I saw the dean’s office again, and pictured the oak tree outside his window. I could hear his voice and how hard he was trying to stay calm as he tiptoed around the subject. ‘We expect two things from our fellows,’ he had said that day, trying not to raise his voice, ‘to produce work in the genre for which they were accepted, and to attend seminars they are leading or participating in. Your colleagues have all produced work and have actively engaged our students, but you, Frank, have hardly been a part of this programme at all.’
I felt again the intensity of his pain, how he paused to collect himself, relaxing the deep line that had appeared on his brow, adding a layer of sadness to a face already battered by the excruciating demands of academia.
When he continued, he expressed his ‘surprise’ (meaning disappointment), that I ‘came all the way here from Nigeria and could not so much as produce a short story in four months’.
At this point I tried to say something but his frustration got the best of him, turning the rather civilised dean into a little savage.
Raising his voice to counter mine, he continued: ‘I recall sending you an email to see what we could do. I mean, how we could help you adjust and deal with whatever you were going through. Your response was, and I quote, “I am on to something.” That was in April, Frank, three months after you arrived. It’s May now and… I don’t know, Frank, my hands are tied here.’
He raised both hands in surrender, brought them down and pushed aside a stack of files, making room for his expansive palms to rest on the ancient mahogany desk he must have inherited from Horace Broughton, the first dean of humanities, whose daguerreotype by Albert Southworth was among those displayed in a case in the lobby.
A giant portrait of William Blake himself, not the English poet, was hanging behind the dean, regarding me that day with a touch of disgust and disappointment. And I swear I heard the seventeenth-century merchant, whose other ventures in the area of human cargo are well documented, mumbling under his breath, ‘I did not start this college to offer free rides to ne’er-do-wells from Africa.’
The other committee members were silent for the most part. But I knew they’d all reached a decision: to send me packing for ‘non-performance’ and ‘non-participation’.
Dr Kathryn B. Reinhardt, director of ethnic studies, was especially cold for reasons I understood only too well. She wondered if I had any idea how my ‘behaviour’ impacted what people thought of Africans. I said I wasn’t in America to represent anyone but myself. ‘Besides,’ I added, ‘you have Barongo Akello Kabumba. He does a good job of representing his dear Africa.’
Sharon ‘Perky’ Hollister was present in her capacity as the academic coordinator responsible for the William Blake Program for Emerging Writers. She managed to speak, offering me a second chance that we both knew was useless.
‘Well, Frank,’ she said, ‘you’ve got some time to share work, and we could arrange one or two projects with students over the next few week.’
‘What if I don’t produce any work or know that I may not be able to deliver?’
It was a thoughtless question. Childish, maybe. But I was already considered a disappointment and I wanted to leave with a bang. I had made a point of showing up late for the ‘meeting’, swaggering in after two pints at The Snug on Coolidge Street.
At one point during the ‘trial’ I wanted to interrupt the dean and make him see the bright side of things. Well, I thought of saying, you now know things like this are possible, which gives you something to plan ahead with, you know, a contingency plan for unproductive Blake Fellows. Another part of me wanted to make it clear that I intended to write but found myself in a new world where fiction no longer existed, where everything was so drummed up that my senses began to turn against themselves.
I had applied on the strength of the slim novel I wrote and published at twenty-four, The Day They Came for Dan, a coming-of-age story set in a fictional version of Port Jumbo, my hometown on the southern coast of Nigeria.
The novel was poorly edited and proofread, lacking in punctuation and peppered with embarrassing typos (‘she’ repeatedly spelled as ‘shay’) – none of which was a deliberate experiment in style. It sold only fifty copies and was already out of print, or ‘rare’, as Belema, who published it, would say.
And it all began when a copy, possibly flung out of a window by a dissatisfied reader, fell into the hands of one Mrs Kirkpatrick, who was visiting her daughter in Port Jumbo.
She’d gone with her daughter to see the weekly street market at Pipeline Bypass, near the intersection which ran east to a cluster of abandoned Slot Oil & Gas equipment stores, and was enthralled by the way books were displayed on mats, how the booksellers called you to come see the titles. I can still hear the ring of her voice when she phoned to share with me her encounter with my book, speaking as though we’d known each other for years.
I was flattered by that call from a white stranger and fan in Nigeria but also irritated by her intrusion. Her opening remark was startling. ‘Hello, is this Frank Jasper, the writer?’
I said yes with a start, more in response to her accent than the question. I should have said no, or at least corrected her: ‘This is Frank Jasper, the recovering writer. You should have called five years ago, when I thought I was a writer, or was suffering from an illness that made me see myself as a writer.’
