New York, My Village

by Uwem Akpan

  Thanks for your trust.

  Even for those former child soldiers, who served in the Biafran Boys’ Company, the BBC, though none of you agreed to reenter the darkness of that childhood with me, I sincerely understand your refusal. “A spy doesn’t tell tales,” one of you told me in Georgia, USA, as you served me onugbu soup and poundo. This was mere happenstance, as I’d no idea I was visiting the house of a former child soldier. But just showing me your war photos helped me a lot; your memories of Ikot Ekpene’s ekpo-ntokeyen masks brought me nostalgia. For some of your former colleagues, elsewhere, who simply said if they’d had ten childhoods they’d give them all to the liberation of Biafra, I praise their honesty. And for those who subtly or bluntly told me to get lost, I respect their stand also.

  WRITING A BOOK is a long, complex journey.

  Big thanks also to Louise Erdrich for the generous endorsement of my first book, Say You’re One of Them. By the time you sent that blurb, which you promised when we read together at the 2006 New Yorker Festival, my publisher had already said the cover was set in stone. I drank a shot of Malibu on learning that they couldn’t resist your blurb. Also, that festival evening, it meant so much to me to chat with you and your friend about the beauty of literature and the formidable Catholicism of your Native American mother. You asked if I was going to set any works in America. Back then, I didn’t know, but you were surprised when I said I’d already visited the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the nineties and had played pickup soccer with Native Americans in Omaha, Nebraska, and Spokane, Washington. It’s only thus natural that in this, my first attempt to set my story in America, I pay homage to your ancestors, the Native Americans, who first walked these lovely lands.

  Thanks for your counsel on the lonely life of the writer and the narrative voice.

  Reuben Abati, I often think of how happy we were to finally make each other’s acquaintance in your office at the Guardian Nigeria in Lagos in early 2009. I was impressed by how much you knew of our old Cross River State ethnic dishes and hospitality. As I said, I’d come primarily to thank you for your 1996 article “An African in America is Baffled by Ebonics” in the Baltimore Sun while you were a Fellow at the University of Maryland, I a senior at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. That syndicated op-ed intellectualized for me the bad blood between us Africans and the African Americans. I was already experiencing the strange complexity and painful “social distancing” between us and them at Gonzaga. And, as you can see, it’s taken me just a quarter of a century to fictionalize this.

  Alexis Gargaliano, my first editor at Scribner, in our initial conversations in 2012, as you tried to sign up this book, you were almost in tears when you told me racism had brought America to its knees and that you wished my kind of writing and imagery would hit at the immigrant foundations of America. God knows how many drafts you’ve read since then! Between us, words fail, except to say without my memory of your visceral understanding of racism, I would’ve given up.

  Eileen Pollack, my teacher at the Helen Zell MFA Program of the University of Michigan, thanks for your brutal honesty about the book’s flaws—but also, most importantly, its strengths. I also believe our experience of workshopping my New Yorker stories did make it easier for me to trust you with my naked frustrations with racism in general and in publishing in particular. I treasure our deep conversations since 2004 about anti-Semitism, the Palestinian question, your heartbreak about all these folks waving the Nazi flags at President Trump rallies, etc. As a Christian, I’m sorry about our history of cruelty and evil toward Jews. I pray we do better in the future.

  You were so moved by the New Jersey church scenes that you quickly researched and sent me the link to a video of a white priest ejecting a bereaved Black family with their grandma’s coffin from a Requiem Mass and calling the cops on them.‡ This sudden discovery revived my confidence in both my imagination and what I personally knew—as a seminarian and priest—of the racism/tribalism in my dear Roman Catholic Church.

  I was touched when, on a research visit to NYC in December 2017, you invited me to your place for the liturgy of lighting the First Hanukkah Candle followed by dinner at a Ghanaian buffet in Little Senegal. I needed such enlightenment to rework the book. Eileen, now that you’ve retired from my alma mater, I want to thank you for your continuous kindness and presence, especially to us minorities and international students!

