Losing Home in America

I wrote the following essay during my time as a Writing Fellow in the Intercultural and International Communication program at American University. The prompt was to write about home and migration.

This is how I remember the day that I first learned that I might move to America: 

I am seven or eight years old, lying on my mother’s bed between her and her sister. It feels like it is a Saturday or Sunday evening because of the way that time passes slowly, the air heavy with our lethargy. But I cannot know this for sure because all of the days that my aunt spends with us on her visits from America feel like weekends— Mommy leaves for work late, or she comes home early. Sometimes, she doesn’t even go to work at all. We eat our Saturday staple— boiled yam and garden egg stew—for breakfast every day. Mommy is happier. I can tell because she laughs more often, almost all the time it seems, and she doesn’t shout at my siblings and me as much as usual. It is as though my aunt’s presence somehow inures her to our wrongdoings, or, as my now 24-year-old self thinks, to the things in Lagos life that make her irritable. I imagine that all of it— the fights between my brother and I, the plates we break, the walls that we touch with our dirty hands, the fact that water doesn’t run from our taps for one week, and when it finally does, it is so brown that we can only use it to flush the toilet, or that her cousin is in prison because the military government has labelled him a dissident— fades into the background of her mind as my aunt’s face comes into focus. At night, they lay together on her bed and talk for hours and hours, surrounded by the sweet America smell that is on everything that my aunt brings with her, the same smell that wafts off of her skin to my nose when I hug her on the day she arrives. I like to join them on the bed, partly because of this America smell, but also because I want to share in their love somehow, to let their words and laughter weave a blanket that soothes me to sleep. This is why I am here tonight. I am not paying attention to their conversation, only reveling in their love, when my aunt says that she might adopt me and take me to America. She strokes my head as she says this, in the same light, affectionate way that she strokes my back on the day in May of 2013 when I surprise her, and myself, by suddenly crying, my back hunched, after my first FaceTime call to my family since my move to her house in Florida. We have finished speaking, but I don’t want the call to end. Instead, I want to just sit around with them— my mother, my brother (who I fight with less often), my sister, and my nephew— and pretend that we are in the same room, sharing in that lazy weekend energy that comes across clearly through the screen. It does not occur to my 7- or 8-year-old self that a day like this will come. Instead, when my aunt talks about moving, my heart flushes with excitement, and I begin to imagine my life in America. I imagine that I am one of the children that I watch on TV everyday, going to school in their house clothes, instead of the straight white dress with tiny green stripes that I have to wear everyday, and riding a big yellow bus that says “SCHOOL BUS” on the side. I taste the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that I will have for lunch, and I imagine taking classes in a room that is colorful, and well lit, instead of the one at my school with its brown walls and broken window panes. Then I see myself going, after school, to the park, and playing hopscotch instead of ten-ten, riding a bicycle or skateboarding instead of walking everywhere, and owning bright, colorful clothes. These thoughts ease me to sleep that night and in my dream, I bathe in water that has that sweet America smell and it starts to waft off of me too. 

None of this happens. 

It is another ten or so years till there is any more mention of moving to America in my house, and then three more years before I receive the immigrant visa that, I later gather, my aunt had applied for when she talked about adopting me. Because I am 21 years old by the time I move, she no longer needs to do so, so I arrive Florida unceremoniously on a cool morning in March of 2013. I also arrive worried, because I understand Nigeria’s position in the world. I have lived in Nigeria long enough, watched enough CNN and heard us berate ourselves enough, that I understand, that though I got good grades in school, and could almost certainly get a job in Lagos, Americans would likely not hire me. They probably wouldn’t even know that the University of Lagos— a respected school in Nigeria, and the one that I went to— exists. So I am not terribly surprised when, six months into my stay, I have not found a job. 

What I am surprised by, is how difficult it is for me to adjust to social life in America. Through my childhood, I continued to watch American TV and movies, and to devour American books. American slangs came more readily to me than Nigerian ones, and when I said “route,” it sounded like “bout” instead of “root,” the way that British taught us to say it in Nigeria when they colonized us. My best friend in Nigeria called me “American gehl” often, and when I told him I was moving, he said “oh, you are going to be with your people.” This did not offend me because part of me felt that it was true. But it only felt true because I didn’t know about how being an immigrant “is a sort of lifelong pregnancy— a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts,” as Jhumpa Lahiri writes in The Namesake.

