Truth Doesn't Have a Side

by Bennet Omalu

  A refugee hospital is nothing like a typical American hospital. Few doctors work there, and those who do have to do everything. For me, this meant that the doctor who cared for my mother through her labor was the same doctor who wrapped my father’s wounds with bandages, Dr. Ifeakandu. Coincidentally, the doctor’s name is an Igbo word that means “life is the greatest gift of all.” On the week of my birth, the full drama of life played out. In one room, my father lay dying, moribund; in the next, I lay crying, having just entered the world. Outside, the air-raid sirens blared, bombs exploded, and a war went on.

  But here is the real miracle. A few days after he was hit with shrapnel, my father turned a corner and began to recover. The doctor and staff had told my mother to prepare for his death. Instead he survived and went on to a complete recovery.

  When I was several weeks old, my father was finally well enough to sit up and see me. They carried me into his room and placed me in his arms. My father looked at me and said, “Your name will be Bennet, from the French word benoit—to bless. You, my son, are a blessing to me and will be a blessing.” My parents also gave me the middle name Ifeakandu, after the doctor who took care of my father, my mother, and me. My last name, Omalu, is actually a shortened version of our full family name, Onyemalukwube, which means “If you know, come forth and speak.” This means my full name is “A blessing . . . Life is the greatest gift of all . . . If you know, come forth and speak.” My parents bestowed this name upon me, but I believe it was God who chose it. Even though no one could have known it on the day my father held me and named me, my name set the course for my entire life and has defined the man whom God created me to be.

  • • • •

  The war ended when I was two years old. After three years of war, the Igbo people surrendered and Biafra was no more. Between two and four million Igbos died in the war. Once the war ended, the country of Nigeria tried to act like it had never happened. The name Biafra was erased from the history books, and Nigeria came back together as one. No one complained, because most people wanted to put the scars and pain of the war behind them.

  To speed the recovery process, the Nigerian government gave £20, or about $48, to every Biafran family that had a bank account before the war. (Because Nigeria had been an English colony, its monetary system was based on the British model until 1973.) We were supposed to start over with this money. Not mentioned was the fact that any money anyone had in the bank prior to the war was now the property of the government, even if it totaled £100,000. All of our family’s savings were wiped out, as were the savings of all the Igbo people. We were now the poorest people in a poor country, labeled losers forever. But at least our family had the £20 with which to start over.

  The Nigerian government rehired my father, although in a diminished position. He gladly took the job. Like everyone else in our country, he wanted to move on from the war and rebuild a life for his family. But life was now different, even at work. All the people my father had once supervised were now his superiors. He lost his years of service and other benefits he’d accumulated over the years. However, he felt blessed just to have a job. He and my mother tried to just get on with life. They had another child, my sister Mirian, whose Igbo name, Ekenedilichukwu, means “To God be all the glory and thanks.”

  Although I have no memory of the war or the bombings or the food shortages, the experience changed my life forever. I suffered some war-related malnutrition during my first two years of life. My mother told me that I did not taste meat or fresh produce until after the war was over. When I had my first taste of meat, I spat it out with disgust. I’ve since made up for that. My body never caught up to where I should have been in terms of growth. I was always the smallest of all the children in my family, standing at five feet seven inches tall as an adult. Even my baby sister passed me sizewise before I was even ten years old.

  My small stature bothered me very much. It didn’t help that my brothers and sisters made fun of me, as brothers and sisters will always do. “Bennet is lazy,” they said because I didn’t like manual labor. “Bennet is weak,” they said because I was so small. “Bennet never works; he just wants to study his books and play his games. What is wrong with you?” they said. They laughed at me all the time.

  One afternoon, I’d had enough. My mother stood in the kitchen dishing out lunch for me and my brothers and sisters. As always, I was right there with her. Growing up, I never left my mother’s side. On this day, I looked up at her and asked a question that had bothered me for some time. “Mommy,” as I fondly called her, “why am I the shortest in the family?” By this time, my little sister Mirian was nearly as tall as me.

  My mother quietly set down the dishing spoon. She bent down and looked me right in the eyes. “Bene,” she called me, as everyone in the family did, “God is the One who makes you tall or short. Your height is beyond your control. But it is within your control as to what you choose to make of yourself. You can become the tallest man in the world in whatever you choose to do with your life.” She paused for a moment, still looking directly into my eyes. Then she asked, “Do you understand what I just told you?”

  “Yes, Mommy,” I said.

  My mother continued looking into my eyes. I could see the loving pain in her eyes. “Bene, do not worry that God made you short because if you work hard, you can become anything you wish, even the tallest man in the world in whatever you choose to do. Do you understand what I am telling you?” she asked a second time.

  “Yes, Mommy, I understand,” I said.

  My mother stood up and went back to working on our lunch. I walked over to the cabinet and grabbed the dishes to set the table, just like I did for every meal. Now I did not feel so small. I believed my mother. Right then, I made up my mind that my physical size did not matter. I truly believed I could become anything I wanted to if I was willing to work hard enough to achieve it.

