There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach.
Academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.
They never said “I don’t know.” They said, instead, “I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge.
Stories matter.
We never actively remember death,′ Odenigbo said. The reason we live as we do is because we do not remember that we will die. We will all die.
But she was uncomfortable with what the professors called ‘participation,’ and did not see why it should be part of the final grade; it merely made students talk and talk, class time wasted on obvious words, hollow words, sometimes meaningless words.
It was black-black, so thick it drank two containers of relaxer at the salon, so full it took hours under the hooded dryer, and, when finally released from pink plastic rollers, sprang free and full, flowing down her back like a celebration. Her father called it a crown of glory.
One day, I will look up and all the people I know will be dead or abroad.
But she had not had a bold epiphany and there was no cause; it was simply that layer after layer of discontent had settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled her.
It was not as if he did not know what living in Lagos could do to a woman married to a young and wealthy man, how easy it was to slip into paranoid about ‘Lagos girls,’ those sophisticated monsters of glamour who swallowed husbands whole, slithering them down their throats.
You look like a black American” was his ultimate compliment, which he told her when she wore a nice dress, or when her hair was done in large braids.
It seemed so natural, to talk to him about the odd things. She had never done that before. The trust, so sudden and yet so complete, and the intimacy, frightened her.
When Ifemelu met Obinze, she told her Aunty Uju that she had met the love of her life, and Aunty Uju told her to let him kiss and touch but not to let him put it inside.
She was after all the kind of woman who would make a man easily uproot his life, the kind who, because she did not expect or ask for certainty, made a certain kind of sureness become possible.
Before, she would have said, “I know,” that peculiar American expression that professed agreement rather than knowledge.
The man standing closest to her was eating an ice cream cone; she had always found it a little irresponsible, the eating of ice cream cones by grown-up American men, especially the eating of ice cream cones by grown-up American men in public.
He had discovered that grief did not dim with time; it was instead a volatile state of being.