Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: A Full Review of the Modern African Classic

Ifemelu is sitting in an African braiding salon in Trenton, New Jersey, having her hair done before she flies back to Lagos for good, and the novel has, in a sense, already happened. Americanah unspools in flashback from that salon chair, which is one of its best decisions and also the source of most of its troubles. Hair takes a long time to braid. Memory unfurls at the pace of the braider’s hands. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published the book with Knopf in 2013 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for it, and ended up with the closest thing the global literary market produced that decade to a definitive immigrant novel. Whether it is also a good novel is a more complicated question, and the answer depends partly on which passport you read it with.

Title	Americanah
Author	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
First published	2013
Publishers	Knopf (United States), Fourth Estate (United Kingdom)
Setting	Lagos, the United States and London
Prizes	National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction; Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction; shortlisted for the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction

Hair, the Salon, the Premise

Mariama African Hair Braiding sits on a side street in Trenton, a train ride from the Princeton where Ifemelu holds a fellowship and where no one braids hair. Ifemelu, author of a successful blog called Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black, has shut the blog down, broken with her American boyfriend Blaine and bought a ticket home after thirteen years in the United States. The novel opens, then, on a woman who has already decided to leave. The flashbacks fill in why she went, why she stayed and what finally made her stop.

The braiding salon framing device is doing serious thematic work. Adichie is writing about Black hair as a load bearing identity question. Ifemelu has only recently stopped relaxing her hair, and going natural is, in the world of the novel, a small political event with consequences for her job prospects, her romantic life and her self image. The braider Aisha, a Senegalese woman with patches on her arms and a complicated love life involving two Igbo boyfriends, is one of the book’s most quietly observed minor characters. She wants Ifemelu to persuade one of the men to marry her. Ifemelu cannot. The salon is also a place where African and African American women are both present and not quite at ease with each other, and Adichie writes that tension cleanly.

The Blog, the Set Pieces, and the Race Essay Problem

Interspersed through the novel are entries from Ifemelu’s blog. These are the most debated passages in the book. They are set off typographically, written in a voice slightly more declamatory than Ifemelu’s narration, and they function as short essays on race in America: on what white liberals will and will not say at dinner parties, on the difference between Non-American Blacks and American Blacks, on the Obama campaign, on how American tribalism actually sorts people. They were the passages that travelled. Readers, particularly white American readers in the late Obama era moment when Americanah landed, read the book partly for the blog entries, which functioned as race essay primers in novelistic form.

The trouble is that the blog entries break the novel. They stop the plot to deliver an argument. Adichie is a sharp essayist, as We Should All Be Feminists, drawn from her TEDx talk, went on to demonstrate at scale, and she knows how to land an argumentative paragraph. But in Americanah the argumentative paragraphs are not always earned by the surrounding scene. They can feel grafted on, especially in the late middle stretch when Ifemelu’s relationship with Blaine is fraying and the blog starts acting as a substitute for psychological interiority the novel is not otherwise giving us. This is also the most common Nigerian critical objection to the book: that Adichie wrote a novel about America for Americans, and that the Nigerian sections, when they finally arrive, feel comparatively cursory.

Obinze, the London Counterpoint

Parallel to Ifemelu’s American story is the story of Obinze, her secondary school boyfriend and great love, who fails to get an American visa in the post 9/11 clampdown and ends up in London as an undocumented worker. The Obinze sections are some of the strongest writing Adichie has done. He cleans toilets under a borrowed National Insurance number. He arranges a sham marriage to a young Angolan raised woman through a network of fixers, and immigration officers arrest him at the register office in Newcastle before the ceremony can take place. He is detained and deported to Lagos, and the novel gives his humiliation no softening.

These chapters work because they have a grim narrative momentum the American chapters lack. Ifemelu’s America is observation heavy and event light: a string of relationships, including the wealthy white Curt and the Yale academic Blaine, plus fellowships, jobs and blog posts. Obinze’s London is a thriller about a man trying not to be deported, and Adichie understands precarity from the inside out. His return to Lagos, where he becomes wealthy through a property arrangement with a Big Man known simply as Chief, also gives her something Ifemelu’s America cannot: a portrait of the new Nigerian rich. The dinner parties at Obinze and Kosi’s house, the wives appraising each other, the men talking business, are written with a sociological clarity that very little international fiction has brought to contemporary Lagos.

