“YOU KNOW you said ‘excited’?” Obinze asked her one day, his voice amused. “You said you were excited about your media class.”
“I did?”
New words were falling out of her mouth. Columns of mist were dispersing. Back home, she would wash her underwear every night and hang it in a discreet corner of the bathroom. Now that she piled them up in a basket and threw them into the washing machine on Friday evenings, she had come to see this, the heaping of dirty underwear, as normal. She spoke up in class, buoyed by the books she read, thrilled that she could disagree with professors, and get, in return, not a scolding about being disrespectful but an encouraging nod.
“We watch films in class,” she told Obinze. “They talk about films here as if films are as important as books. So we watch films and then we write a response paper and almost everybody gets an A. Can you imagine? These Americans are not serious o.”
In her honors history seminar, Professor Moore, a tiny, tentative woman with the emotionally malnourished look of someone who did not have friends, showed some scenes from Roots, the images bright on the board of the darkened classroom. When she turned off the projector, a ghostly white patch hovered on the wall for a moment before disappearing. Ifemelu had first watched Roots on video with Obinze and his mother, sunk into sofas in their living room in Nsukka. As Kunta Kinte was being flogged into accepting his slave name, Obinze’s mother got up abruptly, so abruptly she almost tripped on a leather pouf, and left the room, but not before Ifemelu saw her reddened eyes. It startled her, that Obinze’s mother, fully hemmed into her self-containment, her intense privacy, could cry watching a film. Now, as the window blinds were raised and the classroom once again plunged into light, Ifemelu remembered that Saturday afternoon, and how she had felt lacking, watching Obinze’s mother, and wishing that she, too, could cry.
“Let’s talk about historical representation in film,” Professor Moore said.
A firm, female voice from the back of the class, with a non-American accent, asked, “Why was ‘nigger’ bleeped out?”
And a collective sigh, like a small wind, swept through the class.
“Well, this was a recording from network television and one of the things I wanted us to talk about is how we represent history in popular culture and the use of the N-word is certainly an important part of that,” Professor Moore said.
“It makes no sense to me,” the firm voice said. Ifemelu turned. The speaker’s natural hair was cut as low as a boy’s and her pretty face, wide-foreheaded and fleshless, reminded Ifemelu of the East Africans who always won long-distance races on television.
“I mean, ‘nigger’ is a word that exists. People use it. It is part of America. It has caused a lot of pain to people and I think it is insulting to bleep it out.”
“Well,” Professor Moore said, looking around, as though for help.
It came from a gravelly voice in the middle of the class. “Well, it’s because of the pain that word has caused that you shouldn’t use it!” Shouldn’t sailed astringently into the air, the speaker an African-American girl wearing bamboo hoop earrings.
“Thing is, each time you say it, the word hurts African Americans,” a pale, shaggy-haired boy in front said.
Ifemelu raised her hand; Faulkner’s Light in August, which she had just read, was on her mind. “I don’t think it’s always hurtful. I think it depends on the intent and also on who is using it.”
A girl next to her, face flushing bright red, burst out, “No! The word is the same for whoever says it.”
“That is nonsense.” The firm voice again. A voice unafraid. “If my mother hits me with a stick and a stranger hits me with a stick, it’s not the same thing.”
Ifemelu looked at Professor Moore to see how the word “nonsense” had been received. She did not seem to have noticed; instead, a vague terror was freezing her features into a smirk-smile.
“I agree it’s different when African Americans say it, but I don’t think it should be used in films because that way people who shouldn’t use it can use it and hurt other people’s feelings,” a light-skinned African-American girl said, the last of the four black people in class, her sweater an unsettling shade of fuchsia.
“But it’s like being in denial. If it was used like that, then it should be represented like that. Hiding it doesn’t make it go away.” The firm voice.
“Well, if you all hadn’t sold us, we wouldn’t be talking about any of this,” the gravelly-voiced African-American girl said, in a lowered tone that was, nonetheless, audible.
The classroom was wrapped in silence. Then rose that voice again. “Sorry, but even if no Africans had been sold by other Africans, the transatlantic slave trade would still have happened. It was a European enterprise. It was about Europeans looking for labor for their plantations.”
Professor Moore interrupted in a small voice. “Okay, now let’s talk about the ways in which history can be sacrificed for entertainment.”
