“My mother, well, since I was a child it was Onuorah. ‘Voice of the People.’”
“That is only the first part. This is the second part of it, the complete name.”
I felt as if I were sobering up, or at least my head seemed to allow greater clarity due to a rush of adrenaline.
“What does the second part mean?” I asked him.
“Onuorah is ‘Voice of the People,’ but egbunam means . . . well, something like ‘Will Always Be Against Me’ or ‘What People Say Will Not Stop Me, or, Won’t Kill Me.’”
“So, my name is the Voice of the People Will Always Be Against Me?”
“Well, maybe, something like that. It means a controversial person. Your dear mum, her Igbo was never too good but she tried, oh, she tried . . . God is great.”
He left me standing amid a swirl of mosquitos. I began thinking, remembering. My name, my names. It wasn’t just the alcohol or even the antimalaria tablets, which brought dreams more vivid than the ones I had when hospitalized in Jamaica.
On my way back to my room, I stopped by my father’s grave. All I could do was stare at it and wonder: How did he know? How did my father know my name?
* * *
Despite my godfather being under house arrest in Lagos and regularly blamed by the federal government for the deaths of millions, photos of him and his wife were everywhere, particularly on the covers of the fashion and lifestyle magazines hawked by sweat-soaked boys in traffic. She was a lawyer, but what had caught the public’s attention was that she was some three decades his junior and had represented the country in the Miss Universe contest. To add to the scandal, my godfather was rumored to have been her godfather too, and her father disowned her on hearing of the relationship. The king of a people who famously had no kings was now the prince of the tabloids. A visitor from outer space would have assumed that he was the president or an avuncular pop star.
He’d insisted on seeing me. I prepared to navigate the paparazzi clustered around his compound and the political wannabes within. My time in the village had exhausted me. I’d settled into a numbness indistinguishable from an extended hangover. I had absorbed too much history in too short a time. America, oddly, was where I knew these experiences in Nigeria would make sense.
My mind was swirling with memories of the village and nonstop impressions of Lagos, the scale and size and relentless motion rendering thoughts of the past—thought itself—irrelevant. I would later regret this because I simply couldn’t ask my godfather most of the questions I’d prepared. I could barely even speak. Luckily, he was like most Biafra veterans I’d met, eager to talk about my father. Unlike the others, though, he wasn’t interested in telling me how much I paled in comparison. I managed to tell him how difficult it was to get real, human details about my father. Everything was myth, romance, Doctor Zhivago. What was he really like? I’d been imagining my father as the ultimate man of his time, an über Igbo, as it were.
“Oh no,” said my godfather. “He was always quite different.” And it was probably there that I began using “quite” in his quite British way. “I think that’s why he married your mother, really. She wasn’t like anything he’d known or seen. That woman has such power! You should have seen her during the bombings and carrying you around on her back while tending to our men and boys and setting up clinics. I remember when he told me about her at Sandhurst. He never mentioned she was Jamaican so I just thought he’d found some Churchillian English woman with a straight back and thick ankles. I mean, quite a few of us were marrying English in those days. It was difficult to avoid, you see. But a Jamaican? That, my boy, was a curious angle of approach. Very curious.”
He burst out laughing, a rich chuckle that brought his chin close to his chest and made his eyes look up at me mischievously.
“Will you take another beer? Star or Gulder or perhaps a stout?”
I told him I preferred Gulder to Star or stout. He was happy that I knew my Nigerian beers. It was a sign of something good, of a certain kind of man.
“He was an Onitsha man, but Onitsha people have always been different. You know we Igbos are called the Jews of Africa? Onitsha people are the most Jew-like, if you will. But he was different among the different. No matter how wild his deviations, everyone assumed them appropriate. Everything he did was accepted as traditional, even marrying your mother. If he did something, it was Igbo. Simple. That’s why he was the new Onitsha man. Those two were really the JFK and Jackie O of Biafra. You’ve heard that before?”
“Yes, I’ve heard it before.”
“They were modern, what we should have been.”
“What was it that made him different among the different, as you say? He must have been aware of that, and it must have made him, I don’t know, self-conscious, maybe a little alienated? Maybe that’s what drew him to my mum.”
“He knew she was the woman he should—not would, mind you, should—marry. He didn’t know anything about her other than she wasn’t English or African even though they were both British as we all were then. We weren’t American yet.” He began to laugh.
He trailed off and began to search the ceiling for the precise words. He found them above a small window in the far corner next to an enormous portrait of his wife.
“Alienation, cultural confusion, those things I know are great concerns these days. I’ve read the books. But truly they were foreign to us. We were not racked with doubt. We’d been colonized, but we were not confused. Or we wouldn’t have fought at all! Perhaps you could say that things were clearer then. It’s a sad thing that those things matter so much now. I wonder if it’s really regret, not ours but of those who write about us. Because we had none.”
