I think some people need to understand the difference between "promoting" authors who yes, were marginalized in certain industries for a long time, and heaping endless praise on mediocre works. Who does that actually help at the end of the day? If a reader can take a look at this and say "god, this book was a real slog", then what are they to make of hyperbolic praise in the reviews that seem to serve no other purpose than social justice aims? As if the cynicism that currently exists about those aims isn't enough?
"he book taught me more about being Ifemelu than it taught me about being Nigerian, more about being Nigerian than about being African, and more about being African than about being Black, and I wish that the narrative priorities matched that hierarchy"
Really good way to express something that I feel with a lot of modern authors and author-influencers... they have a very specific perspective that's interesting, but an underlying assumption that what they're doing is political and universal (it's not) and another underlying assumption that if they were to just be a well-done representation of a highly idiosyncratic perspective (which is, in fact, what they actually are, and that's a strength), that would be a failure.
I wonder how this book would've gone had it been written after Adichie's brush with cancel culture? Maybe it would be focused a lot more on the love story and a lot less on woke lectures.
From 2013-2016, I was a lot more Woke-friendly and embracing of the various jargon. 2017 was when I first started having qualms about the whole thing.
Blame the audience as much as the author, perhaps. Books, especially literary books, are written by and for a vanishingly small subset of the population - upwardly mobile, status-conscious, affluent, label-obsessed, neurotic, and completely self-centered. Little wonder that a book with a fascinating launching point end up mired in the muck of Lake Me. Little wonder that a book that could be about an immigrant's experience instead becomes about The Immigrant Experience, and why You, the Reader, are Bad. The book's a mirror.
Upfront: I have a serious problem with what is considered literary fiction; I have very little respect for it, for many reasons. I am a very successful writer; I know the craft. Still, for the most part I hate the literary world and its pretensions. I believe that for every student who found wonder in Moby Dick, a thousand others learned to hate reading from being forced to read it (or any of its brethren). The books I was forced to read in middle and high school almost drove me to give up reading entirely. The only reason they did not is that there are other forms of story out there, the poor relations of the literary world, looked down upon, patronized, and denigrated. Continually.
I have read since, well, i could read. I read anything, from milk cartons to the ingredients list on ketchup bottles. But what really kindled my interest in the written word was adventure stories. And I think (believe) that the literary world's focus on "meaningfulness" has killed their ability to tell stories. They have forgotten that inside most people there is a little child who just wants to curl up beside their mother or grandfather and hear a story. One that is embracing and warm and which enfolds them in, well, story. I have made my living as a writer by telling stories in just that way. Because i love it, because i have respect for my readers, because i believe that the craft is sacred, that something has been passed down to those of us who now write and that in our turn it must be passed on to new generations, to every child that has stayed up late, flashlight on, under the covers, reading until late in the night.
I remember a literary review i read once, in either the NY review of books or the LRB, about the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The reviewer, a literary writer, was embarrassed that she continually got caught up in the story. Finally she said that Tolkien had cheated. His backstory was so deep and comprehensive that it seemed real and so tricked the reader into believing it. He was cheating because no real writer has the time to create that kind of backstory. What she failed to understand is that Tolkien did more to get children to read than she would if she lived a million years. As Elif Batuman once put it (from memory), "Never in the history of writing have so many well written books been published that no one in their right mind would ever want to read." Her article, Get a Real Degree, was a take down of the MFA programs proliferating like weeds in the US education system.
To be clear: I love Freddie's work and writing (which is why i subscribe). But on this point, i have to disagree, and strongly so. When I have taught I have given people books that are stories, not literary works. Stephen King pulled more people into writing than Maya Angelou ever did. Graphic novels have as well. Science fiction (most of which is suffering from a bad case of literary envy these days) did for a time, and fantasy still does. Dick Francis, though not lauded for it in the literary world, could bring to life the essence of a character in just a few sentences better than any literary writer I have ever tried to read. These are the kinds of books i suggested to people and it pulled them in. If some of them then went on and found something in the literary world that moved them, good. Most did not, they stayed with what they loved. Stories that reminded them of the best in people, of the good, of the struggles they themselves go through, and let them know that in the end, they could endure and survive if they only let the best in them come out. While this may seem like the description of a literary novel. it is not. In the literary world, they don't consider it real unless some existential despair is present as essential to the experience of life. They believe that wonder and joy and simple love of story is naive and unsophisticated. Well, then let us all be unsophisticated. the world would be a better place for it.
