Eleven
I tell my friends this might be our last dinner because I don’t see how we won’t quarantine.
I have my full crew, seats brought from upstairs, some perched on the living-room sofa with their plates.
Hauwa looks like a patterned column of sheer grace.
A peach silk scarf floats over her Ankara print headwrap, the rest of her covered head to toe in the same peach-gray print, and her lipstick is close to the peach shade of her scarf.
“Too much beauty for one person,”
I say, and I know she likes me saying that where others can hear.
The biggest presence is Chijioke, who called to say he was in town from Lagos. My friends circle him, unused to him, interested in him.
“If you were not such a fine man, I wouldn’t sit near you, I don’t know what you Lagos people are carrying,”
Chinelo says, and Chijioke laughs.
“How is Lagos?”
Ehigie asks.
“Like Lagos,”
Chijioke says. “People are still moving about but a friend of mine has installed a sink at his front door for people to wash their hands.”
“If I was in Lagos nobody would even come to my house,”
Jide says.
“You keep saying Lagos, how do you know the thing isn’t already here in Abuja?” Edu asks.
“People here don’t seem to think that something’s afoot, though,”
Chijioke says. “I stopped by in Jabi to see my aunt. When I told her I was going to a friend’s house for dinner, she said be careful, and I thought she meant about the coronavirus but she actually said, ‘Be careful about eating in women’s houses.’ Cracked me up.”
“What is she saying, that women will put jazz in your food?”
Hauwa says in an ungenerous tone.
“Ahn, yes o. Women are desperate these days,”
Ahemen says. “And with someone like Chijioke? They will make every love potion there is.”
Someone like Chijioke: a good-looking rich-enough man with no fraud and no bitter betrayed women in his past.
Flirtatiously, Ahemen asks, “And why haven’t you married, Chijioke?”
“I haven’t found the right person.”
Chijioke looks at me and I look at him, wishing again that I could summon not a mere emotion-happening but more. Finally, more.
“Please can somebody make jazz to destroy this coronavirus?”
Chinelo asks.
“They shouldn’t have allowed that Italian man to come into Lagos, honestly,”
Jide says.
“But it’s not as if he was coming from China,”
Ahemen says.
“All the underpaid immigrant Chinese workers making designer bags in Italy must have visited home and brought it back from China,” I say.
“I don’t understand,”
Ahemen says.
“Designers can’t make the bags in China because then they can’t put “Made in Italy”
labels on them. If they put a “Made in China”
label, the designer value disappears. So they bring underpaid Chinese workers to Italy to make the bags and when we see “Made in Italy,”
we think they were made by some quaint, ethically paid family who have been working with leather for five hundred years.”
“Is that a critical tone I hear to the concept of maximizing profit? You no longer sound like a good capitalist,”
Chijioke says. I laugh and I notice Hauwa is watching us, speculative eyes moving from him to me and back again.
“They will definitely close borders and impose quarantine, in a matter of days,”
Ehigie says.
“What about my ladies’ night? I already booked the restaurant!”
Chikamso says.
She organizes an occasional ladies’ night.
Ten or fifteen of us book the good makeup artists to alter our faces, and the good hairstylists to go from house to house installing frontals and laying edges.
Afterwards, we eat at whichever restaurant is the newest or buzziest, a band of glamorous self-possessed women.
We go to the lounge in Wuse 2 or the bar in Maitama, to swim in cocktails and dance with one another and say silly things like “We’re shutting the place down!”
Hauwa can’t come because she doesn’t go out late to public places.
“Ladies’ night will have to be suspended,”
Ehigie says.
“God forbid. Life cannot stop because of virus,”
Chikamso says.
“When they say don’t touch your face, is it that the virus is already in all of us and then when we touch our face it will infect us?”
Chinelo asks.
We laugh but our laughter is full of questions.
Jide says he is not going to talk about this virus at all anymore and asks if they know that I know the hotel maid from Guinea who has been in the news and who will finally speak for herself in an interview tomorrow.
A prickle of irritation runs through me.
Jide is almost swaying as he chatters, his eyes drunkenly reddish, making a spectacle of something he knows I do not want to talk about.
I have never spoken of Kadiatou to my friends because I owe her this scrap of privacy.
