‘It’s amazing what you can accomplish in four months if you’re passionate enough to put in the work.’ The room full of aspiring Nigerian writers nodded and some took notes. I was leading the first Chief F.K.J. Igbikhedia Fellowship for Writers of Immense Promise. The location: a quiet resort tucked away in the Obudu Plateau in Cross River State in southern Nigeria. The seven-day programme, comprising ‘workshops and seminars on craft’, was conceived by my agent slash publisher as the African version of the William Blake Fellowship, sold to the writing community as ‘a fully funded opportunity to encourage aesthetic and stylistic diversity in contemporary creative-critical writing’, and we encouraged applications from ‘writers who tackle social issues’. Hundreds of applications flooded in, from Fez in Morocco to L’Agulhas in South Africa. From this diverse pool we selected ten African writers from Nigeria. I led the workshops while my publisher led the ‘seminars on craft’. And each morning, before the sessions began, I would sit outside my cabin, one of many scattered on the side of the plateau overlooking the eastern view of the mountain range, and sip my coffee, taking in the silence of nature, away from Port Jumbo. I enjoyed these quiet moments and preferred them to the workshops and the company of my students. Their interest in the publishing ‘markets’ of Europe and America, and their endless chattering about this and that ‘lit mag’ that accepted or rejected their ‘work’ in London and New York and Sydney, and that grant they got or didn’t get from so-and-so organisation in Santa Fe and Marfa and Berlin and everywhere but Nigeria drained me. From their modest homes in Nigeria, starved of support for their work and talent, they looked outwards for opportunities, their abilities and stories and energies thrown about to any organisation and programme that offered support. Not once did I hear them discussing the motives behind the generous grants and fellowships and residencies they pursued, or pause to ponder where and how the funds were raised. If it paid, and if it helped them escape the horrors of daily life in Nigeria, they went for it. Listening to them, I thought to myself that the days of sending secret agents as field workers to scout for ideas in remote Africa were over; a single contest for African writers organised from London or New York or Paris or Moscow or Beijing could bring the best and brightest to you on a platter. In the past you had to plant your agents on the ground, as professors or writers or journalists, to do the legwork; all you needed now was a wealthy individual as your front, a prize or fellowship named after them, a clever mission statement, a reputable and diverse panel of judges, a call for submission, and the world of African ideas would come rushing to your doorstep. A contest organised for less than $50,000 could fetch enough ideas to enrich your foreign and socio-economic policies, yielding millions if not billions of dollars in indirect benefits. And the prize money could potentially be recovered by way of submission fees paid by the desperate applicants.
My agent took advantage of that pool of desperate voices. He understood the politics and economics of literary prizes, having himself spent years entering what he described as ‘my wretched poems’ for contests around the world, collecting rejections while losing money.
Bitter, disillusioned and aware that the odds were stacked against ‘the writers now emerging in Africa’, he reached out to Chief F.K.J. Igbikhedia, a reclusive millionaire whose reclusion was not unconnected to his dealings with warlords in various civil wars across Africa.
The chief had already collaborated with a couple of top professors to set up the Centre for Advanced Studies, where bright scientists from across the country were offered funding simply to think and theorise and present their work to the general public.
We had direct access to the chief, thanks to an old friend of my father’s, a professor of theoretical physics at the Tropical School of Technology, who now directed the chief’s Centre for Advanced Studies.
‘A Princeton man’, as he was known to my father’s circle, the professor read my agent’s proposal, thought it was ‘clever’ and ‘exactly what we needed now to advance a robust cultural front in this age of liquid change’.
A week later we received an invitation from the chief’s secretary. They flew us first class to Abuja, where the chief resided in an exclusive section of the nation’s capital.
The ‘meeting’ took place at a social gathering the chief had organised for his friends and ‘associates’, and it was obvious that we were there as the cultural arm of his empire.
He engaged us for two minutes or less, during which he made two quick remarks – ‘My secretary will make all the necessary arrangements’ and ‘Please don’t forget to give her your account numbers’ – before he disappeared into the large banquet room of the Southern Ritz Hotel, which was teeming with his business partners and investors and senior employees from around the world, including a number of Nollywood celebrities.
