ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Observations category.

Blending In

Technically, I should be sleeping. I have a debt of more than 24 hours on my body clock. My eyes close by themselves at intervals, yet instead of going to bed, I am here. A few minutes ago, on the way back from a short lunch at one of Lagos’ famous malls, I slept off in the bus and missed my stop. I had to pay something close to a dollar to get back home. Yes, I should sleep now. But not before this short rant of my first culture shock experiences:

1. Private and public vehicles delight in honking their car horns every five seconds, for NO GOOD REASON! I’ve never seen this kind of madness anywhere else. Well, I may not have been to many places, but this must rank as one of the biggest nuisances of Lagos (nay, Nigerian) roads. Gosh!

2. More than half of the trash baskets in the public places are open in the bottom, thus pretty useless. Those that are not are almost full, rendering useless also the concept of a clean and fresh-smelling environment.

3. There is no visible speed limit on the roads. Although I’ve never felt this way before, I suddenly realized that I’m afraid to now commute in Lagos’ public transports anymore. They drive too fast, and too roughly. There is no visible speed limit on the roads. Most of the transport vans don’t have working speedometers, and there are no responsive health workers on the road in case of emergencies.

4. I’ve been prepared for NEPA (the electric power people), but not in this way. I got out of the airplane to discover that the escalator in the airport didn’t work. I had to walk on it like the normal steps. I heard that last week, there was a power outage at the airport, a now regular occurrence, that lasted almost three hours. Question then: how did the captain of my plane successfully land the plane without working satellite guiding devices at the airport that uses electricity?

5. As for the rest, I’ve discovered that the food in restaurants are not as nice as I envisioned them to be. And they’re more expensive than they should be. Heat is unbearable, and I can’t go out topless as I’d have loved to do. They might mistake me for a miscreant. What else is there to do than to come back here and rant?

It’s not really culture shock. It is just seeing things from a better perspective. More sanity can definitely be introduced, especially from the very little things. Welcome to Lagos, traveller. Just wait a few days more, then pack your things and head home to Ibadan. Maybe the heat will abate. And maybe you’ll at least get some sanity in your lush quasi-country/University life. For now, off to bed I go.

The Eagle Has Landed

I arrived in Lagos Yesterday.

Well, I don’t know if it was really “yesterday” or “today” because I’ve had to reset my wristwatch so many times. Right now, it says a quarter past 5am on Sunday. On my laptop whose time still reflects Edwardsville, it says 11.16pm on Saturday. I am sleepless. I have been travelling for 24 hours, but now I don’t even know which of the days I want to occupy. Let me just take Sunday.

I have not eaten anything other than a few fried chicken wings that my sister thought might do me some good. Really? Even with this overweight size of mine? When I left here in August, I was about 176 pounds. Now I’m about 200, and what do I get for that? Some more fried chicken. I’ve danced, and sweated, and hugged my nephews and nieces some of whom I’m meeting for the first time. I’ve now also been bitten by wicked mosquitos as I type this post. Returning from a one-year trip abroad has certainly put some things in perspective. Electricity, area boys, police, stable internet, time zones, and fried chicken.

Let me thank you all faithful blog readers, those who leave and those who don’t leave comments. I thank the wonderful staff of the foreign languages department, SIUE, for a wonderful session. Belinda Carstens-Wickam, Douglas Simms, Tom Lavalle, Olga Bezhanova, Mariana Solares, Debbie Mann, Yvonne Mattson, Joaquim, Heidi, Carolina; and the workers in the language lab: Catherine, John, Rachael, Elizabeth, Heather, Scott, Joey, Elvira and everyone else I may have forgotten to mention. I thank Prof Ron Schaefer, the director of International Programmes, Sandra Tamari who also works in the same office, and every other person in the IP who made my stay very pleasant, even though they don’t read my blog. I thank the students from both semesters for a wonderful time. I also thank my friends in Cougar Village, Mafoya, Chinomso, Ikechukwu, Jocy, Chris, Ben, Mahsa, Iman, Yo, Keshi, and Afua. See you guys soon. I miss you already.

This is not the end, dear blog readers. I am going to tell you about the trip, and some observations from France and New York. Right now, I just want to figure out which of these time zones I want to adjust to.

Travellers, we all.

