It did not occur to me, in those early days, that America was a real and tangible event of my life; not after I formally resigned from an awesome job and carried an anxious lump in my throat in the weeks that followed; not during my 15-hour flight from Doha to Miami, when I, thinking the journey impossibly long, was sure the diesel would finish or the pilot would grow tired and dive the aircraft into the Atlantic; and certainly not when I entered Miami eventually, (precious, glossy Miami of the Will Smith fame), and saw the dented side-walks, the puddles of water pooled by the drive way and the smell of damp heat and rain that stained the air.
It was my first-time outside Africa, a fact I can casually throw around with quiet impunity now that I am inside the abroad and can see what my mates have been seeing. You know, now that I have seen the sprawling roads, stretching and stretching without a crack to interrupt, and the bright blue sky, actually clean, as if God put angels on a weekly schedule to scrub it. The sun is really bad though, worse than the hottest parts of Nigeria, but at least there is the annual hurricane scare to make us grateful and keep things in perspective. This is America! The wonder full and wonder filling land of opportunities, yet I entered it as if I was strolling down to the neighborhood chemist. So big and bright, this place, yet so small and ordinary, so broken and dented in the human flawed way, plus, you guys! The food here is horrible! Still, I cannot say that I terribly miss the grating sounds of generators or car honks in Lagos, nor do I long for that familiar rhythm from churches singing and drumming and casting out demons.
So yes, this article is not about greener pastures, it is instead about this:
I was walking through the library hallway the other day, (Adult education things!) and this guy and this girl were walking in front of me, laughing and talking, when suddenly, he reached behind and grabbed her left butt cheek. It was not a soft or shy grab, and I promise I did not mean to jump out of my skin for about three seconds, after all what does a butt exist for than to be grabbed? Right?! The only small problem was that this guy, this seventeen-year looking guy, grabbed, and he stayed grabbing, and they both walked; grabber and grabbee, perfectly in sync. So, you see, it was not the grab that made me flinch, it was the continuous ‘grabbiness’ of everything. This was the first moment it occurred to me, that finally, I was inside America.
It is through these small scattered scenes that America opens herself to me, moments like the library incident when my culturally framed perceptions of what is normal come unhinged from the mental space in which I have mounted it, where my curated ideals crash to the ground in a thousand splinters. These are the moments I realize that I have actually moved, that the world around me has changed.
I tell myself—as I breathlessly run through the road—to slow down because the pedestrian traffic sign stopped for me, because I have an entire 30 seconds to sashay to the other side, but although my mind knows the facts, my legs keep running. It was in the middle of one of these ‘runnings,’ in the middle of the road, with the clear white silence that surrounded me that a thought entered my mind: Tochi, what are you doing?
From the ‘somehowness’ of these experiences, I have come to understand that it is not movement itself that tells us things have changed, that forces us to our knees to re-invent ourselves, because a person can be in motion for the longest time, yet arrive at the same spot, with doors high enough to fence out difference, and with legs running through the road even when the world stopped for you.
It is instead, how we inhabit these new spaces – a new job, a young marriage, a new role, a new opportunity. It is how we manage surprise. For instance, there are people here who consider bread to be lunch and call indomie ‘too spicy’, who insist they cannot hear me even though we speak the same English. There are people who are neighbors for years and do not know the name of the person next door, and there are days you will learn that race is not a social construction, it is you, in a room, different, awkward. It is these slow creeping yet sudden surprising moments that remind me especially that I am too far from home.
But the thing about change is that as it happens around you, it can also happen inside you. But this change is not a flight ticket or a loud opportunity; it is how much of yourself you are open to question, how much you are willing to create spaces for things that do not look like your background, that do not sound like the voice of your mother telling you how to behave; it is an ongoing conversation between yourself and the world around you, it is learning to slow down, to not come and kill yourself and die, to know what parts you need to shed and the parts you must keep, because Fam! some things are too much to just accept. It is genuine curiosity and genuine gratitude and genuine erasure, because there are spaces you must also get up and walk away from.
It is hard to learn all these things and still hold on to teaching and writing schedules. But at least, for those of you asked me ‘how is life in America?’ Well, now you have your answer.
