University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Negrolands: anticolonial aesthetics for the lands of the Blacks

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Negrolands: anticolonial aesthetics for the lands of the Blacks

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Content NEGROLANDS:
ANTICOLONIAL AESTHETICS FOR THE LANDS OF THE BLACKS
by
Mary Daniel
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING)
August 2021
Copyright 2021 Mary Daniel

ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I extend my deepest gratitude to the chair of my committee, David St. John, who
has been a generous mentor and advisor during my entire time at USC. His insight and
patience have sustained me. I also sincerely thank Bill Handley and David Bridel for
their kind notes and edits of my early drafts.
I am extremely grateful for the professors who supported me while I completed
this degree: Percival Everett, Susan McCabe, and Doe Mayer. I owe a gargantuan debt to
Janalynn Bliss for her tireless assistance and support, without which I would be lost.
Juan Castillo, Will Nguyen, Safiya Sinclair, Melissa Campos, and Nicole Richards
Diop: I appreciate you all immensely. Good friends are the biggest blessing in a writing
life, and you have been the best.
My research would not have been possible without the countless gracious hours
the four members of my immediate family gifted me during our interview sessions.
Harold, Sarah, Lydia, and Ishaya Daniel: I hope I might do justice to our strange
experience of this world. Thank you for shouldering me.

iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements..............................................................................................................ii

List of Figures......................................................................................................................iv

Abstract.................................................................................................................................v

Introduction..........................................................................................................................1

Chapter 1: Tribal Markings..................................................................................................9

Chapter 2: Doors of No Return..........................................................................................24

Chapter 3: Terrestrial Paradise..........................................................................................39

Ars Poetica..........................................................................................................................63

Poetry Manuscript: Wayward Dancing ............................................................................67
Must Be Some Kind of Spell....................................................................................68
Revivalism 101.........................................................................................................69
Blood for the Blood God..........................................................................................70
Slipstream................................................................................................................71
Feel Better...............................................................................................................72
Bloodmoon..............................................................................................................73
Wolfmoon................................................................................................................74
Ode to Our Unnamed Moon....................................................................................75
Zombi......................................................................................................................76
Nodus Tollens..........................................................................................................77
Invocation................................................................................................................79
Anti-Noir Series......................................................................................................80
Megacity..................................................................................................................89
Innocent Nigeriana.................................................................................................90
Violence is Mother and Daughter............................................................................91
Disease Map............................................................................................................93
For My Uncle...........................................................................................................94
Outbreak..................................................................................................................95
Mefloquine Side Effects Series................................................................................96
Enquiry into the Location & Nature of Hell..........................................................103
Hell with the Lid Off..............................................................................................104
Ill-Starred..............................................................................................................105
Poetry Manuscript Notes.......................................................................................107

Bibliography.....................................................................................................................108

iv
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 – 1767 Map of Negroland......................................................................................40

Figure 2 – 1600s Map of the Island of California................................................................55

v
ABSTRACT

This dissertation is a hybrid critical and creative work wherein I present original
ethnographic and genealogical research alongside mythology. I begin by providing
background context for the historical, political, and social complexities of my native
Nigeria, a nation with origins as intricate and multi-storied as my own. My research
recounts stories from various traditions that generations of my family have handed
down; I conducted this investigation into our heritage through an ongoing oral history
project. The span of the first chapter reaches far back into tribal (pre)histories. The
nomadic narrative moves to the West and back again to Africa via my impressions of the
‘motherland’ (as a place/an idea) formed from journeys returning Back Home. Within
these migrations, I relate my research on my indigenous cultures.
As I reconsider racial and regional identity, I arrive in the American West and
attempt to excavate the hidden Black history of California. I introduce Queen Calafia, a
mythological Black empress—conceived in a 16th-century Spanish novel—who reigns
over an imaginary island called California. Using her origin story in an indictment of
colonial names and narratives, I draw parallels to another “land of blacks”—Negroland,
an archaic imperial reference to Nigeria. I conclude with an ars poetica that introduces
my poetry manuscript, Wayward Dancing. I distill its aesthetics and link my
scholarship to my principle poetic concerns.

1
INTRODUCTION

I was born in Maiduguri, Nigeria—birthplace of Boko Haram, the terrorist militia
that specializes in kidnapping the girl child. A concoction of three religions, four
languages, and thirty-three addresses across three continents have made me who I am.
Too many to count: the phone numbers; zip codes; area codes; ways of thinking and
being in Africa, Europe, and America. For the first decade of my life, I was raised in
England, before my immediate family of five moved to the USA, our final adopted home.
My history straddles dueling cultural systems: I am a dual citizen of Nigeria and the
USA. I’ve been told by nationalistic Nigerians that I am not “really Nigerian”;
xenophobic Americans suggest I'm not “a real American.”
I am a “third culture kid,” a term coined by social anthropologist Ruth Useem to
refer to “children who accompany their parents into another society” (Useem 1) during
those integral developmental years when one’s sense of personal and cultural identity is
formed. In the seminal book, The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds, sociologist
David Pollock refined the profile of the third culture kid and delimited the parameters of
the cultural spaces we inhabit. The first culture is that of our place of origin; the second
is the culture of the country to which we were transplanted; the third culture exists in
the spaces created where the first two intersect (Pollock et al.). This particular pattern of
migration may induce either a greater intercultural literacy or a floundering cultural
identity: that feeling of not having a home—or of having one but feeling lost to it.
Restlessness, rootlessness. We ‘kids’ belong to a cultural group shared with those
of similar experience; yet we do not seamlessly fit anywhere. In this country, I’ve lived
in Nashville and New Haven; Mystic, Maryland and Manhattan; Koreatown, Los

2
Angeles; Detroit on the riverfront with clear Canada views; the Brooklyn before the
Brooklyn now; Chicago. My parents and siblings eventually put down roots fifteen years
ago within the large West African community near D.C.—but I remain shiftless. I
meander and move for work, school, love. I inherited such extreme exophoria—that
tendency of eyes to look 0utward. My early ancestors were herdsmen and traders who
roamed the Sahara in search of water. My nuclear family and I lived as trans-continental
nomads, relentless in our own pursuit of something less material. Only five of us
migrated to this part of the world.

We seek a real and an imagined country.

I am a product of the past and peregrination. I have had to confront many things
about my family or myself I once thought true. I wade through mercurial history to sort
fact from phantasm. When I began this project, I could not authenticate my own
mother’s birthdate. My raw material—interviews of our oral history: recorded
testimonies I have tracked down in an attempt to compile an accounting of who we have
come to be. In their inconsistencies, they parallel those bad boundaries of my colonized
countries themselves. “Nigeria” is a fraudulent fantasy of the British Empire. Its legacy
is confusion, incongruity. My nation was conceived in pursuit of profit and palm oil.
Our borders still appear in a geometry of greed, divining our natural resources
into dividends. European powers divided Africa arbitrarily, apportioning it according to
what they craved. The precolonial corpse of Nigeria they disfigured, desecrated.
Nowhere within networks of institutions built by missionaries did they make room to
accurately preserve and portray what had come before, disregarding the systems of
civilization they’d dismantled. The earliest known civilization in the area of present-day

3
Nigeria belonged to the Nok people, who we trace back four thousand years through
their ironwork and ceramic sculptures. When the Nok civilization declined, great
dynasties like the Kanem-Bornu came to control former Nok territory; they in turn were
conquered through jihads (holy wars) by invading Islamic empires. All these settlements
developed around the Sahara—flourishing along a nexus of trade routes and shifting or
splitting in reaction to desertification. Migratory, pastoral, pilgrimatic, or nomadic: the
way of wayfaring enabled the cross-pollination of far-flung cultures.
There is a famous quote about the impact of the religion that Europeans brought,
an observation made by the Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta. So astute is this saying that
it is regularly misattributed to other African thinkers as a form of praise: “When the
missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land, and the missionaries had the Bible. They
taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened our eyes, they had the land, and
we had the Bible" (qtd. in Glanz 1). In the incursive 15
th
century, the Portuguese were the
first to attempt to commandeer the coasts of West Africa. In those early days, exports of
natural resources by sea and overland via desert routes encouraged lucrative trade
markets and the interest of competing foreign powers. Europeans built coastal
fortresses to protect monopolies amidst import-export wars. Gold and ivory. Petroleum
and people.
For almost 400 years, the West African coast served as the site of chattel slavery,
the kidnapping of over 12 million stolen humans. As that slave trade ended in the 19
th

century, British imperial strategy lay in incorporating companies to dominate trade
markets; bit by bit, these corporations began to exert ruling powers. The Royal Niger
Company, established in 1886, existed as a subsidiary of the Unilever Corporation until
1987—one year after I was born. During the ‘Scramble for Africa,’ spanning from 1870 to

4
1914, European states increased their direct control of the continent from 10% to 90%. A
series of military conquests handed a decisive victory to Britain in 1914. They had their
colony. After decades of indirect rule imposed through military might, economic
exploitation, and proselytization, Nigeria formally faced five more.

...Yes, after all this, we had the Bible. And we had the Holy Quran.

Christianity arrived on the coasts alongside early European traders and
penetrated inland wherever missionaries founded schools and built all the cornerstones
of civic life—churches, meeting halls, administrative offices. Almost half of Nigeria is
now Christian. Islam claims almost all of the other half. Constantly clashing, these
organized religions collaborate only to marginalize traditional animistic spirituality. I
refer to the animistic beliefs of my paternal grandmother, taboo in a land controlled by
Christians and Muslims, which earned her rumors of practicing witchcraft. Her nervous
habits during prayers, like shuffling her feet back and forth, were interpreted as
attempts to “undo” those prayers. Equally sharing in the destiny of our nation, our two
Abrahamic faith traditions diverged; you can see this parting mapped onto the land
itself.
In Nigeria—positioned just out of reach of a constantly expanding desert—water
is life. Our waterways are so fundamental that many tribes revere them as deities. In
general, in Nigeria, Christian communities huddle close to rivers, because early
missionaries traveled by river when establishing their settlements. They issue forth from
slave castles lining slave coasts. Conversely, Islam descended from desert—from
warlords north and scholars of the east who came traipsing down the Sahara beginning
nearly a thousand years ago. A political map of Nigeria presents a country bisected: with

5
Christians neatly segregated in the south until a Muslim north—respective territories
separated by a real, invisible line. The point at which they meet was marked as the
capital, Abuja, which rests in the center of the country in uneasy compromise.
A storytelling tradition forms the foundation for any sense of Nigerian identity.
This unnatural nationality is most possible when it recalls an older, oral order—our
narratives must make a nation. Our stories are manipulated and modified over time,
tellers taking elements of truth and reshaping them into fables, a West African genre—
tales with a moral lesson animated by animals and objects, gods and ghosts. A common
motif is the transmutation of beasts, humans, and deities; in fantastic settings,
supernatural creatures converse and contend with each other as friends or foes. Central
characters are changed in encounters with helpful animals, meddlesome demons, and
peeved ancestors. Humans are guided by ancestors, who interfere and influence
mundane matters.
The cosmology of the Yoruba tribe diffused the New World, traveling with slaves
believing in oneness with their divine creator, Olodumare. The enslaved were forced
into Christianities of various denominations: still, belief did not die. Yoruba theology
initiated Santeria; Haitian and Louisiana Vodun; and hoodoo, amongst other syncretic
practices taking hold throughout the Americas. In my father’s tribe, stories had
longevity but not latitude; they were handed down over generations but not widely
circulated. Official storytellers were usually the oldest people, but merit played a part, as
the stories provided entertainment as well as education and edification. They
collaborated directly with village chiefs to establish the important facts surrounding any
of the stories they told, which were often a recounting of the life of the chief and his
ancestors. Storytellers were chroniclers tasked with storing and sharing information

6
about war, local champions, and memorable hunts; they were the record keepers of the
tribe.
Late in the year, after the harvest when all the crops had been stored, villagers
held festivals during which these stories were told. Elders might select a member of the
tribe who had done something noteworthy and incorporate their actions int0 a tale.
Song and dance were important during these festivals, and stories were often set to
rhythm. Songs were composed to insult or praise another clan, and they were written
and performed in both the tribal dialect and the lingua franca of the area, so even those
outside the tribe who spoke other languages could understand. Another song would be
written to counter the original insult; this back and forth could go on for generations.
Children learned and repeated these songs; songwriters were revered as local celebrities.
In a famous incident, a fabler from my father’s tribe called the chief of a nearby village a
servant—doubly humiliating both the tribal leader and his settlement, which was larger
and should therefore have been acknowledged as superior. In swift retaliation, a
composer from the injured party accused the rival chief of being a thief—firing back that
servants are nobler than thieves.
Moving from one village to the next while listening to neighboring tribes’ stories,
one could perceive subtle differences in their ideals and ethics. Under the moon after
harvesting, these storytelling sessions were one of the few times everyone could leave
their farms unattended and gather together. No longer performed in my father’s district,
this communal tradition began dying out soon after the arrival of missionaries and
modernity. Nigeria’s indigenous mythology remains under threat across both its North
and South, condemned by Islamic and Christian authorities alike in favor of their
respective gospels. In Myth, Literature and the African World, the Yoruba author Wole

7
Soyinka expands upon the fragmentation of the African ‘version’ of the Greek chorus—
the collective commentary of the continent—that was dismantled in tandem with the
destruction of the ritual spaces attached to our ‘pagan’ beliefs. Forms of expression that
are essentially African suffered from the sublimation of the communal cacophony
previously found in the performance of truth-seeking that was our storytelling tradition
(Soyinka 37-38).
The story that supplanted our truths was the “good news” of the Christian gospel
(“Gospel”). The Greek euangelion (evangel in English) refers to good tidings brought by
a messenger, an angel. The direct translation in Old Saxon was gōdspell (where gōd
meant “good” and spell meant “message”). But in this good news, there is one original
flaw: there in the name. Evolving in English to a shortened form, the word gōd, which
originally only meant “good,” was mistaken for “god.” An error made the good spell
divine—a literal message from God. Godliness became gospel, and its usage diverged
from spell, which once also meant a story or fable, in addition to a magic charm. A word
associated with sorcery was alienated from an Evangelical dogma that made no room for
invocation or enchantment—that made the magic in a story inherently evil. Our native
tribal mythology became bad omens: unlucky.

I turn my hand to a new narrative of my own making.

I now present my research in the form of an original oral history. I have
undertaken an investigative genealogical project in order to untangle the syncretism in
our spiritual traditions and attempt to uncover and recover what Christianity and Islam
suppressed. This research began in the interest of compiling a comprehensive
mythology of my tribe, the Hausa-Fulani of Nigeria and Niger. In its final shape, the

8
collection will include my translations of contemporary and traditional poetry in Hausa,
my native language. These translations, together with the myths, will showcase the
trajectory of my tribal literature. Before my grandparents passed, I salvaged the stories I
could, trying to collect as many as possible—stories in that part of the world often die
with each generation, being rarely recorded or considered taboo. In bits and pieces, I
coaxed out our culture after giving elders a simple prompt: “Tell me a story.”

