ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Opinion category.

More Lagos – Noise!

This fast city, known for its dirt as for its fast cars, runs on adrenaline. Panting for air in the back of a rickety bus of uneven metals, one wonders where exactly everyone is rushing to. I had this same feeling in Chicago, but not while in a public bus. Compared to my little village in Edwardsville, Lagos feels like hell on steroids. I’ve told you about the noise, right? When you’re not being deafened by the generators from every household that have resorted to using them to supplement electricity supply, you are being hassled on the road by incorrigibly noisy vendors on the road, bus conductors, and bus drivers with lead hands on vehicle horns. Aaaargh! Give me Cougar Village. Or, at least, give me Ibadan for now.

In my room at Cougar Village, I have never put the volume of my computer up higher than 50% of the total volume, and it was always loud enough to be heard at the front door from my room on the other end of the apartment. Right now in my sister’s house, with roaming children, a roaring fan and a rumbling generator, I can barely hear anything even at my Dell Vostro 1510’s loudest volume level.

When we talk about Climate change, we have always incorrectly assumed that the culprits are big oil corporations in the Niger Delta, or big industries in developed countries. Ask me now, and I’ll tell you that fumes from Lagos generators and commuting vans, and so much of this useless noise contribute even more to the degradation of the environment. And we say the Atlantic Ocean is now encroaching on the Lagos Island through the Bar Beach. Why won’t it? The amount of heat generated by these machines should be enough to deplete even more of the ozone layer. And what about the dirt, plastic bags on roadsides that will eventually find their ways into gutters and clog the flow of water when it rains? Well, there are some working trash cans, but are there sufficient implementation of laws regarding proper waste disposals? Are there such laws to begin with? And does anyone obey them?

My suggestions would include more road signs, stop signs, speed limit signs, traffic lights, required speedometer laws for each vehicle, and a ban on all honking throughout the day. As for the generators, there’s no solution yet although I could say let’s scrap them all totally, and force everyone to get solar panels – after all, we have the sun in abundance. The world is moving everyday towards new clean sources of energy: wind, and solar. Not only to reduce pollution, it will also reduce noise, which I believe must account for much of the disruptive behavioural patterns we see manifest in much of our public life.

Pictures coming soon. Apparently I’m not as used to whipping out my camera on the streets as I was a few months ago.

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.

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.

India – Gender and Human Dignity

Here’s a guest post by a friend and colleague Catherine Xavier. In this write-up, she talks about the less talked-about “third gender” in India – a class of people maltreated and discriminated against on the basis of their sexual orientation. Read it up to see why they do not fall into the class of homosexuals or lesbians or transgenders, but a different category of men raised or conditioned from birth to behave like women. There is a Youtube video interview with one of them here, for anyone interested in further information on the matter.

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The India society is patriarchal to the core – simply stated, men rule the roost. The society in general seems to have resigned to this, while women have been forced to reconcile to be the ‘fairer sex’. However, we are a society that worships women. Our goddesses of strength, wisdom, love, and power, are all personified as women. I cannot understand that irony here; India has one of the highest rates of female infanticide and dowry-deaths, while the society and the government claim to vigorously promote the girl-child and women’s emancipation. How can a society that boasts of a rich, ancient, and varied culture simultaneously glorify and dehumanize women – how can mythical womanhood be celebrated and worshiped in the form of a goddess at the temple, while helpless women are subject to eve-teasing, torture, abuse, discrimination, and unspeakable indignity. I was taught as a young girl that there is greater modesty in ignoring the lewd comments from your male counterparts, as it saves a woman a lot of shame and disgrace – yes, the same society that celebrates week-long festivities in honor of women deities, while sublimely accepting its men resorting to eve-teasing, ogling, and trying to grab women’s breasts in crowded public places.

I could write a lot about the Indian mentality of gender discrimination and the stifling of individual feminine freedom. However, I choose to focus on that part of Indian sexuality and gender that is not broached by most Bollywood movies or Indian novels (You can find this on the BBC though). The simple truth is that the Indian society recognizes only two types of genders – male and female. We prefer to be oblivious to the third gender classification: the hijras or eunuchs.

Hijras are physiological males with feminine instincts. They adopt feminine identities and don feminine attires. The Indian society describes the hijras as ‘neither men nor women’ thereby, making them the most ostracized section of our society. Young boys with feminine instincts are a shame to their family and to the society. Most times, the family is not supportive because they fear social boycott; they abandon these young men who are forced to live with people like them, thought they are not their kith and kin. I doubt if our society recognizes the trauma that the family and the young man go through in this entire ordeal of family bonding, wanting to belong, social belonging, and social abandonment. Most times, the hijras are castrated and they earn a living by working as sex slaves, and by performing dances at the weddings and birth ceremonies of the so-called cream of our society.

It is so strange that though the hijras have a recorded history of living in groups in India since the 17 century, the Indian constitution does not guarantee them any rights – it does not even provide validity to the marriage of hijras. Ironically, the Hindu religious texts in India have several references to them since ancient times; while our society has never accorded them any respect. I am sure that in the US, there is greater privacy, legal protection, and respect for human dignity of the parents and the young man involved. In India they are a joke, everyone laughs at them, pokes fun at them, and metes out violence and abuse to them – worse still, Bollywood portrays them as comic relief. They are no special schools for them, and regular boys/girls schools do not admit hijras – hence 95-96% of hijras are uneducated; carrying with them all the evils of illiteracy – who is to blame???

I just discovered today in a conversation with a friend that the Hijras are becoming a more and more organized community in India –the faint sign of conviction of their part and an utter failure of social justice on the part of the Indian society. I was happy to hear that hijras celebrate communal fellowship and festivities every year at a temple in Villupuram district of Tamilnadu in India, and this festivity encompasses their marriage to a god ( because mortals are far too superior for the hijras, I guess), and to discuss their hijra rights. I would be very curious to see how they react – a caste of India that has endured the most unspeakable indignity and shame – they sure have a right to the heights of indignation towards a society that simply fails to acknowledge and respect human dignity. I wish a goddess could appear overnight to shed wisdom on the males and females of our society, while soothing the scars of abuse and shame endured by the hijras in India.

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Catherine is an MBA holder from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and a PhD student in the University of Arkansas.

Notes on Obscurity

by Benson Eluma

Sister Mustard died someplace

Mount Ebola, I think, in Africa.

They planted a mine on the headstone

For a curious little boy to play with.

Kaboom! and his lost limbs made

A weeklong presence on international news.

Sister Mustard turned

And smiled in her death…

The ants worked hard in the sun

Following the ancient wisdom.

But this year the rains did not fall; they waxed

Lyrical, Hard Rock melting sand-home and barn.

Afterwards, camera crews rushed

To scoop water; their

Precision instruments detailing

The wreckage to the last microscopic fractal…

The poetaster wrote his dying song

After so many years of ruing the ignominy

Of his verse, the evil recalcitrance of his stylus.

He sent it out, a warning to others trying the impossible.

But the critics, hard up for new conundrums,

Overturned every stone;

They scoured every cave

To lay laurels at his unmarked grave…

And Daodu, born on the first day

In the Year of Jubilee, a complete set of teeth

Fortifying his infant gums,

Died a plenipotentiary with 300 monuments.

And the worms went to work on the annals.

And floods ravaged the city year after year.

And finally a generation arose in whose memory

Daodu’s name, undecipherable, was a dead talisman…

Used by permission.

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