My first encounter with Barongo Akello Kabumba, the other African on the programme, was a disaster. It was at the welcome party, attended by the programme team and affiliated professors from departments across the college. Barongo Akello Kabumba had introduced himself with all three names, as if to stress his authenticity, and he had shot me a curious look when I introduced myself, repeating my name back to me to press his point. ‘No native name?’ he asked, adding to the irritation that had been building up in me since I saw his profile on the programme website, where his massive smile and Maasai toga contrasted with my black and white portrait in the same corduroy blazer I always wore on special occasions.
It never occurred to me, not even once, that Kabumba and I could be friends. There was something about him that ticked me off.
He had the same Maasai toga at the welcome party, and this time he had a stick – a damned cattle-herding stick. How he got through customs with that weapon remained a wonder.
Grinning from cheek to cheek, offering slight bows to everyone, he was the centre of attention at the party. There were always at least three people chatting away with him, listening as he gesticulated with one hand, holding out his stick with the other as though to hurry along a cow, his bouncy, full-bellied laughter ricocheting off the walls.
From a corner, standing with Deepak Bhakta, the Blake Fellow from Nepal who wouldn’t stop talking about his trekking business and his work-in-progress on racist Western trekkers, I kept tossing Kabumba contemptuous stares. I didn’t know why. Possibly because he made me look like an undesirable African, a fake. I was baffled by how much control he had over everyone. He could have cut his Maasai toga to pieces and auctioned each for a thousand dollars and they would have fallen over themselves to buy them without question.
When Deepak excused himself to use the bathroom, Kabumba broke free from his groupies and approached me, crossing the room in quick African strides. ‘My African brother,’ he greeted me, clasping my shoulders a little too tightly.
‘Hi,’ I greeted him back. ‘Nice toga.’
‘Thank you. My Kenyan friend gave it to me in Nairobi. The Maasai call them shukas,’ he corrected me.
‘Of course,’ I responded, shrinking, self-consciously plunging both hands into my tired, un-African chino pants.
‘Funny when Africans call them togas,’ he continued, standing next to me, a little too close, keeping an eye on his admirers around the room.
Professor Kirkpatrick was standing a few yards to our left, his back to us, chatting away with Claudia González, the playwright from Mexico, whose reworking of Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities was already making the rounds of small theatres in New York.
Sara Chakraborty, in full Indian regalia, was holding a wine glass in one hand and gesticulating with the other, and I picked out fragments of something about ‘growing up in Surrey as the grandchild of Afro-Asian immigrants’.
‘I’m not saying you’re not African,’ said Kabumba the Ugandan, ‘just funny how we post-colonials are wired to see things through a Western lens.’
The word ‘post-colonial’ rang a sinister note coming from him, especially since I was already having an eerie feeling that the five of us – Sara, Deepak, Claudia, Kabumba and myself – were selected because we were ‘post-colonial’ writers whose ‘worlds’ were interesting enough to jazz up the ‘conversation’ – another word that I was beginning to dread for what it conjured: a room full of intellectuals deconstructing and reconstructing one thing or the other.
‘Funny how that happens,’ I said to Kabumba.
‘So, how did you hear about this programme?’ he asked. ‘You Nigerians are everywhere. Always a Nigerian at this or that conference.’
I ignored his joke and tightened my jaw for a second before answering, ‘A friend told me about it. And you, how did you hear about it?’
‘Oh, I got an email from NAPA.’
‘Napa?’ I asked, irritated.
‘You’ve never heard of NAPA?’
Now he was getting on my nerves. I ignored his question.
‘NAPA. Network of African Poets and Authors?’
‘Right. Of course. Nice.’
‘You should join NAPA,’ he admonished me, ‘great place to network and connect with opportunities.’ He carried on about the NAPA newsletter he edited for three years until he ‘won’ the Blake Fellowship.
I ignored his remark and tried to change the subject.
‘For a second I thought you were talking about Napa, you know, in California?’
He made a sound, drew closer, and in a conspiratorial voice said, ‘Funny, we are the only BAMs here.’
‘BAM?’ I asked, trying hard to conceal my ignorance.
‘BAM,’ he said again, pronouncing it the way I heard it.