9
CHAPTER 1:
TRIBAL MARKINGS

If "Nigeria" as a country doesn't make sense, then it is not enough for one to
know, or to simply say, that one is Nigerian without further clarity. Understanding
where we are from—and who we were—before we were dissected and divided is a task of
great nuance and nuisance. None of us in my immediate family bear any tribal marks, as
the generation before my parents’ was the last to adhere to this almost compulsory
tradition. My parents disagree about why theirs was the first generation to avoid this
practice. The formerly customary scars were a mark of pride in one’s tribe and an easy
way to identify a fellow member from afar—to inform strangers and kin alike to whom
you belong. Visible rites of passage, carved into faces by designated people in the tribe,
not always in a sanitary way. Relatively few people still have them. My mother insists
that these marks lost popularity because of the introduction of Christianity and its
prohibition of bodily mutilation. My father counters that marking was phased out as
people became more educated about infection. The truth is likely a mixture.
The various influences that inform my ethnicity signify a concourse of centuries
of cultural clash. It gets more complicated because my particular family history places us
outside many norms. My immediate family is an anomaly in the West, where the vast
majority of Nigerian immigrants come from the central or southern parts of the country,
usually Yorubaland or Igboland. Not once have I met another African in the West who
claimed the Fulani or Longuda tribes that we do. Similarly, meeting immigrants who
speak our native Hausa is exceedingly rare. If we do encounter another from Hausaland,
they’re invariably Muslim. My extended family is also an anomaly back in Nigeria, a

10
Christian family from a Muslim tribe of the Muslim North. That I was raised Christian is
a testament to the tenacity of a few missionaries who strayed into my mother’s nameless
hamlet.
Conducting genealogical research into tribal (pre)history is daunting and
difficult. Our oral tradition means that most of these histories were never written down;
Northern Nigeria lacks publishing houses and well-maintained archives capable of
producing and preserving those texts that do exist. Our tropical environment made it
difficult to preserve rare paper records. I observe a relative lack of attention and interest
within Nigerian academia concerning its “backwards” North when compared with the
culturally dominant South. We must also contend with the colonial tendency towards
historical revisionism and outright cultural destruction. The few attempts at complete
tribal histories still in print were written by biased British historians; they routinely
include absurdly offensive inaccuracies and stereotypes. At times, it is obvious to us that
the local people the British interviewed were just pulling their legs—so preposterous are
these reports.
Many stories ensconced within the North have only been passed down orally until
now, the time of this writing. This traditional way, which does leave room for
uncertainty, should not be dismissed as inherently less illuminating. When I ask what
we can know to be true—of a family or of a tribe—my parents caution that written
accounts may not be any more reliable. They are broadly skeptical of the accuracy of
most written histories of various tribes, explaining that these were often written by
people from a different tribe who happened to be better educated, commonly
denigrating a rival tribe to make their own look better. These self-appointed historians

11
constantly misinterpreted why people of a certain tribe did things a particular way. Most
people in the generations before my parents weren’t taught to write.
Even with the British knack for bureaucracy during colonialism, there was no
regional office with genealogical records in my parents’ regions—the oldest records were
church rolls, and the earliest of these church records date only back to the early 20
th

century, a mere hundred years ago. Europeans took records according to their own
colonial interests, motivated by profit or proselytization. My father’s method for
ascertaining the veracity of any remarkable story places a high value on consistency: If
you hear the same story from your own family and again around the village or
surrounding areas, it’s more likely to contain elements of truth. If, in the small and
enclosed area of his tribal lands, the stories don’t intersect as they should, he is apt to
discount them. For him, the stories that hold the most weight regardless of accuracy are
those that explain certain mysteries, such as the earliest conflict precipitating a long-
standing tribal rivalry. To recover the best-known histories of our people, going back
generations, I reach into an era both recent and before recorded history: where facts
fuse with lore and legend.
My paternal grandmother was a kingmaker—part of a tiny committee that chose
and crowned the next chief upon the death of the current one. This committee would
pick the chief based on merit, then install him to serve for life. In the Longuda tribe, the
chieftaincy rotates between one of three smaller clans within the larger tribe that are
traditionally eligible to put forth a leader. In Nigeria, each tribe has its own definition of
death based on its particular spiritual beliefs. For one tribe, death officially occurs only
when your intestines have been exposed to the air. In my father’s tribe, the chief is only
considered dead when his head separates from his body. When he first meets his

12
demise, a special hut is built. His body is placed on a gurney that is raised up with ropes
to the open roof. A select group of people—the kingmaking committee my grandmother
served on—enters the hut every day to burn incense under the corpse, whose head is left
hanging off the end of the raised gurney. When the head finally falls off (whether it does
so naturally or is provoked in some way is known only to the committee), both it and the
body are buried together. Every day that the smoke from the incense is seen rising out of
the hut, the chief is still considered “alive.” This window of time allows for mourning
and is also thought to be clever maneuvering by the committee to gain time to select and
groom the next chief.
In 0ne possible origin story, my paternal ancestor was captured as a slave and
then released. If asked, “How many times has disease saved your life?” his answer must
be: One. In a history my family struggles to verify, my father’s great-grandfather was
captured as a slave at 9-years-old along with other children as they played outside one
ordinary day at the turn of the last century. In his village, there was no system of defense
against raiders who came to steal children and cattle. Born in 1890, his supposed
captors were Arab men on horses who sold these children into slavery across the Sahara
and into present-day Libya. To this day, Libya remains an important link in the
diasporic dispersal of West Africans, a major nexus of human trafficking. Trans-Saharan
trade routes had been well-established for centuries; it was by them Islam traveled
across West Africa beginning in the 11
th
century. At that time, a caravan route from
Nigeria to Libya was traversed by merchants and traders of all kinds, including those
engaging in this lesser-known Trans-Saharan Slave Trade.
In this specific region, there hadn’t been any local slave trade between rival
tribes; never had any slaves been captured and transported to either Europe or the

13
Americas. Almost as many people who were taken across the Atlantic were taken across
the desert (approximately eleven million). The slaves in this trade were used as soldiers
and guards, accompanying merchants in their caravans; their duties were to protect the
merchants’ property against bandits, feed and care for the camels, and set up nightly
camps. The militantly trained slaves carried weapons to protect their masters and their
wares: armed and essential, they commanded decent treatment and fared better than
those abducted into chattel slavery. Under this system, a lucky one could earn his
freedom, then own property and rise in the ranks of society. Still transformative and
traumatic to the region, the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade does not exist in the same league
as the Middle Passage—a new animal in atrocity.
According to this story, my great-great grandfather was taken in captivity to a
watering hole around Lake Chad, a hub in the desert that served as an oasis and grand
bazaar, and there he was sold. I want to know how long the journey took—by foot,
beside camel, or on horseback. Do I want to know his price? Before beginning the
second leg of the journey to Libya, he had developed a skin condition that was
discovered by his new masters after they performed a more thorough physical
inspection of their “merchandise.” They mistook him as a leper. This skin condition still
runs in my family on my father’s side, but only resembles leprosy to the paranoid. It is a
hereditary fungal infection with the scientific name Tinea versicolor (in our house, we
invented for it the silly term “frou frou”). Lightly raised brownish spots of a quarter of an
inch spread mostly across one’s back when a type of yeast that naturally occurs on skin
grows out of control, resulting in an infection more common in youth, which thrives in
hot climates. It was the sun of the long march that afflicted the boy. Nowadays, it is
cured by taking anti-fungal pills; washing with Selsun Blue, an anti-dandruff shampoo

14
containing anti-fungal ingredients; staying out of sun. It is neither painful nor
contagious. Then, my great-great grandfather would not have known whether he would
live or die.
He was released because of presumed leprosy—thus, somewhat perversely, my
family considers this skin condition lucky. I am disfavored for never having had it. He
then found his way back to his village in Nigeria by going back via the same route he had
come, working as an assistant for a merchant who guided him as he made for home. All
the merchants spoke Berber, and he was able to pick up some of this language in order
to communicate. He knew his people by their tribal marks (three vertical scars on their
cheeks, then three radiating out from the corners of their mouths, like whiskers).
Identifying these distinctive, unique markings, he was able to reunite with his family
many months after he was taken. He lived a long life in freedom, going on to beget many
children. For them, he left behind no family heirlooms, keepsakes, or mementos: this
was not done, for his people bequeathed only farmland and livestock to the next
generations. Though my father has never laid eyes on it, he claims that somewhere there
still exists a leather patch with Arabic writing. It indicated his ancestor died a free man.

***

Answering the question, “Where are you from?” has never been easy for me. If it’s
another Nigerian asking me this, they’ll want to know the tribe I belong to. Nigeria
remains a tribalistic nation. Tribe isn’t determined the same way it is in the USA, where
First Nations may have strict procedures, such as blood quantum rules, which
determine tribal affiliation and officially enroll members. Tribes in Nigeria—of which
there are almost four hundred—differ widely in religious practices, cultural norms, and

15
language. By the early 19
th
century—around two hundred years ago—the ethnic
affiliations we call “tribes” had coalesced in terms of tradition, religion, and language
into roughly the form in which they exist today. In the short-term period after Nigeria’s
independence in 1960, a few large tribes dominated the political sphere. Smaller tribes—
in an attempt to increase their political capital—began demanding shares of power. They
achieved some success, and small, autonomous tribal governments replaced the former
structure of British civil districts in some areas. However, as the central Nigerian state
consolidated its authority, there occurred another realignment of power, and the
importance of tribe began a downward descent. Now, tribe is more a cultural and
communal system than a formal political entity. Keeping in mind this chameleonic
nature of tribe, there are four possible answers I could give someone asking for my
tribe—each with varying degrees of accuracy:

Longuda; Fulani; Hausa; and Hausa-Fulani.

The history of my tribes is conveyed through an admixture of legend and
historical fact. The Longuda,
1
my father’s tribe, are a particularly difficult tribe to find
accurate records for, and their origins are not well-documented. As the Longuda have
always been sun worshippers, some of their origin stories point to them originating in
Egypt or other parts of the Middle East that hold similar spiritual beliefs. Growing up,
the stories my father was told about the origin of his tribe was influenced by
missionaries, who told him that his tribe simply came from “the east.” In my mind, the
Longuda tribe seems always to recede and diminish; I am not very close to my father’s

1
Information about the Longuda was primarily compiled in family interviews. See Vanden Berg 45-63.

16
small side of the family. I don’t speak or understand the Longuda language well, a
language spoken by only about a third of the 100,000 total tribesmen.
Their name, “Longuda,” was actually bestowed by the British as well as some
larger neighboring tribes, because they could not pronounce “Nugura,” the name the
tribe used for itself. The tribe itself adopted the anglicized name, but originally called
itself the “Nugura Ba”—the people of the land of Nugura. Like so many things, the
original history was scribbled over and subsumed into the Queen’s English. Further
back in history—just past his four grandparents—the Longuda tribe was divided into
even smaller clans, and clan affiliation within the larger tribe constituted an essential
piece of information about one’s identity. The various clans performed different
functions within the larger tribe—my grandmother’s people were the healers and witch
doctors and my grandfather’s were known as rainmakers. As the tribal system broke
down over the years, these tiny factions were left by the wayside. The Longuda were sun
worshippers, and the name of their primary god translates to “the sun above.”
The sun was their central deity, but every family also revered a host of minor
gods—malevolent and benevolent—making idols to represent them, often assembled in
a shrine in the home that formed the focal point of their spiritual practice. Though their
traditional beliefs remain prominent, the Longuda tribe is now nominally Christian. On
my father’s maternal side, his mother’s father was the first to convert to Christianity—
both within their family and within the entire Longuda tribe. He renounced the sun
above. After his conversion, five out of six of his children were female, and other people
in the matrilineal tribe took this as a lucky sign, since a male marked the ending of a
generation. Boys meant no more grandchildren. Thereafter, his tribespeople sought his
blessing and said they accepted his savior. By the time of my father’s childhood, two

17
generations later, everybody in his small clan was Lutheran, reflecting the missionaries
of that particular denomination who settled in that area.
Not influential or exporters of their culture, the Longuda are exceptional in that
they are the only matriarchal ethnic group in Nigeria. The foundation of the Longuda
tribe is matrilineal, but this tradition was trampled; now, its matriarchy is more
romanticized than recognized. The Longuda confirm their lineage through their mother,
using the rationale that when a woman gives birth, all will know who the child’s mother
is, while the father’s identity is less certain. Thus, the logic was that the child only fully
belongs to its mother. For the Longuda, social class was determined by maternal
lineage, and children are often still encouraged to claim their mother’s tribe as their
own. And so, ironically, my rejection of being Longuda and my affinity for my maternal
tribal line is my most Longuda trait. However, because Nigeria as a whole is patrilineal,
on the one line of government forms where you’re asked to specify just one tribal
affiliation, you’re expected to pick your father’s. As a result, on official Nigerian records
and in the opinion of the state, I’m Longuda: I never say I am.
Hausa is my native language, my first language, and therefore the Nigerian
language I speak best. It is the tribe I’ve been telling others I belong to my whole life.
When I say that I am Hausa, this is shorthand acknowledging the lingua franca of the
predominantly Muslim North—a way of letting people know what language I speak,
because language bonds the most. But the Hausa
2
are not really a “tribe”—they’re a
broad, ranging ethnic confederation: in fact, the largest one on the continent, spreading
over West and Sub-Saharan Africa, numbering 55 million in Nigeria alone. The Hausa

2
Information about the Hausa was primarily compiled during interviews. See also Salamone and Shaihua.

18
are the largest indigenous ethnic group in Africa, and its 80 million members are
concentrated primarily in Niger and Nigeria. They can be found in sizeable numbers in
at least 14 other African countries—as far north as Mali; as far west as Senegal; as far
east as Eritrea; as far south as Cameroon. Beyond this, every major African city hosts
Hausa neighborhoods called zangos, the Hausa word for “caravan camps,” referring to
their traditional nomadic lifestyle. Scattered communities with large Hausa populations
crisscross the Sahara and are clustered around the route towards Mecca. Hausa pilgrims
on progress to the Holy Land travel a path of welcome, finding Hausa-speaking
settlements along this itinerary.
The Hausa were first alluded to in the 10
th
century AD by an Arab historian who
was making an account of the extent of Muslim influence in Africa. Of my tribes, the
Hausa have the richest legacy in terms of a written historical record. The history of the
tribe and its jewel, the ancient walled city of Kano, was enshrined in chronicles that have
survived centuries, and further manuscripts discovered recently include evidence of
advanced scholarship, such as constellations and calendars. The dominance of Islam
goes back to the 11th century. Before this time, the Hausa were polytheists, but now the
Hausa tribe is overwhelmingly Muslim—99% of a Maliki Sunni majority. A millennium
of Islam makes the religion the cornerstone of most of its known history as well as its
modern culture. At the height of its civilization, the Hausa were known for our skills in
blacksmithing and salt-mining as well as for producing and trading salt, cloth, leather,
grain, gold, kola nuts, animal hides, and henna. Its population of desert-faring, nomadic
people spread across many trade routes with a tradition of equestrianism unusual in the
land of camels. The settled part of its population influenced the growth of large city
states beginning in the 14
th
century. The medieval Hausa City States developed into

19
terminals of trade routes, markets, and centers of Islamic scholarship, hosting visitors
from far-flung corners of the Muslim and merchant worlds.
Fulani is the tribe
3
to which I feel the closest emotional lineage—I am my
mother’s daughter, and she in turn is her mother’s daughter; her mother claims to be a
“pure” Fulani and sees them as distinct from the Hausa they settled amongst. This
widely dispersed tribe reaches as far east as the Red Sea coast. Its territory overlaps with
Hausaland in the north of Africa, but its growth stretched further towards the west
towards the Atlantic Coast. Half its population resides in Nigeria, and the remaining is
concentrated in Guinea, Senegal, Mali, Cameroon, and Niger. Even though Nigeria is the
main population center of the Fulani, only in Guinea is it the largest ethnic group;
everywhere else it remains a minority. The degree of uncertainty regarding the precise
definition of a Fulani is so great that the actual population of Fulani is also unknown,
with estimates ranging from 25 to 45 million.
The Fulani clan my family is connected to crosses into Niger, where I remember
one lonely truck with Border Patrol inked on its back in green lettering. Because the
Niger-Nigeria border was established by the British in their usual arbitrary manner,
some of the Nigerian North has more in common with Niger—some communities
retained French, for example, as Niger was colonized by France. When my Baba was
alive, I’d practice my schoolhouse French with him, wanting to be able to communicate
with him and the many relatives we’d visit in Niger after passing the checkpoints that
created an unnatural separation between a small tribal turf. My late grandfather’s first
cousin is the current President of Niger—Mahamadou Issoufou, nicknamed “Jan Jan”

3
Information about the Fulani was compiled during family interviews. See Riesman 14-30 and Johnston.

20
due to the redness in his skin tone—who has occupied this office since 2011. I do not
now say I am Nigerienne, but in childhood, the unnatural alienation from Niger felt
profound.
It was the Fulani tribe, through a series of jihads during the 18
th
and 19
th

centuries, that Islamized West Africa. The Fulani jihads stemmed from their desire to
spread Islamic theocracy and reform the Hausa States they conquered into one religious
accord. When the Fulani ruling elite established their authority, segments of the
traditional nomadic society finally settled in order to become effective administrators of
the occupied areas. Despite originating from different branches of the wandering Fulani
tribe, both my grandmother and grandfather share its uniform religious tradition; in
both lines of my maternal family, everyone else is Muslim. These two converts make up
part of only 1-2% of Fulani who follow another religion. Before converting to
Christianity, my grandfather once won a camel at a local festival, a prize in the category
of “wayward dancing.” He was a frequent attendee and dancer at these festivals, where
he also played the drums. His conversion shook his entire village. He hid in a tree
afterward, when his relatives found out and wanted to poison him for this treachery.
After this dangerous and unexpected conversion, he re-converted back to Islam to take a
new wife, then back to Christianity to christen the recent marriage’s new child.
My mother’s Christian family was an aberration in their area, though they found
ways to come together with their neighbors during celebrations. All her village of about
two hundred was invited to her house for Christmas and Easter, and she remembers
going to her neighbor’s houses for Eid or other major festivals, which they referred to as
“Salahs,” after the Arabic word referring to communing with Allah or receiving
blessings. Everyone attended the naming ceremonies for newborns, which took place

21
seven days after the child was born. My grandfather, a pastor, would travel to
neighboring areas whenever a pastor was required. In this volatile region, sectarian
violence touched my mother intimately when she was young; she recalls that during the
Biafran War, she would often encounter groups of Igbos fleeing from persecution.
Amidst her own neighbors, the pastor’s family stood alone in a precarious peace—
everyone knew them, and everyone could say: “That house is where the Christians live.”
A population of 1%, Christians debated whether to proselytize or protect themselves by
continuing Muslim traditions so that they would stand apart a little less. When my
grandfather famously converted from Christianity back to Islam to take a second wife,
his audacity as a Christian with two wives was both scandalous and safer.
I am most accurately “Hausa-Fulani,” a neo-tribe of blended origin. Where and
how the two combined—this points to a clearer picture of who I am. The ethnogenesis—
the development of one ethnic identity—of the Hausa-Fulani goes back five hundred
years, when the Fulani people first arrived in Hausaland. The Fulani and the Hausa
began as distinct peoples, but their histories were mapped onto each other as their
power and prominence waxed or waned. After centuries of domination by the larger
Hausa, in the early 1800s, the Fulani—through their series of holy wars—asserted their
own authority across most of the regions the two shared. The “Fulanization” of the
Hausa involved the elevation of the conquering Fulani to the ruling class of the
Caliphate they established. However, being a minority in terms of population, a reverse
process of “Hausaization” began almost immediately. When the Sultan of the Caliphate
dispatched his emirs to various corners of the conquered territories, the minority Fulani
culture was absorbed by the Hausa in the large urban population centers of Hausaland.
Because of centuries of interaction, they have intermarried and integrated significantly.

