After Migration: The Once and Future Kings
Walé Oyéjidé
Our story is one of migration.
Mediterranean migrations in half-toppled rafts,
winged migrations in first-class seats,
forced migrations in overcrowded ships,
scholarly migrations to enslaved-built universities,
postmarital migrations that spirit daughters away from their daddies,
and chain migrations that bring distant families together,
while tipping the population against invaders
who fear what it means to finally become the invaded.
Our story is one of finding home.
You may now hold the sacred protection of a navy-blue passport. But if you are a traveler who left half your life savings in the pocket of a grinning customs officer at Murtala Muhammed, you will always remember that disappointing your ancestors is a worse fate than deportation or death. After stepping out for groceries, you could abandon your wife and kids without explanation—only to resurface a continent away with a blond sweetheart and blue-eyed children who will never learn to speak your native tongue. After graduating at the top of your class, you could fill a Lagos warehouse with unemployed doctorates to run an email phishing startup that will bankrupt retirees in Florida. And after sharing a meal with sub-Saharan expats, you could flirt with tribal excommunication by professing that jollof rice made by Ghanaians is “actually just as good as Nigerian jollof if we’re being honest.” You could embrace all of these cardinal offenses in one afternoon. But none of them would be more dismaying to your West African family than if you admitted that instead of continuing your preordained life as a doctor, lawyer, or prosperity-preaching charlatan you would rather become a stay-at-home dad, designer, and writer.
Perhaps you’ve seen creatures like me before. Overdressed young fathers whose Chelsea boots and sport coats clash with the battle-tested sweatpants and stained blankets more experienced grandmothers bring when braving the Normandy-like terrors of a public playground. Our faces are filled with undeserved optimism. Our pockets are filled with photo-ready smartphones. But no backup toddler trousers, no juice boxes, and no cartoon-branded Band-Aids in case a child performance of A Clockwork Orange plays out beneath the monkey bars. In earlier times, you would have known men like us by our swooning paramours, and the trail of dead suitors who had sought to challenge us. But now you know us by the stuffed animals we brandish, and the trail of barrettes littering the road behind our careening strollers after we fail, yet again, to twist our daughters’ braids correctly.
The notion of being a male homemaker flies in the tribal-marked face of everything strong men from the vast African continent are supposed to represent. We are, according to any of the historically inaccurate tropes you might consult, anything but tender and incapable of instilling discipline without the aid of a closed fist. For centuries, men from our hometowns strode from compound to compound—surveying their lands, their multiple wives, and the many sons whose diapers they had never even considered changing. “That is women’s work,” they would have said. And they would have stood unchallenged. Back then, such flippant statements may have held sway when confronted by famine, plague, and well-armed European invasions sponsored by well-meaning Christians. But now, when held under the unholy tyranny of Student Loan Debt, no man—bold Nigerian or not—will dare protest domestic duties while his dear wife is the only one keeping godforsaken creditors from broaching the front door. Patriarchy has a strange way of bowing under pressure when love and economic reality rear their natural-styled heads. Still, if it isn’t enough to deal with the chauvinistic moaning of elders turning in graves that have been emptied by colonizers seeking cheap resources, there will always be your mumsy to contend with.
It is often said that mothers from the Middle East lead the arms race in using guilt as a weapon. But during domestic disputes, only a Yoruba mother can package her feelings of betrayal in a silo of prayer before aiming them at her children with the indiscriminate precision of an Obama-sent drone strike. “You mean after all this family has suffered, you will not become a doctor?” she might ask softly, as you wipe the last morsel of her egusi soup from your plate and look up with the fateful awareness of a deer that sees the hunter’s scope a split second after the shot echoes through the forest. Or during conversation, she might slip in a “But how can your wife pay the mortgage?” with the delicacy of a Russian mixing a polonium cocktail for an old colleague during happy hour. None of these proclamations is accompanied by the pomp and furniture-moving fanfare a wrathful father might exhibit. But each of them feels no less fatal when volleyed across the warm steam of a chai-filled teacup. It’s not that the notion of rapidly shifting gender roles is foreign to our mumsies. Nor are their opinions about the independence of modern women any less progressive than ours. It’s just that few women who have left their careers behind on a different continent relish watching their now-American sons spend a Wednesday morning casually prying open produce bags instead of casually performing open-heart surgery. Because we have no other choice, and because we would have it no other way, we nod respectfully at the pious whims of these mothers who have loved us at our very worst. Still, we defy them at every turn. Because the internal drive toward greatness points us in a different direction.
