ktravula – a travelogue!

Reading JP’s America

It’s amazing to think that an African writer/journalist had the kind of access that Nigerian writer JP Clark had to the corridors of US power in 1962 during the Medicare debates, and some of the most high-stakes political period of the country’s history. The writer, then a playwright and journalist working in Nigeria, had won a Parvin Fellowship which, at the time, had been set up to bring young African professionals to the US for one year in order to interact, socialize, learn a bit about the American political system, and gain some skills to take back to their young countries. The result of that experience, and the subsequent fallout from his abrupt ejection from the country, was his 1964 book America Their America now re-published in a 50th anniversary edition by Bookcraft, Ìbàdàn (2015).

At that time in the 60s, all of the countries on this continent had either just gained independence or were in the process of doing so. The coup d’etat hadn’t started rolling in (as they did in Ghana and Nigeria in 1966). The CIA hadn’t started getting too involved in the political process of new states that turned away from the western-type ideals enough to start helping to assassinate them. Names like Wọlé Ṣóyínká had not become household names yet, and Chinua Achebe himself was still in the United States on a different study programme. In short, it was the golden years of statehood of many African countries on the world stage, and this benefited students from the continent who took adequate advantage of America’s attempt at a global outreach through soft diplomacy. It was also during this time that Barack Obama Sr had found himself in Hawaii as a father of a new American son, Barack.

And there was JP Clark, a young and boisterous playwright and journalist from Nigeria with, not unlike what has been described of Obama Sr, an acerbic voice, a confident gait, and a snarky outlook at the elaborately choreographed introduction to the American experience, which the Parvin Program had packaged for him. Even in his own accounting of the times, he was a rude, and unfiltered guest, willing to poke where the society he found himself had decided needed to be left alone: religion, politics, and race. He spent most of his time pursuing his own creative and personal haunts than spending time participating in the rituals required of the scholarship that had brought him to the United States, and he did these all while throwing his weight and sometimes solicited opinion around, often to devastating personal consequences. In the end, his host had had enough, so they kicked him out rather unceremoniously.

The country had, until then, seemed never had such a caustic guest. It certainly had not expected it from this African, half expected to be grateful and obsequious for the privilege that the opportunity had brought, and certainly expected to take the opportunity as one that may never come again. They, apparently, hadn’t met Mr. Clark, the saucy poet, who traipsed around America among some of the most influential members of that country’s society, in culture, academia, literature, and government not quite like he owned it, but like his critical opinion should matter as much as any man, intellectual, and journalist of his competence. And why not? Was he less of a journalist because he carried a green passport or a black African skin? Is America, a country founded ostensibly on the freedom of speech, not naturally best suited for, and welcoming to critical engagement by all that live in it towards “a more perfect union”? At the time, it certainly didn’t seem that any negative or uncomfortably frank perception or opinion was expected of this stranger, and he was informed of this, subtly and directly. He didn’t care. And, today, it is in that quality of brutal honesty and self-indictment that the book America Their America earns its stripe as a cultural landmark – a work of both political, journalistic, cultural, and literary value, packing an unapologetic look at the American political and cultural landscape with an attentive recollection of one man’s travels and travails through its corridors at a crucial time.

JP Clark (Author’s photo from the 60s)

I had moments of deja vu, while reading America Their America, not just because of the eerie similarity of those times and the depicted political realities and the current one, but also because of the similarity and dissimilarity of the visiting experience of Mr. Clark and myself. He had been invited into the country as a Parvin Fellow (a fellowship that was discontinued a few years later, perhaps no thanks to his fiery and bold-faced ungratefulness for much of the fellowship except for parts of it that allowed him the freedom to travel and experience America on his own terms) and I had made my first contact with America as a Fulbright Scholar in 2009 on similar terms. Except in the location of my fellowship and the teaching responsibilities expected of Fulbright fellows, we seemed to have been invited to experience the country in much the same way, through its generosity and openness to exchange of new ideas, and packaged through a rote of American perception of itself as exceptional.

Reading America again through his eyes brought moments of intense recollection, sometimes of nostalgia, but mostly of envy for the kind of access the Parvin Fellowship offered the writer and other fellow scholars. I certainly never got a chance to visit the Capitol building in order to watch legislative deliberations or have 0ne-on-one conversations with congress people. I did walk in front of it, but only because of my own restlessness. Neither, except for my own equally deliberate and constant rebellion against the constraints of a regimented school session, did I experience a year of such intense and colourful freedom. But it is the literary and historical value of the book that packs the most punch for an interested reader as myself committed as much to its contribution to understanding the 60s and early black scholars in and out of the West and the trajectory of the early African writers’ literary voice. Mr. Clark delights both as an astute storyteller of a tale in which he’s both the hero and the villain, and a travel writer experiencing reality through a fiery literary lens.

