Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Frontispiece
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue: Future Legend
Space Oddity
Heroes
Life on Mars
Suffragette City
Absolute Beginners (Part I)
All the Young Dudes
We Are the Dead
This Is Not America
Young Americans
Absolute Beginners (Part II)
African Night Flight
The Man Who Fell to Earth
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2021 by Louis Chude-Sokei
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chude-Sokei, Louis Onuorah, 1967– author.
Title: Floating in a most peculiar way / Louis Chude-Sokei.
Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020023320 (print) | LCCN 2020023321 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328841582 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358395027 | ISBN 9780358394587 | ISBN 9781328781079 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Chude-Sokei, Louis Onuorah, 1967—Childhood and youth. | Nigerian Americans—California—Los Angeles—Biography. | Jamaican Americans—California—Los Angeles—Biography. | Immigrants—California—Los Angeles—Biography. | Los Angeles (Calif.)—Biography. | Nigeria, Eastern—Biography. | Nigerian Americans—Race identity. | Jamaican Americans—Race identity.
Classification: LCC F869.L853 C47 2021 (print) | LCC F869.L853 (ebook) |
DDC 979.4/940049669—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023320
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023321
Cover design by Brian Moore
Cover images © Avgust Avgustus / Shutterstock (landscape) and Sweet Art / Shutterstock (brushstrokes)
Author photograph © Sharona Jacobs
v2.0121
Portions of chapters “Space Oddity” and “Heroes” first appeared, in different form, in Hambone No. 20 published in 2012. Portions of chapters “Life on Mars” and “African Night Flight” first published, in different form, in the November 2013 issue of the Chimurenga Chronic.
For Adaorah.
* * *
This is where you begin.
Prologue
Future Legend
In my mother and father’s time, “exile” would have been the description for people like us. It was a sexy word in some circles. The common terms now are “immigrant” or “refugee.” Neither of those have the same appeal. They come laden with a sense of political inconvenience or victimization. And they imply that the place you have come from still exists.
Throughout my childhood, my mother told me that we were from a country that had disappeared or been “killed.” The murder of our country was a crime she would never forgive because not only had she become a citizen of that country, but she and my father had been partly responsible for its invention. Sometimes our country had been “starved to death.” Our enemy, the Federal Republic of Nigeria, had identified starvation as a legitimate tactic of war and deployed it against us with some virtuosity. We’d become famous for our hunger, particularly our children, who became celebrities in what many called Africa’s first televised war. But we weren’t exiles because nobody owed us anything. We were immigrants because back in my mother’s day that term implied that we were needed in whatever country we ended up in.
Nobody felt guilty for our country’s disappearance because it hadn’t survived long enough to appear on any official maps. It was more than a rumor but had not become a symbol. A handful of African nations had recognized it, and Israel and a few European countries had supported it without providing official recognition. Though virtually forgotten, there were still traces of our country in the lexicon of global charity. For example, it existed in tragic photos of emaciated babies with swollen heads and stomachs. As I said, we’d become famous for our hunger. Images of our children introduced kwashiorkor to the world, a disease so cruel as to be ironic: extreme hunger made the stomach expand enough to suggest gluttony.
We were from Biafra, mind you. Not Nigeria. My mother was emphatic about the distinction. The latter was just a placeholder, a country that was to our real homeland as a scar is to a wound. In other words, it was just like me, as I was to my father who was killed just months before his beloved country was. His death, many said, precipitated the end. Most of what I knew about him when I was a boy came from the endless recollections of those eager to hold on to that almost country. Some say he was its light, its grace, a reason to justify a cultural penchant for song. But when he was gone, all that was left was bloodshed and his people did not sing about death. This was certainly how it was for his family, many of whom were soldiers also; and his village; and his ethnic group, the Igbos. So it was for his wife—a Jamaican woman who had migrated to England to help rebuild the colonial motherland after World War II and then migrated again to West Africa just weeks after meeting him.
Nigerians may not have accepted her initially as African, and her husband’s people might not have accepted her as Igbo. But Biafra, that was something else. Biafra didn’t have the luxury to discriminate within its tender borders, and in it she’d been as heroic as any man or any African. And her son, she claimed, was the first Biafra baby. She’d say this even after I’d gotten old enough to decide that it was meaningless, since we’d left so early in my life. The war was declared on July 6, 1967. I was born just past midnight of that day. Family legend had it that while she was in labor she could hear the first fruits of the federal government’s bombing campaign against Biafra, and when she’d given birth, there had been word of casualties nearby.
I don’t remember Biafra or leaving it. Apparently, all I had with me when I arrived in Jamaica was a song, not an Igbo song but a Western one played on the radio about floating in space and choosing never to come down. It was a song about someone named Major Tom, and it eventually became my only memory of my origins in Africa. My mother told me I first heard it in Gabon, the country we’d fled to just before the final collapse when there were too many dead to still call Biafra a country. She said one of the aid workers played and sang the song often, and that it soothed me to sleep. She claimed that the aid worker’s name was Tom and that he must have been a major like my father, but that stretched credulity.