Richard Curtis, the man who wrote Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral summed it all up very well: "If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it's called searingly realistic, even though it's never happened in the history of mankind. Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you're accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental." That sums up the mindset of the literary world. It has not done any of us any good. Quite the contrary.
Give the children stories that children can love. Maybe later, when they are 40 they will then read Moby Dick and find something in it they or their soul needs that day of all days. But at 16, no. It is just an overlong and rather boring story about whales and this weird guy who dies in the end. What is the fun in that?
I read Americanah for a book club several years ago and liked it very much. It also made for a great book club discussion. But I remember thinking that it read more like a memoire than fiction and I wondered how much was autobiographical. I also didn't read the blog parts as ironic or the author making fun of herself, though this is entirely possible. I found the lecture-y parts of the book interesting, but agree with Freddie that it takes you out of the story in a lot of ways, which is part of what made if feel like a memoire rather than fiction. I'm not on social media a lot so when I read the book, I also wasn't inundated with wokeness and culture wars. These days you can't get away from wokeness and I probably would have less patience for the lectures now than I did when I read it originally (2015 or 2016).
I contrast "Americanah" with "A Place For Us," by Mirza (which I adored). The latter is also an immigrant story, but it reads as both a unique story about the challenges of being an immigrant family in this country, but also as a universal story in the way that family can inadvertently be toxic to members of that family, while only wanting the best for those individuals. And that is what Americanah is missing; it's an interesting story, and Adichie writes well, but as Freddie points out, it reads as an individual's story rather than a universal story (again feeling more like a memoire).
Hey Freddie! Forgive me if this comes across as trite, as this is a genuine question that I’ve sat on for a while now (and have not waded through endless comments sections in search of an answer since subscribing), and I hopefully my questions ties into elements of this post in a convincing way, but I digress.
Is there a particular reason you capitalize the b in black but not the w in white? Given what I understand of your particular ideological orientation towards politics, culture, and identity, I find it quite interesting that you do this.
Perhaps this is simply due to my own perspective on such issues, and it is not actually all that interesting, but. Since you state that your identity confers a function of privilege as a result of your race and gender, I find it odd that you do not ascribe the implication of being white as being White with the same consistency as you do with being black as being Black. The inconsistency of this essentialization of ethnic categorization strikes me as misaligned with your politics, especially given that you have a critical eye for when you comment on the use of blackness as an identity; as you do within the work of Adichie here as an example.
Again, forgive me if this ground is too trodden or if you’ve gotten flack on this too many times under poor pretense. It is just something I have noticed while enjoying your writing on topics such as “Anti-Racism is an Inter-White Struggle” and the consumption of rap music, wherein you link the possession of a white identity (whether socially ascribed or otherwise essentially read as such, given our current social fixations on ethnicity groupings) as being inherent to the cultural and financial success of rap due to the dominance of a politicized white identity and its consumption of a politicized black art form-as-identity, and how that affected rap’s status as a language of rebellion.
As an aside - being a degree-laden musician myself, I am deeply interested in the analysis of political messaging and the spaces of political dialogue that are opened via musical performances for communities to discuss said topics through. Although I disagree that rap, in terms of politics and rebellion, was necessarily just a plaything for white people to consume and assimilate into a broader “white culture” at the time, I find the inherent essentialization of “rap-as-black” and the stereotyping of “white culture” in that example to be of the same form as the assumptions being made by essentializing blackness or whiteness as an ethnic grouping and identity-in-itself in this post. Perhaps you are simply speaking to the realities of how these ethnic groupings have been enforced on a larger societal scale consistency for a while now, but I can’t quite tell given your stance on self-perception and assumptions of racialized ethnicity groupings and their cultural output.
(My convenient tie in for having brought up the other article is the Clinton connection between his Sister Souljah Moment and Toni Morrison’s perception that Clinton was treated as a black person for his scandal. Curious how he could embody both positions at once!)
Really love your literary criticism, and of a book I have not had the pleasure of reading (yet). Suggestion:
Does it make sense to provide short excerpts to illustrate the point s you make? For instance, it could be helpful to see an example on your comment that the the first half of the book being engaging while the 2nd half a bit less.
Also this would help to understand your thinking.
Excellent critique, I'll likely end up reading this book.
