Words Wednesday: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
It’s Words Wednesday! Let’s celebrate with a quote by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, one of our favorite contemporary authors.
This Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie quote comes from her most recent novel, Americanah.
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Published in 2013, Americanah follows the lives of Ifemelu and Obinze, a young Nigerian couple who leave military-ruled Nigeria in search of better opportunity. Ifemelu ends up as a renowned blogger who writes about race in America; Obinze struggles as an undocumented immigrant in England. (Ifemelu’s blog, Small Redemptions of Lagos, is actually published on Adichie’s own website, though there are no posts.)
Through the story of Ifemelu and Obinze, their life together and their lives apart, Americanah explores ideas of national, cultural, racial, and personal identities. The novel examines not only how we form our own identity, but how it is formed for us by our circumstances and our environment.
Even though Americanah is “about” the separation and reunion of a Nigerian couple, this classic love story is a backdrop for discussions about race, class, politics, and money in the US, UK, and Nigeria. Writing for The Guardian, Elizabeth Day notes that the novel is “a brilliant dissection of modern attitudes to race, spanning three continents and touching on issues of identity, loss and loneliness.”
As Colum McCann, noted author of Let the Great World Spin, says:
“This is not just a story that unfolds across three different continents, it is also a keenly observed examination of race, identity and belonging in the global landscapes of Africans and Americans.”
Americanah won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Chicago Tribune 2013 Heartland Prize for Fiction. It was also named one of the The New York Times’s Ten Best Books of the Year, as well as an NPR “Great Reads” book. Read more about readers’ reactions to Americanah on Goodreads.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of our favorite recent authors, and on a previous Words Wednesday, we featured her 2006 novel Half of a Yellow Sun.
Americanah quote
“Why did people ask, ‘What is it about?’ as if a novel had to be about only one thing.”
-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie quote from Americanah
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