More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Sometimes she worried that she was too happy. She would sink into moodiness, and snap at Obinze, or be distant.
“How can I just be myself? What does that even mean?”
“If anything happens between you and Obinze, you are both responsible. But Nature is unfair to women. An act is done by two people, but if there are any consequences, one person carries it alone. Do you understand me?”
The problem is you think everyone is like you. You think you’re the norm but you’re not.”
Kimberly’s unhappiness was inward, unacknowledged, shielded by her desire for things to be as they should, and also by hope: she believed in other people’s happiness because it meant that she, too, might one day have it. Laura’s unhappiness was different, spiky, she wished that everyone around her were unhappy because she had convinced herself that she would always be.
Ifemelu wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be from the country of people who gave and not those who received, to be one of those who had and could therefore bask in the grace of having given, to be among those who could afford copious pity and empathy.
In America, tribalism is alive and well. There are four kinds—class, ideology, region, and race. First, class. Pretty easy. Rich folk and poor folk. Second, ideology. Liberals and conservatives. They don’t merely disagree on political issues, each side believes the other is evil. Intermarriage is discouraged and on the rare occasion that it happens, is considered remarkable. Third, region. The North and the South. The two sides fought a civil war and tough stains from that war remain. The North looks down on the South while the South resents the North. Finally, race. There’s a ladder of racial
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
So if everyone in America aspires to be WASPs, then what do WASPs aspire to? Does anyone know?
There was something in him, lighter than ego but darker than insecurity, that needed constant buffing, polishing, waxing.
Why Dark-Skinned Black Women—Both American and Non-American—Love Barack Obama
To My Fellow Non-American Blacks: In America, You Are Black, Baby
There were people who were born with an inability to be tangled up in dark emotions, in complications, and Iloba was one of them. For such people, Obinze felt both admiration and boredom.
that is because countries in Europe were based on exclusion and not, as in America, on inclusion,”
“European countries are surrounded by countries that are similar to one another, while America has Mexico, which is really a developing country, and so it creates a different psychology about immigration and borders.”
“It seemed to me that in America blacks and whites work together but don’t play together, and here blacks and whites play together but don’t work together,” Emenike said.
“A white boy and a black girl who grow up in the same working-class town in this country can get together and race will be secondary, but in America, even if the white boy and black girl grow up in the same neighborhood, race would be primary.”
Obinze on being black in the UK vs US
all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness.
When actually the “choicelessness” of the population of former European colonies might very well just be a product of such period, and as such it might make sense to take some responsibility (by which I would mean more fluxes of ppl)
They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty.
That word made Obinze feel inanimate. A thing to be removed. A thing without breath and mind. A thing.
She would not understand his story, why he was now walking through the airport with metal clamped around his wrists, because people like her did not approach travel with anxiety about visas.
On the alienation of nationals towards illegal migration
“I think you are a self-sabotager,” Ginika said. “That’s why you cut off Obinze like that. And now you cheat on Curt because at some level you don’t think you deserve happiness.”
There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach.
One of my favourite things about Ifem. I feel that is somehow relatable
I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say,
...more
One of the key takeaways this book allowed me to realise
So is it me or is that the perfect metaphor for race in America right there? Hair. Ever notice makeover shows on TV, how the black woman has natural hair (coarse, coily, kinky, or curly) in the ugly “before” picture, and in the pretty “after” picture, somebody’s taken a hot piece of metal and singed her hair straight? Some black women, AB and NAB, would rather run naked in the street than come out in public with their natural hair. Because, you see, it’s not professional, sophisticated, whatever, it’s just not damn normal. (Please, commenters, don’t tell me it’s the same as a white woman who
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Hair as a metaphor
The point of diversity workshops, or multicultural talks, was not to inspire any real change but to leave people feeling good about themselves.
Race washing?
were they serious, these people who were so enraged about imported vegetables that ripened in trucks? They wanted to stop child labor in Africa. They would not buy clothes made by underpaid workers in Asia. They looked at the world with an impractical, luminous earnestness that moved her, but never convinced her.
as she added that academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.
“Michael’s a good cat but he tries so hard to keep it real that he can seem full of negativity,”
Relatable?
So after this listing of don’ts, what’s the do? I’m not sure. Try listening, maybe. Hear what is being said. And remember that it’s not about you. American Blacks are not telling you that you are to blame. They are just telling you what is. If you don’t understand, ask questions. If you’re uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It’s easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard.
Interactions with american blacks as a non-black
They ticked the boxes of a certain kind of enlightened, educated middle-classness, the love of dresses that were more interesting than pretty, the love of the eclectic, the love of what they were supposed to love. Ifemelu imagined them when they traveled: they would collect unusual things and fill their homes with them, unpolished evidence of their polish.
“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.”
But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past.”
She marveled at what an intense, careful listener he was. He remembered everything she told him. She had never had this before, to be listened to, to be truly heard, and so he became newly precious; each time he said bye at the end of a telephone call, she felt a sinking panic. It was truly absurd.
