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"A young woman from Nigeria leaves behind her home and her first love to start a new life in America, only to find her dreams are not all she expected"--
Adichi belicht op een universele en toch eigen manier de pijn van migreren. De Nigeriaanse Ifemelu begint in Amerika een relatie met een Amerikaan maar vergeet haar eerste Nigeriaanse geliefde niet. ( )
Knap boek. Veel aandacht voor acculturatieprocessen en racisme. Voor mij nieuw: de verschillende positie van "Afrikaanse zwarten" en "Amerikaanse zwarten" binnen de VS. ( )
Soms ... af en toe... eigenlijk heel uitzonderlijk, kom je een boek tegen ... of iemand raadt het je aan... en dat boek tilt je op ...neemt je mee.... en met verwondering, laat je je mee op die reis nemen... betoverd. Dit was zo een boek ..... Wat een schrijfstijl ... maar ook wat een overtuigingskracht om bepaalde ideeën over racisme en ongelijkheid duidelijk te maken. Bedankt, Marie , om mij dit boek aan te raden..... en super bedankt "Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche" om het geschreven te hebben. en .... het is een echte aanrader ( )
Dit was absoluut een mooie ontdekking. Adichie gaf me een inkijk in een wereld die ik amper, of maar heel oppervlakkig kende: het moeilijke, chaotische bestaan in Nigeria, met zijn armoede en diepgewortelde cliëntelisme-cultuur; de bijna ondragelijk zware beproeving om als Afrikaanse migrant voet aan de grond te krijgen in de Verenigde Staten (en in Groot-Brittannië), de gespannen verhouding tussen Amerikaanse zwarten en niet-Amerikaanse zwarten in de VS; en tenslotte het dikwijls goedbedoelde maar daardoor net meer vernederende ontwijkgedrag van Amerikanen als het om de rassenkwestie gaat. Het meest treffende zinnetje in deze roman is de vaststelling van hoofdpersonage Ifemelu dat ze pas ‘zwart’ werd toen ze in de Verenigde Staten aankwam. Adichie kan een stukje schrijven en weet hoe ze een lijvige roman evenwichtig moet componeren, met vooral oog voor de kleine, psychologische kantjes van haar personages en voor de subtiele, maar des te markantere sociale verschillen die zich uiten in taalregisters, kledij en vooral haarstijl (er wordt nogal wat over kapsels gesproken in dit boek). De blog-fragmenten werkten voor mij helemaal niet storend, integendeel, ze legden telkens de vinger treffend op de wonde. En dan zijn er de liefdesverhalen, de verschillende relaties waarin Ifemelu in verwikkeld geraakt. De langgerekte en ook lang onderbroken romance met haar jeugdvriend Obinze laat je uiteraard niet onberoerd, al vond ik de laatste 80 bladzijden, die zich weer afspelen in Nigeria zelf, eerlijk gezegd toch wel erg klef, om niet te zeggen ‘Nollywood’-achtig (een verwijzing naar de Nigeriaanse filmindustrie). Het valt me ook op dat alle mannen waar ze op valt telkens erg ‘goeiige’, empathische, maar ook erg bemiddelde middenklasse-mannen zijn, en dat wringt wel. Ook Ifemelu zelf is best een lastig personage, zelf worstelend met haar eigenzinnigheid en met onvervulde gevoelens die ze meestal niet kan benoemen, waardoor ze soms als arrogant en zelfs antipathiek overkomt. Maar net dat siert Adichie, dat ze de lezer dwingt om de nodige afstand te bewaren van haar hoofdpersonages. Tenslotte kan ik me wel vinden in de geregeld aangehaalde kritiek dat dit boek gerust wat redactioneel snijwerk had kunnen gebruiken, al vind ik net het erg uitgesponnen middenstuk in de Verenigde Staten het meeste interessante. Maar dit is maar bijkomstig: Adichie heeft een belangrijk boek geschreven, dat niet alleen vlot leest en je in de greep houdt, maar vooral je ogen opent voor een bepaalde sociale en culturele realiteit die wij in het westen meestal niet willen zien (en die we eigenlijk ook op ons zelf zouden kunnen toepassen). Tijdens de lectuur moest ik dikwijls aan Grapes of Wrath van John Steinbeck denken dat – op zijn unieke manier – hetzelfde doet, en je in die zin als lezer ‘rijker’ maakt. Wat kan je nog meer verlangen van een boek? ( )
The stories have shifted, too. Nowadays, there’s little angsting about national identity in a post-colonial context or, for that matter, over catastrophe and want. Instead, a bevy of young Africans are shaping the future of fiction, reportage and critique on their continent, and perhaps well beyond.
“It’s beyond an evolution — it’s a revolution,” says Nigerian-American Ikhide Ikheloa, a critic and prominent observer of the scene.
It may have begun in 2003, when Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published — and not just by an American publisher but by a Nigerian one, too. By now, Adichie is the still-young doyenne of the contemporary African lit scene. Her recent novel, Americanah, found a perch on the New York Times list of top 10 novels of 2013 — just weeks before Beyoncé sampled one of Adichie’s TED talks on her new album.
But what makes the book such a good read—despite an anticlimactic ending—is that it's not meant as a cultural criticism, but more as a series of rich observations.
“Americanah” examines blackness in America, Nigeria and Britain, but it’s also a steady-handed dissection of the universal human experience — a platitude made fresh by the accuracy of Adichie’s observations.
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
This book is for our next generation, nda na-abia n'iru: Toks, Chisom, Amaka,
Chinedum, Kamsiyonna and Arinze
For my wonderful father in this, his eightieth year
And, as always, for Ivara.