After class, Ifemelu and the firm voice drifted towards each other.
“Hi. I’m Wambui. I’m from Kenya. You’re Nigerian, right?” She had a formidable air; a person who went about setting everyone and everything right in the world.
“Yes. I’m Ifemelu.”
They shook hands. They would, in the next weeks, ease into a lasting friendship. Wambui was the president of the African Students Association.
“You don’t know about ASA? You must come to the next meeting on Thursday,” she said.
The meetings were held in the basement of Wharton Hall, a harshly lit, windowless room, paper plates, pizza cartons, and soda bottles piled on a metal table, folding chairs arranged in a limp semicircle. Nigerians, Ugandans, Kenyans, Ghanaians, South Africans, Tanzanians, Zimbabweans, one Congolese, and one Guinean sat around eating, talking, fueling spirits, and their different accents formed meshes of solacing sounds. They mimicked what Americans told them: You speak such good English. How bad is AIDS in your country? It’s so sad that people live on less than a dollar a day in Africa. And they themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again. Here, Ifemelu felt a gentle, swaying sense of renewal. Here, she did not have to explain herself.
WAMBUI HAD TOLD everyone that Ifemelu was looking for a job. Dorothy, the girly Ugandan with long braids who worked as a waitress in Center City, said her restaurant was hiring. But first, Mwombeki, the Tanzanian double major in engineering and political science, looked over Ifemelu’s résumé and asked her to delete the three years of university in Nigeria: American employers did not like lower-level employees to be too educated. Mwombeki reminded her of Obinze, that ease about him, that quiet strength. At meetings, he made everyone laugh. “I got a good primary education because of Nyerere’s socialism,” Mwombeki said often. “Otherwise I would be in Dar right now, carving ugly giraffes for tourists.” When two new students came for the first time, one from Ghana and the other from Nigeria, Mwombeki gave them what he called the welcome talk.
“Please do not go to Kmart and buy twenty pairs of jeans because each costs five dollars. The jeans are not running away. They will be there tomorrow at an even more reduced price. You are now in America: do not expect to have hot food for lunch. That African taste must be abolished. When you visit the home of an American with some money, they will offer to show you their house. Forget that in your house back home, your father would throw a fit if anyone came close to his bedroom. We all know that the living room was where it stopped and, if absolutely necessary, then the toilet. But please smile and follow the American and see the house and make sure you say you like everything. And do not be shocked by the indiscriminate touching of American couples. Standing in line at the cafeteria, the girl will touch the boy’s arm and the boy will put his arm around her shoulder and they will rub shoulders and back and rub rub rub, but please do not imitate this behavior.”
They were all laughing. Wambui shouted something in Swahili.
“Very soon you will start to adopt an American accent, because you don’t want customer service people on the phone to keep asking you ‘What? What?’ You will start to admire Africans who have perfect American accents, like our brother here, Kofi. Kofi’s parents came from Ghana when he was two years old, but do not be fooled by the way he sounds. If you go to their house, they eat kenkey everyday. His father slapped him when he got a C in a class. There’s no American nonsense in that house. He goes back to Ghana every year. We call people like Kofi American-African, not African-American, which is what we call our brothers and sisters whose ancestors were slaves.”
“It was a B minus, not a C,” Kofi quipped.
“Try and make friends with our African-American brothers and sisters in a spirit of true pan-Africanism. But make sure you remain friends with fellow Africans, as this will help you keep your perspective. Always attend African Students Association meetings, but if you must, you can also try the Black Student Union. Please note that in general, African Americans go to the Black Student Union and Africans go to the African Students Association. Sometimes it overlaps but not a lot. The Africans who go to BSU are those with no confidence who are quick to tell you ‘I am originally from Kenya’ even though Kenya just pops out the minute they open their mouths. The African Americans who come to our meetings are the ones who write poems about Mother Africa and think every African is a Nubian queen. If an African American calls you a Mandingo or a booty scratcher, he is insulting you for being African. Some will ask you annoying questions about Africa, but others will connect with you. You will also find that you might make friends more easily with other internationals, Koreans, Indians, Brazilians, whatever, than with Americans both black and white. Many of the internationals understand the trauma of trying to get an American visa and that is a good place to start a friendship.”