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Definition of Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the story. Foreshadowing can be achieved directly or indirectly, by making... read full definition
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the story. Foreshadowing can be achieved... read full definition
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the... read full definition
Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—When You’re Ready:
Obinze’s mother cautions Ifemelu and Obinze against rushing into sex in Chapter 5, when their lovemaking attempts goes awry. But life advice turns into foreshadowing as she urges them to wait for the right time:
“I was once young. I know what it is like to love while young. I want to advise you. I am aware that, in the end, you will do what you want. My advice is that you wait. You can love without making love. It is a beautiful way of showing your feelings but it brings responsibility, great responsibility, and there is no rush. I will advise you to wait until you are at least in the university, wait until you own yourself a little more […] Both of you should agree to wait so that there is no pressure."
Obinze’s mother counsels patience, time, and space to the young lovers. “My advice is that you wait,” she recommends. And wait they do. Though Obinze and Ifemelu have sex through their time in college, his mother’s advice ironically previews their decades of romantic separation. As Ifemelu leaves for the U.S. and loses touch with the England-bound Obinze, the lovers gradually find themselves separated by an entire ocean. They wait, one unopened email after the other, until they have all but lost their former ties to each other. When they do meet again as adults, they must bridge the gap formed by those decades of waiting. Obinze’s mother anticipates the hurdles the couple encounters as they attempt to bridge the gap that has formed between them.
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Chapter 17
Explanation and Analysis—Meeting Blaine:
In Chapter 17, Ifemelu and Blaine’s shared train ride awakens an unexpected new romance. As the seat mates flirt and exchange emotional goodbyes, their fortuitous meeting foreshadows an equally magical future relationship:
He wrote his number on her magazine. “You take care,” he said. He touched her shoulder lightly as he left and there was something in his eyes, something both tender and sad, that made her tell herself that she had been wrong to sense reluctance from him. He already missed her. She moved to his seat, reveling in the warmth his body had left in its wake, and watched through the window as he walked along the platform.
Americanah flexes its romantic narrative arc through this foreshadowing. In a moment that almost seems to have been taken from a storybook, a smitten Blaine offers Ifemelu his number while she revels in the imprint that his body leaves on the seat. The traveling companions speak through gestures and glances, parting ways in the most dramatic fashion possible. Beyond achieving an impression of cinema, this scene paves the way for their unlikely reunion. A parting of such poignance only heightens the expectation that they will reconnect—as they inevitably do, years later, with unchanged affections. Blaine and Ifemelu meet again—of all places—at a blogging convention, and love blossoms between them.
Ifemelu’s relationship with Blaine subtly foreshadows her rekindled love with Obinze as well. Her brief, New Haven-based romance reads like a microcosm of her deeper, broader love for Obinze. In a way, falling in love with Blaine years after the train ride also foretells her ultimate reunion with Obinze. Picking up where they left off comes nowhere as easily with Obinze as it does with Blaine—Ifemelu must share decades-old secrets, and she pushes her childhood lover to the brink of marital crisis. But these lovers reconnect by the end of the novel, as surely as promised in this scene on the train.
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Chapter 30
Explanation and Analysis—Thickening of Doom:
For Obinze, dreadful expectation comes just a step ahead of deep disappointment. Chapter 30’s foreshadowing spells imminent doom as he and Cleotilde arrive at the civic center on their wedding day. Though he tries following through the motions of marriage even after the police arrive, something feels terribly awry:
There was nothing to worry about, nothing at all, he told himself, the civic center probably had policemen present as a matter of routine; but he sensed in the sudden smallness of the hallway, the sudden thickening of doom in the air, that something was wrong, before he noticed another man approaching him, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his cheeks so red he looked as though he was wearing terrible makeup.
Obinze’s brief “thickening of doom”—his awareness that “something was wrong”—turns his eventual arrest into a matter of little surprise. No sooner do he and Cleotilde enter the hallway than the handcuffs get applied. In this moment and many others, he senses his capture before it ever happens and all but prepares himself for the inevitable. Obinze’s arrest even comes as a relief: he has feared for this moment so many times that its fulfillment instead feels like “the dull echo of an aftermath.” Reality follows his worst fears as he gets handcuffed, detained, and promptly deported to Nigeria.
However anticipated, this moment still sears an unsettling impression in the reader’s mind. There is an uncomfortable eeriness in the way Obinze’s inklings morph into misgivings, and then materialize into reality. There is also the anguish and despair as he waits in the Manchester airport in humiliation, feeling his dignity and the “outer layers of himself stripped off." Obinze can brace and steel himself all he wants, but he cannot diminish the emotional impact of a moment that is nothing short of nightmarish.
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