Becoming an Immigrant
BY ADEMOLA ADEFOLAMI
- Reading Things
Before the email came in, I had already started reading about Manhattan, Kansas, because I thought I would get into the MA English program. My logic, even if untested, was convincing to me: if one of the professors in the program had taken time to read through my writing samples and application and had felt that my materials were good enough for an application fee waiver, then maybe it was indeed good enough to get into the program. I was not wrong, or maybe I was. But I wouldn’t know that yet.
Wikipedia says the state of Kansas is in America’s Midwest. First red flag, I thought, Isn’t that a very rural part of the United States? It puts the Black population at around 5.8%. Second red flag. What is it with rural America and being majority White? Are African Americans averse to the countryside? Or are they historically forbidden from living in the countryside? These questions and more throbbed inside me as I considered living in rural America; all corn and grassland (“Prairie” wouldn’t become a part of my vocabulary until I got here), with many White people, or at least what some of my friends in MFA programs around the United States at the time had called “too many White people in a place.” I remembered Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village,” one of the best things I had ever read.
Published in 1953 in Harper’s Magazine, “Stranger in the Village” recounts Baldwin’s experience of being Black in an all-white village. In the essay, the absurdity of an American writer from New York being looked down on by people in a Swiss village with possibly limited exposure is not lost on one. While I was certainly no Baldwin, I still could not help but wonder about my own situation. In the same way, I imagined moving away from Lagos, a city known for its nocturnal neurosis, buoyancy, and endless supply of spectacles to a college town in Midwest America for two years. Lagos, in all its gory glory, has always been a fertile ground for stories, so where will new ideas come from? I wondered? What would I be writing about in a college town where nothing happens? What about community? America is an individualistic country, so where would my sense of Ubuntu come from in this small town with very few people who look like me?
*
In December of 2021, when I submitted my application to K-State, I compiled a list of Black writers whose works I would intensify my reading of. Baldwin featured prominently in it. I was especially interested in his writings because of the fact that he had traveled out of his comfort zone to live in Paris and even remote Leukerbad, trying to understand his identity away from the stifling racism in America. What does it mean to discover yourself away from home? Teju Cole addresses this question in a critical re-reading of Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Land.” In his own essay, “Black Body,” Cole paraphrases a letter Baldwin wrote in 1957 to a high school friend in which Baldwin insisted it was necessary to “get over” the idea that there was some place out there where he would fit in once he had “made some real peace” with himself. There was no such place. Maybe there was no such peace or, if there was, it was fleeting, slippery, unsteady. Home, for me, has also always been in fleeting moments. So, in a way, I share a sentimental love for Baldwin more than I do for other American writers. Like Baldwin, I also believed that the place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it. In a sense, some of us have to make “home” as we move along in life. Considering that I would also be traveling far away from home and living in a new country and new culture for two years, gave me the impetus to consider the meaning of home anew. But beyond all of these, I was terrified.
The night my mother died, I was a couple of hours late to witness her final moments. I feared that, for my aging dad, if anything were to happen, I would be some 6000 miles away from home, unable to do anything to help or witness his final moments. This thought remained unspoken because I had always believed in the irrefutable miracle of naming things. My belief was that giving it a body in terms of speaking it might make it come to pass. I banished it into the innermost core of my mind. But I was worried, I was scared. I did not want to be the son that missed his parents’ final moments because he was a slave to capitalism. But here I was, journeying into uncertainty.
