[the dinner party guests] 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. 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. [p. 341]
The novel opens with Ifemelu getting her braids redone: she's going home to Nigeria after fifteen years in America, where she's gone from being broke and depressed to becoming a Fellow at Princeton. She's the author of a popular blog, 'Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black' (excerpts from which are peppered through the novel) and a perceptive observer of racism and Black culture in America. But now she's going home, to a country where race isn't an issue.
The other strand of the novel is the life of Ifemelu's teenage sweetheart, Obinze. Now a successful businessman and married with children, he too emigrated -- to England, where he worked illegally and, despite arranging a fake marriage, was eventually deported.
The novel focuses more on Ifemelu's experiences than on Obinze's, but Adichie (like her characters) is attuned to the subtle shadings of racism and the various ways in which it manifests. I found her vignettes of Black life in America and in England diamond-clear and razor-sharp: the depiction of Lagos life, with its political corruption and unreliable electricity, its sense of the best years being ahead rather than behind, was vivid and emotive. It took me a while to get into this novel, but once I was in I loved it -- and it clarified, for me, some of the differences between the US and the UK treatment of black and brown people.
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. [p. 539]
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