He held Ginger Ale’s trophy between his fingers and rolled it back and forth. He tried to think of a way to tell his dad the reason why he wanted to become an airline pilot, but just saying the words “airline pilot” out loud had already made the dream seem ridiculous. His father was not, anyway, interested in hearing what he had to say. He cast a long and dark shadow. If Oba sometimes behaved like a bully, if he drank too much, if he was sometimes mean to Bennet’s mom, well, everyone forgave him. What he’d been through. All he’d been through! What he’d made of himself. What he’d done for everyone! He instilled God in his children, a backbone of Catholicism from which none of them would ever stray, and he instilled in them the value of education that was somehow light-years beyond most other kids in the village. The boys, the girls, everyone would get the best education money could buy and go as far as they wanted, even if it meant traveling abroad for school, which many of them did.
“So I should be an engineer?” Bennet said to his father that day. Perhaps he should choose his father’s line of work? None of the others had done so. All of the Omalu children would go on to succeed mightily in their professions. Theodore, the oldest, studied industrial mathematics; he would become partner in a land reclamation company in Nigeria and live part-time in the United States. Winny, the second oldest, would become a nurse practitioner and live in London. Uche, the next, would become a physician and a professor of pediatrics in Nigeria and live part-time in the United States. Ikem studied economics and would go on to own a chemical marketing company in Nigeria. Chizoba studied marketing and would go on to own a farm. Mie-Mie, the baby, the genius, would become a lawyer, with a PhD in international energy law, and would become general counsel of a multinational petroleum company in Nigeria. All of them would marry and produce children, and that fact alone would translate to an even higher standing in the village for Oba.
Bennet hoped his father wouldn’t say yes to engineering that Sunday after brunch, because he imagined it a very boring career. Certainly nothing compared to flying jumbo jets around the world and all that went with that life. Bennet’s father poured himself another glass of cognac and Bennet sat on his hands and he tried to think about how to go another round on this pilot idea. Perhaps he could present an argument? No one in even his distant family had chosen such a career. Bennet had never been on a plane ride. He was not, now that he thought about it, even a tiny bit interested in aviation. That wasn’t what the dream was about at all. If it was about fleeing Nigeria and not just about women in condos, he was not aware of it then. Flying away from this broken country: Coup after countercoup in the wake of a war no one dared talk about. A government so corrupt nothing worked. Water mysteriously shutting off. Electricity on one hour, then off the next. If you wanted to make sure the lights would stay on for a funeral or a wedding or some important occasion you had to bribe some shady government man who would make it happen. Random checkpoints on roads, soldiers demanding cash.
“It would be exciting to be an airline pilot,” Bennet said.
“Why do you keep saying such foolish things?” his father said.
There was no way he could admit to his father all that the dream represented. He did not know how to talk to his father about these matters. He certainly did not know how to talk to him about girls and the thunder awakening inside him. He still had not had a girlfriend, still longed to be touched and to be held. He did talk to Christy one time when she dropped her pencil. He picked it up and handed it to her and said, “Here is your pencil.”
“You will die in a plane crash,” Bennet’s mother added.
Bennet reached for the comfort of his bottle caps. Fanta and Ginger Ale and the trophy. Then he slammed the drawer shut. He was fifteen years old, too old for games.
Bennet’s father reminded him of the Catholic doctrine that said life was about serving the Lord and the way you did that was by serving your fellow man. How would he choose to serve? “What matters is how much you make yourself an instrument of God’s peace, love, and joy,” he said. “And how much difference you have made in the lives of people around you.”
“Yes, Daddy,” Bennet said. “Of course, Daddy.” He thought of what his father had done for people as an engineer, the erosion control and the paved roads and the efforts to restore postwar Enugwu-Ukwu. “Then I should become an engineer?” he said.
“Engineers work in dirt,” his mother said. “My Bennet cannot handle dirt.”
Bennet let out a sigh of relief; engineering sounded so dreadful. His father held the brandy to his lips and it seemed he had known the answer all along, and mostly at this point Bennet just wanted to get it over with, to find out what his future held.
“The smartest boy in a family studies medicine,” his father said, as if this were some sort of biblical law, which Bennet knew it was not. “You will become a doctor.”
“Ka anyï kpe ekpere,” his father said. Let us pray.
CHAPTER 3
SPIRAL
Theodore, my oldest brother, accompanied me to medical school, since that was my first time ever stepping so far out into the world on my own. It was September 1984 and I had just turned sixteen years old. I was not prepared for what I saw.
The University of Nigeria’s Enugu campus was fifty miles and a lifetime away from the family compound in Enugwu-Ukwu. Here was eastern Nigeria’s fourth-largest city, nearly a million people pushing and laughing, buses, traffic, sirens blaring, power lines zigzagging the sky. During the war, Enugu had been declared the capital of the short-lived Republic of Biafra; for this reason the city was known as “the capital of Igboland.” Perhaps Bennet should have felt welcomed in a community of people who shared his family’s history. Here was the generation of Biafra babies who hadn’t starved, a generation of refugees all grown up and preparing to take on the world. Perhaps he should have felt comfortable.
