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This is modern life in Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, which becomes almost a character of its own in novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new book, “Americanah.” And within its pages, one catches self-acknowledged glimpses of the writer herself, who shot to fame with her previous love story set during Nigeria’s civil war called “Half of a Yellow Sun.”
As that book is being made into a movie, more international attention will focus on Adichie, part of a raft of new Nigerian writers finding acclaim after years of military-induced slumber in a nation with a rich literary history. Yet Adichie, like her new book’s heroine, finds herself straddled between a life in the United States and one in Nigeria, where even seemingly innocuous comments on hair care and wigs can stir resentment.
“I’m writing about where I care about and I deeply, deeply care about Nigeria,” Adichie told The Associated Press. “Nigeria is the country that most infuriates me and it is the country I love the most. I think when you’re emotionally invested in a place as a storyteller, it becomes organic.”
That sense of place runs throughout “Americanah,” — make sure to stress the fourth syllable, says the daughter of a university professor and a university registrar. It’s a term people use to describe the accents carried by some of the Nigerians now returning in droves to the country after it embraced an uneasy democracy after years of military rule. While oil and gas money continues to flow and other business opportunities abound, the nation’s universities now sit in shambles, graduating more unqualified students than can be offered jobs.
That intellectual dulling has been challenged by a host of new writers, many of whom like Adichie live almost double lives abroad.
“She is part of the pack of novelists who have, after what you might call the two decades of silence, who have helped to tell Nigerian stories to the whole world again,” writer Tolu Ogunlesi said. “It was the dictatorships and all that’s associated with them. ... The ’80s and ’90s were dark ages of sorts for Nigeria.”
It’s that period where “Americanah” finds its beginning. Though dismissing the idea of being a “dutiful daughter of literary conventions,” Adichie’s new novel takes root in the vagaries and murmured promises of a love story like much of her other work. It also focuses largely on the slim percentage of Nigerians able to afford diesel generators in a country largely without electricity and who look at the poor through the chilled air and tinted-glass windows of luxury SUVs.
Despite that, her writing hits a nerve with Nigerian readers who identify with the descriptions of church worship services focused on getting foreign visas and the nervous wives of rich men in a nation notorious for philandering. Adichie describes herself as looking “at the world through Nigerian eyes,” but she doesn’t hold back on criticizing its culture that fosters widespread government corruption. Or what she perceives as the excessive, neutered politeness of “political-correct language” in the U.S.
“Nigeria wasn’t set up to succeed, but the extent of its failure is ours. It’s our responsibility,” she said. “This country is full of so many intelligent people, so much energy, so much potential, so why are we here?
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