I racked my brain to get his drift. He rescued me.
‘They call it POC here, you know, People of Colour. But elsewhere, especially in the UK, it’s B-A-M-E. Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic.’ He spelt it out for me, B-A-M-E, stressing each letter as if to drive home a point I was not getting.
‘So that includes Sara, Deepak and Claudia?’
He ignored my question.
Fragments of Sara Chakraborty’s words floated about: ‘… this oppressive consciousness of the white middle classes, like their upper caste Indian counterparts… that is central to the present onslaught of right-wing pushbacks.’
I scanned the room for anything to latch onto. I saw Perky, who I’d not met formally at this point. She was standing by herself, close to the door, playing with her name tag, which announced her as the Programmes Manager. She looked skinnier than her online photos suggested. I felt drawn to her, to the silence that surrounded her in that space where words were dropping like hailstones, like Sara Chakraborty’s ‘what we are witnessing on both sides of the Atlantic is symptomatic of a system that is consciously designed to subjugate and colonise’.
Kabumba carried on about his BAM. And when he paused to drink from his glass, which seemed a little un-African in comparison to his attire and accessories, especially the stick, I summoned the courage to launch a subtle attack. ‘BAME in the UK, eh? Interesting, have you travelled there?’
Kabumba didn’t get my tone. He surveyed the room and began saying something about the William Blake programme, how happy he was to be back in Boston – he’d visited a few years ago to attend a conference organised by the World Youth Alliance for Cultural Freedom and Socio-Political Inclusion. He told me how much he was looking forward to finishing his first novel, a cross-genre work on the lives of sex workers in some coastal town on Lake Victoria. He wondered if I’d read his collection of stories that was published a few years ago as a ‘downloadable pdf’ by ‘a micro-press in Zanzibar’, the ‘book’ that landed him the Blake Fellowship. It was his fourth writing fellowship, he declared, and I wanted to counter with a question: ‘Do you need that number of fellowships and residencies to finish a single novel?’ He had also attended workshops in Kampala, Mombasa and Pretoria. There had been one in Prague, too, led by some English novelist whose name didn’t ring a bell, where he ‘workshopped’ the first four chapters of his novel. Interestingly, his first fellowship had been in Nigeria, in a small village outside Ibadan, where he fell in love with jollof rice and concluded that Nigerian jollof must be better than Ghanaian jollof. ‘What do you think of the whole Ghana versus Nigeria jollof matter?’ he asked. I said I couldn’t care less about what cosmopolitan Africans cooked up to debate among themselves on Twitter. The word ‘cosmopolitan’ set him off on another tangent; he wondered what my thoughts were on Afropolitanism. I said I had none.
At this point I knew my hunch was right: the guy had too much energy.
Deepak was back and had cornered a freckled adjunct. I wished he would come and rescue me from Kabumba, who, as if reading my mind, asked, ‘What do you think about that Asian guy from Nepal?’
‘Asian guy?’ I asked, stressing the Asian. ‘I’ve just met him,’ I added and went no further.
To my relief, Deepak and the freckled adjunct came over and joined us. And in that instant, as if the universe had decided to favour me, Professor Kirkpatrick, in high spirits, came towards us and, a little too loudly, addressed Kabumba: ‘Hey K’boombah, may I steal you for a minute?’ He tapped the beaming Maasai impersonator on the shoulder, and they both walked towards a grey-haired woman in glasses standing alone beside the spread of cheese and grapes and cured meat, balancing some olives on a paper plate. She was, as Deepak’s new companion shared, a professor of anthropology with a focus on the mating behaviours of ‘indigenous’ societies in Africa, and she had recently received the Krank Prize for her work on the San people near the Okavango River.
Sara Chakraborty’s voice floated in again, something that included her ‘Oxford experience’ and ‘the lingering legacies of empire’ and ‘the Anglo-American flirtation with imperial amnesia’ that her last collection of essays ‘confronted’. From a corner of my eye I saw the shape and majestic sweep of her royal rust saree with its gold embroidery. Her listener, who I later learned was a French-Canadian ethnomusicologist and associate professor with experience of working in the Congo, seemed engrossed in whatever she was saying, his eyes glued to her face.
