Below is an excerpt from a story I began working on in the summer of 2009 [sigh], however, I plan to add more to it over winter break. Right now, it is quite wordy and not devoid of errors in both syntax and grammar. So go easy on it and on me. Thanks.
There is only one way to get back home. Take the bridge down Ahmadu Bello Road over the Kaduna River down to Barnawa. It was always Barnawa until the riot turned it into New Jerusalem with the Christians on one side and the Muslims on the other.
It was almost dusk. The call for prayers went out as the flock began to return home. They understood the call and poured into the compound in single file. The older rams rubbed their sides against the wall as they entered while the lambs frisked around. Mallam Umaru rolled lazily on his bed. He had been in the same position since he finished his dinner. Dinner was tuwo, a corn meal staple and soup made from okra. The soup was very thin so that the okra lay in clumps at the bottom of the bowl while a whitish liquid floated on top. There were two chunks of meat in the soup.
Actually, the chunks weren’t really meat. They were bones the butcher saved for people who could not afford to purchase meat. The bones were typically filled with thick yellow marrow that oozed out and hung limply by a thread-like film.
The bones were kept in a bucket covered with swarms of bluish green flies. The flies were usually loud and the butcher often had to yell above the sound of their annoying chorus. His yelling coupled with the rhythmic slamming of his knife made him look sinister. He never gave a bone away. He sold every part of the cows he purchased. The testicles too, every part had some value.
Last week, Mallam Umaru had to severely whip his youngest son Yahaya. Yahaya had toppled the pot of soup as he tried to gnaw off some of the meat on the bone. The crashing of the pot to the ground woke the entire house. Mallam Umaru unleashed his wrath on the young boy, letting the horsetail whip inflict stripes. He couldn’t decide on what to be angry about, the fact that his son had tried to eat the meat off the bones or that there would be no dinner the next day.
Finally, he planted his feet on the floor rubbed his eyes and then smoothed the fuzz on his head. He let his fingers linger much longer in the middle, circling his bald spot slowly as he fixed his gaze on the door. His eyes dropped down to his prayer mat and then he looked at the corner of the room where his golden kettle was nestled with several plastic kettles. He heard the call again and finally pulled his weight off the bed.
As he opened the door to exit the house, the rams stood up and walked away from under the awning giving him room to make his path. He walked hastily towards the gate his long robes fluttering softly in the wind. As he walked down the road he thought about Salamatu. She had been with him the previous night and would be back tonight. As the thought of the previous night crossed his mind a smile formed on his face. He didn’t see the young man on the bicycle and he didn’t have the time to jump out of the bicycle’s path. The bicycle was old and rusty. The brakes would have been useless even if the driver applied them.
Mallam Umaru felt the left handle bar plow into his sides and then he was knocked off balance. His kettle lodged itself by the front tire of the bicycle and his mat lay a few feet away on the ground. As soon as he landed on his bottom an orange fell into his lap. A few minutes ago, the orange had been sitting in a carefully arranged pattern with others on a metal tray balanced on the head of the bicyclist.
The young bicyclist began to curse at him for not looking out. Mallam Umaru rubbed his head again this time, but he did not let his fingers linger on his bald spot. He ran them down quickly and let his hand slide past his belly button all the way down. The cursing grew louder and a small crowd started to form.
“Dan Iska” the boy yelled, “Open your eyes old man and look where you are going.” He continued.
“If you’re too hungry to keep your eyes open for long then pray in your bedroom.” He said, his voice rising higher.
Mallam Umaru looked up, trying to find a sympathetic face among the crowd of strangers. A younger man in glasses with his prayer mat slung over his shoulder stepped forward and offered to pay the boy for the oranges. The boy stated an inflated price and stuck his hand out defiantly, a look of anger on his face. The bespectacled gentleman put a wad of notes in his hand and begged him to forgive the old man.
Mallam Umaru sat in bitter silence, wallowing in the shame of the whole incidence. He was grateful for his long robe that ran to his feet. It masked the telltale signs of his thoughts just before the accident. With the help of another gentleman he propped himself up and thanked the bespectacled gentleman. The gentleman pressed some money into his hands and told him to praise Allah he was okay.
