Pa Ikhide

In Mindset: The New Psychology of Success published by Random House, Inc. the author, psychologist Carol Dweck advocates that human beings must shed themselves of a “fixed mindset” and acquire a “growth mindset” in order to attain personal growth and progress. I am not a fan of motivational books; however Dweck makes sense; adults, especially those in charge of children ought to take her core ideas to heart. The book’s premise may be summed up in Dweck’s own words thus:

 “When we teach people the growth mindset, with its focus on development, these ideas about challenge and effort follow. Similarly, it’s not just that some people happen to dislike challenge and effort. When we (temporarily) put people in a fixed mindset, with its focus on permanent traits, they quickly fear challenge and devalue effort.” (p. 10)

Also there is a great chart by Nigel Holmes at the end of the book that highlights the difference between a “fixed” and “growth.” (p. 245). Rip it out and toss the rest of the book. Tape it to your mirror and study it daily. It alone is perhaps worth the price of the book. The book is a well-paced easy read which succeeds in engaging the attention of even the most distracted reader. Its practical tips will aid many instructors in their personal growth and in imparting knowledge to students. Dweck is right; every individual has unique gifts and gaps. We look to coaches, teachers and parents to be nurturing firm guides by the sides of malleable youngsters

As with any book, there is much to disagree with in Mindset. Chapter 7 is, for me, the most insightful part of the book; however it is the section I had the most issues with. Here, Dweck quotes Rafe Esquith, a Los Angeles second grade teacher who denigrates restaurant labor as “flipping burgers.”

“Esquith bemoans the lowering of standards. Recently, he tells us, his school celebrated reading scores that were twenty points below the national average. Why? Because they were a point or two higher than the year before. “Maybe it’s important to look for the good and be optimistic,” he says, “but delusion is not the answer. Those who celebrate failure will not be around to help today’s students celebrate their jobs flipping burgers.… Someone has to tell children if they are behind, and lay out a plan of attack to help them catch up.”” (p. 198)

“Flipping burgers” is an honest, dignified living that can lead to leadership positions, either as manager or owner of the restaurant. There are special needs children for whom “flipping burgers” would be a major milestone to be celebrated. Indeed, many parents fleeing troubled lands toil with pride in these jobs in order to provide for their offspring. I think that school systems should be ensuring that children are college and career ready. Messages like this send mixed signals to teachers and demoralize whole populations of students who may not be going to college.

Dweck relies on several scholars, thinkers and corporate leaders to make her case about the difference between a “fixed” and a “growth” mindset. However besides Jaime Escalante and Marva Collins there are few minorities of note in her examples.  On the other hand, the vast majority of her examples of entertainers and sports jocks are minorities. If this was a teacher’s resource I would urge that the examples be supplemented by a diverse group of examples. By the way, Jaime Escalante and Marva Collins were not without controversy. Jaime Escalante was rightly eulogized by the world when he passed as this New York Times obituary shows. But his methods did not always meet with approval. There is a good analysis here of Escalante’s efforts. Also, this Reason magazine article does a great job of analyzing the complex man that Escalante was. Similarly, Marva Collins was also steeped in controversy as this biography shows.  It is true that corporations are headed exclusively by white males in today’s world; however that may be changing as Carla Power’s illuminating article in Time magazine shows. “India’s Leading Export: CEOs” (August 1, 2011).

Dweck’s message is compelling, but the frequent recourse to non-clinical experiments diminishes the credibility of her conclusions. Example: There is a puzzling experiment with African American students who were asked to write an essay to be graded by Edwards Caldwell III, who Dweck describes as “a distinguished professor with an Ivy League pedigree… a representative of the white establishment.” The professor grades the kids harshly and many of the kids respond with similarly harsh feedback of his grading. Dweck concludes somehow that these kids have a fixed mindset about a “white establishment figure.” How she concludes in the experiment that all the black kids saw was a “white establishment” figure rather than merely a cantankerous adult is unclear to the reader. The notion that because they are black, they would all see him as part of a “white establishment” seems patronizing. There are many such “experiments” in the book that reek of pseudo-science.

Mindset is about 200 pages too long, stretched relentlessly to make the same point ad nauseam. It is an uneven, preachy book that focuses too much on the power of individuals to change complex organizations. Robust institutions rely on structures and talented people but Dweck cites numerous instances of organizations and corporations felled by powerful leaders that were hobbled by a “fixed mindset.” There is little reflection on the corporate structure and culture that deified one individual.  Structural issues in complex organizations seem glossed over to make an admittedly compelling point. Indeed, it is the case that structural imperfections amplify what she rightly refers to as “CEO disease.” Dweck should probably have collaborated with scholars of corporate systems and structures.

Many people would disagree with Dweck that the great John McEnroe was burdened with a fixed mindset; he may have had a fixed bad attitude, but a fixed mindset? Similarly some of the examples that Dweck cites glowingly as having a “growth” mindset have since met different and unfortunate fates; for example, Jack Welch. Robert Trigaux, writing in the St Petersburg Times had this to say of Welch:

“…the Myth of Jack Welch — Superhero of Corporate America — has long needed serious deflating. (Manager of the 20th century? Get real.) Welch also acquired the nickname “Neutron Jack” — a dubious monicker much like the one owned by less revered cost-cutting champ,”Chainsaw” Al Dunlap — for introducing to GE the policy of routinely firing the “bottom 10 percent” of the company’s work force. Welch reasoned that fear was the best way of keeping GE’s minions on their toes.”

Human beings are complex manifestations of what many would call multiple intelligences. Mindset raises many questions. Does genetics play a role in resilience? Does wealth or the lack of it sustain a willingness to thrive in the face of adversity as in the case of Christopher Reeve? Is the inability to accept failure a function of society’s expectations? How do parents view failure? What about cultural norms? Is there an immigrant perspective? I found Dweck’s analysis of mental health issues too glib. A celebrated chef commits suicide and she ascribes that to a “fixed mindset.” Depression, suicide, etc. are mysteries that are yet to be fully unraveled by modern science.

