Floating in a Most Peculiar Way

by Louis Chude-Sokei

  Academic life may have surrounded me with the luxury of ideas and the comfort of strangers, but it also caused me to move from school to school, job to job, coast to coast for some years, a perpetual migrant, unable or unwilling to claim anything as my own but books, theories, music, and memories. But just as I thought I’d gotten used to this kind of life—always leaving, always arriving, preferring to always be a stranger—I learned that my godfather had died.

  I was preparing notes for a lecture or a class on Black diaspora, most likely. It was Thanksgiving Day. News of my godfather’s death was squeezed at the bottom of the television screen below commercials heralding department store sales all over America. I’d initially read about his death on a Facebook posting by one of my young cousins in Nigeria, but I didn’t take the news seriously until CNN confirmed it. Just three months before, the Nigerian press had been aflutter with tales of his demise. For a time, it seemed as if he were always dying and coming back to life, always in exile and always returning. Neither these rehearsals nor the fact that I knew he’d been unwell for some time cushioned the shock of my godfather’s death. When the news came, my life adrift suddenly became intolerable.

  In the emotionally difficult days following, I found myself turning to a memory of landfall, of home, of my godfather, but not in Nigeria. I was suddenly missing LA where he had visited before I’d started thinking about Africa as a possible solution to questions I hadn’t yet formulated. I’d recently returned from Jamaica where my head had been split open. The past had become dangerous to contemplate. He arrived at our house without security or entourage, and I remember being initially unimpressed. He wasn’t dressed like a general or a warlord or the son of Africa’s first millionaire or an Oxford-educated playboy or a former head of state. He looked like any uncle arriving to spend a few days in sunny California. Sandals even. He carried himself with an elegant self-confidence my friends would have called effeminate. The way he moved suggested that fame was even more liberating than I’d dreamed. It took me hours to feel confident enough to speak to him though he constantly looked at me, made eye contact, as if he had a secret to share. When my mother was at work, he and I spent the days together, talking, walking, watching television, and more talking. He was the most well-read Black person I’d ever met and loved books without apology or justification. He even did something I’d always dreamed of doing: he quoted books and poems in conversation—loudly.

  I took him through the streets of our neighborhood, down La Brea and deep into Inglewood, but also in the other direction to the park in the middle of the Crenshaw District where African cultural festivals were held in the summer and Rastafarians dotted the landscape. This was near Great-Uncle Irving’s house, which I showed him along with the Jamaican restaurant that bore my mother’s maiden name. He taught me to throw a knife in our backyard. We used an empty shoebox as a target. When I failed to achieve the heroic overhand throw á la karate movies or adventure novels, he showed me how much more accurate it was to throw the knife underhand. Also effeminate, I thought, but definitely more lethal.

  I had no idea what to talk to him about so I told him about the Diamond Dogs and what it was like to move through a world structured by gangs, the police, and athletic teams. I boasted a bit too much, especially when I was hailed by the boys on the street. Maybe I thought proximity to the violence of our neighborhood made me worthy of my legacy. After all, he’d led an army and fought a war. I’d been seeing images of that war my whole life, of him and my father standing next to men who would become leaders of other African countries and who I’d next encounter in books in my college classes.

  I think I wanted him to marry my mother. That would somehow have been appropriate. For some reason, I believed that my father would have sanctioned it, and it would have freed me from the ever-present sense that my mother existed solely for me.

  My godfather visited for only a few days, but he was able to come to Aunt Pansy and Uncle Owen’s house for lunch after church one Sunday. He had to: he was a hero to all of the elders in our immigrant community, even Great-Uncle Irving who, despite his hostility to all things Biafra or Nigeria, did have a weakness for celebrity. It was a full house that Sunday. Everyone and everywhere was there, especially Nigerians and other West Africans, and the accents and dialects were at a pitch and intensity I’d never heard before, not even for Independence Day celebrations.

