by Okey Ndibe
Yet, on a day I most desperately pined for sleep, it eluded me. I rolled about in bed, my mind a magnet, drawing all manner of disquieting thoughts to itself. I was on edge, close to hypersensitive. The sounds of cars zooming past, of humans talking, breached the walls, vexed my ears. I strained for the awful sound of guns exploding. Luckily, it never materialized.
With sleep not an option, I wished that time would hasten, dawn arrive in a hurry. But time, hope, and terror of the adventurer, was heedless. All night long, I remained restless, trapped between periods of weary wakefulness and fitful sleep.
At last, after hours of unsettling aloneness, I felt Uwazurike’s house began to awaken, to stir again. Doors opened and shut, made sharp whiny sounds. I picked up the patter of footsteps, the sucking sound of flushed toilets, the gurgle of water jetting from faucets. The sounds were sweet music. The clink of plates, pots, cutlery, comforted me. There was the sizzle and hiss of food being fried on the stove. Soon, the aroma of fried onions, tomatoes, eggs, and plantains flooded my room. My mouth watered. Yet, I lay in bed, listless and torn. A part of me desired food; another part hoped, with a tinge of desperation, for a final dash of sleep.
I hovered in a daydream state. Curled up to ward off the hint of cold that had come with the morning, I tried to identify the sounds and smells that intruded on me.
A light knock on the door snapped me out of languor. “Yes, come in,” I answered.
“Are you awake?” It was Chudi Uwazurike’s baritone voice.
I wasn’t sleeping, but “awake” wasn’t a word that quite defined my state, either. Still I said, “Yes.”
“Breakfast is almost ready,” he announced.
In the bathroom I brushed my teeth. Then I took another shower, ablution to prepare me for my second day in America. It was a shorter shower time than the night before, but I repeated the nighttime routine of lathering my body with the different soaps, washing my hair with several shampoos and conditioners. One day in America, and I already relished excess, savored variety.
After breakfast, I bid goodbye to Uwazurike’s family. Then he took me via the subway to New York’s cavernous Port Authority Bus Terminal. The descent down a flight of stairs to the subway platform was a novel experience, at once terrifying and exciting. I felt like a burrowing being surrounded by many other such creatures. Down on the platform, I had the sensation of being cast into a Homeric cauldron. Hundreds—perhaps thousands—of people milled about. Their faces seemed staunchly closed and mute. Every space appeared occupied, but there was the impression that each man, each woman, stood alone, apart. In the cavern, the sound of trains pulling in, pulling out, was a horrendous belch. A horde of passengers would emerge from the belly of each train and others would rush in to take the vacated spaces. The train would pull away, its sound like a metallic monster’s hideous roar. Uwazurike nudged me into one of the cars. All the seats were taken. He instructed me to grab a horizontal bar. I had yet to secure a grip before the train sped off. Thrust forward, I barged into a tall man. “I’m sorry,” I said quickly, too embarrassed and scared to look at him. He said nothing; I had the impression he glowered at me.
I was still ill at ease when we arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Here, I felt even more swamped—by people, by human and mechanical sounds. The dashing bazaar of people made me afraid I could crash into somebody or lose Uwazurike. He bought me a ticket and waited until I boarded the Peter Pan bus bound for Springfield, Massachusetts. The bus trip was about three hours, with several stops. In my angst-ridden state, the journey seemed to stretch for an eternity.
Much to my relief, Bart Nnaji was at the bus station in Springfield to welcome me. We drove in his Saab sedan to his home in Florence, a wooded suburb next to Northampton. I joined his family to eat a meal of curry chicken and white rice. His wife offered me some takeaway chicken in a large plastic container with a cover.
Afterward, Nnaji drove me to 38 North Prospect Street in Amherst, my first residential address in America. Built in 1892, the house was a rather grand Victorian-style home, with a TV room, a dining room, a living room, a large kitchen, three bathrooms, and three bedrooms. Chinua Achebe and his family had lived there for a month or so during the tail end of his visiting professorship at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Nnaji left after showing me through the house. Once alone, I realized that the grandeur and commodiousness of my new residence unnerved me, as if I had been moved into a haunted gothic home and left severely alone.
