Living in America, Leaving Nigeria

It was all normal. It was earlier this year—sometime around January. We made light-hearted jokes about our time in Nigeria. We started with the food. We all agreed that because Nigerian food has more spice in it, Nigerian foods are better than most things you will find in America. Even without the spice effect, that Nigerian foods are better than those of Americans shouldn’t be controversial in a room full of Nigerians in America—and we are not just Nigerians in America, but Nigerians now living in Boulder, a very white progressive and liberal city where all the food are also very white. A group’s national identity anchors their autonomy as much as their preferences. Then we spoke about our best Jackie Chan movies. After that, we started a football banter.

I expressed my frustration at the lack of a football viewing centre in America, and others stated that they shared the same sentiment. A football viewing centre in Nigeria is not just a place to watch a football game, it is a place where people—or more clearly, viewers—express their frustrations at strangers and speak with authority about how the football club ought to be spending its money. The viewing centre in Nigeria is a place for football fans to perform the ad hominem fallacy without caring about the well-being of their interlocutors and without feeling remorse about the misfortunes of their opponents. But this is not as bad as it might seem. In the viewing centre, no one is a victim—or, more accurately perhaps, everyone is a victim. Demeaning a team, its players, and their fans in a viewing centre is an invitation for your interlocutors to dig into the worst history of your football club and players. One of us said, ‘The banter at the viewing centre is what really makes football sweet, walahi!’ And we all agreed.

‘Good old days, guys.’ I said to the four other Nigerian PhD students in the living room of my two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of my school’s Graduate Family Housing in Boulder, Colorado. Then we joked about how white Americans smile at us every time we walk past them on the pedestrian side of the road. The roadside white American smile, I strongly believe, is a polite one: a vague but lively bodily disposition that is supposed to remind one that they are nicer than the white people who have been reported to vitiate black bodies—and perhaps not a racist or a mean white person. Or maybe the smile is a subconscious cry to not be victimized, since ‘the people of your kind can be irrationally angry, hungry, and harmful’. We don’t know what it means. But we sit in my living room and mock how the white smile puts us in a position to be psychologically dreadful: ‘Why are you smiling at me? I do not know you, and I saw you when the white boy walked past you. You didn’t smile at him.’ The smile truly looks like a polite smile. And—indeed—it is. But the smile—despite its politeness—objectifies.

The glance and the smile all coalesce to remind me—and I believe others too—that I do not belong here, and I have a fixed position in this part of the world to be an ‘Other’—a position that I share with my Chinese, Hispanic, and Black brothers, sisters, and non-binaries. But I wonder though—and I seriously do wonder—if it is irresponsible for me to blame these polite white smilers for how and what their smile makes me feel. If at all I retained any quantum of blameworthiness for myself about how and what the white smile makes me feel, that blame disappeared when I asked TR if white people also smile at him when he is walking. TR is a white South African PhD student in my department and his response to my question was not affirmative. And that shook my dungeon. Despite its politeness, the smile is a confrontation: It aims to remind one that there is a gaze upon you. As Frantz Fanon explicates: ‘…the Other fixes me with his gaze, his gesture, and attitude.’

No one said this, but the light-hearted jokes reminded us of how we used to be before coming to America: a tiny atom amid other tiny atoms. Here in America, to be an African PhD student is to be big—a patch that some Americans somehow hope would mend some torn part of their country’s history: ‘See, we have an African student in our department. We are very inclusive.’ I am one of the two only African—and in fact, the only Black—PhD student in my own department, and though I have never felt like I’m part of an inclusive project in my department, other African students complain of feeling this way. Jay, my roommate, complained to me that his department does not send him a personal email during other department gatherings and events, but he receives a personalized email when the department wants to do a diversity programme. And this, itself, is interesting. Jay is not just a PhD student anymore, he is now a part of a project—perhaps, to put it clearly, a part of propaganda. I cannot assert that this is bad, but I know it is not right. That boy deserves to be a boy, too. And when we accord him the status of a boy—as we accord to that white boy, we start seeing clearly why it is not right to make Jay an object of an inclusive project. It is true that this project is a project that aims at building a more just world given the unjust world we live in. But I strongly believe that there should be another way to do it, and that way cannot be that we objectify Jay to make white people feel good about their diversity or inclusive project.

I wonder what white people see when they see Jay. Did they see a boy pursuing a doctoral degree or a very brilliant African boy they hired to make their department more inclusive?