22
Depending on who you ask, the differentiation and distinction between the two is not
that important. For one hundred years, they have been classified in more and more
contexts as one.
Outside Nigeria, the affinity between the Hausa and Fulani is not the norm, and
these two are easily identifiable as separate groups. Wherever the Hausa and Fulani
have come into contact and close proximity, they share many similarities that reveal
themselves under inspection; common Hausa surnames like Bello, my cousins’, have
Fulani origins; the word “Fulani” itself is borrowed from the Hausa name for them (in
their own language, they are the “Fulbe”). Hausa dominance over our minority language
and culture represents another strain of imperialism, of a different sort than Europeans
brought. Today, the Hausa language is dominant amongst the Hausa-Fulani, and even a
large number of people who claim to be Fulani speak Hausa instead of the Fulani
language: 150 million people speak Hausa, while only a tenth of that number speaks
Fulani. Although I do not speak or understand the Fulani language at all, this does not
alienate me from identifying with this tribe.
The British exploited the rift and rivalry between the Hausa and the Fulani.
Hausa soldiers were often recruited by the British Empire to fight against neighboring
tribes during its series of military raids in the 19
th
century. This bellicose alliance was
ultimately successful, and in 1903, the Sokoto Caliphate of the Fulani was dissolved and
divided between the British, French, and Germans on terms they settled amongst
themselves. The official concession of power was made in the grand market square by
the last Vizier. A colonial administrator proclaimed, “The Fulani in old times . . .
conquered this country. They in turn have by defeat lost their rule which has come into

23
the hands of the British. All these things which I have said the Fulani by conquest took
the right to do now pass to the British” (qtd. in Carland 68).
In a perverse pattern, the British apportioned power back to the Fulani in the
manner they knew would be the most divisive; they replaced the Fulani in positions of
power over certain territories populated by both them and the Hausa. With the Fulani
again placed at their head despite their battle victories, the Hausa believed themselves
betrayed. A legacy of tension remains; I recall my mother telling me a libelous horror
story about invading Hausas using Fulani corpses when constructing buildings—
creating a gristly scaffolding by stacking them inside walls and pouring concrete over
them.

24
CHAPTER 2:
DOORS OF NO RETURN

Though my parents at one time had decent prospects in Nigeria, we couldn’t
remain there long past my infancy. When I was born, they were lecturers at the
University of Maiduguri in the capital of the northern state of Borno, which had been
somewhat stable during the 1970s. Soon after my birth, however, that institution
stopped paying its faculty during one of the characteristic collapses of a postcolonial
bureaucracy. My parents made immediate plans to escape the failed state, first traveling
separately on hazardous roads back to their home villages to locate original records,
then filling out mountains of forms by kerosene lamplight through increasingly frequent
power outages. They continued to study the subjects they were first drawn to as young
intellectuals hoping to one day help improve our country’s faltering agricultural
methods and public health programs. They were unaware they would become part of
Nigeria’s devastating “brain drain.” Everybody who could go was fleeing; soon, the most
instrumental and fundamental positions requisite in a functional society were left
empty.
The exact date we left—September 12, 1988—was the day after a solar eclipse. In
September 1988, experts warned that Britain’s economic forecast featured recession.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made her famous “Bruges Speech,” in which she
aimed to “dispose of some myths about [her] country”; notably, that “Britain does not
dream of some cozy, isolated existence” (Thatcher, “Speech to the College of Europe”).
As is the Fulani way, my mother was fearless when they made the decision to move to
England. Before we left, she gave away most of our things: items she figured we would

25
outgrow before we returned. Throngs of people from all over came to say goodbye and
for my baby clothes. She thought she knew that these same people would be waiting
when we returned, ready to receive us as celebrities.
If we had moved somewhere with a larger Nigerian community—if we were able
to travel to London to interact with fellow Nigerians more often—I might not feel so
acutely wounded by the separation from my culture. My family unit was isolated on that
island in the North Sea. Because the four other people in my family were for so long my
only reference point, to this day, I often come across a tradition or custom that I am
never sure is either widespread through Nigeria, local to our region, or just a particular
quirk of my family. Seeing how my father ate his rice and stew with a sliced banana on
the side, an English friend I’d brought home asked why he did that, and I did not know.
Learning how to tie my own headwrap, I would study photographs of my cousins, but
never felt as though I knew what I was doing. Because my parents believed for a long
time that we would soon be returning to Nigeria for good, concerns about a
deteriorating relationship with our culture were never as pressing as the material and
practical concerns, which were often made easier by assimilating in any way we could.
We would reconnect when we returned. My England was a maze; my formative years
were spent on the outside looking in while waiting to be swept somewhere else, perhaps
back.
In 1995, my parents gathered us three children to tell us we would also be
departing England, for America—to Nashville, Tennessee, a place we had never heard of.
Fear was the overruling emotion of our journey to the USA. I was overwhelmed, even
before the whirlwind: We were pulled out of the customs and immigration line and
taken beyond a bright, glittering sign heralding our arrival to Music City. Our bags were

26
searched in a small room with a giant American flag as a soldier in full uniform stood at
attention, saluting. I asked my father if the soldier was going to shoot me with the first
gun I had ever seen. The odds of getting the Diversity Lottery visa we can in on were
approximately the same odds as the lifetime chance of getting shot in this country:
around 1 in 300, according to the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System. As newly
arriving Green Card holders, we sat for an interview. As the luckiest few, we took the
Oath of Allegiance: “I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and
fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty . . . I will bear arms on
behalf of the United States when required by the law, so help me God.” As new resident
aliens, we were released into a Tennessean heat wave, promising to bear arms.
Nigeria could not have been more different than England; England couldn’t have
been more different than Nashville. My family was truly “fresh off the boat.” At home,
we still spoke the hybrid of English and Hausa that we always have, though the
percentage of English steadily increased. During each subsequent visit back to Nigeria,
the ease with which I was able to confidently participate in conversations with my
extended family dwindled. In public, we used Hausa to talk privately in the presence of
outsiders, and I was embarrassed by some of its sharp glottal sounds: the hooked “b”
and the hooked “d.” How strange we sounded amidst the southern twang of Tennessee. I
tried to train my odd accent to mirror the Standard American Accent of news programs
and movies, sometimes mimicking the grit of New York City elocution. Amidst attempts
to sound like my Southern peers, my Hausa-English-Southern accent was a messy
mumble that never quite righted itself—that two decades later still prompts the
question: “No, but where are you really from?”

27
All of us were laid bare to our new element. An original entity soon crept into our
environment: the novel chimera of American racism. The only Black family on our street
in our second house in Nashville, we found our neighbors surprisingly unfriendly and
the local shopkeepers unwelcoming. We weren’t expecting slurs. It’s not that my family
had never experienced racism before; I had always just been too young to perceive its
full dimensions once unbridled. In Southern suburbia, I was learning. I became more
and more conscious of my race as a feature that would ostracize me. I was made to
notice. The North of Nigeria holds a reputation amongst Southerners (who are largely
Christian and have better access to education and resources) as backwards, uneducated,
and religiously extreme. In this inverted way, it is like the South of the USA. Perhaps
due to this similarity, a potential new identity as a Southerner appealed to me; I held an
innate desire to defy negative stereotypes and expectations.
In addition to dealing with the particularly virulent strain of racism preferred by
Southern whites, going from a small English town with a 2-3% Black population to a city
with 27% was jolting. My new African-American peers didn’t know what to do with me,
and some held a negative impression of Africa and Africans. Though we are one
diaspora and the same people, our separations often manifest in tension. I had trouble
navigating the culture within a culture that is American Blackness within America. My
earliest interactions with Black Americans were not particularly positive. I was teased
and called an “African booty scratcher,” that baffling childhood slur. I was envious of
their ease. The way they knew what to say to each other and how to behave, while I
could only observe everyone at a remove. I gravitated to immigrants of any background;
they understood the minefield that was a lunch brought from home. Or “Show and Tell.”
They had family photos to explain. They had a parent to hide.

28
When our blue passports arrived in the mail, I didn’t want to sign mine. My
mother was perplexed by my reluctance, but she gave me no choice and forced me to
comply. I resisted becoming American; leaving my signature on that line felt like losing.
Losing what? Perhaps my connection to Nigeria, quickly deteriorating. I had begun to
hate my mother calling back home, when she would invariably hand me the phone and
instruct me to greet one family member after another. The phone call quality was so
consistently poor that we’d have to yell to be heard. This is the soundtrack of my
adolescence: my mother screaming in Hausa to a series of relatives, inquiring about
health and weddings. I was beginning to lack confidence in my Hausa and struggled to
think of what to say and how to be appropriately formal with certain relations;
conversation followed a strict etiquette respecting age, gender, and other qualifications.
Yelling about nothing in a language I was scared I was butchering—the personal
connection became frayed, as the calls dropped.
A key aspect of my family’s particular immigration story is that we often stood
apart. Northern Nigerian Christians make up less than 2% within the hegemony of
Islam. Beyond the desert, Hausaland doesn’t give up its own. Famously nomadic all over
the continent, the Fulani rarely relocate to the West. In Nashville, my parents joined the
Igbo Union (the second most populous tribe in the US after the Yoruba) hoping to meet
other Nigerians. Disappointed, they found themselves lacking a common language or
culture. Excluded from conversations taking place in Igbo, it was sometimes enough just
to be around other Nigerians who did do their best to welcome us despite our
differences. We were ‘alien’—usually in official language, but even beyond bureaucracy,
even amongst our own. By the time my parents bought our first house in Maryland, we
had shared dozens of domiciles on 3 continents. My parents would add no more, finally

29
finding their place within an active Nigerian community in the shadow of the capital.
With my siblings, the four of them cluster close-by, forming a close core in communion:
excluding me. Maryland marked the final place I was ever taken against my will; to
every place since, I went on my own. I alone have gone out; I have gone out alone.

***

During our decades adrift, Nigeria acquired the obscure title Back Home, a place
of unbearable heat and an unmanageable ensemble of relatives. It was the place my
parents would threaten to send us children back to whenever we misbehaved. Its
menace molded our behavior, a deterrent more effective than the prospect of corporal or
divine punishment. There were constant, curious stories I’d hear about Nigeria during
our absence—lifelike, sometimes lurid, always labyrinthine accounts that lent the place
an ethos that both drew and repelled me. Nigeria was a daunting country to get to know.
A Frankenstein colony engineered as a prospect of the Unilever Corporation, cobbled
and coming together bizarrely. A 1907 telegram to the Colonial Office illustrates the
British agenda and priorities. Item 1 reads: “To pacify the country” (qtd. in Carland
108). The British tried to tame their colony, but it resisted being managed. When they
divided its borders in agreement with the other European powers with interests in the
area, this careless construct dissected clans and bisected tribes. A carelessness touching
my family personally; my grandparents spoke French, not English, because the majority
of their tribal congregation extended into areas colonized by France. Upon separation
into distinct nations, they continued to roam and rove amongst their Francophone kin.
Structurally, our states do not mirror any kingdoms that preceded them. There
was no popular input or outpouring from its people during the genesis of such strange

30
states; military regimes unilaterally dictated their configuration, often by illegally
changing the Constitution, itself a British framework. The present architecture of
Nigeria is more stable—a nominal democracy where political power is less volatile than
during its days of dictatorship: where radical structural change is not at hand. Its
morphology was settled by the 1970s, but sectarian strife is built into the bones of its
careless conception.
My country of contradictions. It is the largest nation of Black people in the
world, and these people comprise over three hundred ethnic groups who speak over five
hundred languages. Traveling from one region to the next, different areas of the country
may seem to have nothing in common, and it took a civil war for the diverse array of the
population to agree to live together as one body politic. It is a land of plenty, a land of
never enough. Its “brain drain” saw the departure of much of its educated citizenry and
the depletion of its intellectual resources. It is desert and coast, located within the span
of the Sahel, a flat biozone transitioning from sand into savanna. It is dust versus water,
drought in the dry season meeting yearly floods during the rainy season. Traditional
animism battles Abrahamic faiths; old beliefs challenge those more ancient and those
modern. Neglected natural beauty; environment in crisis; underdeveloped
infrastructure. In rural villages, mud and thatch provide building materials. A nearby
world away—skyscrapers, suburbs, shanties: one slum in the megacity of Lagos occupies
an entire floating island. To the north, an ever-expanding desert. South and still growing
at a rate of 20% each year, Lagos is predicted to become the most populous city on
earth.
A resource curse is an economic phenomenon in which, counterintuitively, an
abundant resource exacerbates a country’s economic problems. Despite its oil reserves,

31
Nigeria routinely appears at the bottom of international indexes ranking countries on a
range of issues related to quality of life. Concerning poverty, poor health, or politics, I’ve
often thought cynically and sadly, “Of course Nigeria is on this list.” It is a country where
there have been recent rumors of child sacrifice; yet it is also the booming center of the
emergent African tech industry. A country that became an international laughingstock
after police arrested a goat for witchcraft; yet its emigrating population is the most
educated ethnic group in the USA, where we dominate scientific, health, and medical
fields. The glamour of Nollywood, the 3
rd
largest film industry in the world, carefully
glosses over the gratuitous poverty of some of the world’s largest slums. There is a
gaping gulf between the rich, many of whom are politicians who embezzled oil money,
and the poor. Known as an innovator—known for its people’s entrepreneurial spirit and
as a vanguard in the creative arts, particularly music—Nigeria can seem stuck in the
past. The excesses of the famed nightlife of Lagos withstand the scorn of the pious and
the dominating religiosity of a population that remains largely socially conservative.
Boko Haram means “education is forbidden.” Yet, our literary contributions have
spread Nigeria’s storytelling tradition far and wide. In the West, Nigerians are often
viewed as a “model minority” because of our high educational attainment and economic
and professional successes; in other parts of the world, Nigerians are associated with
criminality—for drug and human trafficking in addition to the notorious 419 “Nigerian
prince” scams. The stereotype of the Nigerian-American as a doctor or pharmacist exists
uneasily besides the reality of “witch doctors” who still hold sway in rural areas,
sometimes causing harm or even fatal liver diseases with their traditional medicines and
“bush tea.” In the north, malamai (Quranic teachers) preside over a network of
madrasas, Islamic schools that often take the place of liberal education. In an opposing

32
tradition, missionary schools train students in the Christian faith. In the 20
th
century,
Nigeria developed rapidly, thrust onto the world stage as an emerging global power. It
was once grouped with South Korea (in the 1970s) in terms of economic potential. But
in many ways, it stubbornly orients itself backwards, in a rear-facing stance that stalls
progress. The past still presents a problem for the idea of “Nigeria.” We feel the specters
of people and powers who carved and cultivated this unlikely land without logic.
During my family’s trips Back Home, I moved unsteadily through darkening
fields of misunderstanding and miscommunication. Always, just when I was beginning
to sound the depths of this chasm after the weeks we’d spent in Nigeria, the act of
returning to England or the States brought culture shock in reverse, as we stepped back
into that malformed mold of “immigrant.” I no longer fit in anyplace I might have
claimed, and it was never more present and unpleasant a truth than when we traveled. I
came to hate the nickname my cousins bestowed upon us: “al-Amriki,” in both Arabic
and Hausa meaning, “American.” This teasing was their adaptation of an Arabic naming
convention called a nisba, which refers to a person’s place of origin, nationality, or tribe,
usually beginning with the prefix -al (a definite article meaning “the”) and ending with a
gendered suffix (a feminine example would be al-Amrikiya). When we lived in England,
they had called us “al-Britani,” connoting the same but referring to Britain. Of course, I
noticed the segregation: how we were separate or similar. But I didn’t want it named.
Did they have to be spoken—the small shames isolating a girl estranged from her
ancestral home and the people she was ferried away from?
My siblings and I tried to fit in. Once, we memorized, rehearsed, then performed
the Nigerian national anthem for my cousins. We knew all the words and they did not,
and we thought that proved something about our connection to our mutual country, but