Dweck advises against praising for ability rather than for effort. “Praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance.” (p 175) Many would disagree and say that kids should be praised for using their innate intelligence for the good. From my experience, the problem has been selective praises for what society accepts as accomplishment. As the book suggests, children do need honest and constructive feedback. The influence of adults makes a difference.  We should not praise kids as smart because we run the risk of turning them into “liars, simply by telling them they were smart.” (p 73)

I did learn something new about Alfred Binet’s motivation for inventing the IQ test:

 “… Binet, a Frenchman working in Paris in the early twentieth century, designed this test to identify children who were not profiting from the Paris public schools, so that new educational programs could be designed to get them back on track. Without denying individual differences in children’s intellects, he believed that education and practice could bring about fundamental changes in intelligence.” (pp. 4-5)

I did not know that.

[Note: Reprinted for archival purposes; first published June 8, 2008]

“I am no more than an observer who saw more than enough, heard more than necessary, and listened to an excess of words.”

–          Professor Toyin Omoyeni Falola, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir

And so the other day, time came again to take me away from the tedium of my daily existence off to the tedium of travel. Orlando Florida. I am headed in the wrong direction. I should be headed home to Nigeria. I yearn for the salt-sweetness of my homeland. I so badly want to surprise my mother Izuma, princess of the stout bushes, with my lean frame easing into her happy space. I am headed in the wrong direction away from my mother’s grin but life goes on. There is a conference waiting for me, offering an excuse to escape familiar stresses. The airplane awaits me, bird that will take me in its beak and deposit me in kitschy places. The airplane! The airplane never ceases to amaze me, this thing of wonder. I always board a plane with great respect and awe. For me, the miracle is not that the airplane was invented; the miracle is that someone was foolish enough to be its first passenger. Gulp! Besides, I don’t enjoy traveling anymore. It is too stressful. Who needs the hassle when one can read up on these exotic places on the Internet? Time to go but my laptop Cecelia would not go with me. Overweight and middle-aged, she has become cranky, balking at being groped by alien hands at the security booth. So I took a surrogate laptop to comfort me in the warm reaches of my cold hotel room. Big mistake.  I should have frog-marched Cecelia with me to Orlando. In my hands, Cecelia’s surrogate choked with shyness and simply refused to turn itself on despite all my entreaties. My Blackberry tried gamely to keep me connected with the Internet and the world, but my Blackberry is no Cecelia. Far away in the suburbs of Washington DC, Cecelia lay in my bedroom, my world trapped in her ample bosom. Without Cecelia and the Internet, I was miserable beyond the telling of it.

Orlando! Stuck in a resort that celebrates anti-intellectualism, I thanked the gods of my ancestors that I took a book with me, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir by Professor Toyin Falola. I bought the book a while back because this pretty spirit loitering around the watering holes of the new world without walls, that coven without wires called the Internet, asked me to read the book.  I don’t know her name; her pseudonym is an avatar, but she is a spiritual sister brimming with soul and intelligence and the other day she asked me: Have you read Toyin Falola’s A Mouth Sweeter than Salt? And I bought the book, meaning to read it sometime, but my life is crazy, there are only so many books you can read in a lifetime. And so it sat on my coffee table, waiting for my daughter Ominira to pick it up and read. On my way out to the airport, spying the book on my coffee table, I swiped it and shoved it into my reading bag.

A Mouth Sweeter than Salt is an evocative narrative of Falola’s world as a child in Yorubaland. In this book we follow Falola as he navigates a most mystical labyrinth of a world that will never be. The closest book that I can remember in terms of richness and depth is Wole Soyinka’s Ake: The Years of Childhood. This is not so much a memoir but a rollicking history lesson told by Falola with all his might. If I was a dictator I would decree that every African must buy this book and read it. This boy soldier offered us a long peep into the rich dark corridor of a patriarchy. For this book, Falola employs a folksy narrative richly spiced with Yoruba parables and sayings; the audience is seated stitched to seats, rapt in attention. It is a quaint old paradigm – Falola is the charming sage on the stage waxing eloquent before an attentive audience but it is so effective.  His narrative weaves in some metaphysics and playful hints of Soyinka-esque ruminations emerge. Falola’s memoir hearkens to a time in life when thoughts were spare yet deep – a time when people were not really poor, but enjoyed a clarity of choices:

“I was rushed out of my mother’s womb by war songs, the last war songs that the Ibadan army sang over and over again.” (p5)

It goes on and on as reams of gentle erudition wash over the reader’s eyes like pretty waves:

 “My discovery is not like that of David Livingstone, who claimed to have discovered the Victoria Falls when it was actually Africans who showed him the place, later named by his fellow citizens as one of the seven wonders of the world. Neither was mine similar to that of the European explorer, Mungo Park, credited with having discovered the River Niger in the 19^th century, a river that Africans had used for centuries to travel and fish, and one whose long banks had made many settlements flourish.” (p 7)

Falola is masterful at painting the most complex of relationships as in his relationship with his grandfather Pasitor. In the book he and Pasitor go on several trips in search of the mostly elusive (justice, truth, etc) but come across powerful chieftains like the late Chief Akinloye, African Big Men who have mastered traditional structures to suit their own self-serving needs. Out of heartbreaking defeats, his grandfather triumphantly bonds with him through stories about character, perseverance and honesty. My all-time favorite chapter is Chapter 4 (Mamas and Money) Just plain delightful is all I can come up with. And absolutely hilarious. This is Falola at his best – a child in awe of his surroundings. The historical context is deadly accurate. This chapter has to be the most vivid, most robust portrait of the dynamics of the extended family that I have ever read. It is also a rollicking ode to motherhood. His descriptions of the various mothers that gave him succor (and it appears, infinite albeit loving grief) are my favorite. Tart, wicked and downright hilarious. My favorite of all of Falola’s umpteen mothers was Mama Ayo. She had me laughing in my hotel room like a merry lunatic:

“Mama Ayo never had money to give, and running errands for her was mandatory and without compensation. Her tongue was a horse, and she knew how to ride it. With me, it was a rough ride, not to give her trouble as I had none to give, but to get her what she wanted – a quick errand. She could not read a clock, but when it came to an errand Mama Ayo knew when I had been gone too long and asked me to account for each minute. With her husband and others, the horse rode gently, taking her to safety. Whenever anybody praised her, I would become upset, annoyed that anyone would say something nice about her.” (p 98)

And hear this for initiative, can-do, and enterprise:

“No one asked me to fill out a form to indicate my mother’s name, which I did not know. Whenever anyone asked about my mama, I answered in the plural, “they are home.” I never acted or behaved as a child with one mother. When a crack appears in a wall, the lizard finds the opportunity to enter. The crack that I was looking for was the mama with generosity at a particular time, one who would give me more food. When the mamas did not coordinate their activities, I could have two dinners by judging when the food would be ready in two places. They had to give me food anyway.” (p 99)

 The book is personal; it transports me to a genesis, the beginnings of my childhood starting out at birth in Lagos, through “eba” kindergarten school and primary one in Ibadan.  The reader soon joins Falola in lamenting the eroding of the present into the past.

