I took the longest strides of my life during my first winter in America. Race-walking in between classes as my nostrils felt slithering pain at every inhalation and exhalation. When I packed up everything— my belongings that could fit in two suitcases— no one told me to bring the familiar smell of home or hug my mother long enough to go months without an affectionate touch. I think of my two 46kg suitcases as the ball of soil a seedling carries from the nursery bed to its permanent site. The ball of soil falls off grain by grain and your roots sit naked in an alien soil, vulnerable and lost.
For me, the feeling of being lost began with the weather shock. My blood threatened to freeze as I learned the language of layered outfits and weather forecasts. I tell the temperature in degrees Celsius because my brain has not been recalibrated to Fahrenheit. “It takes a while,” my professor says as I arrive to my class, panting from walking as fast as I could to escape the bite of the cold. “You might need a heated jacket, weighted blanket, curtains, thicker socks and gloves.” I could hear my peers as they crowdsourced ideas for how I might survive the “pretty warm” winter. The voices steadily reduced and then became faint whispers as I fought back tears, longing for home and its abundant sunshine.
I arrived in Corvallis, Oregon on a Friday in autumn, exhausted from my thirty hour trip. I took in the view of yellowing leaves, green lawns overlaying homes that looked like they would float away in the torrential rain storms of tropical Africa or become delicious snacks for termites. The smell of moisture, and decay filled my nostrils, hinting of a place starved of sunlight. The taste of the plums Cassandra, my host, offered me on our drive from the airport still lingered in my mouth. It reminded me of the customary kolanuts we offer guests in Nigeria, only those were too succulent and juicy to capture the cultural essence of a six-lobed kolanut.
The months that followed saw many culinary adventures. I tried tacos, burgers, bagels, sushi, mac and cheese, tamales, and horchata. No one told me that my palate will be the last of my body to come to terms with being across the ocean, thousands of miles away from home. I scanned stores for familiar food. I got a headache from going aisle to aisle, scouting, deciding between options based on price as I couldn’t do so by quality, taste, or any other metric.
One morning, I shared a picture of my breakfast with my sister via WhatsApp, captioned “potatoes for breakfast.” She exclaimed, “Purple and orange potatoes! American wonder!” We spent the rest of the morning talking about American fruits and vegetables as she readied for bed. I talked about how bananas looked impeccable as though the familiar brownish spots that lined green Nigerian bananas were bleached off. I shared my disappointment at the first bite— they do not taste anything like they look.
Soon, I created improvised recipes with what I could find, while using the ingredients my mother gave me, as sparsely as I would a limited edition of an expensive perfume. The egusi, the dried ugu, the suya pepper, crayfish, and locust beans were used in tiny treasured bits. When I walk by food trucks, I think about the aroma of roasted corn, akara, puff-puff and all the delicious street food in Nigeria. I pull out these memories one after the other, wipe off the dust on them with towels moistened with my tears. I understand why life begins to shut down when a man suffers memory loss.
I think of the gift of remembering and the possibility of creating backups for memories. Something like an external hard drive, so they can be retrieved and reinstalled into minds blurring from dementia. I share this thought with someone or with myself in a soliloquy in the shower— I can’t remember which. But it is most likely the latter because here, people don’t talk that much. Everyone seems to put an extra effort into avoiding human contact. I see the way people slide off the sidewalk when I walk toward them or prefer to ride the bus standing instead of taking the empty seat beside me. And I wonder if it is a social-behavioral adaptation for COVID or it has always been this way.
“You’ll never worry about being terrorized by the bad breath of a stranger who won’t stop talking,” My sister joked when I told her that Americans do not randomly talk to others like people do in Nigeria. I smile because I should be thankful to have my thoughts uninterrupted and faucets and light switches that do not snub me when I push them. In Nigeria, the streets, buses, church pews, everywhere buzzed with people waiting with pleasantries, advice, stories, gossip, or at least the choral-like lamentations of a people, knee-deep in water but dying of thirst.
