Landing in Lagos

You are immediately disoriented.

“Welcome to Lagos”, the Amharic tinted English crackles from the planes speakers, jerking away from you the few minutes of sleep that you finally managed to wrestle from the large man who has been snoring loudly in the two and a half seats next to you. Meron (by her nametag), the beautiful airhostess, who spent most of the flight shooting you baleful looks because your elbow kept bumping into her ass as she pulled her cart past you, gives your another dirty look.

You feel terrible and want to explain to her that it is impossible to keep your arm tucked in because half your seat is occupied by a snoring mass of Nigerian. Unfortunately Meron doesn’t seem to know too much English. The full extent of her vocabulary, which you got quite familiar with during your quest for alcohol to drown out the incessant snoring, seems to be “yes” and “no” and “more”. 

You collect your bag from the overhead storage bin while hoping that somehow it falls on the head of huge Nigerian. It would be painful for him no doubt, but no less than the five hours of torture he just subjected you to.

Meron is standing by the aircraft door. The standard issue airhostess smile plastered across her face slips off when you step up to leave. Enjoy the rest of your day, you say to her. She says nothing back. You stop feeling bad and wish her and her ass a good life.

Not much has changed in the six months since you were last home. There is a man standing next to an open vending machine, vending the things within. One broken vending machine, one job, and one infinitesimal increase in employment percentage: progress-progress; fitting for Africa’s newest-biggest economy.

You drag your suitcase behind you in no rush. In truth you’ve always held those who run to the immigrations desk in the highest contempt. We will all still be stuck here, sweating by the carousel two hours from now, regardless of the rushing. But ahead they rush, running down the escalator (de-facto stairs). You finally make it to immigrations and you’re the last one in line; at least you think you are until you feel the potbelly pushing insistently into the curve of your back.

It’s two and a half chairs from the airplane come once again to bring hell to you. You decide to ignore him. You shuffle your feet forward giving him a good amount of space. Yet almost immediately you feel his potbelly pressing tenaciously into your back: simultaneously a metaphor for impatience and a bad fuck(in truth, these are the same thing). You stand there seething, hating every inch of his midsection. You imagine yourself sprouting claws at the elbows and ripping into him, freeing him from the burden of the cursed child that must surely reside within.

You shuffle your feet forward, but this time the pressure doesn’t even leave your back. You now have a pot-back. Fucking beautiful. It can’t get any worse you think, but then two chairs decides to join in the conversation three rows over, about how much worse the Nigerian airport is than “insert name of western country short, balding, random just flew in from”. It’s the same text as the last time, just a different group.

“THIS AIRPORT IS SO DISORGANIZED… ”

OUR LEADERS ARE SO CORRUPT…”

“IF ONLY THEY WOULD DO IT THE WAY THEY DO IT IN X”

X = {AMERICA! BRITAIN!  CANADA! WHAT-WHAT! ILU-OYINBO!}

They shout at each other their precious civilization, legitimized by having been abroad, retreating with each shout. Behavior they would never dare exhibit in the “better” countries they just flew in from. Two-chairs shouts the loudest. His potbelly is jiggling now. You must admit, it feels good to have that back support after nearly forty hours of airline economy seating.

But enough is enough, you turn and stand perpendicular to him, arms akimbo, thinking that maybe with your elbow in his gut he will take the hint and back off. He does not. He presses into your elbow. It must be that you offended one of your ancestors when your arm brushed against Meron’s ass, or two chairs has decided that this is a game that he must win by any means necessary.

He leans even further forward to get closer to the conversation, chest pressed against your shoulder. You turn and face him.

Sir, with all of the respect I have left for you, have you heard of this wonderful idea called personal space? You may not know it, since you have been abroad so long and may have forgotten but in Nigeria the line does not move any faster even if you try to stand inside me.

Two-chairs doesn’t seem to move away, but somehow the belly retreats. The pressure is gone, you are healed, praise Jesus!

“Young man, you don’t talk to your elders that way.” He retorts after your back has been turned for the duration of five “STEP-FORWARD!”s.

Sorry, you mumble. Better to say sorry than to face the drama that could ensue should he decide to start shouting. Eventually it is your turn and you step up to the counter.

“Where are you coming from”?

Durham, North Carolina.

“Is that America?”

Yes.

“What did you bring for us? Leave it here”

Nothing O, sir. I’m a poor student on scholarship. My parents don’t have much.