  TO CUT SHORT MY long stories of rejections and rewrites and contract transfers, Alane Salierno Mason, my current editor at W. W. Norton & Company, you wanted to buy this book just a day after I sent it to you in the summer of 2020.

  You loved the depth the Ekong-Ujai relationship brought to the work. I was very moved by your edits of our war scenes. But I really believed I could trust you when you said I’d be allowed to write about NYC bedbugs and the New Jersey church scenes!

  Today, I really want to thank you for taking me and Elif Batumen out to lunch in 2014 during my Cullman Fellowship with the New York Public Library, when I was still battling with this book. Without even knowing what I was writing about, your sad one-liner about the “hopelessly insular nature” of American publishing and the kind of fiction that could put this before the wider public had stayed with me. In the summer of 2018, sensing my own frustration with finishing this book, you were ready to take pictures of New York City, to help my research.

  By the time Nneoma Amadi-Obi—a Nigerian American assistant editor at Norton—read the manuscript and laughed till she cried, three of us were already having a whole different conversation about diversity in publishing, edits, and maps. Nneoma, when you jubilantly told me your knowledge of American Embassy in Nigeria, editorial meetings in NYC, perceptions of our African food abroad, etc., resonated with those of my protagonist Ekong Udousoro, my overwhelming joy sent me on a ten-hour road trip and into making akara and then ekwuong okra soup all night. Thanks also to Mo Crist, assistant editor, and Erin Lovett, my publicist, for your energetic promotion of my book, and to Dassi Zeidel, my project editor, and Dave Cole, my copyeditor, for your patience with my endless edits.

  Azafi Omoluabi and Femi Ayodele of Paréssia Publishers, my Nigerian publisher, your efficient communication skills, book publicity ideas, and insightful conversations about African Rights assured me my book had finally found a home on my two continents!

  Maria Massie, my agent, blessings to you and your family. Suffice it to say when you warned me a long time ago that this book would need a lot of politics to fly, for publishing doesn’t like being called out, I didn’t understand what you meant. Iya mmi, now I do.

  CRESSIDA LEYSHON, MY NEW YORKER editor, thanks for consoling me when I had bedbugs in your city in September/November 2013 during my Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. And I remember all our visits to NYC cafés when my landlord sued me in 2014 for squatting. Jean Strouse, then Cullman Center director, thanks for your immense support. As you can see, I more than loved your amusement that I could frame a whole book around my NYC housing woes; however, back then I was more concerned my infestation could endanger the precious tomes of your New York Public Library. I thank Marie d’Origny, your assistant, for accompanying me to court and giving me a treat in Chinatown. Paul Delaverdac, Julia Pagnamenta, and Sam Swope, I’m sorry for all the times I forgot my key and you had to stand up to let me into the center.

  Peter Holquist of Princeton University, my fellow soccer-crazy Cullman Fellow, I’ve great memories of us sneaking out of our cubicles to watch European Champions League games at the Australian, instead of writing. Our mischief and obsession were such that we ensured others couldn’t join us!

  I also thank Pat Towers and Kristy Davies Albano for our conversations about race in publishing ever since you invited me to write for O, the Oprah magazine, in 2008. Thanks for reading the first versions of New York, My Village. You helped me with research and cooked for me and showed me around NYC. But I shall never forget our lunch of tongue sandwiches and beer!

 
And when you finally said I’d succeeded in writing about your city with the same intensity of our African cities, it gave me a real boost. Brad Kessler, you graced this book with a new depth by teaching me to rewrite the American dialogue to show how New Yorkers use coded language to talk around racism. I also want to thank the three bedbug victims, who’ve chosen to remain anonymous, because of the shame of having to abandon your apartments (with all your belongings) in NYC and Toronto, Canada.

  I’d also enjoyed my fellowship at the Black Mountain Institute of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (2010–11), thanks to Professor Wole Soyinka. Richard and Mini Wiley, your friendship in Vegas quickly helped me settle into Sin City. I thank the very compassionate Jesuit Superior General Adolfo Nicolás, who rescinded his earlier permission for me to leave the Jesuits but then failed to convince me to stay. I’m grateful for your insightful, kind, and prayerful emails. I’m sorry I could no longer stand the hierarchy dangling over my head as I struggled with the restlessness and fears of a second book. After three years of not being able to write a word in fiction, I knew something had to give. I’m grateful, too, to Danny Herwitz for bringing me to the Institute for the Humanities of the University of Michigan (2011–12). I’ll never forget your support as I struggled to transfer my J-1 visa, alias “Leprosy Visa,” from Vegas to Ann Arbor.

