With Fresh Eyes and Open Ears

Read as Temi Ifafore discovers herself – With Fresh Eyes and Open Ears

By Temitayo (Temi) Ifafore

When my brother was young and brazenly devious, my mom would conjure the worst threat she could to put him in line, “You better watch out, or I’ll send you to your father in Nigeria.” He inevitably would shrug his shoulders and walk away, leaving descriptions of orderly, parent-respecting children to impotently bounce off his back. He must have been rubber, and me glue, because the image of disciplinarian Nigeria stuck with me long into adulthood. Nigeria was one part military coup, two parts scam artist, quarter part oil tycoon and quarter part the multiple-wives-having likes of renowned musician Fela Kuti. How could I, an American by culture, Caribbean by palate and Nigerian only by genetic constitution, embrace this place that seemed to be Africa’s greatest hope and greatest letdown?

Temi with her Dad in Nigeria

This past month, I traveled back to the land of my fortuitous birth. I summoned the courage to put down my preconceived notions and simply be. I wanted to hear stories, truths, propaganda and lies. I wanted to meet my family—those people who knew of me before I knew of them. I wanted to, had to, break through my wall of emotional resistance (or at least climb over it) until I could counter fiction with fact, fact with acceptance, and acceptance with love.

I was a surprise baby; not in the Oops Honey We are Having a Baby way, but in the Hey Guys, I Got Bored Sitting Alone in The Dark, So I’m Heeere type of way. My mom, then seven months pregnant, had just packed her bags to fly back to the United States when her water broke. My father drove her to Ikeja General Hospital where she was told to wait. She had forgotten to bring the bag with her own supplies and my father left to retrieve the bag from the house. He had not even reached the front gates of the hospital when a medical staff member ran out to the parking lot yelling “Sir! Sir! Your wife has just had the baby”. When I asked my mom about the process of giving birth, she replied, “I don’t know. I just felt like I had to pee.”
The streets of Lagos hum with activity. Boys selling loaves of bread chase cars along the highway, while vendors take up every inch of cement, tar, and asphalt to sell their wares. Yellow minivans serving as taxis, bob and weave between cars as elegantly as an elephant doing the waltz. My father curses them out of the car window and dabs the sweat from his forehead with a small towel. As we drive by one of Lagos’ many mega-churches, my father states disapprovingly, “Church is now a business.” I don’t fully understand what he means until we pass The Grace of God Frozen & Dry Food and Redeemed Auto Mechanic Parts. Dad shares another factoid with me: outside of the United States Nigeria is the largest importer of Bibles in the world. In Lagos, instead of McDonald’s and Banking billboards lining the roads, there are church advertisements. There is a place for the depressed and the disappointed, the single, those who want 24-hour prayer and yes, every now and then, a poster from a mosque interjects Allah is Supreme. I arrive in Lagos a week after elections and political slogans are still everywhere. Don’t Vote for Money, Vote for Your Future or Doesn’t One Good Term Deserve Another? Over the course of my two weeks in Lagos, I would have many conversations about the “selection”, as people affectionately called the process that occurred, but for now we are stuck in traffic and the conversation just has switched to the lamentable state of the roads….

Traffic in Lagos

My two weeks fly by and I meet aunts, uncles, cousins and siblings. Each contributes a piece of living history like a stone in the Great Wall of China. I learn what my mom was like 30 years ago as an English teacher in Nigeria. I learn that my dad likes to read Punch newspaper everyday. I learn that my sister, as a little girl, loved to climb the garage trellis. I learn that my family state is not Lagos, but neighboring Ogun State, more specifically the soils of Ijebu-Ode. My family has a mixture of Muslim and Christian influences. In his office, my uncle keeps a copy of the Koran at his right hand and the Bible at his left. I listen to people woefully express pride in Nigeria for its abundance of resources and its egregious mismanagement of them. I see police collecting bribes and I give bribes to get things done. I sit in the dark with my family because of constant electricity shortages. My siblings tell me about the struggles of young adulthood in the country and the frustrations of having to pay someone in order to get into university. I converse with one sibling about world politics and love and with another about the meaning of family and forgiveness-you can’t have the first without the latter. I fall in love with Nollywood (Nigerian Hollywood) movies. The plot always contains love, deceit, and a touch of juju, black magic. People want their books, soap operas, poetry and songs to depict what really happens and not implausible impossibilities. I enjoy being in a place where people look like me. I see my arms on a woman flagging down a taxi; my broad shoulders on a teenager in a stylish button-down top; my skin tone in all the magazines and the makeup is just right. I take comfort in blending in; for it is the natural resting point between the extremes of invisibility that I sometimes feel in the United States and being on constant display in Ethiopia.

Mr. Biggs _ Fast Food Nigerian Style

In Nigeria, I see people standing up, expressing their ideas, and being informed global citizens. However, I also see democracy in its infancy. Democracy, in ideal circumstances, will have a series of checks and balances. In Nigeria, people still hope that democracy will work for them some day. Perhaps there is room for a version of it that will work in our cultural context, they say. Yes, I respond. Perhaps there is room for a hybrid version, something like me.

Temitayo (Temi) Ifafore resides in Panama City Panama> She is a Yale graduate who speaks fluent Spanish. She has also worked in Addis Abab, Ehtiopia.

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