Ede Ominira
My father’s Upper West Side apartment is an anomaly. It smells of yam and egg sauce, a pungent odor masked by the clinical air in the marble hallway. My father lies in bed talking on the phone with my uncle Kayode in Nigeria. The two laugh together at reruns of Mr. Ibu, bridging worlds of distance. His crossed feet and calm bearing suggest that this is his retreat.
The object of their laughter is the quintessential Baba London or a Yankee—one who has traveled to the West and wears it as an accomplishment. My father is speaking in a forced and unidentifiable Western accent. The image he makes up in this instance in time is particularly ironic. His figure lounges in a designer t-shirt and jeans atop his 600 thread count duvet, luxuries dismissed or not prioritized in his hometown; his thick Southwestern accent is its own counter-narrative. He wears the cocoon of a man who has espoused the norms of his province by deposit. Still, I know him to be the sorest thumb. I peruse him with unfamiliar eyes.
Dad tilts the phone from his ear for a moment. I haven’t been listening but I assume that he’s told my uncle that I’m around.
“Lolade, re aburo wi pe ‘hello,’” he says.
“E kaaro,” I say, reveling at the small exchange.
My name is a solace when he calls to me, every vowel curved and flowing into the next like the Ogun River on a rainy day. I am not in on these phone calls. I listen in as a foreigner, an American.
A man of few words, he is brimming with conversation when the motherland phones him. Their talks are comprised of stories and viewpoints that hold the insight of a native with the objectivity of an ethnographer—my father has always been an inward thinker with open eyes. Their discussions are esoteric, remnants of a relationship and shared experience that no force can dissolve. He smiles for the entirety of the exchange, occasionally looking up to see whether I need something. This division always reminds me of his facile participation in two worlds. It’s almost as easy as taking a door for an exit east.
The two jump rhythmically from Pidgin, to Yoruba, and to the King’s English without a thought. I wonder to myself, “What language does he think in? “ He may think in them all.
The two jump rhythmically from Pidgin, to Yoruba, and to the King’s English without a thought. I wonder to myself, “What language does he think in? “ He may think in them all.
I feel immediate repulsion when I read about Nigeria’s history. The British imposed on the natives their own ideas of the right language and the right religion, demanding adherence to offshore norms, foreign to the Nigerian people. They smelt of Darwinism in their reluctance to carry out their false burden.
I don’t bring my disdain to the attention of my father—it’s not my place to love or hate a power that I’ve never come in contact with, or to defend a nation that I am not an official member of. Nigeria and I are tied by lineage, a connection surviving only through my direct relation to its people.
Moreover, my father doesn’t see it this way.
I often search his memories for a war-zone scene in Things Fall Apart or Graceland—there is none. He can speak of Nigeria with nothing but warmth.
I attempt to engage him about his commute to America but it’s cut and dry. I question him fervently while he makes egba for my egusi soup.
“Nigeria is okay, but if I wanted more opportunities, I would have to leave Ife. I wanted to write and I wanted a music career. I dreamt and pursued, but I had my first kid in ’96 and pursuit wouldn’t clothe her,” he laughs.
“I’m grateful to have fallen in love with music at its birthplace, anyway.”
When he talks about school in Nigeria, he lights up.
“Every morning you come in, say the Lord’s prayer, and you hope that you get selected to beat the drums while everyone marches. If you were young and could beat drums well, older kids wouldn’t say anything to you. They wouldn’t bother you—they couldn’t. My biggest aspiration then was to hit the big, metal gong. It weighed a ton back then. I would always imagine everyone marching to my own rhythm.
In primary three or four, I was already beating drums. I had this fascination with the sound of the drums and the primary six boys that had the chance were so proud. A prefect laughed when I asked him if I could do it, but I was able to prove myself.
My peers and I would also compete to become a Junior health prefect--I went for this even though I was a small boy.
Everything was military-style. We lined up as a school early in the morning—primary one at the front and primary six in the back. After the drumming was over, everyone marched.