  James O’Malley and Lelia Ruckenstein of O’Malley & Associates, my immigration lawyers, thanks for explaining again and again to this nervous immigrant that even if I lost my civil case with my NYC landlord, I wouldn’t be jailed or deported. Getting to know how much protection tenants and squatters have in NYC courts has made me more appreciative of NYC.

  I’m also grateful to Yaddo (Fall 2012) and Loyola University Chicago’s Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage (Fall 2017) for their fellowships.

  AND HOW DO I thank you, Chinelo Okparanta? Hearing of how some editor had apologized that she wasn’t courageous enough to publish this book, you took it as a personal challenge to strategize on whom to send it. But we couldn’t stop laughing when another editor rejected it because it needed more strangeness, perhaps. “Did she mean we Africans should be walking on our heads or that no apartment in Nigeria could be better than those around Times Square?” you joked. You must also thank your friend Yang Wang, for all she shared about China, her fascinating country, when I visited Beijing in 2015. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize my dream of comparing the racism in Chinese Catholicism to that of America in the book.

  I thank Reverend Sisters Iniobong Akpabio, Philo Bassey, Imelda Effiong, and Magdalene Umoh. I also praise Shanari Williams, Clarisse Ncuti, Anne Okpohs, Ngozi Onuma, Marian Krzyzowski, Chika Unigwe, John Sanni, Dave and Trilla Bass, Aurelie Maketa, Jim Foster, Jim Shepard, Dan Grossman, John Bolen III, Elizabeth Yerkes, Pat and Rich Needles, Trish Roberts, Father Ehi Omoragbon, and Father Edmund Agorhom for your support. Anita Norich, thanks for your Holocaust class at the University of Michigan. Arua Oko Omaka, thanks for the research on Irish missionaries in Biafra. Delia Steverson, thanks for helping me with the Alabama African American vernacular. Chibundu Onuzo, I treasure the fact that when I couldn’t download your BBC version of “Aka Jehovah, Hand of Jehovah,” you sent me a private recording.

  I thank you, Joe Nwizarh, Simeon Enemuo, Emmanuel Ugwejeh, Mekso Okolocha, all Igbos I could really thrash out the Biafran stuff with when I was a Jesuit. Your openness to the other side of the story, your dispassionate, inclusive analysis of our Nigerian politics, sadly enough, wasn’t that common in our dear Nigerian convents, rectories, and seminaries. Simple courtesies like keeping an informal group conversation in English, instead of hoarding it in Igbo, so this minority could follow, went a long way!

  AND FREDDIE OBIORA ANYAEGBUNAM JR., my former high school student in Nigeria, your Biafran War trauma, percolating to you two generations after the fact, stayed with me long after your reassuring visit to Atlanta, Georgia, in 2016. As our one-hour lunch meeting turned into six hours of endless driving around Georgia and catching up, you wanted to know about my minority experience of the war. What bothered you wasn’t so much what the Igbos, your people, went through in the war, as what you saw as “complete, utter, or even snobbish silence” from other ethnic groups. You wanted to know why young Igbos marched for a new Biafra while everybody else carried on with their business. You asked what this meant in a multi-ethnic society. You were surprised by even the silence of your school friends from other ethnic groups. You wondered how your generation can commit to Nigeria, if you’d no understanding of the history—because the Nigerian government had banned the teaching of history, to hide its war atrocities from its children. You felt Nigeria hated your generation. You were really hurting that our compatriots were successful the world over while home remained a hot mess.

