Vocabulary
stately homes
abiding air of earned grace
Baltimore smelled of brine
outside the post office where effusive staff bounded out to greet them at the entrance
He turned to her and said, “About time,” when the train finally creaked in
his hair like old twine ropes that ended in a blond fuzz
A middle manager, she was sure, from his boxy suit and contrast collar
He told her that he and his wife had adopted a black child and their neighbors looked at them as though they had chosen to become martyrs for a dubious cause
You’ve used your irreverent, hectoring, funny and thought-provoking voice to create a space for real conversations about an important subject
over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the carcasses of people’s stories for something she could use
She said the word “fat” slowly, funneling it back and forward
She was severely cross-eyed, pupils darting in opposite directions
but the jeer on the Nigerian’s face had taught her that
Obinze asked, and laughed, a little too heartily.
I’m longing for ceiling, she once wrote on the back of his geography notebook, and for a long time afterwards he could not look at that notebook without a gathering frisson
Mohammed, the gateman, wiry in his dirty white caftan, flung open the gates
His gait was stiff, his legs difficult to lift
Obinze often imagined her belching champagne bubbles
blighted by bitterness
Chief jokingly tugged at the satin lapels of his black jacket
pictures from Chief’s parties were always splattered in the weekend papers
humility had always seemed to him a specious thing
at the famous electronics shop in the market where music blared all day long
“Is it your real hair?” strangers would ask, and then reach out to touch it reverently.
Ifemelu would often look in the mirror and pull at her own hair, separate the coils
woman standing by the fire, splashing in more kerosene as it dimmed and stepping back as it flared
Even her voice, usually high-pitched and feminine, had deepened and curdled
I had catarrh this morning,”
I did not study because I was sick and yet I passed my exams with flying colors
was, in her mind, a white cloud that moved benignly above her as she moved
Ifemelu bristled at Chetachi’s goading.
the cluster of duplexes that wore a fresh foreignness,
she thought how much he looked like what he was, a man full of blanched longings,
He had scolded Ifemelu as a child for being recalcitrant, mutinous, intransigent, words that made her little actions seem epic and almost prideworthy.
Ifemelu got up reluctantly. “This dress is not rumpled.”
She wrote circulars and articles about it,
she sometimes thought of it as a carapace that kept her safe
His kiss was enjoyable, almost heady; it was nothing like her ex-boyfriend Mofe, whose kisses she had thought too salivary
She was popular, always on every party list, and always announced, during assembly, as one of the “first three” in her class, yet she felt sheathed in a translucent haze of difference
OBINZE TOLD HER, one morning after assembly, that his mother wanted her to visit.
“Your mother?” she asked him, agape.
“I think she wants to meet her future daughter-in-law.”
In their America-Britain jousting, she always sided with his mother.
“Trunk is a part of a tree and not a part of a car, my dear son,”
Ifemelu’s mother opened the carton, gently stripped away the Styrofoam packaging.
Ifemelu would remember Aunty Uju, the village girl brought to Lagos so many years ago, who Ifemelu’s mother mildly complained was so parochial she kept touching the walls
Ifemelu could not think of The General as endearing, with his loud, boorish manner
Aunty Uju would laugh, suddenly girlish and pliant
so he sat back, assailed
“I wonder what she is thinking,” Aunty Uju said sadly, musingly.
Ifemelu thought of all those fervent prayers for Aunty Uju’s mentor
She marched towards the phone, as though to challenge it, too, and then she slid to the floor, a boneless, bereft sliding, and began to weep
The rooms upstairs had grown unbearably hot; the air conditioners had suddenly stopped working, as though they had decided, in unison, to pay tribute to the end
Ifemelu and Chikodili stuffing clothes in suitcases, Obinze carrying things out to the van, Dike stumbling around and chortling
Ifemelu shook her head, in mocking, exaggerated incredulity
Sometimes, when she was too late, and the toilets already swirled with maggots
And, still later, the news spread around campus of a strike by lecturers, and students gathered in the hostel foyer, bristling with the known and the unknown
Ifemelu was restless, antsy; every day she listened to the news, hoping to hear that the strike was over.
he bored and spiritless in Nsukka, she bored and spiritless in Lagos, and everything curdled in lethargy
they were tentative with each other for the first few days, their conversations on tiptoe, their hugs abridged
Now, she was watching them, smirking and humming insouciantly.
Ifemelu suddenly imagined that she was indeed pregnant, and the girl had used expired test chemicals in that dingy lab
After they discharge you, you can stay in the house until you feel strong