Americanah: Chapters 11–22

She had slipped into the rituals, smiling a smile that promised to be demure to him but not to the world, lunging to pick up his fork when it slipped from his hand, serving him more beer.

He talked about Nigerian politics with the fervid enthusiasm of a person who followed it from afar, who read and reread articles on the Internet.

“Kudirat’s death will not be in vain, it will only galvanize the democratic movement in a way that even her life did not! I just wrote an article about this issue online in Nigerian Village.”

Later, she read his online posts on Nigerian Village, all of them sour-toned and strident, under the moniker “Igbo Massachusetts Accountant,” and it surprised her how profusely he wrote, how actively he pursued airless arguments.

Later, she read his online posts on Nigerian Village, all of them sour-toned and strident, under the moniker “Igbo Massachusetts Accountant,” and it surprised her how profusely he wrote, how actively he pursued airless arguments.

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.

Igbo Massachusetts Accountant’s rejoinder: “You have been brainwashed by the West. You should be ashamed to call yourself a Nigerian.”

She wanted to start school, to find the real America, and yet there was that gnawing in her stomach, an anxiety, and a new, aching nostalgia for the Brooklyn summer that had become familiar: children on bicycles, sinewy black men in tight white tank tops, ice cream vans tinkling, loud music from roofless cars, sun shining into night, and things rotting and smelling in the humid heat.

Watching Ginika preen in front of the mirror, Ifemelu wondered whether she, too, would come to share Ginika's taste for shapeless dresses, whether this was what America did to you.

Obinze told her nothing would happen, suggested she speak to the bursar about getting on a payment plan so that she would at least have taken some action.

She had spoken English all her life, led the debating society in secondary school, and always thought the American twang inchoate; she should not have cowered and shrunk, but she did.

She spent her free hours in the library, so wondrously well lit; the sweep of computers, the large, clean, airy reading spaces, the welcoming brightness of it all, seemed like a sinful decadence.

“Well, it’s because of the pain that word has caused that you shouldnt use it!” Shouldn't sailed astringently into the air, the speaker an African-American girl wearing bamboo hoop earrings.

There was something venal about his thin-lipped face; he had the air of a man to whom corruption was familiar.

Ginika parked in the circular driveway of a house that announced its wealth, the stone exterior solid and overbearing, four white pillars rising portentously at the entrance.

Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor.

Ifemelu could tell, from the longish length, the near-perfect waves that grazed his collar, that he took fastidious care of his hair.

Kimberly looked at Don, who made a wry face and said, “Well, we do our best but we know very well that we re not messiahs.”

Ifemelu had wanted to slap her dissolute roommate not because a slobbering dog had eaten her bacon but because she was at war with the world, and woke up each day feeling bruised, imagining a horde of faceless people who were all against her.

He offered her something to drink, in a perfunctory way that suggested he expected her to say no, and then he took off his shirt and lay on the bed.

How sordid it all was, that she was here with a stranger who already knew she would stay.

She woke up torpid each morning, slowed by sadness, frightened by the endless stretch of day that lay ahead.

Kimberly, fluttery and ardent, would ask how his day was, scrambling to please, as though she could not quite believe that he had again come home to her.

Cheating was the first thing anyone would think of with a man like Don, with that lubricious aura of his.

First surprise flitted over his features, then it ossified to hostility.

“Hello!” It was Laura, coming in through the back door with Athena, a tiny wisp of a child with hair so thin that her pale scalp gaped through. A waif.

Don kept talking, his voice too larded in bonhomie, her dislike clawing at her throat.

She always hung up on telemarketers, but there was something about his voice that made her turn down the stove and hold on to the receiver, something poignantly young, untried, untested, the slightest of tremors, an aggressive customer-service friendliness that was not aggressive at all; it was as though he was saying what he had been trained to say but was mortally worried about offending her.

Only after she hung up did she begin to feel the stain of a burgeoning shame spreading all over her, for thanking him, for crafting his words “You sound American” into a garland that she hung around her own neck.

A plain brown bottle with a plain brown label, both stylish and salutary.

“My research interests include social movements, the political economy of dictatorships, American voting rights and representation, race and ethnicity in politics, and campaign finance. That’s my classic spiel. Much of which is bullshit anyway. I teach my classes and I wonder if any of it matters to the kids.”

“Yes,” she said, chastened.

Warrington was a somnolent town, a town contented with itself; winding roads cut through thick woods—even the main road, which the residents did not want widened for fear that it would bring in foreigners from the city, was winding and narrow-sleepy homes were shielded by trees, and on weekends the blue lake was stippled with boats.

Warrington was a somnolent town, a town contented with itself; winding roads cut through thick woods—even the main road, which the residents did not want widened for fear that it would bring in foreigners from the city, was winding and narrow-sleepy homes were shielded by trees, and on weekends the blue lake was stippled with boats.

How glorious it was, to be so wanted, and by this man with the rakish metal band around his wrist and the cleft-chinned handsomeness of models in department store catalogues.

It felt a sacrilege to discuss Obinze, to refer to him as an "ex,” that flippant word that said nothing and meant nothing.

Curt talked, while his mother listened, rapt.

How quickly she had become used to their life, her passport filled with visa stamps, the solicitousness of flight attendants in first-class cabins, the feathery bed linen in the hotels they stayed in and the little things she hoarded: jars of preserves from the breakfast tray, little vials of conditioner, woven slippers, even face towels if they were especially soft.

“America is an organized place, and job opportunities are rife there.”

The verve was gone.

She had a great hauteur.

Those who deign to have black wives have light (otherwise known as high yellow) wives.

She cajoled until finally Dike agreed, as long as he could wear sneakers, not the lace-ups his mother wanted.

Ifemelu drew her head away. “What if every magazine you opened and every film you watched had beautiful women with hair like jute? You would be admiring my hair now.”

Her Maryland was a small, circumscribed world of Curt’s American friends.