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Nyanga Dey Sleep
By Uche
Nworah
I screen Tony’s
(not his real name) calls these days, not that he is a
stalker, wife snatcher or swapper or anything like that
but he is one of those ‘strong-headed’ people who are
set in their ways, having made up their minds over an
issue, such individuals still go ahead calling up
friends and family for advice over matters they have
already decided what their course of action will be. It
is because I know that nothing I tell him will make him
change his mind over his present match to perdition that
I’m saving myself the ‘talk-time’ by simply avoiding his
calls. Moreover, Tony has a habit of calling at odd
times and almost always wants to spend an eternity on
the phone with you discussing only his matter, which you
probably must have discussed with him a million times
previously.
He called me up
again on Saturday night, but for some reasons managed to
slip through my ‘security’ screening, I was already in
deep slumber when the call came through and must have
quickly picked up the bedside telephone so as not to
disturb the one sleeping beside me. Almost immediately,
Tony launched into his drones again, but this time with
another twist, this probably got my attention and I
quickly left the room to give him my full attention.
Maybe I should
retrace back a bit here to the genesis of his story and
saga. Tony left Nigeria almost immediately after
graduating from university in Nigeria, he never went
back again until 2005 (almost 10 years later) when he
went to marry this girl he claims he has known from
birth. Before going on that trip, I remember that we had
so many discussions on the gamble of simply rushing off
to Nigeria for just two weeks to marry a girl he hardly
knew, many diasporan Nigerians who have attempted such
stunts in the past may still not have recovered from the
emotional and financial trauma. Tony went to Nigeria and
came back after two weeks happy that he was now a
married man. We all rejoiced with him and couldn’t wait
to meet his wife when finally she arrives into the UK
While in Nigeria,
Tony also filed for spousal visa for his new bride at
the United Kingdom High Commission in Lagos. He had
hoped that his wife would be able to join him almost
immediately but that has not happened yet, the
‘almighty’ visa officers at High Commission are dragging
their feet asking for this and that from Tony and Maggie
(not her real name), finally the High Commission refused
Maggie’s visa application on the grounds of suspected
convenience/arranged marriage. Tony has now appealed to
the United Kingdom Immigration Appellate Authority and
the hearing is scheduled for December 2006. The whole
process has now stretched to over a year by which time
Tony could no longer bear the Liverpool cold alone, like
they say, person body no be firewood.
Tony started
seeing Joy (not her real name), a 23 year-old South
African girl on a temporary basis; in the beginning he
claimed she was just a ‘friend’ but soon the handshake
extended to the elbow and Tony changed his story. Joy
then became a ‘course mate’ from his post-graduate
class, a little later her status changed again to that
of ‘companion’, whatever that meant. Anyway, it wasn’t
really my issue but since Tony wanted to tell, well, I
let him carry on.
Whether it was as
a result of this trait in men to find willing and
unwilling male accomplices in their friends anytime they
are veering off course, or just a guilt feeling on
Tony’s part I would never know but he surely was bent on
letting me in on what he is up to up there in Liverpool,
and expected me to accept his rationalisations and
justifications.
Joy’s status
changed eventually in rapid successions from ‘flat mate’
to live-in-lover thus warranting the late night call
from Tony on this Saturday. He said he was now wondering
if maybe he had made the right decision by going to
Nigeria to marry Maggie in the first place, increasingly
he says, he is beginning to notice a whole lot of things
- the ‘civilisation’ gap between Maggie and himself, the
lack of shared interest, her ‘funny’ way of speaking
English on the phone, her family’s desperation and
burden on his finances, Maggie’s inadequacies in the
beauty department, her bedroom naivety. Tony reeled them
off on the phone and I listened, but I didn’t really
mind him because I knew what had happened. It wasn’t
just the embassy that had caused his apparent change in
direction; Tony had tasted the mythical forbidden fruit
of South African girls, famed for their loose and
raunchy lifestyles. Joy the 23 year old South African
girl had simply ignited Tony’s fire again, a man
tottering on the edges of 40.
Perhaps Joy had
done to Tony what no woman had ever done to him; she may
have shown him a side of South African women which
confirms the myth that many Nigerians living in that
country have since screamed about. Tony said Joy was
vivacious and fun unlike the dour Maggie. He praised her
natural endowments which he likened to Beyonce’s.
And what do you
plan to do next I asked him?
Tony ran off a few
possibilities, he has begun the process of changing his
home telephone number to avoid any potential clash
between wife and sweetheart when he is not at home. He
plans to let Maggie’s visa process run through, he
believes that if he wins the appeal and helps Maggie to
get the spousal visa, that would be a sort of
compensation for all her troubles and she would let him
be, at least she won’t lose out completely he reasoned.
However, Tony
fears that there might be a Catch-22 in all these, which
is what Maggie may do to him, assuming she doesn’t wish
to accept any compensatory or token spousal visa form
him. He says that Maggie is an Mbaise girl (Imo state)
and wanted to know if I knew anything about the supposed
viciousness of Mbaise girls. I couldn’t help him much
here, I didn’t want him coming back to me tomorrow
claiming that I had said this or that. All I told him
was that he should let Maggie know the scores before
ever she boards the flight out of Nigeria whenever the
spousal visa approval comes through. Mbaise girl or not,
I told him that the lesser evil would be in letting her
know now, rather than allowing her to come into the UK
and telling her on arrival. There is no telling the
reactions of a woman scorned.
As to Joy, well
she is gone off to South Africa at Tony’s expense to
announce to her family of her Nigerian catch. She would
be coming back soon to start shopping for baby clothes,
yes a baby is already on the way.
Call this a
gathering of the storm if you wish but Tony sees it
differently, ‘I’m happy’, was his last word on the phone
that Saturday night. Surely this Act has not been played
to the end yet, you can bet on it, how could it when
Nyanga dey sleep trouble come wake am?
November 2006.
info@uchenworah.com
19 November 2006
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Hopes and Prospects
By Noam Chomsky
In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky
surveys the dangers and prospects of our
early twenty-first century. Exploring
challenges such as the growing gap
between North and South, American
exceptionalism (including under
President Barack Obama), the fiascos of
Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli
assault on Gaza, and the recent
financial bailouts, he also sees hope
for the future and a way to move
forward—in the democratic wave in Latin
America and in the global solidarity
movements that suggest "real progress
toward freedom and justice." Hopes and
Prospects is essential reading for
anyone who is concerned about the
primary challenges still facing the
human race. "This is a classic Chomsky
work: a bonfire of myths and lies,
sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky
is an enduring inspiration all over the
world—to millions, I suspect—for the
simple reason that he is a truth-teller
on an epic scale. I salute him." —John
Pilger
In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of
American empire and class domination, at
home and abroad, Chomsky continues a
longstanding and crucial work of
elucidation and activism . . .the
writing remains unswervingly rational
and principled throughout, and lends
bracing impetus to the real alternatives
before us.—Publisher's
Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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