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Setting
Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... read full definition
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Like Cotton Candy:
This example of simile from Chapter 1 brings books and food together. While struggling to finish the novel that Blaine had recommended to her, Ifemelu likens the book to cotton candy:
She had read many of them, because he recommended them, but they were like cotton candy that so easily evaporated from her tongue’s memory. She closed the novel; it was too hot to concentrate. She ate some melted chocolate, sent Dike a text to call her when he was finished with basketball practice, and fanned herself.
The comparison translates intellectual tastes into culinary ones. It showcases the playfulness of Ifemelu’s imagination while commenting on modern, highbrow literary trends. Blaine’s preferred works are stylized, weighty, and dexterous almost to a fault. With hardly a blemish, they instead feel flimsy and insubstantial. Their attempts at authenticity merely end up backfiring, calling attention to their strained polish instead. Yet Blaine’s books are part of a country where everything seems mass-produced if not slightly artificial. Bananas come in bland bunches, chocolate arrives packed with preservatives, and conversations cleverly sidestep uncomfortable suggestions of race or inequality. Ifemelu’s comparison suggests the difficulty of finding art that speaks genuinely or meaningfully in a society of consumption and surfaces.
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Explanation and Analysis—Windows and Ceilings:
In Chapter 1, the narration uses a simile to describe Ifemelu's failed romance with Blaine:
She did not tell him this, because it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.
The comparison—which compares Ifemelu’s love for Blaine to the act of gazing out a window—gives a sense of the tame, passionless state of their relationship. Here in the novel's first pages, it offers a brief overview of their mutual incompatibilities. Blaine charms Ifemelu with his sensitivity and sophistication. But he is also self-disciplined and maddeningly virtuous in ways that chafe against her frankness. He mansplains and theorizes, filling the space with the force of his opinions.
But the simile also suggests a passivity that maps, in many ways, onto her relationship to America. It describes her place in a nation where she is more often an observer than participant. Ifemelu gets profiled, rejected, steeped in American ways of speaking. But she does not experience the country’s race struggles to the same degree that Blaine does. As Shan dismissively suggests, she comes to America as an “outsider” separated by windows.
This emphasis on sight builds mirror-like symmetry with her feelings for Obinze. Unlike her affair with the professor, Ifemelu’s love for her childhood friend is passionate and uncontrollable. Ifemelu and Obinze’s relationship is so intense that, rather than “looking out” windows, she does not see at all. Their love gets defined not by sight but its total absence. When they make love, Ifemelu does not see the ceiling above her at all—“my eyes were open but I did not see the ceiling,” she tells Obinze, affectionately dubbing him “Ceiling.” Like a window itself, the simile provides a first glimpse that the novel unfolds and unpacks.
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Chapter 17
Explanation and Analysis—Grumbling Jewels:
Americanah describes Aunty Uju’s ritual of dissatisfaction with a simile in Chapter 17. During her visits to Warrington, Ifemelu often sits by as her aunt vents her frustrations:
Ifemelu stood by the window while Aunty Uju sat at the table drinking orange juice and airing her grievances like jewels. It had become a routine of Ifemelu’s visits: Aunty Uju collected all her dissatisfactions in a silk purse, nursing them, polishing them, and then on the Saturday of Ifemelu’s visit, while Bartholomew was out and Dike upstairs, she would spill them out on the table, and turn each one this way and that, to catch the light.
The simile creates a perverse impression as it likens the grumbling aunt to a jeweler. Both share the hyper-obsessed, meticulous care of artisans—only, rather than tending to worldly goods, Aunty Uju revels in her disappointments and misfortunes. What follows is a tragic picture that marks the ironic reversal of her life. Back in Nigeria, mistress Aunty Uju had lived with real jewels dangling about her neck. In America, the jaded Aunty Uju only grows wealthier in slights and grievances. Jewel by polished jewel, Americanah decks out the shiny treasures of American racism: guards stereotype her at the library, patients shrink when she enters, and her son becomes the butt of every school joke. Her trove dazzles, but only in its shocking injustices.
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Chapter 18
Explanation and Analysis—A New Dress:
Ifemelu can feel herself changing as begins to date Curt—figuratively, at least, as this example of simile from Chapter 18 suggests. After Kimberly’s dashing cousin asks her out, she begins to notice the differences:
She was lighter and leaner; she was Curt’s Girlfriend, a role she slipped into as into a favorite, flattering dress. She laughed more because he laughed so much. His optimism blinded her.
The novel uses the simile of swapped clothes to literalize Ifemelu’s sense of change. Curt has broadened her sense of possibility—and with it, her identity. Through his help she earns a job, gets a foothold in America, tastes optimism and opportunity for the first time. His relentlessly upbeat attitude broadens the horizons of what is possible. Freed from her knots and worries, Ifemelu becomes “a woman running in the rain with the taste of sun-warmed strawberries in her mouth.”
Personalities, self-perceptions, and life outlooks may indeed shift as quickly as a wardrobe upgrade. By implying as much, the simile allows the novel to explore the relationship between identity, class, and race. Americanah holds up the slippery workings of an ever-shapeshifting self, revealing how it changes in new contexts. Obinze sheds his dignity like a “wrapper” in the Manchester airport’s halls. Ifemelu’s father wears his polished, verbose self like a “costume,” a “shield against insecurity.” Through dresses and miniskirts, the novel interrogates the ways in which identity responds to larger social forces and surroundings.
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