But where is greatness to be found if it isn’t clinking around a third whiskey glass after another day spent chipping away at one’s soul to preserve a job title that sounds impressive at parties? If it isn’t in the Olympic somersaults one does to avoid Thanksgiving dinner questions about the flailing trajectory of one’s career? And if, later, it isn’t peeking through the trees like morning sunlight when a small girl on a swing screams to you, “Higher, Daddy, higher”? Perhaps it is found in something greater than oneself. If you’re a stay-at-home dad from a culture in which manhood is synonymous with work, then you’ve also shut your eyes and walked across the fiery coals of your family’s critiques with the serenity of a Buddhist swearing he will find Nirvana on the other side. But unlike the migrants I befriended in Italy, you’ve never shut your eyes to walk across fiery sands that put miles of desert between you and your family, before putting miles of water between you and the country you once called home.
For me, the journey began as all great things do: with the naive and self-important notion that one individual’s actions can shift the course of an ocean. Or, failing that, one’s efforts can help to stem the tide of negative perception washing over refugees before their feet even touch the first punishing waves along the Libyan coast. I was invited to travel to Florence, where I would present my brand’s latest menswear collection before an audience of fashion dignitaries. There would be bright lights. There would be an army of makeup artists. On the runway, there would be human aberrations of such staggering height and beauty that anyone without the towering ego of a Nigerian would immediately feel inadequate. It was to be my first fashion show. And it was a reason—I had been told—for great celebration. But as Italian headlines told of capsized boats and smuggled people gasping beneath their overturned decks, I felt sober. It occurred to me that while many of us had grown accustomed to looking into our champagne flutes during times of tragedy, it was now a season for bold statements. “There will be professional models at this event, yes?” I asked one the organizers. “Would it be possible for us to cast migrants among them, so we can more positively illustrate the stories of people who are widely seen as burdensome victims?”
It was a simple request that turned out to have transformative results. For members of Florence’s elite, who found themselves giving standing ovations to gorgeous refugees with no current place to call home, except the catwalk they momentarily had called their kingdom. For asylum seekers, who had become familiar with police harassment in Italy’s streets, only to find themselves later being stopped in the road by tourists wanting to know which American rappers they must be because they were so well dressed. And for me, who met individuals whose iridescent smiles cracked through conditions that would smother most men. “This is what I was made for. I must have more of this,” I loudly proclaimed. I was talking about the pastries in Florence, it’s true, but I was also referring to what I now regard as my life’s work: the noble depiction of those whom our society has chosen to ignore.
And so, now I am a designer. In my former nation, it’s the sort of vocation that inspires the same healthy skepticism one would afford a democratically elected leader or a poorly dressed pastor with fewer than two mistresses plucked from his congregation. On some days, the job places me in the middle of fresco-decorated rotundas in Tuscany, where the portraits of dead aristocrats observe me with a How the hell did someone with your skin tone get in here? stare that has been practiced for centuries. On other days, I can be found standing within circles of newly arrived migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. Upon hearing about my prized citizenship, they stare at their hands. Then stare at mine, before raucously declaring in their mother tongues: “How the hell did someone with your skin tone get in here…and how can we be next?!” The empire might well be enjoying its last desperate gasps, but until it collapses, each of us is going to take what we can from it. Thus, we stand patiently at its borders.
