We Should All Be Activists.

This, right here, is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, giving her TedTalk "We Should All Be Feminists". 

Now, this will undoubtedly make me sound super cool (sarcasm), but I've always loved TedTalks: I can probably recite all of Sarah Kay's "If I Should Have a Daughter" from memory. So, I first watched "We Should All Be Feminists" and "The Danger of a Single Story" in middle school, and upon reading Americanah, I can see that Adichie's nuance extends beyond the public speaking sphere. 

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"Why did people ask, 'what is it about?', as if a novel had to be about only one thing." (Adichie)

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Reading Americanah, I would argue that the theme is that perhaps there is no theme. 

1. Education: This book tackles the question "what IS an education?" in a myriad of ways: Ifem compares the education she received in America to the one she had in Nigeria and compares the real-life experience education to Princeton/classroom education. There is even a moment where she compares her parents to Obinze's mother, commenting on how pseudo-education and "big words" seem tacky next to true intellectual thinking. 

2. Class: Ifem's thoughts on classism almost become intertwined with her thoughts about racism in America; while in Nigeria, she was simply poorer because she "didn't know what it meant" to be "on your mother's passport", whereas in America, her blackness made her poor regardless of how much money she made. She talks about how, in America, the headlines often read "blacks and poor whites", as though the 'poor' was the unwritten but implied adjective in front of 'black'. 

3. Racism: There's a scene in Americanah where Ifem is listening in on a conversation about charity and celebrities. She comments on how, "There was a certain luxury to charity that she could not identify with and did not have." In recent years, the ideas of white saviorism and racist charity has become increasingly prevalent, but I've noticed that it remains a topic that white authors/people tiptoe around. 

We read The Help in freshman year, which pointed out a bitter irony-- the white women post-Civil War would dedicate their lives to help the "Poor Starving Children of Africa", found organizations and host galas twice a month where they showed pictures of malnourished African children, then fail to help the African American family that sits in their kitchen everyday. Somehow, while participating in this white saviourism charity, these white women stopped seeing how the very problems they hope to solve in Africa exist among the black Americans they know. Americanah introduces the opposite of this type of racism-- Laura mentions how the African-American women she knows have "all these issues" in comparison to the Ugandan woman she met. Here, we see how Americans seem unable to distinguish between black Nigerians, Ugandans, Caribbeans, and Americans, even though to others, like Ifem, it's glaringly obvious when a cab driver is from Nigeria, and when he isn't. 

We're in this weird limbo state; it's the early 2000s, making it too awkward to be outwardly racist or say the N-word. However, racist ideology is still baked into our culture, and it forces its way into the corners of every conversation; even positive words, like "beautiful", start to sound a lot like racism when only used to describe black women. As non-American Blacks grapple with the reconciliation of the two halves of their identities, they must also face a world which is uncertain of what box to put them in.  

4. Sexism: Finally, although done subtly, Ifem's experiences scream sexism; the entire story takes place in a hair salon, which is obviously significant for black women. Additionally, we see Obinze's wife obsessed with preventing Obinze from cheating, instead of realizing that Obinze is an adult who is responsible for his own actions. Obinze's mother tells Ifem that if she gets pregnant, it will become her responsibility, not his. Even the overt oversexualization of black women in America is incredibly relevant and accurate to today's atmosphere. 

So unlike Adichie's Ted Talk, which tells us that we should all be feminists, Americanah entangles dozens of movements and minorities to scream that we should all be activists.