A Forbidden Thing

Issue 48 • Fall 2023 • Nonfiction

I.

At a small house in downtown Manhattan, Kansas sometime in 2021 I told a room of conservative Christians that I wanted to become American. It happened on a cruel winter evening at a prayer and Bible study event hosted by a Christian organization that helped international students settle in Kansas. The silence that followed was confounding, like what I just said was a forbidden thing. And though the evening had been chiefly uneventful, my declaration would become the most notable happening of the night. Well, until the weird phone call that I ended the night with, from a man who told me he would report my intentions to ICE and dropped the call before I could give him any response.

In the room, I had been speaking with my companion, a Nigerian too, someone with whom I had spent most of the evening making fun of everyone and everything. He had convinced me to attend the prayer meeting, echoing a piece of advice my uber-religious parents had shared since my arrival in the States; something about finding a religious covering. In the conversation that evening, my companion had whispered something about how much he admired the spirit of compassion in Americans regardless of their political leanings.

In the days after I arrived in the US, the Christian organization that hosted the event we were in organized a furniture drive that helped populate my barren apartment with free stuff. But I thought, in my usual way, how possibly these acts of kindness were not really kindnesses at all but could be penance for any crime on a very long list. I wondered if they acted this same way towards their fellow Americans who were less privileged. I thought about the woman I saw on my way to the event that evening sitting in front of an abandoned building close to the Kansas State University Manhattan campus on Claflin Road, barely covered in the cold. Beside her was a trolley that contained what seemed like everything she owned. I wondered in that little moment why these people – who in the short time since I met them, had given me so much – were not in the service of the woman as well. It was an odd moment of intense thought, such that by the moment I blurted out my desire to be American, it was proceeded by an awkward pause, and subsequent banishment from events that were organized by that organization.

The banishment, if one may call it that, was subtle, never communicated to me in person. But it became so obvious that when, on another day, I reached out to my friend to ask when next he would be going for their events, he looked me in the eyes and said, “They think you are too dramatic and not interested in their bible education. So, they basically don’t want you there,” and we laughed.

II.

“When I left Nigeria, I left with the intention of never looking back, to begin anew,” Ope, an old friend said to me on a windy autumn afternoon. “I thought I could get lost in the sea of other immigrants. Work hard till I could actualize for myself the promise of the immigrant dream because this is our reality now.” We were sitting at a table in a tiny Italian restaurant at Canary Wharf, London. It was my third day in the country, and I was visiting my younger sister who had just graduated from the University of Hertfordshire. I had not seen her for about the two years since I moved to the US and so I decided that I would also use the opportunity to see any of my friends who now called the United Kingdom home. Ope was the last person I imagined seeing in a foreign country because, since I had known him, he had had this love for Nigeria that both confounded and amused me. I had once apportioned it to his middleclass upbringing until he told me about his brothers, both of whom left Nigeria for Canada the moment they completed their undergraduate degree.

His family was one of those few who could afford to send their children to school abroad, and when we completed our bachelor’s education in 2009, I encouraged him to leave as well. He never listened until he did. When he informed me that he had moved to Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom towards the end of 2021, I knew that he hadn’t made the decision lightly. Yet, when I saw him, it was important for me to ask why, because if believers in Nigeria like Ope could decide to leave, what hope was there for cynics like me who had always aspired to be everywhere else but Nigeria?

“That country is gone bro,” Ope said. As soon as he said this, I couldn’t help but think about the preface to the late Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe’s 1983 book, The Trouble with Nigeria. In the preface, Achebe explained that he had been moved to write about the issues that held the country hostage because of his children and their mates in whose future the argument was about. The first time I read this portion of the book, I had taken Achebe’s words in the literal. My thoughts had been overshadowed by a sense of an imagination of a youngish Achebe, sitting bent over a small table, wearing a plain short sleeved shirt and small khaki shorts in a room I imagine to be his writing den, imagining a different Nigeria for his children. I imagined him thinking about what the present, at the time he was writing the book, meant to him – news items upon news items from radio, newspaper and television, filled with more of the same kind of debauchery by the government, motivating him as he bangs his slim fingers on the typewriter with an intensity that mirrors the power of his words. But as I read on, I realized what he was doing was positioning himself as an elder, someone who had seen the future and was critiquing what he perceived as a failure of leadership, while consequently offering suggestions on how to solve the issues in a move towards the future.