“I know you’re lying but oya go, can’t you see there are people behind you?”

Yes sir, sorry sir.

You head over to the carousel, which has not even started rotating. And promptly begin sweating.You decide that you will learn the words “I’m terribly sorry about what happened, it really was the situation I found myself in,” in Amharic. That way, the next time you see Meron; you can properly apologize to her. Maybe that way the universe will forgive your sins, sanctify your elbows and be gentle the rest of the six weeks you’re home.

Lost in translation... really just lost

If the worth of a son is based on how often he calls his mother, then I am an extremely worthless son. Thankfully, other things like irrational, unconditional love factor into the grading process. But whenever I do get around to calling my mother, I squeeze as much information into our conversations as possible. I tell my mother everything.

I like to hold our phone conversations purely in Yoruba because Yoruba feels like home. During our last phone call, I tried to tell my mother that classes might be cancelled because of an impending snowstorm. I could not. There is no word for snow in Yoruba and that is how things should be. In my opinion, there should not be a word for the cold stuff in any language. Something so unpleasant does not deserve the honor of a name, but I digress. The point is that lately it is harder and harder to translate my first world problems into my mother tongue.

It is not that Yoruba lacks for expression. There are Yoruba ideas you can never fully unpack in English. How do you even begin to render the complexities of “Abiku” or the impish pepper that lies at the heart of “Agbaya”? Even my name, Oladimeji, I struggle to force into English confines. Whenever I am asked, “what does it mean?” I am tempted to reply “…just that. Oladimeji”. In truth the English language is too narrow to contain the nuances that are immediately obvious when I say the name to another Yoruba speaker.

But as I spend time away from home, I find myself having to switch into English more often than I would like during phone calls. How do you describe things like snow days? Finally finding the sweet spot on the shower dial? Insomnia cookie == life? The frustrations of Internet access at UNC? I could choose to do so, but the necessary convolutions detract from our communication. Also calling Nigeria is expensive; every word must count.

I don’t know what this all means, if I did I would not be writing about it. Maybe it is evidence of my growing multiculturalism, this switching back and forth. Maybe I should move to back to my father’s village, start a farm and never have to speak English again. Maybe this is really, really pointless navel gazing. But what I do know is that slowly, and these days more quickly so, my phone calls with my mother do not feel as much like home as they used to. These days almost nothing feels like home. 

Emmanuel

Dear Emmanuel, 

I have thought of you often these past two days. And my thoughts birthed words, yet I wish I had more than words to give. Perhaps life? I wish I could give you life anew. But know this, you Sir are loved and loved greatly. 

A man wants to be angry, but who shall a man be angry at?

A man wants to curse the gods for blind puppeteers but

Which gods shall a man curse? Because a man wonders at

The madness of a world where the fruit is given bitter and taken just

As it grows sweet? A man wonders at the madness of a world where

So many struggles end in a pool of placid water. A man shudders at the
Darkness that crept into the world when a light that a man saw
Bright burning? Snuffed out. A man trembles at the gaping hole in reality.
A man shudders, a man trembles, a man curses, cries and curses even more
But nothing a man would do can bring a brother back. It is the lot of all men
To die, but a man wishes that the flame knew the length of the wick.
Perhaps a brother would burn less brightly? But a man weeps for a brother because
A brother was brightly burning. A man weeps for a brother because
A brother would have lit the way for many. A man weeps for a brother because
A brother will be missed. A brother will be sorely missed. So a man will weep
But not for long. Because a man knows a brother would have picked him up
From where he lay weeping. So a man will smile, because the world may be mad
And the gods may be blind and the fruits may never taste sweet. But a man will
Smile because a man knew a Brother.

Dear Future Dimeji

 At the start of my second year at ALA I realised that I was having an existential crisis.

It really hit, like a well aimed dodgeball to the gonads, when one day I was sitting in a physics class staring into empty space, chatting with Sprinkles the rainbow unicorn.  In the chemistry and further math classes earlier that morning, I had lengthy conversations with the chief of the squirgibble gnomes, who are the unicorn’s neighbours and blood-sworn enemies. You see there was a patch of sweet-coconut-bread-tree land right between them, and they could not agree on how to divide it. I had to settle the squirgibble-unicorn dispute or there would be civil war and the end of the world as we know it. In front of the classroom, the teacher went on and on about some physics-y thing or the other.