 Ise agbe nise ile wa

Eni ko sise a maa jale

Iwe kiko laisi oko

Ko I pe o ko I pe o

 Farming is our main occupation

Who ever does not work will steal

Education without a hoe

Is not enough, not enough (p 149)

This was practically our primary school anthem in Ibadan. We sang it every day and it has stuck with me. To this day, on certain Saturday mornings my kids can still hear me going at that song with all the lusty gusto that I can muster. Falola’s book takes me to many places where the heart remembers. I remember my grandmother and her unadulterated love for us. I especially remember the way things were as a boy during the Nigerian civil war hiding out in the village awaiting the outcome of the war. This reader remembers with great fondness the joys and strengths of the extended family system. I salute those who believed in it at the time and held my generation across the new river to the other shore. I hope that the generation after mine will be kind in similarly judging our performance. My memories of childhood are gently fading now, gently thrown under the bus by the fatty tissue of life’s issues and choices. The little boy in me hangs back, recedes downcast as the guiding lights of the middle passage refuse me playing rights with my past. I look back and I wave but the boy in me defiantly refuses to acknowledge me. Hands in his khaki pockets, barefooted he kicks stones and stories about, like they are soccer balls. He will play all by himself while I play at being an adult finally. He never leaves my eyes’ windshield; this punishment shall go on for a long time. I salute Professor Toyin Falola for this exquisite trip.

Falola’s book is easily the most comprehensive treatise on patriarchy that I have ever read outside of Chinua Achebe’s books, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. In a certain sense, this is also about life as war, about the plight of children, child soldiers born into a war of cultures that they did not ask for. In many ways, I would argue that Falola’s memoir is a legitimate story of a surviving child soldier. The book offers robust opportunities for a wide ranging discussion on several topics; from patriarchy, the decision tree branches into several other topics each touched upon with great depth. What a treat.  Falola’s views on the current dispensation – the move from patriarchy, the shift to nuclear families and on feminism could also be glimpsed. Falola does not invest much in political correctness and it shows Regardless this is not a mere hagiography of a halcyon past; it is living history because he carefully plots and recreates how things were, how things are and the reader is left agape at how a people can bastardize well founded cultures and traditions for the perverse benefits of a few.

 “From the evening to night and at every moment, Yoruba culture was being displayed in ways that were different from what occurs today. As I have enjoyed the lived culture, embodying many aspects of it, I have also grown to become the narrator of a past that is no more.  The real shock to me is that what I saw at Ode Aje, whether it was a marriage or death ceremony, money raising or debt repayment, has disappeared or been modified so substantially within a period of thirty years. I have read about profound cultural changes in centuries long gone, but I never knew that a similar process could occur within a life span, within my own generation, which is a project in the making. I have never fully recovered from the shock of change and the agony of revisiting a past that has been violently reshaped.”  (p 162)

Of all the characters in the book and they are legion, I was most struck by Iya Lekuleja, Leku the old woman. The mystery of the relationship between Falola the boy and Leku the diviner is simply awesome. I read with rapt attention, hushed with the veil of a certain mysticism each time Falola entered Leku’s room. The mystery of that place renders the English Language a wretched vehicle for conveying its depth. It is a big shame because with the dying of the oral tradition things are not being passed on in writing. It is almost as if our world started when the white man’s letters came ashore.

At the tender age of nine, Falola develops a near-tragic fascination with trains (Ibadan is a central railway hub). He ends up inside one all by himself and he is so enthralled he does not get off the train until he is forced out by a ticket collector at Ilorin. I have a nine-year old boy and my jaw dropped as Falola describes his survival on the streets of Ilorin far away from home, conscripted into child labor by a beggar. He would become a “stick boy” for this “blind” beggar.

 I knew what a boy was. I was one. I could not combine the stick and the boy. It was my first job in life. ‘Stick boy” was an occupation, a great job for that matter. The job started immediately. The man, tall and able, would pretend to be blind. I would hold a stick, with him at the back holding the tail and I holding the head. I led, and he followed behind, whispering to me, giving me directions where to go, telling me to move to a person sitting quietly in front of his house. The blind man would beg, offering prayers. I would repeat the prayer or offer my own. Alms would come, we would give a short thanks, and quickly move on to the next person who might not be so king. I would collect the alms and pass them on to him. He never missed my hands as received the money; he never missed his pocket as he put it there. At the end of the day, he would give me my allowance. This was easy to understand. (p 67)

 Falola is no shrinking violet. His book is rife with opinions on a wide range of subjects like divorce and feminism. The book soaks you in the varied world of herbalists, diviners, charm makers, priests and priestesses and a thoroughly fascinating world of cults, masquerades, magic and witchcraft. And in polygamy we find politics in everything, including sex. In Chapter 9 (Seasonal Pleasures) any lie that Nigerians are inhibited when it comes to sex is laid bare (no pun intended). This chapter is a long oriki to sex. It is an interesting take on phallic symbols, sex and sexuality among the Yoruba. It would make for a very interesting debate because it comes across as overly male-centric, expressing the feelings of the man, some would say in a most vulgar manner – sex as conquest.

 The most hilarious story in book is when Falola and his friends set about trying to hook up a friend of theirs Sali with a girl named Risi. They would pen love letters reminiscent of the kinds of letters in the Onitsha Market literature of my childhood. Here is a ribald teaser; the “love letters” alone are worth the price of the book:

 “Oh beautiful Queen! The geography of your body is perfect. Your body is full of milk and honey, your fingers are richer than gold, your eyes see better than the moon and sun, your head contains more wisdom than the sea can hold water. Queen Risi is the model of perfection, accepted by the angels, created by God on a Sunday when He had no time for other duties. You are the last Queen created by God. Other women that came after you are servants of the king.” (p 179)

 The outcome when the boys are found out by their elders is almost tragic. What happened to Falola as a result of this adventure still gives me shivers – it would qualify as child abuse in Western societies. Read the book. All I can say is that Falola is a generous heart. With great affection he transcends major childhood trauma to paint a heartfelt and compelling portrait of an enduring relationship with various adults.

