Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wins
US National Book Critics Circle award

Emma Brockes (theGuardian)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's third novel, Americanah is the story of two Nigerian émigrés who love and lose each other across continents and years. It is a book about leaving, and loneliness and the intersection between class and race, all of which makes it sound rather hard work – unjustly so. It is a book about hair: straight versus afro; and discreet tensions, not just between white Americans and Nigerian immigrants, but between Africans and African Americans, between the light- and dark-skinned, between new and established immigrants, and its frankness – in particular on the subject of gender – has upset some people. "I knew that was coming," says Adichie. "I can't write a book like that and then go, 'Oh my God, they're upset.' But my intention wasn't to upset." She smiles. “It's just that I'm willing to if that's what it takes to write the book."

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The most misread character in the novel is Kimberley, a woman Ifemelu babysits for and who some readers have erroneously called racist. Adichie says she wrote Kimberley with someone she knew in mind and intended the mockery to be affectionate. (For example: Kimberley is always pointing out plain black women in magazines and going on about how beautiful they are, in a hapless effort to show Ifemelu she isn’t racist.)

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There is one stand-out racist incident in the novel, says Adichie, when a carpet-cleaner comes to the large house of the couple she babysits for and mistakes Ifemelu for the lady of the house. This happened to Adichie when she was babysitting in the wealthy suburbs outside Philadelphia.

"I remember opening the door and his face was such a cliche; he looked at me and his whole face fell. You know: I can't believe I'm working for a black person. And he had such an attitude. And then when I said, ‘Mrs So and So said you were coming', he changed and suddenly was my friend."

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… If you’re enmeshed in mediocrity, you just don’t know how mediocre it all is.
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