‘So, what are you working on?’ asked the freckled adjunct, who introduced herself as Chloe. She who would later become a recurring subject each time I met Deepak for coffee at Café Lucy – ‘Chloe and I went to see her family in Vermont’, ‘Chloe and I are planning an interdisciplinary project together’ – and soon enough Deepak would inch towards his ultimate intention, to propose to the freckled adjunct who he saw – and he didn’t hide this fact from me – as his ticket to becoming an ‘immigrant writer’ in America. An honest plan, in my opinion.
I responded to Chloe by repeating the question, ‘What am I working on?’ – a tactic I usually employed to buy time while formulating a believable answer.
Deepak jumped in and began to share his big plans to work on a documentary, and I was glad he did. I kept casting glances in Perky’s direction. I saw how uneasy she was. At one point our eyes met. She smiled and looked away.
As Deepak carried on, I found myself studying Chloe’s face, catching the spread and pattern of freckles on her right cheek. The freckles were reminding me of someone else, a certain white stripper who was flown in from somewhere to open a high-end club in Port Jumbo.
It was Martin, my boss at the Port Jumbo Post Office, married with four kids, who took me to see this stripper. He’d asked the day before, standing behind me at the till, if I’d been to a strip club before. I answered, ‘No, I haven’t.’ He said, ‘We must change that, Frank, and we must do so in a big way. You know, a new club is opening up in town, a fancy one, not those smelly ones with smelly bitches from the villages. This one will showcase classy chicks, university babes, and guess what? At the opening on Saturday, an American girl will be up there.’ The excitement in his voice was palpable. A customer came in to send a parcel to Finland (or was it Iceland?) and Martin returned to his office, only to emerge when the customer was gone and say, ‘Frank, there’s a picture of the white girl on their website, see, see.’ He handed me his smartphone and there she was, red hair, those Chloe-like freckles on both cheeks, topless, in a black thong, on the floor of a stage, her slim legs stretched apart. ‘She will be here in the flesh,’ Martin announced.
When I turned to hand him his phone, I saw that my boss, a father of four and a deacon at the Redeeming Light Global Church of Jesus Christ our Benefactor, the church to which he’d invited me with equal enthusiasm, had a slight bulge on the left side of his fly.
What had he been doing back in his office? Exciting himself over the freckled stripper? Thank God we were alone there. ‘You should come, Frank. You know what, I’ll call the owner and save us two tickets.’
I listlessly accepted his invitation, but afterwards I wondered why he took an interest in me, why he made no effort to conceal his vices and split life from me, why he believed I would keep his secrets. And so we went to the Prime Gentlemen’s Club, which oddly sat on the same block as a private elementary school for rich kids, and, true to what Martin said, the stripper was white, but since she didn’t address the audience, there was no way to verify her nationality. She could as easily have been Canadian, German, white South African or white Kenyan.
The place was packed, but Martin had managed to secure a table up front, just close enough to see the stripper’s young face, to see the constellation of freckles appearing each time the club lights swept across her body.
I would occasionally look around, away from her, and take stock of the entire space, men with thirsty eyes, thrilled by the performance of the Chloe-like stripper, presumed American without evidence.
Just before midnight I said I was leaving, that I had to see a friend in the morning, which was a lie; I was simply tired by the cheer and rowdiness of middle-class Nigerian men.
To Chloe’s question, which she’d got around to asking again – ‘So, what are you working on?’ – I wanted to lie and say I was working on a novel about an English stripper who had a short career in Nigeria, in the coastal town of Port Jumbo. And to make it sound more interesting, I thought of adding a historical twist, to situate it in the past, that it was in fact a real account that took place in the early sixties, just after Nigeria gained its independence from Great Britain, and that the stripper turned out to be a spy in the service of Her Majesty’s Government, working to strip secrets from wealthy, cosmopolitan Nigerians with links to the new political class. But instead, and because the information was already public on the programme website, I shared my proposed project. ‘I’m working on a historical novel set in the US and Sierra Leone in the mid- to late 1800s.’ I avoided the meta-commentary on how it would ‘engage but also undo the global dimensions of violent histories’.
