Drawing the Map of Heaven

Tanure Ojaide

Description

The celebrated Nigerian writer Tanure Ojaide relates here his experience of living in the United States where he has been based teaching and writing since 1996. Drawing the Map of Heaven picks up where his earlier memoir, Great Boys. An African Childhood which charted his upbringing in Nigeria by his Grandmother, left off. Less a purely personal tale and more a story of the many other African immigrants in the United States Ojaide in the text uses "we" to speak collectively for a traditionally communal society now residing in an individualistic setting. As much a reflection of an African background as an American experience Drawing the Map of Heaven is a unique portrait of the African in the United States

Sujets

• Autobiography
• Biography

Informations

• Publié par: Malthouse Press
• Date de parution: 28 juin 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789788422693
• Langue: English

Extrait

Drawing the Map of Heaven An African Writer in America
Malthouse Critical Titles
Charles Nnolim, Approaches to the African novel Charles Nnolim, Critical issues in African Literature Henrietta Otokunefor O. Nwodo (eds), Nigerian Female Writers: A critical perspective Kanchana Ugbabe, Chukwuemeka Ike: A critical reader Phanuel Egejuru, Chinua Achebe: pure and simple TanureOjaide, The Poetry of Wole Soyinka Tayo Olafioye, The Poetry of Tanure Ojaide: A critical appraisal
Drawing the Map of Heaven An African Writer in America
by
Tanure Ojaide
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This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade, or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher s prior consent in writing, in any form of binding or cover other than in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Tanure Ojaide 2012
First Published 2012
ISBN 978-978-8422-52-5
Distributors:
African Books Collective, Oxford, UK
Dedication
For , Anne who with me has seen both sides
The map of heaven was breaking up in nations and a soggy nimbus haloed the loaded moon
- (Derek Walcott, Omeros )
Preface
This testimony resulted from being prompted to do so. At least one reviewer and some readers of Great Boys: An African Childhood , the memoir of my upbringing by my grandmother, have expressed the desire to know what brought me to the United States of America. Also, for over a decade I have been having a dialogue with Fred Will about our separate experiences of the other s culture and society. This sequel to Great Boys shifts to my adult life and not only fills the gap since my childhood but also addresses my response to the American environment. Fred and I had hoped to write a book together but the project increasingly became cumbersome; hence I am telling my story which, to a large extent, is also the story of many other African immigrants in the United States of America.
I started thinking seriously about writing my American experience while I was the visiting humanities professor at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1996/97. I wrote parts of this testimony there and have continued to revise them to update information to correspond with happenings. I know of no African who has documented his or her experience in America before I started this and only recently saw a copy of Kaffir Boy in America , which I decided not to read until the publication of my own experience.
I personally experienced many things, which I have related here in the first person. Sometimes I relate my observations as a witness to what is happening around me or just my feelings and perceptions. However, I don t want a purely self-centred tale but one that involves other African immigrants in contemporary America. I have thus reported experiences of friends or others I was told or heard. Sometimes I use we to speak collectively for African immigrants who, coming from a traditionally communal society into an individualistic setting, still see themselves as a group however varied their socio-economic statuses might be. In the end this story is as much about my African background as about my American experience; both aspects of my story, despite differences, are similar and give one a lot to think about the African in the United States of America.
Contents
Dedication
Preface
1. Leaving Home
2. Born To Move
3. Black, But Not Quite Black
4. The Walla Walla Year
5. A Nigerian Southerner in the American South
6. North Carolina
7. Representative of a Foreign State
8. African Family Ties in America
9. Dimensions of Difference, Dimensions of Sameness
10. Defining Moment: The OJ Simpson Case
11. Mind Readers and Thoughtful Singers
1 Leaving Home