  I remember that my Yoruba Aunt Joy was in tears the whole time. Even her husband showed up, not with his official wife of course, but he did wear his chief’s robes and hat and carried the straw fan titled men carried for ceremonial occasions. And their son didn’t say “nigger” once. I remember a few aunts came straight from work, wearing their blue or white nursing costumes. Others were in full traditional West African regalia, the colors blinding. There were people I hadn’t seen in years, some I’d never seen before, and those I wouldn’t see again. My godfather was seated at the head of the dining table, and for the first time, I saw Uncle Owen act like a house boy, running back and forth to the kitchen to fill my godfather’s cup or replace a dropped fork or chide one of the baffled young cousins who wanted to know if this was the same South African gentleman who ran the dry cleaners on La Brea Avenue, and if not, whose freedom were we celebrating now?

  My godfather may have been the guest of honor, but I was in my glory because he sat me on his right and held my hand for the whole time and continued making eye contact with me, suggesting that this intimacy between us was in fact the message he had come to convey. Uncle Owen must have noticed because he filled my cup too, picked up my dropped utensils, and, most important, listened when I talked. Everyone did. Someone would rush to the turntable to put on whatever music I wanted to hear. My mother was seated on my godfather’s left. Though she wasn’t in traditional Nigerian garb, she looked glamorous and regal to me, the way she’d always been described by those who knew her before America and the way she appeared in the black-and-white photos stuffed in boxes under our couch.

  At a certain point when the music and the conversation had grown particularly loud, I heard my godfather say, “This was the dream. Africa, the Middle Passage, and the New World, all at once. That is what we were fighting for. Quite so. The pan-African dream.”

  I felt he was talking to me specifically since I was the one who was all of those things at once and who had suffered for being so. He couldn’t have been talking about the people at the table so full of arguments and fighting, dramatic standoffs and painful judgments. Belonging to this was to be bruised always by it, to feel always as if you were failing it. The young ones were fighting over the stereo, the music loud and rude and abrupt in moving from calypso to reggae, high life to rhythm and blues with no justification. Aunt Pansy broke into rooms upstairs to make sure the teenage male and female cousins remembered that we were related by blood even if we mostly weren’t. Was that marijuana smoke on the patio? Aunties were screaming at uncles who could only respond by asserting a power that the women believed they allowed the men to hold in the first place. Eyes would roll and necks would snap. There was a lot of goat meat and enough curry for the smell to stick to everyone’s skin for days. My godfather was ecstatic, glorying in it all.

  My mother sat on the other side of him, beatific, and I again hoped they’d get married, not for their sakes but for mine. If I couldn’t be king of Black America, then I could be prince of the dining table.

  * * *

  The cousin who’d posted the information about my godfather’s death on Facebook had been stationed in Northern Nigeria for his yearlong stint of National Youth Service. He’d been there during the initial waves of vicious anti-Christian pogroms in the North led by the fundamentalist movement, Boko Haram—a Hausa phrase meaning “Western education is sacrilege.” For months before my godfather’s death, that group had been bombing churches, opening fire on markets, and massacring Nigerians from the Southern ethnic groups as well as less orthodox Muslims. My cousins in the North kept me apprised o
f the family’s safety on Facebook, huddling in Internet cafés between power outages or sending random phone texts when the network was up. The pogroms had brought Biafra back into public memory.

  Not that Biafra was ever far from the surface in Nigeria. These acts of violence made my godfather’s death more poignant, especially as the various ethnic groups began to talk of reprisal killings. Some of my cousins in the East had boasted that people had already begun doing just that, picking off herders in the Hausa cattle village that skirted the edge of Onitsha and smothering a few with burning tires, an old staple of native justice. The southern delta of the Niger River had been for years rife with kidnappings and uprisings over the grossly unevenly distributed oil economy. This unrest also resonated with my godfather’s death. This was also when a new Biafra movement began to make the international news after growing beneath public awareness for a number of years.