We’re accustomed to queuing, we postcolonial blacks. Along with the resurrected Messiah and criminally hot tea that assaults the tongue with every serving, it’s one of the many social fictions Brits sold us to maintain order and placate our otherwise restless souls. In long lines outside the empire’s fences, we wait. A chosen few are armed with lottery-acquired visas. Others are armed with letters written by loved ones who embedded themselves in the West decades ago, like Cold War double agents afflicted with a guilty conscience. But the least fortunate are armed with every penny they could dredge from the savings of their villages. As they pour the dreams of their mothers into the bottomless pockets of people smugglers in Tripoli, they pray they will not be sold passage on a vessel with just enough holes in its hull to make it halfway, or worse, sold into the oblivion of an indentured servant army building more ski slopes in Dubai while wealthy blacks take selfies in the souks.
These are the men I meet in Italy, migrants who are windswept and unsteady on their feet. As if they have freshly fallen from heaven, only to flinch for the first time when faced with flagrant racism in the beautiful streets of Florence. They come from Guinea. They come from Nigeria. They come from Syria and beyond. They get fresh lineups when they can. Because these men are brown and still prideful, and they refuse to look like wastemen refugees whose unkempt hairlines now resemble the hurriedly scrawled borders of a colonizer’s map. They smile while telling me they listen to esteemed poets like Kano and Kendrick. They send me messages to ask how my family is doing. Because they know what it means to miss someone who will love your disembodied voice on a dodgy connection, when she doesn’t have the luxury of loving the real thing. Later, when I finally earn their trust, they tell me nothing of Lampedusa, the Libyan coast, or any of the places in between where men like them tread water for hours while watching women and children with the same dreams as theirs drown. They speak little of these terrible moments because they would rather tell me about the joys of home. The sounds that bounce off bustling street corners in Bissau. The curves of women dancing Azonto in Accra. The once-beautiful cityscape that used to be shown on postcards labeled “Love, from Aleppo.” They tell me that sometimes it is better to remember these places for the ways they once were, instead of remembering why men like them eventually had to leave.
They also tell me about their current struggles in the complicated countries that bear ill-fitting names like “Home, for today.” When they speak, they are every bit as erudite in their analyses of Chancellor Merkel as local Lagos hooligans are when offering critiques of Manchester City. To my shamed surprise, I find them to be more eloquent and informed than the televised pundits paid to stir up fear while railing against open immigration policies. And why wouldn’t they be? Throughout history, immigrants have made a pastime of developing a strong, if impotent, knowledge of the rules written to keep them caught within death’s jaws.
I see myself in each of these stateless men. Me, with soft hands that have plied at keyboards instead of working the earth or wrestling the waves of the Mediterranean. Me, with lettered accomplishments that garner acclaim instead of downcast eyes that encounter scorn whenever they meet the gazes of the local population. But me, with the same skin and unbowed spirit as theirs, nonetheless. For this reason, I have chosen to clothe my brothers. In vivid silks and brightly colored cottons, yes, but also in the love and nobility men like them have been denied for all time. Whether they are refugees or learned professors acquainted with the masterworks of a thousand dead white men, they are rarely seen as regal. This is something I find myself uniquely positioned to change. After all, what better case can a reformed lawyer turned designer bring to the bar than one in which he defends his blood and bredren against centuries of systemic subjugation? As the empire selectively swings its drawbridge open for some, others must climb in uninvited. Over barbed fences and across miles of sand. Over bureaucratic red tape and across seas of hypocrisy. As it always has been for people of our ilk, and as it will continue until we erect empires of our own, where we will no longer beg to be welcomed, where we will cordially build bigger palaces, and where we will silently wait when those who once excluded us come calling with empty palms. Our present circumstances may be humble, but our elegant appearance will announce the oncoming glory that awaits us.
When it presents itself, the glory will arrive in ways less grandiose and more wonderful than we might imagine. These days, few of us are atop horses and holding flaming swords. Few of us are immortalized as white marble busts, in rooms where tourists snap photographs while misinformed guides mistake imperialists for notables of history. But we are indeed present, and thriving in places where those charged with recording the greatest gifts to humanity rarely venture. We are present where all the best fathers are found. In parent-teacher conferences, where we make it threateningly clear that the subject of discussion will surpass the highest achievements of everyone in the room. In front of mirrors, where our reflections resemble Basquiat’s greatest works after our children have subjected us to makeovers. And in museum aisles, where we point at empty spaces between masterpieces and say quietly to the kids whose small fingers are squeezed within ours: “This wall is waiting for you.” Like a five-year-old girl suspended in midair with hands outstretched, and no sense that her feet will one day be cut by the rough earth set before her, the glory will fall effortlessly into our waiting arms.