Yet, the future that Achebe was gesturing towards, the future which includes the generation that were at their infancy at the time he wrote the book, were now the individuals who were overseeing the carnage that the country was in. If Achebe was still alive, he would be slightly over the age of ninety, an older, retired ancestor. I wondered what he would have thought about the current state of things. How little had changed since his own years of worry. But to query Achebe this way was also to infer a likely falsehood because the ruling class in Nigeria is still scattered around the Achebe generation, with only a few of those who would have been children back then in a few positions. But somehow, perhaps by proximity, these people have continued to perpetuate the same draconian ideas as their elders.

At the time of the publication of Achebe’s book, Nigeria had recently emerged from a civil war and sworn into power its second republic in a democratic transition from military dictatorship. That democracy which would later be interrupted by a coup would eventually become a blueprint for subsequent democratic administrations in Nigeria several decades later. And though Achebe witnessed Nigeria morph into its longest period of a pretend democracy in his lifetime, I wonder still what he would think of us if he could see the mess we are in now. How several young people have chosen exile over home. How the naira is in competition with garri in water. How Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorists have made exploiting the Nigerian government’s weaknesses a daily affair. How instead of facing the problems head on, the Nigerian president – Muhammadu Buhari in his second incarnation as a reformed democrat – is instead blaming the youths for daring to demand better and calling us lazy.

Would Achebe, as might be his right as an elder statesman, leave us to our troubles? Or would he, like one of his colleagues of the time, the Nobel Laurette Wole Soyinka, aged eighty-eight, leave the future of Nigeria to the strength and expectations of young Nigerians when he said in a 2021 interview with Associated Press that “It was up to the new generation to decide whether they want to keep going along the same chugging one-track train, or chart a new course.”

In a way, it was this clarion call by Soyinka, that young people like me answered when we decided to commit ourselves to the delusions of change as we joined the ENDSARS protests in 2020. The protests began as a movement against police brutality but quickly morphed into a demand for good governance in a way that had never been experienced before. The Nigerian government’s response was decisive and clear. They sent murderous soldiers to the protest grounds, killed innocent young Nigerians, and lied about it.

Achebe’s generation, which included Soyinka, fought with the systems of oppression and corruption that Nigeria inherited from the British colonial masters. For their troubles, many of them were sent to jail, while some chose exile. Soyinka’s famous memoir, The Man Died, was a product of his incarceration in the 60s during the civil war because of his vocal criticism of the Nigerian government’s attempts to suppress the Biafran independence movement. There is another story about a time Soyinka forced his way to a radio station to substitute a tape of his own to disrupt the recorded message by a fraudulent victor of an election in 1964 that earned him two months in jail. The Nigeria then and the Nigeria now feel like a timeless loop: those events mirror the government’s response to the ENDSARS movement, except in this generation, both Achebe and Soyinka would have been killed or disappeared for all their troubles, with no choices of exile.

At the time of Achebe’s death, the conundrum of the failed state weighed heavy on his mind at the release of his final book, There was a Country. The book provided his personal perspective on the history of Nigeria and detailed his role in the formation of the separatist Biafran country while making a case for reconciliation and understanding. Yet, the fact of how those who lived through all the political upheavals of the time could sit back and oversee the destruction of the future that these people fought for, would never not be concerning.

It made me wonder about my generation as well, especially those of us who, like Ope once was, were brave enough to seek political offices. Perhaps this was what power does to people. That perhaps, if the government had not clamped down on us and our demands during the protest. Perhaps if we had had our own opportunity at the bedrock of power. Perhaps we may fare even worse. But this is the thing with speculations: the future is never exact, and now we may never know what our own roles will be like since many of us have chosen to run.

Ope’s voice brought me back to the moment.

“After the massacre in Lekki, I knew I couldn’t remain in that country again. There was nothing to believe in anymore. The country is gone. Totally gone, my brother. I called my wife, and we made plans to leave,” Ope said as he took a sip of the old-fashioned cocktail in front of him.