A young boy blind in one eye with unshorn hair handed him his kettle and mat and asked if he was okay. The boy lingered for a few minutes starring at the crumpled notes in Mallam Umaru’s hands. The boy had already filled his enamel bowl with the dust-covered oranges he gleaned off the floor and through his good eye he looked intently at Mallam Umaru, expecting a note or two. As he gazed, he raised his hand quickly to smack a fly that had perched itself on the thick mucus that ran from his nose. Grateful for the distraction, Mallam Umaru thanked the onlookers, mumbled an apology to the young bicyclist and continued on his way to the mosque.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Happy Thanksgiving!
Here's an excerpt of the things I am thankful for taken from my Facebook page...I am thankful for Law School, Barack Obama, Mad Men, Marie Claire magazine, great books, Maxwell's voice, mechanical pencils, ice-cream, JD's Chippery, perfume, chocolate, my endearing MacBook, fur inspite of PETA, blogs, great furniture, NYTimes, amazing destinations, overly sweetened iced tea, shea butter, dental floss, lipstick, great convos, Amy Winehouse singing "Take the Box," air freshner, candles, and incense (lol), NM, Cardozo's opinions, Gentlemen's Quarterly, Publix, Target, good health inspite of all the odds, Mama Oprah, African print, beautiful shoes, museums, couture dresses, great photography and mostly thankful that The Game returns to regularly scheduled programming on Jan 11, 2011 (BETs best decision ever). Besos!
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Learning to Smile Like An American
Upon my arrival in the United States from Nigeria eleven years ago, I noticed something rather peculiar about Americans. They always smiled. At first, I found it alarming that strangers would smile at me for no apparent reason. But I soon learned that Americans smiled quite effortlessly because theirs was perhaps the only country where the article of their liberation included the right to the pursuit of happiness.
Had I left Nigeria for New York, or some other New England state, my experience might have been different. But I came to Atlanta, the home of Southern hospitality, where your smile has to be as sweet as the tea and your disposition as light as biscuits.
The first episode of someone smiling at me for no reason at all occurred one afternoon at the grocery store. As I walked in, a lady made eye contact with me and just began grinning widely. I did not know how to respond, for it was an awfully awkward moment. Was she smiling at me lovingly as she would her child or was she mocking me with her smile?
A few months after being in the United States, I began working at my first job as a cashier at Target. My red Abercrombie and Fitch polo shirt and my Gap khakis made me look every inch the American, but there was something missing. It was not so much in my looks, but rather my disposition. Three months after working at my job, I received a review from my supervisor which was otherwise stellar but for one single line that read something like “Improve on your smile” or maybe it was “Learn to smile at customers.” The response to the unfavorable evaluation I received was a crying bout that lasted for almost half an hour in the store bathroom.
After the incidence at work, another occurred at my church. I was walking down the aisle after depositing my offering at the altar when the youth Pastor and his wife, both Americans, began gesturing at me wildly to smile. I am not exaggerating, for they were almost falling out of the pews. I was wounded and mortified. I wasn’t angry or in a bad mood that day, I just wasn’t accustomed to walking around smiling like a goof ball, especially when solemn music was playing in the background. Smiling unnecessarily was the domain of jesters or fools, who had nothing better to do than grin like the Cheshire cat all day.
In her book, “Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World,” Barbara Ehrenreich, author of “Nickel and Dimed” and “Bait and Switch,” explores the folly of the American culture of cheerfulness and positive thinking. Ehrenreich discusses her diagnoses of breast cancer in 2001and her subsequent induction to the sorority of pink ribbons and bunny rabbits and incessant admonishment to put on a happy face and just be cheerful. Ehrenreich launches a full attack on the cult of cheerfulness in America where positive is seen as normal and any deviation from the norm is malign or un-American.
In all, Americans are by far the most cheerful humans on the face of the earth. From birth, they are told to smile, have a positive attitude, and are indoctrinated with upbeat slogans that are much a part of Americana as cheeseburgers and baseball. The culture of cheerfulness that’s born in the homes and stirred up in the schools is carried on to the work place where employers constantly encourage their workers to be pleasant. They are reminded to smile, to look cheerful and to always have a “can do” attitude. Nowhere else in the world is the doctrine of cheerfulness expounded as it is in the United States. There is no room for the curmudgeon here. America is the land where everyone smiles because we are all so elated we cannot hold back our contagious joy. For we have learned that when you smile at the world, the world smiles back at you.