Eerste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and Ifemelu like the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately 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.
Citaten
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
...her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.
How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives that we have imagined.
She was taking two sides at once, to please everyone; she always chose peace over truth, was always eager to conform.
She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size.
She liked how he wore their relationship so boldly, like a brightly colored shirt. Sometimes she worried that she was too happy. She would sink into moodiness, and snap at Obinze, or be distant. And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though looking for an opening to fly away.
Depression was what happened to Americans, with their self-absolving need to turn everything into an illness.
But he might be satisfied with suggestiveness alone; he would flirt outrageously but not do more, because an affair would require some effort and he was the kind of man who took but did not give.
Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking academese instead of English and they don't really know what's happening in the real world.
There was something in him, lighter than ego but darker than insecurity, that needed constant buffing, polishing, waxing.
Alexa, and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty.
Nathan had told her, some months earlier, in a voice filled with hauteur, that he did not read any fiction published after 1930. "It all went downhill after the thirties," he said.
"You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy."
Race matters because of racism. And racism is absurd because it's about how you look. Not about the blood you have. It's about the shade of your skin and the shape of your nose and the kink of your hair.
"One of the things I've learned is that everybody in this country has the mentality of scarcity. We imagine that even the things that are not scarce are scarce. And it breeds a kind of desperation in everybody. Even the wealthy."
But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of the past.
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."
She had read many of them, because he recommended them, but they were like cotton candy that so easily evaporated from her tongue's memory.
He was no longer sure, he had in fact never been sure, whether he liked his life because he really did or whether he liked it because he was supposed to.
There was something immodest about her modesty: it announced itself.
For months, the air in their flat was like cracked glass.
Ifemelu imagined the writers, Nigerians in bleak houses in America, their lives deadened by work, nursing their careful savings throughout the year so that they could visit home in December for a week, when they would arrive bearing suitcases of shoes and clothes and cheap watches, and see, in the eyes of their relatives, brightly burnished images of themselves. Afterwards they would return to America to fight on the Internet over their mythologies of home, because home was now a blurred place between here and there, and at least online they could ignore the awareness of how inconsequential they had become.
They said "soon" to each other often, and "soon" gave their plan the weight of something real.
Sometimes, while having a conversation, it would occur to Ifemelu that Aunty Uju had deliberately left behind something of herself, something essential, in a distant and forgotten place.
Ifemelu saw women on the sidewalks going to lunch from work, wearing sneakers, proof of their American preference for comfort over elegance, and she saw young couples clutching each other, kissing from time to time as if they feared that, if they unclasped their hands, their love would dissolve, melt into nothingness.
In her honors history seminar, Professor Moore, a tiny, tentative woman with the emotionally malnourished look of someone who did not have friends, showed some scenes from Roots, the images bright on the board of the darkened classroom.
Ifemelu sensed, between them, the presence of spiky thorns floating in the air.
They reminded Ifemelu of television commercials, of people whose lives were lived always in flattering light, whose messes were still aesthetically pleasing.
He looked people in the eye not because he was interested in them but because he knew it made them feel that he was interested in them.
But Kimberly's unhappiness was inward, unacknowledged, shielded by her desire for things to be as they should, and also by hope: she believed in other people's happiness because it meant that she, too, might one day have it. Laura's unhappiness was different, spiky, she wished that everyone around her were unhappy because she had convinced herself that she would always be.
It had become a routine of Ifemelu's visits: Aunty Uju collected all her dissatisfactions in a silk purse, nursing them, polishing them, and then on the Saturday of Ifemelu's visit, while Bartholomew was out and Dike was upstairs, she would spill them out on the table, and turn each one this way and that, to catch the light.
He talked about himself with such gusto, as though determined to tell her everything there was to know, and all at once.
Ifemelu sometimes sensed underneath the well-oiled sequences of Kimberly's life, a flash of regret not only for things she longed for in the present but for things she had longed for in the past.
In London, night came too soon, it hung in the morning air like a threat, and then in the afternoon a blue-gray dusk descended, and the Victorian buildings all wore a mournful air.
When Shan walked into a room, all the air disappeared.
Their mutual dislike was a smoldering, stalking leopard in the room.
"The idea of interviewing someone and writing a profile is judgmental," Ifemelu said. "It's not about the subject. It's about what the interviewer makes of the subject."
Lagos became a gentler version of itself, and the people dressed in their bright church clothes looked, from far away, like flowers in the wind.
Back home, she heard the hollowness of her steps as she walked from bedroom to living room to verandah and then back again.
There was a moment, a caving of the blue sky, an inertia of stillness, when neither of them knew what to do, he walking towards her, she standing there squinting, and then he was upon her and they hugged.
"I realized I could buy America, and it lost its shine."
She should bring it up, she owed him that, but a wordless fear had seized her, a fear of breaking delicate things.
"When I started in real estate, I considered renovating old houses instead of tearing them down, but it didn't make sense. Nigerians don't buy houses because they're old. A renovated two-hundred-year-old mill granary, you know, the kind of thing Europeans like. It doesn't work here at all. But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past."
She would not cry, it was ridiculous to cry after so long, but her eyes were filling with tears and there was a boulder in her chest and a stinging in her throat. The tears felt itchy. She made no sound. He took her hand in his, both clasped on the table, and between them silence grew, an ancient silence that they both knew. She was inside this silence and she was safe.
...who had run for Governor in the last elections, had lost, and as all losing politicians did, had gone to court to challenge the results.
Laatste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
"A young woman from Nigeria leaves behind her home and her first love to start a new life in America, only to find her dreams are not all she expected"--
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