My life is a complete irony. The last two years had been a roller-coaster of emotional pain, a mosaic of emotions. Pain and pleasure in the same body, I never expected America could be so painful. Tola said things would get better.
For a sustained period, I lived with a constant pain in my chest, lack of sleep, excess sleep, lack of appetite, feeling of sadness and lack of interest. It was a complete mental breakdown. I could no longer hold it. I booked an appointment with a doctor.
The doctor asked questions about suicidal thoughts, appetite, and insomnia. As a Muslim and working class, suicide was the last thing to cross my mind, though time and again I pondered going back to Nigeria. Preliminary examination in an online chat was extended to a physical meeting. The doctor made his diagnosis. Like a malfunctioning gadget, tubes and wires were fastened to my chest. The ECG machine displayed the flashing movement of my system. Afterwards, I was booked for a two-week therapy session subject to renewal.
I was in a dark place, and it showed in my work. Keen observers – among students and professors – noticed a change in me, which affected the quality of work and teaching outputs. The final assessment from my students and the grades from my professors were unmistakable about that. I ignited resilience and managed to get As in all my classes though!
I experienced the worst of winter. I experienced loneliness and isolation in their darkest form. There was a time that I spent two days without speaking to human soul because there was no one to talk to. People here travel in winter break. Nobody in Nigeria called and I decided to give everyone a space until they first reached out. America has so much space without people. Abundance is a commonplace without the people to rip it off.
I was separated from my family. I was going through ordeal: emotional pain, unmet desire, cruel separation, push and pull of migration. Worse was that I knew the term for each of my feeling. I had a voice for my condition, so I knew exactly what was going on. I interrogated my decision to come to America, whether the pain is worth it.
But what was pleasantly surprising was that I was toeing a line walked by several other immigrants before me. My experience is a private collective. As I spoke to people and read books by immigrants, I realized I was the new arrival to the league. Two years ago when I came to the US I found out I was black. Everything I experienced had been experienced by someone else. From winter blues to isolation and loneliness and going back to Africa to feel the tangible deteriorations in your living standards. It is a common knowledge among immigrants that one month in the home-country can quickly wipe out the gain of ten months. This starts the process of your naturalization, the foreign land snatching you from your homeland. You become a visitor to your native land. You need to be somewhat stupendously rich to be able to maintain in Nigeria the basic comfort you have in the US. On some days, for instance, I can live without spending a dime, which is totally impossible in Nigeria for the same amount of comfort.
Each visit to Nigeria gives me clarity. I am trying to make America and Wisconsin home. I particularly like our city, a small, quiet university town in the Midwest. The people are warm, willing to help, and especially welcoming to immigrants.
But I somehow feel I do not belong. The thought of winter makes me shudder. Everything comes to me differently the way I see them and relate to them in Nigeria. Here, a home is just a place to sleep. There is no deep and intimate connection between history and memory, something you can remember from childhood, an uncle or neighbor who used to sit under the tree in-front of the house. There is no chatter of the children outside. There is a total absence of elements that constitute a home, roots that run deep into eons of legends and myths.
My perception of things back in Nigeria is different from my relationship with things here in the US. And this proves more real during a visit to Nigeria. Living in two time zones, I worry and dwell over things in Nigeria, always picturing my people, what they are doing at a particular moment, where they are sitting and what they are saying. Quite unlike how I dwell much about events in Nigeria when I am in the US, I don’t think about events and life in the US with the similar passion and intensity while in Nigeria.
Home is no more than a place to live, in which I can move houses at a drop of a hat. My existence is a collection of papers, two pieces of luggage and a backpack. This excludes neighbors, fond childhood memories, the neighborhood kids, the majlis, the small small Islamic cultures and everything that builds one’s formative experience, which jumpstarts me into the world of instability of belonging.
In one of our numerous discussions about the challenges of diaspora living I have at least identified two things: on one hand, there is one group of us juggling infrequent stability, those who have belonging in one place through marriage but are separated physically because of residency and distance. On the other hand are those of us suffering from acute instability of belonging. We are so rootless, with nor marriage or kids in either country. Any which way, we suffer the double bind of cultural and personal displacement.
Such a difficult process. In our journey across geographies, every stayover or layover adds to your pleasure and trauma. Moreso if you are a Muslim. Take for instance the ritual of daily praying or fasting and the memories in it.
Our life is intimately linked to our devices. As you move across times zones, so does the change in time follow you. The time change competes and tries to override your sense of timing and ritual in your point of origin. The experience is inscribed into your memory, which then tries to destroy or bastardize your sense of stability.
Instability of belonging means you are in a continuous state of transition, never able to put down roots, even if it means you are travelling back somewhere in an unspecified distant future. In the end, majority of people I spoke with have a plan of going back to where they come from. Wherever you move, you are starting all over again. For your intermittent or infrequent visits, the latent awareness of “going” sits in your subconscious. Arriving and going requires logistics and preparing. I have to buy new stuff to start over my life anytime I visit Nigeria, which I then have to get rid of when travelling back to the US. This continuous state of change and transition entails incredible amount of flexibility and minimalism.
My life is screwed up, but this is my choice. And like Tola said things will get better. Things get better with each visit to Nigeria. I went to Nigeria and cut off the wires that caused the sparks. Sadly, in all of this, people think I am enjoying. Everyone thinks I am printing money in the US!
