Eleven #2
My father often said, “Your social register is above average,”
and I knew he meant I had many friends, maybe too many friends. But in America I had no friends.
There was Andy, the White South African, but he was an aggressively friendly person who was everybody’s friend, always asking everyone to come have drinks somewhere, and I thought of him not as a proper friend but as somebody who collected people and who had collected me.
Andy made himself my guide, telling me where was best to eat, what bars were good, who was best to talk to and who should be ignored.
He introduced me to a woman named Jerry who spent ages talking with outsize excitement about eating wild mushrooms foraged in the Catskills.
And then she said her brother, a rich tech bro, injected the blood of young boys to help him live longer, and she said it mimicking a shudder, but I could tell she was secretly admiring of him.
But Andy did not approve of Chinedu, the Nigerian-American, younger than me, who was doing a master’s in international relations and wore a cool puffy coat.
“He’s a Federalist Society asshole who doesn’t know those folks will never like him,”
Andy said, and I felt a flash of protectiveness toward Chinedu.
I drifted into Chinedu because he at least felt like a person who was not looking for all that was wrong in me.
It lasted a few weeks.
He loved Marvel films.
He took me to a football game, somebody had given him tickets, and he said he never imagined sitting so close to the great action, while I thought American football was incomprehensible, the field so small it was a joke.
Why did the players bother taking breaks? Had they seen a real football pitch? Chinedu became animated when we went to see a movie, and I envied him this ability to feel so strongly about something that brought him only pleasure.
I sat beside him in the dark of the theater, looking at the flashy effects on the screen, the big shiny things, fire and smoke and blowing-up noise.
American entertainment had an infantile heart.
Maybe it was why American pornography was the most ridiculous, where the men were mechanical, exaggerated, like robots with the programming gone wrong.
—
Once I joined Andy and his friends for a drink at O’Malley’s. He introduced everyone but I promptly forgot their names, except for a man with a catchy Irish name, Darragh.
So I smiled at Darragh and said I liked his name.
“Did you get back okay the other night?”
Darragh asked.
I stared at him, sure we had never met before.
Andy, fluidly fast-talking, quickly changed the subject and asked if I’d try a beer today.
“You thought I was someone else?”
I asked Darragh.
Darragh was blushing and apologizing and I was smiling, curious to know who he thought I was. “I hope she’s at least good-looking,”
I was about to say, when Andy cut in and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay, let’s get you some beer.”
Later I told Andy, “Don’t ever do that again.”
And he looked hurt, wounded, terribly wronged, as if he could not believe that I dared to be unsatisfied by his handling of things.
Chinedu smirked when I told him this story. “That’s the problem with these liberal folks. They want to end racism but they can’t even talk honestly about it. Try talking to them about the big issues like racism and abortion and next thing you know they’re not addressing the issue; they’re policing your language, and using buzzwords that don’t mean anything, and at the end you’re discussing semantics and the real issue is forgotten. With conservatives you can actually talk about what you’re talking about.”
“Maybe,”
I said, “but your conservative positions are still rubbish.”
“Like what?”
“Seriously?” I asked.
He was always saying empirical this and empirical that, free market decides this and decides that, and I would say, “Your problem is you’ve crammed your class notes but you don’t know how people live.”
“The problem is that liberals are not realistic.”
His usual retort.
“Unions and regulations and welfare seem realistic as a starting point for a society that works. You need rules to keep a free market free. You can never have a free market if you let companies get too big.”
“See, I don’t get offended when you tell me my views are bullshit, even though I know you’re wrong.”
“Bravo to you,” I said.
“So let’s go all Marxist and give everyone handouts.”
“Marx didn’t want people to get handouts. He was all for work. He just wanted the people who actually did the work to get some of the benefits of that work.”
“Still not realistic,”
Chinedu said.
He had never been to Nigeria and after it ended, I said, “You must come to Abuja sometime and stay with me.”
—
My adviser confused me. She looked like the distinguished name that she was, with her long silver hair and her serious face. “There’s increasing scholarship on the horrors of the pornography industry, and how inescapably predatory and exploitative it is, but it behooves us, I think, to pay attention to the sensitivities involved, knowing of course that sex work is work.”
Knowing of course. How did she know I knew, and why should I know, and what if I didn’t know? Even saying it like that—“knowing of course”—gave no room for dissent.
“I’m interested in pornography as an educational tool,” I said.
She smiled thinly, as if to say, “Now be serious, please.”
I was saying I meant the question of where we learn about sex and she was talking again, saying many words, and I kept hearing her say “liberation.”
Everything she said was soft and sank in when touched.
“Liberation? What do you mean? What would it look like?”
I asked. She thought I was being provocative but I really wasn’t. Sometimes I thought not having gone to university in America might be why things seemed so hidden under layers of veils; no sooner had I peeled one off than others drifted down.
“Of course you know what I mean by liberation,” she said.
Later she said she didn’t feel she could support my thesis, with the direction I wanted to take, and recommended someone else I could try working with, but by then I didn’t want to work with anyone else. I wanted only to go home.
