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I
met black America for the first time in 2005, after three years of living and
teaching in America, and one year before I returned to Canada. The long journey
to this eventful meeting started in my father’s library in Isanlu, a small town
in central Nigeria. I came of age in Nigeria as the locust decades of military
despotism and civilian kleptocracy set in, destroying everything including what
used to be known as the middle class. This class comprised a proud and hopeful
generation that returned home from Cambridge, Oxford, Canterbury, Yale,
Princeton, and Harvard in the euphoric 1960s-1970s. After years of colonial
humiliation in the hands of the British, a newly independent and proud Nigeria
beckoned and this generation answered enthusiastically. “Unity and Progress”,
“One Nigeria”, and other such soporific mantras were on their lips as they
fanned across the land, taking up jobs in every sector of national life. Those
who joined the education sector took up positions in the Universities; some
joined High Schools founded and run by Western Christian missions; some others
joined public elementary schools all over the country.
Those
who accepted teaching positions in rural missionary schools took the now rested
culture of the family library with them to our villages. My father belonged in
this category. Being more catholic than the pope, he had hurried home from
Dundee University in Scotland to be Principal of a Catholic High School in
Isanlu. Over the years, as our leadership transformed the Nigerian state into
carrion and turned one of the world’s richest geographies into Africa’s most
embarrassing atrophy, my siblings and I would blame him to no end for that
“ill-considered” decision. “Dad, why couldn’t you just wait for the three of us
to be born in the UK before rushing home”? We were in secondary school and
could not understand why he denied us British citizenship. For most
transnational Nigerians of my generation, the passport of one responsible state
in addition to your Nigerian passport, evidence of dual citizenship, is a vital
insurance. Whenever the Nigerian state defaults on its responsibilities to you
as a citizen, your second citizenship kicks in to save the day. But Dad didn’t
wait. He returned to Nigeria with his books and a wife carrying the pregnancy
of his first child.
That family library became his most important asset. He
continued to expand it till he died in February 2007 and it became my most
significant inheritance. I was practically raised in that library. As his last
born and only son, there was nothing he enjoyed more than having me spend hours
with him there in my formative years. When we weren’t reading, he was giving me
long lectures on the value of knowledge, fulminating against the one thing he
couldn’t tolerate: “a mind that has not read books”, to put it in his words.
And by books he meant “serious books”. Thus, while my secondary school mates
enjoyed the delights of ‘soft’ literature – James Hadley Chase, Nick Carter,
Frederick Forsyth, and the Macmillan Pace Setters series – I was stuck in my
father’s library in the company of “serious writers”. His vigilance, however,
could not stop an underground addiction to Hadley Chase! Years later, I
discovered the thematic thoroughness of my father’s acquisitions: shelves of West
African literature and history led to shelves of South African literature and
history which, in turn, yielded to shelves of African American literature and
history. Colonialism. Apartheid. Slavery. These were the three great themes
that informed his systematic acquisitions in black textual cultures as his
library grew to take up two large rooms in the family house. This was the
beginning of my ensorcellment by the great texts of the black world. It was in
this library that I encountered the names that would plunge me into an
intricate web of trajectories and experiences that, years later, Paul Gilroy
would make theoretically consumable as the Black Atlantic. From my senior years
in secondary school and onward, my father’s library ensured that names like
Fredrick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke,
Langston Hughes, Claude Mckay, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Chester Himes,
Stokely Carmichael, and Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King Jnr, and
Malcolm X entered my world in that small village in the middle of Nigeria.
Whenever Mom complained that some of the stuff was just too high for my level,
Dad would quip dismissively that Catholic missionaries had already introduced
him to Latin texts at my age!
What University training added to this foundation was to
create a transcendental, borderless Black world that privileged color, history,
and memory above geography and nation. Thus, apartheid and slavery were also
very much ‘our experience’, ‘our property’ in those undergraduate lecture rooms
in Nigeria. The curriculum socialized us into treating histories and narratives
specific to Black South Africans and African Americans as phatic links to our
own major narrative: colonialism. Our Professors created a world of ideological
intermeshing in which W.E.B du Bois, Malcolm X, Richard Wright, James Baldwin,
and Toni Morrison were as much “our writers” as were Frantz Fanon, Walter
Rodney, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Ben Okri. Years later, the strictures
of disciplinary boundary cutting in North American academe, the exigencies of
national identities, and the fractious politics and tensions of intra-Black
relations, would unsettle the soporifics of this seamless Black world I brought
to the New World from Nigeria.
