What I like About AMERICANAH

Each time I pick up and read Chimamanda’s books: Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, a smile always hover around the corner of my mouth. Actually, it’s more like an extended grin that is slim always taking too long for it to disappear. Her book is like eating very tasty Jollofrice – you know that special recipe only grandmamma knows how to concoct (wink!) – that is how I look forward to reading her books. It is also how I savour them.

So when I read Americanah – First Editions – the very same day it arrived at the bookstore in Abuja, I knew I was reading a juggernaut. I rolled in laughter, jumped on my bed numerous times and ran in and out of the kitchen severally times still clutching the book. I was hooked!

I loved how she weaved the story of Emenike the wannabe Nigeria-turn-oyibo-by-force who craved for everything class, wealth, royalty, and Western semblance in his life; the baptism by fire fresh students who go abroad to school face when it comes to which ‘African’ society they ought to belong at the University – a deciding factor that reveals their Africanness or dilution thereof; I loved the honest introspection of how she narrated Obinze’s dual internal conflicts – the story of many honest Nigerians who desire to earn their keep by merit, hard work, honesty and sheer pursuit in that for which they have dreams and so desperately want to make real in a society that stifles such.

And each time I reflected back and forth at how sincerely she told Ifemelu’s story with such candour and unpretentious: her love life, her misjudgement during a long period of calamity after calamity which brought to focus her own weakness, her personal desires and vision of herself, her values and goals, and Aunty Uju’s love quest in ‘wrong’ places, I kissed the book a thousand times!

In between all these narratives, Chimamanda made us understand that our hair is an identity of who you are and your roots. A political statement if you will.

I did not want to put the novel down and when I finally did, the book had stains all over it that should have come with years of reading a book over and again. Chimamanda knows how to yarn tori well well, no be small. And today, in many Nigerian salons you’ll see women going in their small but regular numbers lending their voices to the hair movement she’s promoting: back to your hair roots people!

Finally, I was sated. And then it hit me!

I realise that for me Americanah exposes all of our pretentious identities. It looks at the sometimes vague and all too poignant reflection of the images we all tend to conjure up in different circumstances.

The expert way she talked about Race in America – the land of many a Nigerian’s dream; the symbol of all that is the best – using her blog as a tool of narration was a masterpiece. She told it like it is so that if you’ve never been to America before, you will definitely have a buffer around you after reading her book to absorb the culture shock you are bound to experience when you get there.

But most importantly, for me this book hits home. While Race is open warfare in America as it can be seen in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner case, ethnicity and tribalism in Nigeria is similar – an open warfare embroiled and interplayed with post colonial politics even today.

Tribalism in Nigeria is the equivalent of race in America. And that is because Nigeria too is a mismatch of various countries lumped into one dishomogenous entity just as the British and France did with the Arab world. And tribalism is been fanned today by how we refer to ourselves with anecdote, one-liners or a passing remark. One ethnic group calls the other ‘the human eating people’; another calls the other ‘people who shit inside their homes’, and so on. Would you call that racist? Forget they are all blacks with different skin tone and shades. They are all Africans.

So what makes a tribe, an ethnic group what they are? It is called IDENTITY. Identity covers their culture and how this culture is interpreted into norms, beliefs, laws, lifestyles, education, values, skills, business and politics.

But is it wrong that we are different? Even nature abounds with infinite differences. So what makes fanatical racism, ethnicism and tribalism a bile in one’s mouth?

It is when you begin to feel that you are SUPERIOR over the other person and so therefore can decide whether they live or die, get colonised or not, supply arms to or not, become the next president of Nigeria or not. There are only superior ideas but not necessarily superior races or tribes. A race can be powerful, no doubt but that does not necessarily make them superior. Ask Hitler.

The beauty of different races, ethnic groups and tribes is that it allows us to learn one from the other; today you may have a superior idea, tomorrow it could be my turn. We are after all a community of humans living interdependently with nature.

SO LIVE. STOP THE WAR BECAUSE YOU MATTER TOO.

And that’s what Americanah promotes: Love for differences, even admiration.