Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013

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Chapters 23-26Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3

Chapter 23 Summary

The perspective switches to Obinze, who is living in London. He walks through the streets, feeling invisible, as though he has no purpose. He has lived in London for several years, working illegally under another man’s name. He is in the process of completing a sham marriage to a UK citizen, which will give him citizenship. He remembers first meeting the marriage brokers, Angolan men who demanded large sums of money and introduced him to Cleotilde, a “dewy and fresh” half-Nigerian girl. She agrees to marry him. He applies for a marriage license, and the clerk congratulates him. He thinks back to his final year in university, when General Abacha died. Obinze’s plan was: “to get a postgraduate degree in America, to work in America, to live in America” (287), but he was denied a visa. He searched for jobs in Nigeria but found nothing. His mother, having accepted an invitation to a conference in London, put Obinze on her visa as a research assistant, buying him a six-month visa to the UK. Obinze is shocked that his always honest mother would lie for him. “It went against everything she had taught him, yet he knew the truth had indeed, in their circumstance, become a luxury” (290).

Chapter 24 Summary

In London, Obinze gets a job cleaning toilets, giving a percentage of his earnings to the man he is impersonating, a man allowed to work in England. After a particularly disgusting night’s work, he quits his job. That night, he receives Ifemelu’s apology email and thinks back to her “brutal and complete” (239) silence. Unable to tell her what his life is like and still angry at her betrayal, he deletes the email.

Obinze lives with his cousin Nicholas and his family. As he searches for a new job, he helps care for the two children, who have developed British accents and are carefully cultivated by their parents, playing instruments, participating in spelling bees, and attending the best schools. He notices that the children are indulged by Nigerian standards, and are even allowed to argue with their mother. He listens to Nicholas’ wife and her friends discuss the various types of black British people, which women are most likely to steal your man, and their efforts to make their children successful.

Chapter 25 Summary

Obinze meets up with Emenike, his friend from secondary school. Born into a poor family, Emenike was always class-conscious and ambitious, and has done very well for himself in England. Obinze remembers his struggle to secure a fake ID and work number, and how his friends in London banded together to find him a suitable person to impersonate. Obinze becomes Vincent, and the real Vincent gets a portion of his earnings. “Obinze saw himself through Vincent’s eyes: a university staff child who grew up eating butter and now needed his help” (310).

Chapter 26 Summary

Obinze finds a new job in a detergent warehouse, but is soon let go because of downsizing. He then works as laborer, then as a delivery man. Obinze likes his coworkers at the delivery warehouse, though he does not understand their thick, working-class Cockney accents or their love of pornographic magazines. He strikes up a friendship with Nigel, who shows him around London, pointing out the tourist attractions. Obinze is hurt by the wariness their customers show him, how surprised they are when he is polite and does a good job. Nigel solicits Obinze’s opinion on attracting women, but is disappointed by Obinze’s generic advice. Obinze discovers London’s various ethnic enclaves through his job, accepting tea from an Indian woman and a large tip from a Jamaican woman who calls him “brother” (316).

Chapter 23-26 Analysis

At this point, the perspective switches to Obinze and stays with him for several chapters. Just as Ifemelu struggled with her identity and felt invisible during her early days in America, Obinze has a similar experience in London. However, where Ifemelu is eventually paid under the table and can start using her real name, as she enters into a relationship with Curt and finds a job that gives her a green card, Obinze is not nearly as lucky. Even years into his life in London, his eyes follow after other Londoners, “and he would think: You can work, you are legal, you are visible” (281). Whereas Ifemelu is taken under various wings, Obinze is exploited and used by the people he meets. He pays money to the marriage brokers and to Vincent, the man whose identity card he uses. He is never able to use his real name, and so never gains the foothold in London society the way Ifemelu, through Ginika, Curt, and Kim, is able to.

The reader is also given a sense in these chapters of life in Nigeria after Ifemelu leaves. The country seems to descend into chaos, with “General Buhari’s soldiers flogging adults in the street, lecturers… striking for better pay” (288) and Fanta, Obinze’s favorite drink, no longer available. This social turmoil is mirrored by Obinze’s mother’s decision to lie on Obinze’s visa application. He has known her to be a scrupulously honest person, someone who “would not lie” (290), but she does so for her son. In London, Obinze finds order and stability, though his attempt to get a work permit or marry for citizenship shows the human cost of tight immigration regulations and laws. Other Nigerians that Obinze consorts with complain that London has made all immigrants equal, so that formerly privileged people (like Obinze) are looked on as the same as those from poor families (like Emenike). “‘London is a leveler. We are now all in London and we are now all the same, what nonsense’” (303), one Nigerian says. This is excellent news for a man like Emenike, who is able to remake himself in London, but it is not as useful for Obinze, who grew up a certain class and now finds himself at the bottom of the social ladder, dependent on lower-class Nigerians like Vincent for the right to work.