Fatherhood struck me as it does most men: with the ego-shattering affirmation that from that moment forth, there would always be something greater, more beautiful, and more worthy of the lord’s grace than I would ever be. Many fathers refer to that moment as “humbling.” But what most of us mean is we are terrified at being confronted by the physical embodiment of our unpreparedness, our mortality, and a new obligation to make the world a better place for our children to live in.
My daughter was an adequate number of pounds. She had an adequate number of fingers. Samba played in the room—the songs of once-enslaved Yoruba people, whose Portuguese captors stripped them of their language but could never strip them of their joy. Her small hand reached toward the light as her half-clothed mother cradled her in both arms. Nurses bowed adjacent like visiting angels on either side of a triptych. Somewhere near Philadelphia, I beheld a renaissance Madonna who put every brushstroke hanging in the Louvre to shame. We named her after something St. Coltrane wrote, because it was the closest we could come to speaking in the same language as God.
There aren’t a lot of directives offered to young men with daughters. And there are fewer still for those of us who must balance the fading history of a distant home with an encroaching Western culture. We are taught to show our sons how to ball their hands into fists. As if it is we, not an uncaring world, who should first introduce them to violence. But we are told little about how to raise assertive girls in a world men have shaped by silencing women. Our forefathers feared colonization, crosses, and Coca-Cola. But after immigration, we fathers fear raising children who will think it acceptable to slam doors or call us by our first names. Many of us learn too late that the seeming fragility of our girls is the great strength that will save us from our own undoing.
Things have grown clearer now that we are parents. The years spent studying like a wartime code breaker to figure out which accent to use in front of which audience. The evenings spent asking whom to pray to, and wondering which deity ignored the pleas of old countrymen who were unable to escape. The sacrifices of our parents, who withstood endless ridicule in a nation that refused to see them for what they were. And later, their comfort in our triumphs, knowing that the children they raised on foreign soil had become forces for the entire world to reckon with.
There are no right ways to survive as an immigrant in America. But when viewed within the context of a historical struggle for acceptance and self-determination, our reasons for being become apparent. Every song stands as a monument to those whose feet danced to the rhythm of shackles that failed to keep them in place. Every recipe recalls the traditions that held families together, despite the jagged coastlines threatening to keep them apart. And when accompanied by reminders that our daughters are the most beautiful gifts this country has ever received, each of the kisses we place on their cheeks resound as loving acts of revolution.
Our uprisings don’t always come in the guise of smashed windows, overturned cars, or respectable slave owners forcibly torn from their stone housings in front of capitol buildings. Sometimes they come in the form of building-sized brown faces broadcast on cinema screens, portraying characters who are miles away from the token minstrels we have come to accept for want of more inspiring alternatives. If you’re a cinephile who is familiar with obscure works created by unknown auteurs from Oakland, by now you may have heard of a little-known independent film called Black Panther. It enjoyed moderate success and was seen by a few scattered people across the globe, I’m told. Some time ago I became involved with the film in the same way that one does with a 419 scam ring: by responding “Yes! Absolutely!” to an unsolicited email that extolled the glory of black royalty while hinting dubiously at the possibility of future riches. My firm was asked to lend its design aesthetic to some of the project’s personas. One of our scarves appeared in a pivotal scene, after the film’s end credits. Naturally, I leapt at the opportunity to finally see my culture represented in cinema without being depicted as a punch line or a plot device for some well-meaning westerner struggling against the backdrop of a savage Africa only to fly home after bravely surviving malaria and getting the girl with the aid of a grinning black sidekick whose inner complexities would never be revealed. Most of us have seen those movies. Those of us with a conscience have cringed at the accolades they inevitably receive. From the outset, it was clear that Black Panther would be different.
