Chasing Nigeria, in America

Ifemulu and Obinze are seperated by half the world. Ifemulu is a Nigerian living a successful life in America with her black boyfriend. She blogs about the race struggles of the American and frequents intellectual university environments. Obinze lives in Nigeria with his beautiful wife and child, earning money on land deals.

Neither of them are happy.

Ifemulu closes her blog and decides to move back to Nigeria and the memory of Obinze starts to grow strong. They were teenage lovers in Lagos, but Ifemulu left for the United States of America due to the unstable conditions of the university in Nigeria.

Ifemulu and Obinze lose touch and while this sounds like a boy-meets-girl kind of tale, it is more ambitious than this. As Ifemulu moves to the USA we experience the country through her eyes. As someone who also has been an outsider to the USA it was interesting how many observations and experiences that were common – despite her being Nigerian and me being Scandinavian. Much of the book was centered around her experiences, as she leaves Nigeria, she is transformed from a Nigerian into an “African-American”, or a black. All of a sudden Ifemulu is saddled with a skin color and a racial identity she cannot quite identify with.

Parts of Ifemuls blog is interwoven into the story, but it rarely works well. It seems like a contrived way to delve deeper into the racial issues that, in my mind, are much more interesting as told through Ifemulus experiences rather than her pseudo-intellectual reflections.

So while I like the love story and the discovery of America, the racial/immigrant issues were a bit dragged out for me. Especially when Obinze moves to London and becomes an illegal immigrant . Obinze left Nigeria out of boredom and lack of choice, but in Englang he is forced to work under a license of another man. He is fighting for an identity and a struggle for worth in this new society.

But even though he returns to Nigeria he does not re-discover his identity- rather he left it in the dreams that he has a teenager dreamt was America. When Ifemulu returns, so does his America. The story then becomes a story of the creation of ones life. They were happy, enough, without eachother, they found other people to love. If you lose your love, you can always find another partner. We see that falling in love is not limited to “the one”; so what is it that really made them the one for each other?

The book ends right with hints of a happy ending – mainly because a lot of the pain of the main characters is glossed over. In the end they both still chased a dream; Obinze chases America in her and Ifemulu chases Nigeria in him.