  This new conviction did not bring about an immediate change in my behavior, however. I wasn’t very motivated in school. Not only was I the smallest one in my class, but I was also the youngest. I started school when I was only three. My parents arranged for me to go to school with my brother Chizoba, not because I showed great academic ability, but because Chizoba was my first and greatest playmate. When he left for school, I cried uncontrollably until he returned home. Nothing my mother did could calm me down. Finally, she and my father asked the school principal if I could tag along to school for just a few days to help me get over my separation anxiety. Honestly, they didn’t think I would stay more than a day or two. At the end of the week of my attending class, the principal had a question for my parents: “Bennet is outperforming many of the children in the class. How would you feel about letting him continue on in school?”

  My parents were surprised by the request, but they didn’t hesitate in saying yes. My father knew that education means power. He was more than happy to start his youngest son on the path as quickly as possible.

  In spite of my strong beginning, my performance in school was nothing special. I did not bother to study, nor did I work hard at my studies. Sometimes I did, and my grades put me in the top 5 percent of my class. But then I grew bored and ignored my work. Then I found myself in the bottom 5 percent. Either way, it didn’t matter to me. I carried on this same pattern all through primary school and into high school.

  My grades may not have mattered to me, but they did to my oldest sister, Winny. She had already finished school and moved out of the house when she came home for Christmas one year. She saw my grades and laid into me. “Do you have two brains, Bennet?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How can you go from the top of your class to the bottom and then back to the top?” she challenged me.

  “I don’t know,” I replied.

  “I know how. You are lazy, and if you keep this up, you will be a loser in life. Is that what you want—to be a loser?”

  Her words made me very angry, and she knew it. I think that w
as her plan. She then added, “I tell you what. If you finish first in your class next term, I will give you fifty naira.” That was the equivalent of fifty dollars. I was insulted, but I took her up on her offer. The next term, I finished first in my class and collected her money. After that, I never looked back. I spent hours upon hours reading, imagining things, and just thinking. I began to realize that knowledge is a powerful asset. I could not kick a soccer ball, which made my classmates laugh at me. But those same classmates were eager to come to me for help with a math problem or an English composition.

  • • • •

  Grades were something I found I could master if I applied myself, but I struggled socially. As a child I was very quiet and withdrawn. I did not have close friends outside of my family. Most of the time, I preferred to be home, either staying close to my mother or simply being by myself. I didn’t feel like I was good at anything except my imagination. I discovered my imagination had no boundaries or limits. In the hours I spent by myself, I let my imagination take me all over the world. And my favorite place to go was America.

  Growing up, my first exposure to America came through music. Since American music goes all over the world, this should come as no surprise. I liked what I heard, but I really identified with rhythm and blues and African-American singers. I couldn’t get enough of Teddy Pendergrass, Tina Turner, Luther Vandross, Marvin Gaye, Dionne Warwick, Gladys Knight, Lionel Richie, Diana Ross, and Anita Baker. And of course, Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson. As odd as it may sound, I also listened to some country music from America, artists like Don Williams and Kenny Rogers. As I got older, I began to hear this new music called hip-hop. I liked it. Will Smith, Tupac, Jay Z, and Puff Daddy impressed me.

  I liked American music, but what really grabbed me was the perfection the top American artists seemed to create. Occasionally I got to watch music videos on satellite television, and the perfection seemed even more pronounced. The creativity and the production value told me more about America than any newscast or history book. I was an emotional child, and I fell in love with this place, not because of any sociopolitical ideals but through the creativity and quality of their music. This perfection also seemed to know no bounds. Male or female, black or white, it didn’t matter, they strove for perfection. I once saw Lionel Richie playing his piano and singing on television. I was in awe, for he seemed to personify the perfection God created us to attain. I promised myself that whatever I did in life, whatever job I someday had, I would strive for the same perfection. That is why I imagined myself in America.

  Once while watching American television, I came across a game Americans play, but it was unlike any game I had ever witnessed. The players dressed up like extraterrestrials with brightly colored helmets and bulging, protective gear under their clothes. They looked like broad-chested, big-headed, tiny-legged visitors from Mars. The game didn’t make a lot of sense to me. The players purposefully ran into one another like trucks ramming each other on the highway. In soccer, you try to avoid running into the other players. If you hit someone on purpose, you get a yellow or red card. In this game, running into each other seemed to be the point. The name also confused me. Why did they call it “football,” since people carried the ball in their hands and passed it with their hands to the other players? It was the oddest game I had ever witnessed.

  Football aside, America was my favorite imaginary destination. For me, no place on earth came closer to heaven than the America I heard in music and watched on television and read about in books and magazines. I believed it to be the country that was closest to what God wants us to be as His sons and daughters, a place where you can be whatever you want, a place where you can be yourself. That’s all I ever really wanted to be. Myself.