I thought to ask if he really had no regrets about Biafra, the secession, genocide, and the horrible disease of hunger. Could one lose or even win a war without regrets? But I didn’t want to sound like a journalist or an academic or yet another historian trying to get the truth from the great man. I suspected that a man like him dared not succumb to regret. It would have been to finally and truly lose the war.
We had dinner alone, mostly in silence until a house boy appeared with an ex-soldier who unveiled a television at the other end of the room. More beers arrived. The TV screen lit up with white noise. I was surprised when the house boy immediately turned it to American professional wrestling, but I was stunned when my godfather erupted with joy.
“Wonderful,” he said. “You must pay attention to this.”
“You enjoy wrestling?” I asked, my surprise likely tinged with some scorn.
“Don’t you?” I think he noted that scorn. “You don’t have to agree with it to enjoy it, you know.”
As I was at the high point of my ideological period, his latter statement was hard to process. I wasn’t yet able to enjoy and disagree with anything at the same time. But the idea that I was watching American wrestling with an infamous warlord was almost too much to process.
“The pageantry,” he said, “it is committed to rituals.”
“But you know it’s fake, right?” I asked.
He didn’t seem troubled by my assertion, just curious about it.
“I mean the whole thing is staged, and it’s so unreal, the violence.”
“But what’s unreal about that?” he asked.
“It’s all set up, predetermined.”
“Violence is always quite unreal even if you prepare for it. And warfare is not without its manipulations. If things go well, they should seem predetermined.”
At this point I began to wonder if there was a lesson in this, answers to questions I had been failing to ask. Or was this just a meandering conversation between an old man and his hungover godson?
“But I see. It disappoints you,” he said.
“Well, yes, the fact that it is or could be fake loses something.”
He paused but continued looking at the screen. Then he turned back to me with a look of great compassion.
“But hasn’t it become more inter
esting to you because it could be false? Isn’t that an added pleasure?”
I began to laugh. Was this the lesson?
“So you should be as invested in not knowing as I am,” he said.
“Why?”
“Well, your pleasure comes from doubting. Mine comes from believing, and we should assume that our pleasures are of the same quality or we would be barbarians.”
I laughed out loud. Was this the lesson?
Just then someone pulled off an impressive and surprising move. A body doubled over in midair. The canvas shook and the audience erupted. There may have been a splash of blood or the suggestion of limbs overextended.
“You see,” said my godfather. “It is real enough.”
Then it was full night and the generator was on, meaning the electricity had gone. The television was off, and my godfather’s wife arrived quietly. Before I left the house, he disappeared for a time, leaving me sitting with her. She was not called the most beautiful woman in Nigeria for nothing. When he returned, she said she was stunned that I had even come back to Nigeria at all, given that Biafra had sent me so far away for so long. I had earned an enviable right—the right to forget Nigeria completely. I had truly and completely become something else. I half expected her to say that I’d become an American. Even though that would have been true, she didn’t say it and my love for her became permanent.
But my godfather disagreed with her reading of things. He said the fact that I did return and would continue to return was proof of belonging. The taking up of obligations, however painful, however absurd, was confirmation of a choice being made. It was greater than blood or habit. Belonging, he said, had nothing to do with being accepted. It was about duty.
He gave me a letter addressed to my mother.
“When you return to Nigeria for good, there will be much more for us to talk about. I have great plans for the future. You must be a part of them.”
* * *
The letter was in my hand, moist with night sweat, as my godfather’s blue Mercedes driven by two young loyalists tore through the Lagos streets. Though tempted to read it, I knew not to violate an intimacy forged by time and war.
“They know this car,” said the driver, as they pulled past policemen at the beginning of the Third Mainland Bridge. Due to the very late hour, the roads were free of the city’s legendary traffic and we were moving at nightmare speed. “They fear this car, abi.”
“It is true,” the other concurred. “They fear this car and they should because it is his car. As long as they fear him, we are all okay.”
They returned me to the home of one of my uncles in Lagos where I was staying. It was on Allen Avenue, an area then popular among the drug barons who’d made Nigeria a transshipment point for the global trade in narcotics. The streets were lined with prostitutes and late-night beer parlors, gambling dens, and a few nightclubs.
I could hear raucous laughter, clinking bottles, and loud arguments in the house. Electricity was out in the city, and I didn’t hear a generator so it would be unbearable inside. I had no interest in confronting drunk drug barons lit up on Indian hemp—not without AC. I thought to walk up to the main road to a beer parlor where I could buy a round of drinks for whomever was there and have them fill my ears with stories. Instead, I decided to have another cigarette and wait outside for the electricity to come on.
When I flicked the cigarette butt onto the ground, the gateman emerged from the shadows to rescue it as if it were a coin. He desperately pulled what he could of the remaining smoke into his lungs. I went to him and gave him a fresh cigarette.
“Oga, thank you. Thank you.”
“It’s okay,” I said, happy for a conversation.
“You know I knew your father.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, but I tensed slightly, waiting for the inevitable expression of entitlement, the request for beer, food, clothing, betrothals to unseen daughters, or American visas.