The moment of encounter with the chief was anti-climactic for Belema. Deep down he expected the chief to show signs of genuine interest in culture, to throw in a line or two about the project. The disappointment evolved into a long night of him trying to drum up a moral justification for the project he had proposed. At least the writers we would end up working with wouldn’t have to hawk their identities or play up any narrative to secure money to write. Besides, he was doing what others had done elsewhere, recycling and laundering ‘wealth’ to build ‘our own culture’. And that was how ‘the West arrived where they are now, culturally speaking, the museums and historic mansions and botanical gardens and cathedrals and whole cities’. We’re just following their footsteps, ‘and don’t let them preach all that moral crap, we can do the moral thing when we’ve reached where they are. How else are we going to fund the arts here?’
I understood his point but wondered out loud if he thought the world unfolded on a straight line and at different rates for different regions and we were somehow trapped in the past and slowly crawling to meet those ahead.
He looked at me like someone watching an actor losing his marbles on stage. I was already too involved to play the moral intellectual, and I felt the bite of guilt for challenging him the way I did.
It was past midnight in the nation’s capital. We were sitting on the wide balcony of our hotel, on the tenth floor, and we could see the movement of lights on the network of streets stretching into the distance. ‘I would like to visit the outskirts,’ I said, changing the subject. The slums and semi-slums had sprung up after Abuja emerged from nowhere and became the capital in the nineties, uprooting and displacing the communities that lived there, pushing them away to fend for themselves in the outskirts of a city that continued to expand with little regard for the social amenities that sustained modern cities.
‘We all need our share of slum tourism and poverty porn,’ he said, his words slurred, a sarcastic smile on his face. ‘I guess you also picked that up from the US, eh? Ogling the poor to conceal your own poverty, looking over your shoulder to see how bad they have it over there while you bleed from the inside. Well, if you’re looking for me tomorrow I’ll be touring the site of the new Universal City.’
His love for this new ‘ultramodern’ city within the Federal Capital Territory, still under construction, was another extension of his disillusion. Since abandoning political poetry, he’d embraced everything that reeked of ‘modernisation’, a sign that ‘we’ were making progress like ‘the rest of the world’.
I stood up, grabbed the nearly empty bottle of whisky and retired to my room.
I left him because the subject was reeling back a chain of memories in Boston. His mood and remarks triggered me the same way his encounter with the chief affected him. I was feeling again my sense of powerlessness in Boston, the combined feeling of gratitude and wanting to assert my freedom as an individual, a feeling that came into full intensity when I visited the Kirkpatricks for dinner at their home in Scotsbury, outside Boston, a place they’d recently moved to after many years in Charlestown. Betty had suggested that I could stay the night if I wanted, and I agreed.
When I emerged from the station that day, my satchel flung across my shoulder, bulging with the items I needed for the night, I saw Betty waiting for me by a black SUV. When I approached, she clasped me in a tight and unexpected hug that nearly cut off my circulation. I could sense the pride in her warm embrace. The writer and his patron. ‘I can’t believe you’re here,’ she said. Neither can I, I wanted to say, but instead I mumbled something incoherent and sustained a smile.
As she drove away from the train station, towards our destination, we passed large houses, mostly in shades of blue and grey. The ocean bordered the houses to the left, separated from the road by rocks and beach sand. The coastline, spreading out on one side and disappearing into the distance, blurred into the grey horizon of the bay.
We crossed a bridge over the North River, and I saw its dark shape winding its way to the bay, giving of itself to the ocean, like the River Niger back home.
‘And how are you settling in?’ she asked.
‘So far so good,’ I replied, hoping I’d not betrayed the truth lurking in my heart, that so far I’d not managed to connect with anyone on the programme. I didn’t think I should mention Perky, as that might lead to a suspicion of staff–fellow intimacy.
We slowed down and turned onto a dirt road.
She was now asking about my first impressions, but my attention was on a deer I’d spotted ahead which, startled by the approaching car, had jumped into the bushes. I peeled my eyes to that side of the road, hoping to spot it again.
‘It couldn’t be more different from Port Jumbo,’ I finally replied.
She was happy, she was now saying, to see me ‘here in the States’.
The dean wasn’t there when we arrived. He was out on some errand.
She showed me my room, a large space that was twice the size of my room back home. From the window I could see a wooden pier and a small inlet of the ocean.
On the bedside table, I saw that she’d carefully stacked three books: Beloved by Toni Morrison, No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe and The Final Passage by Caryl Phillips.