So much has already been left in tatters.
“The maid that said the head of Multilateral Nations raped her?”
Ahemen asks.
“She didn’t say he raped her, he raped her,”
Jide says.
“It was a setup. Nobody raped the woman. She needs to go and sit down,”
Ahemen says.
“Only a fool would organize a setup that is so amateur,”
Jide says.
Ahemen scoffs. “Why would a man like him need to rape? And rape somebody like her?”
“Handsome men rape, rich men rape, successful men rape. Men rape babies, men rape old grandmothers,”
Jide says.
“Maybe he didn’t give her the agreed amount. I hope she gets the money she wants. This is all about money,”
Ahemen says.
“Ahn-ahn, Ahemen. Did the woman do anything to you?”
Chinelo asks.
Ahemen shrugs. “We have to be honest.”
I look at her and think that it isn’t about this particular rape. It is about any rape at all. Ahemen prefers men. In the face of any rape story, she will craft for men the most gorgeous of excuses, and for women her instinct will be distrust.
“Don’t forget he is French. They are different when it comes to these things. Many French women support him. Some of them have even come out to say it wasn’t rape,” she says.
I think of the regressive poisons of French gallantry. The immaturity at its heart, the backward childishness, rather than childlikeness, which might have had some appeal. I’ve just read the article signed by some French women supporting him, and the remnants of dispiritedness still lie unsettled in me.
“How do these women know it wasn’t rape?” I ask.
“How do you know it was rape?”
Ahemen counters.
“Ahemen, knows the maid personally,”
Jide says.
“So you really know her?”
Ahemen asks me, undeterred in her battle, and still breathing her fire; if only the Frenchman could see his dedicated foot soldier.
“My cousin Chia knows her,”
I say. I will not dissect Kadiatou for anyone’s entertainment.
Chinelo is teasing Lon, whose full name is Lalong Jang: “You Plateau people have names that sound Chinese. I hope you don’t have the virus o.”
“Enough China jokes,”
Ehigie says.
“What does everyone think of choking?” I ask.
“Choking?”
Chijioke asks.
“This is how is always asking us about our bedrooms o,”
Chinelo says.
“I like choking but it has to be gentle,”
Belema says.
“God forbid choking. Any man who tries that on me, both of us will die that day,”
Chikamso says.
“I didn’t think I would like this, but it is nice today,”
Chinelo says, and I say, “You like choking today?”
but she is pulling toward her a platter of Philippe’s potatoes baked in buttery milk.
We are all slack and loosened by drink, teasing and ribbing and laughing.
Jide, you and food!
, are you sure that big bum can fit in that chair?
You are mad!
I imagine this banter happening in my circle of nonfriends in American graduate school and I begin uncontrollably to laugh.
—
Chia sends me a link to watch the interview. Tension weighs down my stomach.
Kadiatou looks pasty, her foundation poorly blended, and I have seen a better wig on her head. The journalist oozes compassion and sensitive, thoughtful nods. She asks her questions with an expression determined to be kind.
Kadiatou is unknowable to her, Kadiatou is a curiosity, Kadiatou exists outside of her imagination.
If you put her in Kadiatou’s world, she would blindly stumble about.
Kadiatou pauses and gestures and pauses and gestures again.
Once or twice the journalist finishes a faltering sentence with a word that is not what Kadiatou was looking for, but Kadiatou accepts the word and plows on.
I imagine producers backstage just before the interview, asking Kadiatou, “Are you okay? Anything you need?”
When they ask, “Anything you need?”
they mean water, ibuprofen, the bathroom.
What she needs is a Pular interpreter and an interviewer who understands that immigrants are desperate to raise children who think they have a right to dream, and what she needs is an America that understands this.
The interview ends and in the final shot before credits roll across the screen, Kadiatou leans back on her chair, her face drained and relieved, as if she knows she has not done too well but at least it is done.
I think of the journalist’s kindness and the raw, radiant power of it. How carelessly Americans wield their power.
—
The first time I went to America I flew through Frankfurt and at the airport the Germans talked in a normal tone, but on landing in Atlanta the Americans didn’t talk, they barked. From the person saying, “U.S. citizens this way,”
to the stone-faced person examining passports, it was all one uncivilized tone.