I remember none of this, but I do remember the first time I heard the word “Biafra.” It was also the first time I remember meeting an African other than myself.
I must have been five or six years old. My mother had returned to America in the wake of my Jamaican grandmother’s death, and I’d been adopted by family friends who were members of a rigidly orthodox Seventh-day Adventist community in Montego Bay. The plan was for my mother to send for me once she’d established herself in America with work and a home, and had managed all the paperwork necessary for my border crossing. Jamaica is where I began to hunt for that song in order to verify a past before that desperate island.
1
Space Oddity
My first African arrived while I was chasing Cousin Cecil around the backyard with a gun fashioned out of hardened coconut-tree fronds. He had given the fronds to me in trade for the map of a sunken continent I’d torn from either a comic
book or one of the science fiction novels I had to smuggle into the house because they were forbidden.
Cousin Cecil was the adopted son of the matriarch and patriarch of this home for left-behind children, Big Auntie and Uncle Daddy. Big Auntie was a high-ranking administrator for the Seventh-day Adventist churches on our side of the island. She was as large in physique as she was in authority and volume. She was infamous for her belches, thunderous affirmations of power. Small and wiry, Uncle Daddy was infamous for his wicked laughter, which came even when delivering punishment. He owned and operated a tour bus, a Japanese-made vehicle rare in those days, the pride of the household and their church. Like everyone in a country like Jamaica, Big Auntie and Uncle Daddy were involved in multiple other businesses and schemes to keep their large household afloat. Uncle Daddy was a driver but also a contractor, a builder, a fisherman, a mechanic. That’s why the backyard we were running through was perilous and wonderful, dense with the detritus of his many professional failures and successes.
Cousin Cecil was the Two-Gun Kid to my alter ego, the dark and driven Phantom, also known as the Ghost Who Walks. My cousin’s unknown Middle Eastern origins meant his skin was far closer to white than anyone we knew. He was famous for his ability to shimmy up lean and tall palm trees, hand over hand like a bug-eyed yellow monkey. The Phantom always struggled to climb those trees, his hands too tender for the rough bark. This time I cut him off from the nearest tree, cornering him against a wall near a glassy pool of oil where two car engines sat exposed like the entrails of prehistoric beasts, which we all agreed they were.
Suddenly, he bolted toward the doghouse under the mango tree. According to our laws, he would be granted sanctuary there. Before I could head him off, I heard our names called from the front of the house. My name was first, which meant I was the primary concern, though it was rare for only one of us to be punished even if only one of us was guilty. We marched through the long central hallway that led from the backyard past the house girls’ room, through the kitchen, the dining room, and into the parlor at the front where worship services were held. Hortense, the main house girl (a woman, really, almost as old as Big Auntie) lumbered knock-kneed against the doorway that led into the parlor. The smell of cooking grease was on her hands, which tenderly and invisibly grazed my shoulder. It was a sign that everything was all right.
Everyone in the house was there. I specifically remember three of Big Auntie and Uncle Daddy’s four daughters, and two other girl cousins rooming for the school year. Hortense stood next to another house girl with Big Auntie, Uncle Daddy, and I’m sure one of the guest missionaries they regularly hosted from Loma Linda, the Seventh-day Adventist university in America. Surrounding us all in the room that suddenly seemed a courtroom was the inevitable tribe of children that comprised my primary community in that house, whose parents had gone a foreign, be it to Canada, England, or America. Sitting against the far wall with the two house dogs at her feet was Grandma—and it was never clear if she was Big Auntie’s or Uncle Daddy’s mother—her hair recalling the powdered wig of a High Court judge. The imagery was complete.
Before I could wonder about the stranger, he leaped from his seat and rushed violently at me. He was a tall, extremely dark man with flat features whose skin seemed to be shining not from perspiration but due to its own sheen. Had there been no other boys present, I would have shrieked. His multicolored fabric billowed as he descended. I remained frozen. The shiny man fell to his knees, grabbing and shaking my shoulders.
“Is this the boy? Is this him?”
He looked at Big Auntie, who nodded.
“Yes. Oh, yes. This is the boy. I can see his father very well . . . you don’t have to tell me.”
Looking around at the audience, the shiny man addressed them in an accent that tightened the back of my throat.
“God is wonderful. God is great. This is his son . . . the first son of the first son.”
He paused with an expression that suggested incredulity at the fact that the onlookers did not know who I was. He then began once again to vigorously shake the child who was apparently the boy.
“You know who you are, boy? Do you know yourself?”
What kind of question was that to ask any child?
He pronounced my name in a way I’d never heard before. There were many more syllables.
“You are the son of the major and are named after him. One of the heroes of Biafra! Your father was the right hand of the great general, the man who led us, the first Biafra head of state, Odumegwu Ojukwu!”