Hanging on the wall, at the head of the bed, was a painting of a lighthouse, which I instantly recognised as the Port Jumbo lighthouse, made famous by Mary Browne, the British artist who painted it from six different angles, all versions ending up in museums around the world. But I could tell that the one on the wall was painted by a local Port Jumbo artist. This was confirmed when I drew closer and saw the signature, Tamunorex, and in my mind I could see this particular painter’s studio on the eastern promenade.
On the other bedside table I saw a magazine. I went closer. On the glossy cover was a group photo of elegantly dressed black men and women, in black suits and white shirts, and it said they were the major black writers one must read. I studied their faces, the opulent background against which they stood, and wondered where I fit in, and why she’d placed the magazine there (obviously because of me, but why?). I was failing to draw inspiration from that image.
During the pre-dinner drinks, I found myself sandwiched on one side by the Kirkpatricks and on the other by Dr Kathryn B. Reinhardt and her husband, Professor George Reinhardt. The Reinhardts had driven down from Boston. I hadn’t been aware that they were joining us. We were all in the living room, by the electric fireplace. Through the sliding glass door, the pier and the houses across the inlet were visible. The conversation somehow stayed on the weather, how the last winter had lingered longer than the previous one. Betty occasionally dropped lines about the weather in Africa, and they would all pause and look in my direction. Someone else would jump in and continue the conversation.
I excused myself and went to the bathroom.
I needed space to work myself into a conversational mood, to feel as lively as they were.
I flashed my teeth in the mirror and held the pose until my cheeks hurt.
I rolled my shoulders.
I opened my eyes until my eyelids couldn’t take it.
I slapped myself on both cheeks.
When I returned, there were more guests, a middle-aged woman and her teenage daughter who, as Betty said, had recently returned from a group trip to India, where she and the others from their high school had volunteered at ‘a school for Dalit children’. She was now interested in Africa after a refugee from Kibera, presently living in the US, visited their school last fall to share his experience of growing up in that Kenyan slum.
I had read about Kibera, and knew it was one of the largest slums in the world, one hell of an eyesore, a depressing fact that wasn’t obvious in the high schooler’s voice. What I heard instead was a load of enthusiasm and excitement at the prospect of travelling there. I admired her interest, in spite of my personal feelings.
I excused myself again and hurried to the bathroom.
I returned and my first attempt to be lively was a disaster. My voice was shrill and loud.
The Reinhardts squinted. The Kirkpatricks winced. The high-school Africanist and her mother kept their broad smile, as if to counterbalance the look of suspicion coming from the others.
I was talking about the dry season in Nigeria, how different it was from winter, no snow and all that, a topic Betty had raised while I was in the bathroom, and on which I felt obliged to offer further context, an authentic angle.
I gesticulated a little too much and my wine glass flew out of my hand, shattering at the feet of the dean, its red contents dousing his white socks and making a Basquiat-esque splash on the floor.
The silence that descended was as profound as it was unsettling. Not a word. Just my voice apologising. My hands shaking.
Betty leaped into action, cleaning up the mess before I could do so. She patted my shoulder, and said, ‘It happens all the time. We’ve all been there.’
They laughed. I tried to laugh but I thought I heard something else in Betty’s voice, in their collective laughter.
As if to show how conversations were made, Kathryn began to share her ‘journey’ to William Blake, in response to a question on how to work in the ‘field of ethnic studies’ posed by the young Africanist. Kathryn took us back to Riverville, Wisconsin, where she was born and raised. She was the first to go to college, where she read English with a focus on African American and Native American Studies at the University of Madison, after which she moved to Boston for a postdoc at Boylston Graduate School. After her postdoc, she joined William Blake as an adjunct, teaching classes in ethnic studies, and eventually ‘transitioned’ to a full-time post. She continued her story while I agonised over the wine glass incident, praying for the evening to hurry up and end.
When we transferred to the table, the dean sat at one end and Betty at the other. The Reinhardts were on one side, opposite me. The high-school Africanist sat to the left of the Reinhardts, facing me, her mother to my right, facing her.
Behind the Reinhardts, a horrible oil painting hung in full glare, clearly a purchase by Betty from one of her visits to Nigeria. The painting showed a canoe on a beach, with abandoned nets and jerrycans on both sides.