It reminded me of how CEO always spoke to his driver in the same shouting tone, whether he was pleased or displeased, as if speaking normally might make the driver forget the steep gradient of power that lay between them.
Of course the visa interviewer at the American embassy in Lagos was screaming into the microphone at me, since talking normally was out of the question for them.
You are a potential liability to the United States government.
I had an American visitor’s visa in my passport and money in my accounts and a house and company in Abuja.
Why would I be a liability to the American government? Behind the glass, her hazel eyes flashed in response to my insufficient deference.
What exactly is the source of this income? Why should I believe that? She might not have this kind of rank power ever again and so she was clutching and squeezing it dry.
Speak up! she shouted.
I had never been told to speak up in my life.
Slights had always been easy for me to brush aside, as long as I achieved my goal, but something about that moment burrowed deep in the part of me that stored pain.
It was the rank stinking power and her rashly righteous use of it, how she chewed my dignity and spit it out just because she could.
Speak up! The intent was to make me feel small.
People paid so much in visa fees and came here timid with hope, only to be humiliated before hearing a no.
If she wanted to, she could say no and still leave their dignity intact.
Not that I wanted to go to China, but at least with the Chinese you paid only when the visa was approved.
How will a master’s degree in…cultural studies from an American university be useful to you in Nigeria? What do you know about cultural studies? Distaste lay thickly on my tongue.
Why was I doing this, forgetting I had choices? I could go to the UK or somewhere in Europe.
I could go to Canada. I didn’t have to stand here like a convict pleading for supervised freedom. And so I cut in and asked, “Why are you shouting?”
She flinched and reared back slightly as if to pounce, and then she pushed the form across the glass and said, “I’m sorry, you do not qualify for a visa. You can reapply if your circumstances change.”
My circumstances did not change. I merely reapplied a few weeks later, and this time a different interviewer examined my documents, saying little, and asked me to pick up my visa in two days.
—
I saw a bad omen in that first visa interview and then in the headaches that started in America mere weeks into the semester. An unyielding band tightened itself around my head, firm and resistant, off and on for weeks.
I had planned to go on weekends to New York to the museums, as I always did when I visited in the past, but those previous trips felt different, better, as if I’d seen a different country then, an alternate America.
Anyway, how was I supposed to look at art with my head in chains? At the student clinic they sent me for a scan.
As I slid in and out of the cavernous machine, I imagined myself dying from a tumor growing in my head and I thought: Will my body be shipped back in a coffin or just wrapped up to be more efficient?
I had never thought such morbid thoughts before, but I had also never lived in a place so acutely not mine.
The technician’s name tag said Kofi . His accent was Ghanaian. I smiled a familiar smile, wanting to say, “My African brother,”
but he knowingly evaded my eyes.
“Okay, all done and you did very well, you did great,”
he said. If Kofi said this in Accra, his incredulous countrywoman would ask him, “How exactly did I do well?”
At least he didn’t say, “Have a good day!”
with that American cheer so transparently false I wondered why they bothered.
I walked out of the building bitter with resentment toward Kofi, because in those moments with me he had made a studied choice.
And his not choosing Africa was not choosing me and not choosing solidarity in an unfamiliar world.
I called Chia, I was always calling Chia, to tell her about the annoying sellout from Ghana who when he saw me decided to be more American than the Americans themselves.
“You did very well, you did great!”
I mimicked, in a bad Ghanaian accent.
“You don’t know what he’s dealing with. Maybe his coworkers are condescending to him and maybe he doesn’t want to be an African at work.”
“There were no coworkers there. Just me and him. You did very well, you did great! ”
“He means you didn’t get claustrophobic or scream or something,”
Chia said, with a small laugh. She clearly approved of giving mundane praise to people merely because they had done something they were supposed to do which was for their own good. Chia, the American.
The scan showed nothing.
At the student clinic a lanky doctor asked how much exercise I did, looking dubiously at my body with all its parts rounder and bigger since I came to America.
I said I walked to my classes.
Was I eating well? I missed Philippe.
Almost every day I ordered curry goat from a Caribbean place, which was tasty but salty and I drank so much water afterwards and still felt thirsty.
How many hours of sleep did I get each night and what did I do to manage stress? I said I did yoga, and the lanky doctor was too honest to hide his disbelief.