*
“Dear Ademola Adefolami,
We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted for Fall 2022 admission to the Graduate Program in English as a master’s student at Kansas State University. Your university identification number, to be used for enrollment and other purposes, is WID: 821…” The email came in at exactly 1:38pm local time, on a Monday in February of 2022. I remember I was at that time, trying to secure a new apartment. I was moving domestically from Lagos to Ibadan, which would be my new neighborhood until I traveled. House-hunting remotely is one of the quick ways to mentally exhaust yourself in Nigeria. The “agents” will disappoint you. The landlords will disappoint you. Every sector and tiny fabric of the housing industry is corrupt. Unlike the United States, Nigeria’s house-hunting structure is crude and unpredictable: there are no guarantees, certainly no assurances. The email came at the right time, a soothing respite for the fatigue caused by three months of relentless house-hunting. My fiancée, who would become my wife a couple of months after, was overjoyed. She knew I had been talking about going to the US for a master’s in creative writing, so she was excited for this new journey. I shared a screenshot of the email on my family’s WhatsApp ground. My siblings lost their minds. It was finally going to happen. At 17, just as I got into college, I had always told them that I would someday study for a Graduate degree in the US. It was why I decided not to enroll for a master’s degree at any Nigerian institution. Even though I did not apply to any master’s program for the first five years after my first degree, I always hoped that, whenever I was ready, it would happen. On my first try, seven years after I graduated with my BA in Theatre Arts from Lagos State University, it was finally going to happen. My cousins acknowledged my persistence; my brothers congratulated me for my perseverance; my dad was happy—traveling to the US, in many African homes—was the beginning of a change in the family’s fortune, or at least that’s what many families thought.
That night, I cried. Not tears of joy. I cried because I could not share this with my mother. I cried because she was not here to see this happen, to bask in that joy with me. This was her dream, too. In fact, she was one of the people who encouraged me in this dream and always believed that it would happen when it was destined to happen. The thing is these were tears of regret, pain, and accumulated grief. For two years after her death, I was in denial. I did not want to believe it. Because it did not make sense that she had died. We were supposed to meet up for our annual family hangout on the second day of January, exactly three days before she was pronounced dead. My eldest brother had already bought two hens to be slaughtered on the day, but that would never happen, and those two hens would eventually be slaughtered for the customary 8th day funeral prayers. Sometimes, as a way to cope with grief, we create alternative stories and parallel realities where loss never happened. That was what I did: I had mentally designed a world where my mother was still alive, and we called each other on the phone every other day. For two years, I lived with this reality, incessantly calling her phone number and pretending that we were having a conversation. I did not tell any of my family members because they would have recommended me for a deliverance session in a church. It was how I coped with the loss of the woman who had been the life of my party. But this email shattered my threadbare wall of suspended reality and re-confirmed a truth I tried not to remember that I could not share this with her in flesh; that our conversations would be in silenced dialogues and dreams and memories; that I would never be able to give her the hug I denied her the last time I saw her alive.
*
When you’ve lost so many people to death and heartbreaks, you begin to see goodbyes in a new light. Paul Coelho said somewhere that “If you’re brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello.” What Coelho fails to mention is the quality of the hello, when placed against the hello you were used to. What he doesn’t cover is the demeaning undertone of the hello of a visibly angry White man at JFK to an African just arriving in a foreign land: how terrifying it is that your first real interaction with America is couched in the kind of racist passive aggressive behavior that would have you labelled overreaching, if you complained about it. A.A. Milne describes it better with “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” But he also did not talk about the pain of an impending exit. Edwidge Danticat admonishes that the immigrant writer must quantify the price of the American dream in flesh and blood. I was on the cusp of departure yet, here I was trying to quantify the promise of a better life in the number of people I was going to leave behind. Did I really have to leave all of these people? Couldn’t I enroll for a master’s program in Nigeria and stay within the warmth of family?
“Let me call Pastor Niyi to pray for you,” my sister says, without any prompting.
We are standing in what appears to be a kind of abandoned garden to the far right of the entrance to the departure lounge. There are many other families or what’s left of them, dotting various spots like the sparse, yellowing portions of grassland scattered like tiny opinions in the garden soil.
In her lifetime, Pastor Niyi was my mother’s most trusted Nigerian “man of God.” She took everything he said as the truth and made sure that every one of her children had a relationship with him. As such, it was not out of place that he would be the pastor to call for my departing prayers.
“Hello sir,” I respond, almost panicky, stunned by how quickly the call went through, and the omnipresent nerve-racking noise of Lagos traffic on the other end of the call. My wife’s touch calms me.