This was the first time I was told that my father was famous and that we had been in a war, and the first time that I heard Ojukwu’s name. It was also the first time I heard the phrase that would repeat itself for years, “the first son of the first son.” I’d simply thought that I was treated as I was because of where I’d come from. I was, after all, on an island and in a household that had largely negative associations with the idea of Africa.
The African surveyed the surrounding crowd. His brow furrowed as if he expected the others to join in his disbelief that I couldn’t answer his questions. Cousin Mark, who was destined for Canada, furrowed his own brow in disgust or maybe jealousy. If it was the latter, it was due to the attention I was getting, not to the revelation of nobility. Cousin June the Younger began to giggle at my stupidity. She tugged at the skirt of Cousin June the Older, who may have been shaking her head in disbelief. Both of them were headed to England, and their mother sent things down for them far more frequently than anyone else’s. Our parents—mothers, actually, it was always mothers—sent remittances for our upkeep and education, and occasionally barrels loaded with clothes, toys, and gifts. These things rarely found their way into our hands. They were deemed too valuable for children in a country like that, and for Big Auntie, foreign products reeked of some distant sin. But just knowing that these packages would come gave each of us value in the house, and we were ranked accordingly, so the arrogance of both Cousins June was warranted.
The Two-Gun Kid had vanished, forcing Cousin Cecil to make sense of what was happening to me without his mask. I had a need to see Cousin Violet. When things made no sense, it was always helpful to look to her, not for clarity but to gauge her comfort with the confusion. Cousin Violet (also destined for Canada) was sitting behind two of the older girls and staring quizzically into her palm as if nothing unusual was going on. Her mouth was open, her eyes tightened, and her legs spread so wide apart that she would no doubt soon be hit by one of the older girls.
“You must know this always,” the shiny man said, lips flaking with white speckles that stood out against his dark skin. “You are the son of the greatest one of our people. A hero. You must know yourself. We are Biafran and we will fight. The battle may be lost but never the war. They assassinated your father, a great, great man, and sent us all everywhere, everyplace. But you are him in spirit. The general is in exile, but this is not cowardice or giving up for lost. Never mind what you will read in the newspapers and the books they will write. We have not failed. This condition is not forever and not permanent because no condition is. No condition is permanent is something our people say, your people. No condition is permanent! Are you hearing me?”
Cousin Cecil was cowering against Hortense’s long bent legs and scarred bare feet. She never wore shoes except to funerals and church on Saturday mornings, which meant that her feet were calloused to a hardness that was close to leather in texture. It seemed she could walk across any surface.
“You must know who you are always,” the man continued. “You are an Igbo boy, an Igbo boy, an I-gbo boy and this is not your home. You are not Jamaican. Biafra is your home! You are the son of the greatest Onitsha man. A handsome handsomest man, tall and fair like a white man but with pure African blood. The general said he was the one who decided to call our country Biafra—yes, your father. Oh, I used to see his car up and down the road from Awka to Enugu. BAF1 was the license plate. He was Biafra Air Force number 1 because he
made and commanded our air force. You must learn all these things and tell our story. Do not forget these things no matter how long you stay in this place. Are you hearing me?”
By now even more children, including some from the neighborhood and our church, had emerged from the various parts of the house and were watching from the edges of the parlor. They stood alongside the house girls, hair half-oiled and half-plaited, foreheads glistening. Cousin Brenda (destined for New York) hit Cousin Violet quietly but firmly. Cousin Violet’s legs closed abruptly but her eyes remained fixed on her palm and her wet mouth was wide open.
“This is the boy. I can not believe this thing. God is truly great. Your mother is a great woman. Because of what she has done, what we were is possible again. She saved many lives. Oh, the children . . . she took many of our children to Gabon and saved them. And you, you will one day return and take your place. That is how the story must end. Are you hearing me?”
There was a sudden dizziness as my past was revealed in a way that only adventure novels and comics had so far suggested as possible narratives. A war somewhere that threatened to wipe out an entire race of people, a tribe scattered and a prince with a destiny—the first son of the first son. This was bigger than the warren of rooms in the house. It was bigger than the backyard, which folded in on itself so tightly that from the roof it looked like a seashell surrounded with moss. What this man was describing was bigger even than this country made up of endless such yards along an endless ocean, with endless aunties and cousins and church services. Though my mother was in America somewhere and my father dead, this man reminded me that this place was temporary. In fact, all places were temporary and so I had the power to float over it all.
Eventually, there were no more giggles or laughter. Even Cousin Violet seemed to pay attention. Cousin Mark stared intently at the floor, humbled, and Cousin Danny and Cousin Cecil were too defeated to feign indifference. The two Cousins June stared fearfully at my straightened back and expanded chest. In my mind, I was reciting the Oath of the Skull from The Phantom: “I swear to devote my life to the destruction of piracy, greed, cruelty, and injustice, in all their forms, and my sons and their sons shall follow me.”
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