  To your next question, abrupt and accusatory, “And, Father Uwem, why haven’t you, teller of painful stories, written about this damn war?” I’d no ready reply, except to say, “Obiora, my man, perhaps it’s exactly that—too painful.” No matter how much you pushed, I promised you nothing, for I didn’t want to disappoint you if I couldn’t put a book together. I wasn’t even sure my knowledge of Biafra would bring you peace anyway. But what I didn’t and couldn’t hide from you was my anger and shame that the Nigerian government—the same government that’s protecting killer Fulani herdsmen—had just shot 150 peaceful pro-Biafra demonstrators, according to Amnesty International. Of course, I’m depressed to be from a country that is cuddling Boko Haram and herdsmen terrorists but continues to kill peaceful agitators.

  Still, my advice to you, Obiora, and your cousin Jeni Giwa-Amu Wellington of Australia (your love for kangaroo meat helped me describe it in the novel) and others over the years, stands: My young passionate African diaspora friends, already Nigeria celebrates you because the funds you send from your diaspora are bigger than our national budget … When these global Western institutions employ you out here, could you leverage this privilege for the benefit of your home continent? And can you risk your privileges like Dr. Arikana Chihombori-Quao, the former African Union’s ambassador to the United States, who lost her job to fighting the status quo?

  But bombing our African issues only from abroad could lead to burnout or a disconnect, a certain win for whiteness. So to recharge your vision and represent us better, visit Nigeria or Biafra as much as possible. Meet up with your less successful childhood friends. Shop often in the open market. Visit public schools. Mentor poor children from another ethnic group—even when their elites are waging a genocide on your people. Sharpen your native language skills so you can understand the proverbs and oral poetry of your ethnic groups. Risk your palates on the most native of dishes. Welcome and dance with the masqueraders, for you can get rid of neither the past nor the future. If your big Cambridge degree hinders you from these things, you’re losing the fight.

  We, your teachers and parents, can only give you so much, and even our limited gifts are tainted. Imperfect. We’ve failed you in the Nigerian project. You must humbly remember all of this so you don’t lose heart when your own children also begin to “cancel” you. Build deep friendships, especially with your Creator, because sometimes they’ll be your only home left in the universe. Marry who you want to marry. And if all of this is stressful and confusing, take the long view, like the ukim tree, of this still-a-wonderful-world. Believe in the wisdom that if you live long enough to be grandparents, you may enjoy a different kind of love with your grandchildren, something less tense.

  TO MY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA students, you’ll never understand how much your enthusiasm for writing has helped mine. Daily, I’m meeting my younger, more confident, hopeful self. I admire your interpretations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. Yet, as I’ve said to you a million times already, too many institutions in our dear America are racist and sexist and homophobic. I stand before you because I believe your generation the world over seems poised to ask the hard questions, to
fact-check on the spot, to re-create everything, to let everyone belong. I hope then my novel, if not these meandering acknowledgments, addresses some of your pointed concerns about how discrimination in publishing does shape the literary canon and ultimately your syllabi, about agents and editors, and about how to research and dialogue across culture and race and gender. You must remain brave and open and forgiving and hopeful, for, as Rilke says, “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.”

  I’m grateful to my colleagues—especially David Leavitt and Jill Ciment, Camille Bordas, William Logan, Ange Mlinko, and Michael Hoffman, and Sid Dobrin, my department chair, and Mary Watt, my associate dean. Melissa Davis, Carla Blount, Dennis Blount, and Lynn Harris, you know how much I depend on you in the administrative offices.

  Jill, in the spring of 2019, a year before the #publishingpaidme wahala or publishing’s reckoning with the Black Lives Matter phenomenon, I cried when you insisted on reading my manuscript though you were undergoing a ruthless regime of radiotherapy and could only read thirty minutes a day. You gave me the best advice on editing this crazy book: you said if you were me, you’d build the book around what average Nigerians didn’t already know about America and vice versa. (It made me so happy because I know this NYC bedbug mess and rent racketeers or 419ers, for instance, would be a total shock to many in Nigeria!) You also warned I shouldn’t allow editors and agents to control how I write about racism in publishing, because, “You know, Uwem, their noses are too in the bullshit to know it’s bullshit.” I’m lucky to have been your student before your retirement!