by Gina Yashere
It is not fishing if you do not have a net; it is simply bathing.
The racism I had been exposed to while at Otis made me want to know more about Black culture and to connect with more Black people. I found some meetings in my community where Black people got together and had interesting conversations about politics and culture. I discovered later that I was actually attending meetings of the Nation of Islam, also known as the Nation.
For those of you who don’t know, the Nation was founded in 1930 in Detroit, specifically for Black Americans, and it soon spread throughout the world. Some of the most famous Nation of Islam followers include Malcolm X (before he left to follow a more orthodox style of Islam), Muhammad Ali, and Louis Farrakhan. The Nation promotes social reform within Black communities and economic self-reliance, and it seemed to have been instrumental in turning around disenfranchised young Black men in the US, giving them pride and purpose. I witnessed this effect starting to take hold in London. Suddenly street guys I knew in Tottenham were eschewing the hood life, educating themselves, wearing sharp suits, and exhibiting newfound confidence and pride in their communities. I was impressed. Anything that offered some sort of dignity to Black men was great to see.
But the other side of the Nation, the one that gets a lot of attention in the media, is that it harbors extreme views—like the belief that white people were made in a lab by an evil Black scientist, Yakub, and that all white people are the devil. In fact, it is designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. But at the time I began attending the Nation meetings, I was unaware of this, and so demoralized by the racism at Otis and desperately looking for Black comradery that I was willing to overlook these beliefs.
During my short time there, I learned about Kemet—“land of the Blacks”—one of the original names of ancient Egypt. I wanted to learn about Africa in ways other than the messages I’d been fed all my life. Africans were more than caricatures with bones in their noses, chasing white men to boil them in pots, and being outwitted by Tarzan on a weekly basis. Africans were more than sad-eyed children with flies buzzing around their eyelashes, begging for donations. When my friend Bev and I realized the meetings we were attending were those of the Nation of Islam, we were already hooked on the knowledge and the bean pies, and we didn’t care.
If you didn’t already know, the bean pie seems to be an essential aspect of the Nation of Islam’s financial structure. As well as the Final Call, the Nation’s self-published newspaper, the Fruit of Islam (the bow-tied male disciples) would sell these pies, more often than not baked by the women of the Nation. These pies were not dissimilar to a sweet potato pie or a pumpkin pie, and they were de-fuckin’-licious. I ate tons of them, warm with cream poured all over the top. I was addicted to them, and was convinced they were healthy—after all, it’s beans! I gained so much weight. During that time, I gave up pork and all non-halal foods, began covering my hair, and prayed four times a day. Muslims are supposed to pray five times a day, but I could never quite make that crack-of-dawn prayer. Devout I was not. But I enjoyed feeling part of something, and I quickly began announcing to everyone who would listen that I was now a Muslim.
My mum was bemused by this, but she never tried to talk me out of it, as after all, my father had been a Muslim. She also knew how I gained intense interest in things, only to become bored months later, so no doubt she assumed it would be one of my “fads.”
Some of the Nation beliefs I could not quite get my head around. After my treatment at Otis, my general experiences with white people throughout my life, and the history of slavery, colonialism, and genocide, I didn’t find it too difficult to believe that the white man was the devil. Not the mystical two-horned deity but by way of their action against indigenous peoples all over the globe. What I couldn’t understand was the belief that the white man had been invented by an evil scientist named Yakub. So white people had been made in a test tube like alien spawn? Naw. I began asking questions. I did not find the answers satisfactory. I continued asking questions. Still no satisfaction. I asked some more. And this is where my disillusion with the Nation began to set in. You see, for a woman, I was too outspoken. I talked too much. I was too aggressive. I began to notice the dynamics between the men and women of the Nation.
Although the men were always super respectful of the women, referred to them as queens, and the word “sister” always precluded our names, it was the men who did all the speaking, who ran all the meetings, who dictated how things were done. Women were visible, but our roles were meant to be more along the lines of the traditional family dynamic, as in we were supposed to first and foremost support our men, look after the kids, and bake the bean pies. Just by virtue of who I was, my natural tendency was towards rebellion.