The idea intrigued her. She said, ‘Really? That sounds very exciting. What is it about?’
‘Oh, it’s about George Thompson, the missionary and abolitionist who sailed to Kaw Mendi, in what is now Sierra Leone, in 1848.’
‘How fascinating,’ she said, her large eyes widening as she inched closer, causing Deepak a pinch of distress.
I feigned the kind of modesty expected of a serious writer, and said, ‘Well, it’s still an idea in progress,’ and was about to add another thought when Claudia González joined us, with a bespectacled and chubby-cheeked lecturer, about our age but balding, in a grey crewneck sweater choking his skinny black tie, a Philip Larkin lookalike.
Carrying on a conversation he was having with Claudia, the Larkin lookalike said, ‘Always a diverse group,’ nodding in agreement with his own observation, perhaps expecting some multicultural input from the rest of us, the thought of which exhausted me.
I excused myself and walked towards Kabumba and the woman who studied the sexual appetites of primitive Africans, passed them, picked up a paper plate, considered the grapes and olives, lost interest altogether, and walked outside for fresh air.
In the growing darkness outside, I took deep breaths and wondered if it was best to head back to Comstock Place. A group of students – so young – passed by. ‘I’ll send you the list,’ said a voice behind me, ‘or you can just look it up online, Top Fifty Books by Women of Colour.’ It was the Larkin lookalike coming out the door with Claudia González. I hurried away from them.
Approaching the Humanities Hall, or St Pierre’s House, on my way to Comstock Place, I replayed my little conversation with Chloe. I was glad the conversation had ended the way it did, but also wished I had carried on and mentioned the context from which the Thompson story arose, to gauge her response and also weigh my own reaction to that response. I could have said, ‘I grew up overhearing my Sierra Leonean mother talking about one of her ancestors who was taught by George Thompson himself,’ and then watched how Chloe would have reacted.
According to my mother, that ancestor was a boy when Thompson landed in West Africa in 1848. The boy and his parents had arrived eight years before Thompson, twenty years after the first ship carrying freed slaves left New York for Sierra Leone.
The first time I googled Thompson, I saw that he had written extensively about his experience. One title stood out: Thompson in Africa, or an Account of the Missionary Labors, Sufferings, Travels, Observations, &c. of George Thompson, in West Africa, at the Mendi Mission (1852). There was another book, an earlier one, covering part of his life before the journey to West Africa, about his five-year imprisonment in Missouri for attempting to rescue slaves: Prison Life and Reflections; or a Narrative of the Arrest, Trial, Conviction, Imprisonment, Treatment, Observations, Reflections, and Deliverance of Work, Burr, and Thompson, Who Suffered an Unjust and Cruel Imprisonment in Missouri Penitentiary, for Attempting to Aid Some Slaves to Liberty (1851).
I downloaded both books and read them without much interest until I found myself thinking of what to include in my William Blake application. I could propose a project based on Thompson’s life, I thought. I had a feeling the committee would jump on the idea, considering how transatlantic it was and how personal.
Looking up Thompson’s life for the second time, I came across a paper by one J. Yannielli, a historian at Yale, ‘George Thompson among the Africans: Empathy, Authority, and Insanity in the Age of Abolition’, and I was struck by a small fact I’d missed earlier. Thompson, according to Yannielli, was ‘shocked to find a large group of schoolchildren participating in homosexual activities’. A group of gay boys in nineteenth-century West Africa. I pictured the American missionary, who had given up everything to bring salvation to that darkest part of the world, boiling over after this discovery.
But it was not the gay boys who tipped his sanity, nor was it the harsh weather or the evil mosquitoes that cracked his mind. It was the ‘crime’ of fornication by a pregnant woman that did the trick, causing Thompson to deal the savage fornicator fifty lashes, to the consternation of everyone, including fellow missionaries and proponents of corporal punishment. ‘I feel conscious of a growing roughness,’ Thompson wrote in his journal, ‘of manner and spirit, arising out of my circumstances.’
A Growing Roughness. The title I gave the novel I proposed to write at William Blake, for which the selection committee enthusiastically awarded me a generous fellowship.