I caught the dean’s thick signet ring glittering on his left little finger, and saw how the collar of his sea-blue shirt hung like a sea holly above his grey V-neck sweater.
George Reinhardt was a fascinating presence. He seldom spoke. And hardly smiled. His thin hair lay like a circular silk bandage around his bald head. A visibly ascetic man, he communicated by moving his eyes and letting them fall on yours, and somehow you intuitively knew what he was thinking. For instance, when his wife used a rather warm conversation about Roxane Gay – whose work she loved and had included in her syllabus – as a segue into a speech on the dearth of diverse voices in classrooms and academia in general, saying this more for my benefit since the subject wasn’t new among those present, George lifted his eyes, held them until they lowered and found mine, and his message came across in a slight rolling of the eyes that seemed to say, ‘Well, how about you give up your position as the director of ethnic studies and make room for a qualified person of colour.’ He came across as the type who would either take action or simply enjoy whatever privileges the system offered him. He’d spent his entire life in New England and bore his insulation with stoic pride. He seemed to know exactly who he was, what he represented, and did not pretend to care about the things he didn’t truly care about. He simply existed where he was, a figure grounded in the routine and tedium of academia, cocooned by the privileges of existing in a world designed to favour him. His wife, on the other hand, fluttered with what I could only see as either extreme guilt or a projection of unresolved anxiety. I was beginning to lose count of the number of times she’d said ‘white people’ in mock despair or just to emphasise a point. When George, in his only chatty moment, mentioned his ice fishing weekends in the Berkshires, a subject I thought was refreshing and enlightening, Kathryn destroyed the mood with her remark, ‘Ugh, white people stuff.’ She swerved the conversation and began talking about the issue of ‘safe spaces’ for students, how her programme was working hard to secure more funding for minorities, how they were making sure students from less privileged backgrounds, especially ‘people of colour’, were given equal opportunities. I listened, knowing it was all meant for me to see and understand that they were the good guys, that I was safe at William Blake, safe around her and everyone at that table – a gesture that was in reality having the opposite effect on me, since I was now beginning to imagine the possibility of hostilities everywhere outside that circle.
Breaking the theme, the dean asked what my first impressions were.
‘First impressions?’ I repeated. ‘Well, I think the absence of chaos is striking. I mean, compared to where I’m from. Here, there are no motorbikes and cars blaring their horns, no bars playing loud music at every street corner, no street hawkers with megaphones screaming at you their invitations to buy magic soaps and antimalarial tree roots.’ I wanted to say something about the Comstock protest but didn’t.
My reply, for some season, drew silence. I felt they were waiting for more, for a sustained talk on my ‘experience’ in America. I panicked. Disconcerted, I poured myself another glass of wine, and from the corner of my eye I caught Kathryn squinting at my full glass. ‘You must be looking forward to meeting our students,’ she said, ‘they’re excited about this cohort of William Blake Fellows.’
She was fascinated by my proposed work on George Thompson, she added, and was interested in my ‘transatlantic roots’ and the ‘global histories’ captured in my ‘work’.
She was quoting me here, pulling from my application statement, nudging me to talk. She must have read the ‘initial inquiry’ that I sent Perky, and the ‘global histories’ probably came from my ‘global dementias of violent hosieries’. I prayed for a hatch to open underneath my chair. My only option was to ignore her comments. And when I didn’t take the bait, she wondered – not to me in particular – if there was a way to have ‘this year’s fellows write up their talks, that way we could put together a little book’. Wouldn’t that be a good idea?
George nodded and forked his asparagus.
I drank my wine a little too fast.
The dean rotated the ring on his finger.
The high-school Africanist, who seemed to consume me with her eyes instead of eating her food, reached for her glass of water. The evening dragged on. I retreated into myself, burdened by a growing feeling that I wasn’t representing as I should.
For a second I wished I had the guts and liveliness of Kabumba and the astuteness and rhetorical prowess of Sara Chakraborty. They would have turned the evening into a theatre of publishable ideas and memorable anecdotes, and there would have been laughter and tears and the sort of catharsis Americans seem to expect when the oppressed and the oppressor dine together.
I wasn’t delivering the goods and wasn’t keeping my side of the bargain; the sense of balance that they were accustomed to having at occasions like that wasn’t being achieved.
