Americanah: Chapters 23–41

His cousin Nicholas had the jowly face of a bulldog, yet still somehow managed to be very attractive, or perhaps it was not his features but his aura that appealed, the tall, broad-shouldered, striding masculinity of him.

In Nsukka, he had been the most popular student on campus; his beat-up Volkswagen Beetle parked outside a beer parlor lent the drinkers there an immediate cachet.

There was a certain vapidity to her reassurance, an automatic way of expressing goodwill, which did not require any concrete efforts on her part to help him.

Was it a quality inherent in women, or did they just learn to shield their personal regrets, to suspend their lives, subsume themselves in child care?

He always spoke quickly, pugnaciously, as though every conversation was an argument, the speed and force of his words suggesting authority and discouraging dissent.

It seemed to, quite quickly as Emenike sent news only of progress: his postgraduate work completed, his job at the housing authority his marriage to an Englishwoman who was a solicitor in the city.

Their conversations, as they waited for their trucks to be loaded up, were always about cars and football and, most of all, women, each man telling stories that sounded too apocryphal and too similar to a story told the day before...

....Obinze was even more amused, because knickers were, in Nigerian English, shorts rather than underwear, and he imagined these nubile women in ill-fitting khaki shorts, the kind he had worn as a junior student in secondary school.

Once, a sad-looking woman had offered Obinze a small pot of homemade jam, and he had hesitated, but he sensed that whatever deep unhappiness she had would be compounded if he said no, and so he had taken the jam home and it was still languishing in the fridge, unopened.

He read contemporary American fiction, because he hoped to find a resonance, a shaping of his longings, a sense of the America that he had imagined himself a part of.

Those words “I want a raise” sounded contrived and comical.

Cleotilde’s gentle sympathy assuaged him.

Nicholas had already lent him some money, he had been loath enough to ask at all, because of the judgment in Nicholas’s unsmiling eyes, as though he was thinking that Obinze was soft, spoiled, and many people did not have a cousin who could lend them money.

The last time they spoke, Emenike had told him, “I don’t know if you’ve seen this play in the West End, but Georgina and I have just been and we loved it,” as though Obinze, in his delivery job, saving austerely, consumed by immigration worries, would ever even think of seeing a West End play.

“I think Waugh is cartoonish. I just don’t get those so-called comic English novels. It’s as if they can’t deal with the real and deep complexity of human life and so they resort to doing this comic business. Greene is the other extreme, too morose.”

She had a tanned, broad-featured succoring face, the face of a person who could not abide conflict.

Georgina said, “It’s a bit tiresome to talk about America being insular, not that we help that much, since if something major happens in America, it is the headline in Britain; something major happens here, it is on the back page in America, if at all. But I do think the most troubling thing was the garishness of the nationalism, don’t you think so, darling?”

“The landed gentry and the aristocrats hunt, you see, and we liberal middle classes fume about it. We want to take their silly little toys away.”

“It’s an iniquitously racist country, isn’t it?”

In his hands was a sheaf of papers and Obinze could see a photocopy of his passport page.

There he was, in handcuffs, being led through the hall of Manchester Airport, and in the coolness and din of that airport, men and women and children, travelers and cleaners and security guards, watched him, wondering what evil he had done.

Even though Ifemelu by then understood that people like the woman said what they said to keep others comfortable, and to show they appreciated How Far We Have Come; even though she was by then happily ensconced in a circle of Blaine’s friends, one of whom was the woman’s new boyfriend, and even though she should have left it alone, she did not.

But they were, all of them hushed, their eyes on Ifemelu as though she was about to give up a salacious secret that would both titillate and implicate them.

Perhaps he sensed otherwise, and knew of the slight unsteadiness of her spirit; most nights she lay in bed and cried, berating herself for what she had destroyed, then telling herself that she had no reason to be crying, and crying all the same.

Was this what the novelists meant by ennui?

He was like a salutary tonic; with him, she could only inhabit a higher level of goodness.

“It has enough depth,” she said, irritated, but with the niggling thought that he was right.

Shan was tiny and beautiful, with an oval face and high cheekbones, an imperious face.

If she did ordinary things, they became enigmatic.

If anybody else had said what Shan did, he would instantly comb through the words in search of nuance, and he would disagree with their sweep, their simplicity Ifemelu had once told him, as they watched a news item about a celebrity divorce, that she did not understand the unbending, unambiguous honesties that Americans required in relationships.

“To be a child of the Third World is to be aware of the many different constituencies you have and how honesty and truth must always depend on context.”

They wore their love like a heavy perfume, exuding a transparent commitment, touching each other, referring to each other.

When she attended a talk with him, he would make sure to say it could have been better, or that the first ten minutes were boring, as though to preempt her own criticisms.

He had no patience for fey talk.

Don’t say your grandfather was a serf in Russia when slavery happened because what matters is you are American now and being American means you take the whole shebang, America’s assets and America’s debts, and Jim Crow is a big-ass debt.

...black politicians don’t try some tricks to reduce the voting power of white folks through gerrymandering and advertising agencies don’t say they can’t use white models to advertise glamorous products because they are not considered “aspirational” by the “mainstream.”

...the girls would have instant crushes on him, the boys would be envious of his panache, and the parents would wish their kids were like him.

They ticked the boxes of a certain kind of enlightened, educated middleclassness, the love of dresses that were more interesting than pretty, the love of the eclectic, the love of what they were supposed to love.

“They do not doubt their presence here, these students. They believe they should be here, they have earned it and they are paying for it. Aufond, they have bought us all. It is the key to America’s greatness, this hubris,” Boubacar said, a black felt beret on his head, his hands sunk into his jacket pockets.

She examined the photographs on the cover, the young Kenyan woman staring befuddled at the camera, arms enclosing her son, and the young American man, jaunty of manner, holding his daughter to his chest.

They clutched each other in front of the television when Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses.

She did not blog about the vileness that seemed to have multiplied each morning she logged on, more chat rooms springing up, more vitriol flourishing, because to do so would be to spread the words of people who abhorred not the man that Barack Obama was, but the idea of him as president.

"It was almost bucolic then. I visited and thought it was beautiful but I just couldn’t see myself actually going there.”

Even that nebulous unease when she was around Paula, part churlishness and part insecurity, had melted away.

And so I name, with insouciant aplomb, Turgenev and Trollope and Goethe, but so as not to be too indebted to dead white males because that would be a little too unoriginal, I added Selma Lagerlof.