So I smiled and said I had never done yoga in my life. Finally, he said, “You might benefit from seeing a therapist.”
His words made me feel deeply deficient, a lost case, but what would it hurt to try?
Therapy was something I read about in books and it had always had a taint of indulgent weakness. I knew it was different now but it still brought to mind spoiled White people sprawled on a couch. The therapist’s office, close to campus, was brightly lit in the afternoon. Two fluorescent bulbs. She wore a swirl of scarves and kept asking, “Is the light too much for you?”
And then she asked, “Do you feel the burden here or here?”
pointing at her chest and at her belly, with a knowing look, as if she would yet fully untangle me. On her window ledge was an orchid plant with fake-looking purple flowers clustered at its tip. I became focused on them. “Are they real?”
I asked, and she said, “Yes.”
“Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”
she asked.
I did not say, “I came seeking restoration in America and I have not found it.”
I should have, but that would leave her with no response for me.
“Whatever you’re feeling is valid,”
she told me.
Valid.
It yawned across the room in its blandness, valid; it felt like being given a trophy for effort rather than victory, a recognition you did not really deserve.
She said it again and again, valid valid valid.
It rang disturbingly in my ears like a mosquito and worsened my headaches, and I stopped seeing her.
To the ongoing headaches, heart palpitations were soon added.
Chia said it was stress from my schoolwork and all those extra classes I packed into my schedule.
But the work wasn’t demanding at all.
It was too soft, like spongy, slippery foam.
Everything was about exploring; we were all exploring, always exploring, and we could say we didn’t have the answers because we were just exploring, and so we didn’t need to boldly risk coming to clear conclusions.
Sunk in the miasma of exploring, we cast off clarity.
There was little pressure and no real rigor.
In the undergraduate class I audited, because the title “Neuroscience and Emotion”
interested me, a student raised his hand and said his paper was late because his dog had an ear infection.
I thought he was being funny and we were supposed to laugh, but the professor said okay and asked how the dog was doing.
Is this how America became the leader of the world? If Russia or China were about to bomb you, would you ask for more time to clean your dog’s ear?
—
In my own class of graduate students, I sensed very early that my life was wrong in their eyes.
Their quick exchange of looks when I said something, the apartness when we gathered in the coffee area, all tilted away from me as if repelled by rays I was unconsciously emitting.
They were all younger, recently graduated; one young man had worked in a nonprofit, another started a business in California selling surfing T-shirts.
They spoke in tightly bound ways that refused the blurring of lines or the bleeding into each other of different ideas.
When I spoke about my work in Abuja, they exchanged looks, twitchy faces, distant stares, and I came to understand they believed banking was bad; not the excesses of banking, but banking itself. Banking was inherently flawed, a woman called Kaley said to me, it’s inherently flawed, and I found myself stuttering because I did not know how to make a point that seemed so self-evident to me.
“Where do you put your money?”
I asked finally.
“That’s not a good argument. I don’t have a choice, but it doesn’t mean the choices are good.”
“How could the Dutch have done it differently when they invented banking?” I asked.
A woman called Eve said, “That’s right-wing!”
Everything she disagreed with she called right-wing, and to call it right-wing was to punctuate it with a full stop. Case closed.
A young man with olive skin often said “as a multiracial person”
before making his point.
I did not know what races he meant, and I was curious to know, but to ask would of course be wrong.
He was the star of the class, loops of beads wound around his wrist, his hair a massive halo of curls.
The others leaned toward him and waited for his views.
He nodded with approval when Eve said the answer to inequality is that the rich must give their money away—not tiny tax-deductible donations, but most of their money.
“Nobody will give their money away,”
I said. “Makes more sense to fix a system that allows people to make so much, instead of expecting saintliness from human beings.”
“Says the person who moves money for murderous dictators,” she said.
I had said some of my clients were politicians, but she had turned it to “dictator,”
and “dictator”
apparently wasn’t enough, it needed “murderous.”
A toddler increasing the pitch of her unnecessary tears.
“This is not how you create a better world. You don’t create a better world by starting with fantasy,” I said.
And to this the mysterious multiracial replied, “Tell that to all the people who actually changed the world.”
—