Americanah

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“You know why Ifemelu can write that blog, by the way?” Shan said. “Because she’s African. She’s writing from the outside. She doesn’t really feel all the stuff she’s writing about. It’s all quaint and curious to her. So she can write it and get all these accolades and get invited to give talks. If she were African American, she’d just be labeled angry and shunned.” The room was, for a moment, swollen in silence. “I think that’s fair enough,” Ifemelu said, disliking Shan, and herself, too, for bending to Shan’s spell. It was true that race was not embroidered in the fabric of her history; it had not been etched on her soul. Still, she wished Shan had said this to her when they were alone, instead of saying it now, so jubilantly, in front of friends, and leaving Ifemelu with an embittered knot, like bereavement, in her chest. “A lot of this is relatively recent. Black and pan-African identities were actually strong in the early nineteenth century. The Cold War forced people to choose, and it was either you became an internationalist, which of course meant communist to Americans, or you became a part of American capitalism, which was the choice the African-American elite made,” Blaine said, as though in Ifemelu’s defense, but she thought it too abstract, too limp, too late. Shan glanced at Ifemelu and smiled and in that smile was the possibility of great cruelty. When, months later, Ifemelu had the fight with Blaine, she wondered if Shan had fueled his anger, an anger she ne...