I finished reading an interesting book by a Nigerian author
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Titled “Americanah” it describes in vivid details the
life of two fictional characters who grew up in Nigeria but spent time in US,
and UK. What make it especially colorful are people and experiences they
encounter in their journey.
We who grew up in India, also a developing country like
Nigeria, can easily relate to what the author describes in the first part of
the book, the life in the “old country.”
For example, a rich Nigerian woman tells one of the main characters of
the book, Obinze, “You must send your
child to the French school. If you want to disadvantage your child by sending
to one of these schools with half-baked Nigerian teachers, then you only have
yourself to blame.”
That reminded me of a conversation one of my father’s
friends had with my parents. “You should send Ashok to this exclusive school (yes,
we had one in the town where I grew up) whose headmaster is an Englishman. How
can you send him to a Gujarati school, where all the common folks go?” Thankfully my parents ignored him and I did
not turn out to be too bad for the experience, just like Obinze.
The other main character of the book, Ifemelu, leaves
Nigeria and arrives in US. She does encounter racism, as can be expected.
However, as the story is set in the Northeast (New Jersey, Maryland,
Massachusetts), this treatment is not overt.
True, she has difficulty in finding a job, due to the covert racism, but at the same time, most of the white folks she
encounters are nice to her, almost overcompensating
in their attempts not to sound racist or uncaring rich.
For Kimberly (a
white upper-middle class woman), the poor
were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor
people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the
greatest saints were foreign poor.
In describing another encounter with upper-middle class white
Americans; Ifemelu observed that Americans
use the word “wonderful” too often. “In Tanzania, we had a wonderful tour
guide. We are making donations to a wonderful charity in Malawi, a wonderful
orphanage in Botswana, and a wonderful microfinance cooperative in Kenya.”
Just substitute India for all the African countries, and
that would be the conversation I have had with so many people in this wonderful
country. I remember an instance when one
of my friends, upon looking at picture of one of my aunts said that she looked
so pretty. That was not the adjective I had ever heard in connection with that
particular aunt. However, my friend was overcompensating and making sure that I
would not think she co-relates color of the skin and prettiness.
One of the most interesting parts of the book describes
Ifemelu’s interactions with the African Americans. When her Blog about the
experience of being black in America is being discussed by a group of African
Americans, one rather pompous character says, “You know Ifemelu can write that Blog because she is an African. She is
writing from the outside. She does not really feel all the stuff she is writing
about. It’s all quaint and curious to her. So she can write it and get all the
accolades. If she were African American, she would just be labeled angry and be
shunned.”
In my bachelor days, I had a number of friends from
Nigeria, Ghana and the Cameroons. One of them had married an African American
woman. I had always assumed that there was a common thread between them, both being black
and of African heritage. How stupid I was. The marriage did not last long at
all. My friend, just could not get along with his strong minded and independent
wife, who was all American, and hardly African.
Ifemelu made the same mistake. When she did not participate
in a college protest against an injustice suffered by a black security guard,
her African American boy friend just could not understand. He accused her not merely about her laziness, her lack of
zeal and conviction, but also about her Africanness; she was not sufficiently
furious because she was an African, not African American.
I can imagine our children facing a similar (but actually reverse) situation when dealing
with people from India, who would assume a certain level of Indianness in them that
they do not have. That is a continuing story of the great melting pot that our country
is.
This is a very worthwhile book to read on multiple levels. It
makes you think more deeply about immigrants and race, and about developing and
developed world. It also makes you aware of
what it is like being black in this world.
