Detailed plot synopsis reviews of Americanah |
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Ifem is angry when she is told that if she wants a job, she has to unbraid her hair and make it look like "white lady hair". Ifem is angry that she has moved to another country and feels it is unfair to conform to the other country's culture. Why should not the entire world accommodate her wishes instead? What a stuck up bitch.
Ifem gets a job but moans about her normal looking hair and complains she doesn't recognize herself. She eventually cuts it all off except for about two inches and then makes the two inches look really wild. When her coworkers see her new hair they ask if she is becoming a lesbian, but Ifem is just asserting her African identity.
Ifem believes in taking thorough showers. Her mother taught her to rub her v_gina thoroughly with a loofah, and one time she rubbed it so hard she couldn't walk properly for several days.
Click here to see the rest of this reviewAfter quitting her job, Ifem has trouble finding a new one and can't pay her bills. She meets a guy who will pay her $100 to help him "relax". She agrees to do it but warns him she isn't having sex with him. He agrees. Then they have sex.
The guy puts a finger in Ifem's v_gina and has her rub his p_nis until he's relaxed (after briefly getting very, very excited, heh heh). Then he pays Ifem the $100 he promised like she's a whore.
Ifem is very upset she rubbed that guy's p_nis for $100 and has a nervous breakdown. She stops communicating with Obinze via email. (She left Obinze, the love of her life, behind in Nigeria, by the way.)
Her friend gets Ifem a job as a babysitter. She cares for two bratty kids. Through their moms, Ifem meets a lot of White liberals who tell her how great it is to go on safari in Africa and how they give money to charities that help poor people in Africa. This offends Ifemelu. She has such a chip on her shoulder that she is offended by white liberals saying they want to help Africa. Auntie Uju finds racism under every rock too. She says that lipstick in America is too light colored for black people. It's as if lipstick is made for Americans, most of whom are white, not Africans. What racism!
Uju complains that Dike's teachers complain he is aggressive in school. Since Dike is black it must also be racism, there can be no other explanation.
Ifemelu gets a white boyfriend named Curt. She almost breaks up with him because he emailed a sexy girl, but she forgave him. Later, she would cheat on Curt in order to get him to break up with her. That was her passive-aggressive way of ending the relationship; she let another guy she didn't care about bone her, and immediately ran to tell Curt, hoping he would end their relationship.
Meanwhile, back in Nigeria, Obinze has lost contact with Ifemelu. She had promised to keep in touch but after masturbating the white guy for $100 she stopped responding to his emails. So Obinze decided to get out of Nigeria and he goes to England.
But he has trouble there when the time on his visa expires so he pays 2000 pounds to enter into a sham marriage with a local woman! And he gets a fraudulent national ID but has to pay the seller 35% of his salary!
And his first job is cleaning toilets! Obinze notices that a fellow toilet cleaner is a beautiful woman from Ghana, but she will not talk to him. Instead the Ghana lady toilet cleaner associates with yet another toilet cleaner who is white! Evidently even among toilet cleaners there is a social pecking order!
Obinze didn't mind mopping up the urine. He didn't even mind flushing the toilets that still had dooty in them. He knew in Nigeria that public bathrooms routinely had shit smeared all over the walls. Yes, that is what bathrooms are like in Nigeria, according to this book.