Members of the Nation traveled around the country for events with their counterparts in other cities, and Bev and I often went to these. These were exciting day trips and a chance to see the size and might of the Nation of Islam in the UK. It was on one of these trips that I realized my time with the Nation was up. We were heading to an event in Birmingham, a city approximately a hundred miles from London. We all met at a designated spot to travel in a large convoy. At that time, I had a souped-up Ford Orion. (I can tell what was happening in my life by what car I was driving at the time.) It was the bigger, four-door brother to the Ford Escort, but because it wasn’t considered a boy-racer car, the insurance was cheaper. I had added a full body kit to it and expensive rims. I had room for passengers, besides Bev and I, so a couple of the brothers without vehicles opted to jump in with us. Now, I am a fast driver. Fast, but not reckless. I don’t believe in showing off and driving above my ability to impress people, but if it’s a dry, sunny day and there’s an open road, I’m putting my foot down on that gas pedal. Hard. Although my hair was covered by a hijab, my driving apparently was not becoming of a good Muslim woman. All of a sudden, I heard a male voice. “Uh, sister, you’re driving too fast.” I answered, “All right,” a little peeved but respectful. I slowed down a little to what I considered a decent speed. After all, we were on a motorway. But then he continued. “Sister, uh, pull over the car . . . I’m going to drive.” Excuse me? Who the fuck did he think he was? I asked him, “Whose car is this? I don’t remember you making any payments on this car, or paying my insurance, so if you don’t like the way I drive this car that I own, I suggest you flag down the rest of the convoy and get in one of theirs. You ain’t commandeering my vehicle.” Bev was my only passenger to Birmingham that day, and I left the Nation soon after.
It was probably for the best. I couldn’t make a decent bean pie for shit anyway.
Being with the Nation led me to another organization, Pan-African Community Enterprise, or PACE. Although also run by members of the Nation, brothers Derek Muhammed and Barry Muhammed, PACE wasn’t so strict and accepted all types of people, whether Muslim, Christian, agnostic, or atheist. It was more of a community group, doing such things as getting food to people in need and raising money for after-school programs. I still got to meet up with other Black people and continue to learn more about the culture, and I didn’t have to wear the hijab to do so.
One day PACE was putting together a community fundraiser. They needed poets, singers, dancers, and performers of any kind. At the time, jungle music—a fusion of dub reggae bass lines and techno, which was the predecessor to what we now know as drum and bass—was huge in the UK. I hated the name of the music, especially as it was a predominantly Black genre. I decided to write a short play about the stupidity of the name, even though I loved the sound.
Two other friends with whom I had attended the Nation, and subsequently PACE meetings, were Lola and Edire, who like me were of Nigerian descent. We were always messing around, imitating the accents of our parents. I wrote the short play, in which Lola and I played a Nigerian mum and auntie, and Edire played the young daughter/niece who was playing this loud music in her room. Our characters admonished her about this noise, the inappropriateness of the nam
e, and the fact that she should be connecting to her African roots. We then finished with a choreographed African dance to Fela Kuti.
It was meant to be a humorous one-act play with a message—something people of different generations and backgrounds in the community could relate to. I don’t know whether people got the message, but they laughed their asses off. I realized that I had written not a one-act play but a comedy sketch. It was exhilarating, and highly addictive, that laughter. And I wanted more.
After that PACE performance, we named ourselves Fusion and began performing the sketch at other talent shows. And we kept winning them. After a couple of months performing the same piece over and over again at various events, Edire left the group, to be replaced by another friend, Lynette. It also became obvious at that point that it was time to write another sketch, but I’d already hit writer’s block and struggled to come up with another idea for the three of us.