I think some people need to understand the difference between "promoting" authors who yes, were marginalized in certain industries for a long time, and heaping endless praise on mediocre works. Who does that actually help at the end of the day? If a reader can take a look at this and say "god, this book was a real slog", then what are they to make of hyperbolic praise in the reviews that seem to serve no other purpose than social justice aims? As if the cynicism that currently exists about those aims isn't enough?
It's just baffling to me.
"he book taught me more about being Ifemelu than it taught me about being Nigerian, more about being Nigerian than about being African, and more about being African than about being Black, and I wish that the narrative priorities matched that hierarchy"
Really good way to express something that I feel with a lot of modern authors and author-influencers... they have a very specific perspective that's interesting, but an underlying assumption that what they're doing is political and universal (it's not) and another underlying assumption that if they were to just be a well-done representation of a highly idiosyncratic perspective (which is, in fact, what they actually are, and that's a strength), that would be a failure.
It’s like they say. Race & gender are really the least interesting things about most people.
Re the cancel culture essay, it's still there -- https://www.chimamanda.com/news_items/it-is-obscene-a-true-reflection-in-three-parts/
I wonder how this book would've gone had it been written after Adichie's brush with cancel culture? Maybe it would be focused a lot more on the love story and a lot less on woke lectures.
From 2013-2016, I was a lot more Woke-friendly and embracing of the various jargon. 2017 was when I first started having qualms about the whole thing.
Blame the audience as much as the author, perhaps. Books, especially literary books, are written by and for a vanishingly small subset of the population - upwardly mobile, status-conscious, affluent, label-obsessed, neurotic, and completely self-centered. Little wonder that a book with a fascinating launching point end up mired in the muck of Lake Me. Little wonder that a book that could be about an immigrant's experience instead becomes about The Immigrant Experience, and why You, the Reader, are Bad. The book's a mirror.
Upfront: I have a serious problem with what is considered literary fiction; I have very little respect for it, for many reasons. I am a very successful writer; I know the craft. Still, for the most part I hate the literary world and its pretensions. I believe that for every student who found wonder in Moby Dick, a thousand others learned to hate reading from being forced to read it (or any of its brethren). The books I was forced to read in middle and high school almost drove me to give up reading entirely. The only reason they did not is that there are other forms of story out there, the poor relations of the literary world, looked down upon, patronized, and denigrated. Continually.
I have read since, well, i could read. I read anything, from milk cartons to the ingredients list on ketchup bottles. But what really kindled my interest in the written word was adventure stories. And I think (believe) that the literary world's focus on "meaningfulness" has killed their ability to tell stories. They have forgotten that inside most people there is a little child who just wants to curl up beside their mother or grandfather and hear a story. One that is embracing and warm and which enfolds them in, well, story. I have made my living as a writer by telling stories in just that way. Because i love it, because i have respect for my readers, because i believe that the craft is sacred, that something has been passed down to those of us who now write and that in our turn it must be passed on to new generations, to every child that has stayed up late, flashlight on, under the covers, reading until late in the night.
I remember a literary review i read once, in either the NY review of books or the LRB, about the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The reviewer, a literary writer, was embarrassed that she continually got caught up in the story. Finally she said that Tolkien had cheated. His backstory was so deep and comprehensive that it seemed real and so tricked the reader into believing it. He was cheating because no real writer has the time to create that kind of backstory. What she failed to understand is that Tolkien did more to get children to read than she would if she lived a million years. As Elif Batuman once put it (from memory), "Never in the history of writing have so many well written books been published that no one in their right mind would ever want to read." Her article, Get a Real Degree, was a take down of the MFA programs proliferating like weeds in the US education system.
To be clear: I love Freddie's work and writing (which is why i subscribe). But on this point, i have to disagree, and strongly so. When I have taught I have given people books that are stories, not literary works. Stephen King pulled more people into writing than Maya Angelou ever did. Graphic novels have as well. Science fiction (most of which is suffering from a bad case of literary envy these days) did for a time, and fantasy still does. Dick Francis, though not lauded for it in the literary world, could bring to life the essence of a character in just a few sentences better than any literary writer I have ever tried to read. These are the kinds of books i suggested to people and it pulled them in. If some of them then went on and found something in the literary world that moved them, good. Most did not, they stayed with what they loved. Stories that reminded them of the best in people, of the good, of the struggles they themselves go through, and let them know that in the end, they could endure and survive if they only let the best in them come out. While this may seem like the description of a literary novel. it is not. In the literary world, they don't consider it real unless some existential despair is present as essential to the experience of life. They believe that wonder and joy and simple love of story is naive and unsophisticated. Well, then let us all be unsophisticated. the world would be a better place for it.
