Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah, and Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City

Sometimes our most beloved books give us a sense of wonder, of escape to another world. But often our favorite books are those we count on to be honest with us. They sharpen up what we almost knew, but couldn’t quite name, and give voice, details, and presence to the questions we most need to understand. In both Americanah and The Four-Gated City, the protagonist is an immigrant, and so sees the society she’s in with a clearer perception, in many ways, than those born into its atmosphere and expectations. The passages here give us the pleasure of watching a couple of the most accomplished writers in history deeply explore what it means to have power, how people use their power in everyday life, how they conceive of their own lives, and what they will do for their children.

Americanah

Ifemelu has, for the moment, left Nigeria for a sterile, muted Princeton. She has to survive in and understand the post 9/11 U.S., which she does so well that she becomes the author of a brilliant, anonymous blog (Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black). Along the way, though, she has serious trouble with money and struggles to find a job. One day, a friend sets her up for an interview for a babysitting job, in “a house that announced its wealth, the stone exterior solid and overbearing, four white pillars rising portentously at the entrance.” Kimberly, slim and golden and effusive, says to Ifemelu, “What a beautiful name…Does it mean anything? I love multicultural names because they have such wonderful meanings, from wonderful rich cultures.” After some talk about Africa and the U.S., she offers her prospective employee a tour of the property.

“Let me show you the house, Ifemelu,” Kimberly said. “Did I say it right?”

They walked from room to room—the daughter’s room with pink walls and a frilly bedcover, the son’s room with a set of drums, the den with a piano, its polished wooden top crowded with family photographs.

“We took that in India,” Kimberly said. They were standing by an empty rickshaw, wearing T-shirts, Kimberly with her golden hair tied back, her tall and lean husband, her small blond son and older red-haired daughter, all holding water bottles and smiling. They were always smiling in the photos they took, while sailing and hiking and visiting tourist spots, holding each other, all easy limbs and white teeth. They reminded Ifemelu of television commercials, of people whose lives were lived always in flattering light, whose messes were still aesthetically pleasing.

“Some of the people we met had nothing, absolutely nothing, but they were so happy,” Kimberly said. She extracted a photograph from the crowded back of the piano, of her daughter with two Indian women, their skin dark and weathered, their smiles showing missing teeth. “These women were so wonderful,” she said.

Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor.

Kimberly’s eager, ingenuous efforts to be good and also to appear good are deeply squirm-inducing: her romanticizing of the poor, her family’s self-mythologizing (as in those photographs like “television commercials”), her earnest efforts to win over her prospective employee.

But she’s not unteachable: in a flash-forward that comes in an earlier part of this extended scene, Kimberly has been referring over time to different women as “beautiful,” and “always, the women she referred to would turn out to be quite ordinary-looking, but always black.” Finally, Ifemelu says to her, “‘You know, you can just say “black.” Not every black person is beautiful.’” Adichie writes, “Kimberly was taken aback, something wordless spread on her face and then she smiled, and Ifemelu would think of it as the moment they became, truly, friends.”

So there’s compassion in the way Ifemelu allows Kimberly to learn, in the way Adichie allows her character to accept a useful correction without defensiveness or overwhelming shame, and even with some humor. Kimberly has power and privilege, and she knows it, but she doesn’t know what to do about it: she appreciates Ifemelu’s teaching. The passage, like the book, is both satirical and painfully accurate. In some places the description potentially, deliberately goes slightly over the top. This sentence is perhaps 95% dead-on and 5% entertaining/agonizing hyperbole: “I love multicultural names because they have such wonderful meanings, from wonderful rich cultures.” Possibly she would say either the bit about the meanings or about the cultures: it’s the piling on that makes it both funny and excruciating.

Ifemelu finds herself a teacher in her new country, via her blog and her interactions with the people she meets along the way. Though she learns as she goes (oh, and there’s also a romance plot, which I would go into much more if this were a review rather than an MPP entry…), this book is not a bildungsroman. It’s a teaching plot more than a learning plot. Our protagonist makes her way through the world and is always learning, yes, and sometimes in bad trouble, but at the same time, she’s waking up everyone around her to what they most need to know.