At about this same time Bev’s older sister, Veronica, who had seen us perform, approached me one day. “Have you heard about this stand-up comedy thing?” She told me that she had signed up for a stand-up comedy workshop that would meet every Sunday afternoon for four weeks, run by two reasonably known comedians on what was known as the Black comedy circuit. At the end of the workshop, you got to perform in a little theater, in front of an audience, endorsed by the comedians. She invited me to go to the workshop with her, and I thought, Why not? The two men were pretty established and could give us access to more performance opportunities, which could help get my creative juices flowing again, and I had both the money and the time, as I had not yet begun to seriously look for another engineering job after Otis. I was going to continue enjoying the summer off, maybe even longer, and return to regular work in the winter. The workshop brought in a mixed bag of people. From an older, shy lesbian, who wanted to increase her confidence enough to stand and speak in front of a room full of people, to a performing poet, who wanted to add humor to her pieces, to a young guy with confidence and swagger, who fancied himself as the next Eddie Murphy.
I turned up for the workshop with a large notebook already brimming with ideas and what I didn’t know at the time was a five-minute set already written. I had plenty of ideas for stories and jokes but nothing sketch-wise yet for the girls and me. I’d also become bored of performing that one sketch, and for a reason I couldn’t quite fathom, I felt restless. Fusion had one more competition to take part in and then either I’d have to come up with another piece or we were in trouble.
On the night of the competition, I arrived early, as I liked to do, to get a feel of the room and watch the other performers we were going up against. I let the promoter of the show know that Fusion was in attendance, and he informed me that we would be up sixth in the show. I settled in at the back of the room and waited, but Lola and Lynette failed to turn up. The show began with a mixed bag of wannabe R&B singers, some dance troupes, magicians, but as far as I could tell, we would be the only “comedy” act. As the show went on, I began to become apprehensive that the girls had still not arrived. As the time drew closer for our performance, I approached the promoter and asked him to push us further back in the show. He did. We were now to be the last performance of the competition. I paced up and down, intermittently worried and furious. No Lola, no Lynette.
The promoter finally approached. “We’re about to bring you up. Your girls here yet?”
“Nope.”
“So whaddya wanna do? Pull out?”
Hmmm. Forfeit this performance and lose our chance to get through to the final, after having driven over an hour across London to get here and sat through three different renditions of Brandy’s “I Wanna Be Down,” or go onstage with whatever jokes I could remember from my little notebook and at least try to salvage this disaster. Fuck it. “No, I’m gonna perform some stand-up comedy. Just tell ’em one of the members of Fusion is gonna tell some jokes.” The MC did just that, and I walked towards the stage with all the confidence I could muster.
“Hey, everybody. My name is Obedapo Ebuwa Bolatito Iyashere. But you can call me Gina.” That intro received a nice chuckle, and my confidence bloomed. “I’m from a Nigerian family. So repeat this phrase after me: ‘Am-eh-nawo, Odukwe, Mamakusa.’ That means . . . No idea, I just made that up, but it sounds pretty African, eh?” Big laugh. Holy shit, I’m killing it!
I did a very respectable five-minute set and walked offstage to enthusiastic applause and cheers. The audience and judges’ votes came in soon after, and with my solo performance, I had managed to get us through to the final!
After the show, the MC approached me. “You’re a stand-up.” He told me, “You don’t need the other two girls.”
I wasn’t ready to dump my friends—well, at least not till I found out why they’d left me hanging—so I smiled sweetly, thanked him, and went about my business. I later found out that Lynette’s house had been burgled, and Lola had been helping her make a police report. It had been a stressful evening for all, but those burglars had actually done me a favor.
At the end of the four-week workshop, the two comedians running it hosted the planned stand-up performances with the workshop’s alumni in a small, fifty-seat theater in South London, and the show sold out three nights. All the Black promoters and comedians working in the industry came by to see the next generation of talent coming through. The comedians considered the strongest were me, Bev’s sister, Veronica—who was already writing strong, observational material that could easily cross over into the mainstream (meaning the white circuit)—and Glas Campbell, a guy from Leeds, about two hundred miles north of London. His shtick consisted of mainly old one-liners, previously told by the white, working-class comedians of the ’70s, but his performance, his swag, and the way he strung those lines together into a killer set made him unbeatable, compared to us green comics with our jokes about African parents and stolen front doormats. He headlined all three nights of the alumni showcase and blew the roof off every night.
