The Naked Man
Chigozie Obioma
A long time ago—I can’t recall when exactly—my father, who grew up in a village and was still one of those who spoke in the manner of our ancestors, said to me: “Son, beware of the naked man who offers you clothes.” In the Igbo culture, it is considered unethical to render a proverb and then interpret it. It is the sole responsibility of the hearer to investigate the intended meaning of the proverb. Thus, even though my father knew that I did not comprehend his words, he did not offer any interpretation. I had come to learn that the fast route to understanding such cryptic messages was to take them literally and hew out some meaning from them that way. This was what I did at first. But despite my best effort, I was unable to unpack the mystery for many years. I now believe that it is often in hindsight that one comes to the full understanding of what such hard sayings mean. And we often arrive at this revelation by accident or serendipity. Sometimes, that understanding can come through a slow unraveling or through a single event, and could take a long time. It was my time in the United States that would do it for me.
For me and other Nigerians, America was glorious—a paradise, shiny and prosperous. I still maintain that the biggest export from this country is Hollywood. Americans almost unilaterally paint a cultural narrative for the rest of the world to follow. And thus, one image I had of the country was that it was cloaked in shiny garments. It was the land of the wealthy, of high-rise buildings and yellow cabs, of scenic structures, of great educational institutions, and of literary agents and publishers. Yet for a long time—unlike my compatriots attending school with me in the little-known island of North Cyprus—I did not think of moving to America during my four years of study. Then, suddenly, a flurry of events occurred in quick succession that swept me up like a weak stake in a violent wind and hauled me toward America.
It was by 2010 that I had managed to struggle my way through an undergraduate degree at a private university in North Cyprus. My father had retired from his job and invested his gratuity in a business that was vulnerable to the oscillations of the tenuous Nigerian economy. So difficult did things become that I worked carpentry, cleaned empty houses for realtors, and still could not afford my school fees. Then, just when I was tottering on the edge of a precipice, help came in the form of an acceptance to a Virginia-based literary journal. The fee that this journal paid me for an excerpt from the novel I was working on, together with a generous 75 percent merit-based scholarship I got from the school for each semester, helped pay my final year of school fees. I was thus able to graduate with the highest CGPA in the university. The university then offered me a graduate teaching assistant position on salary and enrollment in a free graduate program.
But by October 2011, a new problem had cropped up: I wanted to complete my novel, The Fishermen. The publication of the excerpt and its reception—mostly glimpsed through the many emails from readers and agents asking to read more—had convinced me that if I could complete the book, I might be able to publish it. But with a schedule that required me to work in an office from eight to five every day, and sometimes on Saturdays, while also taking graduate classes and teaching two undergraduate classes, it was almost impossible to write beyond a page or two every week. The fortune that had come to me became the major barrier preventing me from achieving my biggest dream.
By now the desert wind had started to scald the skin, causing people to wear sweaters and jackets, and on one of those mornings, I went into my professor’s office determined to do something. So strong was my frustration that I did not bother knocking on his half-open door. I stood on the threshold, greeted him, and said, “I want to ask you for a favor, sir.”
“What?” he said, still tapping his keyboard. He looked up. “Close the door and come in.”
Once in, I stood in the glare of the large portrait of Kemal Atatürk’s face, surrounded by a sea of crimson.
“Can you tell them to take me away from the dean of graduate studies’ office and just let me teach and attend classes? I don’t mind—they can pay me half of the salary. I just want to finish my book.”
My professor, Ünsal Özünlü, a Turkish man whose love for me almost equaled that of a father, shook his head. He turned his face down to his folded legs. For a moment, only the sound of students speaking in Turkish in the hallway came to us, one of them shouting the ominous word that means “no” in Turkish, “Hayir! Hayir!” Then, as if he’d suddenly remembered something, my professor said, “The Fishermen?”
“Yes, The Fishermen.”
He’d read parts of the book and had encouraged me in serious ways. And when the excerpt was published, he’d read it with tears in his eyes.
“Chikozi, you can’t do that. No,” he said, his tone descending lower as he spoke. He shook his head again and tapped his one foot on the floor as he wheeled his chair to face me. “Do you realize that you get paid next to nothing? Eight hundred Turkish lira? How much is that, yani?”
“Six hundred dollars, hocam,” I said.
He was quiet for a minute, then brightened and said, “You know, why don’t you apply for a residency in America? One of the writers’ residencies? If you get that, yani, they will say it brings good name to the university and let you go, and you can finish the book there. Or why don’t you just apply for MFA, that bloody American thing? Do you know about it, Chikozi?”