 Falola is first and foremost a historian and a remarkable one at that. If the prose sizzles, it is his depiction of the history of a place that time forgot that makes it so. On the new dispensation:

 There was nothing wrong with Yoruba food, but the new elites in power were making bread and tea more important than corn and beans, turning the students’ taste buds away from local foods and toward imported ones, preparing them for a future that would enslave them in the global economy. (p 145)

 The book’s most important selling point is that is instructive. There is so much that is new to the reader. I was pleasantly surprised to learn about the difference between the phenomenon known as emere as compared to abiku:

An emere… was… worse than an abiku. Unlike the abiku, who was honest with his intention to live in the world for a few days or months, the emere would not give any clues. So deceptive was he that he would show great promise and courage in order to prevent his parents and the diviners from preparing the necessary prophylactic comprising a rich arsenal with which to oppose death. (p 73)

 Falola is a man enchanted by and truly entrenched in the people and its customs. His childhood memoir is a rich stew of proverbs and idioms. However, in faithfully recording the changing of the seasons and the times, Falola sometimes adopts a historian’s attitude and it robs the prose of some crispness.  Also, sometimes, something gets lost in the translation of the sayings and the profound becomes obvious and trite; the sayings lose their robustness in a sea of English words:

 A twisted hand finds it difficult to grip well. (p 79)

 Rotten wood cannot be carved. (p 80)

But be patient, this book is fun. This is also an important book. I would strongly recommend reading it along with Professor Wole Soyinka’s childhood memoir, Ake: The Years of Childhood. They complement each other very nicely.

As great literature goes, Falola is neither Wole Soyinka nor Ola Rotimi when it comes to dramatic flair and he certainly cannot light a candle to Chris Abani’s prose. But what he has is plenty, more than plenty.  Falola earns my respect as a masterful storyteller adept at turning stories into power. This story starts out trembling like a sly train but soon roars to life filled with Ogun’s fires. And man, do sparks fly! The beauty of the book is in its arrangement – in chunky hearty almost stand-alone chapters than can be devoured in no particular order. Then there are these five black and white photographs, all five of them tastefully grainy. These photos of childhood took my breath away. Like rider-less horses they take you to a time that will never come back. Each photograph is a story. Haunting are the pictures – priceless the time stamp of a time gone for ever. Ominira will read this book. Someone should put Falola on YouTube and make him read his book to us in Yoruba. That would be something. That would be something. Indeed.

Falola is right. Our world has changed and not all of it for the good. But life goes on. We welcome the new villages without walls, with strange names like www.barackobama.com, Facebook and YouTube, defiant celebrations of the spirit and spirited denunciations and renunciations of the weaknesses of the flesh. Life goes on. On earth, today is the Internet’s yesterday. And out on the Internet, the new town-criers blare out tomorrow’s news. On the Internet, tomorrow has already come today. Amazing. Today, my son Lion Cub steps out onto the driveway of our existence, grabs today’s newspaper and drops it in the recycling bin. The newspaper is worthless; we read today’s news on the Internet yesterday. Amazing. Ominira walks into my space her voice greedy harbinger of her wants: “Daddy may I use the phone?” I take one look at her impish face and we both start laughing. When did Ominira start using out landline to communicate with her friends? She is trying to give me the illusion of control; her generation has no need for landlines. Welcome new world, welcome old world. The more things change… Hurry, hurry, hurry, go buy Falola’s book before your world changes yet again.

Reprinted for archival purposes; first published November 30, 2009

Trolling books in search of pleasure is fraught with peril; one never knows what darkness lurks between the covers of a book. There is the danger of inheriting someone else’s demons. Life is too short for such burdens, but it happens. Patrick French’s stellar biography of the writer V.S. Naipaul The World Is What It Is is an excellent example of hard covered darkness. As you read that dark book, the mind simply recoils from Naipaul’s misogyny and the heart fills with the mystery of what depravity and deficits in self esteem would permit a woman to endure such horrors of misogyny. This is a long rambling way of saying for the record that no book has upset me more in recent times than Bitter-Sweet: My Life with Obasanjo, written by Mrs. Oluremi Obasanjo, Chief Matthew Aremu Olusegun Obasanjo’s first wife. This is one horrible book on many levels. It is a perverse metaphor for all that is wrong with Nigeria, but ultimately there is a gripping story under that book’s covers. Yes, it is a gripping book; I could not put it down. Read this book and weep for the fate of the women and children of Nigeria.

This is one horrible book on many levels. It is a perverse metaphor for all that is wrong with Nigeria. My copy came in a “hard cover,” to use that term extremely loosely. The pages seemed affixed to the covers with the liberal use of eba as an adhesive. Everything about it is poorly done – the writing, the research, the production, the editing. It was perhaps not edited. Diamond Publications Ltd, the publishers of this book should be embarrassed; this is not a book befitting the status of the ex-wife of a former ruler of Nigeria. Unfortunately, this sorry excuse for a book did not prevent blurb writers of stature (Reuben Abati, Femi Osofisan, etc) from lustily singing its praises. How it is possible that they could have read past the numerous typos and grammatical errors in that book speaks volumes for the level of indifference to excellence in today’s Nigeria. To cap it all, the “foreword” was written by a university don, Professor Adigun Agbaje, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Political Science at the University of Ibadan. It is quite simply disgraceful that a university don would append his name and prestige to such sloppiness. Why, the book is so bad, even the clichés are mangled.

In this book, Mrs. Obasanjo chronicles an acrimonious and violent marriage to a narcissistic partner, who is horrible and abusive, mean spirited, and nasty to boot. In most societies the allegations against Obasanjo, if proven in a court of law would have earned him a long stay in jail. Mr. Obasanjo is portrayed as a serial manipulator and wife abuser who loves charming all manners of women into his perverse space. In her spell-binding narrative, Mrs. Obasanjo’s life has been a terrifying roller-coaster since she first had the misfortune of meeting him late in 1955.  According to the book, Obasanjo is a ruthless man, one who was fond of offering unsolicited slaps and merciless beatings to subordinates, house help and wives (the late Stella Obasanjo included). Nothing seems beneath Mr. Obasanjo – witchcraft, sorcery and diabolical behavior. To understand the specific nature of the allegations, imagine an African statesman (Aremu Obasanjo), knife in hand, chasing his terrified wife (Oluremi Obasanjo) down the street, not to give her flowers, but perhaps to murder her. Mrs. Obasanjo has been abused beyond the imagining of it. It is tempting to heap blame on Mrs. Obasanjo for hanging around long enough to endure such horrors, except that psychiatrists would describe her odd enabling behavior (of Obasanjo’s sick antics) as emanating from the abused spouse syndrome. Regardless, she represents Nigerians’ willingness to take unspeakable abuse from leaders – for a chance at the table of wretched crumbs.