“Put it on speaker,” my sister says. Or maybe it is my brother.
At this point, my family forms an arc around me, all collectively shouting resounding Amens on my behalf.
“…if you travel in the air, may the sky not blow you away; if you travel on land, may the earth not swallow you; if you travel on water, may the sea be a friend and not a foe,” Pastor Niyi prays in Yoruba, our native tongue.
“Amen,” everyone responds with a tone of finality.
“Thank you so much, sir,” I say over the phone.
“Thank you so much, daddy,” my sister says. For most Nigerian Christians, pastors are fathers/mothers-in-the-lord, as such, there is an unspoken agreement to see them as spiritual parents. In my sister’s case, daddy sounds just perfect for Pastor Niyi, her spiritual dad.
I stare into people’s faces, curious. Some avoid my gaze, trying to conceal their tears. My sister howls loudly while I hold her hands, reassuring her that I will always remember the son of whom I am, a two-pronged promise to be a responsible adult and to never forget home.
When boarding for my flight was announced, I stared into my wife’s face and realized that her eyes were flooded. My dad sighed with sadness so unyielding you could smell its pungency. My immediate elder brother hugged me tightly, tears in his eyes, too. Nothing ever prepares you for the stunning blow of departure. I realized that, for some of the people in that gathering, there was a slight chance that I would never see them again for the rest of my life. The thought of that weakened my resolve not to cry. In that moment, I knew that I deeply loved them. Then the tears flowed. Through decades of fights and arguments and insults where we were at loggerheads, we tolerated each other’s excesses because there was an unbreakable bond of motherly love that held us close. Even though, apart from my immediate elder brother, the rest of them were my half-siblings (my mother had four children from a previous marriage), I could never have loved a full sibling more than I loved them. My wife consoled me, crying. She held my hand, softly, and led me to the entrance of the airport’s departure lounge. Airports are convergence points for sadness, joy, and the wrinkly burden of uncertainty. But the departure lounge at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport in Lagos was a representation of stifled tears and goodbyes flung hurriedly at departing loved ones because of the singular fact that family members are barred from going into the lounge.
Inside, there was a gloomy atmosphere: people re-thinking their decision to travel; family members tugging at arms and luggage; people crying, mourning in advance their loved ones. Sometimes, departure also means finality. Through all of these, my wife and I walked to the portal where I began my boarding process holding hands. She wasn’t allowed to be there, but we did it anyways, damning the possible implications. Thankfully, there were none except for a police officer who sternly told her to leave if she wasn’t boarding, staring into my eyes as he said this; a fickle show of authority. Final hugs and kisses completed, final goodbyes hidden in tears and prolonged stares, too heavy to be spoken, I proceeded to begin the journey to a new life.
2. Being There
On the 11th of August 2022, I landed at JFK Airport in New York. It was around 6pm local time. I had been traveling for 11 hours from Lagos, Nigeria. I joined the queue for the immigration sheds. It was going to be a long wait. Among the sea of heads, Whites, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and many—for me—unrecognizable ethnicities, I began to think of my journey here. I, a Nigerian from Lagos, here in this sprawling city, going for a two-year adventure paid for by an American institution: my dreams to trade the ubiquitous tag of “emerging writer” for “writer” were within my grasp. At the immigration shed, I watched children scampering around noisily; parents chasing their kids to call them to order; hundreds of people of all color brandishing various colors of passports that represent multiple nationalities and identities. Then it occurred to me, again, for the umpteenth time, that, from that moment, I would become Black, a Nigerian, an African and an African in the Diaspora. I would have to contend with jettisoning my own understanding of Blackness and, instead, strap on what it means to be Black in multiracial America. America’s identity of Blackness, for the most part, is rooted in a history of centuries of slavery. The Blackness that I was born with in my Nigerian cubicle in Africa, has not had a direct contact with slavery, so, where does this put me now? For two years, I would have to live wearing multiple identities: a significant sacrifice for a prize so fickle, in hindsight.
