Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

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  About the book

  The Seed of a Novel

  Adapted from an essay first published in Bookslut.

  Ibadan,

  running splash of rust

  and gold—flung and scattered

  among seven hills like broken

  china in the sun.

  —J. P. Clark

  THE SEED OF MIGRATORY ANIMALS was planted during my Fulbright fellowship to study West African literature in Nigeria in 2006 and 2007. I’d come to believe that American writers and readers tended to be too insular, mostly reading and writing for a native audience. With this in mind, I embarked on a reversal of the usual migration, choosing to study at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, an institution that many of the literary titans of Nigeria had passed through at one time or another.

  In Ibadan there was a canteen called Flavours that served the best melt-your-mouth-off goat or fish pepper stews—the goat soup overflowing with juicy chunks of meat, the fish laid across the bowl from eyeball to tail in triumph. This was one of the many cafés where I came to know a circle of young Nigerian writers and lovers of books.

  One evening toward the end of the dry season, clouds flirted with the scorched earth and, as dusk fell on the canteen, we watched dozens of lightning flashes streak the sky, each a slightly different shade of white, blue-white, silver-white: the Yoruba sky god Sango’s fireworks extravaganza. We ordered Star beer or Guinness, pepper soup or isi-ewu, flares of phosphorous matches lighting Bensons or sometimes the menthols called White London.

  Earlier that day the writer Rotimi Babatunde and I had been invited to speak to our friend Kunle Okesipe’s students. (My character Kunle is not based on this real-life Kunle—they merely share a cool name.) I’d shown up at Kunle’s school in the Eleyele district of Ibadan to discover that by “his students” he hadn’t meant the students in his English class but the entire secondary school. There was no auditorium or microphone, just two hundred teenagers lined up in a field with rows marked off by white stones. We stood above them on a concrete slab. I yelled about what it was like growing up in West Texas, about writing what you know while also imagining yourself into the lives of others. Writers need empathy first and foremost, I remember saying, repeating what other writers had once taught me.

  During the Q&A, the Ibadan kids were unforgiving. I’d figured they’d want to know about the United States, but they were more interested in stumping me: What is the difference between prose and fiction? How many different types of poetic meter are there? Can you define hyperbole?

  At Flavours that night, I asked Kunle what the students had to say later about our “speeches.”

  “They thought Rotimi was more arrogant than you,” he said. “And some people”—he laughed—“were confused as to how your parents could possibly be from Liberia.”

  Despite my attempts to speak slowly and enunciate—I knew from experience my American accent would be difficult for the students to understand—I hadn’t anticipated the phrase “my parents are librarians” might cause such confusion.

  “They thought Mary Helen was less arrogant than I was because they only understood every third word she said.” Rotimi wasn’t fat but spherical—a jolly pastille—and he spoke quickly, with a slight stutter, frequently interspersing his words with laughter. He was the most successful of our literary circle, having already had several of his plays staged in London, along with awards from numerous international fellowships like the MacDowell Colony and the Rockefeller Foundation.

  “Or maybe it’s because the superior can afford to be self-effacing,” I replied.

  “See, the Liberian isn’t arrogant at all.”

  The students at Kunle’s school never asked me why I’d come to Ibadan to immerse myself in African fiction, because they knew there was no city on the continent with the charmed literary history of their hometown. It’s a city that, while virtually unknown in the States, played such an important role in the emergence of English-language African literature that I was inspired to move there after graduate school in the same way writers used to swarm the quartiers of the Left Bank.

  My first encounter with Nigerian fiction: holed up in a bone-chilling Boston winter, I was drawn into Ben Okri’s novel The Famished Road, a frenetic, meandering novel of magical realism in which the “scumscapes,” where a boy named Azaro lives in abject poverty, are permeated by the dazzling images and machinations of the spirit world. I learned that the title The Famished Road alludes to a poem by Wole Soyinka (which is, in turn, indebted to a proverb): “The right foot for joy, the left, dread / And the mother prayed, Child / May you never walk / When the road waits, famished.” I had to find a way to get there.