I plan to do many things, which may not materialize. Also, I am thrust into situations I did not envisage. I no longer worry when I pray or ask for a favour and I don t get it. Many denials of supplications might be for my own good. Who knows? Who can see through tomorrow to the future? I don t know what is good for me in the long run, project and reason as I may always try to. Yet I plan what I do far ahead, and this has always helped me to realize my goals. As I revise this manuscript, I have planned ahead for many things. I have accepted a residency invitation to be at the Headlands Center for the Arts from May 5 to 19, 1999. I hope to teach from May 27 to June 30, before visiting Nigeria from July 2 to October 4. I will be going to the Valparaiso Foundation s artists colony in Almeria, Spain, for all of November. Furthermore I hope to participate in a conference on African languages and literatures in Asmara, Eritrea, from January 11 to 17, 2000. Hopefully I will be at Bellagio in Italy from June 27 to July 28, 2000; and at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair from July 29 to August 8, 2000. I may half-believe in destiny, I may believe in one s capabilities and the will to exercise them; but basically I try to believe in myself. What any human being has achieved, I can if I have the ability, necessary tools, and determination to also succeed. And those tools are there for whoever seeks them with heart, head, and soul. There is no magic to achieving one s goals.
Raised at Ibada Village in Okpara, I had no dream of America. The only American symbol in the village, which I was then not even aware of, was the dollar. My old Urhobo people call money idolor , a corruption of dollar . We borrowed many words from outsiders, but only that from the Americans who were relatively unknown in the African world of the 1940s and 1950s. Words for gold, table, spoon, plate, shoes, and clock, among others, derive from the Portuguese who were the first Europeans to meet my people. The British later came with imperial ambitions on our area and had been there as colonizers for over fifty years before I was born in 1948. My grandfather, who so much respected his Benin ancestry, cursed the British for humiliating and exiling Oba Ovoramwen in 1897. He was a small boy then, he told me. He sang the song that sprang up on every lip at the time:
Walk or run,
what should I do?
Will I still meet
the Oba of Uselu?
They have taken him
from us and sent him
away to Calabar.
Walk or run,
what should I do?
My grandfather and my father, who was not yet born at the time of this act of savagery, told in detail the gruesome massacre by the British that I was to read about later as a civilized people. The soil of Benin is still red up till now with the blood of those massacred by the British for them to show superiority to an African monarch. Of course, the foreign soldiers looted everywhere of its bronze and ivory and enriched themselves. Civilization to many involves mass murder or robbery of those whose land and wealth they covet, I thought.
We never had any television or radio in the village, so there was no way of hearing about American or British heroes. There was a peaceful world there that I enjoyed, fishing, farming, tapping rubber, and just playing. I did not read any meaning to the spate of Churchills and Hitlers several years older than me but sometimes playing with me. It would be many years later that I would connect them to World War II. One Churchill from Isoko would be my contemporary at the University of Ibadan. Another Churchill became king of Agbon, my native kingdom. Of the Hitlers, Itila, one was my best friend who would drop that appellation for Victor. He metamorphosed from a vanquished suicide to a victor! Another Hitler was my cousin-he was left-handed in the community of right-handed people, but never surrendered to shouts of elders to change hand or at best be ambidextrous.
At Ibada Village, the Germans and the British were the same white people manoeuvring to dominate the world. It did not matter to these villagers that one lost and the other won. They were all bent on conquest of other peoples and stealing their wealth. Eisenhower s name did not get through to my people who during British colonization would be fed with tales of British heroism and the denigration of everything American, especially the education.
By the time for my secondary school, I left Urhoboland for St. George s Grammar School at Obinomba, where I met an American for the first time. She was Miss Mary Caryl. She was a Peace Corps volunteer and was very close to the reverend father who was our principal. She was not a problem to us students who felt that might be the way white people behaved and lived in spite of their official roles!
Miss Caryl did not interest me with America either. She dressed in tight jeans, which were not always neat. Our women tied wrappers or wore gowns. She smoked furiously at your face as she talked to you. Her teeth were dark and I tended to look away whenever she opened her mouth half-hollow some days, full on others. I did not know about false teeth or dentures then. You could smell her from the cigarettes. Very few men I knew smoked then and no Urhobo woman smoked cigarettes. Grandma had her snuff, and she smoked a pipe. To see a woman in dirty je