THE NAIJA ESSAY: Rhapsodizing on Black Americans’ Cultural Appropriation of Nigerian & African Cultures

{photo credit An Xiao}

I’m not Black. Black is not my ethnicity. In fact, Black isn’t an ethnicity, it’s a race. And race isn’t real. Race, Blackness, whiteness, these categories were created by white people in order to define who they were oppressing and who was doing the oppressing. Check your history y’all. Despite this, Black is something I identify with politically and socially given that I’ve spent so much of my life in the States and I do see myself as part of a global Black community of people—some of whom are/were immigrants to Europe, the States and other parts of the world and others who are descendants of the Africans kidnapped from Africa in order to be enslaved in the States, South America, the Caribbean and so on. Blackness is not a monolithic identify. It’s an umbrella term like Queer. I’m a dyke but identify with a Queer community politically and socially. Countless times, people, Blacks in America mostly, tell me I’m American. “Oh well you were born here so you’re American.” #labelfail. No I’m not. I’m a Nigerian who happened to have been born here and I will be Nigerian until the day I die and in my next lifetime too. It’s that serious.

I’m not Black. I am Nigerian. Period. I am not Nigerian American. I am Nigerian. To be specific, I am an Ijaw and Urhobo Nigerian. (DELTA STAND UP!!!) <-- had to do it. I didn’t even know what soul food was till college. I fetched water as a child. I have a long ass Nigerian name with mad vowels up in it. On the census, I wrote in Nigerian. (We have an African prez and the Census can’t be more inclusive? #sideeye.) After being baptized as a baby, I didn’t go to an American church until college. I’ve learned to be a part of Black American culture and given that I live in the States and contribute to the evolution of Black art forms with the art I create, yes, I claim hip hop, soul music, Black American dance styles and the performance arts. I’m still a Nigerian within all that. Whenever anyone asks me where I’m from, I say Nigeria. Because na so. When I answer in this way, I sometimes get confused looks from people because they want to place me into a category that makes sense for them. They want to either tell me I’m someone else than who I just said or let me know they know who I am. I’ve heard more nonsensical facts about people’s relationship to Nigeria than I can list here. It is okay—to not know. Just admit it. Don’t try to create a familial bond with me and/or my culture where there is none by spewing random facts about Nigeria. You ain’t know about Nigerian heat or suya or NEPA (now PHCN) or pyoowatah or the go-slow or red soil or roasted groundnut.

During a twitter tag team rant session with Zara Emezi, I wrote:

what the fuck i look like meeting a Chinese person & telling them how much i enjoy wonton soup? you think they give a fifth of a fuck?

(Wednesday, September 08, 2010 10:36:07 PM)

people tell me all their random thoughts & experiences re: Nigeria when they meet me. i'm serious--eg: i like Nigerian food. #uhokay

(Wednesday, September 08, 2010 10:35:24 PM)

what the fuck i care you gave your son a Nigerian name? there are over 150 million Africans with Nigerian names. #perspective

(Wednesday, September 08, 2010 10:34:29 PM)

These conversations are tiring. From the woman who, upon finding out I’m Nigerian, takes pride in informing me that she works to set up schools in 3^rd world countries, of which Nigeria is one. Do you want a cookie? Fuck you and your NGO. If you really cared, you’d find NIGERIANS doing good work (there are millions), give them that first world loot (which by the way is built on third world backs) and LEAVE. That’s revolution. That’s being an ally.

So many Black people challenge my Africanness. Black people who, by the way, claim the African identity they attempt to deny me. So many Africans challenge my Africanness. All around, my authenticity as an African gets questioned, judged and minimized. It’s not my life’s work to make the world see me as I see me. It’s my life’s work to be me as I see me and let the world do what the world will do.

Me: "I'm Nigerian." Her: "You speak really good English." Me: "We were colonized by the British." Can't make this stuff up.

(Thursday, August 12, 2010 6:56:40 PM)

Every moment is an opportunity to decolonize our spirits and I seize these moments. Part of that decolonization is to never allow my identity to be defined for me by anyone. There are times when ironically, Africans place me in the same category as Blacks in the States and look down on me because to them, I sound American and have lived here for an amount of time that means I’m Americanized now. I let them know a.) there’s no need to look down on Blacks in the States and b.) I’m so Nigerian my blood is made of palm oil. I love you but sit down.

It annoys me greatly the ease with which Blacks take on an African identity while doing little to no research/reading whatsoever. Spending a semester in Ghana does not equate with my life as an African. People still ask me if I’m Yoruba and pride themselves on knowing that one ethnicity. *Blank stare* Asking me if I’m Yoruba when you find out I’m Nigerian is like me asking you if your name is Keisha because you’re Black and live in the States. Yes, it is that ridiculous. I’m not Yoruba. I’m not Igbo. Abeg, please stop asking. Going to see Fela on Broadway does not qualify as an education on my country. It doesn’t even qualify as an education on him, given there’s only so much a two-hour performance can contain of a person’s life. We all love Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri and Fela but Naija done produced more brilliance than the likes of them.