America’s rabid obsession with insipid optimism is even immortalized in popular culture. The most popular icon of the movement is the yellow smiley face designed by Harvey Ball in 1963. Ball never patented his idea, thus forfeiting the cash cow it would become. However, in the 1970s brothers Murray and Bernard Spain, looking for means to make some quick cash, borrowed Harvey’s smiley and added the phrase “Have a happy day,” creating a revolution of sorts. The phrase would change over time to read “Have a nice day,” becoming the slogan for a nation that was mired in racial turmoil and fighting a war in Vietnam.
Unfortunately, the hot pursuit of happiness and cheer sadly belie the statistics and polls that find the United States bringing in the rear on happiness indices. While it may be easy to discredit these indices for not being thoroughly based on scientific evidence, the sales and prescriptions of anti-depressants and levels of violent crimes shows that the positive thinking campaign may be falling on deaf ears. By contrast, Nigeria for all its instability and discouraging development indices once took the top spot as the happiest country in the world.
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard taking inventory of the omnipresent culture of happiness in the United States remarked that, “whether I am right in all this or not, they certainly do smile at you here, though neither from courtesy, nor from an effort to charm. This smile signifies only the need to smile. It’s a bit like the Cheshire cat’s grin: it continues to float on faces long after all emotion has disappeared.” Baudrillard’s observation is quite interesting, because the smiles I received were sometimes juxtaposed against contradictory behavior. The same person who smiled at me was the same individual who would be really stern and sometimes downright mean, lending credence to Shakespeare’s famous line from Hamlet, “A man may smile, and smile and be a villain.”
Interestingly, the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, the perfect paradigm of a self-loather, would list the song “Smile” made famous by Charlie Chaplin as his favorite. The chorus of the song, “Smile though your heart is aching, smile even though it’s breaking, when there are clouds in the sky, you’ll get by…” are outside of the realm of common sense, for it ignores the idiocy of its instructions, because the sky could indeed be falling over your head. So, is it probable to assume that Jackson might still be alive if he had found an outlet for his emotional disturbances rather than hide them behind a dubious smile?
Nonetheless, after a decade of living in the United States I have become infected with the cheerfulness bug and find people who don’t smile disturbing. Recently, my sister showed me a picture of a friend’s two-year old niece and at once, I made a comment that she had grown out of her good looks and would have look prettier if she had been smiling. Perhaps she had not yet learned to say “cheese,” ensuring that her smile was wide, barring those pearly whites.
Just last week, I went to an Asian grocery store in my neighborhood to return a rotten bag of mussels I had purchased earlier. I left the store feeling slightly irritated until I walked by an old Asian lady who I believe had just made the trip across the Pacific to a new life in the Americas. She looked quite unhappy as she trudged behind her family, seemingly lost in this new sea of red, white, and blue. So, for my personal fracas with the so-called culture of cheer, imagine my surprise when I made eye contact with her and then ensued to do what I believed was the most American of all behaviors. I smiled.
Had I left Nigeria for New York, or some other New England state, my experience might have been different. But I came to Atlanta, the home of Southern hospitality, where your smile has to be as sweet as the tea and your disposition as light as biscuits.
The first episode of someone smiling at me for no reason at all occurred one afternoon at the grocery store. As I walked in, a lady made eye contact with me and just began grinning widely. I did not know how to respond, for it was an awfully awkward moment. Was she smiling at me lovingly as she would her child or was she mocking me with her smile?
A few months after being in the United States, I began working at my first job as a cashier at Target. My red Abercrombie and Fitch polo shirt and my Gap khakis made me look every inch the American, but there was something missing. It was not so much in my looks, but rather my disposition. Three months after working at my job, I received a review from my supervisor which was otherwise stellar but for one single line that read something like “Improve on your smile” or maybe it was “Learn to smile at customers.” The response to the unfavorable evaluation I received was a crying bout that lasted for almost half an hour in the store bathroom.
