Lessons for Ladies from Chimanda's Americanah

The character from the book whose life is almost deliberately shielded from thorough scrutiny is Obinze’s wife – Kosi. Her only sin it seems is to be the proper African woman – a woman who knows her place in the restrictive life that a wife is confined to in our society. Her beauty is described vividly as quite striking which is one of the reasons Obinze got attracted to her. In the process of their relationship, we find that she is the one eager for marriage but presents it with feminine wisdom as merely a demand from her people, not by her own insistence. She is portrayed as one who would rather bury her head in the sand than face the harsh reality. She plays her role as Obinze’s wife in society but never really made any attempt to understand who he was as a person, different from other men. In her attitude, one almost can guess that any other man in her life would get all she was giving to her husband out of duty rather than willingly. Even in their lovemaking, she did only what a wife was expected to do: make herself available for her husband, no attempt to be pleased, only to please. She knew Obinze was cheating on her but ignored it until he blurted out that he wanted a divorce from her. Even then, she made no attempt to join herself to him, only using their children together as the reason why he shouldn’t leave her. Her husband though was a liberated man who enjoyed cooking for his family, something Kosi’s traditional outlook on life prevented him from doing. She it was who had the responsibility to cook, not him.

A lady must understand her man more than anyone else. I remember a lover from many years ago with whom I was watching a football match where David Beckham was about coming on to the pitch for Real Madrid. As the camera zoomed into the audience to show his wife Victoria Beckham, she whispered to me that everyone in the crowd were cheering the Beckham they knew but she knew him more than they all and only she could accurately tell what was on his mind at that very moment.

Friendship is an important part of love relationships for most men and the woman who cannot adapt to this is the woman who loses out in the long run. Admittedly, most men make the task difficult by seeming to hide their persona from the woman they choose rather than opening up but the time to accurately deduce his personality is as the beginning of the relationship. Deliberately shut down your desire to open up to a man and make efforts to find out who he is with deep questions. Make him tell you about his childhood, his fears, his job, his vision and everything else that makes him tick. When you fully understand a man, you can fit into his life perfectly and then invite him into your own world with that mystery that most men find intriguing and which keeps us returning over and over again to the lady who seems most mysterious to us. Remember, once a man figures out all there is to you, there is little to keep him enthralled. Once a man believes he is well understood though, he will stay in that place against all odds because it is a place where he has no restrictions, where he can be truly free: the root desire of all other desires that every man has.

The other lesson from a lady character in the book whom I find interesting is Aunty Uju. She was the mistress of The General and in her words, he describes what he found most attractive about her:

“It’s just luck. Oga said I was well bought up, that I was not like all the Lagos girls who sleep with him on the first night and the next morning give him a list of what they want him to buy. I slept with him on the first night but I did not ask for anything, which was stupid of me now that I think of it, but I did not sleep with him because I wanted something. Ah, this thing called power. I was attracted to him even with his teeth like Dracula. I was attracted to his power.”

I do not endorse ladies who date married man but it is a reality in our society and as Kenny Rogers said in his song “if you’re gonna play the game boy, you got to learn to play it right”.