Americanah SparkNotes Literature Guide

Genres: African American Women's Fiction; Cultural Heritage

Synopsis

Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes give you just what you need to succeed in school:

• Complete Plot Summary and Analysis
• Key Facts About the Work
• Analysis of Major Characters
• Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
• Explanation of Important Quotations
• Author’s Historical Context
• Suggested Essay Topics
• 25-Question Review Quiz

Americanah features explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols including: the importance of authenticity; race and racism; the male peacock; reading and novels; lies; hair. It also includes detailed analysis of these important characters: Ifemelu; Obinze; Dike; Aunty Uju.

Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Print pages: 96

Sample

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born on September 15, 1977, in Enugu, Nigeria, and grew up in Nsukka, where the University of Nigeria is located. Her parents worked for the university, her father as a professor and her mother as the first female registrar of the university. Her family is Igbo, one of the three major ethnic groups of Nigeria, along with the Yoruba and Hausa. Although she began studying medicine at the University of Nigeria, Adichie longed to study the humanities and later received a scholarship to Drexel University in Philadelphia, which changed her course of study. After two years, she transferred to Eastern Connecticut University, where she graduated summa cum laude with a BA in political science and communications. She then attended Johns Hopkins University for her MFA in creative writing and later received an MA in African studies from Yale University. Since then she has won numerous fellowships and awards, including a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2008. She now teaches in Nigeria and the United States.

Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published in 2003, and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in 2005. Following that, she wrote two novels, Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, plus numerous essays and short stories. In addition to her fiction, Adichie is well known as a speaker and essayist. Her two extremely popular TED Talks highlight themes that she explores throughout her creative work and quite clearly in Americanah. At 2009’s TED Global Conference she presented “The Danger of a Single Story,” which discusses the consequences of stereotypes in both fiction and reality. Her 2012 TED Talk, “We Should All Be Feminists,” addressed the importance of raising both daughters and sons to create a fairer world. It has been downloaded millions of times and republished in book form. In 2013, Beyoncé sampled the talk on her song “***Flawless,” bringing Adichie’s message to the wider public.

Adichie worked on Americanah throughout 2011–2012, while on fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. The novel draws inspiration partially from her experiences in the United States throughout college and partially based on the experiences of friends. Like her character Ifemelu, Adichie was taken aback at being considered black in the United States and the negativity associated with the label. The book was released in 2013 to great reviews, winning the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. The New York Times listed it as one of the best ten books of the year, and it was chosen for the New York Public Library’s 2017 “One Book, One New York” campaign. In 2018, actress Lupita Nyong’o announced that she was working to adapt the novel as a television miniseries. Former president Barack Obama included Americanah on his list of books by “a number of Africa’s best writers and thinkers,” a collection he compiled in 2018 in preparation for his first visits to Kenya and South Africa since his time in office. On that list, Americanah joins Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, one of the undisputed classics of Nigerian literature.

After Nigeria’s independence from the British Empire in 1960, the country faced a series of military coups, and the government passed from one general to another. The resulting instability had catastrophic effects on the nation’s infrastructure. Poor working conditions and late payments for the staff of the universities caused strikes, and universities closed for months at a time. Amid this chaos, many Nigerians chose to immigrate to countries like the United States and Britain in search of opportunities. Adichie has said that she wanted to depict this kind of immigration in Americanah, one of middle-class immigrants on a quest for opportunity, rather than fleeing danger. In 1998, the then head of state, General Abubakar, brought forward a new plan to return Nigeria’s power to an elected president. The 1999 elections proceeded as planned, bringing Olusegun Obasanjo to power. However, corruption and conflict still plagued the country.

Ifemelu and Obinze’s differing immigration experiences relate to the changes in the United States and Britain after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Among other new security measures, the United States created a new Department of Homeland Security, which took over the scrutiny of visa applications, leading to more rejections overall. Similar immigrant paranoia reached Britain, and the home secretary at the time, David Blunkett, worked toward stricter immigration laws and even proposed implementing identification cards for British citizens. These fears and bureaucratic difficulties added to the already challenging immigration landscapes of these countries. Also important to the novel are Ifemelu’s frank and often humorous observations of race in America. These experiences become tied to the nomination and eventual election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States in 2008. His central campaign messages of hope and change resonated both as an alternative to the fear that typified previous administrations and as the dream that the United States was ready for a black president despite its deep racial divide.