In the celebration of the remains of narcissistic ME the author glosses over substance at every opportunity. It is largely because, like her husband, she is innocent of substance. When she tries to be deep, it is comical. It is all about style for her. All sizzle and no suya. This is a shame because through the roughness peeps sensitivity. She needed a good ghost writer. There is very little analysis, although there are interesting anecdotes. Mrs. Obasanjo reveals that during the civil war years, there were simmering tensions between Benjamin Adekunle and Obasanjo. Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu cuts a dashing and romantic, if quixotic figure, He showered her with the kind of attention normally reserved for lovers – she should have married him, he was such a gentle man. It is a book about missed and wasted resources. We come face-to-face with pathetic lives preoccupied with the accumulation of the banal and the trite. There are all these powerful soldiers and civilians accumulating an army of dead peers, victims of naked ambition – none related to securing Nigeria’s fortunes.

By Mrs. Obasanjo’s own account, Obasanjo treated her worse than the wretched chickens of Otta Farms. Still, it is strange, after all that she went through, she was in the habit of loitering around the corridors of power calling herself Obasanjo’s wife and apparently collecting favors. As his “wife”, she led “delegations” to other countries, to do what, it is hard to tell. Gaps in the narrative rankle and blatant hagiographies abound as she strangely channels Obasanjo’s delusions of grandeur. Her spirited defense of her daughter Iyabo Obasanjo defies and defiles logic. It tears to shreds the book’s pretense to credibility. The self-absorbed ME looms large in the narrative and once more Nigeria is an Okada motorcycle being ridden to its demise by a handful of overweight riders. In this sad horrid book, everything comes together in one perverse convergence – the collusion of rogue intellectuals with rogue soldiers and a willing populace to screw Nigeria to death. History will hopefully be just to Obasanjo and Nigeria. Obasanjo was a horrid husband; Mrs. Obasanjo would know. Obasanjo was a horrid leader, we would know.

Note: Reprinted for archival purposes; first published June 20, 2011

I revere Buchi Emecheta, Ola Rotimi, Flora Nwapa, Elechi Amadi, Cyprian Ekwensi, Gabriel Okara, Chinua Achebe, John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike, Wole Soyinka, and TM Aluko. Together, they raised and nurtured those of my generation who loved the world of ideas and we devoured their works like starved children. We owe much of what we are today to these great owners of words.

So imagine my excitement the other day when I chanced upon a used copy of Clark’s book, America, their America. As a teenager I had been awed by the audacity of this African that had gone to America, hated her patronizing and condescending attitude, and spat at her faux generosity. I cheered then, when in the end he was unceremoniously ejected from America for being a prickly non-conformist. Clark was defiant to the end. I was a hot headed youth in those days and I loved beret wearing, brandy swilling, cigar chomping rebels, so romantic. Besides I always liked JP Clark, as we called him in those days. As a playful secondary school student, I appreciated that his poems were always more accessible to me than those of Soyinka. Try this: Read Clark’s Abiku and then read Soyinka’s Abiku. Your headache will ambush you after reading the latter.

America their America. America, their America is an angry book from cover to cover written by a gifted young man that railed against the alienation and sense of loss he felt upon turning the corner and seeing the nightmare that was their America. Clark gleefully deployed muscular prose to settle scores with America. The America he saw was not the America of his dreams. And this young man was not impressed. He spoke truth to their power in prose. It is an important book; I will always include it in a study of Africans in exile, along with Nnamdi Azikiwe’s My Odyssey and Buchi Emecheta’s early books. I still think America, their America is an important book; however, upon re-reading the book recently, I was taken by how angry Clark was in the book. Clark used the novel to settle scores with his American guests. As I read the book again, it occurred to me that I did not know much about Clark beyond his poetry and the book. Indeed, we do not have a robust culture of writing reliable biographies of our literary heroes.

I am always filled with envy when I read unflinching high quality biographies of folks in the West, most recently of VS Naipaul by Patrick French. So, I was thrilled to learn that Adewale Maja-Pearce had just written a biography about Clark, titled, A Peculiar Tragedy: J.P. Clark-Bekederemo and the Beginning of Modern Nigerian Literature in English. I went online to buy the book; with taxes, shipping and handling and other forms of robbery fees, I was looking at $30. Not happening, the economy is bad. Seeing that the book was published in Nigeria (The New Gong), I begged friends to scour bookstores in Nigeria in search of the book. It turns out that The New Gong publishing company is owned by none other than Maja-Pearce himself and the distribution structure on the ground in Nigeria is non-existent. To cut a long story short, this self-published book is not available in Nigeria. I finally relented and bought the book online. I did not waste our family’s money but I expected more for $30, I really did.

Hagiography or Biography? So, how did this biography come about? It goes something like this: Maja-Pearce dreams up a proposal to write Clark’s “biography” and applies somewhere for a $63,000 grant to fund the project (don’t ask me why he needed that much to write a book). When he doesn’t get the grant, he approaches Clark who agrees to foot the bill for the “project.” A flattered Clark readily agrees and pays Maja-Pearce one million Naira (about $7,000) with a promise to pay an additional one million Naira later. There are other perks; Maja-Pearce is allowed free access to Clark’s records, house and wine bar (and Maja-Pearce admits that he helped himself generously to everything, especially the alcohol). Soon, things go wrong; Clark does not like drafts of the manuscript and balks at the use of a certain letter. The relationship goes south badly. Maja-Pearce is unceremoniously ejected from Clark’s home and heart and he goes off in a huff to write a stinging tell-all tale.

The conflict of interest inherent in this pay-for-your-hagiography scheme shreds whatever credibility the book has. Clark was right in demanding that the product fit his specifications. Well, think about it, if you commission an artist to paint your portrait wouldn’t you want the portrait to be flattering of your jowls? What doomed the project from the onset, besides the sloppy writing is the loss of credibility. When someone pays you to write his biography, he is most definitely not interested in an objective tome. He wants something that will provide a mirror to the side that flatters him the most. Why would you demand payment from someone to do their biography? Who does that? It reads like a shake-down to me. And it was.

