Never Look an American in the Eye

by Okey Ndibe

  At the professor’s behest, our class met at the Lord Jeffery Inn, a regal restaurant that had long been a fixture in the center of Amherst.

  There were twelve of us in Aczel’s fiction workshop. We were as varied a group of writers and readers as could be found in any gathering of twelve scribblers. Yet, as the semester progressed, we coalesced into a close-knit group of writers and readers.

  One reason for this was our shared passion. We were all deeply invested in the banquet of reading and writing—and, yes, eating and drinking, too. I’d suggest, however, that a far more important reason was Aczel himself. He was an understated but quietly magnetic presence, and he acted as the glue for our small creative community. There was an avuncular gravitas about the man. That gift enabled him to hold our idiosyncrasies in check and beseeched us to coalesce into a close-knit, cohesive tribe, a republic forged by letters.

  I’d hazard that the ambience of the Lord Jeffery shaped the dynamics of the workshop. At each weekly workshop session, Aczel picked up the bill for our drinks: beer, wine, spirits, juice, and soda. Sometimes, his generosity on an expansive scale, he also paid for hors d’oeuvres. We’d eat and drink as we responded to our peers’ short stories or excerpts from novels or grappled with some question of craft or broad issue of literary practice that Aczel would provoke.

  The experience of being in Aczel’s workshop set my conviction that few other sensations could trigger imaginative flights and dispose the mind to creative contemplation better than the sight and fragrance of food—and the seductive power of beverage on the tongue.

  Aczel was in physique rather short and smallish, but he managed to project a patrician carriage. His face suggested erudition and aristocratic bearing, the kind of features that would be a portrait artist’s delight. It was stamped by time, so that he looked older than his seventy years. Yet, time did not mar as much as it decorated him. An artist’s impressionist rendition of his face would, most likely, include a pipe hanging from the lips, a wisp of smoke curved upward, slightly obscuring sharp, lively eyes, narrowed.

  By the time I met him in 1993, Aczel, at seventy-one, was a year away from his death on April 18, 1994. He was hunched over, often walked with a cane, his gait slow. Sometimes he seemed lost in his long, dark winter coat. Yet, there was nothing deathly about his appearance or manners. He had a commanding presence, one that filled any space he entered.

  He spoke an urbane English, in a deliberate, cultivated vein. His voice, clear and resonant, belied his age—or, more, his looks. And there was a faintly Oxonian quality to his enunciation, his speech shaped, doubtless, by the years he spent in the UK after breaking with the Communist rulers of his native Hungary in the late 1950s.

  At our workshops, he spoke sparingly, as if words were the most dear of commodities, the overuse of which he considered unconscionable. Sometimes he offered broad comments on the story or novel excerpt we were critiquing. Sometimes he zeroed in on some technical detail. Sometimes he asked a question or a series of questions, nudging us to think about some aspect of a work. A man of prodigious intellect, he often mentioned some familiar or remote author or unknown or known text that a work under critique recalled for him.

  His was the second workshop I ever took as an MFA student. I was still at the stage when I was in awe of my professors and tried to hang on to every word that came from their lips. Aczel happened to be a parsimonious speaker. For me, then, whatever he had to say seemed to have some weight to it, highly precious.

  I became curious about him. I began to dig up bits and pieces about him. What I found must have been a concatenation of facts and fiction. It nevertheless transformed the man, in my eyes, into a legend. The crux of my findings was this: once upon a time, the man had been a towering figure in the literary circles of Communist Hungary. He’d won the highest state-sponsored accolades. In the end, he had become despondent about the Hungarian Communist regime, particularly the predations of its apparatchiks whose fealty was to their Soviet masters. He’d risked life and limb for a while as a dissident but ultimately fled to London. In the UK, he had found both love and a new space that conduced to the free roam of his imaginative spirit. Then, fed up with an intellectual atmosphere in Europe that sometimes flirted with or romanticized communism, he had made another flight, this time across the waters to the United States.

