Never Look an American in the Eye

by Okey Ndibe

  One day I encountered an elderly woman sitting on a wooden bench near the center of Amherst, a miniature poodle on her lap. The dog barked at every passerby. The woman, to distract the dog, held it in conversation as one might a precocious child. “Be a good girl,” the woman cooed. “Are you trying to be naughty now?”

  Americans’ obsession with dogs often became subjects of conversation among Africans. A Nigerian once complained that he found it impossible to eat bread at the home of an American who had invited him to dinner.

  “Before slicing the bread for dinner, the woman began to play with her dog. The dog licked her hands. And without washing hands, she grabbed the loaf of bread and began to slice it. I couldn’t bring myself to eat it,” he said, shaking his head and body in exaggerated horror.

  Another Nigerian, who had lived in America longer than I, told me, “If a dog and a human were drowning in a rushing flood, many Americans would first rescue the dog.” It struck me as funny, except that the man who made the conjecture assured me it was far from a joke.

  One day I met a couple walking their two dogs. They noticed that I took the trouble of getting as far away from the dogs as possible.

  The woman gave me a reassuring smile. “They’re the nicest dogs,” she told me, pausing with the dog at the end of her leash. It was as if she wanted me to venture close and play with the dog.

  I stopped but kept my distance. “I don’t doubt you,” I replied. “But I’m rather scared of dogs. Or, as I like to say, they’re scared of me.”

  The man, who had also stopped with his own dog, laughed. “These ones are really, really friendly.”

  I nodded but kept my eyes, warily, on the dogs. They regarded me with dim interest, their tongues lolling.

  The woman pulled one of the dogs to herself. Then she bent over and lovingly rubbed its head as the dog sat on its hind legs.

  “They’re man’s best friend,” the man said.

  “And woman’s as well,” the woman added, glancing up at me, silently inviting me to join the fun.

  I did not budge from my safe distance. Instead, I managed a nervous laugh. They and I went our separate ways.

  I had seen many dogs in Nigeria, but most of them were put to less sublime and more practical purposes. They were guard dogs, often caged in the daytime but unleashed at night to roam the compound, their growls and barks striking fear in would-be burglars. beware of dog was a familiar post on walls or the metal gates that partially hid the homes where Nigeria’s middle class or nouveau riche lived. On at least two occasions, such guard dogs had taken a nip at me as I visited their owners’ homes. By the time I arrived in America, I had never been tempted to see any dog as a friend, much less a best friend!

  One day, to my utter amazement, I overheard one woman tell another that she and her husband had decided not to have any children. “But we have two cute cats and a dog,” she said. Until then, I had never heard children and pets so brazenly mentioned in the same breath.

  Much of American television disillusioned me. I often gaped, incredulous, at talk-show guests unabashed about dragging their best friends or family to the most glaring public forum to confess to all manner of secrets, from sleeping with two best friends to lying about their sexual orientation. News telecasts seemed to revel in serving a gory menu: drive-by shootings, suicides, arsons, and violent robberies. I saw the ubiquitousness of sex. I saw that, despite the vaunted gains of feminism, a woman’s body was available to be used in selling everything, from cars to canned soup. I watched some celebrated comedians but found their routine jejune, often obsessed with profanity and scatology. Sometimes I wondered whether some Americans’ lives were so denuded of humor that they needed to hire third-rate jokers to titillate them.

  I found certain features of American speech enthralling. In Nigeria, many used English not so much to communicate as to impress, to perform their learning. Just like the characters in my early writing, Nigerians would say, “It’s incumbent upon you” instead of “It’s your job.” They treasure words like aver, conditionalities, expatiate. Coming from a culture where English usage was a form of spectacle, I found the American English endearing—in its aspiration for a democratic plainness, its openness to innovation, its jazzlike musicality, its sheer variety.

  But my take on American English was not all endearment. There was a debit side of Americans’ impact on the English language. I began to tell friends that Americans had humbled—perhaps “deflated” is a more apt description—certain words that, prior to my arrival in the United States, used to conjure grandness or evoke extraordinariness. I’d say how Americans, single-handedly, removed the greatness from the word “great.” And the awe from “awesome.”

  I still remember the first time I asked somebody “How are you?” and he said, “I’m great!” Was he as great as Alexander the Great? I wondered. Or was he great in the tradition of Shaka, the great Zulu warrior? Great as in an immemorial poem? As in Shakespeare’s opus? I was bemused to hear my American friends (or simply strangers whose conversations I eavesdropped on) describe pasta or pizza or ice cream or some wine as “great.” I heard an American describe a weekend party as “awesome.” I instantly felt sorry that I had missed out on a monumental social event!

  The day I became a citizen, several friends rang me to offer their congratulations. But the accent of delight was by no means unanimous. One friend said, in effect, that he hoped it was a good thing. Another asked how I felt inside. He was visibly disappointed when, rather than respond with monosyllabic exultation, I offered a series of hedges, parenthetical asides, and qualified happiness. Another Nigerian friend asked what I would do if Nigeria and the United States were to be at war. I would lend myself as a peacemaker, I said. He dismissed the answer, insisted that I must choose one side or the other.