I nodded. I knew about writers’ residencies and had come across the MFA thing only recently while reading an interview in which the Nigerian writer Uwem Akpan had spoken about his experience in the creative writing department at Michigan. But until my professor mentioned it, I’d not considered the possibility of applying for such a program. When I left his office that afternoon, I felt like a fool. How was it that I had not thought of this option until a sixty-nine-year-old man suggested it?
By the end of the following week, I had applied to the Ledig House International Writers’ Residency in upstate New York, and the week after that, to the University of Iowa Writing Center and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. In just two weeks, I had gone from frustration to making a big decision: a potential emigration to the United States, a place that, until two weeks before, I hadn’t even thought of visiting.
When the acceptance letter came from Ledig House for a six-week residency, I was delighted but cautious. TRNC (Turkish Republic of North Cyprus), as the country of North Cyprus is called, is a pariah state, and visas are hard to come by for African students. When my visa interview at the US Embassy in Lefkoşa came, I went in nervous but certain that I had all the necessary documentation. The visa officer, a young African American man who wore an earring in one ear, grilled me for close to fifteen minutes. Then, through the glass cubicle, he said, “I must tell you that you have an uncommon application from the bulk we have been receiving from Nigerians and others here. So I won’t reject your application. We will further review it and give you a call.”
I left the embassy, relieved but still afraid. I had been singled out from the pack of applicants from African countries, a sign that gave me hope. That hope was dashed days later when a form email came telling me that after a review, my application had been rejected. I was still writhing from the blow when an admission letter to Michigan came. It had all the hallmarks of a successful visa application: full funding, a higher degree, and a reputable institution. I knew at once that my journey to the United States had begun.
As I had expected, things were different this time. The admission was for August that year, a time during which the school term would have ended. Since I had finished coursework, I agreed with my professor that it was best to work on my thesis and complete the master’s degree while in the United States. To boost my chances of getting a visa, I returned to Nigeria, where I had stronger ties, and my admission was to a prestigious school and had come with many opportunities. I was therefore not surprised when, within a few minutes of appearing at the visa officer’s counter, my visa was approved. I tried to shade my joyful relief as I boarded a taxi back to my uncle’s house. The man in the taxi had an American flag on the dashboard. I told him I was going to America and asked if he could sell me the flag. He offered it to me for free, in exchange for a promise to help his children move there in the future. After I pocketed the flag, he asked me to take down his number. I did, without thinking of what I might do with it or how I, a mere student, might be able to help a man I did not know move his children to a country I was myself just about to move to.
I was holding that flag when I got out of the airport at JFK, and I kept holding it through the long bus ride from New York to Ann Arbor. All my savings had gone into making the journey to Nigeria, and it was my parents who had bought me the tickets from Nigeria to the United States. I had only about five hundred dollars left with me. By the end of the second day, which was when I arrived in Michigan, the flag had become crumpled. I stood gazing at its spindly stalk as I sat in the Greyhound bus station, contemplating what to do with it. It was precious in some way, a reminder of my recent triumph over what had seemed an insurmountable obstacle. But now, in this country of opportunities, a slice of which I had seen in the bursting flamboyance of New York, the crumpled flag began to feel like baggage from the past—an old garment. I stood up and threw it in a fly-infested trash can.
As with most immigrants, it took a few days, even weeks, for me to get over the euphoria of having come to America and to face its realities. But it would take months, even years, for me to fully understand the nuances of American culture and politics. At first, I interpreted everything I encountered, or that encountered me, through the lens of a Nigerian. Had I been more aware, I would have thought more about my first interaction with an American on US soil, outside of border control officers.
It happened at the JFK airport, less than an hour after I arrived. I had been dragging myself about the airport, unable to decide what to do or how to find the bus to Michigan, when a young, good-looking white woman with blond hair tied in a ponytail with a ribbon walked up to me. She came up to me and said she was hungry and looking for money to buy food. Her words struck me with great incredulity. I had heard that there were poor people in the US, but I had expected them to be immigrants who did odd jobs, or black people in poor neighborhoods, or, if they were white people, to be either on drugs or unable to work. For this white woman who looked so put together, even pretty, to come up to me and beg for alms? It was unbelievable.