After the incidence at work, another occurred at my church. I was walking down the aisle after depositing my offering at the altar when the youth Pastor and his wife, both Americans, began gesturing at me wildly to smile. I am not exaggerating, for they were almost falling out of the pews. I was wounded and mortified. I wasn’t angry or in a bad mood that day, I just wasn’t accustomed to walking around smiling like a goof ball, especially when solemn music was playing in the background. Smiling unnecessarily was the domain of jesters or fools, who had nothing better to do than grin like the Cheshire cat all day.
In her book, “Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World,” Barbara Ehrenreich, author of “Nickel and Dimed” and “Bait and Switch,” explores the folly of the American culture of cheerfulness and positive thinking. Ehrenreich discusses her diagnoses of breast cancer in 2001and her subsequent induction to the sorority of pink ribbons and bunny rabbits and incessant admonishment to put on a happy face and just be cheerful. Ehrenreich launches a full attack on the cult of cheerfulness in America where positive is seen as normal and any deviation from the norm is malign or un-American.
In all, Americans are by far the most cheerful humans on the face of the earth. From birth, they are told to smile, have a positive attitude, and are indoctrinated with upbeat slogans that are much a part of Americana as cheeseburgers and baseball. The culture of cheerfulness that’s born in the homes and stirred up in the schools is carried on to the work place where employers constantly encourage their workers to be pleasant. They are reminded to smile, to look cheerful and to always have a “can do” attitude. Nowhere else in the world is the doctrine of cheerfulness expounded as it is in the United States. There is no room for the curmudgeon here. America is the land where everyone smiles because we are all so elated we cannot hold back our contagious joy. For we have learned that when you smile at the world, the world smiles back at you.
America’s rabid obsession with insipid optimism is even immortalized in popular culture. The most popular icon of the movement is the yellow smiley face designed by Harvey Ball in 1963. Ball never patented his idea, thus forfeiting the cash cow it would become. However, in the 1970s brothers Murray and Bernard Spain, looking for means to make some quick cash, borrowed Harvey’s smiley and added the phrase “Have a happy day,” creating a revolution of sorts. The phrase would change over time to read “Have a nice day,” becoming the slogan for a nation that was mired in racial turmoil and fighting a war in Vietnam.
Unfortunately, the hot pursuit of happiness and cheer sadly belie the statistics and polls that find the United States bringing in the rear on happiness indices. While it may be easy to discredit these indices for not being thoroughly based on scientific evidence, the sales and prescriptions of anti-depressants and levels of violent crimes shows that the positive thinking campaign may be falling on deaf ears. By contrast, Nigeria for all its instability and discouraging development indices once took the top spot as the happiest country in the world.
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard taking inventory of the omnipresent culture of happiness in the United States remarked that, “whether I am right in all this or not, they certainly do smile at you here, though neither from courtesy, nor from an effort to charm. This smile signifies only the need to smile. It’s a bit like the Cheshire cat’s grin: it continues to float on faces long after all emotion has disappeared.” Baudrillard’s observation is quite interesting, because the smiles I received were sometimes juxtaposed against contradictory behavior. The same person who smiled at me was the same individual who would be really stern and sometimes downright mean, lending credence to Shakespeare’s famous line from Hamlet, “A man may smile, and smile and be a villain.”
Interestingly, the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, the perfect paradigm of a self-loather, would list the song “Smile” made famous by Charlie Chaplin as his favorite. The chorus of the song, “Smile though your heart is aching, smile even though it’s breaking, when there are clouds in the sky, you’ll get by…” are outside of the realm of common sense, for it ignores the idiocy of its instructions, because the sky could indeed be falling over your head. So, is it probable to assume that Jackson might still be alive if he had found an outlet for his emotional disturbances rather than hide them behind a dubious smile?
Nonetheless, after a decade of living in the United States I have become infected with the cheerfulness bug and find people who don’t smile disturbing. Recently, my sister showed me a picture of a friend’s two-year old niece and at once, I made a comment that she had grown out of her good looks and would have look prettier if she had been smiling. Perhaps she had not yet learned to say “cheese,” ensuring that her smile was wide, barring those pearly whites.