Passing St Pierre’s House, Comstock Place in view, I tried to reimagine the shape of this non-existent novel, something different from how I’d proposed to write it. The idea of starting at the harbour in New York was appealing. I pictured my three-year-old ancestor and his parents waiting to board the ship, waiting with hundreds of other African Americans, freed slaves at the threshold of a world they knew and the one across the sea from which they’d been alienated for centuries; standing there at the lips of the vast ocean that bore their ancestors and that would now bear them back. I tried to imagine what crossed their minds, what shades of hope, what depths of fear. The world behind them was violent and cruel, but also familiar; the world ahead, although perceived as ‘home’, was unfamiliar and inconceivable. They were people of the faith, who’d found refuge in the Gospels, and in their hearts it was this faith that would guide them across the sea, lead them through the perils of settling down in West Africa, through new encounters with ‘animists and cannibals’, as one returnee wrote in a letter back to America. A Growing Roughness. The idea was now so strong I felt I needed to put down a line or two before entering Comstock Place.
I sat on the same bench I saw on my first day, and was about to start typing on my phone when I felt a presence behind me. I turned and saw Perky grinning as though her arrival was expected. She had undone her jet black hair, which now rested on her shoulder.
For no particular reason I looked around to make sure there wasn’t anyone from the party nearby. The campus street lamps were on, but it was dark enough in various corners that someone could be hiding and watching.
I wasn’t sure why her presence raised my paranoia. Student–faculty ‘relations’, as I read on a campus blog, were a ‘no-no’. Perky and I weren’t in either category but still I feared I might be breaking some code by just being out alone with her while an event was going on. My worries diminished when she said something about ‘the phoneys back there’ and how she ‘couldn’t stand’ such events, which was ironic because she had organised it.
I was relieved to know that I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t stand them. I wasn’t sure who the phoneys were for her – maybe the dean and faculty, all of whom seemed to gorge on every word and action of the ‘post-colonial’ fellows, worshipping them like gods from another world. It was nonetheless refreshing to know she was not on their side like Sara’s listener, who I saw flushing with excitement, maybe desire, when Sara said something about ‘the politics and long histories of spice’. You would think he was ready to saddle up a horse and race east on the Silk Road to fetch her rare spices from the Orient.
I’d also seen how Perky was standing by herself near the door as if to flee without warning, her hand clasped in front of her – a gesture that had drawn my eyes to her green skirt, which ended just at the kneecap, followed by pale legs that planted themselves in black Oxfords.
Sitting next to me on the bench, my first close company since my arrival, her legs spoke to me. The green skirt, now drawn up, introduced more skin, which in the different lighting of the street lamps looked enriched. She didn’t bother asking why I left but declared how she knew I too was ‘uncomfortable back there’, how she ‘could feel the different energy coming from me’, how she saw how much I wanted to ‘liberate myself’ from ‘the suffocation back there’.
I was careful not to make categorical statements in reply.
I tried to formulate a response to the effect that I truly loathed Barongo Akello Kabumba and Sara Chakraborty, that I was dreading the weeks ahead, how their march of authenticity and resistance would make me look like an indifferent and self-absorbed bastard.
I held my thoughts since I didn’t know where her own dislike for that group was coming from.
Mine was partly because I didn’t understand the depth of their moral authority, the immutable certainty with which they said things about the ‘post-colonial world’ of which they were clearly the true voices. I’d heard more about that ‘post-colonial world’ in a few days than all the years I lived in it, breathed its air, smelled its filth, lost my virginity in one of its many dark underbellies, survived years of crushing depression in its hold, endured its psychosis in the fragmented lives of my parents and their friends who crossed European ideas with anything they could find in their local milieu. But that ‘post-colonial world’, which I apparently ‘embodied’, was nothing like the fully formed and footnoted gunfire sentences I heard from Sara Chakraborty, nothing like the costumed performances of the Ugandan writer. Mine was just another tired world of ordinary and complicated people trudging along, like anywhere else, mostly oblivious of life beyond their neighbourhood, full of pain or courting happiness, vile or honest.
Perky’s presence was refreshing because it was new and held the possibility of an exit towards a different picture of America. I believed this more strongly when she offered me a cigarette and lit it for me. And while I smoked that first stick in America she sketched a portrait of a life that reminded me of the books I’d read, bringing some warmth to my heart, lifting me from the depths of ‘post-colonial despair’ to a place where, for a second, it seemed like I was now entering my true idea of America.
