorns on her skin. Her parents, too, seemed to think that she might not be able to cope with Nigeria. At least you are now an American citizen so you can always return to America, her father had said. Both of them had asked if Blaine would be coming with her, their question heavy with hope. It amused her how often they asked about Blaine now, since it had taken them a while to make peace with the idea of her black American boyfriend. She imagined them nursing quiet plans for her wedding; her mother would think of a caterer and colors, and her father would think of a distinguished friend he could ask to be the sponsor. Reluctant to flatten their hope, because it took so little to keep them hoping, which in turn kept them happy, she told her father, We decided I will come back first and then Blaine will come after a few weeks.

    Splendid, her father said, and she said nothing else because it was best if things were simply left at splendid.

    Aisha tugged a little too hard at her hair. Fifteen years in America very long time, Aisha said, as though she had been pondering this. You have boyfriend? You marry?

    I’m also going back to Nigeria to see my man, Ifemelu said, surprising herself. My man. How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives that we have imagined.

    Oh! Okay! Aisha said, excited; Ifemelu had finally given her a comprehensible reason for wanting to move back. You will marry?

    Maybe. We’ll see.

    Oh! Aisha stopped twisting and stared at her in the mirror, a dead stare, and Ifemelu feared, for a moment, that the woman had clairvoyant powers and could tell she was lying.

    I want you see my men. I call them. They come and you see them. First I call Chijioke. He work cab driver. Then Emeka. He work security. You see them.

    You don’t have to call them just to meet me.

    No. I call them. You tell them Igbo can marry not Igbo. They listen to you.

    No, really. I can’t do that.

    Aisha kept speaking as if she hadn’t heard. You tell them. They listen to you because you their Igbo sister. Any one is okay. I want marry.

    Ifemelu looked at Aisha, a small, ordinary-faced Senegalese woman with patchwork skin who had two Igbo boyfriends, implausible as it seemed, and who was now insistent that Ifemelu should meet them and urge them to marry her. It would have made for a good blog post: A Peculiar Case of a Non-American Black, or How the Pressures of Immigrant Life Can Make You Act Crazy.

    CHAPTER 2

    When Obinze first saw her e-mail, he was sitting in the back of his Range Rover in still Lagos traffic, his jacket slung over the front seat, a rusty-haired child beggar glued outside his window, a hawker pressing colorful CDs against the other window, the radio turned on low to the Pidgin English news on Wazobia FM, and the gray gloom of imminent rain all around. He stared at his BlackBerry, his body suddenly rigid. First, he skimmed the e-mail, instinctively wishing it were longer. Ceiling, kedu? Hope all is well with work and family. Ranyinudo said she ran into you some time ago and that you now have a child! Proud Papa. Congratulations. I recently decided to move back to Nigeria. Should be in Lagos in a week. Would love to keep in touch. Take care. Ifemelu.

    He read it again slowly and felt the urge to smooth something, his trousers, his shaved-bald head. She had called him Ceiling. In the last e-mail from her, sent just before he got married, she had called him Obinze, apologized for her silence over the years, wished him happiness in sunny sentences, and mentioned the black American she was living with. A gracious e-mail. He had hated it. He had hated it so much that he Googled the black American—and why should she give him the man’s full name if not because she wanted him Googled?—a lecturer at Yale, and found it infuriating that she lived with a man who referred on his blog to friends as cats, but it was the photo of the black American, oozing intellectual cool in distressed jeans and black-framed eyeglasses, that had tipped Obinze over, made him send her a cold reply. Thank you for the good wishes, I have never been happier in my life, he’d written. He hoped she would write something mocking back—it was so unlike her, not to have been even vaguely tart in that first e-mail—but she did not write at all, and when he e-mailed her again, after his honeymoon in Morocco, to say he wanted to keep in touch and wanted to talk sometime, she did not reply.

    The traffic was moving. A light rain was falling. The child beggar ran along, his doe-eyed expression more theatrical, his motions frantic: bringing his hand to his mouth again and again, fingertips pursed together. Obinze rolled down the window and held out a hundred-naira note. From the rearview mirror, his driver, Gabriel, watched with grave disapproval.

    God bless you, oga! the child beggar said.

    Don’t be giving money to these beggars, sir, Gabriel said. They are all rich. They are using begging to make big money. I heard about one that built a block of six flats in Ikeja!

    So why are you working as a driver instead of a beggar, Gabriel? Obinze asked, and laughed, a little too heartily. He wanted to tell Gabriel that his girlfriend from university had just e-mailed him, actually his girlfriend from university and secondary school. The first time she let him take off her bra, she lay on her back moaning softly, her fingers splayed on his head, and afterwards she said, My eyes were open but I did not see the ceiling. This never happened before. Other girls would have pretended that they had never let another boy touch them, but not her, never her. There was a vivid honesty about her. She began to call what they did together ceiling, their warm entanglements on his bed when his mother was out, wearing only underwear, touching and kissing and sucking, hips moving in simulation. I’m longing for ceiling, she once wrote on the back of his geography notebook, and for a long time afterwards he could not look at that notebook without a gathering frisson, a sense of secret excitement. In university, when they finally stopped simulating, she began to call him Ceiling, in a playful way, in a suggestive way—but when they fought or when she retreated into moodiness, she called him Obinze. She had never called him The Zed, as his friends did. Why do you call him Ceiling anyway? his friend Okwudiba once asked her, on one of those languorous days after first semester exams. She had joined a group of his friends sitting around a filthy plastic table in a beer parlor off campus. She drank from her bottle of Maltina, swallowed, glanced at Obinze, and said, Because he is so tall his head touches the ceiling, can’t you see? Her deliberate slowness, the small smile that stretched her lips, made it clear that she wanted them to know that this was not why she called him Ceiling. And he was not tall. She kicked him under the table and he kicked her back, watching his laughing friends; they were all a little afraid of her and a little in love with her. Did she see the ceiling when the black American touched her? Had she used ceiling with other men? It upset him now to think that she might have. His phone rang and for a confused moment he thought it was Ifemelu calling from America.

    "Darling, kedu ebe I no?" His wife, Kosi, always began her

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