—
The headaches had already started when I talked about Uncle Hezekiah in class.
I talked about Uncle Hezekiah and about Gideon Akaluka, whose head was paraded on a metal pole around the streets of Kano.
Later I wished I hadn’t said anything at all, and to the shame I felt for not crying for Uncle Hezekiah, I added more shame for talking about him to a class of Americans heedlessly drunk on their certainties.
I made his death something they could trivialize and dig into the dust.
It was a class discussion on civilians in civil wars and I should never have opened my mouth; after all, a riot against Igbo Christians in the North wasn’t a civil war.
It wasn’t even one of the big riots, it was much smaller, so small a Lagos newspaper called it a fatal disturbance.
Uncle Hezekiah’s beard kept growing even after he was dead, Aunty Jane said.
She went to see his body, one of the bodies brought back piled in a trailer, for families to sort through and identify their beloveds among stiffened blood-soaked forms.
Uncle Hezekiah was murdered when I was in university, by men who shopped in his convenience store, men he had exchanged greetings with for years.
But it was only when Gideon Akaluka, a complete stranger, was murdered, in the police station where he had gone for succor after his wife was accused of using a page of the Holy Book to wipe her baby’s poop, that I cried, looking at a grainy photo of the macabre.
A head.
A human head.
I was supposed to cry for my uncle but I cried for a stranger instead.
My words laced themselves together as words sometimes do, and as soon as I finished I wished to take them back. Silence followed. The class was free of fidgeting and small coughing and throat-clearing and looks exchanged. Then the multiracial person spoke.
“There’s so much Islamophobia in the world; don’t add to it.”
He was leaning forward on the desk, looking at me. His demeanor was all disgust, but it was not disgust for the barbarism of Uncle Hezekiah’s suffering, but disgust for me. His eyes held that brand of condemnation made worse by thinking itself gentle and right. I stared at him, too taken aback to respond.
“You’re weaponizing your family’s loss and that’s problematic,” he said.
I looked around the class in that African way that asked, “Who else is witnessing this with me?”
A woman sternly settled her hair behind her ear and kept looking straight ahead. A man was nodding. Many were averting their eyes, too distressed by my crime to even look at me.
I was too stunned to do anything but push back my chair and pick up my bag and leave. If I didn’t have liquid rushing in my head and in my ears, if my body wasn’t faltering, I would have asked, “Do you feel nothing else? Are the compartments of your heart not roomy enough?”
The professor was looking down at her notes, tapping her iPad pen on the desk, like a biased referee pretending to be fair. It wasn’t even that they felt offended; it was that offended was the only thing they felt. Perfect righteous American liberals. As long as you board their ideology train, your evilness will be overlooked. Champion an approved cause and you win the right to be cruel.
—
I had come to America hoping to find a part of me that was more noble and good; I came in search of repair.
Because I wanted so desperately to look up higher and be reminded of things I could believe in again, my disenchantment stung.
Disappointed disenchantment, or disenchanted disappointment, a feeling with flint at its core, as if a much-loved aunt I ran to for succor had turned to land on my face a series of surprising slaps.
My apartment building had a game room and a roof deck and a restful resident lounge, vacuumed twice a day.
I walked through the glass doors wishing my insides matched the brightness of that lounge.
Misery always had seemed a big dramatic emotion, but I knew now that it was small and slow-dripping, a shallow submerging that felt eternal.
—
Then misery grew into rage and my rage became ravenous and had to be fed.
I got into arguments that felt so meaningless.
I always started them.
They were unnecessary and unedifying, but I still started them.
No, the Democrats haven’t always cared about Africa; both parties don’t care about Africa because they don’t have to care.
What party bombed the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan? What party destroyed Libya? What party meddled in my country’s elections and imposed a nincompoop on us? I hoped someone would bite on this so we could drag it out, but nobody did.
They wanted me to put my glass down and get up and leave the bar, so they could continue their happy time. “Race is a construct,”
said a badge on someone’s shirt, and I pointed at it and derisively asked, “So how do sickle cell and cystic fibrosis know who to afflict?”
Of course I knew the meaning, that race is not an idea set in stone, and is always about the social setting, as one person in America might be called Black but in Brazil or South Africa be called a different race. When I asked, “So how do sickle cell and cystic fibrosis know who to afflict?”
I added, “It’s not enough. Don’t just say that and be smug. Race is a construct but—and there’s always a but—race is also the language of health care with real consequences. Black women have more aggressive breast cancers and Black women have bigger fibroids and Black women die more often in childbirth.”
They all stared at me, a gasp suspended in the air but their scorn unhidden in their eyes. The winter layers I wore made me feel muffled; my thoughts were deadened and I could not hear myself.
“That wasn’t worth being so angry about,”
Chia said later.
“It was.”
“You know depression can show up as anger.”
Depression can show up as anger . America has bamboozled us all. We are all defining our worlds with words from America.
“I don’t remember when you last laughed,”
Chia said.
“Would help to have something to laugh about. These people don’t laugh,” I said.
“You’re depressed,” she said.
“I’m not depressed,”
I said, and I was horrified to see that tears had gathered and I was crying.