After completing a doctorate in Canada in 2002, I was hired
by Penn State University, the beginning of my American odyssey. State College,
Pennsylvania, is one of those typical American college towns where everything
revolves around an octopus University. Rich, serene, beautiful, and almost
always completely White, many American college towns have an invisible sieve
that lets in just the right quota of a certain kind of yellow, brown,
and black skin. Just enough dosage of colored skin to enable the authorities to
make politically correct noise about diversity and multiculturalism. Strategic
tokenism. That certain kind of colored skin is almost always a student or
faculty, in essence, already mainstreamed and stabilized as non-threatening to
America’s ur-text: whiteness. Thus, my ‘black’ world in Pennsylvania comprised
African and African American faculty and students, some of whom became family.
Outside of that immediate circle was the broader circle of Nigerian writers and
artists of my generation – we all moved to North America in the great
hemorrhage of the 1990s. I spent alternate weekends with the writers Ogaga
Ifowodo and Akin Adesokan in Ithaca, the painters Victor Ehikhamenor and Victor
Ekpuk in Maryland, or the novelists Maik Nwosu and E.C. Osondu in Syracuse. The
poet, Obi Nwakanma, made infrequent visits to our axis from his base in
Missouri.
In the Spring of 2005, I co-taught a funded graduate seminar
in African and African American drama with Professor Charles Dumas, an African
American actor-Professor who has featured in a good number of Hollywood films
and also makes appearances in the television drama, Law and Order. We had
enough grant money to take the entire class to stage productions of Black plays
in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York. Towards the end of the semester, we
got word that an August Wilson play was on at the Yale Repertory theatre.
Charles could not come along so I had to drive the entire class of ten white
students to New Haven, Connecticut. It didn’t take long into the play before I
realized to my horror that I didn’t understand anything the African American
actors were saying! Not a word. I strained and stretched my ears to no avail.
This was pure Ebonics. The sort of fast-paced Ebonics that always stands
between me and one of my favorite comedians, D.L. Hughley. This, however, was
my first blood and flesh contact with Ebonics. None of my African American
brothers and sisters used it to interact with me in our cocooned sphere in
academia. As my frustration mounted, I had to rely on my students to whisper
things to me. What’s he saying? What’s she saying? I kept asking. Then another
shocking realization: here was a Black Professor asking his White students to
interpret and make sense of Black actors for him! Suddenly, the Atlantic Ocean
and the four centuries that stood between the African American and me were no
longer the stuff of literature and history books or scholarly discourse. There
it was inside that theatre, the tragic separation, requiring the separator to
serve as bridge and reconnect what s/he separated! In Yale of all places!
This jolting contact with non-academic, non-mainstreamed
African American idiom was only the beginning of a series of events that would
take me to Black America, away from the ostracism of academe. Shortly after the
incident at Yale, I received an invitation from an old Nigerian friend who had
made it to America on a diversity visa lottery and was living on Staten Island,
New York. As we hadn’t seen each other in years, I wrote down his address and
promised to spend an entire weekend with him. The trouble with mapquest is that
it takes you to a specific doorstep without telling you anything about the
sociology of the neighborhood. As I approached my friend’s address after a
six-hour drive from Pennsylvania, I got an eerie sense of the familiar. Apart
from the fact that I was familiar with the ghetto in West Africa and had
visited South African townships, years of reading African American writing and
watching media stereotypes of the ‘hood’, especially blaxploitation films, had
given me a fairly good mental picture of America’s black ghetto. Could my
Nigerian friend possibly be living in the ghetto? Everything around me looked
very much like the mental image I had of the hood.
My suspicions were confirmed when I pulled up in front of my
friend’s huge apartment complex. He was waiting for me in front of the building
and rushed to my car as soon as he saw me. We barely exchanged pleasantries
before he exclaimed: “you can’t park here. I’ll take you to a friend’s place.
You’ll leave your car there and we’ll come back here by bus”. I let him in
beside me in front. “What’s the problem?” I asked. “You didn’t tell me you
drive a brand new Toyota Camry!” He explained that my car could attract hostility
from folks in the neighborhood. I was bewildered and it showed on my face. He
explained that the idea of successful continental Africans coming to flaunt
their success didn’t always go down well. I got it. I’d read the literature
about such areas of tension between continental Africans and the Black
community in America.