Just last week, I went to an Asian grocery store in my neighborhood to return a rotten bag of mussels I had purchased earlier. I left the store feeling slightly irritated until I walked by an old Asian lady who I believe had just made the trip across the Pacific to a new life in the Americas. She looked quite unhappy as she trudged behind her family, seemingly lost in this new sea of red, white, and blue. So, for my personal fracas with the so-called culture of cheer, imagine my surprise when I made eye contact with her and then ensued to do what I believed was the most American of all behaviors. I smiled.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Will the Real Italian-Americans Please Stand Up?
What Francis Ford Coppola’s epic movie, “The Godfather,” did in inviting the movie going public to an experience of Italian-American culture is now being attempted by MTV’s reality series, “Jersey Shore,” now in its second season. The reality series that was first filmed in August 2009 in Seaside, New Jersey, debuted on December of the same year to mixed reviews. Chronicling the lives of eight young adults who worked at a boardwalk souvenir store in exchange for room and board, the show thrives on the dramatization of offensive Italian-American stereotypes and the use of the term guido and guidette, a pejorative slang term that refers to working class Italian-Americans.
What the series has done is obliterate images of hard working Italian-Americans arriving at Ellis Island with leathery, sun burned faces with a new breed of obnoxious, bacchanal young adults, whose existence is defined by excessive gym visits, frequent tanning, poor diction, uncouth behavior, gel spiked hair, slutty outfits, alcohol abuse, and promiscuous behavior.
When Mario Puzo walked into the office of Robert Evans, who was then head of production for Paramount Pictures in the spring of 1968, he came bearing a few pages of written script that would later become The Godfather, the piece de resistance of his career. Puzo’s book based entirely on research was about organized crime within a prominent Italian-American family and introduced the word Mafia into American lexicon, sparking a war between Paramount Pictures and the dark stratums of the Mob.
So offensive was the word Mafia that the head of one of the largest mob families in New York at the time, Joseph Colombo Sr. began an organization, The Italian American Civil Rights League that set out to charge the F.B.I with persecution and violation of civil rights.
Puzo’s book was going to tell about the fabled Italian underworld, outing a string of actual mob families that profited from racketeering and illicit gambling operations.
Attempting to halt Puzo and Paramount, Colombo and his cohorts then embarked on a war of sorts fraught with threats that were of the same ilk as the sight of a prize horse’s head wrapped in silk bed sheets.
The response to threats from Colombo would lead to a meeting that cornered the movie producers into erasing any mention the word mafia (which by the way only appeared once) from the movie script and Paramount subsequently garnering the support of Colombo and the greater Italian-American community.
While Coppola’s movie may be criticized for being about as offensive as Jersey Shore, depicting Italian-Americans as savage, cold-blooded brutes, The Godfather can be treated as social commentary that is reflective of American life, playing on themes of sex, greed, love for family, and capitalism. What’s more, it’s a reflection of great writing and skillful minds. Jersey Shore however is different. The cast members are left to use their imagination to humor the audience. But what starts off as comedy quickly turns into a farce on Italian-Americans. It can be argued that the series is reflective of contemporary American youngsters, but the series is not an equal opportunity undertaking. The main stars are Italian-Americans. No jokes are made on other sub-cultures, the show promises after all to show us guidos at their best.
Surely, MTV is no PBS nor has ever claimed to be the instructor on what is and isn’t acceptable in race relations or normal human behavior (not with shows like Jackass or Parental Control), still the subtle lessons on the show cannot be ignored. Mention the word Italian-American and the first images that come to mind aren’t of cheese or Don Corleone. Rather, Snooki and her bird’s nest hairdo are proximate.
Incidentally, the second season of Jersey Shore makes it grand debut on the same day as Arizona’s racist law, which is a poorly disguised witch hunt aimed at Latinos. Just like Arizona wants all of America to believe that SB 1070 will be as normal as having an order of fries with your super-sized burger, MTV wants you to believe that singling out a racial group for a gag is. But since hordes of people do not indulge in watching clips of fascist parades with nostalgia, I doubt that Jersey Shore will ever be remembered for anything close to brilliance in the future. The only memories of Jersey Shore will be crummy impressions of Snooki hidden in Facebook photo archives, under the album: Halloween.
