Americanah (54 page)

“Omar doesn’t touch women to whom he is not related,” Shan said.
“Which is very sexy, no?” And she tilted her head to look up suggestively at Omar.

“This is the beautiful and utterly original Maribelle, and her girlfriend Joan, who is just as beautiful. They make me feel bad!” Shan said, while Maribelle and Joan giggled, smallish white women in dark-framed oversize glasses. They both wore short dresses, one in red polka-dot, the other lace-fringed, with the slightly faded, slightly ill-fitting look of vintage shop finds. It was, in some ways, costume. 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.

“Here’s Bill!” Shan said, hugging the muscular dark man in a fedora. “Bill is a writer but unlike the rest of us, he has oodles of money.” Shan was almost cooing. “Bill has this great idea for a travel book called
Traveling While Black
.”

“I’d love to hear about it,” Ashanti said.

“By the way, Ashanti, girl, I adore your hair,” Shan said.

“Thank you!” Ashanti said. She was a vision in cowries: they rattled from her wrists, were strung through her curled dreadlocks, and looped around her neck. She said “motherland” and “Yoruba religion” often, glancing at Ifemelu as though for confirmation, and it was a parody of Africa that Ifemelu felt uncomfortable about and then felt bad for feeling so uncomfortable.

“You finally have a book cover you like?” Ashanti asked Shan.

“ ‘Like’ is a strong word,” Shan said. “So, everyone, this book is a memoir, right? It’s about tons of stuff, growing up in this all-white town, being the only black kid in my prep school, my mom’s passing, all that stuff. My editor reads the manuscript and says, ‘I understand that race is important here but we have to make sure the book transcends race, so that it’s not just about race. And I’m thinking, But why do I have to transcend race? You know, like race is a brew best served mild, tempered with other liquids, otherwise white folk can’t swallow it.”

“That’s funny,” Blaine said.

“He kept flagging the dialogue in the manuscript and writing on
the margins: ‘Do people actually say this?’ And I’m thinking, Hey, how many black people do you know? I mean know as equals, as friends. I don’t mean the receptionist in the office and maybe the one black couple whose kid goes to your kid’s school and you say hi to. I mean really know know. None. So how are you telling me how black people talk?”

“Not his fault. There aren’t enough middle-class black folks to go around,” Bill said. “Lots of liberal white folks are looking for black friends. It’s almost as hard as finding an egg donor who is a tall blond eighteen-year-old at Harvard.”

They all laughed.

“I wrote this scene about something that happened in grad school, about a Gambian woman I knew. She loved to eat baking chocolate. She always had a pack of baking chocolate in her bag. Anyway, she lived in London and she was in love with this white English guy and he was leaving his wife for her. So we were at a bar and she was telling a few of us about it, me and this other girl, and this guy Peter. Short guy from Wisconsin. And you know what Peter said to her? He said, ‘His wife must feel worse knowing you’re black.’ He said it like it was pretty obvious. Not that the wife would feel bad about another woman, period, but that she would feel bad because the woman was black. So I put it in the book and my editor wants to change it because he says it’s not
subtle
. Like life is always fucking subtle. And then I write about my mom being bitter at work, because she felt she’d hit a ceiling and they wouldn’t let her get further because she was black, and my editor says, ‘Can we have more nuance?’ Did your mom have a bad rapport with someone at work, maybe? Or had she already been diagnosed with cancer? He thinks we should complicate it, so it’s not race alone. And I say, But it
was
race. She was bitter because she thought if everything was the same, except for her race, she would have been made vice president. And she talked about it a lot until she died. But somehow my mom’s experience is suddenly unnuanced. ‘Nuance’ means keep people comfortable so everyone is free to think of themselves as
individuals
and everyone got where they are because of their
achievement
.”

“Maybe you should turn it into a novel,” Maribelle said.

“Are you kidding me?” Shan asked, slightly drunk, slightly dramatic, and now sitting yoga-style on the floor. “You can’t write an
honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it’ll be too
obvious
. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you’re going to write about race, you have to make sure it’s so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn’t read between the lines won’t even know it’s about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy.”

“Or just find a white writer. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn’t threatening,” Grace said.

“What about this recent book
Monk Memoirs
?” Mirabelle said.

“It’s a cowardly, dishonest book. Have you read it?” Shan asked.

“I read a review,” Mirabelle said.

“That’s the problem. You read more about books than you read actual books.”

Maribelle blushed. She would, Ifemelu sensed, take this quietly only from Shan.

“We are very ideological about fiction in this country. If a character is not familiar, then that character becomes unbelievable,” Shan said. “You can’t even read American fiction to get a sense of how actual life is lived these days. You read American fiction to learn about dysfunctional white folk doing things that are weird to normal white folks.”

Everyone laughed. Shan looked delighted, like a little girl showing off her singing to her parents’ eminent friends.

“The world just doesn’t look like this room,” Grace said.

“But it can,” Blaine said. “We prove that the world can be like this room. It can be a safe and equal space for everyone. We just need to dismantle the walls of privilege and oppression.”

“There goes my flower child brother,” Shan said.

There was more laughter.

“You should blog about this, Ifemelu,” Grace said.

“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 never fully understood.

Blaine did not like Boubacar, and perhaps this mattered or perhaps it did not matter in the story of their fight, but Blaine did not like Boubacar and her day began with visiting Boubacar’s class. She and Blaine had met Boubacar at a university-hosted dinner party in his honor, a sable-skinned Senegalese professor who had just moved to the U.S. to teach at Yale. He was blistering in his intelligence and blistering in his self-regard. He sat at the head of the table, drinking red wine and talking drily of French presidents whom he had met, of the French universities that had offered him jobs.

“I came to America because I want to choose my own master,” he said. “If I must have a master, then better America than France. But I will never eat a cookie or go to McDonald’s. How barbaric!”

Ifemelu was charmed and amused by him. She liked his accent, his English drenched in Wolof and French.

“I thought he was great,” she told Blaine later.

“It’s interesting how he says ordinary things and thinks they are pretty deep,” Blaine said.

“He has a bit of an ego, but so did everyone at that table,” Ifemelu said. “Aren’t you Yale people supposed to, before you get hired?”

Blaine did not laugh, as he ordinarily would have. She sensed, in his reaction, a territorial dislike that was foreign to his nature; it surprised her. He would put on a bad French accent and mimic Boubacar. “ ‘Francophone Africans break for coffee, Anglophone Africans break for tea. It is impossible to get real café au lait in this country!’ ”

Perhaps he resented how easily she had drifted to Boubacar that day, after desserts were served, as though to a person who spoke the same silent language as she did. She had teased Boubacar about Francophone
Africans, how battered their minds were by the French and how thin-skinned they had become, too aware of European slights, and yet too enamored of Europeanness. Boubacar laughed, a familial laugh; he would not laugh like that with an American, he would be cutting if an American dared say the same thing. Perhaps Blaine resented this mutuality, something primally African from which he felt excluded. But her feelings for Boubacar were fraternal, free of desire. They met often for tea in Atticus Bookstore and talked—or she listened since he did most of the talking—about West African politics and family and home and she left, always, with the feeling of having been fortified.

BY THE TIME BOUBACAR
told her about the new humanities fellowship at Princeton, she had begun to gaze at her past. A restlessness had taken hold of her. Her doubts about her blog had grown.