'Hunger and restlessness' in Adichie's Americanah

 "It's a novel, right? What's it about?"

Why did people ask "What is it about? as if a novel had to be about only one thing. Ifemelu disliked the question.

~Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

Ifemelu, the protagonist of Adichie's Americanah, would warn readers away from an attempt to categorize the novel that tells her story. Ifemelu's dislike of delineating what a novel is "about" echoes some of the ideas in Adichie's famous TED Talk: "The Danger of a Single Story," in which she says, "The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story." 

The danger of trying to describe what Americanah is "about" is that we will inevitably leave something out. It is a story about identity, a story about race, a story about journeys, a story about America, a story about Nigeria, and a story about "real deep romantic love, the kind that twists you and wrings you out and makes you breathe through the nostrils of your beloved."

Americanah follows the young adulthood of Ifemelu and her first love, Obinze, both of whom move away from Nigeria (Ifemelu to America and Obinze to England) and wrestle with the complications of leaving home and and then coming back again. Americanah makes us ponder how much of our identities are tied to other people's perceptions. Most obviously, Ifemelu experiences this tension between the inner life and the outer world when she comes to the U.S. and realizes she's "black" for the first time, discovering a new way to think about herself.

But Americanah also explores how our personal relationships with other people shape our identities, as Ifemelu learns new things about herself in romances with three very different men: the reflective Obinze; Curt, a privileged white American; and Blaine, an idealistic African-American academic.

What makes Americanah most successful is that even though it is funny and, overall, optimistic even in the face of the personal tragedies that befall Ifemelu and Obinze, it does not provide easy answers. Set partially against the backdrop of Barack Obama's first presidential campaign, a frequent topic in Ifemelu's blog and among her liberal American friends is whether America is ready for a Black president. But even in her joy over his election, Ifemelu knows that America is far from healed of its racist past (and present). Similarly, although the audience roots for Ifemelu over the course of her personal and romantic journey, we can't ignore that her path of self-discovery often brings pain both to herself and to others. 

While experiencing self-inflicted heartbreak, Ifemelu muses, "There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach." It is in this hunger and restlessness that Adichie captures truths about the human experience that reach beyond the categories we use define ourselves and others. It is hard, torturous work to figure out who we are. But it's work we must do.