  In Robert M. Wren’s Those Magical Years: The Making of Nigerian Literature at Ibadan: 1948–1966, he avers that no other university town in the world has “produced a similar cluster of distinguished authors.” There are dozens of renowned writers (Flora Nwapa, Elechi Amadi, Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare, Remi Raji, and many more) who at one time or another have made their way through Ibadan, but the four heavyweights to whom Wren alludes are Wole Soyinka (playwright/poet/novelist/biographer—Nobel Laureate), Chinua Achebe (whose Things Fall Apart adorns high school and university reading lists everywhere), Christopher Okigbo (the modernist poet who died tragically in the Nigerian civil war), and J. P. Clark (known primarily as a poet, though he wrote a number of plays, one of which was first directed by Soyinka and involved the live sacrifice of a goat). Even two of the biggest names in African literary criticism had come out of Ibadan: Biodun Jeyifo and Abiola Irele.

  As an anthropologist passing through town on research told me once: “In the Ibadan of the ’60s and ’70s, everywhere you went, literature was in the air.”

  The British established University College in Ibadan, or UCI, in 1948 as one of three full-scale institutions of higher education in Africa to confer degrees from the University of London. One purpose of this program was to educate an African civil service elite as part of Britain’s policy of “indirect rule.”

  UCI became the University of Ibadan after Nigeria’s independence from Britain in 1960 and attracted talent regionally and globally. The city of Ibadan was also the hub of West African publishing, and it was there in the late ’50s that the German Ulli Beier and South African exile Ezekiel Mphahlele started the literary magazine Black Orpheus, encouraging an African literature built on indigenous models rather than British ones. Today, the publication’s list of authors reads like a Who’s Who of anglophone African fiction and poetry.

  In May 1967, months after a bloody coup led by a northern Nigerian military faction, the eastern part of the country, calling itself Biafra, seceded, igniting a civil war that lasted almost three years and left hundreds of thousands dead. The war scattered the Nigerian writers—Achebe, Okigbo, and Gabriel Okara went east to support the breakaway state, while others, including Soyinka and J. P. Clark, remained on the federal side. Clark once remarked that the war dispersed “atoms that should have collided to make a nuclear charge.”

  By the time I arrived at UI, extreme financial straits—precipitated by a series of kleptocratic governments—had led to perennial strikes, overcrowding of classes and residence halls, the almost total lack of laboratory equipment or texts, and the crumbling of infrastructure. From the moment I stepped on campus—via a back road because strikers had blocked the front gate—it seemed obvious that Ibadan’s “magical” years had long ago rung down the curtain.

  The classrooms were stifling, despite the open windows flanked by frangipani trees; there was rarely electricity to run fans or computers. And there was the problem of books—where to find them, how to afford them. The collection in the library was old and most volumes devastated by the tropical heat. The selection at the two decent local bookstores (in a city of over a million people) was not much better: Who was going to spend the equivalent of two weeks’ worth of food on one nove
l? Most of the graduate students passed around photocopies and abandoned the idea of keeping up on the latest scholarship. Even if they had the money, it was near impossible to order journals or books online without a credit card, or to convince international websites they were not just another Nigerian scammer/prince-in-distress.

  During my first month in Nigeria, I arrived early for a seminar and pulled out a ratty paperback to read. Everybody’s heads swung in my direction. Where did you get it? Can I borrow it? Can I make a copy of it? Books were valued in Ibadan in the way one values something hovering on extinction.

  And yet Ibadan’s important history of nurturing authors—though the facilities and intellectual support were remnants of what they once had been and the newer generation composed of what Jeyifo called “the unfortunate children of fortunate parents”—still inspired. There was the echo of myth. Of barely lingering magic.

  When I got together with my Ibadan literary crew, we shared works-inprogress and argued over politics; we told bad jokes and drank too much Star beer; we sometimes left the canteen with our arms flung over each other’s shoulders in affection.

