Reading Order
Americanah Reading Order
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah (2013) is a standalone novel following Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman who leaves Lagos for the United States at nineteen and discovers that she has become Black in a way she was not Black in Nigeria — and Obinze, the man she loved, who goes to England and is deported. A novel about race, identity, hair, and the question of belonging in three countries. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Where to start
Americanah
Complete Americanah Book List
- 1Buy
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie·2013·The complete novel. Entirely standalone. - Buy
Purple Hibiscus
OptionalChimamanda Ngozi Adichie·2003·Adichie's debut novel — Kambili and her abusive father in post-military Nigeria; the natural starting point for Adichie's work and the book that established her reputation. - Buy
Half of a Yellow Sun
OptionalChimamanda Ngozi Adichie·2006·Twin sisters and the Biafran War — Adichie's second novel; the historical counterpart to Americanah's contemporary focus; together the three novels give Adichie's full portrait of Nigerian experience across different historical moments. - Buy
We Should All Be Feminists
OptionalChimamanda Ngozi Adichie·2014·Adichie's TED talk adapted as a short book — the direct statement of the feminist politics that run through the fiction; published the year after Americanah and informed by the same ideas.
Americanah — Frequently Asked Questions
What does Americanah say about race?
Americanah's central argument about race is made explicit by Ifemelu in her blog posts: that race in America is a specifically American experience, not a universal one, and that arriving in America means becoming racialized in ways you were not before. Growing up in Nigeria, Ifemelu did not think of herself as Black; she was Igbo, she was Nigerian, she was middle-class or not, she was many things, but not primarily 'Black.' In America, her skin color becomes the first and most significant fact about her to the people she encounters, and she must learn to inhabit a racial identity that was constructed without her and that she can never fully escape. The novel is also acute about the differences between African American experience and recent African immigrant experience — the way that Ifemelu's Nigerianness puts her outside the African American tradition even as she is racialized with it — and about the way that different kinds of Black experience in America are illegible to each other.
How does Americanah treat the question of hair?
Hair is one of the novel's central preoccupations: specifically the question of whether Black women should straighten their hair or wear it natural, and what that choice means for their professional and social legibility in America. Ifemelu's journey — from relaxed hair in her early American years (painful, expensive, damaging), to her decision to go natural, to the social and professional consequences of that choice — is one of the novel's running dramas and the subject of some of her most compelling blog posts. Adichie's treatment of the subject is funny and precise and politically serious at the same time: she understands that hair is not merely aesthetic but is a site of political identity, of assimilation versus resistance, of the demand that Black women make their appearance legible to white professional culture. The subplot about the hair salon in Princeton is one of the novel's most vivid social observations.
Who is Obinze, and why does his story in England matter?
Obinze is Ifemelu's first love in Nigeria, a man of quiet intelligence and deep feeling who cannot get a visa to the United States after September 11, 2001, and who goes to England instead — where he lives as an undocumented worker, marrying an EU citizen for papers in a transaction that goes wrong, and is ultimately deported. His storyline is the novel's other major narrative thread and its political argument's other half: where Ifemelu's story is about what America does to a Nigerian woman of ambition and intelligence, Obinze's story is about what Britain does to a Nigerian man — the hostility, the precariousness, the dispossession of dignity that undocumented life requires. The two stories together show the full picture of what it means to be a young Nigerian trying to make a life in the Western world in the early twenty-first century, and their eventual reunion in Lagos — both now formed by their different experiences of exile — is the novel's complex, qualified conclusion.
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