What Maja-Pearce has written is not a biography in the real sense. I am not sure what to call it. Let’s just say that Clark will not be pleased with the book. Wole Soyinka will not be pleased either. Neither will Achebe. Maja-Pearce is an equal opportunity hack savaging the dignity of any and every one in his jaded sight. Which brings me to another point: Sometimes you wonder if this is really about Clark or about Maja-Pearce’s desperate need to put together all his sloppy research about various subjects in one book. He succeeds in that and fails in virtually everything else.

If the aim of the book was to diminish Clark and his generation of writers, Maja-Pearce misses the mark terribly. The reader actually comes away empathizing with Clark at the end of the book. And it was not for lack of Maja-Pearce trying. He expends extraordinary energy toward diminishing the man. Insults and put-downs fly gleefully and no one escapes Maja Pearce’s teasing, especially Soyinka and Clark. It is an unnecessary exercise that merely diminishes Maja-Pearce himself. And as an aside, the notion of setting Clark up as a rival to Soyinka and Achebe is a needless distraction. Maja-Pearce plays up the rivalry between Soyinka and Clark to very tasteless levels. Each writer is different, endowed with extraordinary gifts and if Clark is a literary failure, as Maja-Pearce implies, many of us would like to fail like that. The bottom line is this: The history of African literature, indeed English literature would be incomplete without Clark’s contributions.

Analysis or Personal Opinions? Maja-Pearce should have enlisted the help of someone who knows poetry; his analysis of the works of Soyinka, Okigbo and Clark is disgraceful. He readily admits that he knows little about Okigbo’s poetry but he did some work on it because it “was just a job with a modest fee at the end of it.” One thing about Maja-Pearce, he is honest. He presents himself as a hustler lurking in the seamy edge of the literary world scheming to make a quick buck. Here is a man who measures a writer’s worth by the number of google hits: Achebe is more important that Soyinka who is more important than Okri. Who does that? His standard of success is suspect. Biases and prejudices mar the book’s quality and credibility. I would read Robert M. Wren’s Those Magical Years: The Making of Nigerian Literature at Ibadan first before reading this book. The few insightful observations in Maja-Pearce’s book are inspired, if not lifted from that book.

In this highly disorganized book, Maja-Pierce fails to provide the appropriate context for his thesis. Who is Clark? Why are we reading this book? The analysis of several weighty issues falls short, for example Maja-Pearce lacks an appreciation for the complicated relationship minorities had among the major ethnic groups leading to and even after the Nigerian Civil war. He concludes that Clark’s decision to side with the Federal government, rather than the Biafran side, was reactionary and self-serving. To ascribe Clark’s decision to side with the Federal side as self-serving is to totally miss the complexities of that unfortunate war. Maja-Pearce does not get it: Clark and Saro-Wiwa especially would never have joined the Biafran side. His analysis of this issue is typical of the strands of his arguments – they are mostly shallow and glib retorts to weighty positions.

Despite all my misgivings, I would still recommend this book. Maja-Pearce spent a lot of time developing and accessing sources for his book. The cited sources alone are worth the steep cost of the book. It is a gossipy, fairly entertaining and engaging book written in an accessible style. He provides useful insights about the lives of Clark, Achebe, Soyinka and Okigbo. The reader learns for instance about the influence of the CIA on African intellectuals (funding grants, workshops, etc). One learns that Government College Umuahia produced a bountiful crop of great writers: Achebe, Elechi Amadi, Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike, and Gabriel Okara. Clark’s valiant struggle to sustain several high quality literary magazines is nicely documented here.

Slivers of Brilliance and Petulance. Maja-Pearce is more at home with plays. In Chapter 3, he devotes literary muscle and rigor to analysis of plays. Chapter 3 is almost worth the price of the book but it has little to do with Clark. It reads like a failed manuscript from a different project. The book provides some good history showing Clark as a visionary when it comes to promoting our literature (Mbari, Black Orpheus, etc.). However, Maja-Pearce manages to diminish Clark’s contributions by ascribing significant credit to the late Ulli Beier. He is genetically incapable of giving unqualified praise.

The most egregious failing of this book is Maja-Pearce’s misrepresentation of a 1975 letter which clearly showed that Clark was in the oil business and was soliciting business overseas. Maja Pearce sought to represent that Clark “benefitted from an oil contract for services rendered to the nation following his support for the federal side during the civil war.” The letter, a copy of which is in the book’s appendix, makes no such claim. I think it was irresponsible journalism, bordering on blackmail for Maja-Pearce’s part to make such an insinuation. In a responsible society he would have been hauled before an ethics commission.

Grammatical issues plague the book and careless statements are paraded as facts. The book is a dizzy harvest of tipsy thoughts struggling to pass the sobriety test. As a result, the book fails grandly. There are all these loopy drunken sentences dripping with vinegary venom. Maja-Pearce quotes myriad sources but there is ample evidence that he did not read them thoroughly. I urge a more talented writer to use the same sources and write a real book about a great man- John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo.

Shakedown Inc. Faced with Clark’s alleged pettiness, Maja-Pearce rises above the effluvium with his own brand of pettiness. In that department he easily bests Clark. The story of the book is of a shakedown gone awry. And Clark is the victim here. Maja-Pearce’s fee to write a shoddy book is a hefty $63,000 and he is piqued when Clark asks him why he would need all that money to write a damn book. This is one Nigerian intellectual pining for alien wines, turning tricks for quick bucks.

Maja-Pearce describes Clark’s eagerness to fund the book as part of an elaborate plan to rehabilitate his image, in the hope that he might get the Nobel Prize. Bizarre. Some of it smacks of megalomania on Maja-Pearce’s part. It is quite possible that Clark was unimpressed by the work. Maja-Pearce had trouble selling the book to Western publishers but he ascribed ulterior motives to their refusal to publish his book. Reading this poorly edited book, I can see why no one would want to touch the manuscript. It is poorly written, poorly organized and certainly not marketable as presented.