33
the strangeness of the performance only demonstrated how we were desperate and
disparate. Our cousins were unimpressed while we sang of “one nation bound in
freedom, peace, and unity.” These lyrics appear in the second attempt at a national
anthem, itself emblematic of the confused identity common in former colonies. The first
anthem, “Nigeria, We Hail Thee,” was written by a white British woman and adopted
during Independence in 1960, when it was predictably met with fierce criticism and
protest. Lillian Jean Williams’ lyrics rang false: “Our own dear native land! / Though
tribe and tongue may differ, / in brotherhood we stand” (lines 2-4). “Arise, O
Compatriots” replaced it in 1978, its lyrics combining phrases from the top five
submissions to a nationwide contest open to all citizens, and it was arranged by a
Nigerian composer. In song, we exhorted our cousins to “Nigeria’s call, obey! / To serve
our fatherland / with love and strength and faith” (lines 2-4). We recited the second
verse of the anthem, used as the National Prayer, an appeal to corrupt leaders and a
generic “God of Creation” (9). We also rang false.
My missteps mounted, increasingly replicated on my tongue. I speak Hausa,
4
but
not in the way those who stayed put speak it. Hausa is the 30th most-spoken language in
the world due to its history as the lingua franca across the territories dominated by the
Hausa tribe. In the 19
th
century, it was threatened by Arabic, when the Sokoto Caliphate
proclaimed Arabic as its official language, to be used by emissaries, emirs, armies, and
imams. Hausa has many loanwords from Arabic, itself the lingua franca of the entire
Islamic world, used in the directives of the Commander of the Faithful, the Caliph. Its
150 million speakers make it the most widely spoken indigenous African language. Its

4
For structure and phonology of the Hausa language, see Furniss and “The Hausa Language.”

34
official use can cause controversy, as in 2017 when Nigerian president Muhammadu
Buhari delivered a message on the lessons of Ramadan during Eid-al-Fitr—the festival
that concludes the holy month of Ramadan—in Hausa rather than in English. Because
Hausa is spoken mostly by Muslims, many Nigerians were outraged, believing his use of
the language encouraged sectarianism and signaled preference in a country where
religious polarity dominates national identity and politics.
Hausa is a highly idiomatic language, and though I could usually piece together
the literal meaning, sometimes I struggled with the figurative expressions rife in daily
use. When my mother said, “Ga fili, ga doki,” I knew she meant, “Here is the horse and
here is the field,” but I did not know she really meant, “Stop showing off; you have
everything you need to do something, so do it.” Or if my father said, “Rammamme kada
maikibba,” I knew he meant literally that “the thin person defeats the fat person,” but I
didn’t know that was taken to mean that “the unexpected happens”—a meaning
dependent on realizing that in his culture, a fat person is assumed to be much stronger
than a thin one. Some of the loanwords in Hausa are borrowed from the languages of
other tribes; as in any other language, the current slang kept changing. This sometimes
alienated me from cousins of my own age. Living outside of Nigeria, I had fewer
interactions with all Nigerians, and my parents didn’t know evolving slang, either. I do
have a native’s pronunciation, correctly articulating implosive and ejective consonants
(ɗ, ɓ and kʼ/ƙ)—sounds that non-natives would pronounce as d, b, and k. Hausa is a
tonal language that uses tone in an atypical way. Most non-native speakers do not speak
in the correct tones; speakers from other parts of Nigeria may retain the tonal structures
of their native tongue and thus sound unnatural. Hausa employs the “creaky voice,”
known in the West as a “vocal fry” and associated with Southern Californian Valley

35
girls—the derided, high-pitched yet guttural up-speaking often construed as ditziness.
Non-native speakers may confuse or avoid gendered nouns. While insecure, I was
always proud of getting at least these things right.
I had more and more trouble constructing complex, fluent ideas in Hausa. When
alone, my immediate family spoke English peppered with Hausa—or Hausa peppered
with English. Hausa was briefly an official language in the North (from 1951 to 1967),
but English is now Nigeria’s sole official language. Widely taught at every level of
schooling, it is not always the chosen tongue when people gather socially. Many revert to
their native tribal language, which reinforces separation along tribal lines. Some of this
linguistic gap is bridged by Nigerian Pidgin, a creole language spoken by 30 million
people in the country, serving as common dialect mixing English and various tribal
languages. I was exposed to Pidgin only when I returned to Nigeria, as my parents didn’t
have any reason to speak it in England (though they knew it well), and I eagerly listened;
its cheekiness and simplified structure fascinated me. In Pidgin, to ask how you are, one
would say, “How you dey?” Telling someone not to bother you, you’d warn, “Make you
no vex me.” Pidgin differs from Nigerian Standard English, which also features
loanwords from several Nigerian languages, but is used in more formal settings and in
most media. While Nigerian Standard English has official, political uses and is what
you’d hear on news broadcasts, Pidgin is considered more casual and is employed by
common people to navigate daily situations like markets or mass transport, sometimes
having the negative association as a marker of the less educated (Adejunmobi 4-5). Able
to understand Pidgin, I was too self-conscious to use it much, as I felt that it only
sounded right with a certain kind of accent, which I no longer had and didn’t want to
fake.

36
Nigerians take pride in the incisive, cutting way we insult each other; this is one
of our richest linguistic traditions. Jovially roasting friends or families is an artform,
though once translated, they often lose the clevernesses of their connotations. See your
head like a calabash. Your legs as dry as uncooked potatoes. Your character like that of
the wind. I never took these lighthearted jibes personally, because I was aware that the
tone of creative putdowns differed wildly from curses uttered in anger, of which I also
heard plenty. But I never laughed at myself quite as hard as my cousins did. Sometimes,
I felt like a pest, constantly interrupting the flow of conversation to ask what someone
meant. Sometimes, I pretended to understand less of the language than I did just so I
could hear what personal quarrels my cousins had with my voice, my toys, the way I
clung to my mother like a life raft. This curious reality of language retention became
apparent—that the part of the brain responsible for understanding a language is
different than the part responsible for recalling it. One understands much more than
one can say.
The linguistic gulf between me and my “truly Nigerian” cousins made themselves
apparent as soon as I woke up, when Nigerian children are expected to engage in a
series of questions greeting their elders: How did you sleep? Are you well? Are you
tired? The tone of this exchange was supposed to be an earnest inquiry after one’s health
initiated by a younger person in a sincere display of respect. I, however, stumbled
through these reluctantly; I only now recognize the care and concern in their cadence. I
now recognize that the linguistic immersion of these trips to Nigeria were a gift, though
not enough to stave off the reality that I was gradually losing my grasp on my own native
language.

37
Back then, the simple ritual of morning greetings was enough to make me dread
the first encounter of the day that I had with my extended family; I had internalized the
relative ease with which my siblings and I were allowed to address our own parents in
the morning in England, usually with a simple “Good morning.” Such informality was
disrespectful in Nigeria, so we conformed to their conventions out of fear of bringing
shame to our parents for failing to raise properly polite children. The extended formal
greetings were tedious and embellished, and they made me feel almost fraudulent,
because when I uttered them, I worried my delivery would be received as forced and
insincere. It didn’t help that there was seemingly always someone there eager to catch
any minor mistake—to either correct, chide, or laugh at us. Hausa has its own simplified
pidgin called Barikanci, referring to the British Army barracks where soldiers from
various parts of Northern Nigeria had to learn to communicate with each other in the
early 20
th
century. Fittingly enough, I could always understand this “Bastard Hausa.”
I have not returned ‘back home’ in 10 years due to homegrown violence,
particularly the ongoing terrorism perpetrated by Boko Haram in and around the city of
my birth, which has caused over 35,000 casualties. Boko Haram enjoyed a resurgence in
2o1o after a mass prison break when several prominent members escaped. It escalated
attacks—suicide bombings in marketplaces, at police headquarters, and at the United
Nations building in the capital. The advisory for my birth state specifies an elevated risk,
making it one of three states (all in the North), with the Level 4 “Do Not Travel” warning
issued by the US State Department. In preparation for visits, anxiety added to expense;
the result was untenable. We started cancelling trips, and our caution set us in a
ceaseless drift ever further from our relatives.

38
My final visit home was in 2011, when I was 24. That makes an entire decade of
distance; too long a time since I set foot on the real, raw earth that gave me up. In the
time since, I have discovered that one’s own culture doesn’t have to feel instinctive or
innate. One may pursue it and pull it apart. A person removed should never feel
inadequate or undeserving when reattaching severed customs. We are neither true
outsiders nor true insiders—but never is any litmus test the point. ‘True’ is pointless. For
our part, immigrants are integral, even when we are not integrated. We are the
embodiment and evidence of our unrooting: the tensile connective tissue in all diaspora.

39
CHAPTER 3:
TERRESTRIAL PARADISE

I used to say, “I was born along the border between Niger and Nigeria, two
nations whose names both literally translate to ‘land of the blacks.’” And this inaccuracy,
which I held as true for almost all my life, has some basis in reality. This is esoteric
etymology.
5
It was a reasonable assumption: that two former West African colonies
would have names derived from the Latin niger—meaning black, dark, unlit, unlucky.
Niger is one of nine Latinate ways to indicate the color black; it is the most ill-omened.
In fact, I was born near the border of Niger and Nigeria, two nations whose
names invoke the universal good omen of abundant water—referencing a river (“ni”)
called Gir. Ptolemy’s world map, which informed the Hellenistic understanding of the
known world, depicted a great river of the African continent (then “Libya”) by the name
of Gir. We know that in early modernity, Ni Gir was Latinized by European mapmakers
in archaic terms, Nigritia and Nigritarum, to mark the riverside realms: that Latin
nudged Ni Gir to Niger. However, as with that other great African river, the Nile, the
exact etymology of Gir remains a mystery. One theory traces its roots to the Persian
giaour, a slur reserved for strangers, foreigners, or infidels. Another potential stem
signifies “mother.” Mother of water? River of infidels? It may be derived from a Tuareg
term meaning “river of rivers.” An alternate translation offers the catatonic “water-
water.” Its linguistic origin points toward several possibilities: Hausa, Fula, Yoruba,
Persian, Arabic. Even to some lost languages.

5
The etymological understanding of niger and Negro was sourced in Jeffreys 443-451; Meek 1-17; and
“Niger” and “Negro” etymological dictionary entries.

40
For much of my life, I mistakenly assumed Niger/Nigeria referred to Blackness,
a now widely discredited theory. No possibility points to skin color. After clarifying this,
I must complicate this. Though Ni Gir, and thus Niger/ia, is not derived from roots
indicating race, I was amazed to discover that—independently of this
misunderstanding—I am actually also from a region called “Negroland,” which does
refer to a land of blacks. The first in a series of atlases sponsored by the British Crown in
1670, John Ogilby’s Africa labels an area stretching from the Nile to Atlantic waters, just
below the Sahara. He labels it Nigritarum, which is subsequently also Latinized as
Nigritia. From the early 1700s, on slightly later English maps based on Ogilby’s original
survey, this strip of land was translated to “Negroland” (see fig. 1). A racialized term
referencing the Negro race, it was in constant use on British colonial maps until the
middle of the 19
th
century.

Fig. 1. 1767 Map of Negroland by Emanuel Bowen from African Maps Digital Collections; Stanford
University Libraries, https://exhibits.stanford.edu/maps-of-africa/catalog/tg858rf9015.

41
There does exist a word in Arabic, Sudan, that denotes Black people. The Arabic
term Bilad al-Sudan signifies a literal “land of blacks,” and you can see it labeled as such
on Medieval Arabic cartography. Europeans considered Islamized Negro tribes like
mine part of the sprawling Arabicized world, and so found it natural to adopt the Arabic
terminology and demarcation. On European maps of the early modern era, Nigritarum
and Nigritia both mark roughly the same corresponding areas as did Bilad al-Sudan.
Only a little over 100 years ago, in the Century Dictionary of 1904, Nigritia was defined
as “nearly equivalent to Sudan, home to the most pronounced types of the Negroid race”
(qtd. in Jeffreys 8). My native tribe, the Hausa-Fulani, are dispersed across the Sahara
and thus affiliated with the Muslim world that extends via desert caravans into North,
Central, and East Africa: then onto the Middle East. Hausaland produced thriving
centers of Islamic civilization; the Arabic culture that we imported yoked us together.
The Arabs differentiated themselves from us by our darker skin color, calling us al-
Sudan, “the Blacks.”
On those archaic maps, the Niger River runs right through Negroland, bisecting
it. The territory of colonial-era Negroland covers only the northern portion of modern-
day Nigeria. Negroland begins just at the base of the Sahara Desert and stretches west to
the Atlantic Coast: a horizontal column that terminates near Lake Chad. When
Negroland existed, two of its dominant states were the Bornu Empire (8
th
century AD-
1900) and the Sokoto Caliphate (1804-1903). The Bornu Empire exists now only as the
state of Borno, in which I was born. And the former Sokoto Caliphate, sovereign under a
sultan until its dissolution by the British, included the regions where my mobile
maternal family line of pastoralist people settled, sometimes. “The capital, Sakatu, is
one of the largest cities in Negro-land,” according to the 10
th
edition of the Encyclopedia

42
Britannica, published in 1902 (“States of Central Africa”). If another Nigerian asks
where my family is from—the second most important question after inquiring about
tribal affiliation—I will say, “Sokoto.” The now-defunct caliphate remains a theocracy
and our base for family visits back to Nigeria.
This “land of the blacks” was once also known as the “white man’s graveyard,”
because of its intense heat, humidity, and the tropical diseases that ravaged newcomers.
That same 1902 encyclopedia entry goes on to characterize Negroland terrain as
underexplored, representing the promise and terror of the unknown: “So little is yet
known of this vast region that the general features of some portions only can be
indicated” (“States of Central Africa”). In the study of how places get their names,
toponomastics, problems plague historians who hunt the definitive root of a name:
conflation and convergence are natural obstacles. Such elusive investigations are
routinely impeded by poor translations, multiple meanings, and cultural conflicts. This
can happen even when a name organically emerged from local languages and local
peoples. Colonization adds another layer that conspires towards confusion. They named
us as they knew how, and they followed the pattern in which names bestowed by
foreigners tend to be “pejorative rather than complimentary, especially where there is a
real or fancied difference in cultural level” (qtd. in McCoy 6). In a hostile stance towards
inhospitable lands, they were not troubled by any loss of lyricism.
No longer in use are ancestral names like Igala, Onicha, Nri: our lands that came
to be united or untied by the usurping hand of an ultimate power. Igala—iga meaning
“wall” and ala, “sheep”—alluding to pastures without provenance, as the people of those
parts did not herd sheep. Onicha, the kingdom of allied royal villages whose toponym
may mean “fertile” or “feral,” became a number without name. Nameless became Nri, a

43
dynasty that peaked in the 18
th
century whose priest-kings, the eze nri, expanded their
authority via the famed beauty of their artifacts, gaining influence through art or craft—
never force—until the British came (Falola and Genova 161-163).
What is remarkable to me about colonial naming devices is the lack of
imagination. Overly broad or obvious: the same names over and over. Sudan was still
used generally for northern Nigeria until very recently; my father was educated by the
Sudan United Mission Group. Guinea is not to be confused with the modern-day
country: Guinea, derived from Portuguese and Spanish slurs originating during the 15
th

century, also means roughly “the land of blacks.” Did the entrenched colonial obsession
with race impact the evolution of the names of Niger and Nigeria? Between the initial
usage of Nigritia as a direct translation of the Arabic Bilad al-Sudan and the more
recent revelation that Ni Gir came from the River Gir, contemporaneous sources,
including those making maps, writing dictionary entries or articles, were often
confused—and amused. Where there was no initial linguistic relationship to race, such
an association was indelibly introduced into the historical record by British journalists
and cartographers. It was a pun to them, basically. One that reinscribed the name given
to my nation with a sneer. There was animus in the name.
I am animated by names. Mostly the unknown in names, like that within Gir,
the river to which Niger and Nigeria refer. A name that might mean mother, water, or
infidel. Even common names confound us. Consider my first name
6
—a classic, popular
name, and a mainstay on the list of the top 100 American girls’ names since anybody
started keeping track until only one generation ago. Miriam was the sister of Moses, a