  I would tell Kunle I’d enjoyed his play about the pompous professor, but I thought the ending, where he threw a woman in a wheelchair up against the wall, might be taking things too far. They would critique my retelling of the Handsome Man folktale, where a village woman follows a handsome stranger into the bush only to discover he’s a spirit who borrowed his human parts. In my version, the handsome man was a white woman.

  “I think your dialogue in pidgin was okay,” said Rotimi. “But you need to make the bird a parrot. In Yoruba tradition the parrot is always the gossipmonger.”

  In the fog of beer and conversation, we could almost forget that the world had changed, Nigeria had changed, and literature itself had changed. My friends sitting across the table were the inheritors of Ibadan’s past, for better or for worse.

  On one of those nights, I tramped back behind the canteen to piss in the only bathroom available, the gully. There, tucked into the cuff of my jeans, was a lone firefly winking against the backdrop of denim. And I remember thinking: These days, even in this decaying city during these decaying times, are sometimes magical, too.

  On my return to the States, I lived alone on a Texas ranch for the Dobie Paisano Fellowship and continued writing about Nigeria with the goal of completing a creative nonfiction book. Several essays from this stage were eventually published, including “How Could I Embrace a Village” in the New York Times. I didn’t want to portray Nigeria one-dimensionally, when in reality it is a country with rural huts and modern houses, dirt roads and concrete flyovers. I had notebooks full of descriptions from my time living there, and I combed through them, looking for details that would do the most work to reveal the country’s complexity.

  However, along the way, the book changed on me. I became less interested in writing about what was and more interested in writing about what if. During this time in Texas, I was also watching the economic recession ravage people, many of whom were well educated and hardworking, people who’d always expected adult lives at least as successful as those of their parents. And I was thinking a lot about place while living at the ranch, and I wondered, what if an American woman felt she’d finally found her place in West Africa but wasn’t allowed to stay? What if she returned to a homeland in trouble? I was a fiction writer by training, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when the what ifs pulled me back in and Migratory Animals was born. I am grateful for it.

  Read on

  Recommended Reading

  IN WRITING ABOUT NIGERIA, I’ve struggled with the question of whether it is possible to write, as Edward Said asked, about “other cultures and peoples from a . . . non-repressive and non-manipulative perspective.” This is a question I explore in my online essay “The Challenges of Writing Global Fiction,” and I’m still not sure I can answer it fully; however, I think there is an opportunity for writers from the developed world to write about the developing world in a way that is productive, especially when these writers use the opportunity to explore their own privilege and maybe even culpability. That said, it is almost impossible to entirely escape being part of the “Western gaze” when writing about other cultures. I believe the most important action writers and readers can take to ameliorate this situation is to support—by reading, reviewing, promoting, assigning to our students—international fiction written by nonwestern writers. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discusses in her amazing TED talk, the danger is perpetuating a “single story” about any given place. If there is a multiplicity of voices, native and nonnative, writing about a country or culture, then there isn’t the same pressure to provide some impossible “objective” viewpoint. The beauty of fiction, after all, is in the opposite, in its subjectivity and ability to refract the world through many prisms.

  To this aim, I encourage everyone to explore the diverse and brilliant array of Nigerian authors easily available at local bookstores. If you’re unfamiliar with Nigerian literature, here are some good places to start: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s beautiful tour de force Half of a Yellow Sun tells the story of the Biafran civil war through multiple points of view, from the Nigerian to the Western, the powerful to the powerless. In the memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn by Wole Soyinka, revel as this very public intellectual and Nobel Prize winner holds up an Ibadan radio station at gunpoint for not broadcasting correct election results and runs into the daughter of Nigeria’s most infamous dictator at Wimbledon, among other adventures. While less canonized than his more famous Things Fall Apart, my favorite Chinua Achebe novel is Anthills of the Savannah, which is set in a postindependence unnamed African state where the educated protagonists must confront the question of whether it’s possible to live good lives in a country where corruption and oppression are the norm. Political Spider and Other Stories, edited by Ulli Beier, is culled from the pages of famed Ibadan literary magazine Black Orpheus, and the stories are by many of the best writers of Nigeria’s independence era, including Ama Ata Aidoo. If you’re looking for more Nigerian fiction writers from this “golden” period, consider exploring the work of Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Femi Osofisan, and Amos Tutuola; if you’re interested in more contemporary stories and novels, try reading Rotimi Babatunde, A. Igoni Barrett, Teju Cole, Helon Habila, Chinelo Okparanta, and Ben Okri.

