Dating : A Long Walk Back to My City

A Long Walk Back to My City

It was on a chilly morning in September 2018, I had watched the day come into its own from my window in Cambridge. The Charles River was opposite the road and I couldn’t hear its sound, the students living in the dorm where I was a Resident Scholar were asleep, there was not a sound alive in my world, I listened hard enough and there was no sound coming from somewhere to save me. I turned on my Bluetooth speaker and from my phone played Burna Boy’s “On the Low” on repeat.

I grew up in cities across Nigeria, my father was a civil servant who returned to the country from the UK with a wave of other educated Nigerians trained in the diaspora, all of them were eager to return and contribute to the growth of the developing nation, but military dictatorship and a realization that corruption has permeated the civil service broke them and slowly some of them moved back to the west to pick up pieces of the lives they left at airports when they boarded planes with joy to obey the call by the then Head of State, General Ibrahim Babaginda. The ones that stayed back struggled against the system; some were made head of parastatals, but their staff didn’t want them to succeed. Corruption has a way of fighting back with vigor, it is shameless, it is powerful, it knows how to entice those on the other side, its ultimate weapon is greed, it boasts that it cannot be defeated, it knows human nature too well, in cities across the world, its siblings that have gone on to be named in more fancier names than corruption nods in approval. My father stayed behind, he worked as a Director at the National Electric Power Authority, a government owned company. He was transferred from Lagos to Kaduna to Port Harcourt. He died in service, he was survived by his six children, a corrupt staff and a dying company that will go on to survive through different names until the federal government got tired and sold it off.

In every city where we lived there was noise, the cities had voices, they had personalities, they grew up with me, they became familiar with my dreams and fear. In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino writes “you take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.” I have lived in cities where every stranger was a face that reminded me of someone I knew, a friend who at that moment might be fucking a lover in a shitty motel at the outskirt of a city, or maybe he might be staring into the blue sky on a beach, wondering what the hell he was doing here as the waves rush toward his body with more questions, or maybe the stranger in a white shirt I saw munching plantain chips by the roadside was a friend I had not seen since childhood, who at that moment was spread wide eagle on a bed, a butt plug up in his ass, the sound of porn coming from the laptop beside him.

The city that is familiar to us holds our freedom; it holds the true freedom we seek. It says, you belong to this land, just as I belong to you. There is no true escape from the bond between a man and his city. A man will run to the end of the world and still meet his city in the shadow of another city. A man’s city is his world. Kicked out of Napoleon’s France, Victor Hugo wrote in a letter, “exile has not only detached me from France, it has almost detached me from the world.” A city knows us, it hears our fear, our love, our prayers but sometimes it is silent, a mother is never silent, even when confused, she holds you and says, it will be well. A man’s city is not perfect, but it is his, it recognizes his voice when he speaks, it says, you belong to this land, a mother and a city shares that same truth, the children they watched grow up will always belong to them. We all belong to a place that knows the true meaning of our names, places are never perfect, they are homes where you can ask questions without the fear of someone saying, go back to your filth.

I do not believe the city that knows me hold all the answers to my questions, what it holds is a familiarity that knows me well, a familiarity that embodies home. There is an intricate type of freedom rooted in that kind of familiarity, a freedom that leaves me dancing at 2am on the streets of Ikeja as I leave the nightclub, a freedom that sees me walking from the farm in a dirty shirt, a hoe on my shoulder and the song of birds rising from an Obeche tree. The familiarity that dwells in the land that knows our true names is diverse, it does not demand me to play one role and one role only, it does not cages me in a corner the way a foreign city does, it does not say immigrant because the “we” in my city is rooted in me, it does not forces me to learn that true humanity is one without borders or discrimination in any form. Foreign cities teach you to love human beings in all our diverse forms, it teaches you to protest for every stranger, perhaps in protesting for others you are also protesting for yourself, perhaps solidarity can also be a longing for self-preservation. This freedom has a voice, the city has a voice, our longing for home begins in the longing for the voice of our city.

In an interview about his writing process, Chris Abani said “I grew up in a very noisy neighborhood and if it’s too quiet I get distracted.” In the city that’s not ours we are scared of silence, perhaps it reminds us of what we lost when we moved here.