  “I don’t operate by such bleak prognoses,” I said testily.

  When I called my mother on the phone and told her about being sworn in as an American, she paused. Her silence was pregnant, suggested a momentary struggle with incomprehension. Then, regaining her voice, she asked in an anxious vein, “Why?”

  I could imagine her picturing her son as having mutated into one of those big, bad characters she had seen in westerns: a cigar-chomping, mean-eyed, gun-quick, bad, bad cowboy. If I had turned into one of those, then I was no longer the son she knew and loved.

  Why, indeed? I had to ask myself. What did it mean, at bottom, that I had become, on that May morning, an American? Did becoming an American entail an obligation, as my mother no doubt feared, that I had “unbecome” what I had been before—an Igbo, a Nigerian, an African? What deep significance was I to attach to the oath’s prescription that I renounce and abjure all allegiance to my natal country? Did the acquisition of American citizenship transform me into a human slate wiped clean of a set of sentimental, cultural, and experiential data, the better to make room for a new, uniquely American imprimatur? Was American citizenship somewhat ersatz, nullifying Nigeria and all that it had meant to me? Did it call for amnesia about America’s past history of racial discrimination against Africans, its unresolved legacy of racism, or the turning of a blind eye to the nation’s sometimes exasperating foreign policy choices?

  I had wrestled with these questions in the months before I decided to apply for naturalization. I had even agonized over the weirdly intriguing word: “naturalization.” Did it mean that I was no longer Igbo? Or did it imply that my Nigerian identity had been rendered artificial, a mere conceit, inchoate?

  These questions lingered long after I took the oath of American citizenship. I consider myself an ever vigilant, fretful American. Some days I find much to be proud of in my second nation. Some days I bring a more censorious eye to America. However, with the passage of time, the questions that once troubled me have taken on a less anxious pitch. Perhaps I would never find full, adequate answers but I decided to get on with life as an American, as best
I could.

  Even so, one question was settled in my mind. In assuming American citizenship, I had not undertaken to vitiate who I was before. I had not consented to bleach my “Nigerianness,” whatever ambiguous meanings and stirrings that coinage might conjure. “Naturalization” has never demanded of me, in the everyday experience of being American, that I erase Nigeria in order to enter fully and wholesomely into the patrimony of my American identity.

  No, I have been able to cope quite well, even to thrive. I have come to see my US citizenship as far from an invitation to gain the kingdom of America by giving up filial ties to Nigeria. Rather than adopt a singular conception of citizenship, I have embraced a vision that sees it in terms of a fruitful marriage. As far as I am concerned, naturalization is not a loss-gain dialectic but a gain-gain proposition. In me, Nigeria and the United States don’t find a battleground. Instead, they find a new momentum, a harmonic hyphenation: I am proudly Nigerian American.

  Yet, this celebratory insight came only after the fact; it certainly would be dishonest to invoke it as justification for my decision to take up American citizenship. What, then, inspired me in that decision? Quite frankly, a messy mélange of factors.

  Part of my provisional answer is rooted in Nigeria’s historical experience. In 1995, when I applied for US citizenship, Nigeria was in the grips of a brutal military dictator, General Sani Abacha, a man whose operatives had killed several political dissenters, maimed many, and sent even more into exile. Some of the casualties were my colleagues or friends. I was deeply pained that, nearly forty years after independence from Britain, a cabal of ill-educated, morally inept military officers could hijack the affairs of my nation of birth and put my fellows and me at peril. From where I stood, then, the American promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” whatever its verifiable contradictions, seemed quite appealing.

  There was another—call it spiritual—dimension to my decision to become an American. As a student of African American history, I had come to see the nation called the United States as already mine in a sense. My claim to the country was more than established by the blood and sweat of the Africans who for several hundred years invested their lives in building a strong America—while receiving little material recompense, acknowledgment, or gratitude. It was not difficult at all to imagine myself as an American citizen. The perplexing question was, What kind of American?

  For there can be, it seemed to me then and seems to me now, many different kinds of Americans. For one, I decided that I would bring my African being fully into the lively equation of citizenship. Nobody who meets me or hears my stories or understands the values that animate me can mistake where I was born. Unlike the snake, I was not about to slough off my African skin in order to inhabit the American republic.

  I came to citizenship with few illusions. I know that, whatever the color of the passport I carry, my skin, as the indomitable James Baldwin reminded us, always gives me away. I know about the perils of race in America, but I know of something even more potent and powerful: the grammar of values passed on to me by my parents—and passed down by all the ancestors before them.

  Barack Obama as US president was not even a serious dream at the time of my naturalization. Jesse Jackson had run for the White House, and his exhortations had left many in the nation in tears, shaken to their roots. Yet, he had not moved enough men and women to that decisive mind-set and critical location where they could contemplate entrusting America in his hands. For me, then, the lot of many African Americans was still to be on the outside looking in. It was not an enviable position. Still, my reading of literature by African Americans, as well as my familiarity with their sustained critique of America’s contradictions, led me to believe that the marginalized often have a richer, more complex, and profoundly more humane imagination.