  A year or two before I became his student, Aczel had published what proved to be his last novel, The Hunt. The work had appeared after a hiatus of close to a decade since the writer’s previous novel, Illuminations.

  I doubt that any of us in Aczel’s workshop had read his books. Yet, I took it on faith that I was in the presence of a writer of immense consequence. In fact, my decision not to read his last book felt like a negative act of homage. It was a ploy to conserve my intuitive sense of the man’s fame and greatness, lest the familiarity with the work leave me disappointed, disillusioned.

  Aczel’s act of defiance, his renunciation of political orthodoxy, struck a chord with me. As a fledgling MFA student, I wanted to get his response to my writing—the seed that became my first novel, Arrows of Rain. Close to the end of the first round of workshops, I offered two consecutive chapters of Arrows for a critique session.

  I arrived at the Lord Jeffery in a mood split between mild excitement and anxiety. Before class started, I took healthy gulps of my Guinness draft to brace myself. Then, as was the custom, Aczel asked me to read a few paragraphs from my work. My classmates began to respond to it. Most of them liked it, others made suggestions for revisions, and one or two were no fans. Many of the comments bordered on my use of dialogue, too scripted and implausible. It was a typical day at the workshop. Only there was something awfully odd: Aczel did not utter a word. His silence left me unnerved.

  Class ended, and I fully intended to make a swift escape, confused as hell.

  “Okey,” Aczel called out. His stentorian voice stopped me in my tracks. “I’d like you to come see me in my office.”

  “Okay,” I managed, a lump caught in my throat.

  A day or two later, I mustered the courage to knock on his door at Bartlett Hall.

  “Come in,” he beckoned.

  His head was down when I walked in. He was reading something, the bridge of his glasses at the very tip of his nose. Without much raising his head, he lifted his eyes and gave me a quick wash of a look. Then, raising a hand, he gestured to a chair. I sat down at the very edge of the seat. He read for another two or three minutes, then scribbled a note in longhand. Finally, he looked up at me, removed his glasses, and regarded me with piercing eyes.

  “Do you know why I asked you to come see me?”

  I knew: my writing had thoroughly disappointed him. But I wasn’t going to confess it. I wasn’t about to compound my humiliation. So I said, “No.”

  “Well,” he said, “of the stories we’ve looked at so far in class, yours strikes me as having a great potential to become a book. I want you to promise me you’ll continue working on it until it becomes a book.”

  He regarded me with intense, curious eyes. I smiled awkwardly, still stressed out from thinking the worst.

  “Do you promise?” he asked in a raised voice, a strident judge asking a parolee if he promised to resist the lure of recidivism.

  “I do,” I said.

  “Of course you do! Otherwise I’d kick your ass!”

  He roared with laughter. I laughed, too, out of relief. But something else had helped trigger my amusement. For I pictured the committee of at least two persons that it would take to accomplish an ass kicking by the writer. One person would have the task of lowering me close to the ground, the other the job of raising Aczel’s leg to kick said ass, and then to return the leg to its original position.

  A Brand-New American

  On May 10, 1996, in a cavernous hall at the US District Court in Hartford, Connecticut, in the presence of a judge and a flag of the United
States of America, I raised my right hand and, with solemnity, declared on oath my renunciation and abjuration of “all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen,” and other words along the same lines, and, when I ended with the phrase “So help me God,” the judge smiled expansively and welcomed me—and many other oath takers—as brand-new citizens of the American republic.

  The event was deeply moving, in part because it was, for me, colored by paradox, some pain, even ambiguity. The moment’s emotional fuel enabled me to travel back in memory to the thoughts and sensations that marked my early encounter with America.

  Taking the oath, I recalled the day of my arrival in America, lugging one suitcase and loads of advice—remarkably from friends and relatives who knew little or nothing at all about America.

  I had come to find it amusing that, thanks to the westerns that Hollywood long ago exported to the rest of the world, my relatives, like many other Nigerians, were confident that they knew what America was all about. And their dominant image of America was of mean streets where swashbucklers held sway, their guns drawn, ready to wreak havoc at the slightest provocation—or none at all. As far as some relatives of mine were concerned, America was some sort of concrete jungle, where the tough and mighty reigned, and arguments were settled—decisively won—by the man able to pull the faster bam-bam.

