Americanah: Chapters 1–2

She liked watching the locals who drove with pointed courtesy and parked their latest-model cars outside the organic grocery store on Nassau Street or outside the sushi restaurants or outside the ice cream shop that had fifty different flavors including red pepper or outside the post office where effusive staff bounded out to greet them at the entrance.

You’ve used your irreverent, hectoring funny and thought-provoking voice to create a space for real conversations about an important subject.

You’ve used your irreverent, hectoring funny and thought-provoking voice to create a space for real conversations about an important subject.

Readers like SapphicDerrida, who reeled off statistics and used words like "reify” in their comments, made Ifemelu nervous, eager to be fresh and to impress, so that she began, over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the carcasses of people’s stories for something she could use.

He taught ideas of nuance and complexity in his classes and yet he was asking her for a single reason, the cause.

But she had not had a bold epiphany and there was no cause; it was simply that layer after layer of discontent had settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled her.

So here she was, on a day filled with the opulence of summer, about to braid her hair for the journey home.

Her decision to move back was similar; whenever she felt besieged by doubts, she would think of herself as standing valiantly alone, as almost heroic, so as to squash her uncertainty.

Not that Dike would ever wear those shoes that looked like espadrilles.

They all turned to look at her, but only one, who had to be the eponymous Mariama, said, “Hi. Welcome.”

A precious performance, Blaine had called it, in that gently forbearing tone he used when they talked about novels, as though he was sure that she, with a little more time and a little more wisdom, would come to accept that the novels he liked were superior, novels written by young and youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness.

A precious performance, Blaine had called it, in that gently forbearing tone he used when they talked about novels, as though he was sure that she, with a little more time and a little more wisdom, would come to accept that the novels he liked were superior, novels written by young and youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness.

She sectioned out Ifemelu’s hair, plucked a little attachment from the pile on the table, and began deftly to twist.

Aisha was simply a true market woman, immune to the cosmetic niceties of American customer service.

Ifemelu thought little of Nollywood films, with their exaggerated histrionics and their improbable plots, but she nodded in agreement because to hear “Nigeria” and “good” in the same sentence was a luxury, even coming from this strange Senegalese woman, and she chose to see in this an augury of her return home.

Ifemelu thought little of Nollywood films, with their exaggerated histrionics and their improbable plots, but she nodded in agreement because to hear “Nigeria” and “good” in the same sentence was a luxury, even coming from this strange Senegalese woman, and she chose to see in this an augury of her return home.

“I’ve just finished a fellowship,” she said, knowing that Aisha would not understand what a fellowship was, and in the rare moment that Aisha looked intimidated, Ifemelu felt a perverse pleasure.

I’m longing for ceiling she once wrote on the back of his geography notebook, and for a long time afterwards he could not look at that notebook without a gathering frisson, a sense of secret excitement.

“Why do you call him Ceiling anyway?" his friend Okwudiba once asked her, on one of those languorous days after first semester exams.

It had always discomfited him, the pleasure she took in being mistaken for mixed-race.

She had no idea, this cousin who had grown up in the village, who looked at the world with stark and insensitive eyes.

A steward let them in; Chief was sitting on a gilded chair that looked like a throne, sipping cognac and surrounded by guests.

He sprang up, a smallish man, high-spirited and ebullient.

It surprised him that Chief was something of a fop, with his air of fussy grooming: nails manicured and shiny, black velvet slippers at his feet, a diamond cross around his neck.

Big Men and Big Women, Obinze would later learn, did not talk to people, they instead talked at people, and that evening Chief had talked and talked, pontificating about politics, while his guests crowed, “Exactly! You are correct, Chief! Thank you!”

Chief spoke with a triumphant tone, mundane observations delivered as grand discoveries, while Nneoma listened and smiled and agreed.

On his next visit, Chief was his usual garrulous self.

“They said the National Farm Support Corporation is bankrupt and they're going to privatize it. Do you know this? No. How do I know this? Because I have friends. By the time you know it, I would have taken a position and I would have benefited from the arbitrage. That is our free market!”

It had startled him, too, how easy many other things became, how even just the semblance of wealth oiled his paths.

There was, after all, a trail of prostrating visitors to Chief’s house, relatives and friends bringing other relatives and friends, their pockets full of requests and appeals.

Now she was curtseying and greeting Mrs. Akin-Cole, a famously old woman from a famously old family, who had the supercilious expression, eyebrows always raised, of a person used to receiving homage; Obinze often imagined her belching champagne bubbles.

Now, in her tight sequinned dress that outlined the swell of her lower belly, she had become a certain kind of middle-aged Lagos woman, dried up by disappointments, blighted by bitterness, the sprinkle of pimples on her forehead smothered in heavy foundation.

She spoke with the unplaceable foreign accent, British and American and something else all at once, of the wealthy Nigerian who did not want the world to forget how worldly she was, how her British Airways executive card was choking with miles.

He was about to say something to Mrs. Akin-Cole, something meaningless and mollifying, when he heard Chief's raised voice behind him: “But you know that as we speak, oil is flowing through illegal pipes and they sell it in bottles in Cotonou! Yes! Yes!”

Obinze was drawn to his gaucheness; in the young man’s clothes, and in the way that he stood, was an outsiderness he could not shield even if he had wanted to.

He had been uncomfortable, with her overdone fussing, the deference that seeped subtly from her pores.

Besides, humility had always seemed to him a specious thing, invented for the comfort of others; you were praised for humility by people because you did not make them feel any more lacking than they already did.

Marie was slight, and Obinze was not sure whether she was timid or whether her halting English made her seem so.

She had, in the years since they got married, grown an intemperate dislike of single women and an intemperate love of God.

It was not a physical fatigue—he went to the gym regularly and felt better than he had in years—but a draining lassitude that numbed the margins of his mind.