Chicago took a new meaning in the summer of 96 when my friend, Fadeke
introduced me to The Boyfriend’s club. Before then, Chicago was the
place, to which I was never going to adjust to, the place, in which I
was never going to fit in, like one sitting on a comfortable chair but
not reclining.
It was the place I remembered in the faint light of the morning when
my Nigerian Boyfriend had called me to say that my application for a
master’s programme to Loyola University had been approved and that the
school had sent my approval letter to his Port Harcourt flat because it
was the address I had used in my application. And I had known then when
he, Odunola said “I am so happy for you, Baby,” that he was not happy
for me or anything like that.
Chicago was vast city parks and soaring skyscrapers.
I told Odun about the skyscrapers on our first phone conversation
when I arrived, three days after I had landed at the O’Hare
international airport and I had waved for long for my Aunt Chinwe to
find me.
“They are so big, so tall, we have not seen anything in Nigeria sef,”
I said and he laughed softly with the innocent animation in his voice
that had attracted him to me when we first met.
Odun was a lawyer at the Shell branch in Port Harcourt, one of those
people who never complained about the huge disparity between his wages
and that of the actual Shell engineers. He never said, “They are
belittling what we do in the arts” like his Lawyer friends did and this
calm reserve, this head above water persona had made Odun irresistible.
It was in Chicago that I first realised I was black, that black was
my last name and not “Okoli”. I might not have been Igbo, might not have
been Nigerian or African, but I was black. The airport officials, my
Aunt Chinwe told me, had paid closer attention to me than everyone else
because I was black, and then Nigerian. They had ruffled my bag for
longer and questioned each content from my face wipe to lip-gloss
because I was black and Nigerian.
The cab driver from the airport had asked us to pay before entering
because we were black and my Aunt Chinwe had paid for a woman’s bus
ticket the next day “Because she was black and looked like she had it
tough” she said.
“The black concept issue I believe is not born out of difference, it
is rather born out of similarity,” Odun said three months later during
one of our phone conversations. I had just told him about a White
attendant at the University who had been rude to me. “The problem is
that the blacks choose to stick together, not that Whites single them
out.”
“That’s a very silly thing to say, Odun” I said, trying to remember
the face of the white woman who had yelled with such disgust “Get the
hell out of my office, you monkey!”
“Is it really, Uche?” He asked me “I don’t speak lies. The woman was
mean to you because your kind has chosen to be separated, not because
she is naturally mean.”
“You are a very stupid person, Odun,” I said and slammed the receiver.
I broke up with him two days later, not because of what he had said, I
was of course not just realising he was stupid. But because the minute I
had boarded the flight at the airport in Lagos with him waving until I
feared his hands would dislocate, I had known that I would break up with
him and he had known this too.
I had felt empty afterwards, riding the bus to school from my Aunt’s
apartment on 19 Michigan Avenue every morning, returning home in the
same manner. Drowning myself in Television, watching events of the
White-water scandal unfold and saying Hillary Clinton looked nice when
she testified before the grand jury. In Chicago, I did not matter. I had
no friends, I was not in school long enough to have friends, I did not
go to church because my Aunt Chinwe did not go too.
In April 1996, eight months after I had arrived, my Aunt Chinwe found
me a job. I was going to work as a sales personnel at an hardware store
when I did not have school, nothing like the banker job I left behind
in Nigeria, but something, my job was something.
“You are very lucky” She said, “Most immigrants work as nannies for
wicked white bosses, this job we got you is everything” and I had
replied “Thank you Aunty”
I earned five dollars an hour at my new job, and by May, I was able
to save enough to send home to my Parents in Nigeria not because they
actually needed it-they were both comfortable- but because one in
America had to send something.
It was there I met Fadeke, a postgraduate student too but at the
University of Illinois. If we had been in Nigeria, Fadeke and I will not
have been friends. I did not like the way she brushed off conversations
about art or politics, how she was only interested in talking about Men
and sex as if her life did not matter except when placed in those
beams.