*
“You don’t look American,” he says.
I am wondering what American looks like. Am I not Black enough? Am I too Black? What makes me un-American? But I do not say anything. I would rather not get into the politics of race on a chilly Friday evening, especially not when I am smoking.
I am seated on one of the chairs leaning against the wall by the entrance to American Shaman just off Moro Street, smoking from a tired pack of Camel Crush Menthol. Much of my life here is political, so this is the only place I come to for neutral, non-political conversations; Brad and Don (the co-owners) and I talk mostly about inflation and what CBD is good for anxiety, cost of rent in Manhattan, and many other things that have nothing to do with color and race.
He comes in blaring loud music from an unseen speaker. He is not one of the guys. I know because I have never seen him in over a year of my coming here. The music is too loud for just one person’s consumption. It is evening, so I do not see him clearly as he dodges one of the parked SUVs to close the gap between us, but I know he has dreadlocks on his head, and he is certainly not White. He moves closer, squints at me, studying my face.
“Your nose, your face structure, your eyes, and the shape of your head, they don’t look American.”
I want to ask him what American looks like, but I don’t. I focus instead on the cigarette I am smoking.
What ensues is a small lecture about racial communities in America and their defining facial features. “See,” he begins, “we Americans are divided into White, Black, and Native Americans. But you, you’re pure blood. You don’t look like the rest of us.”
Just as I begin to ruminate on what he possibly could have meant by “pure blood,” he cuts into my thoughts. “Are you from Africa?”
“Yes,” I respond, as halfheartedly as possible. Just to not seem rude.
“I knew it. I am very good with these things,” he proclaims, a sly smile about his lower face.
In “The Exoticization and Commodification of The Black Body,” Sarah Merzenich posits, “…Although this exploitation is painfully obvious to recognize in some instances – i.e. the Transatlantic slave trade – in other instances it is less obvious and well masked under the pretext of admiration – a sort of perverse admiration.” Phrases like “pure blood,” for instance, connote some kind of fetishizing or exoticizing that borders on discomfort. It is unclear if these problematic terms of endearment for the Black body come solely from a place of pure admiration (but even admiration could become an issue if it reinforces racial stereotypes) or were made with racist undertones. One thing, however, is the undeniable existence of language that seeks to present the Black body as a spectacle, something to be admired and not taken seriously. This language is also reminiscent of how centuries ago, some selected African slaves were put in cages and taken to circus as entertainment for White people. So, when someone calls me “pure blood,” it represents the injustice meted out to people who looked like me.
He proceeds to a lecture on race, the places he has lived and still lives in, and many other political conversations that do not hold my interest. But there is another man on my far right who seem slightly drunk, fumbling to light a cigarette, who seems to be interested in his crude ideologies, so he continues. I stand up to leave.
“Be safe,” I say to him, not really meaning it.
“You be safe; you’re the one who is new in the States,” he retorts.
“Fuck you,” I cuss under my breath. I never should have said anything…Fucking idiot.
*
It is Saturday, 4th of March, Fake Patty’s Day in Manhattan, Kansas. Aggieville is a sea of white people: young, old, male, female, every other sexual identity, I suppose. There have been a sparse number of Black people since I’ve been here for an hour; two, so far, and they’ve both been in the company of other white people. It is as though there is an understanding among Black people on campus to avoid crowded spaces on this day. Too many white people, too many alcohols, and that’s a very well-known recipe for disaster, especially when Black people are in such gatherings. I am sitting some 50 meters away from the bar where I was assaulted by 5 white students two weeks ago. I am wondering how humans are slaves to our experiences. By humans, I mean every member of a minority group or disadvantaged community all over the world: specifically, I am talking about Black people, African Americans, Africans, who have had to deal with the harsh realities of being forced to live as second-class citizens. We always carry the weight of the pain on our skin, under our nails, in the underbelly of our core.
