“You wanted to feel disdain, to show it as you brought his order, because white people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same – condescending.”
As with Proulx’s story above, the American Dream again proves a fallacy, or at least prohibitive for some. An unnamed narrator leaves Nigeria for Maine, seeking new opportunity as she stays with an ostensibly helpful uncle who isn’t an uncle, until he abuses her. ‘America is give and take,’ he tells her. Amid the diasporic disorientation a romance ensues, her white boyfriend attentive yet blind to the insidious prejudice or effusiveness that flanks them everywhere. ‘…the nasty ones were too nasty and the nice ones too nice.’ She sends money home, an illusion of success bestowed, but the cultural disconnect is irreconcilable, the death of her father in Lagos luring her home, perhaps forever.
First published in Prospect, June 2004, and available to read here; collected in The Thing Around Your Neck, Fourth Estate, 2009
A Personal Anthology 