  But instead of Nigerian politics, the news led me to thinking about my mother. Since I was a teenager, she’d been making me promise to return her remains to Nigeria even though everyone in our family expected her to be buried in Jamaica, or in America where her son, the Black American, was clearly going to spend his life. As the cancer grew to consume her, she’d intensified this request, reminding me of it regularly even as I spent most of my time and effort promising her I would while believing she would survive simply because she’d already survived so much.

  She died, however, just after I’d gotten tenure, weeks before my first book was published. I was happy that she was able at least to see the dedication to her, which I read through the rumble of the life-sustaining machines attached to her body.

  The last time I’d seen my godfather was when I took her remains back to Nigeria for burial. We’d waited for him at our compound, holding off the dozens of people who remembered my mother and father from the war and the very many more who’d heard that the King of the Igbos was expected to preside over the ceremony. Eventually, we went ahead with the burial, placing my mother’s remains next to my father’s grave near the house he’d built for her before the war scattered us.

  We found out later that my godfather had collapsed the day before while visiting a church outside of Onitsha and had been hospitalized. When he and I later spoke on the phone, he told me I should be proud. I’d done my duty and reunited my mother and my father. I reminded him that according to village custom my father was still alive since I still had to arrange the appropriate rites, which given my father’s stature would take time and money. He said my father’s spirit had been waiting for nothing more than to witness her return. This completed their story, he said. Everything else was mine now.

  Those two deaths sealed the loss of the sense of heroic mission I’d carried since childhood. I felt now only the exhaustion that came from relentless movement and the nostalgia that came from having left too many places without knowing any of them well enough to call them home. The deaths left me, however, with a gift, the memory of my mother and my godfather at Aunt Pansy and Uncle Owen’s house. Maybe it was a way of managing loss, but I began to think of my godfather’s dream at the dining table as the lesson that I’d expected to get from him when I visited him in Lagos years ago. He’d already shared it with me, it just took me all this time and loss to grow into it. Because the dream was big, so expansive that it needed a place big enough to hold it. My godfather had seen the dream in Inglewood, California, east of LAX and the Pacific Ocean but well south of Hollywood or Beverly Hills or those other places that signify Los Angeles to most people. It was a place, after all, big enough for everything my mother and I had brought with us and everything we’d left behind but still carried, and for all the stuff that remained boxed up and stored under couches. Big enough eventually to remake our expectations of this country and of each other, and to allow us to hide from the responsibility of having had those expectations in the first place. What my godfather was celebrating was fractious and painful. But any attempt to render that dream as unified or the possession of any one people or voice would lead to failure, tragedy, violence. I didn’t have to fight a war or start a country to learn that.

  By the time the name and face of General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu had vanished from the television screen along with the accompanying black-and-white images of children stricken with kwashiorkor, and as the news shifted to the civil wars of department store Black Friday sales, my arrival in America all those years ago seemed if not fated then at least inevitable. The scars and bruises I carried were because I’d fallen to earth and had landed in a country where I could fulfill the promise of my true name.

  Acknowledgments

  As always, there’s too much to say and too little space and time, too many to thank for their contribution to the opportunity and very ability to tell this tale. There are names, however, that must appear at the end of these pages.

  Deanne Urmy, for seeing what I didn’t see despite or perhaps because of my having lived with it for so long. Jill Kneerim, for relentless advocacy and an understanding of scope and scale. Kristin Lawless, for reciprocity. And Onyi, for roots after a lifetime of errancy.

  Women have truly shaped my diaspora.

  About the Author

  © Sharona Jacob

  Louis Chude-Sokei’s writing and award-winning scholarship on the literatures and cultures of the African diaspora appear widely in national and international venues. He is editor in chief of The Black Scholar, the premier journal of Black studies and research, and director of the African American Studies program at Boston University.

  Connect with HMH on Social Media

  Follow us for book news, reviews, author updates, exclusive content, giveaways, and more.