After my assault, the Office of Student Life had a couple of meetings with me, probing on how it happened. The man I was in contact with had mentioned that one of my professors had reported the case to them. A couple of zoom meetings and some email exchanges later, I was told that the case had been logged into the system and that the investigation would be closed unless someone came forward with more details. One thing was clear, though, there would be no form of justice. Not even a visit to Aunty Mae’s where it happened for questioning or some kind of investigation. This got me thinking about the American version of justice, especially justice for people wo look like me. Would the process have been different if a White student had been assaulted at Aggieville by five Black students? Would this department that told me that they would “keep the investigation closed” be more pushed to actively investigate this incident, if the races were different? I do not know, and I will not speculate, but I figured that, in a predominantly White town, a White person would probably never be in my situation, in the first place. The helplessness that comes with being a minority can be alarming at times. Correspondingly, the US. Department of Justice reported that, in 2022, race and ethnicity constituted 45.3% of bias motivation for hate crimes in the state. In a town where the percentage of White people is about 15 times more than that of Black people, there will always be racial tensions. That was something I would have to contend with.
*
“May I see your ticket,” the security guard at Walmart asks me, just as I am trying to push my cart out of the giant establishment.
“Of course,” I pass along my ticket.
She moves closer, prying into my very full cart, reconciling each listed item on the receipt with the cart.
“Why is this taking too long?” I asked. “Are you really going to check everything?”
Silence!
But she continues to check.
“Is this because I’m Black and you don’t think that an African-looking young man spending $300 at Walmart meant that he stole something?” This was because I had been at the same Walmart twice and noticed that White people walked in and out, without anyone stopping them or asking for tickets.
“No, she says,” avoiding my gaze, “I’m just doing my job.”
“That’s absolute bullshit!” A woman cuts in, moving closer to us.
“I saw what happened, and you’re fucking racist,” she accuses the security woman, also a White woman.
“I have been coming here for years and never has anyone checked my ticket that hard.”
Now, a tiny crowd has gathered around us, listening to what happened.
“In fact, I don’t even remember the last time my ticket was checked,” she adds.
“Poor boy,” an elderly woman says. “Are you from Africa?” Another person asks. “Do you go to K-State?” someone asked. I nod my head, hoping that they understood that I was answering both questions.
“We need to do better as humans. You can’t just pick on someone because you think you’re better than them because they don’t look like you. It’s wrong,” the one woman continues.
People nod their heads in agreement. The security woman, embarrassed by this unprecedented lecture on racial relations, handed me my receipt and said that I could go. As I walked out, trying to find where my Lyft driver had parked, the initial woman told me that she had son who was also in college at K-State and would hate it if anyone put him through such embarrassment. She wished me luck and we both went in the opposite direction.
*
“In the time that you have maintained this store, has there ever been a case of racism between customers?” I ask Brad.
He takes a deep pause, thinks long and hard, presumably trying to remember. Exactly 14 seconds, according to my phone’s recorder.
“Not inside the store,” he responds, still wearing a puzzled look on his pale face. “Not as far as I know,” he adds.
In 2017, Bradley and Donald had pinched together tens of thousand of Dollars to purchase and stock up their franchise of CBD American Shaman, a multinational retailer of varieties of CBD and THC products. Within that period, according to Brad, there has never been an issue that involved escalations of racism. He makes a further clarification, perhaps trying to not sound so sure.
“However, I cannot really say, because it is not impossible for some people to not feel comfortable around other people.”
“How do you mean?” I probe further.
“I know there are racist people who patronize us, because it is the default of White people so there is that, but if it ever happens that someone is being racist towards another person here in the store, I will do everything to shut it down immediately,” he says.
Just before I could respond, he asks me a question, “has anyone been racist to you here?”
“Absolutely not,” I reply, “I was only curious about your experiences.”