I relished the still silence of America, shared my jokes with myself, and spent the rest of my time introspecting. I walked around with lips pressed together with a ready-to-go plastic smile, nodding hellos and hi-s to strangers who stare, but sizzling with ideas longing to be shared. I learned the concept of intellectual loneliness for the first time. I thought about the blessing of being surrounded by people fighting a common enemy, people with dreams so widely shared and values so similar that you could find a port to plug in your ideas and process it together. Then I went down with my millionth bout of homesickness.
It was about this time of frequent homesickness, I met Fernando. He had his umbilical cord buried in America but his heart was in Mexico. “Buenos dìas, mi Corazón,” my phone would beep every morning. My weekends went from monochrome homework-and-chores days to adventures embroidered by fine Mexican cuisine—quesadillas, carne asada, fajitas, and tacos. His curiosity had a unique flavor, it was not from a vantage point of privilege. It was genuine, not investigative or armed with a quiver-full of stereotypes waiting to be confirmed.
Fernando’s friendship was like a glimmer of sunlight. It shone through the snowstorm of January and the cloudy rainy days of late winter. We practiced bachata, accumulated years’ worth of memories and collected an album of inside jokes in just a few months. He teased me for being too thin and didn’t mind if I called him fat. “Flaca, comó está?” he’d say when I answered the phone, and when I grumbled, he’d say, “We only tease those we love, right?”
Today, I hopped on the bus and rubbed my ice-cold hands on my thighs the way Fernando would have done; his soft warm hands gently massaging my palms as we speed off to the next adventure. Flashes of our friendship replayed in my head as though pages of a large photo album were being flipped by an invisible hand. The first time we met at the Corvallis Public Library, it was a few days until Christmas. He hugged and kissed my cheeks.
Fernando’s hugs came to be my favorite thing. His pillowy body held enough warmth to make me forget the sting of winter. “You like me for my body heat; I should bill you for that,” he’d joke when I held a hug longer than usual. Initially, I didn’t like him because he tilted his ears toward my lips for most of our first conversation as though my English was so terrible that he had to listen twice as hard. I wonder how he cut through my initial hesitation and arrived at the degree of fondness I came to have of him.
I never got to share this with him before he left for New Mexico, but I no longer feel slighted when heads angle at 45 degrees and ears tilt toward my mouth to catch every syllable of my Nigerian accent. Perhaps, I am beginning to appreciate the effort made to listen twice as hard and visibly so, or I have relinquished my right to interpret the body language as derogatory as I wait for a body language dictionary to be published.
Frankly, I’d take a million angled heads and tilted ears over a thousand “pardon me-s” because after nine months of being here, I have yet to fully grasp the American lingo. I have not mastered how to volunteer an animated “That’s exciting!” and go on and on about something being “Pretty cool” while nodding intermittently. My Nigerian English, embroidered with British expressions, rolls off my tongue like the royal guards on a parade—stiff and stern. The reality of English as a second language stares back at me, something I never thought much of until I moved to the U.S.
With over two decades of formal education for which the language of instruction was English, my mind processes everything in English. I think, imagine, make my best arguments, and write in English. I cannot speak Idoma, my Nigerian language, without throwing in English. I feel like the platypus, oscillating between aquatic and terrestrial habitats but not belonging anywhere.
I try hard to remember the Idoma alphabets but, all that washes ashore my mind are memories of the times I interrupted my dad to request an interpretation of an Idoma proverb. For the first time, I feel a profound sense of loss. I think about my degrees and wonder what fraction of my identity and cultural heritage is the opportunity cost. I acknowledge and grieve the parts of me which atrophied in my acquisition of an exotic taste and I light candles in honor of them.
American wonder: is an expression from a 90s Nollywood comic drama.
*Edited by Non-Fiction Editor, Jina DuVernay
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