The voice of my city is afrobeats, juju, street slangs that are born in the underbelly of the streets, buses full of gossip, crying children, singing children, exuberant voices of touts, music from roadside shops, the gospel of Christ monetized and thrown into quiet houses at 4am in the morning, the Muezzin disturbing your ears with the call to the faithful, barks of stray dogs, raunchy songs from beer parlors, the slurp of pepper-soup entering opened mouths, songs from drunk young people leaving the nightclub, people arguing at newspaper stands, complains against the government, creak of danfo buses held together by faith, purr of Ferrari engines, laughter opening brown faces into joy, din of generators, sweet sweet chaos, and dance. In my city, dance has a voice, it is the noise of feet hitting the ground during shaku shaku, during zanku and the new style of dance that comes out with every hit song, it is the body ready to respond in a voice that’s a wish to forget the hardship of the city when it hears gbé body é.

When I dance alone in my room to Burna Boy, it is me falling into the beats of his songs, into drums and trumpets, into the saxophone, into the baritone of his voice, into the organized chaos of his music, it is me seeking for home, reaching and reaching as my body twist and twist into exhaustion. But even in music there’s a wholeness of being that is lost, a wholeness of being that after our bodies has rested, we will realize that what we are seeking for cannot be found in music, still we have to try. There are musicians in the diaspora, musicians of Nigerian descent who through music seek to create a road that will part the Atlantic Ocean until it reaches Lagos.

Tobe Nwigwe in his song “Ewu” wore a shirt made with akwete; an okpu agu cap, royal coral bead necklaces and hand fan completed his outfit. In one of the stills in the music video, he is sitting on a chair, there is an agbogho mmuo masquerade sitting beside him. On the wall above his head there are pictures of his parents dressed in clothes made from Ankara fabrics, on his father’s head there is a red cap, the one that says, this man is a chief, respect him. In another still from the same video, he is sitting on a royal chair flanked by two sculpted leopards. The rest of the video was a celebration of the Igbo culture and in the music video Tobe Nwigwe celebrated his reach for royalty, his reach for home. He declared with all boldness that his Nigerianess is intact and can flourish in a foreign city. It seems he has been thinking about displacement for quite some time, in the song “Ewu’ he rapped “I know that it is sad but everyone try to fill a void.” And it seems that in music he had found something to fill the yearning for home. In the collaborations between Wale, Phyno, Davido and Olamide, there is the need by Wale to create and recreate a way back to Nigeria. In his song “My Sweetie” he kept saying “This is for my Nigeria…I’m from Naija…I make my Jollof with a love of pepper..I am Naija all day.” It was a song popular in Nigeria in the 1980s, it didn’t matter to him that the original song belonged to Bunny Mack from Sierra Leon. He might have heard it from his parents and used it as a vehicle to drive back to his homeland. It is the same also for Jidenna, from his clothes, to his songs, to the tattoo on his arm, there is a claim to a homeland, to a city, to a place. There is a declaration that they belong to a place and the place belong to them.

Every city becomes strange over time, the city is not stable, it must adapt to the flow of time or get passed and become a ghost city or a relic and become a place where tourists visit to remind them of something or it takes a new name, a new identity and the old city becomes dead. This is what the musician in the diaspora can’t understand because the city he reaches for is no longer the city he left or the city of his parents, it is a different city. A man leaves a city and at his point of departure, he will look back and the city will never be the same, there is no wholeness in exile, in migration. Migration is a displacement that leads to despair, despair is falling into the hands of a city but never falling into the soil. The despair in displacement is the inability to break out of the need to long for a place, it is a cage, one that is as wide as a city, it grows smaller with each passing year until it leaves us empty with only the name of our homeland rattling in our hollowed bodies.

Tobe Nwigwe would in a panel at Harvard University make a claim for being whole in two cultures, he would claim to be American and Nigerian and he was right, he is American as he is Nigerian, but there is no wholeness in a man caught between two places. He is neither here nor there. He is a being that will always defend his claim to belonging to a place. The Nigerian poet, Ijeoma Umebinyuo, in her debut poetry collection “Question for Ada” wrote in “diaspora blues.”

“so, here you are

too foreign for home

too foreign for here

never enough for both.”

For the man walking out of his city for the first time, the realization that his body has began a walk of displacement begins the moment he arrives at his destination. He realizes there is a part of himself he left at home, a part that can never be salvaged. A man leaves his city and his city leaves him, both of them long for each other across the expanse of land and water, both of them never walking into each other the same way they parted. A man leaves a part of him in every city he lives in, all of these parts reach out to him only to find a void, only to fall back into lonely places, yet these places are in the man, they are the man. A man returns to a city not the same way he left it and not the same way he leaves, he must struggle to feel at home in this city that once knew him well, the city having moved on from him must struggle to adapt to the city. Both of them are two lovers who were once so free with themselves, they could eat on the same bed they just fucked in, one could shit in the same space where the other was wearing his brief, now time and space have made them strangers, they look at each other with shy eyes, both of them don’t know how to walk toward the other without the chasm that has been created between them when the man left.