  This image was not any more ludicrous than some Americans’ impressions of Africa, including that example of a graduate student who believed my yarn about crocodiles ferrying Africans across the Atlantic to the shores of North America!

  In 1996, I had lived eight years in America. I had come to forgive America all its sins against me—especially that chilly reception the day I first arrived, the blast of evil cold that left my jaws chattering, and that near arrest for bank robbery that had so terrified me. Better still: I had purged myself of the notion of being wronged—maliciously, even—by America.

  Yet, those memories of injustice marked—in some ways marred

  —the beginning of my American rite of passage. Even so, neither America nor I was in a haste to demand a divorce. Instead, the romance blossomed, more strengthened than wrecked by its vicissitudes. The culmination came in 1996, in my adoption of American citizenship.

  From the outset, inevitably, a sense of contrast had framed my American experiences. I had viewed America through my African sensibility; through it, I sifted, weighed, and evaluated the multitudinous impulses that were a part of my everyday experience in the United States. Looking back at any point, I could see that much that was painful, hilarious, humdrum, or illumining had happened between the day I came to America and the day I took up American citizenship.

  In Nigeria, I was used to my apartment being invaded at will by friends. They would stay as long as they wished, sometimes several days at a time, and help themselves to what food I had as well as drinks. By contrast, my American friends made sure to phone before they called at my apartment. Sometimes they would telephone several days before.

  Such American drama went apace. Everywhere I turned, America—Americans—intrigued me. I was amazed that people here would walk past one another without exchanging a word, rather like dumbstruck waifs. Back in Nigeria, none but the notoriously evil or socially maladjusted lacked for friends. I had come from a place where people shake hands a lot, even compulsively, sometimes with near strangers. Indeed, the Nigerian world I had been conversant with was one in which people lived and had their being, for the most part, in a communal space.

  In America, I learned of something called personal space and of Americans’ unshakable commitment to its preservation. It meant, among other things, that you did not intrude on your fellows without first obtaining their permission, without hatching out the terms of the intrusion.

  For a while, I felt greatly astonished about personal space. I saw the idea as a plague, spelling the very doom of what it means to be human. Seen from the angle of my cultural background and experience, the idea of a zealously claimed personal space seemed pregnant with peril. It signaled isolation, disconnection, pain, and alienation.

  No, my American friends assured me, personal space was a wonderful zone to inhabit. They explained it as an inviolable vantage point, sometimes as a bubble from which one could “get in tune” with oneself. It was all gobbledygook to me. The idea of getting in tune with oneself was akin to holding oneself in open conversation. Where I was born, such a quirk was associated with the insane.

  I set out to wage a personal battle against personal space.

  That battle was dramatized by an encounter with Kitty Axelson, one of my first American friends, our friendship clicking soon after she showed up one morning at my door and asked if I would consider writing for the Valley Advocate. Some weekends, she’d ask me to take part in a softball game she and her circle of friends and family played. She invited me to my first Thanksgiving dinner where I met even more of her friends and family. A gregarious person, I was always greedy for friends. Kitty was not just a friend; she also gave me the gift of numerous other friends.

  Even though I esteemed her as a dear friend, Kitty had the (American) habit of ringing me to ask if she and her boyfriend could drop in at my apartment. Sometimes, she would give me as much as a three-day notice.

  “You don’t have to ask, Kitty,” I would explain at each turn. “You and Hank are my friends. You should come to my door anytime you wish.”

  “But that would be rude,” she’d insist.

  “No. What’s rude, actually, is to ask a friend’s permission to visit him.”

  “But you may be in the middle of something,” she’d persist.

  “That’s fine. If that’s the case, you can exchange quick greetings and leave. And return at a later time.”

