Drawing the Map of Heaven: An African Writer in America

Singers

1

Leaving Home

I plan to do many things, which may not materialize. Also, I am thrust into situations I did not envisage. I no longer worry when I pray or ask for a favour and I don't get it. Many denials of supplications might be for my own good. Who knows? Who can see through tomorrow to the future? I don't know what is good for me in the long run, project and reason as I may always try to. Yet I plan what I do far ahead, and this has always helped me to realize my goals. As I revise this manuscript, I have planned ahead for many things. I have accepted a residency invitation to be at the Headlands Center for the Arts from May 5 to 19, 1999. I hope to teach from May 27 to June 30, before visiting Nigeria from July 2 to October 4. I will be going to the Valparaiso Foundation's artists' colony in Almeria, Spain, for all of November. Furthermore I hope to participate in a conference on African languages and literatures in Asmara, Eritrea, from January 11 to 17, 2000. Hopefully I will be at Bellagio in Italy from June 27 to July 28, 2000; and at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair from July 29 to August 8, 2000. I may half-believe in destiny, I may believe in one's capabilities and the will to exercise them; but basically I try to believe in myself. What any human being has achieved, I can if I have the ability, necessary tools, and determination to also succeed. And those tools are there for whoever seeks them with heart, head, and soul. There is no magic to achieving one's goals.

Raised at Ibada Village in Okpara, I had no dream of America. The only American symbol in the village, which I was then not even aware of, was the dollar. My old Urhobo people call money "idolor, a corruption of dollar". We borrowed many words from outsiders, but only that from the Americans who were relatively unknown in the African world of the 1940s and 1950s. Words for gold, table, spoon, plate, shoes, and clock, among others, derive from the Portuguese who were the first Europeans to meet my people. The British later came with imperial ambitions on our area and had been there as colonizers for over fifty years before I was born in 1948. My grandfather, who so much respected his Benin ancestry, cursed the British for humiliating and exiling Oba Ovoramwen in 1897. He was a small boy then, he told me. He sang the song that sprang up on every lip at the time:

Walk or run,

what should I do?

Will I still meet

the Oba of Uselu?

They have taken him

from us and sent him

away to Calabar.

Walk or run,

what should I do?

My grandfather and my father, who was not yet born at the time of this act of savagery, told in detail the gruesome massacre by the British that I was to read about later as a civilized people. The soil of Benin is still red up till now with the blood of those massacred by the British for them to show superiority to an African monarch. Of course, the foreign soldiers looted everywhere of its bronze and ivory and enriched themselves. Civilization to many involves mass murder or robbery of those whose land and wealth they covet, I thought.

We never had any television or radio in the village, so there was no way of hearing about American or British heroes. There was a peaceful world there that I enjoyed, fishing, farming, tapping rubber, and just playing. I did not read any meaning to the spate of Churchills and Hitlers several years older than me but sometimes playing with me. It would be many years later that I would connect them to World War II. One Churchill from Isoko would be my contemporary at the University of Ibadan. Another Churchill became king of Agbon, my native kingdom. Of the Hitlers, Itila, one was my best friend who would drop that appellation for Victor. He metamorphosed from a vanquished suicide to a victor! Another Hitler was my cousin—he was left-handed in the community of right-handed people, but never surrendered to shouts of elders to change hand or at best be ambidextrous.

At Ibada Village, the Germans and the British were the same white people manoeuvring to dominate the world. It did not matter to these villagers that one lost and the other won. They were all bent on conquest of other peoples and stealing their wealth. Eisenhower's name did not get through to my people who during British colonization would be fed with tales of British heroism and the denigration of everything American, especially the education.

By the time for my secondary school, I left Urhoboland for St. George's Grammar School at Obinomba, where I met an American for the first time. She was Miss Mary Caryl. She was a Peace Corps volunteer and was very close to the reverend father who was our principal. She was not a problem to us students who felt that might be the way white people behaved and lived in spite of their official roles!

Miss Caryl did not interest me with America either. She dressed in tight jeans, which were not always neat. Our women tied wrappers or wore gowns. She smoked furiously at your face as she talked to you. Her teeth were dark and I tended to look away whenever she opened her mouth half-hollow some days, full on others. I did not know about false teeth or dentures then. You could smell her from the cigarettes. Very few men I knew smoked then and no Urhobo woman smoked cigarettes. Grandma had her snuff, and she smoked a pipe. To see a woman in dirty jeans and always brandishing a stick of cigarette was what those who came from cities told us was part of the lifestyle of prostitutes. Miss Caryl was our French teacher and was definitely not a prostitute, very unlike those women in Okoye Street in Warri who could not live without male customers. She brought old books, which even then I knew were not the best for me to read. And she was always condemning the Soviet Union and I knew that she was part of a clever unarmed war being fought between America and the Soviet Union in the 1960s.