6
The etymology of “Mary” was sourced from Maas and “Mary: Meaning and Etymology.”

44
prophetess in the Book of Exodus. Because Hebrew originally did not include vowels, its
first form in Hebrew is MRYM. By the time of the New Testament, the name was
popular enough to belong to the mothers of Jesus, James, and John. Subsequent
translations rendered it Mariam (in Greek). Latinate Bibles in early Christendom gave
us Maria. “Mary” first appeared in Middle English translations of the Bible, anglicized
from the French Marie. This modern English form dates to the 16
th
century, the 1525
Tyndale Bible. Other forms render it: Muire in Irish; Meryem in Kurdish; Miren in
Basque; Malia in Hawaiian; Maija in Latvian; Voirrey in Manx; Moira in Scottish. The
Quranic Arabic name is Maryam. Its influence is evident. But its exact origin remains a
mystery; it is not known if it is originally a Hebrew name (whether from the Hebrew
root “mr” meaning bitter or “mry” meaning rebellious). Some etymologists argue it is
likely from the Egyptian language, meaning “beloved.” The search for its exact meaning
dead-ends in contradictory conclusions. Most often, the meaning is given as “ocean of
misery,” referencing historic mistreatment of the Israelites. “Sea of bitterness” is an
accepted alternate. Ocean of misery. Sea of bitterness. Drop of sorrow. I have often
wondered: Why would anyone call their child this?
A name is a cipher. Letter by letter, it diagrams the influence of religion or
regime. My father Harold’s peers have “ridiculous” names like Tennyson and Griffith,
because an English name was considered a status symbol in his area and his era, during
pre-Independence. Many also have names in his native Longuda, but not as frequently
as with the Yoruba or Igbo tribes, who retain a strong tradition of naming in their
language. My father doesn’t know a single Nigerian who has the same name as his own
father or mother; it would be unusual to find a father and son who share a name. A
name is given to honor someone more important or famous than yourself or to flatter

45
grandparents and other kin. If a Hausa, Fulani, or Longuda person happened to come
across me by name only, they wouldn’t know it. In this country, where I can so readily
identify other Nigerians by their Yoruba or Igbo last names—as well as the Christians
with buoyant first names like Peace, Patience, Victor, Blessing, or Goodluck (a previous
president)—I am often left explaining my name, even to fellow countrymen. I always felt
estranged from the name Mary, because it never seemed to fit me; after a rapid
generational decline in popularity, those who now share my name are typically older,
often Catholic, and usually white. Only knowing my name, people are often surprised
when I materialize.
Mary was an unusual choice for a baby born in the “Holy North” of Nigeria. Girls
from the North typically take names from the Islamic tradition, particularly names of
Mohammed’s wives and family—Zainab, Habiba, Amina. These common Arabic names
are sometimes adapted into my native Hausa language with slight adjustments—
Mariamu instead of Mariam; Zainabu for Zainab; many names are rendered identically
in the two. I was supposed to be have been named Amina, the same name as another
mother of divinity, the Prophet Mohammed’s. Her name is popular, as Mary is in
Christendom. This idea was repudiated after one of my aunts married a polytheistic
Muslim man; my mother wanted to reaffirm her own commitment to Christianity by
entrenching it in the name of her lastborn. Yet, she couldn’t completely shake the
Islamic impulse. My mother gave me the name “Mary” because she thought it would
find favor with all followers of Abrahamic faiths: Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
Much of my convoluted history can be condensed into the fifteen letters plus one
hyphen that constitute my name. My paternal great-grandfather, an early convert, took
the name “Daniel” upon baptism—just the one name, Daniel. Missionaries had all

46
brought with them their own naming traditions from whichever European country
they’d come from; they all spoke English, but many of the ones in my fathers’ area were
Danish. These Danes must not have cared that he adopted a short mononym; he must
not have needed a longer name to stand out nor a surname for any administrative
purposes. Before his name change, he was Tapwarakan Butereni. His sons, including my
grandfather, took “Daniel” as their last name after much debate—defying tradition. It
was revolutionary that “Daniel” replaced “of Banjiram” as the name my father’s family
would have been known by—Banjiram being the name of the place they are from. You
won’t find many Nigerians with last names like Daniel, and the few you might find likely
trace the history of their name to an ancestor with an affinity for the eponymous hero of
the Biblical book. The name “Daniel” is localized as a common last name only in my
father’s particular area, which leads us to believe that the story was a favorite of the
group of missionaries teaching there. Perhaps those converting to a new, minority
religion were heartened by the miraculous survival in the lion’s den.
My names changed as I moved around the world. I had a measure of agency in
claiming the name Mary. I am “Nana” at home, because of a northern Nigerian cultural
norm to give a child who is named similarly to an elder a nickname—in order to avoid
the taboo of speaking that elder’s name aloud in frustration. Given out of respect for my
grandmother, Mariam, my nickname “Nana” was what I used outside the home as well,
with my friends and in school during my time in England. As soon as I moved to
America, I became Mary. At nine years old, I abandoned the name everyone in England
had called me, which I was also called at home—“Nana,” meaning grandmother. I
thought “Nana” sounded infantile and that its vowel sounds exposed my accent. When
we moved to the US, for the first time, I took advantage of being in a place where no one

47
knew me, and I started going by a more “normal” name, Mary. In Tennessee, my new
name seemed tailor-made for assimilation. However, switching the name you’ve always
responded to takes some getting used to, and for months I would fail to respond to
“Mary,” forgetting that that was who I had become. A name taken out of shame will
always feel a little unnerving.
In the disarray of documentation compiled during various immigration
processes, I realized I am “Mary-Alice” as one hyphenated first name on some official
documents; on others, Mary is my first name and Alice is my middle. The “Alice” was
added for the daughter of an English missionary who taught my mother. On one form,
my absurd name begins with “Mary-Alice Alice.” My full name, then, sounds like three
or four first names. A name always like an error; I have quarreled with my name. Yet, if
you take it apart into its distinct pieces, my name is actually extremely Nigerian, all
parts reflecting a long legacy of colonization and conversion. I’ve come to admire its
incongruity; that I initially found it ill-fitting is fitting. My name tells an essentially
Nigerian story, the same kind of story found in the name of Nigeria itself. A Miss Flora
Shaw covered the colonies from London. In her column, the name “Nigeria” first
appeared in print in The Times in 1897, a portmanteau of “Niger” + “Area”: clinical
language parceling property, contouring an ill-conceived colony. The exact extent of this
speculative area had not yet been determined. The Oxford English Dictionary
christened the earliest “Nigerian” in 1908. All of us now—regardless of tribe or faith—
affectionately call our country Naija.

***

48
In his essay, “Walking in the City,” philosopher Michel de Certeau considers the
ways in which the spatial organization of a city can be understood in a form analogous to
the complex organizations of grammar—constructing a theory of a poetic geography on
top of a city. The names of places we inhabit “articulate a sentence” (Certeau 104) whose
logic we reconstruct in our waking movements as well as in our dream lives. Tracing a
toponym is a cultural excavation: an attempt to distill the mythos and ethos of a
particular place. I fled to California after I decided it’s impossible to understand
America without spending time Out West. I moved to LA the first time on New Year’s
Day, and that first morning, waking up by the glaring sun through a window, my body
recoiled reflexively—not understanding why it should be so bright. I was beset by the
early, insistent sunshine, which felt like an intrusion. Having been drawn out here twice,
I refer to the first time and the second time I lived in Los Angeles as though I’m stuck in
a loop—driftless and without a home, as if doomed to wander.
Time operates differently here. Telling a tale temporally, even a simple one, is
more difficult when talking about California than any other place. The sunniness—how
it becomes the sameness—affects one’s memory. When I attempt to remember when
something happened, the first sensory detail I try to grasp is the season—what the
weather outside was like; how the trees were dressed; the debris on the ground. In New
York, I remember the weather. I will never be reconciled to those winters, but I can say
when something happened just as well as I can say what happened. In LA, the weather
is almost the same all the time, and there are no real seasons. When recalling an
instance from the period from the decade I’ve called it my home, the mental image of
November looks and feels exactly like June. I cannot piece a timeline together. Recent
unbearable heatwaves and forest fires have punctured this pattern somewhat.

49
When I first moved here, I had never considered living in LA; the furthest west I
had ever been was still Tennessee. My friend assured me that I would love it: that it
would be a waste of time and money to visit first. Just come. So, I just went. At first, I
lived in the nomadic way of my ancestors from a different desert—in a way that would
tie me to the place as impermanently as possible. Semi-settled. I had no car, instead
living in the centralized and walkable Koreatown, which is serviced by buses and the
Metro train system few people know LA has. I signed the shortest lease I could find, a
six-month contract, and thereafter renewed my stay on a month-to-month basis. I had
arrived with the two free suitcases that were my allotment on my Southwest flight. I
slept on a mattress with no frame.
I knew I desperately loved LA when I begged a friend with a car to help me bring
home a couch. Falling for LA came as a surprise; I had shared some of the general
antipathy towards the city that I believe is a cultural phenomenon. When I tell people
that Los Angeles is the greatest city in the world, the most common reaction is laughter.
Once, sitting in a movie theater back on the East Coast, I saw a trailer for some disaster
movie featuring scenes of LA being destroyed: the Hollywood sign exploding, palm trees
on fire. Other people in the audience cheered and clapped, showing their gleeful
approval with a passion more appropriate for an enemy nation during wartime. The
common complaints about LA are that it’s “fake” and that the celebrity-obsessed culture
it spawns is responsible for many toxic ills in our society. But my LA is as far removed
from that glamorous world as the romanticized version of Hollywood is removed from
the gritty reality of its streets, sometimes its squalor.
Los Angeles was built on a network of corpses. The indigent and unclaimed
were buried in mass graves all over the city; in the earliest eras, these were attached to

50
missions and churches; later, the county administered them. Considering our city’s
relatively short 239-year history, our dead became an insistent feature of our
infrastructure with unusual speed. As the city developed, these mass public graves had
to be dug up to accommodate public works projects. All subterranean construction,
including our Metro system, must work around the vast architecture of skeletal remains
compacted in layers beneath our streets.
Are they the angels we invoke when we pronounce the name of our city—whether
softly, as it sounds in Spanish, or with the accent of Anglos? For almost a century, a
debate between historians questions the original name of the city of Los Angeles when it
was first settled as a Spanish pueblo in 1787. The historical record was marred by errors
on early maps, particularly the mislabeling of the Los Angeles River. An array of
conflicting sources—history books, church records, commemorative plaques—presents
different versions. Some possibilities listed in the Los Angeles Almanac (“Where Did the
Name”) include: El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles. El Pueblo de Nuestra
Señora de los Ángeles de la Porciuncula. El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reyna de los
Ángeles del Rio Porciuncula. El Pueblo de la Reina de los Ángeles Sobre el Rio de
Porciuncula. Pueblo del Rio de Nuestra Señora la Reyna de los Ángeles de Porciuncula.
The most commonly accepted original name, “El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de
los Ángeles,” means “The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels.” Angels are
certain. A queen is certain. The most commonly accepted original name, “El Pueblo de
Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles,” means “The Town of Our Lady the Queen of
the Angels.” Angels are certain. A queen is certain.
From its beginnings, California has been steeped in hidden Black history; Hernan
Cortés may have arrived accompanied by three hundred Black navigators (Templeton;

51
“African Explorers”). In Downtown LA, the major street that is currently named Los
Angeles Street originally included a one-block section called “Calle de Los Negros”—
meaning “Street of the Blacks.” It was also referred to as Nigger Alley and Negro Alley
(“politely”). It appears as such on maps of the early city streets from the late 19
th

century. When first populated in the 1840s, the street was home to “men of very dark
complexion,” (qtd. in Estrada) a description likely referring to a population of Afro-
Mestizo laborers. On the Street of Blacks, one prominent establishment was a bordello
owned by a woman called La Prietita (the “dark-skinned lady”). The street would later
become part of Chinatown and the site of the Chinatown Massacre of 1871, during which
a mob of hundreds ransacked and murdered residents in “the largest mass lynching in
American history” (Johnson). During its short tenure, it was known for “vice and
violence” (Estrada). Per historian James Guinn in his Extended History of Los Angeles
and Environs, it was “the wickedest street on earth” (351). He marvels at its compact
corruption: “In length it did not exceed 500 feet, but in wickedness it was unlimited”
(Guinn 268). Today, it is peopled by a few homeless in tents near the onramp for the 101
freeway.
Negro Alley’s wickedness was tied to its name: the name of the dark-skinned
people that fueled the economy during the Gold Rush by legal and less-than-legal
means. “The Calle de Los Negros was as black in character as in name” (Guinn 351).
After the massacre, it was officially renamed as part of a campaign to redeem that
section of the city—to bring order by rehabilitating its reputation and association with
criminality. Any traces of Negro Alley had disappeared on maps by the middle of the
20
th
century. As part of a bureaucratic plan to reform its moral character, the name was
sanitized and this part of Black history, hidden. This repeats a pattern of erasure

52
concerning the Black history of Los Angeles and California—perhaps not always as
intentional and deliberate as this name change, but in a manner that nonetheless
obscures the parts Black people played in the vital boomtowns. In the 1781 census of the
original 44 settlers of the original Pueblo of Los Angeles (“Original Settlers”), only two
belonged to a racial category we might now consider white (Spaniards from Spain).
According to the census’s whitewashed demographic information, almost a quarter were
Black: two were listed as full Negros and eight as Mulattos of mixed Spanish and
African ancestry. At the LA Bicentennial, a plaque on Olvera Street publicly recognized
the Black ancestry of the “First 44” for the first time.
California’s hidden Black history is woven into the name of the state. Like the
name of Los Angeles, it refers to a queen. Again, like that name, it involves a mistake on
a map. To understand the history of the name of the Golden State, enter the speculative:
the island of California. Such an imaginary island first appeared in a 16
th
-century
Spanish novel, Sergas de Esplandián (The Exploits of Esplandián). In the 1510 chivalric
romance, Castilian author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo invents an island nation. He
writes, “Know, that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California
very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise; and it is peopled by black women,
without any man among them, for they live in the manner of Amazons” (qtd. in Hale
245). When encountering natives in the New World, Spanish explorers often recalled
legendary native tribes composed entirely of women—one notable counterpart was
made up of women with blindingly white skin, who were accounted goddesses. But
Montalvo placed a dark-skinned empress at the helm of his legendarium. Queen Calafia
reigned over this mythic matriarchy. Its fictional geography made a deep impression on
generations of explorers. In 1535, when Spanish conquistadors familiar with her legend

53
moored their ships along our coast, they believed they had discovered Calafia’s golden
island. They named it after her: California.
The etymology of the heroine’s name and namesake territory is derived from the
Arabic khalifa, referring to a ruler (caliph) of an Islamic religious kingdom (a
caliphate)— such as the former Sokoto Caliphate that established theocracy in my
family, tribal home (“Caliph”). The link to “California” was presented in 1862 and
published in 1864 in The Atlantic Monthly by historian Edward Everett Hale. Hale
argued for this specific source behind California’s state name, discrediting some far-
fetched possibilities. One plausible influence on Montalvo is the territory of “Califerne,”
mentioned in the French epic poem, Le Chanson de Roland. The 11
th
-century Song of
Roland indicates a cluster of lands: “And those of Africa, and those of Califerne” (line
2924). It is not clear whether this Califerne is considered part of Africa. The author of
the Song of Roland may also have been influenced by the Arabic khalifa as the basis for
his own geography; the plot of his epic as well involves the Crusades and battles against
Muslim Moorish armies in Spain. The territory marked as “Califerne” was listed as one
in rebellion: potentially under the rule of an “infidel.” Whether or not caliph directly
inspired Califerne and contributed to Montalvo’s naming process remains unknown, but
the Arabic origin of the basis of his “California” is now widely accepted amongst
historians (Polk; Templeton).
The book was completed at a critical moment in Spanish history—at the
conclusion of the Reconquista and during the dawn of the Age of Discovery. In Spain in
1510, the dogma of Roman Catholicism was re-established after the re-conquering of
territories held by various adversarial Islamic caliphates (a power struggle spanning
seven centuries, from 722-1492). When hundreds of years of religious conflict with

54
Moorish armies came to an end, Christianity took its place as the unquestioned religious
order of the land. The Treaty of Granada, signed in 1492, signaled the cessation of
military engagement with the Moors. Having defeated foreigners, the authority of the
Church intensified its domestic efforts: Jewish people were expelled, and an Inquisition
designed to root out any whiff of heresy began its brutal course. Impelled by the
emergent Doctrine of Discovery, Spanish (or Spanish-financed) conquistadors
aggressively reconnoitered the unknown New World in service to a newly unified and
increasingly powerful empire. This is the religious and imperial context in which the
character of Calafia was conceived. Composed at this pivotal point in history, she is at
once a symbol of centuries-old conflicts and new worlds: a “heathen” confronting both
Muslim and Christian invaders at her shores.
Queen Calafia is the powerful sovereign of this island of women where male
trespassers are fed to pet griffins. The island of California, as Montalvo characterized it,
was similar to El Dorado, and his descriptions of the gold to be found there were so
tantalizing that Hernan Cortés himself lusted after it obsessively, willing it into
existence. In the myth, the island’s inhabitants jealously guarded this legendary
treasure. Their primary concern was the protection from invasion of their lands—with
its “steep cliffs and rocky shores,” (qtd. in Hale 246) the island’s natural defense was
supplemented by a fierce, militaristic society devoid of men. The women on the island
were “of hardy bodies . . . and great force” (qtd. in Hale 246). All male children were
eliminated at birth.
The 500-year-old myth’s impact on the chronology of our statehood has been
well-established. For 200 years after they first arrived, Spanish settlers believed
California was an island. They erroneously believed a large body of water lay to the east,

55
and that there was no land route connecting this strip of land to the main body of the
continent. The territory was depicted as an island on maps well into the 18
th
century.
The power of the myth persisted, its promise prompting early mistakes in mapping
California to endure long after evidence indicating that the Baja California Peninsula
was in fact continentally enjoined (see fig. 2). A promise not only of gold, but in infinite
quantities: “For, in the whole island, there was no metal but gold” (qtd. in Hale 246).