It was a midweek afternoon. I was still in bed. Her call was a wake-up alarm I didn’t need.
‘Your book stood out from everything on display,’ she said after her anecdote about street booksellers in Port Jumbo. ‘I bought it and was glad I did. By the way, is that a Yinka Shonibare on the cover?’
‘Yes,’ I answered, calibrating my brain to match the pace and tone of the conversation. I waited to find out where her call was leading.
‘I knew it,’ she gushed. ‘I guessed it from that colourful Dutch wax.’
What you don’t know, I wanted to say, is that my publisher pinched that image off the internet, without consulting the artist or his representatives. The whole book was a complete joke. And just as I was about to inch towards thanking her and hanging up, she fired on. ‘It’s such a good book, Frank – may I call you Frank? Such a good book. I can almost touch your characters, and boy, how did you get away with handling such a delicate subject, I mean, an openly gay character in a novel set in 1990s Nigeria?’
Well, I thought of replying, there were only fifty copies printed and sold, ninety per cent of which went to my publisher’s close friends. That took care of the risks involved in ‘handling such a delicate subject’.
I held on to my thoughts and thanked her for reading my work, and for her kind remarks.
I wondered how she read the whole thing without cringing at the errors and the poor print quality. These Americans are something, I thought. They fall for anything and anyone, or pretend to. They flatter you until you begin to see sparks of genius where none exist.
Her enthusiasm that day made me want to reread the surviving copy of my novel that was languishing under the bed, a move that I knew would make me revisit my early twenties, the crisis of culture that marked it, the ridiculous outpouring of Byron, Pushkin, Huysmans, Proust… onto the pages of a tiny novel set in modern Nigeria. The big ideas about the world that I shoved down the throats of my few readers.
I believed then, and still do, that rereading The Day They Came for Dan would have plunged me into unthinkable despair, the kind I experienced when I read a copy of the first (and last) print run and spotted the typos. For ten days I barely ate anything. On the eleventh day, I exploded into a rage that I thought I was incapable of. I tore up the book and threw the tatters out of the window. Two months later, regaining a measure of confidence in myself and my work, I ventured to mentally revisit the cursed book; I wrote a review and sent it to The Ganges Review of Books under a false name.
In the review, I compared my novel to everything Amit Chaudhuri had written, tracing my influences, pointing out the themes, noting my references to obscure writers and artists, concluding with a taut bombast: ‘Readers of Proust will find in Jasper’s work the same keen eye for the subtle shades of the human condition.’
The Ganges Review of Books, managed by some chap with an astonishingly long name, responded enthusiastically: ‘Dear J.C. Barnes… most delighted to run this review…’ And they did, and I visited the website every day while lying in bed and peering into my phone and enjoying the way my alter ego had captured the very essence of The Day They Came for Dan.
Two weeks or so later, The Ganges Review of Books disappeared from the internet. ‘Cannot find host’ read the page when I tried to load the website. I refreshed it and was redirected to a website selling Viagra.
That was the final blow. It was clear that my book would not go far, that my hope of gaining attention in the West by way of India was a dead end. Then Mrs Kirkpatrick showed up. ‘It would be great to meet you, Frank,’ she continued. ‘My daughter Iris and I would really like to host you sometime. How about this weekend? It would be nice to meet you in person.’
It was happening too fast. I felt my head pounding, my heartbeat racing. I didn’t know how or what to answer. I forced myself to say something. ‘Give me a second to check my calendar.’ There wasn’t any calendar to check. What I wanted was a moment to take a deep breath and relax. I had no appointments to cancel. No place to go. I liked not having things scheduled. The thought of agreeing to meet someone at a fixed time was a major source of distress to me. But there was something about her, something in her happy voice, that already made me feel an answer in the negative would ruin her day, perhaps ruin her entire visit to Africa.
I picked up a book and held it close to the phone, ‘flipping’ through my ‘schedule’. Finding no conflicting appointment, I agreed to meet, a decision that was rewarded by a ‘thank you’ so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear.
When the call ended, I sat on the edge of my narrow bed for a few minutes, trying to feel something. Belema, my publisher, had sent me a text: ‘Hey Frank, long time, no hear. Got a call from one Mrs Kirkpatrick, Betty Kirkpatrick, I think she’s American, she liked your work and asked for your info. I gave her your number. Expect a call from her. Hope you’re OK?’
I didn’t bother replying. My shoulders ached and I felt nauseous. I knew precisely why this was happening; too much activity, too much external interference. I wasn’t used to this kind of attention.
I went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet seat and stared blankly at the open door, trying to silence Betty’s voice, which kept ringing in my ear.