Migration renders the familiar into a stranger. The man returning to his city will try to know it again and again, in reaching for the familiar he is reaching for failure, he is reaching again for another exile, for another migration, most times he leaves the city, for he can’t reconcile his city with what it has become. He will search for his familiar city in the strangeness of the new city he now calls home, perhaps for him home will be a concept he will try to recreate again and again until he realizes that for the man who leaves his city there will be no home waiting for him, there will no place where he will be whole, all his life will be a journey of hope, for the exiled and the migrant are doomed to fail in belonging to a place, both his homeland and his new city will never be his, he will become a being trapped between destinations, always seeking to arrive, always seeking to depart, yet he can’t escape the love he has for his city, for the love between a man and his city cannot be broken in a lifetime, even in death, a man’s love for his city may drive him to request that his dead body be taken home, a final attempt to claim and belong to a place he couldn’t fully belong to when he was alive. A man may request that his dead body be buried in the foreign city because home has become something he can’t hold, something he has lost and this is love, the realization that you love a city so much and since you can’t claim it then you must stay far from it. Our love for our city determines how we see other cities; it stops us from loving other cities completely. Barthes writes “I encounter millions of bodies in my life, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.” This is the dilemma of a man that has lived outside his city, he is forever lost, he is forever seeking for a way home both in life and in death and when he arrives he will always be a stranger in his home city waiting for him to learn how to walk through it again.

In Boston, for the first six months of my time there I wandered through museums, I searched for art that looked like me, art that shared a bit of history with me. Sometimes it is a futile journey, sometimes I find art that speaks of home, like the Benin bronze head at the Museum of Fine Arts, the pictures of Gordon Parks exhibited at the Cooper Gallery or the art from different African countries in Skip Gates house. I do not know why I reach for home this way, I know it is a privilege to have free time to sit before paintings in a museum, the man who arrives in a new country must begin to create a place for himself, a place was created for me before I arrived, it was owning that place that made it possible for me to have time to sit before paintings.

There are other ways I have reached for home, every day in that city that was not home I searched for home on the face of every black person I met. During drinks on a cold December night, a friend who is an Ethiopian scholar asked why I only dated black people, he accused me of being racist. There is an argument to be made for or against if black people can be racist and what form and shape it takes. I am neither a race scholar nor a black American whose history is choked by racism, I am learning every day about racism because it doesn’t ask where are you from, it doesn’t give you a chance to breathe in America before it creeps on you, it only have to see your skin and then it attacks. On my first week in Cambridge, a policeman stopped me from entering my dorm because according to him there has been incidents of burglary in the area and he just wants to see my ID to be sure I live there. During our conversation other white people were going in and out of the dorm, he didn’t ask them for their IDs, I was the one he asked, the one whose skin color is still considered strange in a wealthy neighborhood, the one whose skin color marked for interrogation, the one whose skin color is a sign that I must prove myself every day that I belong to the wealthy neighborhood. A white man can get drunk and sing through the street at midnight, a black is considered a threat if he tries it.

On that cold December night, I had looked into my friend’s eyes and said, “sex is political just the same way as love is political, I chose who I want to be in politics with.” There was laughter around the table. Sometime alcohol is the only way I know God exist and that he can be a God of peace. We drank, got shitfaced and found our way home without calling each other names, he was worried I had certain things to say about him dating a white girl.

The truth is I don’t care about someone’s penis if it’s of no use to me, I don’t care where he puts it in, what color is the orifice or what name she calls him. Whatever he did with his penis that night was on him, the world is at risk and someone wants me to be bothered about some white girl he is fucking alone, what was I going to gain from worrying? I could recycle a few bottles, renounce the use of plastic straws and feel a little better at night with the time he wants me to use in worrying about his penis dilemma.