Fig. 2. 1600s map of the Island of California from Honnold-Mudd Library Special Collections; Pomona
University, 11 Mar. 2014, http://magazine.pomona.edu/2014/spring/the-island-of-california.

To this day, California still exists in the contemporary imagination as an island—
it is often considered and experienced as distinct from the rest of the nation, separated
by prominent ideological and cultural boundaries. This surreal island is still inhabited
by the mythical figure of Calafia. As a dark-skinned warrior queen, she has been
depicted as the “Spirit of California.” You can see her in the City Club of San Francisco
in Diego Rivera’s first American mural, “The Allegory of California.” Completed in 1931,

56
the figure of Queen Calafia dominates the stairwell: a lone female figure among men and
machines, a giantess whose oversized hands cradle the earth and instruments of
industry. Another mural from 1926, also housed in San Francisco, at the Mark Hopkins
Hotel, shows her bare-breasted and brown, cradling a ragged lump of gold and guarded
by two of her Amazonian tribe, all armored and bejeweled. One of her earliest
representations, it sets her against a gold-leaf background, and sets upon her head an
oversized crown. Installed in a public park in 2003 in Escondido, California, a sculpture
of Calafia clad in golden armor of mosaic tile stands on a gargantuan bird encircled by
eight large-scale mythical beasts. Immortalized in such artwork, her spirit possesses her
eponymous territory.
An isulonym is the proper name of an island: California counts, marked by the
unreality of the myth that birthed it. This place has never rid itself of its early
associations with a fool’s paradise—the locus of a lost city, like the Garden of Eden or
Atlantis—thus, a reverie or illusion. The creation myth of California holds influence,
even though too few know its significance, because it infuses the lexicon of these lands.
Her name is now an asteroidonym: 341 California, an asteroid unusually bright. A
cosmonym: the California Nebula, named so because it resembles the shape of the state.
A hydronym: the Gulf of California. An oronym: California Hill in Nebraska, the first
major hill confronting travelers along the Oregon Trail. A speleonym: California
Caverns, a limestone cave system in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Calafia has given her name to plants, like Eschscholzia californica, the California
poppy—also called the golden poppy, California sunlight, and the cup of gold. She has
given her name to Californite, a jade-like mineral cut into gemstones. To Californium, a
radioactive element synthesized in 1950. To at least twelve cities, neighborhoods,

57
unincorporated communities, municipalities, and boroughs across the US; to 1 ghost
town in West Virginia.
The mistaken magic that manifests the island of California has much in common
with Nigeria. They were both misunderstood and mislabeled on maps drawn by
outsiders. Both marked the “land of the blacks.” Cobbled clumsily. A fantasy creation. A
fabrication. Curious nations of a nature better perceived in dreamscapes: Nigeria was
made in myth. Is made of myth. Both were coveted under a resource curse, making their
lands an enticement but their inhabitants a nuisance. In many senses, the island
represents Africa in the imagination of its author. The Gold Coast of West Africa is the
golden coastline of a Californian island, extended. The trajectory of the myth reproduces
Nigeria’s colonial past. As in the myth, colonization changed the structures of our
society at the most intimate levels, while conversion transformed us spiritually. Old
traditions and beliefs were outlawed, lost, and libeled. Our practices, branded pagan,
were held up as exaggerated cruelties (in the myth, infanticide and the practice of
making pet food from captives indicate barbarism). The conclusion of the myth mirrors
the catastrophe of my native land. The Calafian way of life was also ultimately doomed
after the tribe came into contact with a “superior” people. We are to understand that the
act of a Christian marriage civilizes Queen Calafia. We see this trope over and over in
colonial narratives—that we are tamed.
The kismet of the mythical character follows an uneasy path—original paganism;
initial rebellion; ongoing heresy; and ultimate conversion. Religion is transformative,
the main engine of her arc. In the beginning of her narrative, Queen Calafia wages war
first against Christians then against Muslims: resisting both to adhere to ancient
practices. What predated her conversation was a paganism cast as primitive. In the

58
island’s tradition, men’s bodies are literally food, used to feed the women’s wild beasts
and pet griffins. After a saga of cultural clash, the relentless compulsion of the crusaders
finally overwhelms Calafia, and she capitulates, embracing the new European religion.
Her marriage to a Christian prince signals an end to a way of life going “so far back that
there is no memory of the beginnings of it” (qtd. in Hale 273). She is convinced of
Catholic doctrine after seeing “the great disorder of all others” (qtd. in Hale 274). In
Montalvo’s telling, the scales have fallen from her eyes, and she is delivered from her
ignorance. Calafia’s decision to marry one whom she initially opposed is not merely a
calculated act of self-preservation, but also a fundamental shift in her worldview. At the
end of her myth, after her religious conversion, the Eucharist is performed—another act
of consumption. Male bodies offer sustenance—first in a practical, pitiless way, then for
a transcendent spiritual purpose. The new religion presents the male body of their
savior in mysterious new terms—both murdered and risen, both human and divine, both
literal flesh and food. The sacrament of the Eucharist is portrayed as redemptive for the
Calafians—it must also have been abjectly terrifying.
Montalvo’s treatment of the figure of Calafia makes plain some of the typical,
intransigent problems within colonial narratives. We may take for granted an
assumption of and confidence in the inherent superiority of European societies. This
line of thought explains “benevolent colonialism”—the idea that instead of merely
exploiting land and resources, the colonist was also bringing order and the rule of law to
people who would benefit from such, but who could not independently and organically
develop these principles. The term “Noble Savage” is intimately tied to this point of
Spanish history. The English term first appeared in John Dryden's play, The Conquest of
Granada (1672), whose plot follows the Spanish conquest of Granada in 1492 and the

59
fall of Muhammad XII, the last Islamic ruler of Spain. The noble savage trope defines a
population left uncorrupted due to its isolation from civilization. The noble savage is
unburdened by decadence. He is depicted as closer to nature, closer to the beasts, with a
physicality fit not for life in a society, but in the brutal state of nature for which his body
is more suited (Ellingson 11-20; Symcox 223).
Queen Calafia’s characterization departs from this trope in one notable way.
Whereas the figure of the savage is characterized by his inability to rule himself,
Calafia’s kingdom is portrayed as self-sufficient, guided by her at the helm as its capable
ruler. She is described as a formidable opponent in battle, and her society is highly
regulated and disciplined—ruled with competence and authority. Montalvo’s
characterization of Calafia would have been informed by the Moors, the principle
representation of that “other” of African extraction. The Moors occupied and Islamized
southern areas of Spain for eight hundred years. During the Crusades, the word Moor
was synonymous with “infidel,” and today, Moreno still refers to dark skin (“Moor”).
Though the Moors were seen as religious enemies, these Africans were also
acknowledged as culturally advanced in the early modern era, particularly due to their
indispensable vocation as navigators accompanying explorers (Templeton, 1991). The
novel’s author, in his capacity as a regional guard, was briefly stationed at the Moorish
Alhambra Palace in Granada, which had been captured by Spain. It is likely that his
guard duties in 1482 occurred concurrently to his writing of the novel, which was
completed a decade later (Ruiza et. al).
In the novel, the author refers to “una isla llamada California de mujeres
negras” (Montalvo CVIII)—an island called California of Black women. It is important
to note the particular Spanish word used to denote their race—“negra.” As Spain

60
dominated the early Atlantic slave trade, its empire of exploitation introduced
influential racial classifications. It was during this time that negro moved completely
away from neutral usage—a mere description of colorific qualities of a person’s skin—
and took on the racialization bred in imperial Spain after they defeated the Moors
(“Negro”). In this period, Spain introduced what historian Jeffrey Gorsky defines as “the
first set of racial exclusion laws in modern history” (Gorsky). These laws were initially
also anti-Semitic, designed to exclude Jewish as well as Muslim converts to Catholicism
from political assimilation and social acceptance. Thus, they established a form of
discrimination that went beyond religion and encouraged the incipient concept of
biological race, which Spain’s jurisprudence further codified. These racial categories
“provided the final seedbed for Christian Negrophobic racism” (Gorsky). Essentially,
infidel was institutionalized as an official class and color. Originating the earliest
conceptualization of blood and its purity, Spain even lent English the current
connotation of the word “race.”
Monster or Black Madonna. Savage, slave, or superhuman: these were the
archetypes Black people embodied in precolonial texts. In distorted narratives, Black
bodies were represented as beastly or beatific. In the European imagination, we were
strange populations to be written about as though we befit the Uncanny Valley—human,
but not quite. Always more than or less than human. Frequent comparisons to animals or
machines or demons; physical descriptions that border on the graphic—these are
standard for this time and present frequently in this novel. Montalvo’s descriptions of
Calafia’s body often veer towards the grotesque. The “grotesque” refers to an aesthetic
paradox wherein one is at once fascinated and repulsed by an object of curiosity.
Repeatedly, Montalvo uses language that presents her physicality as extreme: routinely

61
describing her as “very black” and “very large” (qtd. in Hale 247) and using superlatives
to place her appearance far outside a norm. The descriptions of her body using hyper-
sexualized and intimidating language, combined with traits of ferocity and aggression,
convey a characterization almost feral. Yet, Montalvo admires his creations. Although not
in a way free from exotification, he emphasizes their physical beauty and attributes to
them elevating characteristics. They never seem as mere mortals. Calafia transcends the
boundary and bondage of her own origin story.
I feel tied to her name, and my discovery of her history became an essential
tether. What does it mean to be from a place? Is it an accident of birth? Wherever you
were taken as a child—or the first home you knew? Something earned, like citizenship? I
was born near a last body of water. Zooming out after pinpointing my birthplace on
satellite maps, you can see a red marker piercing the yellow color of arid land: one of the
final indications of sand until the encroaching fields of green in the Afrotropical areas
south. The desertification of Southern California and of the Sahara present a similar
environmental calamity; still, I am drawn to deserts. Still, I left one caliphate only to end
up in another. In the Valley Girl accent, I hear the Hausa vocal fry—an odd linguistic
connection in a type of phonation most people find grating, its usage said to make the
speaker sound vapid. One accent an unlikely echo of the other. America, I didn’t choose,
but California—an island distinct—I did choose. After a lifetime of searching, California
is my adopted, emotional, mythic, and linguistic home. It feels increasingly natural to
reply “California” whenever someone wants to know where I am from. This response
seems to make people happy, perhaps recalling sunshine and movie magic.
When I was fourteen, after a fight with my mother, I packed a small bag and my
guitar, stole her credit card, and left home meaning to buy a cross-country bus ticket to

62
California. Once there, I planned to join a commune, having never divorced the
California in my imagination from the flower child era of the 1960s. It is a lucky thing
she discovered me and followed me on the train to Union Station; I likely would not
have come back. But in that mind-boggling moment of adolescent stupidity, I glimpsed
something of the fantasy that compelled men west—something more than the greed for
gold and the prospect of panning a fortune out of dirt. When I began my search for my
ancestry, I did not imagine I would add a fifth possibility as an answer to the question of
my tribe. To claim the demonym “Californian” is to fantasize a kinship where I belong to
Calafia’s tribe. I place another ancestor in my personal pantheon of originating spirits,
then continue my project of unearthing—the root of a thing: a name or a narrative.

63
ARS POETICA

An etymon is the essential meaning of a word seen in its origins. From the Latin:
true, actual, real (“Etymon”). The Latin niger—from which I mistakenly formed the root
for Niger/ia—is the real root for negra and Negro
7
. Niger is one of nine Latinate ways
to indicate the color black, and it is the most ill-omened. The Latin niger itself is of
unknown etymology but may come from a Proto-Indo-European word meaning “night.”
The mood of niger portends a coming storm, a disturbed night sky. The figurative
texture of this tint: "gloomy, unlit, unlucky.” Its Latin connotation goes beyond
pigmentation and is ascribed a negative moral value: “bad, wicked.” Niger is the etymon
Europeans chose for us: tied to us as if a generational curse. But what if we could
subvert the narrative in this naming? Consider that, although niger is unlucky, it is not
dull. As opposed to dull black, as a color, its quality is a distinctly “shining black.”
I am a poet of place. My writing life is the product of our immigrant experience.
My self-mythologization is desultory: working passed a past of no true home. Because I
come from a long line of nomads, I have a more tenuous, less tactile relationship with
place. Both physical and mythical landscapes compel me as I write. In my poetry, I
navigate illusory locations: the hypothetical notion of ‘Negrolands’ sketching out a
reimagined homeland. And the island of California, which offers me a new lens through
which to reconsider my relationship with the country of my birth. The Africa of my
reimagination probes the bonds and boundaries of the Black diaspora—from colonial

7
The etymological understanding of niger and Negro was sourced in Jeffreys 443-451; Meek 1-17; and
“Niger” and “Negro” etymological dictionary entries.

64
empires to my home in America. I introduce an Africa that meets the noir. My Africa
meets the city of Los Angeles in an interplay of light versus shadow: noir Nigeriana.
The etymon of the filmic “noir” is the same as the racialized precursor to Negro.
The French noir was itself derived from the Latin niger. “Film noir” was coined in
1958—literally, "black film.” In this connotation, blackness points to darkness and
obscurity (“Film Noir”). Film noir is defined visually by dramatic black-and-white
cinematography and urbanity (the city at nighttime); stylistically by bleakness;
structurally by a dark mystery, typically a crime; and philosophically by cynicism and
doubt. In my definition of “poem noir,” images must evoke an uncanny atmosphere. An
image is always greater than the sum of its parts—after pulling apart the image, there is
always some ineffable quality as a remnant. An almost ghostly remainder. In poem noir,
infusing the “ghostly remainder” of dualistic, two-toned imagery into the setting is the
chief concern of the poet as architect. The poet engages in world-building and generates
various “-scapes.”
My concept of “Nigerian noir” shares with film noir a preoccupation with mood
and motif. In poem noir, the mood landscape central to its psychological force depends
upon a dichotomy of light and dark as the unknown unfolds under bright sunlight. The
unreal of the world of Hollywood brushes against the gritty, seedy underbelly of the city.
Los Angeles presents itself as both utopia and dystopia, a paradise and a wasteland. In
poem noir, death interferes with teeming life; the boundaries allowing us to imagine the
two as separate are blurred.
The atmosphere of Nigerian noir is charged by my indigenous folk mythology and
its syncretism. Per our occult cosmology predating Islam, one may be possessed by any
of its innumerable, mysterious spirits. They populate my writing, their presence

65
presenting the perpetual prospect of being haunted or hunted. Spirits in multiple
valences haunt the landscapes or dreamscapes I create: an umbra of earthly vice and
unearthly totems. In my manuscript, I invoke spirits of indigenous mythological
characters; spirits of my real and imagined ancestors; those spirits lingering in surviving
stories connecting the torn Black Diaspora. In the “Anti-Noir” series in my manuscript,
some spirits we encounter are complex female figures—the femme fatale; the aging
Hollywood actress; the Virgin Mary (as the Black Madonna); the fallen woman; the
Mexican Death Saint Santa Muerte; Christina the Astonishing (the patron saint against
insanity); and Queen Calafia. She inspirits the work.
I see engaging Calafian myth in poetry as an opportunity to create new
narratives—new forms of representation concerning how Black diasporic archetypes
may be recast. Postcolonial theorist Heather Russell proposed the Legba Principle,
which describes art that “transcends all prescribed boundaries of form” (Russell 10)
attempted by New World authors of African descent. Her principle attributes the
potentiality of this art to our tendency to challenge colonial and imperialistic values,
such as through “imaginative and resistive acts of border crossing” (Russell 22). In the
potential of literature to push back against exotification, there exist opportunities to pull
the Black female body from the pages of National Geographic. The mythical figure of
Calafia offers a potential reframing. Although in many ways Calafia’s narrative
ultimately conforms to the trope of the “taming” of a wild woman, she nevertheless
proposes a subversive figure. She embodies contradiction—her body caught between
carnality and divinity.
In my native mythology, as in LA noir, specters whisper of wealth but ultimately
seek to devour, spelling destruction. In my poem “Nollywoodland,” I engage an aging

66
actress afraid of harsh lighting in LA: the “fluorescence along La Brea” (line 2) where
she is “exposed in Technicolor outside every 99¢ store, / unmasked in the just-right
yellowing of a haunted motel . . . by art installations; one county museum / and its forest
of lamps; Christmas; the bulbs” (9-12). When I urge her to flee to Nollywood, I refer to
the glamour of the 3
rd
-largest film industry in the world. In referencing its daily power
outages, I highlight the same glaring dualities found in “La La Land”—the way the silver
screen carefully glosses over the gratuitous poverty of some of the world’s largest slums.
The Africa of this reimagining is complicated and expansive. Africa is not a country: so
goes a long-running joke amongst its natives. Of course, it is a continent of fifty-four
nations—but one often undifferentiated, presented as a monolith. Africa is routinely
flattened in representations that cater to a Westernized world audience. A homogenizing
process ignores its diversity and churns out easy tropes and stereotypes. Observed
through such a “haze of distortions or cheap mystifications,” (Achebe 14) a story
becomes untold. My poetic cosmologies are experiments in form against easy narratives.
I call this series “Anti-Noir,” because my anti-colonial aesthetic aims to perform a
literary intervention investigating tensions found at the uneasy intersections of
disparate belief systems—a project embodying resistance and reaction to colonialist
culture clash. My poems probe the friction created by conflicting cultural ideas at work
in my history as they rub against each other: Islam against Christianity against
animism; modernity against tradition; sacrilege against the sacred; superstition against
science; ghosts against industry; the mystical against the mundane. My writing life is
infused with the weight of Nigeria’s colonial past as I navigate the syncretic traditions
that I consider my inheritance. In my engagement with the past, I hope to pull
something useful—elemental—out of my maelstrom of memory and myth.

