Americanah: Foil 5 key examples

As Nigerian immigrants, Ifemelu and her aunt both struggle to find footing upon arriving in America—Americanah finds a common thread in their stretched bank accounts and bleak hardships. “America had subdued [Aunty Uju],” Ifemelu thinks as she sees her once-proud aunt deflated by medical entrance exam scores and juggling three jobs at once. But the urgencies of survival don’t spare Ifemelu, either. Ifemelu’s pile of rejected job applications and dwindling savings account wear down her morale. She becomes a“small ball, adrift and alone” as discovers the elusiveness of the American dream. Both characters experience the difficulty of staying afloat in an unforgivingly competitive and capitalist society.

These resemblances only highlight the difference in the choices they make with their new homes. Aunty Uju and Ifemelu each climb their way to success; the aunt becomes a family practitioner while the other earns acclaim with her viral blog. But one ultimately leaves while the other stays behind. Aunty Uju settles down in America—she remarries, starts a practice, and even moves to a whiter Massachusetts suburb. She effectively joins the ranks of the American middle class, no longer the struggling immigrant outsider. Aunty Uju’s story features an arc of assimilation against which her niece charts the opposite. Rather than remain in America, Ifemelu returns to Nigeria out of cultural longing. Nigeria is the place where “she was supposed to be, the only place she could sink her roots in without the constant urge to tug them out and shake off the soil.” Whereas Aunty Uju gradually fills into an American identity, Ifemelu acquires a strengthened awareness of her African roots.

Born on separate continents, they bear unique backgrounds even as America sees them as the same race. And beyond Blaine’s critical, know-it-all tendencies, these differences eventually splinter their relationship. In an awkward exchange over the phone, Ifemelu—the Nigerian native—must convince her parents that her “American Negro” boyfriend is not a “devil-worshipper.” She stings with envy as Paula and Blaine bond over mac and cheese and battered fried chicken, southern comfort foods that she refuses to stomach. 

The absence of a shared cultural vocabulary ultimately dooms the relationship. If Ifemelu is unfamiliar with collard greens and okra, she is equally uninitiated into the institutional racism that the American-raised Blaine is all too familiar with. Ifemelu discovers racism as an immigrant, experiencing it from a distance that prompts Shan’s scorn for her. At one of her salons, Blaine’s sister chalks up the Ifemelu’s blogging success to the fact that she is “writing from the outside. She doesn't really feel all the stuff she's writing about. It's all quaint and curious to her.” Whereas Blaine has grown up with racism his entire life, Ifemelu only gradually picks up on its terms and microaggressions. When an outraged Blaine organizes the protest on behalf of the mistakenly arrested Mr. White, Ifemelu cannot bring herself to attend the event any more than she can swallow biscuits. Though they share the same skin color, Ifemelu’s cultural differences drive a wedge between herself and her boyfriend.

During Ifemelu’s babysitting job interview, Laura pesters her with questions about 419 scams and African immigrants. She suspects the validity of Ifemelu’s driver’s license, patronizingly crows about America’s first-world status, and peddles stereotypes. Africans, she notes during a conversation with Ifemelu, come with none of the issues that African Americans have. With her helicopter parenting and tactlessness, the Laura reads as a caricature of American arrogance and privilege.

In precisely opposite fashion, the novel reveals the ways in which Kimberly overcompensates for her sister’s needling remarks. Laura is unabashedly crude. But Kimberly happens to be equally irritating in her compulsion to do good to stay politically correct. She idealizes the poor, who “were blameless” and “so wonderful.” She gushes over the “beauty” of Ifemelu’s name and every Black woman, afraid of broaching touchier racial issues. Her compliments feel almost like flattery or fawning. Laura radiates her unhappiness, “[wishing] that everyone around her were unhappy because she had convinced herself that she would always be.” Kimberly hides it. Laura plays provocateur and Kimberly the people-pleaser, apologizing to the point where her pleas for forgiveness seem “tinged with self-indulgence.” The two sisters call attention to the uncomfortable subtleties that underlie Ifemelu’s interactions with the White world.

Kosi is blandly unimaginative, beautiful yet banal, and always too quick to appease. The novel presents a woman who irons over disputes about pre-school and even attempts to wish away Obinze’s own infidelities. Untroubled by life’s deeper questions, Kosi turns to performative pieties and pleasantries that grate against her husband. For Obinze, she represents only a “touchstone of realness,” a blueprint of the life that he—an ordinary man made unimaginably wealthy—should be.

Obinze’s more genuine affections tend towards Ifemelu, who points out crooked paintings at restaurants and invents sex-nicknames for him. Her “unpredictable stubbornness” gives her an authenticity that Kosi—the dull if beautiful housewife—lacks. While Kosi parrots sermons about God or pushes Obinze to partake in the usual upper-class conventions, Ifemelu delights him with her blunt if brutal powers of observation. She does not mince words or conceal her emotions. In a country so overrun by politics and flattery, Ifemelu presents herself to him as she is. She stirs within Obinze a deeper, realer love than the kind that orders his days with Kosi.

Curt—white, with pale hair and blue eyes—basks in the privilege of his family’s wealth. His “boyish enthusiasm” and innocence are products of his pampered upbringing. Conditioned by his plush life of spontaneous vacations and a white-collar job, he can afford to “[believe] in good omens and positive thoughts and happy endings to films.” Curt can indulge in the kind of optimism and righteous outrage that his Black girlfriend cannot.

Obinze’s experience in London tells a story of the very opposite. Washing toilets and working in delivery warehouses, he struggles to secure an ID. Obinze toils while Curt travels. Even his plans to remain in the UK get foiled: Obinze gets deported at the steps of the altar during his sham marriage with Cleotilde. In Americanah’s white-centric world, Ifemelu’s childhood boyfriend sinks to something less than second class. As a Black, undocumented immigrant, Obinze experiences hardships that serve as counterpoint to Curt’s blithe life in Baltimore. He foils the white lover even in the way he becomes wealthy: where Curt comes from old money, Obinze amasses a fortune only after ingratiating himself with the Chief. One of Ifemelu’s lovers descends from a powerful family and can draw upon connections in America; the other is newly wealthy and can only assert his status in a third-world country.