  But I was not sure who I was. I often escaped to my imaginary world because the world in which I found myself as a boy was filled with disappointment and dissatisfaction. I struggled with low self-esteem. I had no reason to feel like this, because I grew up in a warm, loving family. Of course, my siblings made fun of me, but that’s what siblings do. I gave it right back to them, just as much as they gave it to me.

  However, in spite of the love I received from my family, I felt I was a loser in everything. Perhaps I had absorbed the label pressed upon the Igbo people after the war. In Nigeria, the Igbos were losers. I was Igbo. That made me a loser. I carried this feeling with me all the time. When I was around people, I felt like everyone looked down on me. My feelings of inadequacy caused me to pull more and more into myself, into the world where my imagination set me free. But I could not imagine my way out of the loneliness I felt.

  The problem was I did not feel like I fit in anywhere, often not even at home. I had this driven home to me one Saturday morning when I was about thirteen. My father was a remarkable man. He reminded me of the traditional, cultured English gentleman who dressed so formally and so well, who spoke impeccable English, and who believed in proper English manners and etiquette. His years in England and working side by side with British nationals rubbed off on him in this way. Like any proper English gentleman, my father also had a beautiful garden in our home, and he expected his children to work in it.

  Early one Saturday morning, I heard my father call out to my brother Chizoba, my sister Mirian, and me to get out of bed and come down to work the garden. My four older siblings no longer lived at home. Chizoba was the direct opposite of me. Energetic and sociable, he ran out and joined my father in the garden. Mirian fell right in behind him. Me, I rolled over and tried to ignore them. My mother came into my room. “Bene, get up. Your father is waiting for you. Time to get to work.”

  “I want to sleep,” I said. I did want to sleep, but I also wanted to spend my day reading, alone.

  My mother kept after me for a few minutes, without success. I should have obeyed her. Instead I laid in bed until my father, the proper English gentleman, burst into my room and in a less than genteel way made it very clear that I was to report to duty in the garden immediately or there would be serious consequences. I bounced out of bed, humiliated. When I went outside, my brother and sister glared at me. “It’s about time,” Mirian barked. Chizoba joined in chiding me. My father—he didn’t say much. Instead he pointed to the worst part of the garden where the weeds were the thickest and the work was the hardest. “There,” he said and pointed.

  For the next few hours, I worked and sweated and became covered with dirt. When I was finally released from duty, I went back up to my room and shut the world out. I ran out onto the balcony off my room and sat down and cried. Why can’t people just leave me alone? I wondered. Looking back, I understand why my father did what he did, and I also understand my brother’s and sister’s resentment toward me. I do not resent the fact that my father expected me to work. However, my real crisis came because I felt so ill at ease and so different from the rest of my family. The feeling washed over me and caused me to break into tears.

  As I sat on my balcony, crying, I felt the Spirit of God speak to me. Yes, you are different, I felt the Spirit impress upon me, but that is okay. You are who I made you to be. You are Bennet Ifeakandu Omalu, and there can never be another. There is only one you. I thought about this truth for a long while. If I am the only me, I could not allow anyone else to define me or determine who I was or who I was to become. Jesus Himself said, “You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house. Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father”1 These words came to my mind as the sky grew dark above me and the stars began to shine. God had made me who I was, and He made me and called me to let His light shine through me in my own unique way.

  From below, I heard my mother call, “Bene, it’s getting late. Come in and take a shower.”

  “Yes, Mommy,” I answered. However, before I went in, I looked up at the sky and m
ade a promise to myself and to God. I promised that from that day forward, I would cry no more over being different, nor would I let anyone else define me. I would let my light shine through the power that God gives me. I did not yet know what form that might take, but I was still just a boy. I had a long time to figure that out.

  Chapter Three

  To Be Myself

  One cold Sunday afternoon, my family sat down at the dinner table for a Sunday lunch of white rice, steamed spinach, and chicken tomato stew. My brother Chizoba, my sister Mirian—whom we all called Mie-Mie—and I were the only children still living at home. We all loved Sunday lunch because it was the one day of the week we got to drink a bottle of Coca-Cola with our meal. I had just taken my first drink of my Coke when my dad looked over at me and asked with his deep, baritone voice, “Bennet, my son, what do you want to become?”

  The answer was easy. “An airline pilot,” I said. All my life I had dreamed of becoming a pilot. Sometimes at night, I would lie in my backyard and watch the lights of planes flying across the sky, wondering where they were going. I could see myself at the helm of one of those jumbo jets, flying all over the world. One day I would fly into Paris, where my beautiful Parisian girlfriend waited for me with open arms. The next day might be Sydney, where a gorgeous Australian model awaited me. Of course I would fly across the Pacific to San Francisco where the most beautiful woman in all of America would wrap her arms around me, welcoming me back. I could not imagine a better life.