Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In the novel Americanah, C. N. Adichie tells the story of the young Nigerian woman Ifemelu who emigrates to the United States to pursue a university education but instead of going home after completing her studies, as the original plan had been, she decides to stay and work in the USA. After 15 years there Ifemelu finally moves back to her Nigerian homeland.
At first, Lagos assaulted her; the sun-dazed haste; the yellow buses full of squashed limbs, the sweating hawkers racing after cars, the advertisements on hulking billboards (others scrawled on walls – PLUMBER CALL 080177777) and the heaps of rubbish that rose on the roadsides like a taunt. Commerce thrummed too defiantly. And the air was dense with exaggeration, conversations full of over-protestations. One morning, a man's body lay on Awolowo Road. Another morning, The Island flooded and cars became gasping boats. Here, she felt, anything could happen, a ripe tomato could burst out of solid stone. And so she had the dizzying sensation of falling, falling into the new person she had become, falling into the strange familiar. Had it always been like this or had it changed so much in her absence? When she left, only the wealthy had mobile phones, all the numbers started with 090, and girls wanted to date 090 men. Now, her hair braider had a mobile phone, the plantain seller tending a blackened grill had a mobile phone. She had grown up knowing all the bus stops and the side streets, understanding the cryptic codes of conductors and the body language of street hawkers. Now, she struggled to grasp the unspoken. When had shopkeepers become so rude? Had buildings in Lagos always had this patina of decay? And when did it become a city of people quick to beg and too enamoured of free things?
"Americanah!" Ranyinudo teased her often. "You are looking at things with American eyes! But the problem is that you are not even a real Americanah. At least if you had an American accent we would tolerate your complaining!"
Having been back in her home country for a while, Ifemelu starts a blog where she reflects on her experiences as a returnee. In her blog she writes:
Lagos has never been, will never be, and has never aspired to be like New York, or anywhere else, for that matter. Lagos has always been indisputably itself, but you would not know this at the meeting of the Nigeropolitan Club, a group of young returnees who gather every week to moan about the many ways that Lagos is not like New York as though Lagos had ever been close to being like New York. Full disclosure: I am one of them. Most of us have come back to make money in Nigeria, to start businesses, to seek government contracts and contacts. Others have come with dreams in their pockets and a hunger to change the country, but we spend all our time complaining about Nigeria, and even though our complaints are legitimate, I imagine myself as an outsider saying: Go back where you came from! If your cook cannot make the perfect panini it is not because he is stupid. It is because Nigeria is not a nation of sandwich-eating people and his last oga* did not eat bread in the afternoon. So he needs training and practice. And Nigeria is not a nation of people with food allergies, not a nation of picky eaters for whom food is about distinctions and separations. It is a nation of people who eat beef and chicken and cow skin and intestines and dried fish in a single bowl of soup, and it is called assorted, and so get over yourselves and realize that the way of life here is just that, assorted.
*Oga = Nigerian for big man or boss