As ‘a working-class chick from Ohio’ who grew up with a single ‘drug-addicted mother’ in a ‘trailer park’ she could ‘sniff BS from a mile away’.
It wasn’t the sniffing that I liked but the little biographical detail, the image it conjured of the mother sitting on a foldable chair outside her trailer, smoking a joint or whatever she was addicted to, her enormous breasts pouring out of her distended tank top, and little Perky in whatever space was designated for her in the trailer, playing with some Barbie doll or dreaming of a faraway land, of an escape from the backward flatness of her small town to San Francisco or New York.
A smile crossed my face when she mentioned her actual escape from her hometown at the age of seventeen, driving east to New York for college at Vassar, after which she lived for two years in the Catskills, in ‘a community of makers and seekers’ from all over, and it was there that she met her first husband, a black poet from Damascus, Virginia, who had fled an abusive family to ‘just live and thrive’ up north.
I pictured some kind of twenty-first-century underground railroad where black folks were fleeing north or wherever to ‘live and thrive’.
When the ‘community’ disintegrated, after it came out that the ‘leader’ kept ‘crossing the boundaries’, she and the black poet moved to Lisbon for a year, travelling around Europe. They separated in Rome, after an ‘incident’, and she came back to the States, where she applied and got the job at William Blake.
The job itself was disappointing when it did not deliver what she needed to ‘thrive’. But she knew ‘this year would be different’ when she read my email and looked me up.
I pinched the cigarette butt harder than necessary.
A group of students walked past.
I tried to make sense of the gaps in her story, the omissions and vagueness.
When she said she had read my book, I not only tensed but also understood clearly why she was sharing her ‘journey’ with me. She saw similarities between some aspects of her life and that of my character, and she could also tell that I was ‘more daring and original’ than the other fellows.
I wasn’t sure about the originality but I was flattered all the same, and she compared my work to ‘something Salinger would have written if he was born and raised in Africa’.
I felt a rush of blood and a little warmth in my crotch. It was a new feeling, this positive response to a compliment from a reader of my work. Maybe it was the atmosphere, sitting on that bench in a dreamy spot on a quiet campus in America. Maybe a part of me was craving reassurance, some form of acceptance. I suddenly felt proud of my work, its universal appeal, its ability to gather the human condition far and near under its own relatable roof.
Out of curiosity, I asked how she got my book.
Apparently, Betty had donated her copy to the Harry Putnam Library and Perky had borrowed it soon after I sent her my initial inquiry. She had repeated those words, ‘initial inquiry’, which made me wonder if she still remembered the typo in my email, ‘the global dementias of violent hosieries’. My mood swung from where it was to a lower rung.
Involuntarily, I looked at Comstock Place, hoping to find an excuse to flee the scene.
She uncrossed her legs, as if to reorder my gaze.
She tugged the edges of her skirt.
She asked me, ‘How about we take this conversation elsewhere?’
She stood up and I found myself following her, my mind suspended between confidence and crushing self-doubt. I didn’t care to ask where we were going. There was an air of command and authority about her that magnetised me. And she seemed to know this about herself and her voice, because she did not wait for me to answer or look to see if I was comfortable following her. She simply led and I followed like a loyal dog. She had also, in that instant, transformed from the ‘sharing’ Perky to a more dominant figure who knew precisely what she wanted, and how and where she wanted it.
As we walked towards the gate, away from the vicinities of Comstock Place, she took a small bottle from her handbag and sipped. ‘Care for some?’ she asked.
I accepted and was glad I did. It was whisky and it tasted like nothing I knew from life back home. I studied the bottle and the label said something about the Hudson Valley.
She pointed to a narrow road to our left, just before the gate.
I saw a sign saying it led to one of the campus car parks. I followed her again. And I took in for the first time her height and shape, how tall she was, a foot or more above me, slightly hunched. How old was she? I tried to guess but concluded it did not matter. If she wasn’t my age she was at most thirty-five. But it didn’t matter. There was something in the air, in that moment, that had seized me by the collar and was dragging me along, and I felt the move itself was a walk into a different and more intriguing world.
