Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Author:Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, African American, Fiction, Cultural Heritage, General
ISBN: 9780307271082
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2013-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

Everyone joked about people who went abroad to clean toilets, and so Obinze approached his first job with irony: he was indeed abroad cleaning toilets, wearing rubber gloves and carrying a pail, in an estate agent’s office on the second floor of a London building. Each time he opened the swinging door of a stall, it seemed to sigh. The beautiful woman who cleaned the ladies’ toilet was Ghanaian, about his age, with the shiniest dark skin he had ever seen. He sensed, in the way she spoke and carried herself, a background similar to his, a childhood cushioned by family, by regular meals, by dreams in which there was no conception of cleaning toilets in London. She ignored his friendly gestures, saying only “Good evening” as formally as she could, but she was friendly with the white woman who cleaned the offices upstairs, and once he saw them in the deserted café, drinking tea and talking in low tones. He stood watching them for a while, a great grievance exploding in his mind. It was not that she did not want friendship, it was rather that she did not want his. Perhaps friendship in their present circumstances was impossible because she was Ghanaian and he, a Nigerian, was too close to what she was; he knew her nuances, while she was free to reinvent herself with the Polish woman, to be whoever she wanted to be.

The toilets were not bad, some urine outside the urinal, some unfinished flushing; cleaning them was much easier than it must have been for the cleaners of the campus toilets back in Nsukka, with the streaks of shit smeared on the walls that had always made him wonder why anybody would go to all that trouble. And so, he was shocked, one evening, to walk into a stall and discover a mound of shit on the toilet lid, solid, tapering, centered as though it had been carefully arranged and the exact spot had been measured. It looked like a puppy curled on a mat. It was a performance. He thought about the famed repression of the English. His cousin’s wife, Ojiugo, had once said, “English people will live next to you for years but they will never greet you. It is as if they have buttoned themselves up.” There was, in this performance, something of an unbuttoning. A person who had been fired? Denied a promotion? Obinze stared at that mound of shit for a long time, feeling smaller and smaller as he did so, until it became a personal affront, a punch on his jaw. And all for three quid an hour. He took off his gloves, placed them next to the mound of shit, and left the building. That evening, he received an e-mail from Ifemelu. Ceiling, I don’t even know how to start. I ran into Kayode today at the mall. Saying sorry for my silence sounds stupid even to me but I am so sorry and I feel so stupid.

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