Brad and Donald run an amazing store. There is a genuine sense of cordiality in the way people interact with each other. This warmth and cordiality is present in the physical organization of the place: to immediately inside, to the left of the door, is a standing fridge where I have been taking free bottles of water for the most part of a year; adjacent the fridge is a bookshelf or cabinet that now holds different CBD snacks for horses, dogs, and many other kinds of pets in its underbelly—considering the bureaucratic limitations of the nationwide legalization of marijuana and cannabis in America, learning that pets had their CBD snacks was a discovery for me. By the fridge is an electric drum and an array of electronic guitars jostling for space beside a three-seater couch where people idle. Sometimes, very rarely, Donald plays the electric guitar and I fumble around on the drum, trying to find home in the familiar sound of the electricity-muffled sound of the snare and cymbal. From what I can tell, Brad is allergic to music or just bad at it. The rest of the store is a multipurpose long L-shaped show-glass housing different brands of vapes and capsules while the top is a makeshift table on which sits jars of display gummies, CBD vape samples, and a payment point. Between the table and the wall—covered by a shelf displaying numerous products, is an isle where Brad or Don, depending on the shift, stays to interface with customers on the other end. Every inch of the store is a beckoning warmth strategically designed to disarm and make you feel relaxed. In the world of finance and offshore accounts, this store would be Switzerland, the symbolism of neutrality. In almost two years, I have watched people blur racial and cultural lines by trading saliva when they share a joint. While I have always advocated against this, there is a shocking, albeit beautiful realization in watching something almost nauseous project a possibility of American unity. Every time I watch this unfold, I remember some lines from Ilya Kaminsky’s poem, “After Bombardment:”
“I dip a glass in a bath-tub,
drink dirty water.
Soaping together—that
is sacred to me. Washing mouths together.
You can fuck
anyone—but with whom can you sit in water?”
Although there are many studies that conclude that pain is powerful in producing bonding between people with similar experiences, not many studies have said much about discomfort doing the same. But Kaminsky tells us how merely sitting in water with someone is a pointer to the fact that you can stand them at their most repulsive state. This is how I see people sharing a smoke: the temerity to stomach someone else’s saliva without a tinge of resentment is, without doubt, as strong as bonds get. As far as I can tell, at the CBD American Shaman store in Manhattan, there is zero racism or racial prejudice. This, in a way, mirrors how different American cities are from each other in terms of the level of racial prejudice that is prevalent.
“Mostly, I think people are positive in Manhattan in terms of how they relate with race, unlike in many other places,” Brad says.
“Perhaps, that is one of the benefits of a small college town,” I reply, wondering if there is a way to ascertain what percentage of racism is permissible as positive.
3. Writing Things
For my first creative nonfiction class, I wrote two unraveling essays titled “Directions to Black Avenue,” and “Blackness as Metaphor for Something Other Than Darkness,” essays that deeply explore, in different ways, the vicissitudes of being Black in America. In one class, two of my essays (out of three) were a kind of activism. This is not a new phenomenon; instead, it reflects how not much has changed. So much time has passed between when the Black Arts Movement was established— “to create an art, a literature that would fight for black people’s liberation with as much intensity as Malcolm X our ‘Fire Prophet’ and the rest of the enraged masses who took to the streets”—and now, however, some elements have remained. Like racism. Like police brutality. As such, many Black writers still use their Voices to fight against these oppressive systems. Ibram X. Kendi, another one of my favorite writers, has built a career around sensitizing Americans about the brutality of systemic racism, police violence, and the tumultuous existence of Black people in America. While Kendi’s aren’t always the most flawless of thoughts, there is much to be said for the fact that America and Americans still need reminders on the basic tenets of racial equality. As a Nigerian, an African and, a current “resident alien,” the fact that writing is an aggregation of our experiences and imaginations means that my daily existence in America is a statement against racism, a continuous reminder of the perilous torture and persecution that Black people had endured for us to have the freedom that we do. I am, in a sense, creatively obligated to document these stories, both as a statement against oppression, but also as a documentation that I, we, Blacks, Africans, Caribbeans, existed and will continue to exist.
