Text: Excerpt from Americanah

The following excerpt is taken from the novel „Americanah“ which is about two teenagers, Ifemelu and Obinze, who fall in love in a Nigerian secondary school during the country’s dictatorship. They both want to flee to America, but only Ifemelu is allowed in. Obinze instead initially lives as an undocumented immigrant in London, and later becomes a wealthy man in democratic Nigeria. When Ifemelu returns to the land of her birth, the pair face a number of tough decisions. 

The excerpt at hand deals with Ifemelu’s feelings when she comes to the United States to study. She struggles with the experience of racism in American culture and the many varieties of racial distinctions. For the first time, Ifemelu discovers what it means to be a „Black Person“.

Americanah

(A)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 and Brooklyn of sun-warmed garbage. But Princeton had no smell. She liked taking deep breaths here. 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, [GAP 1], someone specially admitted into a hallowed American club, someone adorned with certainty.
(B) 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, [GAP 2], she wondered why there was no place where she could braid her hair. 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. 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. Before, she would have said, „I know,“ that peculiar American expression that [GAP 3], 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.
(C) The ice-cream-eating man sat beside her on the train and, [GAP 4], 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, [GAP 5], 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 not curvy or big-boned; she was fat, it was the only word that felt true.
(D) 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 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 that they were living her life. Nigeria became where she was supposed to be. 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 [Gap 6], 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.
(E) 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.

Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah, New York 2013 (abridged) (1.036 words)