It is true I had certain things to say about sex, who doesn’t? But the things I had to say concerned me and no one else. Love and sex for me is a political act, it is a way of finding home, of reaching for my city and also a rebellion. After a good fuck, I want to see the black sweaty face beside me and think that I might be on a bed in Lagos, and in that face I am not confronted with the strangeness of a foreign city. When someone sits and grind on my face, I do not want to think about colonialism, I do not want to see my forebears lifting up a white person on their shoulders as they walked with him from Lokoja to Ibadan. Black people have a lot to deal with, sex should be a ritual of slutty peace, it shouldn’t be a place where you don’t know if the racist soul hiding all day long in your lover’s body will suddenly break out during climax, jump off that black dick and call you, my nigger. Do not be surprised, it happens. Michael Blackson is not a nice person, but on the Breakfast Club with Charlemagne Tha God, he said it happened to him, I was happy it happened to him because he had used the “dumb African” stereotype to further his comedy career, if a white woman during sex calls him a nigger then he should be proud white people see him for what he has taken upon himself in his pursuit of fame. I do not think Michael Blackson is the only black man with that experience in America, people chose their cages. Interracial relationships can also be beautiful, I am happy for those who have found happiness in it, I do not have the strength to navigate it, what I seek is different, it is a semblance of home and a white body cannot give it to me. I also do not fetish black love, we have our problems, maybe I am a coward in seeking for the familiar, I do not deny it. Every political act leads to a cage and not to freedom as the world wants it to be, for me freedom is choosing my cage and be free to live in and out of it without the world chaining me to a pole. Loving another black body sexually is a walk toward my city, this is what I couldn’t tell my Ethiopian friend, this is what I think he wouldn’t understand, we all seek for a way back to our cities in different ways, each way is a cage, I have chosen mine, I can only hope I am happy in it.

Like art, who gets to have sex in a new country is a privilege. The man who arrives a city with just the clothes on his back, little money in his pocket, and a few of his things in a bag is bothered about survival. He must find shelter; he must find a means of earning money. The exiled, the migrant most times arrive in a place without knowing anyone, it takes time to know a place, it takes time to find their way into the mating dance. America is a cold place, sometimes finding your way into the mating dance takes time because you have to navigate the strangeness of a new place also, sometimes it doesn’t take time, sometimes a man can be lucky, but even with the dating and hookup apps, a stranger is a stranger, it is in your accent, your clothes, the way you pose in your pictures, the words on your bio, everything. No one tells the man in a new city that dating apps have a language, a language he will learn with time, so he wanders and wanders through different dating apps, sometimes he will stumble on some dating apps where his foreignness is what makes him desirable, he will have lots of sex until he figures out that something is wrong. People consume people, cannibalism has progressed from roasting human flesh over open fire, it now includes fucking a man, sucking his dick until he cries out, and then bragging to your friends afterward about fucking a foreigner. Welcome to new age cannibalism.

The man in a new city is confused, newly severed from his familiar city he is still in pains, he wishes to go back, yet he can’t, so he must a find a way to reach for his city, sometimes he searches for the way back in a familiar God. In major cities across America the Nigerian Mega-church God has found a way to reach His people. He is resilient, He knows his people, if the Nigerian in a new city is scared of gay people holding hands on the subway, then he has a homophobic Nigerian God to run to. If he is scared of his new city, then the Nigerian Mega God will take on the role of a comforter. The Nigerian God is sleek, He is malleable, He understands religion can be rigid and flexible, He allows the Nigerian in a foreign city to be a bit liberal, the Nigerian woman can wear trousers to a church that won’t allow a woman in a Nigerian city to wear trousers. The Nigerian God is crafty, He is rich, He takes up spaces and call them churches. He says, look at me, I am thriving in a foreign city, you can be like me, just have faith, give me your green dollars, it doesn’t matter if your money is buying the oil for my pastors hair, just believe, you will make it.

The Nigerian God is deeply flawed. He does not understand racism, His word is founded on the belief that white skin is holy, He does not understand why black Americans are complaining about racism. The Nigerian God is a capitalist, He believes money solves everything, He believes if you make enough money then no one can call you nigger, He is not lazy, even His sermons are lessons of hard work. Yes, He says, there is a heaven, but you can only rest on Sunday when you are bringing your offerings to him or when you get to heaven. His word is filled with admonitions against laziness. This is the major reason why most Nigerians don’t understand racial relations, our solution to everything is money, this is what most essays about Nigerian solidarity with marginalized groups have failed to capture. It is more than the desire toward whiteness, the Nigerian God knows Nigerians are local beings, we want to return back to our cities in the most expensive car, with palm fronds laid on the ground for our feet, the voices of the poor asking for a miracle, our hand reaching for wad of cash. Every Nigerian had had a variant of this dream, the dream requires hard word. The Nigerian God knows His people and He uses this knowledge to His advantage. The Nigerian in a foreign city knows racism but he serves the Nigerian God and the Nigerian God says he shouldn’t be bothered about white skin for it is holy, he should be bothered about wealth because when a white man calls you nigger and you are driving away in a Ferrari, who is the loser?