He complements the narrative with occasional poems written at moments of distress or contemplation. This one was written while thinking of James Meredith (the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi) and composing a letter to his brother in India:

Last night, times out of dream,

I woke

to the sight of a snake

Slitering in the field, livid

Where the grass is

Patched, merged up where it runs

All shades of green – and suddenly!

My brother in India, up, stick

In hand, poised to strike –

But ah, hiimself is struck

By this serpent, so swift,

So silent, with more reaction

Than a nuclear charge…

And now this morning with eyes still

To the door, in thought of a neck

Straining under the sill,

I wake

To the touch of a hand as

Mortal and fair, asking

To be kissed, and a return

To bed, my brothers

In the wild of America!

(page 56)

Of Washington DC, he wrote, a terse indictment:

A morgue,

a museum –

Whose keepers

play at kings.

(page 184)

In each poetic offering on the state of his mind at different moments, one glimpsed doses of frustration, mirth, mischief, inspiration, and more. It was a peek into the creative potential of the – at the time – 29 year-old author. The style, in which poetry and prose were effectively deployed to serve the purpose of memorizing, would also be deployed equally as effectively in Wọlé Ṣóyínká’s The Man Died (1971).

Politically, what impressed and fascinated me, even more, is the relevance of the debates that JP Clark diligently documented of the Senate debates surrounding the passage of the Medicare Act of 1965, and how little seemed to have changed. As I write this, the US Senate has just given up on their latest attempt to repeal the healthcare law signed into effect in 2009, a law that takes care of the most vulnerable in the society just like Medicare did in 1965. And watching the US media debates surrounding healthcare as I had when I lived in Illinois in 2009-2012, the following passage seemed very familiar:

“How are you sure he wants to follow in his father’s footsteps?” I asked.

“He darned well will want to,” the man said. “Why, he’ll all be provided for. I have built this business up for what it is today so no member of my family will lack for anything.” And here he brought out another photograph, this time of the entire family, even with the old parents included. Radiant in the centre with a strapping son and two daughters on her either side was his wife.

“Now, they’re pretty well taken care of, for now and the future as far as human hand can provide.” He congratulated himself and the American system of which he was a shining ‘success’ example.

“Don’t you think by all this provision and security, you deny them their great American privilege of paying their own way through life?” I asked.

“How is that? he showed genuine surprise and disbelief.

“Well, I can appreciate the point of your doctors when they say they want no medicare for the old,” I began.

“Go on,” he prompted me, calling out for more drinks for us both in the bar where we sat.

“As I see it, the doctors seem to be insisting that every American citizen should have provided for himself fully by retirement age. So why ask government now to pay their full medical bills?”

“That’s right, boy, you’ve been following pretty close our American debate,” he cheered me on. Until I added:

“Well, it seems to me you’re denying exactly that sacred principle the doctors are insisting on by wanting to lay on everything for members of your family.”

“Young man, are you calling all my life’s effort vain? No, no, don’t withdraw or make any apologies for beliefs you honestly hold to. But tell me, as a writer, of what I don’t know, don’t you want to make money?”

(page 182-183)

As a Parvin Fellow, Mr. Clark was based in Princeton, but the traveller’s gene in the poet carried him around the country, from New York to Boston, and to DC. As a Fulbright fellow, I resided in Southern Illinois, with aspects of my work taking me to Rhode Island and Washington DC. But much of my emotional connection to Mr. Clark’s delightfully addictive rant against his uncomfortable participation in American life comes also from my hitherto lack of sufficient time and discipline to put my one-year experience into the words and images, with diligent markings of its most notable moments, as the writer has brilliantly done. America Their America was published about a year after the writer had returned unceremoniously after being kicked out of the fellowship for failing to show up in class. The closeness of that recollection to the space and time of the event’s happenstance probably helped its acerbity. But its ability to endure, even till today, as one of the most honest accounts of an African writer’s sojourn in America is tribute to the writer’s impressive talent, creative fire, and artistic integrity.