Can we please be accountable to the way in which Blacks travel the world as tourists with the same or similar kinds of destructive manners/patterns as rich white people? Tourism in third world countries is another form of colonization. Beautiful portions of the country are often off limits to people indigenous to that country in order for hotels and resorts to be made available for tourists and the tourism economy. Traveling to someone else’s home in search of peace of mind, relaxation or a deeper sense of self is the most colonial bullshit on the planet. Black Americans do this in Africa and the Caribbean, looking for a rugged, vacation lover to help them forget the woes of their lives. Please, please read Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place for an amazing analysis of what tourism has done to Antigua. I don’t travel to other people’s countries to get free. I would never be so arrogant or disgustingly first world. I go home. Or I travel because I want to partner to make art and/or partake in activism that is led by those indigenous to the place I’m traveling to. Any Black person with the privilege and resources to travel to another country to find themselves, and who does this, is feeding into a racist and violent tourist economy.

South Africa, Kenya, Ghana are some of the chosen countries that everyone outside of Africa wants to travel to, specifically Black people. The sexiness and allure of Yoruba culture is due, in my opinion, to how far it’s traveled (Brasil, Cuba, the States) and the exotification of Brasilian and Cuban cultures/languages continues to feed into the way in which Yoruba is a commodity and a spiritual practice laden with inaccuracies (as it is practiced in the States by those initiated into it) and commerce.

It can be strange to talk about my culture to Blacks in the States. One of or a combination of things happens: they can’t relate at all or they make weird statements that highlight their ignorance of my culture or try to make me see how much they know (asking if I’m Yoruba or Igbo) or there’s a sadness that they don’t have the same linkage to their culture that I do to mine. At times, there’s a visible resentment that wo/manifests in challenging my choices, eg: asking me why I hang with so many Nigerians. < --- Um reeeally?! Why do you have so many Black friends? So many gay friends? Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? I guess the same reasons why all the Nigerian queers are eating jollof rice in the park. Sanity dey with family sometimes. And there are all types of family. A lot of my chosen family are queer Nigerians and I’m blessed to have such a beautiful community. I also rock hard with Caribbean folks, Africans from other parts of the continent, South Asians, Latinas and so on. My family wide. I will not apologize for loving my Naija folk and anyone that asks that is selfish and just weird.

I’m surprised that folks sometimes are surprised that I miss home and the extent to which I miss home:

people wonder why i talk about Naija so much & hang w/ Nigerians so hard... Wednesday, September 08, 2010 10:27:16 PM via web

...dude--you know i ain't from here, right? you know every breath i take away from my country breaks my heart right? #dontgetittwisted. Wednesday, September 08, 2010 10:27:41 PM via web

All Black people are not the same. The reason I do not identify as Pan Africanist is because so much of its application (from my perspective) of the ideology is about making Black people everywhere the same. We aren’t the same. I live here but I am not from here. First world privilege, third world blood. Na serious.

So many people want to say we were kings and queens before the white man came to Africa—yeah, like 10 of us, and the rest of us were just regular folks. This hyper-romanticization of Africa is terribly aggravating and completely ahistorical. Nigeria is hella modern, is hella rural, is hella lots of thangs. It ain’t full of “nubian kings and queens.” #realityfail. Africa today is not some fantasy, nor has it ever been. It’s a real place, filled with 54 countries, thousands of ethnicities and languages, countless hairstyles, clothing styles, culinary magic and so on. Africans are real people, not mythological fodder for folks’ fantasies about what they’d like Africa to be for them. When I hear there are ethnic conflicts in Nigeria, I call home to make sure my family is okay. I don’t shake my head and keep sipping on my coffee. That is the difference.

I am from the Delta and I am proud. If ever I choose to have babies, they will know exactly where they are from because we will live there and there will be no English spoken in my household, besides Pidgin of course. I’m a Naija elitist in this way. And that is as it should be. Allowing anyone with wide eyes into African culture is part of the reason our land was haphazardly partitioned for colonization by Europeans in the first place—abeg our heart bigger than the universe we dey in, sef.

Black people are descendants of Africans. Of course. But they aren’t African. My great grand mama is from Trinidad. I am not Trinidadian just because she was. Na difference, you see? To ignore these differences, to gloss over them is to pretend mac and cheese is fufu. Na lie.