The end of the day was the same. Everyone marched at attention, every boy trying to outsoldier the other. We stood in the yard and after the instructor said to begin, we sang our closing song:
Now the day is over
Night is drawing nigh
Shadows of the evening
Steal across the sky”
“Did you perceive frustration from the adults about English being the language of education?”
“Some did. My father was an academic so he talked to us about it, but Nigeria would’ve taken much longer to be a unit without a unifier.”
He speaks in an amalgam of Yoruba and English.
“So it wasn’t all bad?”
“Well I was born after the transition so I can’t tell you much about it. British education was not coming—it was there. But it didn’t remove our language. Everyone practiced their Yoruba, their Igbo, or their Hausa at home. Religions were different but that didn’t matter. Unity and Faith. Peace and Progress. I can’t imagine how Nigeria’s growing economy or even forming friendships could work if we didn’t understand each other.”
“Don’t you think that you all would’ve figured that out without that imposing presence?”
“Of course… Nigerians are a resilient people. But when English came, we weren’t there yet from what I know. It put an ‘urgent’ stamp on national connection.”
I tried to find parallels between his educational experience and my own. I remember a similar sense of joy but nothing as immersive or elaborate as his descriptions. I did notice that their Lord’s prayer was our Pledge of Allegiance, but where they offered their loyalty and worship to a deity, we offered ours to a country. I present the thought to my father who is not one for contention.
He says, “You find a way to think politically about everything.” He laughs.
Micro-detailed, he would always call me.
“Naija was different about politics then. For me, my job was to learn maths and memorize species names; I was good at that—that’s exactly what I taught you. L’ade, you always had one job, abi?”
I agree with him.
“We were children and adults let us enjoy being children. My mother was a cop but I don’t remember her trying to frustrate us with Nigerian politics. We just knew what we saw. Power could go off, or water could go off, but we were to maintain control.
I researched politics in secondary school, around form four. I was hanging out with the older kids at Baptist Boys’ and their older brothers. I learned about the military, oil’s role in our country’s income, and corruption. I remember that we would always talk in Pidgin. We always spoke Pidgin. It was a code—it is a code.
So I can’t say that there was a constant worry about what the British came and did, just what we could do with it.
There were even artists like Fela Kuti, a guy from my own home town who was making it--singing the gospel. Speaking for the people who couldn’t speak. Part of power was knowing that we could divide ourselves.”
He carried on. Fela Kuti became one of the first of many to popularize Pidgin. My father called it, “hearing my country on the radio.”
Pidgin is associated with the lower classes of Nigeria. People say that it belongs to those who were resistant to education, as pedagogy was restricted to English, but dad calls it a “language of freedom.” English was an accidental endowment—it was given to Nigeria but they seized it and built a nation and kept tribe languages alive all the same.
There was representation there.
Inadvertently, I’d placed Nigeria in the position of a victim, another facet of the Western perspective, but they are no victims.
English was a tool wielded by certain nations, but its power did not remain restricted to them. The language was set to cause disruptions, but it refused to be kept within these confines. Reclamation proves that it is not the language that demands obedience so much, as they can decide to use it or leave it behind. In the mouths of the “other,” the language becomes a different speech, infused with and replaced by dialects. They assert themselves as their own entities, reclaiming freehold that they were not entitled to. The rise of English as an agent of power is connected to a nation, but the faculty associated with it belongs to every country that the nation has crossed paths with.
Pidgin is a rhythm. It is not a dialect. It is a language. Made up of the hundreds of tribal languages in Nigeria and bits of English, the language is everyone’s contribution to a band’s set.
In a way, my father did get to create his own rhythm, Pidgin is a representation of the duality that he would carry out for the rest of his life.
As he says, “Make no mistake--It is not what I get, that will define me. It’s what I do with it. And I never feel shaped, I feel built upon.”
By Lola Jacobs
llustrations done in collaboration with the New Media Artspace at Baruch College. The New Media Artspace is a teaching exhibition space in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Baruch College, CUNY. Housed in the Newman Library, the New Media Artspace showcases curated experimental media and interdisciplinary artworks by international artists, students, alumni, and faculty. Special thanks to docent Stephanie Jones for creating artwork for this piece.
Check the New Media Artspace out at http://www.newmediartspace.info/