Another part of the book caught my eye:

Americans, very true to their candidatural role, like being liked a lot by foreigners. The picture they cut is of a big shaggy dog charging up to the chance caller in mixed feelings of welcome and defiance, and romping one moment up your front with its great weight, all in a plea to be fondled, and in the next breaking off the embrace to canter about you, head chasing after tail, and snout in the air, offering furious barks and bites. “Where are you from?” they breathe hot over the stranger to their shores. And before you have had time to reply, they are pumping and priming you more: “How do you like the US? Do you plan to go back to that country? Don’t you find it most free here? In Russia the individual is not free, you know, he cannot even worship God as he likes and make all the money he should.” And from this torrential downpour of self-praise the American never allows the overwhelmed visitor any cover, actually expecting in return more praise and a complete instant endorsement. God save the brash impolitic stranger who does not!

Little wonder why his visit ended with such infamy!

But such a shame that the fallout from the perception of his “ungratefulness” for writing the book had coloured the author’s subsequent negative perception among Western gatekeepers of African literature from which he never recovered. Heck, it had coloured perception on the continent itself, allowing publishers (many of which had ownership in the West anyway) to distance themselves from it. The book, for all of fifty years, remained invisible on bookshelves, earning its reputation only by word-of-mouth while other memoirs that came after it (The Man Died; 1971, Second Class Citizen; 1974) had enjoyed multiple print runs. Hard to think of any other book of such fame/infamy not having a second reprint for fifty years.

“Out of Print-Limited Availability” on Amazon today.

Yet even if we ignore the much more fruitful contribution of the author to the African literary space, the service that the presence of a book of this nature offers continues to be relevant, not just for African writers, many of whom have found less assertive ways of navigating the American immigrant experience either through soft engagement (see: Americanah, Open City, Never Look an American In the Eye), or through silence (see: Ngugi, Achebe, Soyinka), but for writers in general and for people interested in the enduring power of documentation with honesty and verve. JP Clark won’t be with us forever, but many of the issues raised by the book continue to be a relevant mirror to the American society, just as valid as those by its own active citizens, from James Baldwin to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

To call it merely an “African” classic is to do it too much disservice. It’s a classic nevertheless.

—-

(Rating 5/5)

No, Not “America”, but Love – A Review

Here are my thoughts on the final story on the Caine Prize shortlist for 2013: Chinelo Okparanta’s America. Thoughts on earlier stories are here: Bayan Layi, Miracle, Foreign Aid and Whispering Trees.

_________________

As far as the Caine Prize shortlist is concerned, no better gift could have come after last week’s unimpressive encounter with Whispering Trees than a story that is unpredictable, sweet, and delightful – a worthy end to my review of the five shortlisted stories of the Caine Prize 2013. In Chinelo Oparanta’s beautiful story of love and longing is that final elixir. It is a tale of love between two women, eventually separated by the other by the Atlantic Ocean, hence “America”, and a story-long attempt through a stream of recollections to reunite with the distant lover.

The story begins in medias res with the heroine Miss Nnenna Etoniru on the way to Lagos from Port Harcourt for a visa interview. She is hoping to head to America in order to meet Miss Gloria (whose age we didn’t quite figure out), a subject of her affection and love which had defied parental objection and entreaties. Before the trip is over, we hear about her first visit to the visa office which ended in a rejection. We also hear of the story of the relationship itself, how it began, who knew about it and what their reactions were, and what Nnenna was looking forward to in the nearest future. They had met in a school she worked, and where Miss Gloria had visited for a week, and struck up a relationship away from the eyes of their colleagues and the world. All through the story – and to great credit to the writer not falling into a temptation to write a treatise – the word “lesbianism” was never mentioned once. Instead we had the following:

“Mama still reminds me every once in a while that there are penalties in Nigeria for that sort of thing.”

The “sort of thing” taboo-speak the author used here and elsewhere enhances the sense of the abominable in the relationship, leaving us to resolve our feelings about it ourselves. In another scene where her mother walks in on a live sexual scene taking place in Nnenna’s room, the writer describes it again as follows:

“Mama stands where she is for just a moment longer, all the while she is looking at me with a sombre look in her eyes. ‘So, this is why you won’t take a husband?’ she asks.”

It is subtle so that all concerned know what the mother had just witnessed. This dexterous show-not-tell style of writing greatly benefited the story, and deserves a lot of commendation. It also ensured that the story had just those (barely) two sexual encounters in order – I would guess – to keep it special/relevant enough to matter in our minds before it became all too gratuitous. In another scene, she describes something that seemed like a woman on her period:

“There is a woman sitting to my right. Her scent is strong, somewhat like the scent of fish. She wears a headscarf, which she uses to wipe the beads of sweat that form on her face. Mama used to sweat like that. Sometimes she’d call me to bring her a cup of ice. She’d chew on the blocks of ice, one after the other, and then request another cup. It was the real curse of womanhood, she said. Young women thought the flow was the curse, little did they know the rest. The heart palpitations, the dizzy spells, the sweating that came with the cessation of the flow. That was the real curse, she said. Cramps were nothing in comparison”

It turned out eventually that there was a literal fish somewhere in the woman’s bag, and that the woman herself was pregnant. It seemed to be a special narrative strength of the writer to put things like this, or else a personal quirk derived from her own inability or reluctance to be anything but discreet with intimate subjects. I found it enchanting.