It was towards the end of my undergraduate years that I started to have mixed opinions of America. I had demonstrated with my fellow students many times against America, Britain, France, and Portugal. I had been bussed to Lagos to chant anti-Yankee slogans. I had hurled missiles at the Embassy compound, but they of course fell short of changing American foreign policy, which almost all my generation of students opposed. We were sure we knew what the CIA was capable of doing. I did not know about de-classification of papers then, but we knew that the CIA participated, colluded, or collaborated in the killing of our hero, Patrice Lumumba. In the play written on the Congolese nationalist, I played Frances, his daughter. We knew those who would always want us to be ruled by corrupt leaders so that we would stagnate. We knew the international wizards and witches that plagued our continent. We knew everything!

How it all began I don't now know, but Joseph Bruchac, an American writer and editor, had served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana and got to know many African writers. By my last year at the University of Ibadan in 1971, I got to know him. I sent him some of my poems, some of which he published in The Greenfield Review. In that poetry magazine I was to meet Syl Cheney-Coker, George Awoonor-Williams, Ossie Enekwe, and Morgan Owhovoriole. Later Joe published my first collection of poems, Children of Iroko & Other Poems, almost all of which I had written as an undergraduate. His encouragement and Professor Harold Whitehall's had made me take writing poetry seriously.

Joe Bruchac had studied at Syracuse University and mentioned it to me that he studied creative writing there. Later I turned down an offer to do an M.Litt. programme at the University of Leeds, England, to go to Syracuse University for the M.A. in creative writing. The deciding factor was not a preference for England or for the United States; they were about the same to me. Rather, it was my desire to pursue writing poetry. Maybe if there was a graduate programme in creative writing at Ibadan or around, I would have gone in earlier than when I went to Syracuse. If I had gone to Leeds, I might not be in America today. But maybe I would still be here. After all, Wole Soyinka who inspired me to apply to Leeds is today in the United States. My friend Niyi who studied at Leeds before going to Canada is also here today. As I have said, there are paths perhaps prepared for me to tread no matter how much I want to avoid them.

If there had been no death, Grandma Amreghe would be around to smile confidently and say, I told you that you would go very far. Indeed, very far I have come from Ibada Village that is no more—it has been abandoned for Okurekpo, as the old village that had been abandoned to create it. The world is always changing faces and we are changed by it. So Ibada Village is gone. Even when living there, a lot of changes were taking place.

Returning there after my undergraduate years, Agbene had gone mad; my friends Iboyi and Godwin stuck there. Grandma saw me through college before dying and being buried in Okurekpo where she would not have liked to live. But Uncle Onosigho, her senior son, took the decision to bury her in the new compound that we were moving into in Okurekpo. In spite of its being overtaken by weeds, Ibada Village of my youth is frozen fresh in my adult mind.

So I have taken a very long and tortuous way to America. I did not start from Ibada Village, nor from Okurekpo to which the Bedford lorry was a great novelty. The journey started long before I realized it in the trans-Atlantic flight from Lagos to New York. The preparations took a long time. It began from Obinomba, the Catholic grammar school of priests and Peace Corps volunteers. Then Ibadan, where I took part in many demonstrations against neo-colonialistic acts of the West as in Guinea Bissau and the French open secret collusion with apartheid South Africa in armaments. I fell in love with poetry, which possessed me, and has taken me wherever it wishes. It was the University of Maiduguri that offered me a fellowship to study at Syracuse; it was the same University of Maiduguri's parochial policies that later drove me to Whitman College, Walla Walla, the beginning of my second American sojourn.

* * *

These are trying times in Africa and for Africans worldwide. These are selfish and greedy times in which motives and actions are suspected. Many Africans would impugn that there is no business for an African writer outside Africa, more so in the United States of America. After all, America not only heads the Atlantic Alliance but also controls the world capitalist megamoths of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. These names evoke bad feelings in Africa and are loathed and scorned more than witches. Since generally many Africans believe that America and most European countries pursue policies that negatively affect Africa, there are those Africans who see African writers in Europe and North America as having jumped ship—the economically sinking craft of Africa—for the First World comfort and convenience. Such writers could be said to be in league with the lords of the poor.