In “Migration, Globalization, & Recent African Literature,” Tanure Ojaide describes African writers who are children of emigrants as “children of postcolony.” According to him, writers who belong to this category “imagine Africa because they have not experienced the continent physically and culturally. The problem with this analogy is that Ojaide presents Africa as a “monolith,” a cultural generalization that many Africans cannot stand, if used by non-Africans. What version of Africa is in Zimbabwe and South Africa? Is it the same version of Africa as Egypt and Libya? Or Sudan and the Congo? Do Nigerians live their lives daily with the consciousness of fighting for their ancestral lands the way South Africans do? Are Nigerians as educated on race as South Africans? Do Ghanaians have to contend with “White Ghanaians” for post-independence sovereignty? So, what version of African culture is the accurate one to study? If the universality of the “African culture” is valid, wouldn’t the fact that Nigerians typically don’t have a direct contact with racism, infringe on African cultural unity? Republic Du Benin. Burkina Faso. All breaking out of colonialism, the forebear of racism. Does that not make racism an African problem? How then is this different from a Nigerian, an African, experiencing racism in America or the UK? What separates that experience from that of a South African if not physical location? What role does location play in defining identity, then?
While I am not a self-proclaimed pan-Africanist, living in the US heightens my awareness about the treatment of Africans who, like me, are riding on the goodwill of White America in form of assistantships and are, as such, subtly at the mercy of those institutions: like a White Kansas State University police officer who mistook my Nigerian accent for an inability to speak the English language and had confidently mentioned this to a colleague of mine, also a White person, who had told me all about it. Racism does not discriminate between Africans and African Americans: we’re all Black. That’s what we get, the Umbrella Black treatment. The only way I understand how to be Black is to be Nigerian. And that is how I interact with America.
Koffi Asaph, in “Migrant Literature and the New Generation of African Writers,” expands on two striking phenomena: Emigrant versus Immigrant perspectives. He says, “It is possible to distinguish the “emigrant perspective” of the migrant whose main focus is backwards to the country of origin from the “immigrant perspective” of the migrant who is reconciled with the prospect of permanent residence in the country of arrival” (Koffi, 2020). Here, Koffi references the point that this difference is visible in how these writers write. The limitation of Koffi’s ideology is that it does not put into context the realities of writers like me, new to their lives in faraway countries, who cannot yet tell what the next five years of their lives would be like. How do you ascertain between a backward and forward gaze? Is permanent residency in a new country enough to change your culturally embedded perception?
This is where I disagree with Koffi. Having lived in Kansas for more than a year, I have certainly imbibed some cultural experiences that are different from what I was used to in my little corner of Africa. However, because my experiences here are personally viewed through my Nigerian sensibilities, I am able to create a distance that helps me to reconcile these experiences using two different perspectives. Culturally, I am a more aware observer and a conscientious human being. Living in a new place, amidst myriads of culture and social ethics, exposes one to nuances that would not have been possible without migration. By living in America, I have developed an expanded coverage of the gender, sexual, racial, even economic conversations that my experiences as a Nigerian living in Nigeria might not have been able to comprehend because now, I am able to look at issues from not just a Diasporic lens, but also from a place of my Nigerian nationality and the haunting reality that in the US, I am more of a racial box, waiting to be ticked and, as Danticat captured it, “bearing witness from a distance.”
In “Create Dangerously: the immigrant artist at work,” Edwidge Danticat, touching on the interesting notion of the flexibility of identities, uses Emerson as a relatable allusion. She says: “We, as we read,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in an essay on history, “must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly” (Danticat, 2011). Here, she espouses a truth that many modern critics do not want to hear: that identity is fluid; that African writers do not have to write about Lagos before their stories are regarded as authentic African stories; that African writers can write about Turkey and still be reflective of their cultural identities.
There is an expectation put on the immigrant writer to write or not write a certain way. In 2013, Tope Folarin whose short story, “Miracle,” won the Caine Prize for African writing, had been called out by some section of the African literary ecosystem about the “Africanity” of his prize-winning story. For some, his American experiences brought to fore the argument of if stories like his, notwithstanding that they are written from an African’s perspective, are qualified enough to be regarded as African literature. Unironically, in 2016, his shortlisted story for the same prize, “Genesis,” was accused of being more biographical than fiction, weighing in on the similarity between his experiences as an African, African American, and American. While the immigrant essayist gets off somewhat easily, fiction writers and poets are put under intensive scrutiny. Questions like how autobiographical their novel is, and if those should still be within the confines of fiction, begin to unravel.