The Return, the Reunion, the Verdict

Ifemelu returns to Lagos and joins a circle of Western educated returnees, the Nigerpolitan set, who meet to complain about the food and the generators and the things Lagos does not have. She takes a job at a magazine, starts a new blog about life in the city, and finds Obinze again, now married to Kosi and the father of a small daughter, Buchi.

The ending has divided readers more than any other passage in Adichie’s work. Obinze leaves Kosi. The novel closes on Ifemelu opening her door to him. Reasonable readers have called this a betrayal of the careful sociological realism that preceded it. Others have called it the only honest ending the love story would tolerate. Adichie herself has been mildly impatient with the question in interviews: she set up a love story and she finished it, and the fact that the love story violates the marital sociology of contemporary Lagos is part of what she meant to write.

My own view is that the ending is the weakest stretch in the book. Kosi, who up to that point has been drawn with some sympathy as a beautiful, well trained wife who has done exactly what was expected of her, is essentially discarded by the plot. The novel does not earn its romantic certainty. The flashback frame has been so elaborate, the hair braiding so patient, that the reader expects a more complicated reunion than the one Adichie delivers.

What the Novel Got Right About Its Moment

Read more than a decade on, the book functions as a strangely accurate snapshot of a specific moment in American racial discourse. The register of the blog entries, earnest, taxonomical, mildly affronted, is the register of liberal American race talk in the years around 2010, and Adichie captured it just before it changed. Some of the entries now read as if written from a slightly more innocent era. The argument that Non-American Blacks have to learn how to be Black in America is still true. The mode in which the argument is made has shifted considerably.

The Nigerian sections have aged less. Lagos still has the generators and the wedding parties and the returnee circles and the casual arrangements Obinze marries into. If anything the Nigerian setting reads more sharply now than it did on publication, because the non Nigerian reader has had a decade more exposure to Lagos through Nollywood, Afrobeats and a diaspora that has become culturally legible in ways it was not when the book first appeared.

The Reception Split

Western reviewers loved the book on first publication. The New York Times placed it on its ten best books of 2013 list. Awards followed: the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, and a place on the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize shortlist. American book clubs and university campuses embraced it, and the blog entries in particular travelled into syllabi.

Nigerian and broader African reception was warmer than for Half of a Yellow Sun on craft grounds, since the writing is more relaxed and funnier and not carrying the burden of a war, and cooler on political grounds. The charge most often made is that Americanah is a novel about Nigeria written for an American reader. The Lagos of Ifemelu’s blog after her return is filtered through returnee irony; the Obinze sections in Lagos are sharper precisely because they are not filtered that way. Whether the charge sticks depends on what you ask of the novel. As a portrait of African immigrant interiority it stands very high. As a portrait of contemporary Nigeria it is partial.

The Adaptation That Keeps Not Happening

Readers often assume there is a screen version. There is not. A ten episode limited series was developed for HBO Max with Lupita Nyong’o and Danai Gurira attached; pandemic era delays created scheduling conflicts, Nyong’o left the project and the series was reported in 2020 as no longer going forward. The rights have since resurfaced: Canal+ has listed Americanah among the African productions in its development slate. Nothing has been filmed or released. Anyone who tells you they have seen the Americanah series has seen something else.

Who Should Read It

American readers should read it for the race essay sections and for Obinze in London. Nigerian readers should read it for Obinze in Lagos and for the returnee scenes, which are observational journalism of a high order. Readers coming to Adichie for the first time should probably start with Half of a Yellow Sun, which is the better novel; Americanah is the more discussed one. Readers interested in novels about hair, race and the limits of the immigrant success narrative should put it next to Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing. Skip it if you want a stylist’s novel or a tightly plotted love story, because the book is sprawling, opinionated and structurally a little baggy.

The Salon Light at Closing Time

Where it sits in the African canon is a peculiar middle place. It is not the masterpiece Half of a Yellow Sun is, and it is not the formal experiment that novels such as Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay With Me and Eloghosa Osunde’s Vagabonds! have attempted in the years since. It is the bestseller. It is the book that gave Adichie the platform from which she has done everything else. It is also a book that helped change the demographics of who reads African fiction in the West, by writing an African heroine whose interior life took for granted that she belonged in Princeton, in Brooklyn and in the salons of Lagos returnees, and that her cosmopolitanism was a starting condition rather than an achievement to be marvelled at.

Aisha is still braiding when Ifemelu walks out of the salon to catch her flight. The braid will last her months in Lagos before it has to be redone. The novel does something similar to its reader. You walk out of it with something tightly woven and slightly uncomfortable that you can feel for a long time afterwards.