On the bus back to his place, I finally got to ask him why
he was living there if things were that bad. His was a classic case of the
ill-informed African giving up far better conditions back home for the American
eldorado. On winning the diversity lottery visa, he gave up a good job in
Lagos, sold his belongings, and headed out to America only to discover that his
Nigerian college of education diploma was meaningless. He moved from one odd
job to another until he ended up as a security guard on Staten Island. He
became friends with an African American co-worker who soon needed a room mate
to help with the rent. He moved in. Since he did not join the American system
at a level superior to the social and economic status of his roommate and most
of the black folk in the neighborhood, he reasoned that he was not a candidate
for resentment and intra-racial backlash. “But you, you are a Professor and all
that.”
I nodded and remarked that he had acquired some of the
inflections and tonalities of Ebonics. I told him about my Yale experience. He
laughed and confirmed that language had also been the most serious obstacle to
his integration when he moved to that neighborhood. His African American
friends had trouble with his heavily accented Nigerian English but resented it
when he confessed to having trouble with Ebonics. How could the brotha from
Africa take on airs and pretend not to understand them? Things smoothened out
progressively and he blended and made very good friends. We arrived at his
building and he led the way into the lobby. One look at my surroundings and my
heart sank. The squalor! The squalor!
I have traveled extensively in Africa. I am familiar with
all those spectacles of poverty and disease that Western voyeurs – journalists,
missionaries, NGO experts, World Bank/IMF eggheads, etc – love to present as
‘Africa’ to a Western audience high on its messianic self-image as the great
White Hope chosen by God to save the rest of us from ourselves. But nothing of
what I’d seen anywhere in Africa prepared me for that jolting contact with
American poverty and squalor. More scatological evidence of the Black condition
confronted me as we negotiated the long, dark, crowded, and grimy corridor
leading to the two-bedroom apartment my host shared with his African American
friend and co-worker. It turned out he left out one significant detail:
Rashonda, his roommate’s younger sister, was also crashing with them. Rashonda
was a single mother with two young kids from two different men: a baby mama.
This was getting uncanny. Really. I had walked into a
situation that assembled every imaginable American stereotype of the Black
community. Unfortunately, the mainstream America of gloss and chrome at the
source of these stereotypes has never tried to project mentally into the Black
condition, let alone undertake a physical pilgrimage to the territory of this
hidden and oppressed humanity. I was introduced to our African American hosts
as a cousin visiting from Pennsylvania. By now, I’d learnt that my being a
University Professor was an inconvenient detail my Nigerian friend was
reluctant to let out in the circumstances. The sociology of interactions in
that building and neighborhood was Africa on display. People moved in out of
one another’s spaces and apartments without the cold formalities that have
emptied social interaction of all humanizing value in the West. Shouts of ‘yo’
and ‘whaz up ma nigga’ were ubiquitous. Four hundred years of violent
separation from the source and they still remembered those modes of
warmth. I became part of the toing and froing between apartments and spaces. My
hosts took me to fraternize with “otha brothas and sistas”. All the places I
saw told the same story of roaches, rats, grime, overcrowding, drugs,
despondency, and hopelessness. Anger. The black anger that surprised white
America when the Rev. Jeremiah Wright treated them to an infinitesimal snippet
of the smoldering crucible they have sat on and repressed for four hundred
years. The black folk who received me so warmly were still saddled with the dud
American check that Martin Luther King had complained about so many years ago.
Some forty years after his death, they still cannot cash the check of America’s
promise: no sufficient funds.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t blend. They caught a
whiff of the continent the moment they saw me, even before my accent gave
things away. Everywhere we went I was moved by the brotherhood and fellowship
that was extended to me in the middle of so much poverty. We would gather in
someone’s apartment to drink and talk late into the night. I gave them Africa;
they gave me a Black America that had been the stuff of scholarly discourse and
texts for me until that moment. A Black America that has never gained access
into the sight, ears, and consciousness of white America. I tried to teach them
Nigerian Pidgin English and they gave me lessons in Ebonics and Black argot. Ultimately,
the interactions revealed the damage wrought by the great historical chasm. The
questions some of them asked me about Africa were simply unbelievable, as
unbelievable as some of my own long-held facile assumptions about them. The
divide and rule brainwash of America had inscribed Africa in their imagination
as a better-forgotten oasis of original savagery. To them, Africa was a
horrifying marriage of Hobbes and Conrad. “Yo, dem folks have cars in Africa?”
“Like here?” And the incredulity when my friend and I replied in the
affirmative. My friend was elated. I told you so, he gloated.