Ifemelu, a Nigerian woman who lives in Princeton, New Jersey, gets her hair braided in preparation for her upcoming return to Nigeria. She has broken up with her boyfriend, Blaine, closed her popular blog about race, and uprooted her life because she feels weighed down. When she thinks of returning to Nigeria, she can’t help but think of Obinze, her first love, now a wealthy man in Lagos with a wife and daughter. Upon receiving an email from Ifemelu, Obinze becomes distracted. He has stumbled into wealth after his cousin introduces him to a well-connected man. His wife, Kosi, is beautiful and adoring, but they never connected on the emotional level that he and Ifemelu did. That night, he listens to the music he and Ifemelu used to listen to when they made love.

The novel flashes back to Ifemelu’s youth. She and Obinze meet at a party where a friend attempts to set Obinze up with a girl named Ginika. Obinze has admired Ifemelu from afar since transferring to their school, and they immediately hit it off. They date all throughout secondary school and through the start of college. However, university lecturer strikes keep closing the universities, and Obinze and Aunty Uju encourage Ifemelu to apply to school in America. Ifemelu is accepted and then quickly approved for a student visa. Ifemelu and Obinze plan to one day reunite in America. Unfortunately, Ifemelu’s student visa does not allow her to work, and without a full scholarship and stipend, Ifemelu must find a source of income. She applies for jobs using a family friend’s social security card, to no avail. In desperation, she agrees to work for a shady tennis coach as his “relaxation assistant,” which involves allowing him to touch her sexually. After one meeting, she never returns to the coach. Out of shame and self-loathing, she stops replying to Obinze’s messages and emails.

Ifemelu succeeds when Ginika introduces her to Kimberly, a white woman who needs a babysitter. The steady work offers her a chance to focus on her studies. She meets Kimberly’s wealthy cousin, Curt, who is immediately smitten with her. They start dating, and when Ifemelu graduates, Curt helps her get a job that will sponsor her green card. For the job interview, Ifemelu decides to have her hair relaxed so that it will look professional according to American standards. The relaxer burns her scalp, and her friend Wambui encourages her to try wearing her hair natural. At first, Ifemelu thinks her hair is ugly, but soon grows to love it. One day, she runs into a friend from Nigeria who asks what happened between her and Obinze. She gives him the cold shoulder and is upset the rest of the day. Although she explains that the university friend was not an ex-boyfriend, Curt acts possessive.

Meanwhile, Obinze lives as an illegal immigrant in London. His American visa application was rejected because of anti-terror panic after the September 11 attacks. His mother offers to bring him as a research assistant on a trip to London as a way to get him into Britain. Obinze’s friend links him up with a fellow Nigerian, Vincent, who is willing to let him use his national insurance card in order to work if Obinze will give him a percentage of his income. Obinze agrees and finds a job in a warehouse. Eventually, Vincent demands more money. Obinze refuses, and the next day his boss tells him that someone reported him as an illegal immigrant. Desperate, Obinze tries to find someone to arrange a green card marriage for him. The day Obinze’s wedding is meant to take place, he arrives at the courthouse only to find the police awaiting him. Obinze is deported.

Ifemelu cheats on Curt and ends their relationship. After she writes an email to Wambui detailing her frustration with Curt’s inability to understand the necessity of Essence magazine in a world of beauty magazines catering to white women, Wambui suggests Ifemelu start blogging. Ifemelu starts a blog focusing on her observations on race in America as a non-American black woman, and her clever posts soon lead to its popularity. At a conference for minority bloggers, she runs into Blaine, a black American professor at Yale. They begin dating, and Ifemelu moves in with him. When Ifemelu does not attend a protest Blaine organizes against the university’s racial profiling of a black staff member, they have a major fight and almost break up. However, Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy draws them back together and gives them a joint mission up until the election and Ifemelu’s subsequent decision to leave.

Aunty Uju calls Ifemelu to tell her that her son, Dike, tried to kill himself. Ifemelu rushes to be with him. Onc. . .