Andrew has checked out, they used to say in Nigeria in the 1980s. Andrew was the male academician on Nigerian television used to criticize the brain drain. In the later 1980s so many highly qualified medical doctors and university teachers left Nigeria to take up jobs in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Many concerned individuals cried out against the exodus. The Government set up a committee to examine the phenomenon of the intellectual exodus but its recommendations to stop the flight were neither published nor implemented. This inaction on the side of the government to implement the recommendations of the committee it set out is a common plague that afflicts Nigeria and perhaps many other African countries. National problems can be identified but there is no strong will to solve them. Many of the uneducated military leaders were quoted as saying that whoever wanted to leave should leave. What a pity, when a leader would drive many of the most talented citizens out of his country!

On visits to Nigeria in the early 1990s, I was confronted with the question, Have you checked out? I am working in the United States but have not checked out, I would tell my questioners. I was on a sabbatical leave, which I had extended indefinitely for family reasons. Army officers, university teachers, and business people, among others, asked this question. There was the unkind suggestion that those who stayed home were patriots and those who left had betrayed the motherland (or the fatherland?). Thus those who were home were on the moral high ground of patriotism. Of course, most of these had the least claim to patriotism. The military were literally looting the national treasury and so felt contented. In fact, the saying Power sweet-o was on every military officer's mind. It was good to be a general, even if you would never fight any war before being summarily retired with full benefits. The businessmen, friends, mistresses, relatives, and cohorts of the military always touted the slogan No place like Nigeria. I wished every other Nigerian in the corrupt and harsh circumstances could say the same.

Many academicians were behaving like flies, unashamed of and indifferent to the overwhelming dirt around them—they had resumes on the ready to submit to whoever became head of state or military governor for a ministerial or commissioner's appointment. It did not matter to them who came to power, a dog, a goat, or leopard with a human mask—my learned brothers and sisters would pay homage and besiege the beast for the position of adviser or whatever is available. There is neither honour nor integrity in the academy of flies. Many academicians remained in the university only waiting for the least opportunity to leave for a more lucrative political appointment. I had earlier witnessed in Maiduguri lecturers appointed managers and directors of government-owned banks. Not that these were accountants or economists, but because they with PhDs in education and history had relations in government circles who could lobby for them.

This hypocrisy of those at home morally taunting those who left would change, as by 1992 whenever I visited home former colleagues and those who knew that you were teaching in the United States would besiege you with their resumes for assistance to get jobs abroad. The situation had become more desperate. The austerity measures of Shehu Shagari's administration that we cried so loudly against were child's play compared to the IMF-imposed strangulation of Ibrahim Babangida. The rule of the hyenas had begun. Those who did not answer me when I sent them fellowship application forms earlier now literally begged that I should send them air tickets and letters of invitation to visit so as to melt into the American cultural pot. At the Women of Africa and the Diaspora (WOMAD) Conference at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1992, married female professors were asking (I believe without their husbands' knowledge) to be helped abroad and that they would do anything to pay back. I wondered if they understood the implication of their prostitution proposal. Entering the United States became more difficult with time, and try as much as you could it was not easy to help anybody come in. As we used to say in Warri, Express don pass!

It is true that most of those who left for positions abroad had economic reasons for doing so. There were many others who left for different reasons. The atmosphere in many universities was repressive, as many colleagues from the University of Benin would testify. In any case, most of those prepared to leave had felt like tail-less cows with sores. Only God came to their succour. Those who complained the most against the brain drain were either secure, close to the powers-that-be, or had the amorality to survive at all cost. The academicians had more than adequate copies of their curriculum vitae to sell to any dog in power for an appointment. University teaching had become a way station towards a more paying job. Professors secured positions of commissioners from the semi-literate military hierarchy. In send-off parties they were showered with expensive gifts from poor teachers, so as to be remembered once in the corridors of power. Even after the frequent cabinet reshuffles at state and federal levels, the removed ministers and commissioners never went back to the university to teach. Within a short time they had already made or stolen enough money to take care of themselves for the rest of their lives. One could have a long list of such names, professors of English, history, political science, education, and so on. I know a renowned political scientist and a linguist who should have become luminaries had they stayed in the university system rather than become government functionaries and retired young but with ill-gotten wealth. They became business contractors or career politicians from then on. Teachers at every level had lost respect, and one wonders whether those who left teaching were interested in academic life in the first place.

With so many strikes and closures, Nigerian institutions of higher learning had become a shell of what they used to be