I am intensely patriotic and deeply proud to be a Nigerian. I can’t even explain it, it’s mad intense. I love Black people. I be marching, writing poems, mouth behind bull horn, loving hard, soft, tender and fierce for the sake of ALL our COLLECTIVE freedoms regardless of what continent we were born onto. We are a global community and we are connected. Let’s respect who we be and who we ain’t.

“It’s not that I’m heartless. You don’t understand, my heart is buried in Nigeria.”

~Yagazie Emezi.

My bodi dey here.

My heart dey in Naija.

Forever.

say my name

people ask me, as we as humans do, what's your name? and i tell them:

my name is fly.

this is inevitably followed by a compliment, a smile and/or a question. one of the usual questions is:

is that your REAL name?

and i think to myself: didn't i just tell you it was my name?

i say: yes.

apparently unconvinced, they persist with: REALLY?

and i say: yeah, that's my name.

it seems some people would feel more comfortable if i told them: fly is some shit i made up but my REAL NAME, my GOVERNMENT is keisha. or jessica. or monica. or something else, something common, average, "normal", but don't worry, my REAL NAME is most certainly NOT FLY. what kind of world are we living in when someone's REAL NAME is FLY!?!?!?? the entire moral fabric of society would CRUMBLE INTO ITSELF if my name was REALLY fly.

when folks change their name--to reflect a new spiritual consciousness, a new gender identity, or just because they never liked their name, i often hear this lack of respect for their new chosen name amongst some of the people around them via mumblings like "well, she calls herself Phoenix but whatever, her real name is Bernadette." and i wonder: what sense does it make to spend your whole life being called a name your parents gave you before you or they even knew who you were when you can just pick one yourself as a grown ass person that you like and that means something to you? i mean, it takes some guts to make folks who been calling you one thing for years, call you something else. why is that looked down upon or scoffed at, ridiculed or demeaned?

in conclusion, please just call me what i say call me and stop stressing about my "REAL" whatever. i doubt your ancestors REAL LAST NAME was jackson. so chill the fuck out.

one more thing: my name is yvonne fly onakeme etaghene. it's actually longer than that but those 4 i use most often. there are no quotation marks around "fly" and no it is not a nickname. it is in fact my name. some people in my life get to call me yvonne. sometimes people call me by multiple names like "have you ever seen fly perform? shit there was this one summer yvonne had a show on a rooftop..." and i like that shit. but those are folks who been in my world for a minute so they get to do that. one day i might just start goin by onakeme. it all depends on what my spirit say do, we'll see. but for right now, just call me fly.

i never said i love you, Professor Saaka. i love you

i'm procrastinating writing this. like i've been procrastinating living my life to the fullest. but my thoughts return to you so i am writing. i heard you passed today. immediately tears crawled out of me and i screamed. ran to my bed, lay there, cried. i cried mostly because i never told you how much you touched me. and that ain't right. you taught me ME. you taught me about me, you taught me about Africa, about West Africa, about Pan Africanism, about Kwame Nkrumah, taught me about our politics, history, spirituality. you taught me what cosmology means. and it has nothing to do with make up. it's how a people see the world. i still remember that, you had this way of making the complex so easy to understand.

i apologize so deeply for hoarding my words of love for you in my heart, they belonged to you, not me. and so now, inadequate though it may be, i hope it means something to say i love you. i thank you for dedicating your life to teaching people like me, for spending many more years than i've even been alive teaching. i thank you for being so open to speaking at that commemoration of Kwame Ture's life i organized my first year at Oberlin--you were phenomenal. honestly, you always kind of scared me. mostly because i felt like you could see right through me, i had no defenses or quick answers with you, just the truth of my thoughts. i know you have touched and moved thousands and thousands of people. and i hope i do you proud.

i don't think you're online in the after life reading my blog, but i do so strongly pray that you get these words somehow, that some angel delivers these words to you and you know they're from me and you know that for every word written here, there's so many others who feel the same.

Professor Yakubu Saaka, Rest In Power. i, and so so many others, love you and thank you, honor you and are honored to have known you.

tender by nature

there's got to be another way to love.

i am used to anger and defenses springing up hard and with fuck-you attitude. i am used to needing defenses, excuses, protection and rage. i am used to the fight in me being just as strong as the love in me. i think i must love you cuz i care enough to fight but really i just love being right. and that passion ain't got shit to do with who's in front of me. we could be talking about u.s. foreign policy, doing the laundry or how you strap on me. i just want to be right.

this is what i am used to: evidence and exhibits to prove my thesis and my conclusion. and there's bloodshed. there's cemeteries where our kindness and tenderness with each other is buried in unmarked graves this desecration of love we call a relationship pisses on. i am used to battlefield type love where we scream. and it hurts. and there are treaties we make and tear up. truces we grudgingly half-honor and then completely dishonor. and i say to myself--it wouldn't hurt if it wasn't love...it hurts because it's love, real love. but that's bullshit, love doesn't hurt, people do.