By the time we reached her car, a black Subaru Forester, and after my third swig from her bottle, I was beginning to sense a long and exciting night ahead. She exuded the energy of a host leading a guest to the sanctum sanctorum of a crowded party, away from the crowd, towards a more exclusive offering. I tried to imagine where she was taking me but quickly resisted the urge to dwell in fantasy.
When she said something about having a better drink back at her place my head spun in multiple directions. Now I gave my mind free rein, conjuring all sorts of images as she reversed the car and drove away.
It took us a little over twenty minutes to reach her place, a period of time we spent trading what we despised about the likes of Sara and Kabumba. I felt understood and accepted chatting with her. By the time we entered her house, we were already brushing against each other’s bodies, hovering close enough that kisses came naturally, her lips enclosing mine, and I felt the strength of her tongue, its probing powers, and a part of me wondered if Kabumba would ever experience this aspect of America, this other type of welcome.
We stumbled deeper and deeper into her large living room, which was mostly empty and dimly lit. We landed on her couch, the only thing of substance that I saw.
As if recalling an appointment, she sprang up and commanded me to come with her. She pulled me up and I followed, self-consciously dragging my hard-on with me.
At the door to her bedroom, she asked me to close my eyes, turn around, and wait. ‘You’ll like what you’re about to see,’ she said. She went in and I stood there, trying to process what was happening and how fast it was unfolding. There was anticipation but also a hovering awareness that something was off. She had mentioned that she lived alone in the Stonehill part of town, which she described, or rather dismissed, as ‘a little sleepy but nice’, and I imagined a small flat, not a multi-room mini-mansion set back from the street. It wasn’t clear if she owned or rented but these details didn’t matter and I was not interested in asking, at least not in that moment of anticipation.
I could hear her moving inside, and could hear the music coming on, a piece that sounded familiar, like it was rising from deep inside a part of me that was long dead or repressed. And when she called out for me to turn and see, I saw a scene that simultaneously impressed and embarrassed me. The candles were there, along with enlarged pictures on the walls, and the music came back to me, the same ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ I’d played and liked and thrown into a scene in my novel. She had recreated that scene, bringing the imagination of my young protagonist to life in her large bedroom. She’d planned it all and was waiting for the right time to ‘invite me over’ and how ‘perfect’ that it ‘worked out’ the way it did.
I looked around and saw the scene again as it appeared in my book, awkwardly thrown in after I’d googled names and places to make it all sound real. My young protagonist had read the now out-of-print Midnight Orgies by the Swiss-American writer Jean Rudolph Lauper, and had imagined himself in one of Lauper’s orgies in Greenwich Village in the early twentieth century, receiving a blowjob from a flamboyant ‘queen’, surrounded by portraits of ‘well-known Bohemians’ on the wall, ‘their faces barely illuminated by low-burning candles placed at different corners’. His anachronism was mine, born out of a period when I fancied myself a ‘bohemian’, enamoured by distant and faded worlds. I was a curious creature formed by the stories I heard from my parents and their friends, by the things I read.
As I entered the room I understood one could simultaneously have a hard-on while cringing and praying for one’s embarrassing past to disappear.
She had stripped down to a glittering bra and a black thong, just as my character described the ‘lady that threw herself at me while the queen sucked my dick’.
Now it seemed Perky was making my book into a movie, with major twists that I couldn’t help but notice. The posters on the walls weren’t the ones in my book. Hers were of black intellectuals and writers and activists and celebrities. Baldwin, Fanon, Idris Elba, Angela Davis, Oprah. I tried to speak and she put a finger to her lips, like the Greenwich Village ‘lady’ in my book. She descended on me, straddled me and undressed me so fast I could barely recall when the grinding began and when I started squeezing her arse with equal intensity. She lifted herself and disappeared again and when she returned she had ropes and a big bottle of champagne. This too I recalled from the scene in my book. The champagne was coming down my mouth in no time, my legs and arms tied to the bedposts and her on top of me. The music shuffled from one twenties jazz to another, louder this time. The audience on the wall seemed to come alive, as my young character had imagined. Now it was Baldwin and Idris Elba, visible on the left wall, that looked on as Perky – naked by this time – continued to grind, the champagne bottle placed on the side table. She left again and returned with something in her mouth, which she offered me in a kiss, a pill, like the ‘lady’ had done in my book. I asked what it was and she said, ‘It’s nothing,’ and I was already too drunk to resist. I actually did not want to resist and did not care because for the first time in my life someone was taking the time and pain to create something special for me no matter how absurd it was. Whatever concerns I had vanished when she turned and sat on my face.