I couldn’t free my mind from my uncle’s dire warning—that every American owned and carried a gun. It didn’t help that it was the dead of winter. By 5 p.m., darkness had fallen outside, wreathed the house. I couldn’t see beyond the front door. Yet, I knew that anybody outside could peer at me through the front door or the home’s large windows.
Some gunman, I feared, might be prowling in the dark, in absolute anonymity, scouting me out. The fear exasperated me, but I felt powerless to dispel it. It recalled a fear that seized and menaced me as a young schoolchild.
We lived then in Enugwu Ukwu, a town of several hundred thousand people in southeastern Nigeria. My father was the town’s postmaster, my mother the headmistress of one of its two elementary schools. The buzziest part of the town was its marketplace, located on one part of a busy tarred road. Some days, I would steal away from my parents’ watchful eyes and head for the market. I could always count on meeting some of my school friends. We loved to gather at the edge of the market. We would kick around soccer balls. We would take in the sights and sounds of traffic, traders, and buyers. We would daydream. And we would talk about any subject that caught our fancy.
Across from the market, on the other side of the tarred road, was a cemetery. It was nondescript, this cemetery, except for a huge marbled tomb that was ringed round with steel chains. One day, as we dawdled near the marketplace, one of us pointed across the road at the cemetery.
“Does anybody know why that tomb is chained?” he asked.
None of us had any idea.
“I will tell you,” he said.
According to him, the occupant of the tomb had been a notorious member of a secret cult. The cult had given him a choice between (a) enjoying a long life with modest means and (b) acquiring spectacular wealth but dying at a relatively young age. The man had chosen option B and had undergone the requisite diabolical ritual to seal the pact.
Yet, when death came calling, the man had turned bitter. He’d become a bullying fiend-ghost. Some nights, he would arise from the grave, adorn his glittering attire, and plant himself by the roadside. Any foolhardy pedestrian who happened to pass the cemetery after dark faced merciless beating by the ghost. Other nights, the man jaunted to his home. There, he’d punish his sleeping wife and children with vicious punches until neighbors ran to the scene, alarmed by the shrieks and screams. It took the services of a powerful dibia, a traditional healer and the closest thing to a priest, to restrain the unruly ghost. It was this dibia who ordered that a steel fence be built around the tomb, to finally contain, cordon off, the pestering ghost.
For months after hearing this story, I was certain that the ghost would breach the steel barricade—and that, for sure, he would come after me. Night after night, I would lie on a mat, wide awake, in a room with my siblings, unable to fall asleep. For a long time, my eyes would scour the darkness, filled with hideous, haunting shapes and images. And then, thoroughly exhausted, I’d succumb to sleep.
This childhood fear was similar to the fear I felt my second night in America, my first in Amherst. I had conjured up an armed, faceless foe I was now unable to dismantle, unmake. I had allowed myself to imagine that this invisible enemy was set to do me in, and in a final, decisive way. What—who—could prevent this foe from taking deadly aim at me, pulling the trigger?
I felt trapped, hemmed in inside my new, well-lit abode. I proceeded to pull shut all the blinds.
Then I turned off all the lights in the house save for a table lamp in the TV room.
I flipped on the TV and found a movie. I sat on a couch and gazed at the television. It was an absentminded sort of gaze. I was less interested in the movie than in using the TV to lure my mind away from this aching idea that some armed, sinister bully was out there. The movie could not transport me. That, or I just was unable to shake off the notion that some armed predator prowled outside.
It dawned on me: my second night in America was shaping up to be even more tormented than the first. I had never slept in a house, of any shape or size, all by myself, much less lived alone. In fact, my last apartment in Lagos was something of a mecca, always abuzz with relatives, friends, or colleagues who would stay for anything between a few hours and several months.
In Nigeria, houses were built either with concrete or mud, not the wood that many Americans favored. The wooden floor at 38 North Prospect creaked. I tried treading stealthily, like an artful burglar doing his best not to awaken his victims. Still the creaking stayed constant. Pressed to pee, I groped my way to the nearest bathroom, tried to hold my breath. Even then, the creaking taunted me.