The problem with the Nigerian God is He thinks He understands human nature and a man seeking for a way to reach back to the city must drop his green dollars and walk through Him with songs of praise for He is the way, the truth and through Him a man will reach his city faster. The problem with the Nigerian God is that He leaves His worshippers lonelier than ever, they can only find peace when they are in the church, when they are in a community of fellow believers.

A man looking for way back to his city will meet the Nigerian Christian, after a few words the Nigerian Christian will bring out his words of comfort; just believe and it shall be done, Jesus saves, have faith. The man looking for a way back to his city must become a Christian or feel alienated.

Religion among migrants will never bring unity to migrants from the same city, except all of them worship the same God, belong to the same religion, and have the approach toward worship which is very unlikely.

The man arriving a new city must suffer displacement with his fellow migrants, suffering is what brings a people closer, we all speak the language of survival better than the language of joy, we are all on the pursuit of happiness and suffering is the road we must walk through to get there. While religion can help a man speak about his fear, about his loneliness, it doesn’t help everyone, it alienates a man who doesn’t believe in it.

I have always wondered about Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s decision to write in kikuyu, in “Decolonizing the Mind” he writes, “the bullet was the means of physical subjugation, language was the means of the spiritual subjugation.” I do understand how language was a means of spiritual subjugation, as a Nigerian it is everywhere in our society, from religion to government to protest, language has held us hostage, it has set us on a path where we are no longer the same people who left in the morning. As someone who has been robbed of speaking Yoruba by my father who believed English will take me far and by a Yoruba society that continues to mock me for trying to reach for the indigenous language of my city, I often wonder if indigenous languages are not subjugating Africans who through no fault of their can’t speak any of the indigenous languages, we who can’t speak our “mother tongue” must watch as we are judged not worthy of our heritage. I have stopped trying to learn how to speak Yoruba, there are some who still try and try to learn how to speak their indigenous language, to you I doff my hat, but I chose not to try, I am tired of been mocked, someone once told me that language is learnt through insults, I have been called a bastard over and over again because I can’s speak Yoruba, there is only so much the body can take before it says enough, I have taken enough, I have said enough.

I do not believe I am the only one that can’t speak their indigenous language, we are many across cities in Africa and in the west, we are marginalized in our home city, it is for this sole reason that I say every man cannot walk toward his city in language because if a man can’t speak the language, no matter how humble he crawls toward the city, the city won’t pick him up, even Pidgin English for all its lower class origins also excludes others, most first generation migrants can’t find their way back to their home city through language, they are doomed to fail and it is for the reason I say language is not enough for every man seeking for ways to walk back to his city.

It is 2pm on a Saturday afternoon in Portland, the weather is humid. Inside the house I share with three other housemates and three dogs, I am preparing Jollof rice in the kitchen, occasionally a housemate comes to the kitchen to smell the spices rising in steam and finding their way to the vent. Food recipes from the home city is where every man in a foreign city feels most comfortable to begin the walk toward home, it does not require language or God, it is simple, open your mouth and begin the walk. Every migrant kitchen across America is a reach for home, even if we know our home city is gone and we are doomed to fail to reach it the same we left it but we try because food is a beautiful way to know the longing for home, it does not discriminate, it feels your stomach, tingles your tongue and at the same time leaves suffering for your home city, this is the way I chose to suffer, this is the way I chose to walk home, every man must chose the way he walks and suffers to meet the disappointment waiting for him.

In Open City, Teju Cole writes, “I couldn’t remember what life was like before I started walking.” That sentence is heavy with so much truth, the man arriving in a new city must begin to remember his city as soon as he arrives, he must hold on to it, to let it go means to stop remembering, to give up on life as he knows it, a different kind of death. I chose to suffer and live, I chose to hold my city close to my heart in its perfect and flawed nature, this is my suffering, one that I can’t leave behind as I journey from one new city to another.

The man arriving a new city must battle displacement. At first, he is surprised, then he accepts it and begins to crawl back toward his city.

For the Queer Nigerian arriving a new city, there is no surprise, he already knows displacement, he is familiar with it. He comes from a country where he was never comfortable enough in his skin to throw away the fear underneath his it. I know what it means to belong to a city that will never belong to you. I know what it means to exchange one country for another without feeling at home in any of them. I know the loneliness of places, the pain of not belonging, of always looking in from glass windows as if window shopping for lives I will never be a part of. I’ve been a stranger to cities all my life, I write like a stranger, yet I am doomed to reach for my home city. This is my curse and also my blessing.