Going to Meet Black America (2)

On the bus back to his place, I finally got to ask him why he was living there if things were that bad. His was a classic case of the ill-informed African giving up far better conditions back home for the American eldorado. On winning the diversity lottery visa, he gave up a good job in Lagos, sold his belongings, and headed out to America only to discover that his Nigerian college of education diploma was meaningless. He moved from one odd job to another until he ended up as a security guard on Staten Island. He became friends with an African American co-worker who soon needed a room mate to help with the rent. He moved in. Since he did not join the American system at a level superior to the social and economic status of his roommate and most of the black folk in the neighborhood, he reasoned that he was not a candidate for resentment and intra-racial backlash. “But you, you are a Professor and all that.”

I nodded and remarked that he had acquired some of the inflections and tonalities of Ebonics. I told him about my Yale experience. He laughed and confirmed that language had also been the most serious obstacle to his integration when he moved to that neighborhood. His African American friends had trouble with his heavily accented Nigerian English but resented it when he confessed to having trouble with Ebonics. How could the brotha from Africa take on airs and pretend not to understand them? Things smoothened out progressively and he blended and made very good friends. We arrived at his building and he led the way into the lobby. One look at my surroundings and my heart sank. The squalor! The squalor!

I have traveled extensively in Africa. I am familiar with all those spectacles of poverty and disease that Western voyeurs – journalists, missionaries, NGO experts, World Bank/IMF eggheads, etc – love to present as ‘Africa’ to a Western audience high on its messianic self-image as the great White Hope chosen by God to save the rest of us from ourselves. But nothing of what I’d seen anywhere in Africa prepared me for that jolting contact with American poverty and squalor. More scatological evidence of the Black condition confronted me as we negotiated the long, dark, crowded, and grimy corridor leading to the two-bedroom apartment my host shared with his African American friend and co-worker. It turned out he left out one significant detail: Rashonda, his roommate’s younger sister, was also crashing with them. Rashonda was a single mother with two young kids from two different men: a baby mama.

This was getting uncanny. Really. I had walked into a situation that assembled every imaginable American stereotype of the Black community. Unfortunately, the mainstream America of gloss and chrome at the source of these stereotypes has never tried to project mentally into the Black condition, let alone undertake a physical pilgrimage to the territory of this hidden and oppressed humanity. I was introduced to our African American hosts as a cousin visiting from Pennsylvania. By now, I’d learnt that my being a University Professor was an inconvenient detail my Nigerian friend was reluctant to let out in the circumstances. The sociology of interactions in that building and neighborhood was Africa on display. People moved in out of one another’s spaces and apartments without the cold formalities that have emptied social interaction of all humanizing value in the West. Shouts of ‘yo’ and ‘whaz up ma nigga’ were ubiquitous. Four hundred years of violent separation from the source and they still remembered those modes of warmth. I became part of the toing and froing between apartments and spaces. My hosts took me to fraternize with “otha brothas and sistas”. All the places I saw told the same story of roaches, rats, grime, overcrowding, drugs, despondency, and hopelessness. Anger. The black anger that surprised white America when the Rev. Jeremiah Wright treated them to an infinitesimal snippet of the smoldering crucible they have sat on and repressed for four hundred years. The black folk who received me so warmly were still saddled with the dud American check that Martin Luther King had complained about so many years ago. Some forty years after his death, they still cannot cash the check of America’s promise: no sufficient funds.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t blend. They caught a whiff of the continent the moment they saw me, even before my accent gave things away. Everywhere we went I was moved by the brotherhood and fellowship that was extended to me in the middle of so much poverty. We would gather in someone’s apartment to drink and talk late into the night. I gave them Africa; they gave me a Black America that had been the stuff of scholarly discourse and texts for me until that moment. A Black America that has never gained access into the sight, ears, and consciousness of white America. I tried to teach them Nigerian Pidgin English and they gave me lessons in Ebonics and Black argot. Ultimately, the interactions revealed the damage wrought by the great historical chasm. The questions some of them asked me about Africa were simply unbelievable, as unbelievable as some of my own long-held facile assumptions about them. The divide and rule brainwash of America had inscribed Africa in their imagination as a better-forgotten oasis of original savagery. To them, Africa was a horrifying marriage of Hobbes and Conrad. “Yo, dem folks have cars in Africa?” “Like here?” And the incredulity when my friend and I replied in the affirmative. My friend was elated. I told you so, he gloated.