Between the rush of that unknown pill and the phenomenal sensation of the face-sitting, what followed simultaneously erased itself as it unfolded.
I recall bits and pieces and vaguely remember her disappearing and reappearing with a black mask and a giant afro, and I recall laughing as she said something about showing me how she ‘truly’ saw herself, ‘like that bitch over there,’ she said, pointing at a figure that could have been either Angela Davis or Oprah. I kept laughing disproportionately as she rode me and slapped my cheeks so hard I felt it in my brain.
She’d gone off-script from the scene in my book and there was no going back. I vaguely recall how she raised her fist as she came, and after that it was the blankness of night.
It was this experience that inspired one of my lectures at the Global Centre for Gender and Equality at the Osakwe University of Southern Nigeria.
In that lecture, titled ‘Diasporic Erotics: Inter/course as New World Dialogic Dis-course’, I relied on a ‘combination of first-hand encounters and a sustained body of lucidly researched ideas’ to argue that ‘the future of our planet, from the realisation of gender equality to the end of racism and the clearing out of all anxieties produced by the excesses of the modern world, not to forget the horrors of late capitalism and the rapid and riotous and raucous resurgence of ferocious fascist fetishisms’ depended on ‘a carefully orchestrated indulgence of bodily proximities’. I argued further that the ‘flowering of bodily proximities across geo-temporal itineraries could potentially do more for global cultural understanding than all the Peace Corps and Fulbright and NGO-esque pre- and post-Cold War simulations and vigorous insistence on difference’. I recall lifting my head to see if someone would interrupt me with a question but no one did and I was grateful because I had no idea what I was saying. During the short break a young scholar about my age came close to me and asked if I could share a thing or two about the ‘widening rift’ between the political sides in the US. I nodded solemnly as if giving serious thought to his question, threw some cashew nuts into my mouth, munched contemplatively, formulating my answer as the bespectacled young scholar in his oversized and outdated suit and skinny necktie waited patiently in the overpowering heat. Unsure what to say, I spoke through a smirk, noting that he should never take that ‘widening rift’ seriously. Lowering my voice, I told him that enduring and observing politics in the US ‘is the same as having your arse cheeks held apart while a unicorn rams its horn up your behind, the Left holding your left cheek and the Right holding the right and both sides taking delight in watching their unicorn doing justice to your arse’. I threw in more cashew nuts and returned to the rostrum, leaving him to meditate on my spur-of-the-moment advice. It was at this same lecture that I mentioned the ‘fact’ that the burgeoning pornography industry in Nigeria and Africa as a whole ‘is a sign of radical progress’ and a true break from ‘the primitive conservatism that shackles the present to the primordial past’. The success of that lecture led to a well-paid invitation to give a talk on ‘new positions for global harmony’ at the Nigerian Institute of World Relations, and I thanked that night in Perky’s bed for the inspiration.
I remember waking up the next morning around ten, my head pounding, the room transformed to an ordinary space without the costumes and the posters, its dark grey walls so blank and boring I wondered if I had dreamed the previous night.
Perky wasn’t there. She’d left a note to let me know she was off to Concord to ‘co-lead’ an outreach programme that introduced minorities to the ‘great outdoors’.
There was bread and eggs and bacon and I was told to please make myself breakfast.
I checked my phone and saw a text she sent at 8 a.m. to say she’d arrived and the activities were going great, with a selfie of herself standing in the centre of knee-high pillars marking ‘the original location of Thoreau’s cabin’.
I took a hot shower and made myself scrambled eggs and toast and avoided the bacon. She’d asked if I could wait to have lunch at a place she liked downtown but I decided I needed to re-enter the world alone.