I tried as much as I could to disentangle Africa: to present
it to them as a diverse geography of some fifty-four countries as opposed to
the homogenous, singular basket of savagery that America had woven into their
imagination. As they told me about their own gory experiences in the America of
the year 2005, I had to quickly unlearn my privileges and reduce my ignorance
of the Black experience in America. Unless you’re a black person from White
settlerist South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, or Kenya, the mountain of quotidian
racial oppressions and institutionalized discrimination that African Americans
load into the expression, “white folk”, may not resonate for you as fiercely
and as urgently as it does for them. You may not start and end every sentence
with “white folk” and your interlocutors could get impatient with you. What,
for you, has become colonial history is still, for them, painful daily reality.
As I drove back to Pennsylvania at the end of what had been
a road-to-Damascus experience, my emotions oscillated between joy and sadness.
I was glad that I had had the opportunity to meet black America outside of the
gloss of seminar rooms, conference venues, and the text. I was saddened by the
realization that I was not unlike so many other continental African
intellectuals who spend decade after decade in America without ever going
beyond the Black America of the text, seminar rooms, and conference venues, and
who often indulge in authoritative pronouncements on the African American
condition. We make friends with African American colleagues. Sometimes the
friendship gets so strong we become family. Yet we hardly ever ask to be taken
to the roots and routes they navigated to academe – and the mountains they
overcame along the way. I realized I’d never been ‘home’ with any of my African
American family. I was saddened by the constatation of this grim disconnect.
Back in Pennsylvania, I phoned a cousin who was a student in Alabama. I told
him I needed a road trip in rural Alabama and Mississippi in the summer of 2005
to continue my education. He laughed and told me that what I mistook for Black
poverty in the state of New York was in fact black luxury! “I will show you
Black poverty when you come to the south.” He was right. We spent a whole month
traveling in America’s black poverty belt in the south. In certain places, it
felt like the plantation was still alive and healthy. Only Massa was gone. Here
were Americans poorer than anybody I have ever met in Africa. American towns
and neighborhoods more indigent than anything I’d seen in Africa. I traveled in
those spaces where the anger that white America doesn’t understand smolders.
Today as I listen to Barack Obama and John Edwards talk
about the two Americas that need to be brought together, I marvel at the
distance between their politician-speak and reality. Contrary to Obama’s and
Edwards’s theory, there are no two Americas. America is a minimum of four planets
separated by the gulf of violence and unending injustice: a Hispanic planet, a
Native American planet, a black American planet, and planet white America. The
first three planets orbit around the blazing fourth which has narrativized
itself as the sun. Although planet white America has been to the moon and is
assiduously studying Mars preparatory to a visit within the next twenty years,
it has never visited any of the three colored planets right there under its
nose. It doesn’t even feel the need to project mentally into those three
planets, hence the shock with which it received the so-called anger of Jeremiah
Wright.
The road to any Aesculapian contact between planet white
America and the other American planets it has never met lies first and foremost
in the de-sensitization of the most sensitive body part in planet white
America: the ears. The ears of planet white America are so sensitive that there
are way too many truths it does not want to hear about the reality of America
as lived and experienced daily by those on the colored planets it has never
visited. America’s many inconvenient truths tend to hurt those ears so it is
better to repress them. Sensitive ears and repression of the inconvenient cost
America lessons it could have learnt from Katrina and Jena. Jeremiah Wright’s
voice, screaming from the black planet, grated those sensitive ears. What I
learned from my conversations with the black America that I met in the course
of my education is the feeling that after recording successes in the Civil
Rights struggle to be seen in America, they are now simply never heard.
When those ears have been de-sensitized, America will also
have to resolve the clash between memory and non-memory. The history of America
has evolved in such a way that planet white either cannot afford the luxury of
memory or can only tolerate the most doctored, sanitized memory that eventuates
robotically in exceptional narratives of the world’s only good country. Any
contrarian memory, such as defines the trajectory and humanity of Jeremiah
Wright and black America, is a dangerous threat to the orthodoxy of a neatly
packaged national self-image. Until America resolves the clash between memory
and its negation, the words of Ralph Ellison which I encountered years ago in an
essay, “If the Twain Shall Meet”, will always be waiting for her around the
corner, just when she thinks she has turned that corner: “It would seem that
the basic themes of our history may be repressed in the public mind, but like
corpses in mystery dramas, they always turn up again – and are frequently more
troublesome”.
* This essay is dedicated to my father, Alfred Dare
Adesanmi, who flew away home one bright morning when his work was over.
** Previously published by Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.com),
SleptOn Magazine (www.slepton.com),
and The Zeleza Post (www.zeleza.com)
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Posted by Robot| 01.05.2008 00:49