“Uche, Come for our Boyfriends club meeting” She said when I told her
I was single and did not need a man anymore. I was done with my shift
and changing to go home, she would get off in two hours.
“What’s that?” I asked, drawing my top over my bra.
“We are a group of black ladies with man problems, but we talk about
other things too, we meet at a friend’s place on Rush Street first and
last Sundays of the month,” she said and pushed an address into my
palms.
I went for the meeting that Sunday at a brick built house on Rush,
Fadeke had introduced me to everyone as her colleague proudly and I knew
it was not because she liked me. I attended the next meeting, and the
one after that.
With time, I started to know everyone. I knew Oyenike, the host who
was divorced from the white husband she had married simply because of “
Kpali”
and Zainab who I never forgot because she limped. I knew, Itunu who
was the topic of discussion at the first meeting I attended because she
wanted to marry a man who said they would have to split the bills and
Chilemba, the Kenyan lesbian woman with giant locs.
There was Sewa, “fantastically rich” as Fadeke described her, who
when I said my last Boyfriend was a Yoruba man whom I had had sex with
only twice retorted, “It’s a lie! Don’t lie here”
We had been talking about the Centennial Olympic park bombing at the
summer Olympics that week and somehow the conversation had drifted to
men and preference.
Itunu had said, “I know few Yoruba men who can only deal with sex six
times a month. I had a Yoruba boyfriend who lived in Atlanta few years
ago. He came on weekends just so we could have sex”
Fadeke said “And they like different styles. Hay, God!”
It was then I told them about Odun, that we had had sex only twice,
and then Sewa had spoken before Oyenike concluded that it was because I
was Igbo.
I had my first fight at the club two months after that day when
Chilemba had said my weave was smelly and the other women had looked at
her astonished.
“She is jealous of you” My Aunt Chinwe said when I told her, “The Kenyan thing is jealous of you”
“But to say it! Itunu’s perfume itches my nose, Sewa has a mild mouth odour, but I have never said it” I whined
“Not everyone knows how to keep things to themselves, sometimes it becomes an excuse for stupidity”
“I would never go back there Aunty” I said
“Why?” She asked, “They make you matter”
“I just won’t. I am better than small talk” I replied
But when Fadeke had come with Sewa a month later in the pouring
October rain, brownies in paper plates and said, “Itunu just met an Igbo
man, we need your advice on how they like to do it and Chilemba has
found a girlfriend we all think is terrible for her.” I had known then
that I would go back; I had known that I always would.
“Come in” I said, “My Aunt Chinwe made Ofe Nsala”
The events succeeding my first fight were like my rebirth in the
club, I sat at a different position during meetings and not the new girl
spot anymore. There was a new girl, Toyin – Sewa’s cousin from Nigeria –
and when Sewa had introduced her to me, I realised I had just become a
grounded member.
Oyenike had said that everyone in the club had fought at some point
in time and that it was very normal that I had gotten upset; she said it
meant we were real and honest, not a group of girls who told each other
what they needed to hear.
At my first meeting after the fight, Chilemba had walked up to me and
apologised for calling my weave smelly, then we had moved on to talking
about the lesbian girlfriend she had just found.
“I think she’s too fast for you,” Itunu said about Chilemba’s choice
of a partner, “You say she’s an actress, why would she want someone like
you?”
Fadeke shook her head “Do you mean Chilemba doesn’t deserve her?”
“No” I replied for Itunu “She simply means that such things don’t happen except in movies. Everyone should stay on their lane”
“Uche is right, such things don’t happen” Sewa said, smiling tenderly at me.
She said it again, Sewa, two months later when I told them I had
found a man, a white man, Jim. She said it and then added “He is white
Uche, are you forgetting that? Oyinbo?”
I had not forgotten, I knew very well he was white. The first time we
had gone for lunch in a strictly white restaurant on a street I did not
know, people had stared at us oddly, he was very white and I was very
black.