  These, I felt, were attributes that the United States sorely needed as, daily, its economic prosperity misled it into a false moral confidence and invincible certitude. A more intriguing way to view my citizenship was to spell out the challenge other Americans have, the partial responsibility they bear, to determine what value and meaning to assign to me as a brethren of theirs, a relative, even if a distant one. In fellow Americans’ eyes, how American was I deemed to be, with my African features, my stories, my accent and all? How much of my Nigerianness would they permit me to bring along with me, and what would they insist that I check at the door? What price, in other words, would they expect—require—me to pay in order to authenticate my American identity?

  An interesting answer came my way in an editor’s response to the manuscript of my first novel, Arrows of Rain. In a letter to my agent rejecting the novel, this editor, although informed in my bio that I was a naturalized US citizen, nevertheless wrote the following words: I must say I judge novels from outside the US with harder requirements because of Americans’ general difficulty in picking up books from other cultures.

  The editor’s letter veered, by default, into the internal debate occasioned by my becoming an American citizen. I was aware that, once in a while, American publishers would issue a novel set in Africa but written by a writer born and bred in Bruce Springsteen’s America. But I was born and reared in Nigeria, and my novel evinces a depth of intimacy with its characters, setting, and events. Apparently, then, this editor could not imagine me as quite truly American. For her, my oath of allegiance might as well be a nullity. My ritual of naturalization was in vain. The US passport I carry was a mere accoutrement, signifying little. Simply stated, I didn’t figure in her conception of Americans, a breed she maligned—unfairly, it must be stated—as culturally insular and aesthetically incestuous.

  There must have been some validity to the editor’s characterization of Americans. I don’t doubt that there are parochial readers in America, antipathetic to texts by authors whose names sound “alien,” content to subsist on the narrowest idea of literary nativism. Yet, there are many different kinds of Americans. There are many who are both adventurous and open-minded when it comes to sampling cultural products from all over the world. The problem did not lie in Americans’ literary taste, which is often broad and capacious. It lay in this one editor’s narrow, misconceived mind.

  What would it take to get that particular editor to see me, an American citizen who freely—indeed gleefully—reads books from other cultures, less as an aberrant phenomenon than an equally valid kind of American? Would she require that I renounce and abjure my cosmopolitan tastes in order to belong to her parched cultural landscape? Or would she be persuaded, perhaps, to adjust her vision and enlarge her idea of American citizenry?

  On my part, I still wonder if my first reactions to American life tended to ungracious harshness. I am still residually uncomfortable when I hear the words “personal space.” I still treasure friends dropping in on me without warning. I have adjusted a little bit to dogs, calibrated my relationship with those brave and complex citizens of the canine republic, but I still flinch when they are pegged as man’s and woman’s best friends.

  It would be sad if I left other American citizens with the impression that I disdain their choices. At any rate, it is far from my intention. To the extent that some of my views appear scathing, it is due, I like to think, to the way my tongue is fashioned: a sharp, sometimes-trenchant, style.

  In fact, that acidulous tendency is most fully displayed in my criticism of Nigeria, a heartbreak nation rich in promise and prospect but short on achievement.

  I frequently run into Americans who have one grouse or another against Nigerians. Often, they gripe about being inundated with letters or emails from Nigerian scam artists promising millions of dollars, on the condition that the recipient provide confidential information about his or her bank account. The misfortune that befalls those gullible or greedy enough to be duped by the scheme is better left to the imagination. Sometimes, I meet Americans whose complaint is a blanket one: about Nigerians’ haughty deportmen
t, grating loudness, or showiness.

  Blanket stigmas are themselves troubling, and simply unfair. Some Nigerians’ negative habits also trouble me but not as much as the visceral temptation to paint all Nigerians with the same brush: as drug smugglers or credit-card fraudsters or just plain vain. Some Americans don’t seem aware of the fact that, at about 170 million, Nigeria has the largest population in Africa—and the largest concentration of people of African descent in the world. And most of these Nigerians are decent, hardworking, and well educated. Many Americans also fail to realize that Nigeria is one of the largest producers of crude oil in the world and used to be far more important to America’s energy needs than was widely recognized.

  Sadly, Nigeria is also a country conceived in hope but nurtured—primarily by its gluttonous leaders and their global corporate partners in crime—into hopelessness. If Nigerian scams had made themselves felt around the world, it was largely because the country’s leaders had respected no bounds or limits in their egregious grasping, in their culture of self-aggrandizement and illicit enrichment. Between them, two of Nigeria’s former military dictators may have siphoned off as much as ten billion dollars from the country’s oil earnings. Most of that money was believed to be in foreign banks or assets.

  Despite the transfer of power to an elected government in 1999, Nigerians remained far from confident that such scandalous levels of corruption were in their past. These are painful conjectures and intuitions to have about one’s country of birth. They are painful and also—as far as I am concerned—unforgivable.