Maja-Pearce portrays Clark as a tragic Walter Mitty character who still harbors dreams of making it big on the world stage. Maja-Pearce is no angel himself. A self-confessed heavy drinker, in one forgettable passage, he leaves Clark’s dining table after a feud but does not forget to grab a half-empty bottle of wine on his way to his bedroom. What a class act. The Clarks were generous to him, paying for his writing and buying his wife’s expensive art. Still he whines nonstop; he even complains that the Clarks put him in a bedroom that lacked a balcony. Someone hand me my violin.

Broken Guns for Word Deities. Clark is a well-read complex thinker. It would have been more respectful and productive to pair him with a thoughtful and gifted interlocutor. Clark is an accomplished playwright and poet and nothing can take that away from him, not even his own demons and there are many of those.  Clark is not the only victim here; Maja-Pearce dismisses Achebe’s Things Fall Apart but offers no reason for such recklessness. Who does that? One of the chapters offers an egregiously awful rumination on writing in one’s own language, one that calls to serious question, Maja-Pearce’s ability to engage in these kinds of debates.  It is a poorly articulated filler that was relentlessly stretched to give the impression that it is somehow about Clark. There is scant evidence that he personally interviewed Soyinka, Achebe, Ike, etc. And missing are the insights of the female writers of the time, someone like Buchi Emecheta who is still alive.

The book is a petulant retort to a spurned relationship with JP Clark-Bekederemo Paul Theroux wrote Sir Vidia’s Shadow, a good book on VS Naipaul based on a sustained decades-long personal relationship with Naipaul. It was a work of rigor and scholarship. Maja-Pearce is no Theroux. For one thing, Maja-Pearce desperately needs to read new writing to update his opinions.

Many decades ago, Paul Theroux, a young aspiring writer befriended an older writer VS Naipaul. The friendship of two complex persons was to be a marathon journey of at least three decades that Naipaul ended abruptly and on a sour note.  Theroux did not take being unceremoniously dumped well. He wrote a caustic but important and well-received biography of Naipaul, Sir Vidia’s Shadow:  A Friendship Across Five Continents. Patrick French followed up with his own book, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of VS Naipaul which largely corroborated the main burden of Theroux’s book. In neither instance was the subject of the biography asked to pony up money for the privilege of being flattered or lampooned. Such an act would have been inappropriate and unethical. Maja-Pearce owes Clark a huge apology.

The chapter on how to win the Nobel Prize is yet another long unnecessary chapter that has a long unnecessary riff about Soyinka. The chapter has little or nothing to do with Clark. Tasteless is the rumination about whether Soyinka was worth the Nobel. One senses that he is unhappy with Soyinka because the latter wisely declined to be a reference for one of his numerous money making schemes. (p253).

Recreating Faux Naipaulean Drama. In his book, Maja-Pearce’s attempt to recreate a Theroux-Naipaul drama is self-serving and falls short on many levels. There is clearly no chemistry between the two men and Maja-Pearce is in too much of a hurry to make a quick buck to establish a rapport with a clearly more complex man. And when Clark boots him out of his house, he responds with a poorly written book that is remarkable mostly for its vindictiveness and cutting sarcasm. He paints Clark as a has-been writer for whom several doors are no longer open. Did he not know this before going to Clark with a proposal to write a biography about him?  This is the same man who in the book proposal to Clark praised him as the most underrated writer of four men, the rest being Achebe, Okigbo and Soyinka; who stated that Clark’s plays were more accomplished than Soyinka’s; and who shared that  he had a poor opinion of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (p 125).. It would appear that he basically said all of this to make money off an old man.  The intellectual dishonesty is blatant and galling.

There is a pattern to Maja-Pearce’s mischief; he has sought to sustain a tottering career in letters by attacking better known and accomplished writers. He is probably best remembered for his long rambling attack-review of Soyinka in 2007 under the smirking title Credulous Grammarian a scathing “review” of Soyinka’s You Must Set Forth at Dawn that is so full of ridicule, it barely has room for substance.

Quoting liberally from Soyinka’s The Man Died, Maja-Pearce makes sinful literary hay out of the tensions between Clark and Soyinka and pits both men against each other. He is quite gossipy, Maja-Pearce is not someone you want to invite into your home, you will regret the result. The disrespect shown Okigbo, Soyinka, Achebe, Clark and even Odia Ofeimun is particularly troubling. There is no compassion for the bravery, intellect and erudition of these men who taught several generations of youths even as they were youths themselves. Despite their flaws and demons, these men deserve our gratitude not ridicule. Maja-Pearce owes these great men unqualified apologies.

Again, the burden on these brave warriors of letters in the face of the birth of a new nation is hard to quantify. They were certainly no angels, but that is what makes their narrative powerful, evocative and compelling. Try to imagine as a twenty something year old, writing Things Fall Apart long hand without the benefit of a word processor and definitely without the Internet and you get some sense of what these griots accomplished. A balanced objective biography that tells the truth warts and all and respectfully is what we need. In the twilight of their life’s journeys we should treat these brave men and women with compassion, respect and definitely with appreciation for making our world a better place than they met it. I salute Professor John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, warts and all.

Writing is a mystery. Why do we think about things and write them down? Writing is a laborious, messy, painful, sensual, time consuming process. The poor soul drawn to this form of self-flagellation er self-expression may attract fame, more likely notoriety, but it is almost always the case that riches will not accrue from this disability. Disability? Yes. Many would consider the ability to write and engage an audience a gift, but one suspects that a typical writer would confess to a crushing burden, of sometimes having to stop any and everything to record something. Many times, that something makes absolutely no sense. The truly burdened or gifted writer is moved by an unseen hand to transport mind matter through the hand into words – of wonder and sometimes of inanity. It is what it is, a mystery. But in the fiction of our word griots lies the history of our people.

Africa’s owners of words have attained a new status as custodians of our history because the oral history of our clans cannot compete with the written. Warriors die with their stories and the living are left to re-tell the stories. Stuff gets lost in the re-telling, memory is a forgetful lover. Some of the best poets I have ever known died without ever writing a book. Many more will die. It is the nature of things. But then, there is no book robust enough to capture all of history. History is easily distorted, as Chinua Achebe reminds us with the East African proverb, “Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter.” We know now that much of what passes for African history is defined by the (white) written, much of it distorted by the lenses of the (white) historian. It does not help that many African historians have fled to more nurturing societies where they unwittingly toil at writing and teaching someone else’s perversion of African history. What remains is remarkable only for its shoddiness and laziness of craft.