In response to the earlier-quoted charge, Nnenna responds:

“It is an interesting thought, but not one I’d ever really considered. Left to myself, I would have said that I’d just not found the right man. But it’s not that I’d ever been particularly interested in dating them anyway.”

This is where my fascination with the plot begins. Many questions arise: was Nnenna a lesbian or merely bisexual? Was she capable of ever loving a man the same way she had loved Gloria? Was Gloria the last woman she would ever love (it certainly sounded like she was the first, or we would have been told)? Is it a love based on mutual respect of mental and professional capabilities and idealism, or one fuelled by lust and desire? Is it both? Will it endure or has it already begun to fail by the time Gloria returned home for the first time after her initial departure? Is this story about an expression of sexual orientation bursting out of a repressed environment or an expression of just a particularly stimulating and enduring passion developed serendipitously for one person only? Not all of these can be answered by the quote above, or by the story itself. At the end, we are left with the endless possibilities that abound in the reunion of two distant friends in a foreign land.

I am curious about these because the story is an important intervention in the current debate about same-sex relationships. From all we know, it was a consensual relationship. But from what we hear of the interventions of Mama, it was one caused by the overbearing influence of the foreigner which Nnenna just couldn’t shake.

I found Mama‘s presence very interesting too: a Nigerian woman of the conservative Igbo culture whose strongest reaction to her daughter’s same-sex relationship was to cry a few times, and to pick out baby names in order to pressure the daughter. No church interventions. No village elders brought in. No shouting out loud until the whole town got involved and shamed the daughter. Either she is a weirdly tolerant modern Igbo/Nigerian mother, or she is a contrived flawless character that exists nowhere else but in Ms. Okparanta’s rebellious imagination. Either seemed to work perfectly, but I can accept this only because I am creatively wired to do so. It might be harder for others.

On the other hand, female-to-female sexual love seem to occupy a lower run on the outrage ladder of our society than male-to-male. The writer seemed to have acknowledged that reality in this scene, a nod to the more familiar types of Nigerian families we have come to always expect to meet in these kinds of situations:

‘You know. That thing between you two.’
‘That thing is private, Mama,’ I replied. ‘It’s between us two, as you say. And we work hard to keep it that way.’
‘What do her parents say?’ Mama asked.
‘Nothing.’ It was true. She’d have been a fool to let them know. They were quite unlike Mama and Papa. They went to church four days out of the week. They lived the words of the Bible as literally as they could. Not like Mama and Papa who were that rare sort of Nigerian Christian with a faint, shadowy type of respect for the Bible, the kind of faith that required no works. The kind of faith that amounted to no faith at all. They could barely quote a Bible verse.
‘With a man and a woman, there would not be any need for so much privacy,’

************

I enjoyed reading the story because of how it is written, error-free as you would expect from something in Granta, and the dimensions of politics, policy and advocacy that formed a humming background to the whole relationship. The right balance was struck to keep them visible enough, but not too loud as to crowd out the other details in the story. When the story is over, we forget about the oil spill and the other issues bedeviling Nigeria or the US, and are just contented that lovers are finally going to unite.

My grouse with America is with the title, an attempt to be plain and simple that ended up terribly as trite at best, and patronizing at worst. Out of about a million other titles that evoke love, expectations, guilt, distance, longing, and a thousand more other emotions one must feel while being in a taboo relationship fraught with such perils, Chinelo chose “America”, the biggest buzz-kill of all. The theme of “America”, “Americanah”, or traveling or returning has been written about so many times that inviting the audience into that story on that premise holds too much risk. I had the same problem and a disappointment of expectations with Pede Hollist’s “Foreign Aid”. One had to read the with a much reduced of expectations only to discover a gem in the end. That is too cruel, and doesn’t do justice to a work that could otherwise have enticed more curious readership and a better whetted appetite for such interesting stories.

_____________

Reproduced on Nigerianstalk LitMag | Photos from Actuatornic and Queer Cinema.

