Americanah

From the moment we meet her, we sense in Ifemelu a need to belong somewhere and a fear that she doesn’t belong anywhere. What she likes most about Princeton, a city she has lived in for years, is “that in this place of affluent ease, she could pretend to be someone else, someone specially admitted into a hallowed America club, someone adorned with certainty” (3). And yet, her sharp eyes spot many things at the Princeton train station that do not fit within her self-circumscribed world, such as a grown man eating ice cream. Where she truly finds cultural kinship is several cities away, in Trenton, where her hair braiding salon is located. The women who work there are all African, but they, unlike Ifemelu, have not completely adapted to American society; they speak with thick accents and consume African media. Yet, they speak the same language. Ifemelu bargains with them in a way unacceptable in most American stores. The other African immigrants she meets are too playing a game of belonging and identity—“Nigerian taxi drivers in America were all convinced they were not taxi drivers” (10).

The perspective shifts in Chapter 2, and we see the Nigeria that Ifemelu has left, the one in which Obinze is thriving. Unlike Princeton, with its order and certainty, Lagos is a place of instability and unfairness. Adichie contrasts Obinze’s description of a grand house, with rooms that are “cool, air conditioner vents swaying quietly” (26) with the image of a “rusty-haired child beggar” (25). As Chief, Obinze’s boss and patron, tells him, “‘That is the principle that this country is based on. The major principle. No one knows tomorrow’” (30). Though Obinze is secure in his finances and personal life, with a dutiful wife and young daughter, he nonetheless feels like an “intruder in his new circle” of the wealthy. “He spent too much time