America didn’t owe me restoration and yet I felt that it did, as if it had reneged on a promise that was never really made.
I drank whiskey alone in my apartment and went so often to the liquor store the man at the counter said hi and then said we have a new single malt you can try.
I was drinking as I packed up my apartment, and I liked the companionable scent of whiskey on my breath.
I began writing the only post I ever wrote on For Men Only that was not in response to messages I received, but I deleted it days later, when I was in Chia’s house, feeling slightly better, and eating Kadiatou’s fonio, which I had never tasted before.
Some Thoughts on My Brief Time in an American University, marginally related to being on your side, dear men.
America is so provincial, like an enormous giant of a man from a bush village who blunders about with supreme certainty, not knowing he is bush because he is blinded by his strength.
If you’ve lived your whole life in a sensible part of the world—that is, Africa or Asia or Latin America—be careful going to America for a master’s degree in the liberal arts.
Science is fine, and an MBA is fine as long as you are happy to become a parroting robot.
As soon as I started my program, so much I said was wrong but I did not know why it was wrong and they did not tell me because even my asking why was wrong.
They expected me to know.
Welcome to the world of the Americans of the pious class.
We’re talking about race in Europe and I mention how Lord Haw-Haw, who was a British Nazi, claimed that Churchill’s father had African blood and suddenly somebody cuts in: “This is an intellectual game for you while Black people are dying!”
I was puzzled. From outside, America makes more sense. They want your life to match their soft half-baked theories and when it doesn’t, they burst out with their provincial certainty.
Somebody was reading a novel about the Nigerian-Biafran war and said, “It’s really fascinating, but honestly I’m still a bit confused about why the Igbo people were massacred?”
And I said that to understand Igbo people in Nigeria, think of them like the Jews. People say don’t trust Igbo people because they want to control everything and they love money and they’re too pushy.
A woman said, “Oh my God, don’t say that, you can’t compare anything to the Jews.”
What do you mean by “can’t”? What in the cultural genetics of Americans makes them think they can decide for the rest of the world how they should think? I never knew that there existed in this world a class of people who feel so securely entitled to the minds of other people.
London was the center of my childhood dreams and even though I went as a child to Cambridge with my father, I didn’t feel I had seen England until I saw London, so as soon as I could afford it, I went, and I was disappointed that the staff at my posh hotel were all Polish and spoke poor English because it wasn’t the London I expected.
And an American bursts out: “How can you be so fascist and anti-immigration and perpetuate a dangerous nativism?”
The professor didn’t say, “Let’s be civil.”
They love that word “civil”
by the way.
But when this White woman was mocking White women for paying Jamaican nannies to raise their White children and I said that was regressive nonsense, women throughout human history have always had help caring for their children, it’s the relative or the husband’s relative, it’s the village, and now it means paying for it, but then so what, the Jamaican nanny is building a small house outside Kingston for her parents—and then the professor said, “Let’s be civil.”
Let’s be civil indeed, as if their quiet evil isn’t the real incivility. The incivility of quiet evil.
There was this Chinese-American woman talking at a bar about her Chinese parents and how racist they were for not wanting her sister to marry a Black man. She said, “I’ve cut them off and I’m mad my sister still takes their calls,”
and everyone in that godforsaken circle told her she was so brave. I could look through her and see the glow of her sanctimonious soul. She thought she was resplendent in her righteousness, but she was just a person unable to love.
They don’t know how to love, these pious people, and they don’t know love. Even the way they help each other is so cheerless and earnest.
I said I loved Kigali, and they said oh my God it’s a dictatorship.
But the policemen are trim, the markets are clean, people stand in line, and I am proud of it because it is African and I am African.
I asked them—Can you understand that love and pride complicate? They can implicate as well but first you must see how they complicate.
But they can’t see because their hearts lack eyes.
Their hearts are blind.
They are so dead to human foibles, these Americans of the pious class.
And they don’t laugh.
I mean actual laughter, that sound nature made to lighten our hearts and calm our blood pressure.
One day I mentioned my driver Paul and a woman with a nose piercing said you mean exploited labor, call it what it is—all Third World domestic staff are exploited labor.
She was a famous academic feminist but she didn’t like women.
She liked only the idea of women.
She posted cryptic quotes about feminism that you were supposed to feel guilty about but not understand, and vaguely threatening conditions for how to be a feminist, like if you don’t know blah blah blah about Bangladesh then you’re no feminist, if you don’t liberate this and that then you’re no feminist.
Her followers loved her for her bitterness, and even if she ever wanted to let joy in, she couldn’t because she would lose the applause.
And anyway it would have to be joy as resistance.
Or joy as a subversive anti-patriarchy project.
Never just joy. As joy.
One day we’re listing the many horrors of Facebook and I say, for full disclosure, I just put up an ad on Facebook for a logistics person for my company in Abuja, someone 35 and above.
An American bursts out: “It’s illegal to mention age in job ads!”
Well, it isn’t in Nigeria. You Americans need to climb out of your cribs. You think the world is American; you don’t realize that only America is American.
To be so provincial and not even know that you are.