Hours passed, but I remained awake, afraid. In fact, my fear fed sleeplessness. It was well past 2 a.m. when I decided to turn off the TV and head upstairs. I tiptoed up the staircase and into the master bedroom. I flicked on the light, revealing a huge, antique bed, waiting for me. The curlicues in the bed’s wooden frame lent it an air of ancientness.
For a few minutes, I debated what to do with the bedroom light. A part of me wanted to leave it on through the night. But what if a sniper hoisted himself up on a ladder, snooped at me as I slept? I turned it off. Instantly, a thick darkness swallowed me. Unnerved, I quietly lowered myself on the bed. I curled up and then gingerly pulled the covers over my body.
I didn’t expect to tumble off into deep sleep, and I didn’t. Supine, I moped at the parade of ghostly faces in the layered, liquid darkness. From outside came the ceaseless chorus of insects and other creatures. Now and again, the house itself would seem to sputter or groan, as if some disembodied presences had sneaked into the space to keep me company, torment me.
I was surprised when the phone by my bedside began to ring. I groped about, picked it up, and croaked, “Hello.”
“Okey, Professor Nnaji here. Did I wake you up?”
“It’s okay,” I said.
And it truly was. My body had defied fear, triumphed over nocturnal nightmares, and surrendered to sleep. My second night in America, first night in Amherst, I had found a way—hurrah, hurrah—to rest.
“Do you need anything?” Nnaji asked.
I knew he couldn’t give me what I was desperate for: some human company. Would he even relate if I voiced that earnest wish?
“No, nothing,” I said.
Nigerian, Going Dutch
On December 14, 1988, I went to see Nnaji at his office at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He’d invited me over to talk to Karen U, a tall, wiry African American woman who wore a military-low haircut, her vein-lined arms an exhibit of sinewy, defined muscles.
After introducing Karen to me, Nnaji told her I was a major Nigerian journalist who had just arrived in the United States to take up editorship of a new magazine. Nnaji then addressed me.
He said Karen had sought him out for advice about a trip she contemplated making to Nigeria. Since I had arrived from Nigeria only days ago, he felt that my insights would better serve Karen.
Karen took it from there.
From her first moments of awakening awareness as a child, she had wanted to know who her father was and the origin of her last name, which was rather unusual among her peers’ surnames. She had asked the only person she felt should know, her mother. But for years, her mother had balked against discussing her paternity. And then the woman was diagnosed with cancer.
As the disease ravaged her, Karen’s mother finally relented. She gave to her daughter the information she had withheld for years.
In sum, the dying woman told her daughter that, in the late 1950s, she had fallen in love—or merely fallen in—with a Nigerian man who was then a graduate student at Fordham University in New York City. As their relationship progressed, she had become pregnant. Meanwhile, the Nigerian had completed his studies. He arranged a trip to Nigeria. He would soon return, he told her. When he did—she never doubted that his word was good—she expected that their relationship would blossom, perhaps into matrimony.
As it turned out, the man never returned to the States. At any rate, he never came back to her. Embittered about being betrayed and jilted, she nevertheless gave birth to her daughter, whom she raised alone. Her resentment took the form of silence, came in her refusal to divulge the identity of her jilter, much less to name him. The only thing that shook that resentful silence, the only thing that could, was the visitation of a horrific disease that wreaked havoc on her body, lent each remaining moment an air of urgency.
One day, just before her struggle against cancer ended in her death, Karen’s mother summoned her daughter. “Your father’s name is Emmanuel U,” the woman said. And then, sticking to the bare bones, she gave her daughter a sketch of what had transpired between the Nigerian and herself.
After burying and mourning her mother, Karen felt a tug deep in her heart. Everything within her, fueled perhaps by the pangs of bereavement, pointed her emotional compass in the direction of Nigeria. Daily, the quest to find her father, to go to his country, grew. It became a consuming desire. It was this hunger that had brought her to Nnaji. And then Nnaji had pointed her in my direction.