Danticat’s notion of “honorary nationalities” by virtue of readership strikes a critical conversation. Can I be a “Japanese writer” if I write “Japanese stories?” What are Japanese stories? Are there Asian stories? Having befriended people from Iran and Indian on campus, there is a noticeable uniformity of experiences in many of these countries, perhaps being “third world countries.” In the same vein, these similarities, on closer scrutiny, also point to cultural differences between these countries, therefore, am I, a Nigerian, allowed to write an Indian story in the same way a White American can write a Black story? Did J.M Coetzee, for instance, lose the privilege to write South African stories because he’s been living in Australia for 22 years? What, to J.M Coetzee, a White South African, is the authentic South African story? How are these stories different from each other? Can there be relativity and universality of stories? If so, what then would the role of regional classifications of literature be?
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Idman Omar in “Running to the West: The Necessity of Immigrant Literature,” mentions that feelings of exile, worry, trauma, and even relief are key themes of immigrant literature, making for intriguing stories, new viewpoints, and new voices as well as this universal borrowed understanding of what the western ear wants to hear, without betraying the writer’s authentic national identity. What Omar meant by the writer’s authentic national identity is the core of this essay. At what point does the writer’s national identity change? But he does not clarify what exactly is meant by migrant literature.
Rather than comprehensively interrogate the question of cultural identity in relation to migration, the fashioning of a niche literature, “migrant literature,” only evades a thorough dissection of what role migration plays in the shaping of writing identity. Specifically, the limitation of what is regarded as migrant literature is that it dissociates the writer from their existing cultural identity but, rather than place them entirely within the context of American cultural realities, this dissociation places writers in limbo, without a defined identity. Migration is a continuous process, as such, migrant literature is continuous literature not particularly rooted in any cultural identity and is susceptible to any critic’s or writer’s interpretation of what migration is. When in 2018, while working for a literary festival in Lagos, we had tried to bring in Warsan Shire, one of my favorite British poets, who was born to Somali parents in Kenya, her agent had mentioned that while she could attend the festival, there was no guarantee that she would be allowed back into the United Kingdom. The only justification for this was that she had come into the United Kingdom as a refugee, so, even with the gift of a British citizenship, her freedom was limited. Who then is to say that Shire, whose poetry revolves around themes of advocacy for asylum and war, does not write African stories?
What role does migration play in the fashioning of a literary identity? How does location affect meaning? Why am I telling more “Black stories?” Is this because I am just physically interacting with the reality of my Blackness and Africanness on a non-African stage? Or is this purely because, now in America, I am considered Black and that’s the categorization that my stories will be ascribed under? How are my experiences shaping my perception?
In my Material Culture class, my final project is an expansive essay on my Nigerian passport. For this assignment, the idea is to explore my passport as an extension of my identity. This is how I think about my Nigerian passport: the lightness of it as an object; how unbelievably light it is. Is this a testament to the intangibility of identity? Is it because identity is something that we can carry in our pocket or wallet, a representation of how it is inside us? What does it mean when I do not carry my passport in America? Does that mean that I am without identity, from an American’s point of view? Or does it mean that, even without my passport, I am Nigerian by the virtue of the blood that runs in my veins? What makes my blood Nigerian? What is the role of a passport in all this?
These same questions come to my mind when I write. Am I writing as a Nigerian, an African, an African in the Diaspora, or as a Black man? Am I writing as an “American Black man” or as an “African Black man?” Or am I writing as an aggregation of all these identities? If so, will my writing become an African writing, an American writing? Or will I be enveloped in a sense of authorial anonymity because of the itinerant nature of my identity? At what point do I stop being an African writer?
Well, you tell me.