  Huntington’s disease entered as a thread in my novel when, while driving to visit my parents, I heard Charles Sabine, the former war correspondent, speak on NPR about his family’s experiences with the disease and his difficult decision to get tested. I knew about HD already from studying the life of Woody Guthrie, but I was particularly moved by this radio piece. It got me thinking about how Huntington’s disease, inherently a horrific situation where children watch their parents die slowly from symptoms that they have a fifty percent chance of inheriting, is a twisted and magnified version of what we all go through on some level: watching our parents age and die, knowing that, in a way, we are watching our own futures. If you’re interested in learning more about Huntington’s disease, I encourage you to listen to Charles Sabine’s story on the NPR website. In addition, I was aided in my research on this topic by Alice Wexler’s The Woman Who Walked into the Sea: Huntington’s and the Making of a Genetic Disease as well as her more personal Mapping Fate: A Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic Research. Huntington’s disease is also a very powerful thread in Joe Klein’s excellent biography Woody Guthrie: A Life.

  Two other nonfiction books that I used in researching this novel were The Noonday Demon, a moving and informative book on depression by Andrew Solomon, and The Bedside Book of Birds, Graeme Gibson’s beautiful anthology of literary and visual representations of birds throughout history and myth.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to my secret agent Emily Forland, who championed this work with such enthusiasm; to my insightful, discerning, and patient editor, Emily Cunningham, and the rest of the HarperCollins family; to everyone
who read early versions of the manuscript, especially Dalia Azim, Sarah Bird, Dave Brice, Ellen Garcia, Jessica Grogan, Charlotte Gullick, Erin Hamilton, Margo Rabb, Dawne Shand, Tyler Stoddard Smith, Kirk Walsh, Amanda Eyre Ward, and Chris Zarate; to my teachers, particularly Pamela Painter, who taught me how to enter the “House of Guns”; to my students, who allow me to see the world through their eyes; to everyone who touched my life in Nigeria, especially Rome Aboh, Wole Adeleke, Rotimi Babatunde, Chris Bankole, Mr. Clement, Tariye Isoun Gbadegesin, Ayobami Kehinde, Sam Krinsky, Kunle Okesipe, Kathy Okpako, Toja Okoh, Ayo Olofintuade, Josiah Olubowale, and Krystal Strong; to my wonderful family and friends, especially Josa and the Chezmarcs, who sustained me with beer and tacos, sofas to sleep on, incredible loyalty and warmth, and who “let” me mine from their lives.

  I am deeply grateful to those individuals who aided in my research for this novel: climate scientist Dr. Kerry H. Cook from the University of Texas’s Jackson School of Geosciences; the talented weavers Ann Matlock and Patricia Day; neurologist Dr. Sunil Cherry; and especially, Leslie Morris, Annie Murray, and the others from HD families who shared their stories with me. Any errors or misrepresentations are my own. The Fulbright Program, the Dobie Paisano Fellowship, the I-Park Foundation, and St. Edward’s University all helped make this work possible with their generous gifts of support. Thanks also to the Austin Public Library.

  Most of all, I thank my parents, Alice and Joe Specht, who, with offbeat grace and humor, gave me everything.

  CREDITS

  Cover design by Gregg Kulick

  Cover background art © Shin Tukinaga/Getty Images