What the series has done is obliterate images of hard working Italian-Americans arriving at Ellis Island with leathery, sun burned faces with a new breed of obnoxious, bacchanal young adults, whose existence is defined by excessive gym visits, frequent tanning, poor diction, uncouth behavior, gel spiked hair, slutty outfits, alcohol abuse, and promiscuous behavior.
When Mario Puzo walked into the office of Robert Evans, who was then head of production for Paramount Pictures in the spring of 1968, he came bearing a few pages of written script that would later become The Godfather, the piece de resistance of his career. Puzo’s book based entirely on research was about organized crime within a prominent Italian-American family and introduced the word Mafia into American lexicon, sparking a war between Paramount Pictures and the dark stratums of the Mob.
So offensive was the word Mafia that the head of one of the largest mob families in New York at the time, Joseph Colombo Sr. began an organization, The Italian American Civil Rights League that set out to charge the F.B.I with persecution and violation of civil rights.
Puzo’s book was going to tell about the fabled Italian underworld, outing a string of actual mob families that profited from racketeering and illicit gambling operations.
Attempting to halt Puzo and Paramount, Colombo and his cohorts then embarked on a war of sorts fraught with threats that were of the same ilk as the sight of a prize horse’s head wrapped in silk bed sheets.
The response to threats from Colombo would lead to a meeting that cornered the movie producers into erasing any mention the word mafia (which by the way only appeared once) from the movie script and Paramount subsequently garnering the support of Colombo and the greater Italian-American community.
While Coppola’s movie may be criticized for being about as offensive as Jersey Shore, depicting Italian-Americans as savage, cold-blooded brutes, The Godfather can be treated as social commentary that is reflective of American life, playing on themes of sex, greed, love for family, and capitalism. What’s more, it’s a reflection of great writing and skillful minds. Jersey Shore however is different. The cast members are left to use their imagination to humor the audience. But what starts off as comedy quickly turns into a farce on Italian-Americans. It can be argued that the series is reflective of contemporary American youngsters, but the series is not an equal opportunity undertaking. The main stars are Italian-Americans. No jokes are made on other sub-cultures, the show promises after all to show us guidos at their best.
Surely, MTV is no PBS nor has ever claimed to be the instructor on what is and isn’t acceptable in race relations or normal human behavior (not with shows like Jackass or Parental Control), still the subtle lessons on the show cannot be ignored. Mention the word Italian-American and the first images that come to mind aren’t of cheese or Don Corleone. Rather, Snooki and her bird’s nest hairdo are proximate.
Incidentally, the second season of Jersey Shore makes it grand debut on the same day as Arizona’s racist law, which is a poorly disguised witch hunt aimed at Latinos. Just like Arizona wants all of America to believe that SB 1070 will be as normal as having an order of fries with your super-sized burger, MTV wants you to believe that singling out a racial group for a gag is. But since hordes of people do not indulge in watching clips of fascist parades with nostalgia, I doubt that Jersey Shore will ever be remembered for anything close to brilliance in the future. The only memories of Jersey Shore will be crummy impressions of Snooki hidden in Facebook photo archives, under the album: Halloween.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Friday Photograph
Mural from Coney Island...Amber Rose now graces murals? There's Hope. Have a great weekend!
photograph courtesy of fashionispoison
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Saturday, July 10, 2010
On A Mother's Love
"The Exotic and the sunlit when I could easily have had a boyhood of stern and dutiful English gray. She was the cream in the coffee, the gin in the Campari, the offer of wine or champagne instead of beer..."
~Christopher Hitchens
These few lines mark the authors dedication of his memoir to his mother. I read them and was profoundly moved by how beautifully crafted they were. "...the offer of wine or champagne instead of beer." So beautiful and so well deserving to not only mothers, mine chief among them all, but all kinds of lovers whose love is boundless.
~Christopher Hitchens
These few lines mark the authors dedication of his memoir to his mother. I read them and was profoundly moved by how beautifully crafted they were. "...the offer of wine or champagne instead of beer." So beautiful and so well deserving to not only mothers, mine chief among them all, but all kinds of lovers whose love is boundless.
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