Boiling over Healthcare

Yesterday, the signature legislative achievement of the Obama Administration – the Healthcare Reform (also called Obamacare) was upheld by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 vote. Among other things, it prevents insurance companies from dropping people from insurance who have a pre-existing condition. It keeps children on their parents’ healthcare plan until they are twenty-six. It basically fundamentally changes the way healthcare has been provided in the United States – a success that has eluded many presidents for many years.

I spied a few newspaper headlines today to see how the people on the ground relate to the ruling. I was only in Iowa, so my perspective is limited to a swing midwestern state. The USA today as well as an Iowa newspaper were basically optimistic, cautiously celebratory while advising that rather than repeal it as Republicans and other conservative groups have sworn, they should work to improve on the parts of the law that they find objectionable. Returning to the chatter on cable news tonight, what I find is that this is going to be an uphill task.

I’m only a foreigner anyway, with just a little knowledge of the country’s history spanning a few generations. I know however that the divisiveness and polarization of the nation’s politics is as old as Lincoln and as young as Monica Lewinsky. What is most stunning however is that this much of a fight is going to be waged over the right of people to have access to affordable and patient-oriented healthcare like the rest of other developed countries. In a hundred years from now, no matter who wins the final battle to be waged on election day in November, those alive in the world would be able to look back and see how – like the time of slavery – a group of privileged people were willing to stake the future of the country for a chance to get their way and keep the status quo.

On the one hand, I’m now confident of the historical place for the president for his fortitude and perseverance, on the other hand, I fear for a country in which this kind of fight becomes elevated to national attention. America, you fascinate me.

Three Worrying Things

1. According to some reports, about 700 people were arrested yesterday for their role in the Occupy Wall Street protests. Many have also been pepper-sprayed by the NY police or attacked just for participating in the protests that has now spread to many states and has received endorsement from many activists.

2. An American-born terrorist (so-called because of his not yet disclosed links to the Fort Hood shootings and the Underwear Bomber of 1999) has been assassinated in Yemen through a direct order from the current Administration. Repeat: He is an American, the first in recent memory that has been denied the due process of law before any allegations against him has been proven. Most of what has been proven about this man is that he engaged in hate rhetoric.

3. Salman Rushdie, a writer known for his brilliant prose as well as for the number of years he spent underground being protected from a draconian death sentence placed on him by an Islamic (police) state has just gone on television to defend the extrajudicial killing of the man referenced in #2. On Bill Maher’s show last Friday, he opined that when someone has been accused of treason, they lose a certain percentage of their rights (and can therefore be killed without being brought to trial).

Worrying times!

Glad for the Holidays

America is such a fast society; busy people talking on mobile phones, travellers in big cities with heavy backpacks and briefcases, racing cars on motorways and a 24 hour news cycle. One almost can’t keep up. I remember the feeling on the first day of my return to this town, wondering just how different it all seemed again. It took me a few days to get back in the grind. Things never seem to wait. It all goes by so fast, and one is left wondering where all the day went. More than thirteen weeks later, it feels good to take a breather. What a ride that was.

The awesome gift my Amigo Secreto gave to me last week. It's an awesome reminder of what I must do instead of being stressed out with work.

Last week at our final office lunch, I was talking with a colleague – an elderly professor originally from Italy. How does he like it here? I ask. Oh no, I don’t much, he replied. If he hadn’t left his country after the World War when it was both fashionable and imperative to do so, he would still be living there, he said. “It’s the people, the culture, the food, the company. Most importantly, the relaxing ability of people to enjoy life.”

There is something about America that is both endearing and sometimes frustrating at the same time, I think. It is the system that makes working the centre of existence, and leisure something you never do unless you’re dead. On the one hand, it is endearing to see how much you can achieve if you work hard for it, on the other hand it is frustrating to see how hard it is to enjoy the fruits of your labour if you only spend all your time working. The delight is in the balance. I wonder if the country has a retirement age.

In any case, I’m glad for a break from school work that sometimes threatened my sanity. Without the occasional comfort of delightful classmates and a couple of courses that one really loves, it could have been harder. Now all I do is stay up in bed for as long as I want, and wake up whenever I want. Watch a movie, listen to music, and get back to just being lazy. Yesterday, I saw the eclipse of the moon. Christmas is in a couple of days and I don’t even know it. Back home, it would already have been a bustle of fun activities including Christmas fireworks and the dry smell of burning grass that characterizes the harmattan season. Oh well, one can’t have it all.

On the bright side, all the snow from the United States has now been shipped to Canada and Britain. There are a few more warm days ahead.

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