I didn’t give her anything because I was afraid the money I had was insufficient for me. She shook my hand and left, saying, “I understand.” I didn’t think about that encounter until one afternoon, two days later, when I was out walking with Jide, the other Nigerian student in the Creative Writing program. We had been walking the length and breadth of Ann Arbor in the hot late-August afternoon, looking for housing for me. Since classes had not yet commenced, the streets were still mostly deserted except for a few new students arriving with their parents in tow. We were trudging along the sidewalk on the way to a co-op housing facility when, as we approached a group of three girls coming toward us, something I hadn’t expected happened. The girls paused, then, locking hands, crossed the grass divide and walked between cars parked on the side of the road. They stole glances at us as they walked until, seemingly satisfied they were now completely out of our reach, they returned to the sidewalk.
“Their papa!” Jide cursed under his breath. He stopped, turned back toward the girls, and, gazing from them to me and back, he said in Yoruba, “Look at these ones. They are afraid of two black African men.”
Although I laughed at the time, the moment stayed with me. These girls were younger than the woman at the airport but also, in some ways, the same. There was something in our appearance, in the sound of our voices, and in who and what we were that seemed to have scared them. I pondered these things lightly because the need to get a place to lay my head was predominant in my mind. But once I got the apartment paid for, and once the department advanced a payment to me, I began to give greater weight to these kinds of encounters. I began to look and to see and to ask questions. In my second week in America, on a tour to places in Ann Arbor, I asked an elderly white woman, who had been very helpful to me, if there was a big black population in Ann Arbor—especially those from Africa, preferably from Nigeria. I wanted to know where I could get African food and supplies. Her answer was a swift “No.”
Then she added, “There are in Detroit. But, uh!”
I looked at her. We had just gotten out of the car at the best cider place in town. She’d been touting this place as a must-visit even before I arrived in the States. She met my eyes and shook her head.
“Well, I mean, they don’t have a very good reputation there. Crime, drugs…”
She must have seen a look of concern on my face, for my mind had cycled back to the woman at the New York airport and the girls who had avoided Jide and me. I wanted to arrive at a full knowledge of what was normal, what was usual. Was it the kindness of those here or their hostility? I wanted to know more than it seemed she—who had taken her time to show me around—was willing to reveal.
“Yes,” I said.
“But it’s more complicated than that,” she said. We’d entered the building and were now sandwiched between tables filled with jars of cider. She bent toward me and said, “If you are new, an immigrant, like from Africa, they treat you differently.”
Once those memorable words left her mouth, she picked up a jar of cider, pointed at the label, and began talking about it. She would not return to the subject that had kindled a small flame within me, even though I was certain she knew I was curious. I thought about those words, They treat you differently, again and again.
I was still thinking about them when I began going to classes and encountering so many beggars. Unlike the woman at the airport, they were dirty, unkempt, sometimes drunk, and mostly black. The sight of them haunted me, and often, I’d give generous alms. Many times I tried to engage them in conversations, to find out why they were begging. In response I got a blank stare or, sometimes, a deep confessional about a life in crime or some history of drug use. Whenever a new reality opened itself to me about America, I would recall the woman’s words: They treat you differently.
Those words stayed with me through that fall of 2012 as I followed, from a close distance this time, the election competition between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. In 2008, in Cyprus, my friends and I had stayed awake nearly all night as the prospects of the first black—and, as we were convinced at the time, “African”—president of the United States drew closer to reality. I watched one of the debates in which Obama, articulate and bold, skewered his opponent (who had said that the navy had fewer boats in 2012 than in 1917) with the quip: “We also have fewer horses and bayonets.” I laughed for days, but even more, I began to wonder if he, Obama, was treated differently too.
As months passed and then a year, I began to realize that living in America meant more than one thing. I realized that I could be treated civilly by one person among the dominant group of white people and poorly by another of that group in the same day. I could be lifted by one person in that group and brought down by another. Jide, who was growing despondent about staying on in America, knew this too. But he seemed to think little of it as his resolve to return to Nigeria after his MFA grew stronger. He kept more to himself now, writing and meditating, while I turned frantically, daily, to the news. By the time the police shootings began to hit the news in 2014, I had come to understand much about the American political landscape and decided firmly not to engage in it. Since I could not vote anyway, I would not join in the vicious politics fueled more by hatred of the other side than by policy differences.
As everyday reality washed over me, the woman’s words assumed an even more chilling effect. I found myself concerned as days passed that my novelty was wearing out the longer I stayed in America and that, sooner or later, I would be treated like other black men in this country. I was right, and it didn’t take long. A man, Eric Garner, had been killed by policemen, and in response, protesters went about in force setting cities alight. I was crossing State Street in Ann Arbor on the way to my apartment when a fast-moving car veered from the intersection and came so close to me that it touched the bag I was carrying. As my mind swirled back to the reality of my great fortune that the car had not hit me, I saw that the man in the car, having pulled to an abrupt stop, had wound down his window. As I leapt onto the sidewalk, among a few bemused onlookers, he called after me, “If I hit your fucking ass down, they’ll say it’s ’nother white man!”
