Chris Abani has lived in several places and been assumed to be of numerous and widely varying origins, ethnicities and parentage. In this excerpt from his memoir, he pauses to trace the map of being in the realm of “neither, nor”.
Call
OTHER BROTHER: Hey, G. says you’re asking for face jokes.
ME: Not really.
OTHER BROTHER: I’ve got a good one. You’ll thank me later.
ME: Fine.
OTHER BROTHER: Kid says, Mommy all the kids at school say I’m a werewolf! Is it true? Mom says, of course not. Now shut up and comb your face. What do you think?
ME: Fuck Google.
Face Value
When I tell people that my mother was a white Englishwoman and my father Igbo, they look at me sceptically. It’s a pause that really means, “Are you sure? You’re so dark.”
It’s a pause that I’ve heard only in the West. In Nigeria most people know upon meeting me that I’m not entirely African. Nigeria has a long history of foreigners coming through – the Portuguese in the 14th century, North Africans as far back as the 12th century, Tuaregs and Fulani to name just a few.
In fact, in the late 1980s and early 1990s the civil war in Chad caused the very light-skinned Chadians to pour into Nigeria as refugees. It was a disturbing sight to see hundreds, sometimes thousands, of homeless Arab-looking people begging for food in the streets and markets. The public outcry was so severe that the military government began a programme of forced repatriation. Army trucks rolled into markets and soldiers would round up these refugees, separating families without a second thought – after all, they all looked alike – and driving them back to the border.
I once found myself being pushed into one such truck, but my fluency in several Nigerian languages saved me. I was often mistaken for being Lebanese, Indian, Arab or Fulani. Yet not in England or North America. In these places I am firmly black, of unknown origin. But people have learned to be polite here, so no one says anything that might offend. They nod and make murmuring noises instead; except for the Los Angeles Police Department, whose officers took great offence at my still very English accent when I arrived in LA. They asked me why I was faking it. I never quite figured out why, but whatever the reason, they were always very offended when I was pulled over.
It is interesting that I would be suspected of lying about my mixed-raced heritage. As though I was seeking some privilege, some “betterment” of my black lot, because, well, everyone knows some white in you is better than none, right? Wrong. When we were kids in London, my mother was often congratulated for adopting us. It still amazes me that she never grew tired of correcting people, and not always kindly.
Once, in the 1990s, I was standing next to my mother at an ATM in London and we were chatting as she withdrew money. A policeman wandered over and casually asked my mother if she was okay and if I was trying to rob her. And one of my agents, on meeting my mother at an awards ceremony in LA, exclaimed, “Oh my God, she’s as white as day.”
Frantz Fanon has written better than I ever will about this matter: the idea of whiteness, and a visible whiteness, being preferred; the idea that secretly all white people believe that everyone really wants to look like them, to be them.
Face value, an interesting term, has many origins. It refers to the value of money guaranteed by the sum printed on its face. There was no need to bite the coin to see if it was gold or weigh it to see if it was an alloy. There was nothing hidden. But what claims to uncover, to reveal, can often obfuscate. If there is face value, a fiat of measure, then the opposite is implied – apparent value; as in, don’t accept promises or claims of face value.
In Nigeria growing up, my brother Greg was very light-skinned, and of all of us he had the longest, straightest hair. “Mbunu Jesus,” my aunt would say, which loosely translates to “He’s just like Jesus.” The nickname stuck for a long time. When I was out and about with Greg we must have made quite a picture – Greg skinny with long hair and me plump and with kinky hair. In the usual way of people in Afikpo they would ask, “Who claims you?” A way of ascertaining your lineage, determining whether they needed to know more. Only when you had been located in a lineage of repute would the follow-up be, “What is your name?” In our case, the next question would be, “You are brothers?”
“Yes.”
“Same mother, same father?”
“Yes.”
Then with a mix of pity and mockery they would ask me, “So, what happened to you?”
Face value.
In taxicabs in Nigeria, or in buses, people would talk about me, referring to me as korawayo, a nickname for foreigners (particularly Lebanese) who exploited and cheated Nigerians. I would sit silently, listening to the badmouthing used, then I would casually ask in Igbo (fluently), Yoruba (less fluently), or Hausa (even less fluently) what the time was or some such question. The effect was hilarious, the embarrassment and apologies profuse.
When I lived in East LA, a predominantly Chicano/Latino neighbourhood, I was assumed to be Dominican or Panamanian. In Miami, where I go regularly for religious reasons, I am mistaken for a Cuban. In New Zealand I was assumed to be Maori. In Australia, Aborigine. In Egypt, Nubian. In Qatar, Pakistani. In South Africa, Zulu or some other group, depending on who was talking. At other times, because of my accent, which is a mix of Nigerian, British and now American inflections, I am assumed to be from “one of the islands”. No one accepts my Nigerianness, not without argument. In fact, the two things I have been most rarely taken for – Nigerian and white – are the very things that form my DNA. Face value.
Agemo, the Yoruba say. Chameleon. Most of the confusion about who I am is a product of how my face is read. Thus it is perceived to be where it is thought to belong. And how it is supposed to look. As my father used to say in the heavy Igbo accent he would adopt when particularly disgusted by some new facet of my rebellion, “You are just a disappointment.” Even my grandfather, who cast kola nuts when I was born and who nicknamed me Erusi (spirit), would shake his head and say, “You don’t belong here or in the land of the spirits. You are a bat, neither bird nor mammal.”
I loved that. That meant I could be anything. Even Batman.
This story features in the new Chronic, an edition in which we ask: what if maps were made by Africans for their own use, to understand and make visible their own realities or imaginaries? How does it shift the perception we have of ourselves and how we make life on this continent?
This story features in the new Chronic, an edition in which we ask: what if maps were made by Africans for their own use, to understand and make visible their own realities or imaginaries? How does it shift the perception we have of ourselves and how we make life on this continent?
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This is an edited extract from Chris Abani’s memoir, The Face: Cartography of the Void, published by Restless Books (available to order here)