He did not feel comfortable.
His brother Theodore was big, like Oba, and he had that same deep, booming voice, and in those first few days Bennet marched obediently in his shadow and paid attention. Theodore got Bennet’s new life organized, textbooks, keys, a dining card; he would bark orders at strangers, wave his hand, shout, “Go!” He threw money at people, handed out naira as if they were edicts. Just flashing those bills got you service. Theodore made urban life and manhood look so easy.
“You sure you understand everything?” Theodore said, after days of manhood lessons in Enugu. He was standing outside the dormitory building, and he had his luggage by his feet, and Bennet was holding a campus map.
“Thank you, yes,” Bennet said. “Thank you for everything, Theodore.” It was a hot morning and Bennet was wearing starched chino trousers and a starched white shirt, just like his secondary school uniform. Was this what a medical school student should wear? He had a feeling it wasn’t. He felt short. It didn’t help that he had a round face like a bowling ball. He looked like a ten-year-old boy and he knew it.
“Now you go make Daddy proud,” Theodore said, handing Bennet a thick roll of naira for his own use, a starter pack, and patting him on the shoulder.
“Okay, Theodore. Okay, bye-bye.” Bennet waved as the taxi scooped his brother up and slowly disappeared from view. “Bye-bye.” He stuffed the money into his pocket. He looked at the campus map and took a few steps, then turned the map this way and that. A putter and a roar came from behind him, a motorcycle whizzing, nearly clipping him, and then another right behind. Girls on motorcycles, bare feet, bright skirts. They sounded like monsters growling, so loud and scary, this whole city, so loud and scary. Urban life, like manhood, was a confounding, impenetrable adventure. He was not ready. He was not even a tiny bit ready. He folded his map and went back into the dormitory and stayed there, locked himself away, locked away the real Bennet—whoever that was—and came out pretending.
—
He was a boy on the inside, suffering, choking, and yet to the outside world he was a fun guy, quirky, happy-go-lucky. He made friends easily, went to soc
cer games and parties and church. He was the smiley-face kid with the super-neat attire and the cleanest lab coat—starched, everything starched. He was the neurotically organized guy with the spotless room who swayed and belted out Lionel Richie songs while he shaved. He was that guy with the strange cackle-laugh, a rhythmic ack-ack-ack that you might expect out of a cartoon hyena. When he made that noise he would hold his shoulders up, and sometimes actually slap his knee. Ack-ack-ack!
“Bennet is here!” people would say, at bars or coffee shops, hearing that distinctive sound. He had a certain charm, and women were drawn to him. But not in the way he wanted them to be drawn to him. He wanted so much more. He learned to cook to get women to like him. He bought fancy candleholders and candles and little twinkle lights to hang. He bought a white tablecloth made of linen and matching napkins. He practiced before he asked a woman over, practiced stewing the tomatoes and searing the steak and lighting the candles. Then he started asking women over, one by one. They would come because it was so adorable. A teenage kid in starched chinos staging candlelight dinners! Oh, Bennet, you are so adorable!
He didn’t want to be adorable. He wanted to be a man with a woman on a date. He wanted to throw naira at people and bark orders. He found himself falling far short of these basic matters of adulthood and in his mind he called himself a failure, a loser, a pathetic excuse for a man.
Depression starts like a membrane, a shield you can’t pierce, the internal world so vivid and nagging, the external world right there, right in front of you. He felt angry at the world for being so difficult to enter. He felt angry at manhood for eluding him. He did not want to be a doctor, he did not belong in this stupid town. He did not want to go to medical school, he wanted to be a pilot, a beautiful girlfriend in each city with whom I could spend blissful nights in condominiums. His dad had stolen his dream from him; he would never forgive him for that.
Adolescence is by definition a state of nonbelonging. You’re supposed to be fearful. You’re supposed to be angry at your parents. So maybe this would pass.
It did not pass.
The problem, he believed, was his dad, was Enugu, was Nigeria, was outside him. He was a sixteen-year-old boy growing angrier by the day.
—
I had led a very shielded and protected life. I was not prepared. I had a pristine sense of idealism in my naive and virginal mind.
In medical school he encountered political strife. That was a remarkably new concept. As a child growing up in postwar Nigeria, he understood the world in terms of good guys and bad guys. Persecuted people over here, and soldiers who had tried to kill them and starve them over there. You fit into one category or another.
But now he was in the real world and it turned out the situation was considerably more complicated. A military coup had just swept away the reelected president of Nigeria, ending civilian rule. The military was in power. Bennet saw classmates on the streets chanting in protest. The televisions in the med school cafeteria showed chaos and mobs fighting, and Bennet sat alone and watched and tried to understand the complexities and the nuances.
There was one emerging leader who seemed like the most obvious person to calm the chaos, to fix all of Nigeria’s problems—and, by proxy, Bennet’s own. Moshood Abiola—they called him M.K.O. Abiola. He was always on the TV in the cafeteria making speeches. He was a philanthropist and activist who had worked his way out of poverty, and his story symbolized the aspirations of so many downtrodden Nigerians. “On the face of every Nigerian today, there are bold expressions of despondency and disillusionment,” Abiola said on the TV, with the smooth intensity that made you feel he was speaking just to you. “I know that together we can replace cynicism with confidence; we can replace disillusionment with optimism; we can replace apathy with mass involvement.”