He slammed on the gas and sped away, through the WALK sign. I had not done anything untoward but crossed the road when the sign had said to do so. Yet I’d almost gotten hit by an angry man. As I walked, shaken by the encounter, it struck me that in that moment when I had not opened my mouth to utter a word and the man did not know who I was, it had not mattered that I was an immigrant. I was simply black. I was the other. And he would not have treated me differently, no matter what.
By 2015, I had completed my studies, and The Fishermen was being published in many countries. I was appearing in media around the world, and my work was receiving attention. I was traveling the US, and then the world. My new status meant I was indeed being treated differently—not always in a good way. Now every time I returned to the US, after waiting in line at the border control counter and answering a few questions, I inevitably would be taken into a room and detained for a while for cross-checks. After which, usually after an hour or so, they’d set me free and allow me to enter the country.
This happened to me many times in 2015, even after I switched visas from student to H-1B—temporary worker—because I had gotten employed as a professor at the University of Nebraska earlier that year. One of the cruelest detentions occurred in October 2015 on my way back from a hectic week in London. The Fishermen had been up for the Man Booker Prize but did not win. Although I had secretly feared that I was not ready to win such a top prize for my first book, I was still somewhat sad about the outcome. I arrived in the US two days after the prize ceremony, feeling worn out. I approached the border control counter with a heart full of prayers that I would be let through easily this time. I had a close connection I hoped not to miss. The officer, a man with a shock of gray hair that he kept scratching as he spoke, asked where I was coming from in a guttural voice.
“London,” I said.
“What for?”
I cleared my throat. “I went for a prize ceremony for my novel.”
He raised his head and made eye contact with me for the first time. “You wrote a book?”
“Yes, sir.”
He turned over my passport, gazed at the green cover with the fading print that read ECONOMIC COMMUNITY OF WEST AFRICAN STATES. I am not one to guess at people’s unacted intentions or to hear their unspoken words, but I could tell that the man was surprised.
“Hmm,” he said and then pointed at the biometric machine in front of the counter. “Your left fingers please.”
As I placed my fingers on that biometric machine, I was thrust into a psychological space where everything feels balanced on the thin line of the threshold between success and failure, where the mind works like a loom, spinning thoughts and felting them up into a fabric. Why did he ask me these questions? Was he impressed with me? Was it that he’d compared me to others from my country or continent and thought I may be better off? I had no way of knowing. My immediate fate was to be decided in the moments after the green lights of the biometric machine flashed. And indeed, once they did, the man said with a countenance that was so harsh one would have thought I had insulted him earlier, “Go and stand in that corner. An officer will come and pick you up. Follow him.”
In that room on that day, I was furious. There were a lot of people there, including a man from some Arab country who was being sent back. The man was in distress. Two Arabic speakers in Qatar Airways uniforms were scrambling to translate his increasingly anguished words, and his wife was struggling to contain his tense gestures. I watched in the subdued light from a single bulb at the center of the room, the sound of the airport filtering in as troubled susurrations. As I sat there, watching and thinking about how I would spend the night in Chicago, having missed the last plane to Lincoln, Nebraska, my father’s saying came to me like a thing from some other world.
And in the way my mind sometimes works, turning words into images, I pictured a naked man standing by the side of the road with a basketful of clothes, thrusting them at anyone who passed. In my mind, the man was somewhere in Nigeria, on a familiar street in Makurdi. He stood there on that street corner, unshaken by the voice of the Arab man pleading as two men in uniform forced him out of the room. The man who sat by me turned and whispered to me through labored breathing, “He had a visa. How can they deport him?” I shrugged, for on that street corner back home, a man sartorially graced in a suit and tie had stopped and taken a cloth from the naked man.
It crossed my mind that I could be that Arab man being dragged away. I thought of the possibility of things going that way, and a strange relief came upon me. I thought of home, Nigeria, and what I missed about it. I thought of Jide, who had returned just the previous year after studying in America for a few years. He was happier, freer amongst his own people. I saw now why he’d always felt strongly that he must return to Nigeria when the norm was that if you left home, you stayed wherever you went. It occurred to me, then, that America was not the man in shiny garments as I had often believed it was. It must have been this realization that had moved my friend so forcefully, and driven him out of the country. Perhaps he’d come to see that America was a naked man who hid himself behind the cloak he holds up for others to take. And I, like many others, have now started to see his nakedness, exposed in the bright light of the living day.