As if he could read my suspicion in the dark, he quickly said, “Yes, I was in the air force during the war. BAF1 was his car. I remember it. BAF1.”
“Yes, that was the license plate.”
“He was very handsome. You do not look like him, but you remind me of him.”
I asked if he remembered my mother.
“Yes, Oga. The English woman.”
“She was Jamaican, actually.”
“I only know she was English and very strong. We saw her a lot when she came to see him at Uli where we were stationed. Seeing them together was a hopeful thing. Is she somewhere?”
“In America.”
“That is where you are both living?”
“Yes, that’s where we live.”
“God is great. She should be in comfort. What of your sister?”
I looked at him quizzically.
“The one he had with the Onitsha woman,” he said.
“I don’t have a sister. I’m an only child.”
He looked at me for a long moment and finished his cigarette. He seemed to have more to say and I kept waiting for him to speak. But then I was grateful he didn’t and we smoked in silence.
I gave him another cigarette.
“Your father was handsome. You look just like him. He could have been president. Governor would be too small. The ones we have now are a problem. People like you scattered by war must come back. Only people like you can fix this place. If you came back, people in the East would vote for you. Eze Nd’Igbo would support you.”
“I actually just came back from seeing Ojukwu. That was his car.”
“Yes, I know the car,” he said. “Everyone knows the car.”
My cigarette was finished and I feared throwing the butt on the ground.
“Oga, tell me if you need anything,” he said. “If you want a girl, I can bring her. I will bring her behind the kitchen. There is a small room there.”
Then he was covered in dark at the threshold to the shack by the gate. His shadows became even darker as the electricity came on and the city shuddered into life again. I walked toward the house steeling myself for what I would find inside. It was unlikely I’d get much sleep, but I’d gotten used to it. The mosquitoes had either stopped biting me or I’d stopped paying attention to them. I was leaving tomorrow night, so before reaching the door to the kitchen, I went back and gave him the entire pack of cigarettes and the lighter. His mouth opened in surprise.
“Thank you, Big Brother. God will bless you.”
His eyes were wet with tears.
12
The Man Who Fell to Earth
What I missed most about Nigeria once I was back in LA was a particular mantra that had kept me oriented. When the electricity went out, and the mosquitos descended, and the pressures of family history overwhelmed me, I told myself, This will only make sense when I go back to America. Of course, it didn’t. And the reverse idea—that going to Africa would solve my problems with America—was proof of nothing more than how much of a Black American I’d become.
As an immigrant, I recognized exquisitely by now the limitations of race in the country I had grown up in. But this was the country where I’d formed the questions that had led me between and among dialects, cultures, and communities; and despite its own limitations, the academic world still seemed the best place to continue asking them. I’d never been like some of my aunts and uncles who’d counseled me and my cousins to leave the issue of race alone because it wasn’t our business. As Great-Uncle Irving used to say, We’re here to drink the milk, not fuck with the cows.
I chose to fuck with the cows. My first formal experience of doing that was with my dissertation topic, which drew harsh criticism and rejection by the few African American professors in my department and by white professors afraid to contradict them. They were angered by my desire to study the histories and outcomes of Black immigrants in this country, particularly as they differed from those of African Americans. They didn’t want to sponsor a dissertation that described how and specu
lated why Black immigrants seemed at times to perform in America like many other immigrant groups and argued for how their different responses to racial prejudice influenced these outcomes. For many of these professors and my fellow students it was also a betrayal to make public the prejudices and tensions within Black communities. Turns out that Cousin Brian was right; there was only one story that mattered here.
I’d assumed that there was much to learn from the spaces among multiple Black stories, and about America’s past and future in a world fast outgrowing this country’s static racial categories. And that there was much these groups could teach one another about different approaches to racism, especially since so many Blacks from Africa and other places had been arriving in the United States in record numbers over the course of my own lifetime and were redefining Blackness in America. But for many of my professors and peers, the topic itself was taboo. The African American / white model was sacred. To stray too far from it was alien and dangerous. I decided to go elsewhere for advisors, which was seen as an act of treason. For me, it was just like high school when I was accused of snitching on my homies who’d stolen the sports equipment. I was always selling someone out.
I may have felt momentarily like both martyr and revolutionary for taking a stand, but changing professors took its toll. I was still one of the very few Blacks at that university at that level, and was even more isolated from my graduate peers than before. The space between Inglewood and the university now seemed farther than the distance I’d traveled to America in the first place. In the wake of the LA riots and the heartbreak that seemed to prefigure the violence, I could understand how easy it was for others to think about this country only in black and white terms and be uninterested in the differences and tensions within Blackness itself. After all, unpleasant run-ins with the police, which had in part fueled the riots, had been as much a part of my life as they were for any Black man growing up in Inglewood or South Central whether he went to college or not or had been born here or not. So when I received a job offer completely on the other side of the country, I took it even though it meant leaving my mother, uncles, aunts, and cousins in a neighborhood with walls still covered with soot from those nights of burning.
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way Page 15