67
POETRY MANUSCRIPT

WAYWARD DANCING

68
MUST BE SOME KIND OF SPELL

Your favorite knife goes missing.
A guest stole something.

The mojo of the home, disturbed.
(Your house isn’t haunted—You’re just lonely.)

Walking through, after the after-party,
see your empty chairs arranged in perfect mimicry

of human congregation: assembling in groups
of two to four, dominating a space,

facing conversation pieces and food—
Policing every exit.

And rings of bottles all around the house …
And sticky ring stains under the bottles all over your house …

concentric cones of hospitality, radiating out like crop circles.

They are visual traps. Also, they are sensory traps.
Also, they are fetishes. They are effigies.

(Objects are animate.)

They want to return, like children or brides, to their owners.
A boning knife has disappeared: mojo of a house disturbed.

It turns up weeks later under your bed, just in the middle.
You must understand—under the precise center of your bed.

In that spot children hide from their parents’ vicious arms:

knife

pointing perfect, straight at your headrest.

69
REVIVALISM 101

You never wonder what demons do in downtime.
They're flat characters, not hobbyists.

But once, under a revival tent in Jos, it came out—
(Keymakers, the preacher said.)

Goldbeaters. Machinists. Weavers, Welders, Menders.

You should have known only a Paperhanger could
wall in dreams with doodles of pre-cancerous parents.

Only a Taxidermist could handle a corpse long after
you wondered why the fat heart hadn't given out—

heart that must have been skeined with dark, wrong veins:
liver sequined with syphilis.

Under the weight of perfection,
these craftsmen set to their task in studio and playroom—

Whip and Grump and Immolation and Work and
nothing at all about writing the same old things over and over:

[…Sometimes, I imagine I can tell by a girl's name:
how or how much her parents love her—supposing
there's never been an unloved Ibis, Hasbiya, Little
Laughing Dove—names of birds, never of flowers.]

And how they are masterful—these practiced, relentless ones—
a grand hydra architecture of contamination & cooperation.

While our own world destroys itself, all we do is eat, sleep, groom:
and write obsessively about bodies as objects of death study.

70
BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD

You can do to a body a lot of things.
A feature in Smithsonian on cannibalism makes me hungry.

I’m learning so much—they use bodies as ritual snacks,
eating everything but teeth, hair, and penis.

(Toenails as pills for stomachache.)

You can view bodies with Aequanimitas, that clinical practice:
—emotional distancing—as of a doctor.

Or you can want them put down.
Eliminate 350,000 bodies a year to reach optimal population:

If they assume the fetal position,
they may be slaughtered in orderly fashion.

You can make pain principles out of anything: unripe papaya.
You can pickle a man in a four-foot-tall glass jar.

Zip things in & out of a body
surgically like a Sunday purse.

Explain the disappearance of a people by making myth—
Say that conquistadors stacked bodies inside walls,

then poured cement on top, building them into houses—
thumbing their noses at hauntings and good engineering.

I learn that cannibals use bodies as we all do:
in practical application of questions ordinary and extraordinary.

(This is the best way, the only natural way—in anger, in heat.)

One lonely cannibal, so upset by his wife’s truancy,
twice burned down his own treehouse.

71
SLIPSTREAM

Like Kamikazes, these houseflies dive-bombing my wine
—(five have wasted themselves to its dark Shiraz liquidity)—
pitch waves of special force attacks and turn
their bellies to the sun in self-murder.

Unlike Kamikaze pilots, they have not written death
poems and care too much, I think, for Muscovado.
These could be the stories we tell milk-slick children
to warn them from balcony edges: of the damages of height.

* * *

Ask anyone who plays around with planes on weekends.
They'll tell you: propeller accidents are common.
Really, the only remarkable thing about Anne's case:
That she lives.

Missing one arm—perplexing police.
The confetti they found on the tarmac
(pieces of map sprinkling arm and thumb)
suggested she had not meant to walk just there.

But how could she have neglected the insistent wind in the slipstream?

Perhaps she’d been looking down at a weather report,
turning over something she didn’t understand about sky charts,
and within the whir of three broad blades moving so fast
as to be imperceptible, she surprised herself.

Perhaps overwork and restlessness at night.
Perhaps that frustration—of being stuck in just one whole body.
(Stuck in only one body that inhabits only one place at only one time.)
What if she simply wanted to feel the strange mechanics of motors?

You must remember that Curiosity and Satisfaction are primal—
Primal. Basic. Stone Age. Reptilian.

72
FEEL BETTER

There are some among us with no impulse control I mean zero

Give them a pencil they’ll stick it in their eye

Show them a picture of eyelash mites no eyelashes seconds later

You strap them in a wheelchair crazy as hallelujah

Useless meat puppets Carnival of bad animals

Little Chaya in India believed the world would die when the Large Hadron Collider

rebooted She thought earth would crack up and everyone would get

pulled like a body just getting pulled

Her father tried to divert her attention no such thing

A black hole That is a bad end

Irresponsible television saying eclipse is omen

The rabble rushes to temple ignoring scientists warning nothing to fear calm yourselves

calm calm

No wonder humans are called long pigs Not only for taste

Chaya ran from the evening news straight to the bleach you already guessed she

chugged it

Hallelujah is the wrong word to begin with so start over

Tiny tiny crazy baby steps towards mass extinction

73
BLOODMOON

Our moon should have tipped over
into the gulf.

A bad apple falling into a pool, it was that big and unbalanced.
And seeming many worlds away—Across the Atlantic in coach,
we pass the dead-point of marginal sea praying God lays Hands
on top of our plane to keep us from shooting into the exosphere …

THIGMOTROPIA— an impulse in every creature to ensconce itself:
think of the vermin cozying your walls
and the simple audacity in their desire,
the plain directive of all life towards comfort.

PSYCHOTROPIA— that incantation driving you out of your head:
many ways to cut it,
but at the heart,
a knife fight.

You are snug as a bug, as an intrusion of insects nestled in a nasty null.
You are even an outsider scientist on a shoestring budget, trawling sky:
seeking forests on the moon or the moon towns that dead men sought,
back when we all still believed in counter-earths. Now see for yourself—

That we must be heading Somewhere;
There must be a force pushing the thing forward.

On a darkish coast, our moon oppressing: overworking waves to spittle.
In submission to a satellite overripe and overpresent—the world bends.

At this size, a moon in bloom.
It cradles; it is orange.

74
WOLFMOON

What the hell is a wolfmoon?
We don't need more types of moon.
We just need a better moon.
One that gives more room—
in millihelens, the quantity of beauty
required to launch one warship.

Moondogs appear when angled moonlight pierces ice crystals:
(sudden impressions of mock moons astride our true moon).
They occur in arctic climates but also in African imagination.
Zambia circa 1964 witnessed the spectacle of the “Afronauts”:
in unfunded ambition to outdo America and the Americans,
a teacher supposed he could quarrel with all applicable gods.

His catapult would send to the moon and Mars a spacegirl
and her pets, all trained inside oil drums tossed down hills.
More bodies circling the drain of a great stratospheric sink:
the dogs recruited for early and eccentric space programs
were strays in a wild love with Soviet steak and marijuana.
(Cue: mist, howl of wolf, and nest of mink.)

Doggy suicides over a bridge pile up like junk mail—(fifty!)—
tenacious and acrobatic, all long-muzzle breeds on clear days:
then the lone, disabled one in a steaming pool in Houston.
A sub-orbital pup, if exceptional, survives 12 flight hours.
We look up at our moon and might see our star
in a malevolent, dog-headed saint.

Politically, I believe in revenge raining down from outer space…

75
ODE TO OUR UNNAMED MOON

MOON and its dark star of calamity.
MOON like moths: twilight- and night- flying white moths.
MOON with half-suicidal/half-sexual affect.

Unimpressed, Islamic councils won’t standardize a lunar calendar.
Should we bother to name it soon? A Copernican principle insists
there is nothing at all special about Earth’s little corner of universe—

moon stars sunshine everything else …

Yet in our orbit, Neil Armstrong claims he heard the Adhan—the call
to prayer—thus converting. First man bowing from Moon toward Mecca.
Did he think to recheck his horoscope? Astrology is Anthropocentric:

So, constellations appear entirely different anywhere other than Earth
—Pick any moon; Planet that is a diamond; Planet of inaudible hum.
Tethered to this planet of escalating nonsense, I prefer homemade prophecy:

I browse Bibles, pushing pins in random verses, turning scripture into policy.
Call it insurance against a God who seems to be “seeing how things go.”
Personally, I choose to believe I hold death in my pouch—I cannot die.

76
ZOMBI

A screw in my motel room wall bothered me, and I couldn't get it out.
Even after using a t-shirt for leverage, it wouldn’t budge.

Okay, so try a spell— But realize—

You cannot un-turn what you didn’t yourself turn.
It’s no matter that you drove down to New Orleans
to unravel the clothing of the American mind, even
bringing back an apothecary full of what you found—
dedicated to main or minor patron saints of pharmacy.
(No wonder nobody lit the lucky candles you tried to gift.)
Figure that whoever first fixed that screw wasn’t human
and got booted out of every other job there was to have:
a night custodian superhuman or subhuman or wearing
the human face over the body of a void that walks like us.

The screw held in the port of call my great-grandfather would have disembarked—
if they hadn’t pulled him off the slave ships when they culled lepers.

They sent him home, untouchable in the sugarcane, those slavers
moonlighting as missionaries— middlemen of the Middle Passage—

“We want the papaya-and-brimstone Messiah: bush man and a gentleman.
We want that part of the Bible where black people get stoned.
We want our great revival full of high caliber weapons;
Where Jesus looms over high holidays.”

The screw held, and it never occurred to me to just leave it alone
or else become like songbirds trying to make their headstrong way home:

Southbound; Temperate; Warbling
that manageable levels of The South shall rise again …

77
NODUS TOLLENS*
*The realization that the plot of your life
no longer makes any earthly sense to you.

I've been trying to get it down—
what I mean when I think
about Southern Melancholy.
You can see it in our old story charts
or in the radio short about a barefoot boy
who tried to buy his way outta Appalachia
by gathering bloodroot and
selling it a buck a pound.

Here is the Cumberland River.

Here a strain of the heartsickness bubbling
through it, and so through my childhood.
One blackberry winter, I went
behind our apartments and down
the slippery ravine in flip-flops
(…a Blue Ash sapling saved my life…)
just to touch what it was
that flooded and killed twenty:
What, once, when I was seven,
as if to confirm the existence
of a petty personal god,
claimed a neighbor’s porch set,
which I had envied.

The Supercell of 1997 made a Ford-sized dent in our water tower;
10-month-old baby in the cupboard with a cut
the night nature lost her goddamn mind.
We covered our heads with slavery-apologetic textbooks—
Those who knew to hide under underpasses hid under underpasses.

What could have stuck in these hills
to make the Scots-Irish accent drawl out—and twang
like certain strains in certain songs?

78
(Expository music of the same sad stones: foundation of
The Baptist Church. The other churches. That Pentecost.
Tornadoes, several of them, and the last few days of prophecy.
Fleeing the root of rapture. Coming back. Always coming back.
The call of the night collector. The spectre of the Bell Witch.)

To make it more personal, I will elaborate:
Still I don’t know many love songs, yet I learned two names for each tree:
Alaqua—sweet gum. Chinquapin—chestnut. Serviceberry—alemanchier.
And I think it was in a harmonica I first learned that love is nothing like
the myth of grandfathers:

A brewery bottler went to dig for gold in Carolina—
returning against all odds with a band for his bride
and gold futures in baby’s name. Gone three years,
he found every family member he’d left still alive,
and not a single brother in jail.

Love is not like luck, no—Love is more like flying
to Pensacola years later to see that old lover again:
Getting drunk in an airport bar just to cheapen it.
He’d put me to bed like a child in his son’s room:

We’ll talk tomorrow.
Sleep it off.

79
INVOCATION

In that achingly sweet voice, Nina Luckless turns on me.

So she says to me, she says to me, she says:

I wanna hotwire a blue ‘57 Chevy, but just to take it
around the block once before returning it where it was.

Tired of delusion, I say, “That’s oddly specific”—We are driving down Main in her truck.

It’s got 200,000 miles on it and takes a calamity to turn over.
It is the holiday season, so trees dress in pinpricks of light.
They glitter and shatter in a washpoint of starshower.
They surprise. (And now I am afraid.)

Of how her voice turns metallic; Of how her eyes are painted on—

Afraid of murder as a first resort;
extreme cases of the willies;
the lack of any barrier
between Us and Space …

Early warning systems had a very serious influence on the formation of my whole heart.

But what was it my mother always used to say?

Don’t whistle out into the dark; You will surely call devils here—

And what am I doing now but whistling…

80
ANTI-NOIR

SERIES

81
DEATHCENTRIC

City of sinister pattern—pulsing in and out of traffic:
a little give, a little take, and slow cruise past the wreck.
Caught in the throat of a geology made of past people,

decide now whether it’s scared or lethal you need to be.
The type of disaster travelers and transplants volunteer
to risk tells you something about the Soul of that place.

Of many American options, here we remain ready to die
amid the pretty blue flashes often sighted during quakes,
knowing the plates beneath are waiting—willing to shift.

(El Doradan Optimism undercut by fault line.)

For 200 years, colonistas mistook California for an island:
close to Eden, full of gold, ruled by Black warlike women
who tamed griffins and fed them solely the meat of men.

Perhaps we will break off into a true island any day now—
Our home in the universe begins to rock out of all control;
our attempts to manipulate seismic activity may not save us.

Conceive an emergency plan in equal measure to your life:
Stay in bed. Pillows over your face, have faith in manmade
celestial bodies. These final moments will be as ravens…

Wild Ravens That Frolic in Snow Like Children

82
NOLLYWOODLAND

For actresses terrified of aging…

Imagine doing Hollywood with a phobia of light.
Fearing fluorescence along La Brea; shy on Sunset.
Meanwhile, Lucifer—Light Bringer, Morning Star—
seeks whom he may devour.

Despairing of this desert where a defect in scorpions
makes them glow whenever the moon or stars are out.
Then navigating night via dung beetles: They in turn
steer by the imprecise and low light of our Milky Way.

You’re exposed in Technicolor outside every 99¢ store,
unmasked in the just-right yellowing of a haunted motel.
Bright betrayals by art installations; one county museum
and its forest of lamps; Christmas; the bulbs.

Bad energy accumulates in this glossy infrastructure of unluck:
(Vintage & Space Age neons. Chrome & contour of a face).
In unmentionable movie machinery—moonbows or firebows
or alchemies of animatronic light culled from earthly sunrise.

Not ready for your closeup. Scary yet scared in cigar-light.
Even by candelabra, never safe ever. So flee to Nollywood—
to Nigeria’s daily power outages and the mercy in kerosene.
On the Dark Continent, night is coming, when one can work.