Karen’s story, told at a feverish pace with intermittent interjections by Nnaji, rent my heart. There were times when the torrent of her words seemed choked off by emotion, the narrative lurching, threatening to fall to pieces or incoherence. At such moments, Nnaji, who had heard the story at least once before, would jump in, throw her a tidbit she had earlier shared with him. Karen would give a quick nod and a nervous smile. Then she would steady her voice, snatch back and stitch up the story—and determinedly continue.
Her pain was all too evident. But there was also in her countenance something even more stubbornly visible, even harder to disguise. It was a quality of hope, a stalwart confidence in the success of her mission to find and unite with her father. I found her pain devastating. But even more heartbreaking was that expression on her face, barely contained, of expectancy and hope. She exuded an exultant sense of anticipation.
I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect that Karen’s search for her father had an enchanted, if illusory, dimension to it. Earlier in 1988, the movie Coming to America had come out and become a commercial hit. Perhaps Karen fantasized about making a triumphant entry into her own mythic kingdom of Zamunda. Perhaps she pictured herself an unheralded princess sashaying in from the shadows, three decades later, her stunned subjects heady with adulation, joyful tears in her eyes, a baby tiara on her head.
Eddie Murphy’s movie aside, the late 1980s also teemed with a certain brand of “Africanist” scholars. These scholars turned skin color—pigmentation—into a (perhaps the) central paradigm of human experience, of history. Historical and literary texts had opened my eyes to the nature and tragic dimensions of Europe’s exploitation of Africa, including the horrific cost of the capture and enslavement of millions of Africans. I knew that Europe’s imperial adventurism and its depredation of Africa’s human and natural resources had left lasting scars on the African continent and people of African descent. But I was taken aback to hear or read scholars who purveyed a simple, uninflected idea of Europeans as irredeemably nefarious, Africans as unblemished lords, princes, and princesses, preternaturally disposed to nobility. At packed lecture halls, churches, and mosques, the most demagogical of these scholars cast Caucasians as congenitally ice hearted, profit obsessed, resentful of the sun-warmed exaltedness of their dark-skinned bret
hren. They theorized that Europeans, driven by envy and hunger for gruel, had battered Africa and upset its millennia of splendor.
That perfumed version of African history was very much in the air, indeed reigned, in some circles in late-1980s America. I had a hunch that Karen, in addition to curiosity about her father, also wanted to encounter this blissful Africa.
Karen’s story, her plight, reminded me of the biblical narrative of the prodigal son. With two obvious differences: the prodigal was a father who had wandered away from an expectant lover, turned his back on a baby bulging in the womb, and the child in Karen’s narrative was a daughter, not a son. And it was not the case that this prodigal father had come looking for his daughter. No, it was the daughter, as in the fable, prepared to cross seven hills and ford seven rivers. It was the daughter, ready to beseech or beguile mischievous or sinister monsters bent on blocking her path, to find her absentee father.
I immediately saw impediments to Karen’s looming wanderlust. I knew enough to realize it would not be easy for a voyager to land in Nigeria, a country of more than a hundred million people, and find her way, by asking questions, to the door of a man she had never met before. I knew Nigerians to be famously suspicious of strangers with loads of questions. Few Nigerians would open up readily to such a quester, especially one whose mission, once revealed, would raise social alarms and awaken cultural taboos.
I could tell—from his name—that the man who had fathered Karen was Igbo, like Nnaji and me. The Igbo frowned on the idea of leaving one’s child, the creature of one’s blood, in the “wild,” outside of one’s hearth. To be implicated in the abandonment of one’s progeny was in the Igbo imagination close to the gravest acts of betrayal. If Karen materialized in Nigeria, unheralded, and announced herself as an abandoned child, the cost of such revelation could prove quite dear—too dear, in fact—for her absentee father. The man would have built other lives, other relationships, other memories and histories apart from the pregnant woman he’d left behind in America, the daughter he’d never ever known much less held in his arms. The sudden, unanticipated appearance of the unknown daughter would unsettle any delicate balance the man had constructed, give a violent jolt to his world.