The idea of “representation” is often hushed over at family dinners in middle America. All over the world, it is viciously derided by internet commentators whose zeal for “the good old days” conceals the fear and creeping erasure they feel when dark-complected people with better qualifications invade the sanctity of their once-homogenous lives. But less is heard of the impact that a fictional King T’Challa or Princess Shuri can have in places where more tangible role models have been made invisible by institutional discrimination. On a Sunday afternoon in West Philadelphia, while the opening bars of “Before I Let Go” echoed off the red-brick walls of a community block party like the final rebellious trumpets of an army that refused to surrender the losing battle against gentrification, a group of black children did somersaults inside a multicolored bouncy castle. They knew joy and flight in ways that could not be defined. Because they had not yet grown old and callous in a world that would define their ascendance as ceiling high before they even had a say in the matter. I stood nearby holding a camera, because the soul-shattering beauty of my daughter demands that I always have one at the ready. Spotting the lens of my instrument, two boys ran from the inflatable castle and made a beeline for my position. Unprompted, they stood before me with defiant eyes while crossing both arms in front of their small chests in unison. “Wakanda forever!” the boys shouted. It was a battle cry. It was a celebration. It was a remembrance of days past and kingdoms yet to come. When a man sees the face of God, he is expected to bow his head in reverence. Instead, I smiled and depressed my finger on the camera’s shutter button. The boys were immortalized on film. Just as my ancestors from Ikiré are immortalized in the oral histories our people have told for generations. And just as the golden moments those boys experienced in that theater will be immortalized when, years later, they tell their grandchildren about the first time they saw blackness shine gloriously on a pale white screen.
Acknowledged or not, we are children of a distant society that has reared us at arm’s length. Regardless of whether we are held in its embrace, we are no less deserving of images that show us at the height of our potential. In furtherance of this dream, there will be windows to break and there will be statues to tear down. But perhaps most revolutionary of all, there will be endless stories to write. And, increasingly, there will be audiences filled with us waiting to hear them being told.
But what does this nation make of its adopted? We, the sons of former diplomats who now smile politely while trying to maintain their dignity in the caricature-proportioned suits of lobby doormen? We, the daughters of former scientists who now taxi belligerent passengers through Babylon’s crowded streets? And we, the scions of half-English speakers who appear backward but are literate in the great philosophies of an older world? Those proud holders of navy-blue passports that were won through patience, bribery, and blood? Those devoted wavers of miniature red, white, and blue flags that welcomed them into a better life? We are accepted as long as we learn to blend in and bury ourselves within the boundaries of what is defined as a God-fearing citizen of the self-appointed Greatest Nation on Earth. We are the seeds of those young idealists who gave all, and would give more still, so that their children could have the luxury of choice. It took us too long, perhaps, to realize that it doesn’t matter what this nation makes of us. It matters much more what we make of it and ourselves.
Through desert sands, we have migrated. Through neck-high waters, we have migrated. Through invasive customs searches, and through pinhole eyelets of legalese that ensnared the millions of cousins we left behind, we have migrated. For what we have given, for what we have built, and for all we have yet to accomplish, there is no nonindigenous man alive who dares tell us we do not belong. I am like many. A father. An artist. And, like most immigrants, a teller of obvious truths that are obscured by the fear of otherness.
Promises were made to those who arrived on this country’s shores. There were full-throated declarations about equality and all men breathing free. Regardless of how uncomfortable those words may now make some sons of the men who wrote them, we intend to hold those promises to account. Among Yoruba people, it’s not uncommon for some distant relative to arrive at your home uninvited, with packed bags and with no precise date on the calendar for when they plan to leave. Now, in the Land of the Free, our shops have been opened. Our foods can be found in street carts that outdo the most revered restaurants. Our students can be seen in the front rows, with heavy accents and small hands raised to annoyingly answer first, again. Our collective bags have been unpacked. We have made ourselves comfortable in the seats of our success. And like those damned Yorubas are known to do, we are all planning to stay—for more than just a little while.