I held up a hand to silence Sprinkles.

“What the hell am I doing here?”

I looked up at the board with no interest whatsoever in the numbers that filled it, numbers that would have had me drooling two years ago. Numbers that, like the thought of the Sodexo lunch that afternoon, slowly sucked the will to live from within me, viciously pounding my psyche into submission until I put my head back on the lab table and went back to listening to Sprinkles’ woes.

Seventy-five minutes later I sleepwalked out of that classroom with all the vigour of a sack of straw. But in my physics induced vegetative state, I knew two truths. The first was that the loss of the Squirgibble gnomes and the rainbow unicorns would be no great hurt to mankind, let them have their petty civil war and wipe each other out. The second was that I would fail physics and chemistry and further math and every other subject I was currently taking, because I simply did not give a damn.

I had no idea what I was doing in school, but you don’t go telling that to your Nigerian parents. And if physics, chemistry and further math are all you’re good at, you don’t go telling that to anyone at all. I couldn’t even tell Sprinkles because he was busy working himself up into a frenzy over sweet-coconut-bread trees. I was royally screwed.

I needed to find something new to do or fail; fail terribly. And my ego does not handle failing too well. So I decided to go with the best option possible; the utterly dramatic. In a feat of bravado, I dropped all of my subjects and took up Literature and Economics. Admittedly a pretty dangerous and might I add half-witted move for a person in their second year of A-levels, but in my defence I needed the excitement.

And for a while the excitement kept me going, the thrill of knowing absolutely nothing and thus having something to prove. It kept me up late at night studying. But it was not a passion for the subjects that kept me going, but my ego. So the moment my ego became satisfied and I felt I had nothing else to prove, my Squirgibbles and Unicorns returned to me; albeit this time with a different quarrel.

There I was sitting in my strategic sleeping position in Economics class. It was in the right hand corner and Rima’s head always seemed to block Mr Kangami’s view of me. I had rolled up my sweater and made a really nice pillow when they came. You see Jack had planted his giant beanstalk smack in the centre of Sweet-coconut-bread tree land. So they both wanted to armour up and head into the sky, challenge the fee-fi-fo-fum giant, recapture Jack and bring him back to pay for his crimes. How dare he plant the giant beanstalk there? Who did he think he was? Something had to be done.

And I agreed wholeheartedly. I returned to further math halfway through the year. And again for a short while, the thrill of having something to prove invigorated me. I stayed up late studying, turning myself into a hermit and estranging my friends.

But you see further mechanics is a cruel mistress, she loves none and if you seek to master her, you must be ready to be humbled. I did not have the time to be humbled, final exams were less than two months away. So after receiving three consecutive U grades in further mechanics, I realised that I was fighting a losing battle.

For the first time in my life I conceded defeat to a subject. It was EXHILARATING!!! to say the least. Further mechanics taught me a valuable lesson in humility. I bear the scars of my dance with her openly, but I will say this, I could have tamed her, I just did not give myself enough time.  (Yeah right)

By this point there was hardly any time left in the academic year anyway, so I carried on with almost no interest in what I was doing. I took up a million hobbies; origami, drawing (yes, I tried drawing), ken-ken, skateboarding. But none lasted long enough.

I slowly learnt to ignore my restlessness, ploughing through my books like a crazed bull, becoming nocturnal, giving my computer away and staying in my room for days all in the effort to study. I had no taste for the subjects I was doing, but I have developed a strong liking for success. And success meant passing and to pass I had to study.

But since coming home, my uncertainty has come back to plague me. I am sad to say that I am not looking forward to college with as much excitement as I should, because I have no clue what I want to do there and two years is too short a time for me to explore all that there could be.

Two years ago I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to study Mathematics and become the guy who solved the millennium problems, all seven of them. I wanted to win a Field’s medal. Today I have no idea what I want to do with my life and it scares me. What scares me even more is that I find myself listening to my father and his constant suggestions of becoming an accountant. And what scares me the most is that it slowly dawns on me that I will tread the beaten path. I will cop out and spend the next four years of my life studying engineering or something else of the sort. And I find that instead of the outrage at myself that should be, there is a cold resigned acceptance.

Oh and if you were wondering about Sprinkles and the Squirgibbles, the giant killed them and their heads hang from the giant beanstalk.

The End