Americanah: Style 1 key example

Graded class participation merely “merely made students talk and talk,” and waste class time on “hollow words, sometimes meaningless words.” Political correctness leads Kimberly to repeatedly apologize for “mauling” Ifemelu’s name or to effusively praise the beauty of Black women. Ifemelu’s excerpted blogs uncover truths that seem still more raw. She notes how the successful American Black men “who deign to have black wives have light (otherwise known as high yellow) wives,” and how Obama can only win the election by selling himself as a wise, saintly, “Magic Negro.” Through its undecorated, colloquial sentences, Americanah speaks out about the unspoken. It illuminates some of the everyday experiences in a light that is alternately comic and cruel.

The novel’s formal structure works in tandem with its language. Ifemelu’s blog posts are scattered throughout, giving Americanah an intimate, scrapbook-like quality—they create moments in which the reader engages directly with her writing. The novel’s narrative sequence is equally casual. Chapters loosely organize otherwise unrelated, vignette-like scenes, such as a brush with a powerful Nigerian man or a cooking session at Blaine’s apartment. Meanwhile, Ifemelu repeatedly wanders back to the past during her six-hour hair braiding session at the salon. Almost all the events in the novel—from Ifemelu’s teenage romance with Obinze to her early struggles in America—are memories from the past. Americanah shuffles between Ifemelu’s past and the hair salon, and its plot picks up the story in the present only as Ifemelu lands in Lagos. As with Ifemelu’s unfiltered blog posts, the novel unwinds itself like an unscripted conversation with a friend.