I tried as much as I could to disentangle Africa: to present it to them as a diverse geography of some fifty-four countries as opposed to the homogenous, singular basket of savagery that America had woven into their imagination. As they told me about their own gory experiences in the America of the year 2005, I had to quickly unlearn my privileges and reduce my ignorance of the Black experience in America. Unless you’re a black person from White settlerist South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, or Kenya, the mountain of quotidian racial oppressions and institutionalized discrimination that African Americans load into the expression, “white folk”, may not resonate for you as fiercely and as urgently as it does for them. You may not start and end every sentence with “white folk” and your interlocutors could get impatient with you. What, for you, has become colonial history is still, for them, painful daily reality.

As I drove back to Pennsylvania at the end of what had been a road-to-Damascus experience, my emotions oscillated between joy and sadness. I was glad that I had had the opportunity to meet black America outside of the gloss of seminar rooms, conference venues, and the text. I was saddened by the realization that I was not unlike so many other continental African intellectuals who spend decade after decade in America without ever going beyond the Black America of the text, seminar rooms, and conference venues, and who often indulge in authoritative pronouncements on the African American condition. We make friends with African American colleagues. Sometimes the friendship gets so strong we become family. Yet we hardly ever ask to be taken to the roots and routes they navigated to academe – and the mountains they overcame along the way. I realized I’d never been ‘home’ with any of my African American family. I was saddened by the constatation of this grim disconnect. Back in Pennsylvania, I phoned a cousin who was a student in Alabama. I told him I needed a road trip in rural Alabama and Mississippi in the summer of 2005 to continue my education. He laughed and told me that what I mistook for Black poverty in the state of New York was in fact black luxury! “I will show you Black poverty when you come to the south.” He was right. We spent a whole month traveling in America’s black poverty belt in the south. In certain places, it felt like the plantation was still alive and healthy. Only Massa was gone. Here were Americans poorer than anybody I have ever met in Africa. American town

s and neighborhoods more indigent than anything I’d seen in Africa. I traveled in those spaces where the anger that white America doesn’t understand smolders.

Today as I listen to Barack Obama and John Edwards talk about the two Americas that need to be brought together, I marvel at the distance between their politician-speak and reality. Contrary to Obama’s and Edwards’s theory, there are no two Americas. America is a minimum of four planets separated by the gulf of violence and unending injustice: a Hispanic planet, a Native American planet, a black American planet, and planet white America. The first three planets orbit around the blazing fourth which has narrativized itself as the sun. Although planet white America has been to the moon and is assiduously studying Mars preparatory to a visit within the next twenty years, it has never visited any of the three colored planets right there under its nose. It doesn’t even feel the need to project mentally into those three planets, hence the shock with which it received the so-called anger of Jeremiah Wright.

The road to any Aesculapian contact between planet white America and the other American planets it has never met lies first and foremost in the de-sensitization of the most sensitive body part in planet white America: the ears. The ears of planet white America are so sensitive that there are way too many truths it does not want to hear about the reality of America as lived and experienced daily by those on the colored planets it has never visited. America’s many inconvenient truths tend to hurt those ears so it is better to repress them. Sensitive ears and repression of the inconvenient cost America lessons it could have learnt from Katrina and Jena. Jeremiah Wright’s voice, screaming from the black planet, grated those sensitive ears. What I learned from my conversations with the black America that I met in the course of my education is the feeling that after recording successes in the Civil Rights struggle to be seen in America, they are now simply never heard.

When those ears have been de-sensitized, America will also have to resolve the clash between memory and non-memory. The history of America has evolved in such a way that planet white either cannot afford the luxury of memory or can only tolerate the most doctored, sanitized memory that eventuates robotically in exceptional narratives of the world’s only good country. Any contrarian memory, such as defines the trajectory and humanity of Jeremiah Wright and black America, is a dangerous threat to the orthodoxy of a neatly packaged national self-image. Until America resolves the clash between memory and its negation, the words of Ralph Ellison which I encountered years ago in an essay, “If the Twain Shall Meet”, will always be waiting for her around the corner, just when she thinks she has turned that corner: “It would seem that the basic themes of our history may be repressed in the public mind, but like corpses in mystery dramas, they always turn up again – and are frequently more troublesome”.

* This essay is dedicated to my father, Alfred Dare Adesanmi, who flew away home one bright morning when his work was over.

** First published by Counterpunch.