The Four-Gated City

When I started the MPP, I thought I’d be writing almost at once about Doris Lessing, the brilliant, expository, insightful, political-to-the-bone presiding spirit of my youthful writing. After a few false starts over these past months, though, I finally realized that her urgent, transparent, impatient prose reveals something different when it’s in conversation with Adichie’s own version of brilliant, sharp-edged, insightful, political-to-the-bone storytelling.

In the final (stand-alone) book of Lessing’s Children of Violence five-part series, Martha Quest, Matty—a passionate Communist and practical idealist—moves from the former Rhodesia to England, where she winds up as an employee entwined in the life of an upper-class household torn by personal and political tragedies and grappling with mental illness. There she explores new levels of consciousness, psychological and societal. Like Ifemelu, she sees what they don’t. And she’s shocked when Mark, her employer (who becomes her friend and occasional lover), decides to send his son to public school (in U.S. terms, private school):

To his back Martha cried out: “But, Mark, what sort of logic or common sense is it! Let alone any decent ordinary humanity! You say you are pleased you weren’t sent to a public school, you say being sent to America was the best thing that happened to you-you carry on about the upper classes like a socialist in Hyde Park-and now you are sending Francis through that mill. What for? “

His back still turned, he said: “‘They have some kind of a strength. I haven’t got it. I want him to have it.”

“‘What strength? Who has it?”

“Oh … some of them. Oh I dare say it’s a kind of narrowness. They’re blinkered. If you like. But it is strength. One’s got to have something.”

His dead brother (and Mark was the last person, as his writing proved, to see a death in war as arbitrary, unconnected with what a person was), had been, when war broke out, on the point of throwing up his job, or jobs, as chairman of companies, to go farming in Kenya. Hardly an evidence of unconformity to his own type, but his reason for wanting to do this was that England was no longer a place to bring children up in, people cared for nothing but making money. The second brother was Colin. Then Mark. Then Arthur, left-winger and regarded by the Coldridge family as not much better than a street agitator.

“Well, all right then,” said Mark. His back was still firmly turned to her. “Take Arthur. He talks red revolution all right. But put him beside that Communist Party scum and you see the difference.”

“What scum?”

“I wouldn’t trust that lot farther than I could kick them. But Arthur—well, if he says a thing, you know that’s it. You understand? You can trust him.”

And now Martha could not reply: he was saying that Arthur was a gentleman.

Where Ifemelu is in a position to teach Kimberly something, Martha is stuck when it comes to Mark. He feels he’s been damaged in some way by his knowledge of the world, by his painful awareness of what it means for him to have class privilege, by his having missed out on the narrowing education his brothers had. At the same time, he’s entangled in the deep conviction that working-class people are “Communist Party scum” about whom he feels “I wouldn’t trust that lot farther than I could kick them.” He’s been, in many ways, appealing in his damage up to now, which is partially why Martha’s so appalled.

And while Kimberly is trying to open up the world for her children as best she can, Mark wants to protect his son by hiding him behind the walls of traditional upper-class schooling. It’s not a satirical approach, but flat-out upsetting. As a reader, I hate what I’m seeing about Mark, though Lessing continues to present him as complex and often sympathetic. And narratively, this moment is quite urgent. Lessing shows us a powerful man who understands his own position and is willing to betray his deepest values to keep his son inside the system that will protect his privilege. And it shows us Martha’s fear for Mark’s son Francis, who is very dear, and currently at a “sensible, humane day school.”

I first read The Four-Gated City, in my teens and then reread and reread it (along with most of Lessing’s other books). And I read Americanah when it came out and admired it but wasn’t as instantly wild for it as I had been for Adichie’s epic war story, Half of  A Yellow Sun. Americanah made me look into some areas that were deeply uncomfortable. But I taught it, taught it again, wrote about it, and discovered that I had fallen deeply in literary love with this book, that I wanted to hand it anyone and everyone, including strangers on the street.

Writing instructors have been using some of these MPP entries in class, and I’m really glad about this. Because Adichie and Lessing, for example, are as foundational as any writer who lived in the 19th or 20th centuries, and though I love many older authors as well (of course!), we need contemporary voices as part of the fundamental conversations in writing, reading, and teaching. Certain power structures cannot be perceived as clearly from within. Adichie and Lessing give us a felt way to understand exactly what this means in practice.