Some Thoughts On My Brief Time In an American University, marginally
related to being on your side, dear men.
America is so provincial, like an enormous giant of a man from a bush village
who blunders about with supreme certainty, not knowing he is bush because
he is blinded by his strength. If you’ve lived your whole life in a sensible part of
the world – that is Africa or Asia or Latin America – be careful going to
America for a master’s degree in the liberal arts. Science is fine, and an MBA is
fine as long as you are happy to become a parroting robot. As soon as I started
my program, so much I said was wrong but I did not know why it was wrong
and they did not tell me because even my asking why was wrong. They
expected me to know. Welcome to the world of the Americans of the pious
class. We’re talking about race in Europe and I mention how Lord Haw Haw
who was a British Nazi claimed that Churchill’s father had African blood and
suddenly somebody cuts in: “this is an intellectual game for you while black
people are trying to stay alive!” I was puzzled. From outside, America makes more sense. They want your life
to match their soft half-baked theories and when it doesn’t, they burst out
with their provincial certainty.
Somebody was reading a novel about the Nigerian-Biafran war and said, “it’s
really fascinating, but honestly I’m still a bit confused about why the Igbo
people were massacred?” And I said that to understand Igbo people in Nigeria,
think of them like the Jews. People say don’t trust Igbo people because they
want to control everything and they love money and they’re too pushy. A woman said, ‘Oh my God, don’t say that, you can’t compare anything to the
Jews.’ What do you mean by ‘can’t?’ What in the cultural genetics of Americans
makes them think they can decide for the rest of the world how they should
think? I never knew that there existed in this world a class of people who feel
so securely entitled to the minds of other people.
London was the center of my childhood dreams and even though I went as a
child to Cambridge with my father, I didn’t feel I had seen England until I saw
London so as soon as I could afford it, I went, and I was disappointed that the
staff at my posh hotel were all Polish and spoke poor English because it wasn’t
the London I wanted.
And an American bursts out: How can you be so fascist and anti-immigration
and perpetuate a dangerous nativism?
The professor didn’t say ‘let’s be civil.’ They love that word civil by the way. But
when this White woman was mocking White women for paying Jamaican
nannies to raise their White children and I said that was regressive nonsense,
women throughout human history have always had help caring for their
children, it’s the relative or the husbands relative, it’s the village, and now it
means paying for it but then so what, the Jamaican nanny is building a small
house outside Kingston for her parents – and then the professor said ‘let’s be
civil.’
Let’s be civil indeed as if their quiet evil isn’t the real incivility. The incivility of
quiet evil.
There was this Chinese-American woman with a pretty pious face talking at a
bar about her Chinese parents and how racist they were for not wanting her
sister to marry a Black man. She said, “I’ve cut them off and I’m mad my sister
still takes their calls,” and everyone in that godforsaken circle told her she was
so brave. I could look through her and see the glow of her sanctimonious soul,
she thought she was resplendent in her righteousness but she was just a
person unable to love. They don’t know how to love, these pious people, and
they don’t know love. Even the way they help each other is so cheerless and
earnest.
I said I loved Kigali, and they said oh my god it’s a dictatorship. But the
policemen are trim, the markets are clean, people stand in line and I am proud
of it because it is African and I am African. I asked them -- Can you understand
that love and pride complicate? They can implicate as well but first you must
see how they complicate. But they can’t see because their hearts lack eyes.
Their hearts are blind. They are so dead to human foibles, these Americans of
the pious class. And they don’t laugh. I mean actual laughter, that sound nature
made to lighten our hearts and calm our blood pressure.
One day I mentioned my driver Paul and a woman with a nose piercing said
you mean exploited labor, call it what it is, all Third World domestic staff are
exploited labor. She was a famous academic feminist but she didn’t like
women. She liked only the idea of women. She posted cryptic quotes about
feminism that you were supposed to feel guilty about but not understand and
vaguely threatening conditions for how to be a feminist like if you don’t know
blah blah blah about Bangladesh then you’re no feminist, if you don’t liberate
this and that then you’re no feminist. Her followers loved her for her
bitterness and even if she ever wanted to let joy in, she couldn’t because she
would lose the applause. And anyway it would have to be joy as resistance. Or
joy as a subversive anti-patriarchy project. Never just joy. As joy.
One day we’re listing the many horrors of Facebook and I say for full
disclosure, I just put up an ad on Facebook for a logistics person for my
company in Abuja, someone 35 and above.
An American bursts out: It’s illegal to mention age in job ads!
Well, it isn’t in Nigeria. You Americans need to climb out of your cribs. You
think the world is American, you don’t realize that only America is American.
To be so provincial and not even know that you are.