Ope wasn’t the only one who left. Many of us did too. We left Nigeria for Ghana. We left Nigeria for Kenya. We left Nigeria for Germany. We left Nigeria for the United Kingdom. We left Nigeria for the United States. We left Nigeria for Canada. We left Nigeria for anywhere that would have us. We left for jobs. We left for our safety. And years later, we are still leaving. Exile has become for us a constant conundrum to negotiate and as a gift, we have become the reluctant Nigerians, people for whom our nationality is only by the fact of our international passport.

III.

In a recent after-brunch conversation with a friend on a fine fall afternoon in front of my apartment in St. Louis, Missouri, I told her of my worries that my allegiance and nationality had shifted from its stoic and solid position. We had been talking about privilege and the American identity and what it means to be a Nigerian navigating the diaspora. Our conversations were always something of this nature. We tried to understand what it meant to be in the positions we both occupied, her as an African American woman who was interested in unearthing her African identity, me as the Nigerian man who was still confused about my place in the American society and the larger world.

That afternoon, I explained that my identity had become something of a negotiation, a position in which I was no longer an active participant, but a spectator. My companion looked at me for what seemed to me like a very long time and burst out laughing.
“That is stupid,” she said after the laughter.

“I know,” I said. I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain to her that this was what exile does to you. That even she, who was proudly Black and American, with all the privileges and oppressions of the position, was in the same boat as I. That her friendship with me, rooted in our shared affinity for a community that was chiefly made up of people with the same kind of melanin color as ours, was rooted in the same kind of negotiation. That the days when I felt proudly Nigerian were the days when the country of my birth, the place where I spent the last three decades of my life, wasn’t in the news for some shit our government did again. That my Nigerianness, which appears shaky at best, could never be compared to the half humanity – according to her – that her own African Americanness sometimes connotes. That on some days, I felt like James Baldwin in his wistful musings about the villagers at Leukarbad, Switzerland in his essay A Stranger in the Village. How he imagined the villagers as people who, from the point of view of power, could never imagine themselves as strangers in the world.

“Why is it that Nigerians are always so competitive? Like their whole thing is just to succeed. All the ones I have met, including you, not one of you know how to live in the moment. I feel it is inhumane,” she asked, almost suddenly.

I paused, because the question was so irrelevant to the conversation we were having and yet, in a way, it proved the point of my anxiety about my identity as well. Since my arrival in the US, I had been flinging the idea of my presence in America as exile, when in truth, it probably wasn’t. I didn’t leave home because of the protests like Ope. I didn’t leave home because I had become a political commentator who the government was chasing down. I left because I needed to, and the history of my leaving began the moment I graduated from my first degree in Economics, back in 2009. I left because my time as a university undergrad had been riddled with series of industrial actions by the Academic Staff Union of lecturers which ensured that on graduating, I didn’t feel ready to face the world. I left because those I had to compete with for the very few available jobs were people who either graduated from foreign universities or attended private universities. So, for me it became a no-brainer to seek that sense of completion elsewhere.

Yet, the circumstances that brought me to the point of claiming the word exile is resident in the aftermath of my decision to leave. When I left, I uprooted my life, resigned a job I had done for over ten years with all its attendant securities, and arrived in a very complicated America where everything feels jaded and many encounters with people sometimes inferred or connoted the feeling of being unwanted. So, almost immediately, I began to negotiate another kind of way to exist in this place – an existence that would allow me to look back always. To hold my Nigerianness as a badge of honor instead of the disdain it might sometimes connote. To always wish there was a place to return to, a home to return to even if that home may not recognize itself as such.
“Your feelings about us are valid,” I said. “However, it is also difficult to quantify why we do the things we do. We can call it the immigrant’s curse, and it is only more noticeable with Nigerians because African Americans expect some form of solidarity from us by the sheer virtue of our shared history. But instead, what we tend to do is what James Baldwin in his conversation with Audre Lorde calls ‘trying to be white.’ We aspire to whiteness in ways African Americans will never understand. It is why we are always so quick to shed our Nigerian nationality the first chance we get, because our standard for everything is set and determined by our colonial history.”