When I arrive America, I expect, because people have told me, that people will ask me silly questions about whether lions roam the streets like dogs and cats in my home. But I am surprised by how American English is so different from the British kind that I grew up speaking, that I am sometimes confused by the things that people say. People haven’t told me that, because of this linguistic confusion, my mouth will feel heavy and speaking will become difficult. Or that I will one day write on a blog about immigrant life that, “sometimes, you will...just not want to talk to Americans for a while. You may hurry home to use the wonder that is fast internet to stream a radio station from your country and remind yourself that there is a place where you fit in.” They also haven’t told me that I will go from seeking out radio stations to seeking out Nigerian books and music. Or that a small part of me will realize, as I devour these things, as they lighten the load in my mouth, and straighten my back and my neck so that I can look in people’s eyes, that there is much that I do not know, because I have not bothered to pay attention to my Yoruba language and culture, because I have spent so much of my life thinking that America is the place where I will be happiest. That same part of me feels deep shame, but I suppress it by holding fast to the few things that I do know— I speak Yoruba to my aunt every time that we are out, though my intonation is terrible. I spend hours and hours gathering old Nigerian hit songs and I listen to them everywhere I go. When he comes to the department store where I eventually get a job, I curtsey to greet my uncle, even though he says, his voice lowered in a nervous whisper “ma se be ibi o ma ki n se ile”—“don’t do that, don’t you know you are not at home?” I am Yoruba, I insist, and I refuse to bend myself. I have forgotten how, at home, I am uncomfortable in circles of older Yoruba people, because I often neglect to touch both my knees to the ground to greet them, or to offer everyone my food regardless of whether or not I want to share. I have forgotten how the tradition of insisting upon the use of only right hands irritates me, how I find the sound of fuji music more disorienting than entertaining. And I have forgotten how I like my friend’s mom, who is not Yoruba, more than I like my aunts and uncles because she does not have as many expectations for how I should be. I have forgotten, no, I do not let myself remember these things, because remembering them would mean acknowledging that I do not belong there, in Nigeria, or here, in America. Instead, I continue to hold fast to the things that I know, and use them to steady myself in the world. 

This works for a while. But when I move to D.C., I realize it is not enough. Here, I meet a group of young Nigerians. They are kind, funny, and incredibly loving. But every time we gather, I cannot shake the feeling that I am not one of them. Perhaps I already suspected that this would happen because I avoided Nigerian circles for most of my time living with my aunt in Florida. When, one day, I stay silent while my new friends talk about how they must buy houses and get married soon, I realize that I have avoided groups like this because these people can lay claim to me in a way that others cannot. They will not excuse my difference from them, but will say, that “we are Nigerian and this is how we do things.” I also realize that the Nigerian things that I surround myself with are insufficient because they haven’t shifted the things within me that make me feel that I am not quite Nigerian. I still do not like to pray loudly, or wave my hands when I sing in church. I am not even sure that I know the truth about who God is. I am not especially interested in being married, with a good job and two children by the time I’m 35. I am not street-smart or energetic. And I do not like to wear lacey iro and buba sets because it is itchy, or tie geles, because they press too hard on my ears. The more time I spend with my new friends the more acute these dissonances feel. The more acute these dissonances feel, the more useless my Nigerian and Yoruba things become for holding me up in the world. Eventually, their steadying power fails and I start to fall, slowly at first, then quickly, all at once.

As I fall, something happens. I see my cousin, Lola who was born and raised in America but does not fit in with Americans or Nigerians, falling with me. She points me to others like us, author, Taiye Selasi, and artist Njideka Akunyili. I, myself, find author, Tope Folarin in this place. He recently wrote that creation is working on itself in him. “What does it mean if I say to you that creation is working on itself inside me?” he continued. “Well, it means that I am made up of the stuff of the universe, like everyone else. Stardust and starlight and words and images and America and Nigeria and Africa and who knows what else. It also means that these familiar components have assumed new forms within me, that to spend some time with me is to glimpse possibilities that have yet to manifest themselves in our shared reality.”