I met Jim at the store I worked, he had walked in one morning in a
sweater and grey pants requesting to buy glue and needing me to
prescribe one to him. He looked like a cut out picture from the
Basketball Lives magazines Odun kept on his room dresser, the same sophistication in the simplest of things.
“I don’t know which to recommend” I said, “I haven’t used anyone, I don’t even know if anything on that shelf works at all”
“Your Boss would not be proud of you telling that to an ignorant customer,” He said, pouting his lips
“My Boss should actually be more concerned about the customer’s
welfare” I replied and he smiled softly then pushed his business card
into my palms.
I did not call him, not that night, or the night after. Not even when
my Aunty Chinwe asked me to because a white husband was an easy way to
get my papers or when I saw him reading the local news on the small
television in my bedroom.
It was three weeks later he came to the store again. He wanted to
know why I had not called him; he had outright asked if I thought him
unattractive, if I thought –because he was white-, that he had a small
penis and if I preferred a black man because ‘they had it longer,’ he
said.
I had been amused and disgusted, all at once, but the former emotion
took the dominance and I found myself giggling to the words that rolled
out of his mouth, there was the vulgarity about him that amused me.
Itunu said during the next meeting that it was because I was from a
country where sex was a minority, where it wasn’t discussed and where
everyone acted like they never got into bed which made her wonder how we
were so densely populated.
Nevertheless, I did not think it was that. In the months I am with
Jim, when I tell him I am a virgin and I want to be celibate –I do not
know why I do this- because I am saving myself for marriage, I enjoy
watching the disappointment in his eyes as the glass of vodka touches
his lips. When I tell him that I would miss his mother’s 60
th birthday celebration because I am a feminist and he says that I have started to lose my cool, I am thrilled.
It is from Itunu that I first hear the word “Feminist,” when she is
talking about her man who wants to split bills, when she says “He gave
me a name for what he is, he is a feminist” and when I see the
excitement on the face of the girls. It is from her that I first realise
that it is somehow all I have always been, and that word, that word
that she had defined in her Nigerian understanding to mean “A woman who
nor dey gree,” shaped most of my decisions with Jim.
Years later, I would realise how faulty this definition was, how
flawed, but not then. Not when it became the only thing, we talked about
during meetings or when Oyenike said we should rename our club to The
Powerful Feminists Club, I did not find the true meaning then.
The faulty concept of feminism I had was there when I said I did not
like how Jim looked at me, in that way that objectified me, as if I was
only a sexual item and he said my resolve was silly because I could not
assert that he only wanted me for sex if we were not having sex.
It was there when I complained about the porn I found on his desktop
computer, how it went an extra mile to show he had no concern for issues
as important as “Feminist sex.”
“Your porn treats the woman as an animal!” I yelled, “And that is not alright, Jim”
It was there the day I said his friend called me a “Nigerian woman”
and that I did not like the tone with which he had said it, that he said
it as if there was something wrong not just with being a Nigerian, but
being a woman and that I thought his friend was a misogynist.
And with every issue I raised, I watched this man who loved me slowly
lose himself. I watched him miss his cues when he read the news those
nights, I watched him force a smile when his friends wanted to talk
about feminism, yet somehow, for some reason I did not know, all of this
thrilled me.
“I am not doing again” is what is sprawled on the note Jim
leaves in my purse the day he breaks up with me -it is one of the
Nigerian expressions I taught him- and it is escorted by a
“You are too much of a feminist.”
I do not flinch when I read it, I am somewhat relieved and when I
tell the girls later that he broke up with me because I was a feminist
–the topic had then become the major bane of the club; they raise a
toast to men who cannot contain feminists, who cannot contain “women who
no dey gree.”
Sewa whispered in my ears as she passed me brownies that evening “Hope the break-up isn’t hurting, hope you’re fine?”
I nodded.
I was fine. I was actually really fine.
END...
Featured Image: Frank Morrison
From: http://firstcultureng.com