I was no slouch. I had come up with a killer ten-minute routine, and at the end of every show, Black promoters approached me, offering me money to perform at their events. Money! People wanted to pay for my little jokes! It wasn’t a lot—we’re talking anywhere between five and fifty per show—but at this point, with my cheap rent and my bought-for-cash car, I didn’t need a lot of money to live on, and I was having fun.
I began to play with the idea of taking a little bit more time away from engineering and seeing how this played out. I became enamored with stand-up and threw all my energy into my new passion, neglecting my sketch group, Fusion. But Fusion limped on. I’ve never been good at ending relationships, always slowly pulling away till the other person gets completely fed up and does the dirty deed for me. Fusion was my first foray into this technique. Our brainstorming meetings became more and more sporadic while I explored my exciting new stand-up comedy world. I was struggling to come up with another sketch for Fusion, compounded by the fact that I’d lost interest and already emotionally moved on. I attended our meetings as much as I could, although my heart was no longer in it, and the girls could feel it.
One evening I turned up at Lola’s house, where we were set to meet and finally come up with a new sketch together. There was another girl there. “Who are you?” I asked somewhat abruptly. No one had told me we were taking on a new member. She looked down in embarrassment and waited to be rescued.
“You haven’t had much time for us lately,” Lola began, “so we decided to bring someone else in to take your place.”
I was relieved but still furious. The gall of throwing me out of the group I had put together. “Fine, do your thing, but you can’t perform my sketch, ’cause I wrote it. You’re gonna have to write your own.” I wished the new girl good luck and left Fusion to continue on my stand-up adventure.
13
However Hard a Lizard Does a Push-up, It Will Never Have an Alligator’s Chest
When I was around ten, I was looking through one of my mum’s
magazines and something caught my eye. It was an article entitled “Women Who Don’t Like Men.” I was intrigued and began reading hungrily. The article was about women who loved women—in other words, lesbians. As I previously mentioned, I was a tomboy when I was a kid, climbing whatever I could get away with. I detested the dresses my mother made for me, and besides my brothers, I didn’t particularly like boys—I found them stinky and rude. But I coveted their freedom. I wanted to be free to be whoever I wanted to be without being told I was “unladylike.” That word was bandied about in relation to me for most of my childhood and deep into adulthood by everyone from teachers to friends to family members to even wannabe boyfriends. One guy once told me, “You’re pretty, but you walk like a barbarian.”
For as long as I could remember, Mum had ranted consistently about the perils of men. We girls were to keep away from boys at all costs. They were dirty and only wanted one thing, to use us, then dump us, and she would not stand for our education being ruined by pregnancy and shame. Penises were generally the work of the devil, until you were married and needed one for babies. As I read this piece in the magazine, everything seemed to make sense. I ran to Taiwo, triumphant in my epiphany. “Look!” I brandished the magazine, open at the page. “Mummy wants us to be lesbians!” By my childish deductions, it was completely logical. Lesbians didn’t like boys. Lesbians didn’t touch boys. Therefore, as per Mummy’s wishes, we were supposed to be lesbians. Taiwo was somewhat taken aback and tried to explain to me that she didn’t think that was exactly what Mum wanted, which only confused me more. Then made me suspicious. Maybe Taiwo was just upset that I’d worked it out before her, because what else could Mum possibly want? I wondered . . . but I soon forgot about it and continued on with life.
My mum’s plan had been for her daughters to avoid the opposite sex completely until we were qualified doctors, lawyers, engineers, or accountants, then meet Nigerian men, from the same tribe as us, who were also doctors, lawyers, engineers, or accountants, marry them, have kids, and produce more doctors, lawyers, engineers, or accountants. And preferably more than her friends, as immigrant parents always seemed to be in competition with one another over who had the most kids, the most successful kids, the most grandkids, and the most successful grandkids.