“But it is the same with us, except we chose to walk away from it,” she said.

“That’s why it is difficult; unlike slavery, the position of the colonized is not an inconvenient one. It is convenient. Most Nigerians are not even aware that there are other types of white people. Some of us are not even aware that sometimes power is not equal to whiteness. We see a white person or a white person adjacent, someone like you for instance, with your fancy accents and all, and we start quaking in our boots. In our most revered spaces, we open doors for them, doors we will never open to people who look like us. So like Lorde in response to Baldwin in that same conversation, our struggles are not the same. We still have more work to do in terms of being able to decolonize our minds.”

“I have never thought about it that way.”

“Yet, even I don’t know if I am right or just making excuses.”

IV.

In the same visit to London, England last September when I met Ope, I sat on the plane with this American woman who, like me, was visiting the Queen’s country for the first time. Over the course of the eight-hour flight from Chicago to London, we bonded over our shared experiences of rural spaces in the United States. I had lived in Manhattan, Kansas before moving to St. Louis, Missouri and she lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. She would tell me later that London was going to be her first stop in a stretch of travels visiting all the major capitals of Europe and then Seoul, South Korea, Tokyo, Japan, and Beijing, China. I listened to her gush about what she would do in each place, and how she was fulfilling a lifelong desire to see the world.

Listening to her talk reminded me of similar dreams I had and shared with my little sister as youngsters, backpacking through Europe and the Americas. As we grew into adults capable of making these travels, the passport of the country we swore our allegiance to had become so infamous that smaller countries in Africa like Tanzania and Madagascar would treat a traveling Nigerian like a stain. Stuart Wakeling, a business consultant with Henley & Partners, a global company on citizenship and resident investment, in an interview with Pulse Nigeria about the issue, explained that because “visa-free travel and passport ranking is contingent on a positive international perception of domestic affairs and proactive engagement between sovereign states,” it was a no-brainer that countries around the world would treat the Nigerian passport like a disease, since the country was in a whirlwind that didn’t seem to be calming. Hence, people like me and my sister quickly learned to abandon any ambition that we harbored in our quest to see the world.

While my American companion from the plane was able to sashay her way through the customs and border patrol at Heathrow, I would spend three hours waiting in line for my turn. Not because I did anything wrong or because something hazardous was found in my bag, but simply because of the origins of my passport. I felt in those moments, standing in the long cue watching different people from different countries, some eastern Europeans, some Nigerians and many folks from other African countries, this feeling of being an inferior other. I wanted to aspire towards what gave my American companion ease. I wished my declaration in that room in Kansas had been true and that I had the power to put the mechanism that could make it happen in motion.

V.

Yet, to be American is to be constantly reminded of the evil that has been done to ensure your freedom. Perhaps this is a stretch, because I know of some types of Americans who are happy to wallow in their ignorance. When you live in a society where basic things like electricity, pipe-born water, decent roads, are a given, ignorance might become a currency worth wasting. Yet, to be American as well, whether the average American is aware of it or not, is also to be part of a colonial project, one that is perpetuating acts of violence against Indigenous Americans, its own Black citizens, and the rest of the world it considers inferior. It wasn’t surprising to encounter a sentence that mirrors this sentiment in the American writer Eula Biss’s essay Pain Scale.

“People suffer, I know, so that I may eat bananas in February,” she writes. Why then would someone like me be attracted to such a project? Well, this answer might be obvious, but in case it isn’t, it is so that I can hoard my ignorance as well. It is so that I can think about other ways I can exist. To be able to travel un-harassed. To be able to sleep knowing that there is no chance that my electricity can disappear at any moment. If I was like Ope, I could make the claim that I came to America to become the model Black man, the type who knew how to receive the crumbs from the table of white people, cap in hand and expressed gratitude in a loud voice. To be able to say that I came for the American dream – whatever it means. To be able to aspire without doubting if my time here might be interrupted by some random man’s phone call to ICE. But I am not. I am instead a person who wishes power wasn’t such a solid, rigid thing. I am also an African who will always have to negotiate his blackness in this place. And more importantly I am a person whose aspirations are at loggerheads with his status.

Issue 48 • Fall 2023

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry