These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  After one of Achebe’s fictional characters is told by his son that he is about to get married to an Osu girl, he lectures him about the deeper import of his proposed action: “Osu is like a leprosy in the minds of my people. I beg of you my son not to bring the mark of shame and leprosy into your family. If you do, your children and your children’s children will curse you and your memory …You will bring sorrow on your head and on the heads of your children.”5

  There aren’t many written histories of the Osu that one might refer to, but there are some oral histories that have been passed around. It is believed by some Igbo historians that the Osu caste system came into existence six centuries ago. The ones referred to as Osu emerged as a priestly class to administer and perform—on behalf of the community—a series of rituals to appease the gods of the Igbo indigenous cosmology, many of whom took on “the form of major topographical landmarks like streams, rivers, lakes, caves and mountains, or maybe trees, animals and famous ancestors.”6 It was part of the worship of these powerful deities to be attended to. Some of these supreme beings were ranked so high on a hierarchy of power that their proper care required “a retinue of high priests and attendants on full-time basis. The high priests’ attendants were responsible for performing intricate religious rituals, which were taboo to the average citizen, in the shrines of the deities.”7 The special ones who took care of the deities’ needs and loved the shrines were known as the “osus” of the deity in question.

  In short, the Osus were sacred in precolonial Igbo communities; they were not to be touched, and only to be approached with reverence. They were a people apart. Untouchable only in terms of the power they wielded on behalf of the community and their “living sacrifices” to the gods.

  However, when the British made their way inland, they disrupted the order of things. Intent on gaining political and economic control over the Igbos, but lacking the manpower to effect this radical transformation, they adopted a system of rule by proxy, indirectly stirring the pot of local life through the familiar visage of sympathetic chiefs and rulers. With missionary outposts and newly built schools, they began supplanting indigenous wisdoms and values with the Christian faith and with the promise of a better life if they learned the one-tongue. As adherents grew, the lands where the Bible reigned supreme shriveled up into a stark binary of those who believed versus those who didn’t. The offerings to the shrines dried up; the deities no longer heard the prayers of their people. Buried deep within the symbolism of the cross, which now dotted the new landscape, was a deep antagonism that rejected the now pagan claims of the Osus. In one fell swoop, a people apart became a people in part—their ontological inadequacy now arising from an abhorrence and deep-seated hatred for the animism and lecherous materiality of the Osus. There was no room for their practices of care.

  The changing conditions of respectability required new frames of seeing and new motivations to forget one’s connections to the nonhuman world. With new aspirations, people moved into the big cities, where many others also gathered in floating congregations, left unmoored by the universal promises of white modernity. The Osus had, like Okonkwo, suddenly become unwitting subjects of a new power and of a new Future; their eyes became vestigial, no longer serving their visual negotiations with thick places. Their memories? The fabulations of superstitious minds needing the “benevolent doses of the real” only white people could provide.

  I tell this story of the Osus because we are living in times of a deep forgetfulness, and because the subject of home cannot be dealt with without thinking of homes we’ve already lost. And because you are born of people who have been (and are still) considered a people in part. You are the first fruit the Future forbade, the child of children who were not meant to be and which society had no place for.

  As a black man—probably “blacker” than the current diasporan descendants of the young men and women our ancient chiefs sold off to traders heading for the so-called “West”—I know the numbing cramps of dangling feet. The unbearable lightness of having no ground, no lasting support for one’s claims to identity.

  It’s an itch, really. An existential itch right in the middle of one’s back. People like me are constantly trying to reach it, to scratch out a deeply ingrained idea, supported by the political-economic structures of our time, that we are inadequate. A people only in part. Not fully matured to take on the mysteries of the world or the challenges of being alive. And so we struggle with our mottled manacles—our full-mouthed accents, our inferior cultures, our pouting lips and abrupt hairlines. Any bodily manifestation that deviates from the default requires correction.

  My mother once told me about the time she and my father stood outside a hospital in Germany—looking for a nurse to attend to them and help wheel her in. No one came to both of them. It took my mum’s grabbing a nurse that was about to ignore them by walking past quickly before they were paid any attention. But it was too late: my sister’s head, your Aunty Tito’s head, could already be seen between her thighs.

  For me, the feeling of not being at home has always been tied up to the color of my skin and its associations with backwardness. Well, not always per se—but since I came to realize I was a citizen of white normativity in my own land. As I have probably mentioned in a previous letter, I was beaten in school for attempting to speak my own language, by teachers who were most probably beaten for attempting to speak their mother tongues. I was trained to think of the world as a dead place I could eventually plunder. Trained to find myself in universalized homogeneous time. Our countries are categorized in terms of their proximity to the edge of the moving hands of this giant clock. While Europe and America are ahead in the first realms of this race, Nigeria and India—two countries that lay their claims on your body—are known as “Third World” nations or developing nations/emerging markets—as if the most important thing that can be known about a country is how well it does on the development scale. Lately, India has been doing better than Nigeria, and its leaders are doing what they can to ramp up the nation’s potential to become a global superpower. Left behind in this quest for a seat at the global table is India’s richly embroidered history and cultural wealth.

  We are all in a race, heading toward the Future. But being black—being a nonwhite human being—means one is already late. There’s a tongue-in-cheek name for our lateness: it’s called “African time” (and its cross-cultural equivalent: “Indian time”), and rightly refers to the cultural tendency to be less than punctual, but may just as well be a comment on our second-tier or third-tier status as humans. We are all late. And you, my daughter, like me, and my father who haunts me, are late too. Turmeric and dal be damned.

  So then, when will the shofar blow, announcing our exodus toward lands flowing with milk and honey? How do we respond to these exclusions, these Manchurian transactions that leave us without help, without a past, without a history, without a seat at the table? Is there a place where it is safe to sit in our nonwhite skins without being considered in part? Without being paraphrased or encapsulated? Is it too much to imagine a world that embraces my difference, and recognizes my wealth?

  These questions have been airborne long before those new slaves that had traveled across the Atlantic walked off their vessels and into cotton fields. They were alive when Martin Luther King Jr. sang the lyrics of a powerful hope for a postracial America, standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial monument and at the cusp of a civil rights movement’s yearnings for peace; they were alive when Mandela punched the air with his upheld fist, walking out of Victor Verster prison and his twenty-seven-year incarceration for challenging apartheid. Those questions are especially alive today in America—where the old apparition of racial violence screams through the easy domesticity of the American dream, shocking its mostly white settlers, who thought race was just a thing of the past, “a problem still found here and there, in the outback of Idaho or in the imagination of the academy.”8 These racial tensions are most pronounced when a black man is
shot dead or manhandled by those supposed to protect him on the streets, or when a colored person is treated differently, objectified, or italicized as a strange occurrence in the otherwise normal flow of a sentence. They are certainly alive here in India, still struggling in the schizophrenic twilight zones between its ornately wealthy histories and the colonial infractions of a singular Future it must now adhere to.

  In my queer journeys for hushes, I have had the good fortune of meeting very sincere people—white, black, brown, yellow, you name it—who care about countering white supremacy, racial prejudices, sexism, and the outmoded claims of environmental patriarchy. They are forming neighborhood groups, joining rallies, printing T-shirts with “Black Lives Matter!” boldly emblazoned on the front, calling out deeply entrenched patterns of seeing and talking and behaving that are insensitive to minorities, and writing eloquently about the social structures and institutionalized power dynamics that militate against people of color. In the face of those that deny the shadows of the past and would rather say, “All is well—there’s no such thing as racism … if you work hard enough you should make something of yourself,” they are countering with troubling questions, conjuring memories that most would rather bury under the cavalcade of the modern present. They are pointing hard at the embroidery of a modern-scape that is already textured in ways that notices some and dismisses others—no matter how hard they work or try to prove themselves just as humanly variable as the noticed ones. I am thankful that I met these beautiful feet; their unseen practices, hidden behind a blitzkrieg of entertainment news, are part of an insurgency of hope for a world of justice.

  I am, however, meeting the traces of a strikingly different reconfiguration of the kind of questions we pose to the world about race and justice. A different ethos, one which I will … with great hesitation … christen as “transraciality” (being fully aware of my hubris)—not to be confused with “transracialism.” I’ll tell you more about this as you read on. I started to think differently about race when I met a forbidden child—someone who came forth from a hard-to-swallow union of bodies. An outlaw. Yes, yes … it seems this crazy, seemingly improvised journey to meet strange creatures has—so far—been about meeting strange women as well. This “forbidden child” … she met me in a queer time and place, and gave me the fourth and fifth hushes9—bringing me closer to my destination.

  Meeting this forbidden child in the time that I did has afforded me an opportunity to look around, to survey the vexed ideas about race and identity, and raise interesting questions that I would not have considered if we didn’t (already) meet.

  In 2015, a black American civil rights activist, professor of Africana studies and president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter in Spokane, Washington, grants an interview with KXLY 4, answering the questions of a reporter outside the frame of the camera that is trained diligently on her facial expressions and responses. Clad in a white blouse that is imprinted with a motif of graphic black squares (which is perhaps a figure of the shocking revelations about to be made), she speaks emotively about her history of being victimized, and about one of her black sons—thirteen years old at the time—feeling so terrorized by a “package” her family had received that he now sleeps next to her in bed. She talks about hate crimes perpetuated against her and her two black sons, and the police modalities for identifying hate crimes. She falls silent sometimes when she considers the seriousness of racism in America, the images of lynched black men she has come across, and her work fighting for racial justice.

  “I would love to live in a world where hate crimes didn’t exist, and I can assure my children that we are safe,” she says, her voice almost drowned out by the heavy traffic of vehicles, trucks and people to her left, in what seems like yet another run-off-the-mill interview with an eloquent black woman about prejudice.

  When the reporter goes off topic a bit and asks whether her father could make it for an event in Spokane, she smiles and tells him her father has bone cancer and was not able to get cleared for surgery. She looks down to something fluttering outside the frame, out of our sight, apparently a picture the reporter is holding in his hand. There is a palpable shift in her countenance. She looks worried.

  The reporter asks, “Is this your father?” She nods hesitantly. “That’s … that’s my dad.”

  “This man right here is your father—right there?” the reporter presses further, with a tone of managed incredulity that now spells a marked and awkward segue from the earlier focus of the interview.

  “You have a question about that?” she asks, visibly ill at ease.

  “Yes ma’am, I was wondering if your father is an African American man.”

  “That’s a very … I mean … I don’t know what you are implying.”

  “Are you African American?”

  She stares at the reporter, her fried brown coiled hair shifting in the wind as her forced smile drains away into a scowl. She is barely able to keep this up much longer.

  “I don’t … I don’t understand the question of … I did tell you that yes that’s my dad … and he wasn’t able to come in January.…”

  The reporter, Jeff Humphrey, starts to ask if her parents are white, but his subject—Rachel Dolezal, who is to become the eye of a stormy scandal about the politics of race and racial relations in the United States and the unloved poster-child for the contested notion of transracialism—has already walked away.

  Thanks to that interview, Rachel Dolezal, a blond white woman who identified as a black woman, and had built a comfortable career on the back of that co-opted identity, was outed as a phony. A hailstorm of studio music and flashy graphics streamed across television surfaces in the nation as journalists and show hosts capitalized on the scandal of her transformation. Not since Clarence King, a nineteenth-century “blue-blood society type who lived half his life as a well-known explorer and Manhattan man about town—and half as a black married man with five children in Brooklyn and Queens,”10 had anyone else reportedly crossed the racially charged divide that runs through America, and lingered on the other side for so long.

  Riding the crest of the controversy to the shore of public outrage, Rachel’s father and mother appeared on television in their Caucasian glory, denouncing their daughter as delusional. Members of the NAACP felt duped, including the preceding president, who believed Rachel when she said she was African American. Rachel’s adopted brothers, both black, announced that Rachel had taken them aside and told them she was going to adopt a new identity, and asked them to keep a secret. “She grew up privileged,” one of her brothers said. “She had good intentions but she didn’t go about it the right way.”

  Defending herself, Dolezal released a statement identifying herself as “transracial”—this in spite of the fact that she did not grow up in an ethnically ambiguous household, had Caucasian parents, and reportedly lived a privileged life like most white people in her town.

  The seething rage from both black and white communities felt justified. Why would a white woman want to “pass” as a black woman? In earlier times, fair-skinned black women often “passed” as white women or were often mistaken as white. But they used this to reduce the crushing existential load of suffering that they—and people like them—had to endure. Rachel Dolezal’s curious reversal of identity roles felt like the perpetuation of a certain brand of American anything-goes-ism, a state of affairs that applied more to rich white people in the upper echelons of society than to minorities in the doldrums of exclusion.

  This much was clear to Ijeoma Oluo—a writer who has your mother’s Igbo name and who, like your mother, is multiracial with a Nigerian father and American mother. I recently came across Ijeoma’s article, which she had written following a visit to Rachel Dolezal, or—as she chooses to be called now, after a Nigerian Igbo man had given her a new name—Nkechi Amare Diallo, following the latter’s recent publication of a book recounting her ordeal as a transracial person.

&nbs
p; Oluo’s opinions about Diallo were already rock-bottom; she had been part of previous conversations about the white woman who pretended to be black, and was exhausted with the topic. However, taking an offer to interview Rachel in her home, Ijeoma flew out to meet her—perhaps hoping for a glimpse of someone she might come to sympathize with. She didn’t find that person.

  Her report—widely praised and celebrated—was scathing and full-toothed in its in-depth analysis of Nkechi’s apparent malaise, pointing out that Nkechi’s colonizing adoption of black identity was yet another unfortunate instance of white privilege exerting itself.

  There was a moment before meeting Dolezal and reading her book that I thought that she genuinely loves black people but took it a little too far. But now I can see this is not the case. This is not a love gone mad. Something else, something even sinister is at work in her relationship and understanding of blackness.11

  Oluo sniffed out what came across as a critical lack of awareness about whiteness: Diallo, seeming to compare her early childhood experiences to chattel slavery, appeared to have fetishized blackness, unaware of the enormous privilege and power she wielded to be able to co-opt the experiences of black people in her personal quest for redemption. Oluo’s point—that she treated blackness like a plaything, while enjoying the security and access her white skin granted her—amounted to an egregious erasure of black people. Her forays past the drawn lines of racial memory did nothing to dismantle the furniture of white exceptionalism—in fact, as Oluo noted, Diallo shifted the fence a little bit more, taking a chunk of the little ground blacks had left:

  I am more than a little skeptical that Dolezal’s identity as the revolutionary strike against the myth of race is anything more than impractical white saviorism—at least when it comes to the ways in which race oppresses black people. Even if there were thousands of Rachel Dolezals in the country, would their claims of blackness do anything to open up the definition of whiteness to those with darker skin, coarser hair, or racialized features?12