there's got to be other ways to love. i know because i have loved sweetly before, with kisses placed onto the sides of bellies, fingers sliding inside pussy as loving as a prayer, loving so deep i want to be vulnerable. i have loved like sharing secrets nobody but you knows, loved like traveling far to see you because i've got to see you. i have loved like love wants to be loved, loved holy like no words come close to describing this beauty, loved like when we can feel Goddess in the room.

i can be hard. walls so high, so thick, so dense, so fuckin serious. and it's work--it takes work to maintain the barbed wire all around me keepin whosoever might piss me off at a safe fuckin distance. i know i am tender by nature. so naturally all this hard is hard on me, hardly my favorite position. i miss the sultry of me.

Hard Femmes Stand Up

yvonne fly onakeme etaghene

It’s Sunday afternoon, the first in March. Listening to the Onliest on myspace getting lifted. Went dancing last night with my peoples. Cut up a rug for real. Been meditating on lots of things: these ideas up in me double dutch with each other, play tag, run relay races. My mind be runnin on roller skates in the rain: faaaaasst. Here are some thoughts…

I identify as a hard femme, a femme aggressive, a fierce femme. This means I am fire, sometimes I wear stilettos and always I don’t take shit. I like my lip gloss poppin, my lip gloss cooool. Sometimes I rock boxers, baggy jeans and kicks if I’m feelin that way, but mostly my clothes and body language/mannerisms are femme. When I dated men (oh wait, there was just that one guy), I always wanted him to be a woman—I wanted him to kiss me, hold me, listen to me like a woman…I’m sure you can see how this was an exercise in futility for all parties involved (lol.) My first sexual experience was with a woman, my first and second and third and fourth (and so on and so on) relationships were with women. I kissed boys, tried to make it work but it didn’t and it wouldn’t. I eventually realized I was not the bisexual dyke I thought I was but just a dyke. Old school butches have at times challenged me identifying as a “dyke” because their definition of “dyke” was “butch”, but my definition of dyke was and is “a woman who loves women proudly, fiercely, passionately.” A sista like me loves butches. Now if you know me you know I adore all kinds of gender identifications from hard femmes like me to soft butches, androgynous beings, soft femmes, folks who traverse the gender spectrum with a flow easier than water, trans folks and on and on but for me, as far as what I’m attracted to, nothing beats the flyness of a butch. Hands down, no question, no contest.

Because all my firsts were women (except that first kiss I had with Eugene at our eighth grade dinner dance), when men would try to holla, I just did not fit into their idea of what a woman “should be”. I didn’t have enough experience with boys or men to know what was “expected of me.” I was too independent for their idea of independence and would not allow them to sweep my dykeness under the rug or bed they kept trying to rush me into. I was bored and unsatisfied so I left. It was the masculinity in the men that I liked, not the men themselves. I love how masculinity looks on a woman’s body—how it flows, hangs, its hard edges, soft curves. Even when I’m around or dating butch women, my hard femme fire can become an issue, as the way I am femme is not based on the heterosexual norms some butches (and femmes and queers in general) subscribe to. Straight women are not my role models for how to be a dyke (!) and thus when I’m with a butch women I do not treat her like a man, despite encouragement to the opposite from society and/or the butch I’m dating. It’s tough on us queers sometimes—the media demonizes us, caricatures us or doesn’t represent us at all. We are thirsty for images of our colored, queer, woman-loving selves in the media (the L Word don’t count y’all) so sometimes we may look to the (most likely) straight relationship we grew up watching our parents have, or we look around our heteronormative neighborhood, in the books we read or films we’ve seen for some sort of example of what we do in relationships. And then we impose these straight ideas on ourselves and our partners/lovers/fuck or cuddle buddies/girlfriends. I don’t want a man with a pussy. That’s not what this dykeness is about. Some “educated queers” feel that the whole butch/femme model is always a mimicry of heterosexuality, they look down upon it and formulate complex critiques about the problematic nature of what they assume to be dykes adopting unhealthy straight relationship models. I say life isn’t that fuckin simple people! Butch/femme isn’t just straight in drag just like gender isn’t just boy or girl (check one), you feel me? Choosing to fuck and love and flirt in a butch/femme context can be unhealthy just like any other way of being or having any other “type” when you cruise for a new partner can be unhealthy. We have many, many labels to choose from but so many of us shun labels because we feel them to be confining, restraining, too big or small to hold our spirits, our everyday loving, our quirks, our humanity. True indeed, I understand not wanting a label, but more than that, I embrace the labels I wear, I wear them vibrantly, naming and claiming my peoples, who I am and who I want around me.

I’m a hard femme, through and through, proud and fierce. Holla back y’all.