The thought had crossed my mind at the dinner table at the house of a Palestinian professor of history Tamari’s on Wednesday evening. On one side of the table was my head of department, and on the other was Reham the Egyptian. Joyce, the oldest, was American, and I am you-already-know-what. The head of department, had just made a startling confession: her parents were German Jews who fled from Germany in 1939, first to Canada, and then to the United States. The confession, in its ordinariness, however brought a new dimension to a conversation on history, the commonness of our humanity, and migration.

Where are Jewish people originally from? I don’t know. But now they occupy the Palestinian region as a Jewish state of Israel. They used to live all over Europe and the Middle East for thousands of years. Sitting down there trying to get it all in, here was what my brain was trying to process: Jewish people in Europe (who had gone there from the middle east) were gassed in millions and some managed to flee to other parts of the world, adopting a new nationality and a new home. (Well, not quite. Belinda has confessed to have felt a certain homeliness anytime she visits Germany, in spite of the contradictions of the occasional meeting with descendants of people who just a couple of decades ago could have murdered her parents or sent them to the gas chamber.) As a result of their new nationalities, these travellers have become a new people: Americans. Not even a Jewish Americans or an American Jew, she is every inch American albeit with a certain longing for the beauty of Germany. Had Hitler not begun killing, she probably would not have been born, or she might not have been born in the United States. And there won’t have been the State of Israel, perhaps, and the displacement of the Palestinian people. But now, she’s no longer German. She wasn’t born in Germany; nor is she really Jewish. She doesn’t practice Judaism. Alright.

Now, our host professor is Palestinian. His people are regularly killed and/or victimized in Gaza and parts of today’s Israel by settlers (or state soldiers meant to protect settlers) many of whom are likely descendants of survivors from the pogrom of 1940 Europe. A sign at the entrance to his house says “No more war” or something to that effect. He is one of the softly-spoken people I’ve ever met. Brilliant and level-headed. He is a professor of history and he is as knowledgeable in the Palestinian cause as he is in the subject of the Jewish holocaust. Had he lived in Palestine or Israel today, he could have been killed by suicide bombers, or the Jewish state soldiers either for looking like a terrorist or throwing a rock at a soldier, or arrested for being outspoken against the state. Had Hiltler not started killing Jews in Europe, he could also have been born and raised in Palestine, where his ancestors lived and had land before they were evicted, living there till old age, and not ever having to have migrated to the United States, or meeting someone like Belinda, or myself.

Of course, if instead of coming to the West, Belinda’s parents had instead gone with the folks who founded the State of Israel, she could be a citizen of Israel by now, or a settler on occupied areas, or a supporter/descendant of those who evicted Palestinians from their lands, some of who might be related to Tamari. Just sitting there in their midst brought to me a new sense of amazement, at how something as little as migration could have changed the course of history.

Full Circle – Short Faction

Written at Cougar Village.

Looking up into the predictable night sky, he saunters home. In other climes, he might have been a little high on the freedom of the night to surprise, and to appease his seething exhilaration and bubbling fears. Here, he just paces home in little steps that completely ignore the need for caution, yet a buoyancy remains. Even the geese have gone to bed, and the road is free of any surprises. Only the warm wind blows from all directions, and his open shirt blows with it opening spaces around his armpit and exiting through his similarly open cuffs. From afar and against the background of light – except for the colour of his shirt or the size of his frame – he could have been mistaken for a waving flag, or a moving scarecrow.

Once upon a time this was home to more shuffling feet and heaps of snow. But that was then. Once upon a time, trees and their leaves that now whistle with the night shedding grains of white pollinated flowers were only high and dry, and winter shook the alien city to the barest limit of its own survival. Then there was nothing but death and dryness, and a certain music to the melancholy of heavy and seemingly wounded trees. It was seasonal. Hope had sprung up later like the flowers that now scatter on his head from on top of the tall pine trees. All in one night the change came, suddenly and without warning. Even to him a traveller, it was an unexpected miracle of a seasonal revival.

Like a visitor in a now growing market place, he looks around again with a certain brightness. The fears that returned were about how in a different place and a different time this might have been unwise, coming home at this time of the night. In his mind was something similar to a mother’s scoff of a rage: “Bloody fool, you toss your life around like a game of cards.” The delight in mischief of such confrontations has gone now, and only a nostalgic smile remains drawn on the face of the dark night sky that breathes on his upward gaze. Like looking at a mirror of one own smeared reflection, he muses, head up towards a direction that could only be east, judging by the position of the crescent moon. Home lies there, he whispers.