American history is deeply and apologetically Eurocentric and indifferent to those periods that make the majority uncomfortable. Indeed re-writing the right history of America will soon become a civil rights issue.   Every day young warriors of color swim mean seas, scale impossible peaks and ride on the roofs of indifferent trains into America (“illegal aliens” these beautiful warriors are called) and they forcibly change the landscape. You don’t see that in the history books of this country, because it is HIS-story, NOT our story.  In fifth grade my daughter Ominira’s class Ominira participated in a “field trip” called Westward Ho where they were required to reprise the rush West. As parents, we were required to walk behind them through brooks, streams, hills and all sorts of contrived hurdles designed to simulate the white man’s struggle to get to Nirvana. Nowhere was there mention of the fate of Native Americans and needless to say, the fate of black slaves was nowhere to be observed. I almost wept when in the evening, my daughter broke away from a dance to offer me “Santa Fe Stew and corned bread”, dressed in an apron and a bonnet. The conquest is complete and irreversible.

While we are being frog-marched to Babylon, we can at least sing ourselves our songs. Upon the death of Dim Ojukwu, many of us donned the flag of Biafra. One young Nigerian reached out to me on Facebook and asked what the flag was about. I told him. He asked me to tell him more about Biafra. I asked him how old he was. 35 years old. A man born in Nigeria in the 70’s told me that very little of Biafra was taught him in school. How can that be? After all these moons living far away from the land that cradles my placenta, I have become aware of the power of the historian. Many events have shaped my awareness. Dark were the days when I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC and the Hector Pietersen Museum in Soweto, dark were the days.  Civilization is a euphemism for barbarism, markers for those humiliating periods when the world went mad.

Many versions of our history lie in the fiction of our griots, from Ngugi Wa Thiong’o to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and finally to Professor Toyin Falola. Falola? Google Falola and your computer may crash from the umpteen hits. I will never forget reading his autobiography, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir which I reviewed here.  Falola has probably written dozens of books about the African journey. One of them, Etches on Fresh Waters, a collaborative effort in poetry with Dr. Aderonke Adesola Adesanya is a coffee table book with muscle. It sits my living room with pride, showcasing the dignity of our humanity.  Falola does not know it, but like Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, Adichie, Pius Adesanmi, Okey Ndibe, Lola Shoneyin, Chika Unigwe and others, he is an inspiration to many of us.  On this February, what we call Black History Month in America, I rise to salute you, Alagba Falola.

America. I am at the bookstore shopping for a gift to celebrate a friend’s retirement. She must leave with a piece of me. Procrastination dropped the day on me without warning and I had to go to a bookstore to buy a book. Who does that anymore? I will give my friend Teju Cole’s new book, Open City. She loves New York, classical music, art, museums, classical music, pretty people, gourmet food and wines, and stuff like that. She will like Open City, there’s lots of that in the book.

At the bookstore. There are computer monitors everywhere, you can look up who and what you want and you can even print a map that takes you to the book inside the store. I don’t like going to bookstores. I feel sheepish inside this huge bookstore. I ignore the computers; I did not come to the bookstore to play with computers. Customer Service. I tell a young man, I guess I can look it up myself, but maybe you can help me, do you have Teju Cole’s book, Open City? He looks at me with practiced faux enthusiasm, Oh sure, glad to help! I spell T-E-J-U C-O-L-E and tell him proudly, he wrote Open City. The clerk looks it up on the computer, nope, it is not in stock, I can order it for you.  Nope, I say, not unless you can postpone my friend’s retirement party. What about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie? I spell A-D-I-C-H-I-E. I do not spell the other names. He divines his computer again. Ah yes, Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, The Thing Around Your Neck. He says they are in Fiction upstairs. Wow, Fiction upstairs! Not in “Black American,” not in “African-Caribbean,” not in the back of the bookstore, gathering dust with losers. Nice.

I decline the young man’s offer to take me to Fiction, and thank him profusely, nice man. I will go to Fiction upstairs, browse around and pick out something nice for my friend.  At Fiction, I start with G for Petina Gappah, yes, my friend will like An Elegy for Easterly, I love that book, I must have given away half a dozen to grateful readers. There is no Gappah, too bad. This is why bookstores are dying all over America, who needs this? My laptop Cecelia always has these books, point, click and pay, and they show up in three days, plus free shipping.

I scoot over to the A section, A for Adichie, Chris Abani, Chinua Achebe, Uwem Akpan. Abani’s Graceland is there posing with attitude, no, I don’t want my friend to attempt suicide with such a depressing book. Akpan is there with Say You’re One of Them, no, I don’t want my friend to attempt suicide with such a depressing book.  All of Achebe’s books are there; Arrow of God, Things Fall Apart, etc. No more Achebe, please, we have skyscrapers in Africa now and we eat ice cream, she won’t like reading about cute yam farmers. I settle on Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. I also grab a copy of Pablo Neruda’s 100 Love Sonnets; don’t ask me why, it is a long delightful story.

The cashier’s line is a pleasant line, summer is all lined up. A pretty lady behind me keeps smiling at me, I wonder what is wrong. There is a mother-daughter couple in front of me; they seem to thoroughly love being with each other and my heart yearns for my daughters and sons. I wonder where they are, what they are doing.  My turn. A cashier with auburn tresses calls me up to the counter. I am a member of the store’s club; I give her my identification number so she can shave off a few pennies from my bill. She pulls up my information and pronounces my name the way my ancestors like it. Her tongue wraps around my father’s name like she owns it. Wow! Lovely! I beam with pride at the mention of my name in all the right places. I compliment her profusely, impressive!

She squirms happily like a puppy offered treats. Did I pronounce it right? Yes, thanks! Good! When I was young I had an impossible to pronounce name also so I take care to pronounce impossible to pronounce names correctly. Thanks, I gush with gratitude. From West Africa? Yes, I cry with pleasure, I am going to fall in love with this soulmate! Which country? Nigeria, I say with pride. I passed through Nigeria once. Really? Which Airport? Lagos. As she mentions Lagos, her eyes lower into pretty ice picks, I was going to Senegal and the Congo. They stole my luggage in Lagos, it was awful. She spits out the dagger-words sweetly. Her pain stabs my pain. I deflect. How was Senegal? It was okay, a bit too sleek, I liked the Congo. The Congo was innocent. Innocent! Oh Africa! I flee with my bag of books. Memo to self: Please begin to catalogue all the losses you have endured everywhere in America. Beginning with this bookstore.