Yes! Bennet thought. Yes! This is what Nigeria needs! He was echoing his classmates. He was getting swept up in the rhetoric of a political party, the first one ever pitched to him, and he adopted it wholeheartedly.
“I want your support to banish the thinking that our beloved country cannot know real development in our lifetime….Our people today are united by one cry, the cry for a new source of hope.”
Yes!
It seemed so obvious. There was talk of Abiola rising up and becoming president one day. Bennet listened to the speeches and wondered why all of Nigeria didn’t just stop with the chaos and start doing whatever this man said. Nigeria was a mess and here was a guy who said he could fix it, so why didn’t everybody just hand over the reins to him? He did not understand the nuances. He had no patience for disagreement or argument. What he saw on TV and on the streets was a broken country and it exhausted him and fueled his depression.
I began to notice deficiencies in the society I grew up in. My youthful idealism was strongly inconsistent with what I was observing. People accepted the status quo and somewhat embraced and encouraged mediocrity as a way of life. It really got me very upset and impatient. I began to think that I did not belong to this society, with these people, with this system. I became more unsettled and angry.
You could flip the channels on the cafeteria TV, and when Bennet did that he saw worlds that were so much calmer, cleaner, happier. Satellite television was new to Nigeria, and the channels were windows into other cultures, places he had read about in books, but now here they were live, far more enticing worlds than the mishmash streets of Enugu, or the mobs fighting in Abuja on the Nigerian news.
It was the Reagan era, and on the TV, Bennet saw that life in America was beautiful. Life in America was about dancing in cosmopolitan nightclubs, playing high-tech videogames, and wearing fashionable clothing with shoulder pads. The streets in America were paved and manicured. Reagan spoke eloquently and exuded a clean charm. In Brat Pack movies Bennet saw that kids his same age were capable of achieving perfection and happiness. Nothing like that was happening in Nigeria. Also from America came MTV. Bennet watched Michael Jackson singing “Thriller” and Whitney Houston singing “Saving All My Love for You,” and he became mesmerized by their performances. Every note: perfect. Every movement: perfect. Every outfit and every hair on their heads: perfect. Why couldn’t people in Nigeria be perfect like Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston?
Watching those videos, I had an awakening intuition. I thought I should strive to be perfect in whatever I do. If every person in my country would be perfect in whatever they did, one person at a time, in whatever calling, my society and my country would be like the USA. In that moment it seemed like a good and viable plan. I was not sophisticated in my thinking. My mind was a child’s mind.
Later that night after watching the music videos, while lying in bed, I realized that most other people in my country were not thinking like I did. Very many people did not strive for perfection. This was one more reason to become angry at the world around me. The lackadaisical way we led our lives. Especially the government, the filthy corruption that permeated every fabric of our society, from the housekeeper to the chancellor of the university.
Extreme corruption steals our dignity from us as human beings and degrades us to the level of animals, and not the children of God that we rightfully are.
—
Around the world, young men from oppressed societies see rich, shiny America on TV and grow angry and become easily seduced by fellow angry men. They stew and lash out. What saved Bennet from lashing out was an insight, the stark, frank realization that his problem was only incidentally Nigeria, his dad, Enugu, women. His problem started from the inside, not the outside. Depression is like a virus festering in your mind, and the discovery of it can cripple before it cures.
By the time I was eighteen, in my third year of medical school, I could not wake up in the mornings. I just wanted to be left alone in my dark room. One Sunday after mass I went and had lunch in the cafeteria, then walked back to my room. I just could not do anything. I grabbed my medical biochemistry book to go to a reading room somewhere, and while I was walking up the hil
l I realized that I simply did not have any energy to walk. I stopped and sat on a rock by the roadside and just gazed into the air. I was extremely tired. I just could not move on. I spent hours sitting on this rock. While sitting on this rock, I decided to go to my sister Uche and tell her about the insight I was having. Something was wrong inside me, very very wrong.
Uche had attended the same medical school as Bennet; she was now doing her residency at the Enugu university hospital and she had an apartment across town.
Bennet went to her and told her what was happening to him. He felt so terrible for bothering her. He thought he saw embarrassment on her face. In Nigeria, in those days, people did not acknowledge psychiatric illness, or any such disgraceful matters. And now here was her little brother suffering from something terrible in his head.
Uche did not judge him. She listened and showed compassion and love. She scooped Bennet up, found him a doctor. The doctor diagnosed him with developmental crisis in an adolescent and prescribed group therapy. Bennet went to a few sessions. The people sat in circles and the doctor instructed them to breathe and stretch. A guy next to him was unshaven and muttering, a girl across the room was rocking and weeping. These people scared him and he felt he did not belong and he did not go back. He decided to run away instead. He hopped on a bus, went to an uncle’s house, then another relative’s, and then another’s. He told them, “Hello!” and, “Hi! I’m on vacation!” and he kept running.
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