Americanah a novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Americanah is a hymn to the complexity of our emotional lives. It is a novel where many things are said, but these are the things that I heard;

1) there is comfort in cheap chocolate.

2) she shows us how arbitrary brutality pervades our world and some of this is not intentional cruelty; it's just the systemic faceless kind.

3) Harm is a temporal thing, it can happen in an instant and we'll live with it for the rest of our lives. This is obvious in a car crash, but here it is of the emotional kind. Growing into a malignant burden that corrupts the rest of our relationships, and each of us kills the things we love.

4) It's a book about place and identity that rails against those narrow confines of identity. Her characters resist all attempts to be defined or sully themselves in narrow trenches of how to be. 'Ring out false pride in place and blood'

6) Adichie is a woman, who knows her place and that place is among the classics. She has a character joke about the novels that will be read in two hundred years' time.

7) She begins in the middle, as the classics do.

8) This is a story of consequence. This is poetry.

Comments

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