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