Facebook Nation (For Izuma)

I come from a land that has streets with no names. Our people did not name the streets of our village because they saw the coming of smartphones, Google, e-mail and Facebook and whatnot.

Well, the little path that goes from my father’s village to my mother’s village is called the little path. Was. The little path is no more. My father’s father was buried by the path half way to my mother’s people. He is no longer buried there. A government thief built an ugly mansion over his bones. In the land of my ancestors, people don’t venture far from the earth. There are no mortuaries, when they die they practically fall into their graves themselves. We are simple people; it is complicated.

I have ventured far, very far from home. When I left home, no Facebook messages charted my way out of Africa into America’s issues. My parents put me inside this capsule to somewhere and hoped that someday I would be back. I am still here in America. I am not going back soon.

Today, I stare at the remains of winter in America; earth, frosting on chocolate cake. After all these moons, alien images and clichés stick to me, white on rice. Nothing stays the same. Not in America. The changes make me dizzy and I obsess non-stop about the way things used to be.

Here in my part of America, our drugstore no longer has human cashiers. The owners remodeled the store, and replaced humans with machines that talk to you. You walk up to a machine, scan your goods, pay and leave. It is very disconcerting; I keep looking for humans to return, I actually miss them. I know now that I love people and I cannot shake this cold unfeeling nothingness I get from interacting with a machine that proves its indifference with faux warmth.

Don’t get me wrong, I am high on the possibilities and the opportunities riding on the strong backs of these new and emerging technologies, but I do wonder now if there are downsides to all of this. The world is becoming more and more shaped by a few and powerful; the cognitive elite. We struggle daily to deal with and adapt to the awesome force of new technologies and the new billionaire dictators that built them.

Life is war. We were all born into a war that we did not ask for. And people write about our world; sometimes it is mostly gory. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Achebe, they belonged to a certain era when one had no choice but to concentrate all of one’s creative passions on one medium of expression – the book.

I read a lot of books, mostly about the condition we find ourselves as people of color in a white man’s world. It is a shame that we are talking about books because in my clan we are steeped in the oral tradition. Some of the world’s greatest “books” have been “read” to us in song by our ancestors. My mother, Izuma is one of the world’s greatest living poets; she has not written a lick. She would be great on YouTube. She would at least help to preserve one of our dying languages.

On Facebook, walls are colorful wrappers wound tightly around a billion new municipalities of ME. Facebook is falling leaves, hearts fluttering, forlorn, drying on yesterday’s clothes lines. People are waving hasty goodbyes out the windows of indifferent relationships. It is complicated. Life goes on. There are no nations as we remember them.Facebook. The new frontier has edged into our consciousness. Africa. We fled her angry windows for Facebook Nation.