Richard Curtis, the man who wrote Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral summed it all up very well: "If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it's called searingly realistic, even though it's never happened in the history of mankind. Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you're accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental." That sums up the mindset of the literary world. It has not done any of us any good. Quite the contrary.
Give the children stories that children can love. Maybe later, when they are 40 they will then read Moby Dick and find something in it they or their soul needs that day of all days. But at 16, no. It is just an overlong and rather boring story about whales and this weird guy who dies in the end. What is the fun in that?
I read Americanah for a book club several years ago and liked it very much. It also made for a great book club discussion. But I remember thinking that it read more like a memoire than fiction and I wondered how much was autobiographical. I also didn't read the blog parts as ironic or the author making fun of herself, though this is entirely possible. I found the lecture-y parts of the book interesting, but agree with Freddie that it takes you out of the story in a lot of ways, which is part of what made if feel like a memoire rather than fiction. I'm not on social media a lot so when I read the book, I also wasn't inundated with wokeness and culture wars. These days you can't get away from wokeness and I probably would have less patience for the lectures now than I did when I read it originally (2015 or 2016).
I contrast "Americanah" with "A Place For Us," by Mirza (which I adored). The latter is also an immigrant story, but it reads as both a unique story about the challenges of being an immigrant family in this country, but also as a universal story in the way that family can inadvertently be toxic to members of that family, while only wanting the best for those individuals. And that is what Americanah is missing; it's an interesting story, and Adichie writes well, but as Freddie points out, it reads as an individual's story rather than a universal story (again feeling more like a memoire).
Hey Freddie! Forgive me if this comes across as trite, as this is a genuine question that I’ve sat on for a while now (and have not waded through endless comments sections in search of an answer since subscribing), and I hopefully my questions ties into elements of this post in a convincing way, but I digress.
Is there a particular reason you capitalize the b in black but not the w in white? Given what I understand of your particular ideological orientation towards politics, culture, and identity, I find it quite interesting that you do this.
Perhaps this is simply due to my own perspective on such issues, and it is not actually all that interesting, but. Since you state that your identity confers a function of privilege as a result of your race and gender, I find it odd that you do not ascribe the implication of being white as being White with the same consistency as you do with being black as being Black. The inconsistency of this essentialization of ethnic categorization strikes me as misaligned with your politics, especially given that you have a critical eye for when you comment on the use of blackness as an identity; as you do within the work of Adichie here as an example.
Again, forgive me if this ground is too trodden or if you’ve gotten flack on this too many times under poor pretense. It is just something I have noticed while enjoying your writing on topics such as “Anti-Racism is an Inter-White Struggle” and the consumption of rap music, wherein you link the possession of a white identity (whether socially ascribed or otherwise essentially read as such, given our current social fixations on ethnicity groupings) as being inherent to the cultural and financial success of rap due to the dominance of a politicized white identity and its consumption of a politicized black art form-as-identity, and how that affected rap’s status as a language of rebellion.
As an aside - being a degree-laden musician myself, I am deeply interested in the analysis of political messaging and the spaces of political dialogue that are opened via musical performances for communities to discuss said topics through. Although I disagree that rap, in terms of politics and rebellion, was necessarily just a plaything for white people to consume and assimilate into a broader “white culture” at the time, I find the inherent essentialization of “rap-as-black” and the stereotyping of “white culture” in that example to be of the same form as the assumptions being made by essentializing blackness or whiteness as an ethnic grouping and identity-in-itself in this post. Perhaps you are simply speaking to the realities of how these ethnic groupings have been enforced on a larger societal scale consistency for a while now, but I can’t quite tell given your stance on self-perception and assumptions of racialized ethnicity groupings and their cultural output.
(My convenient tie in for having brought up the other article is the Clinton connection between his Sister Souljah Moment and Toni Morrison’s perception that Clinton was treated as a black person for his scandal. Curious how he could embody both positions at once!)
Really love your literary criticism, and of a book I have not had the pleasure of reading (yet). Suggestion:
Does it make sense to provide short excerpts to illustrate the point s you make? For instance, it could be helpful to see an example on your comment that the the first half of the book being engaging while the 2nd half a bit less.
Also this would help to understand your thinking.
Excellent critique, I'll likely end up reading this book.