  She never could bring herself to go by my stipulation. One day, I decided to offer an emphatic illustration in how friends related. Without serving prior warning, I drove up to the home in the leafy, hilly woods of Leverett, Massachusetts. I rang their doorbell.

  Kitty came to the door and seemed to do a double take. I held a steady smile, and she presently found her voice.

  “Hi, Okey,” she said, doing her best to work up a measure of warmth. She seemed to me painfully perplexed. “What a surprise. Come on in.”

  We sat in their kitchen that opened out to a grassy incline that led to a jagged, winding valley. Finally she asked, “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes,” I assured her. “This is how we do it in Nigeria. We just show up.”

  “Interesting,” she said. But she spelled out that she still preferred to be given notice before a guest, even one who was a friend, showed up.

  I left a bit dismayed but also educated. After the surprise visit to Kitty Axelson, I realized that I would have little chance of converting her—or other Americans—to conform to my cultural norms. I gave the matter much thought. Slowly, I came to concede that my ways were not better—they were, simply, different.

  How I must have tried some of my American friends’ patience. For my part, I found some Americans and their ways odd, bewildering, and, often, hilarious.

  Almost every summer, my parents-in-law would visit from Nigeria and spend two or three months with my family and me in West Hartford, Connecticut. One day, a classmate in a graduate course at the University of Massachusetts Amherst asked how my weekend went.

  “I drove my parents-in-law to JFK. They traveled back to Nigeria after visiting us for two and a half months.”

  Her jaw dropped, and she regarded me with a look that suggested I had been subjected to cruel and unusual punishment.

  “Two and a half months with your in-laws?” she asked. “How could you stand it?”

  “It was no problem,” I explained. “I actually felt sad that they left. To have them around is like hosting my own parents.”

 
“You like your parents that much?” she asked.

  I burst out in loud laughter, alone; she had not tried to be funny.

  Americans’ relationship with their dogs and other pets both impressed me and tickled me silly. For a while, I wondered why there was such a fetish around pets, dogs above all. I don’t believe I have figured it all out, but my observations have shaped my view of life in America. In a society where people are obsessed with personal space, dogs have come to serve as welcome, neo-human mediators of loneliness and solitude. In the late 1990s, for example, I became friends with Richie and Helen Salomon, who lived in my neighborhood in West Hartford, Connecticut. They were siblings, Richie older by two years, both of them more than eighty years old. Neither sibling ever married or had a child. For fifty-some years, they had lived together. In the time I knew them, their only regular companion was a dog they named, simply, Doggie. They doted on the dog. They talked about the dog’s idiosyncrasies with the same indulgent tone parents might use in discussing a child.

  Without Doggie, Richie and Helen’s lives would have had no center, little salt, none of that healthy, vitalizing dose of disturbance that those whose lives are rich and fulfilling know, rue sometimes, but need. Remove Doggie and the elderly siblings’ experience would have had little color to it, little depth. They would have had nothing, beyond themselves, to activate and engage that most human of faculties: an ability for empathetic feeling, a desire to take care of somebody, something other than the self, the drive for a cause. They needed to expend that nervous energy to find food for Doggie, to walk Doggie, to pick up after Doggie, to fret when Doggie seemed down, to fuss when, suddenly, Doggie appeared uninterested in a favorite treat, to forage for the veterinarian’s telephone number.

  “Do you believe in heaven?” Richie asked me one day. When I told him that I did, he said, “I don’t want to go there unless Doggie comes along.”

  I got it.

  In fact, just from watching people walk their dogs, I developed a great admiration for Americans’ sense of duty and commitment. Being squeamish about feces, I have marveled at those brave girls and boys, women and men, who daily walk their dogs, a leash in one hand, a plastic bag in the other. Often, the bag droops with the weight of poop dropped by the dog and dutifully harvested by its walker. American dogs deserve credit for bringing people together, serving as veritable currency for social interactions. It’s rare, in my experience, to see two strangers in the United States pause to hold each other in conversation. Yet, numerous times I have seen two or more strangers with dogs stop and exchange notes, talking excitedly, lovingly, about their pets’ quirks.