I thought of the room Betty had prepared for me, with Morrison and Achebe and Phillips on one side, and a host of black writers on the other, and suddenly a well of anger sprang up inside me, which I fought to conceal.
When the would-be Africanist, eyes glittering with anticipation, asked what it was like ‘growing up in Africa’, I tried to advance a simple one-liner, something to simultaneously answer but also evade. But Betty, eager to show her knowledge, launched into her experience of teaching kids in East Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer. It wasn’t the accuracy or inaccuracy of her intervention that set me off. It was the way she spoke as though her East African experience, in the seventies, applied to every single village and town and city on the continent, across time periods and languages and cultures shaped by different traditional and colonial experiences.
My reaction was incoherent and impassioned, forced through a combination of caution, confusion, respect and repulsion, and the result was everything from how the forces that shaped the modern world, transforming the disparate European groups at that dinner table into Americans, were also responsible for turning the average city dweller in Africa into a hybrid creature whose life is split between the multiple influences and traditions going back to the same period that Europe began making its inroads in what would eventually become the United States. I staggered back to the Romans in northern Africa, to early Christian settlements in that region, jumped to the Portuguese and Dutch and English in southern Africa, and the worlds of trade and culture and violence that shaped identities down there and everywhere. I rambled on, cheered by the wine, cheered by the desire to break free and plant myself outside what seemed a cage of received and glamourised and unquestioned ideas, cheered by my own insecurities and inability to just play along.
And somewhere in my spontaneous lecture, I feared there was something truly wrong with me, an irreparable flaw, a gap in my thinking and being; I feared they all had access to some pure and morally correct knowledge that I did not.
I longed to summarise with one of those terse and tweetable lines you hear from some writers of the ‘immigrant experience’ who seemed to know how to lambast white audiences without losing their support, a tactic Sara Chakraborty once described as ‘postcolonial proximity to privilege as resistance’. I wanted them to know that I wasn’t advancing any single ideology or worldview or notion of progress, and wasn’t trying to attack anyone, that I just wanted to exist and cry and laugh and fuck and live and die without prefixing or suffixing my actions with any universal idea of blackness or Africanness or whatever thing out there that I was supposedly tied to as a POC or BAME.
Betty rose and started clearing the dishes. They all joined her, moving in different directions.
They congregated near the kitchen. I sat where I was, alone at the dinner table, composing a text to Perky.
I could hear the young Africanist chatting with George, sharing stories of her ski adventures the previous winter. Kathryn and the dean stood to one side, talking in low voices. Betty and Lauren, the high schooler’s mother, stood by the kitchen counter, talking about their volunteer work at a homeless shelter in the next town.
When it was time for the Reinhardts to leave, I saw my opportunity to head back to Boston. Perky had replied to my text asking if I could stay the night at her place. Better to endure her clamps on my nipples than bear a night in the room Betty had prepared for me.
The Reinhardts dropped me off at the station downtown. I took a train to Stonehill. On the train, I tried to suppress my experience at the Kirkpatricks but it was impossible to do so. I caught myself looking at my own black fingers where they rested on my knees, and glancing sideways to catch a glimpse of the white faces around me. I looked around to see if there were other black people in the carriage. I spotted a black teenager and stared at him until he caught me staring and changed his seat.
Out on Kendell Avenue, I stopped at a liquor store run by a bespectacled man who I overheard saying to a customer that his parents ‘moved here from Las Piedras’ in Puerto Rico.
I wandered around the store and eventually settled for a pack of Sam Adams.
At the till, the man from Las Piedras asked for my ID.
I showed him my Nigerian driver’s licence. He held it up, looked at me then back at the ID, and asked, ‘Any American ID?’
‘No,’ I answered, and told him that I was new in the US.
Something sparked in his eyes. I couldn’t tell what it was but it was warm and understanding.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘welcome to the United States of America.’
He returned my driver’s licence.
Turning around, I saw those in line behind me: two black men, each holding a bottle of hard liquor, and a sad-looking white woman in grey sweatpants hugging a large bottle of vodka. They were all staring at me, the new creature from Africa.
Hurrying out the door, I began the walk to Perky’s nice neighbourhood, away from the area around the liquor store, which seemed like the threshold between two sides of the socio-economic divide. Perky had offered to pick me up but I wanted to walk off my anxiety.
A minute or so into my walk, I stood and opened a can of beer.
There were two cans left when I got to Perky’s.