The Vatican formally decreed the Death Saint Santa Muerte
blasphemous: so pray to any patron saint of total lost causes.
Pray to sink into tar pits and transform wholly into the fossil
you are already becoming… reemerging eons later…

when you can be
Absolutely Alone.

83
CHAOS MUPPET

1. As a statuette of Mary nodded YES, seizing against the wall
before falling, my mother predicted I would bring fortune:
(80% of divination starts with shit falling to the ground).
If I take advantage of another disaster and disappear,
I’ve fled town to make a new life: Such is a practice
repeated the world over by women disappointed—
by their children or money, their father’s country.
I’ll start over as someone suffering that sadness
of knowing I will never know how history sorts itself out.
In the state where fake IDs remain legal because actors use them;
In the specialized state of exhaustion fueled by senseless violence,

I’m a thin woman, there is a beach, etc.

2. Now then, I become a woman who specifies a return address in prayers:
Jesus es el Señor Bodega, Salon of Anointed Blood, Christ the Bridegroomers.
If prayer can be practical, send a stunt double when I’m hunted or slow.
My “Philosophy of Fear” professor tried to ready me for disaster movies—

Getting scared for the fun of it is our last primal urge.
We have nothing else left to worry about,
No tigers at the mouths of our huts.
What could you do if trouble burst through this door?
You couldn’t fend off a frantic child.
Silly girl.
Flee.

3. GOOD NEWS!

The murder of Kitty Genovese was misreported,
and the “Bystander Effect” might not have basis.
Seeing calamity’s next move, I hit my prey stride.
Cataclysm comes for me... but strangers may help.

84
MURDERABILIA

…and it happens again in every sequel.

Over and over—DARK:
The body count and schlock of horror.
Those at the end of their rope, in turn,
end lives.
It’s just what people do here.

Take a knife… and take a life…

LINE DO NOT CROSS POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS

Jack the Journalist came to expose crime, then killed three prostitutes
in homage to his subject. Of active American serial killers,
see what three-quarters call home and happy hunting—

Lots leading out to nowhere, people all chased off;
Actual ghost towns under a star of doom; Man in his hole by some party store.
In order to move such an audience, you must write coldly:

A parking ticket is not atrocity, no matter how unjust. Setting up in the middle
of bad industry, film crews first hack through the knots of our improperly buried:
Apocalypse with so little prep.

In this subculture of specters, the estimate of unknown murders in history
is our ‘Dark Figure’: Scores whose magnitude we wandered through in a skiffling past
and in the soft-shoe of having plenty more to kill.

85
MEAN WORLD SYNDROME

Something thought to be a cow
sprinkled over commuters. Large groups
of blackbirds slamming into skyscrapers—
lavished over the night sky, way in the West.

How lucky you’d have been to have been there.

A couple of German tourists tell reporters
they’ve come to see the end of this world
—an illness both ancient and futuristic—
That is, the desire to be struck by disaster:
to survive a crash or lose everything in fire.

How is *everything* Hollywood makes so good?

A new game called psychoball.
Bunkers for future
wars in hallucination monoculture:

tidy laboratory
with hint of machine.
Performance art collectives draped
in ghostwear.

Beer labels in end-time themes.

Constant machine machinations of being

methodically crushed.

Even plans for zombie theme parks: abandoned.

Graffiti not making sense, not finished. Old,
bankrupt train station.

Every other thing closed or to be closed. Decay
obsession.

Photo journals: —shot after shot—
of cold blood bed & breakfast.
Skies with twin suns.

Life—& that other thing.

86
HAGIOGRAPHY OF A PILLAR OF SALT

The tourism board of Jordan still searches
for extrusions of salt resembling a particular
fallen woman. Lot’s Wife, she may be called—
or Ado or Edith or the female Orpheus.

In a Metropolis of mercy, god and evil live a mile apart.
A sinful woman is told to flee the city of her addictions
and go where good people go.

She drops dead crossing the exact midpoint of this journey.
Angels and demons bicker in the borderland—one side
complaining she didn’t travel far enough to earn herself:

(So, burn.)

The other faction protesting that the act of going proved
her intentions—as if Salvation must work by proximity,
or Sanctuary as circles of protection defying bureaucracy.

God tells them to measure the precise distances between
Sin City … Her Body … & The Place of Redemption.
(Let’s call this place Los Angeles—for the angels of good.)

Perhaps He made her body fall West,
which is Best. I like to think God extends civic boundaries
out to corpses, in obvious parallel: to suburbia, its sprawl.

The people of paradise and the principalities of hellfire—
Between them, half-lost quarrels with God. Worst of all,
Hell was prepared and waiting before poor man was born.

87
INDIFFERENT PARADISE

In the likely case I die soon in the city first called
El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles,
you can feel superior in that way we do whenever
we hear of an acquaintance dying young.

(Local historians can’t agree on the original name,
but settlers intended angels—that much we know.
Neither can we ever agree on our official saint…)

If I die scuffling in a mixed-income residential hotel,
pray to Christina the Astonishing against insanity.
Or if I die of the usual—light today, dark tonight—
pray to Pio of Stress Relief: martyr of new year blues.

If when I die, I am yet more a saddy than a baddy,
pray to Chad of Mercia—charged to protect losers,
the pre-damned, the disappointed and unsuccessful.
Pray in all cases, against pirate attacks, to Albinus.

If I die in techno-sized unreality; in a social disaster;
in a massive parking lot known for the blasts of dust
terrorizing The Town of Our Lady Queen of Angels,
once very near to the region of Terrestrial Paradise—

where we last heard from the raving-man-ghost,
where celebrities huddle to mourn Marius the Giraffe—
You must remember: To say, “I died in L.A.”
is a different thing altogether than saying, “I died.”

And when the county holds its annual burial
for the unclaimed dead, honoring the 1,379+ individuals
whose remains share a mass grave in our public cemetery,
take care not to mistake me for my body double, then—

unearth me.

88
ADIOS, LA...

Please publicize how I joked with the dead through dance.
If there was kindness involved.
How the melodramatic universe hurt me and must pay.

Memorialize me using cinemagraphs:
otherwise-still photos
in which a minor, repeated movement occurs:

(tiny movement)

(endless loop)

(Tantalusian)

In a single frame:
(me playing with a rose in my teeth)
(welcoming you into the machine of light)

Meaningful graffiti in the background:
<3 sky flowers up in heaven <3
DEATH WILL BE YOUR SANTA CLAUS

Suffer the frustration
of photographing something amazing
knowing thousands of similar photos already exist

&

Wherever I die,
name that place after me—
something loosely translating to:

“death trundling along on a ramshackle purple line, out to Fukushima-tainted waters”

89
MEGACITY

All industry as we set out for Hausaland. Then green and green.
Greening all over the windows—this is the radical brush of Nigeriana.

The Slave Coast highway system gives country towns something to do.
Our “Pearl of Tourism” has a history of gold rush and holy mess.

But if we pass one more “Blood of Jesus Barber Shop,” I’m done.
But if we pass one more thing looking exactly as it should:

—giant moon—big bear of a moon—a frightening loom—

Such extravagant gifts of our Earth-Moon-Sun System:
A happy science. Plus Calamity. Plus Coincidence.

A whole airplane wing—dragged behind a truck one lane over.
Hurt locomotion. Large amputation thing.

(Never seen anything like it: Makes the day.
And then you see another … And another …

Objects are animate—They want to return,
like pilgrims, to the seat of their caliphates.)

We are bound and binding in a substance called Pan-African Fire.
We enter the place of stopped bodies—of water as weapon of war:

Come for white skies... good food... bad blood...

90
INNOCENT NIGERIANA

Returning to a place after 17 years,
after an uncle’s 3
rd
wife bit the ear off
his 2
nd
: a feud that drove aunts to
airport lounges—calling us in England,
asking what shall they do.

The carpet as the same carpet.
The children are like children.

Dogs Pavlov to other language and what
once was a house is now a table of water.

We settle in Illela, on the cold plateau where grow
custard apples and swollen plastic bags full of bacteria:

where frost kills thirty-five chicks in one night.
Among other predator issues—jackal situation, golden caracal fiasco.

The radio-tracked male, tracking. The female hiding carcasses in trees.
A tiny maniac, such as a child.

Flies with their classic behavior of over-involvement.
Men, praying in the umbrage of small mountains—

for wives and their sore throats, for daughters:
girls who belong wholly to their mothers.

At each wedding, a child wears a wedding gown:
the custom of the little bride.

Blue of twilight—only thing like a body of water we’ll see for weeks.

I learn that goats are afraid of thunder.
The eldest butts its head against
the kitchen door trying to break in.

The lesser ones bleat pathetically all night,
wanting to be let inside,
certain they are human.

91
VIOLENCE IS MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

There is a superstition—holding a dying creature in adolescence
will leave the offender with trembling hands for life:
Perhaps some early violence on my father’s part explains
why all the photos of her by his hand are blurred.

The photographs I return to when I feel I could hate my mother—
In here, she scowls from the heat of their Peugeot 405.

I wish there were something else—
images more happily complicated,
curled strings and white spaces,
as in her wedding photos.
I am jealous of my father,
she is young and pretty.

She holds me up to prove how well she’d lined my eyes
with kohl to protect them from the dryness in the desert.
I am a baby with a pink Lamborghini and selfish with birthday cake.
I’m forcefully posed—so, beginning to understand the will to power.

An old boxing ring makes itself a stage, in this one.
She dances in the spotlight—to music she knows
and everyone else knows, but I do not know.
(Her insecurities later condensing into wet
hatred for my father and for America.)

Then she is biting her bottom lip: sad.
A box above her: Orthodynamic Headphones.
A framed poem with words I can’t make out: three lines of what?
Her expression: You’ve made it. So what? You’re old.

I am nearing the age she was then—
The age people compulsively show off photos of parents.
That same age a certain countdown commences:
How many times you will see your parents before they die.

I grew up this way:
one hand in my mouth and the other
on my mother’s breast—until I got too old

92
and she had to fend me off. By ten,
she had broken me.

I used to draw images of her with crayons
in the cleaning closet of the old house—
before they were students, when we were still refugees.
Between the Domestos Thick Bleach and the mop,
I drew her hair as a pentagon.

Once I made three lines.
No one could figure out what they were.
Here she appears in a series of green
and damaged concentric circles.

With a paint chipper, I etched fantasies:
She and I would flash in unison, eyes
looking more and more red and rabbit—
Infernina meaning “little feminine hell.”

Notice attention to detail.
Notice absence of father.

93
DISEASE MAP

It’s about my aunt getting tuberculosis.
Outbreak in her village is Devilry after 1 death—Risk at 10.

You can reduce anything to a number and elevate any number
to a name: Pandemic at 100, when the W.H.O. trucks roll in.

Harbingers of infection are chickens, songbirds, and horses.
In TB cases, the first to die are tiny birds learning to sing

the same way children talk—a process of trying and flailing—
and a fucked-up, un-birdlike song.

Otherwise not much warning, except general wrongness.
Hunger and nausea coupled.

On the disease map,

the wash of pink covering Sokoto State is impolite:
alluding too obviously to swollen gums.

I believe there are lifetime statistics that should be kept
on all of us: How many times disease has saved your life.

My great-grandfather was captured as a slave
and released.

A coastline is an unmeasurable thing.
Depending how close you zoom in to how much detail,

twists and turns can extend any boundary infinitely.
Baba walked a coast, on leprous legs:

so tired his soul was just dragging
its body along on his shoulders—

back

and

back to the ancestry of infection.

94
FOR MY UNCLE
WHO DIED OF AIDS
CONTRACTED AT THE DENTIST’S OFFICE

If he dies during the Month of Brides it is a great shame.

Wash the body 3 or 5 or 7 times: Never 2 or 4 or 6 times.

We see Allah rearranging candlesticks in the starry hall,
creating spectral shapes, undoing them,
and remixing the music of the situation—
in widening circles containing us
in these compulsions as He wonders
which fires He has left un-extinguished.

Who commits to us these instructions?
Your heavenly blameless Father;
prophets amid your earthly fathers;
superstition and blind notion.

Welcome all to the wake—Buddhists; followers after Christ;
those who look up to Chang’e, the lady in the moon
who sweeps her vast cold palace all alone.

Recall small black dogs your mother dreamed of devouring
each other in play near the incense pit, and know:
if there are night visions, there are mystical visions.
There must be a heaven—gods’ birthplace.
Therein resides Allah.

The face must point towards the House of God in Mecca:
those living always walk beside or in front of death.

Into the grave, place no object.

Avoid burial at sunrise, high noon, and sunset.

Allow neither music nor emotional outburst,
for though we surrender our dead to the earth,
forward from it
we shall bring them
once again.

The procedure described above is the only correct.
To Him do we belong and unto Him, our return.

95
OUTBREAK

i

just
had
a really
strange
moment
where
my mind
told me
to tell
your mind—

infection
is a star
that
fell
inside
your
body
:

portal
to a new
half-visual
body-technology

(to transfer
bulk tissue
is surgery—
to shape it,
art)

with broom of purification
here comes Babalú-Ayé
(cripple god)
(our god of cholera)
(of AIDS & influenza)

to score how
well you live
with malady.

96
MEFLOQUINE SIDE EFFECTS SERIES

LARIAM (LAH-ree-am)
Generic: mefloquine hydrochloride

Mefloquine is a medication used to prevent and treat malaria. I take it when I return to
West Africa. It is notorious for inducing serious side effects, specifically psychological
ones: "Some who take Mefloquine will experience sudden yet severe mental problems
including: anxiety, hallucinations, paranoia, distressing dreams, panic, disorientation,
irregular thoughts and irregular behaviors.” Its label cautions: “Do not take Mefloquine
if you have had recent mental instabilities, including depression and schizophrenia—
or if you have lost touch with reality. In some patients, these side effects will continue
long after usage is stopped. Some who take Mefloquine will consider or commit suicide.”

One woman remained in a Mefloquine-induced psychosis for months.

97
HYPERREALITY

1/ We are bound together in a substance called Pan-African Fire.

2/ Butterflies sputter like defueling generators.

3/ We pretend we are mercenary to murder mosquitoes.
One we let get away, for that emotion most like pity
—we thought it already dying—and catch malaria.

4/ The ants so cutesy with their work ethic,
forming a procession to carry a roach corpse
over the troublesome window ledge.
One looks like panic, circling with a wing bit.

5/ I've heard doors make all kinds of sounds, but this one just giggled at me.

6/ Liquor really starts to become the biggest thing.

7/ Everyone has a personal cloud of bacteria floating around them at all times:

8/ a farcical parade of escalating nonsense

9/ a shocking Sabbath carnival of death

10/ soft shuck of everything on Earth

sliding away into space.

11/ Here comes trouble from the trouble people.

12/ Animal walking toward those people.

98
NIGHTMARE

If you assemble it, you will love it: The Ikea Effect.
This even applies to dreams—

An emerging psychiatric practice proposes that scripting
your nightmares while awake could eliminate the worst.

Not everyone agrees it’s healthy.
Now I write nightmares of murders in a small town.

Looking for ideas, when I get my alumni magazine,
I immediately flip back to the necrology.

I read 419 email scams: Made in West Africa, deliberately
implausible and rife with error to attract only the gullible.

I am interested in how dreams spiral—
out from the center, either a little or a lot each turn.

Q: What happens to a nightmare when the official picture of its world
—its cosmology—is incomprehensible to 99.9% of its inhabitants?

A: A victim incurs the wrath of demons
or else is chosen to become their horse.

(But maybe I should stop riling things up—)

Hippasus
was drowned at sea
for theorizing irrational numbers.
That’s seriously all it took.

99
DAYMARE

The first thing the dead might say
when they finally get a chance to respond

is: Sing!

(Terrible singing—terrible songs.)

The dead may be controversial—they may liken us to birds.
Maybe birds should just go a little wild.

Sometimes the spirit-like quality is pleasing and slight—
But every once in a while, I want a little muscle—you know?

I don't yet feel the weight of these enormous birds,
because they're only wings and wings are only light.

Parrots do have a presence.
They have the quality of bad visitants—a dire nature in their speech.
Parrots remember your face—(conspire)—can find you.

A two-inch feather emerges
from a baby girl's neck:

the body internalizes the
flight-coded language of dreams.

100
WHY DOES DREAM LOGIC ALWAYS WORK AGAINST YOU?

That murder may happen. That murder is the first resort.
That you are anticipated by whatever wants to overwhelm you.
That if the witch in bed beside you climaxes—her spells strengthen tenfold.

Occasionally, you will have only a notion of liking the word “songster.”

An infirm crowd peopling this adult education center,
milling around their widowhood and phobia,
and they’re in the latter part of animate life.
Inside they sit—so still—senseless—
the motion-detecting lights turn off.
One night, a disembodied hand comes through
the doorway, reaching for a stack of course evaluations: Lights On.
Monks sit still for the camera when they self-immolate: Lights Off.

Enough Hamletting. In dreams, you need grounding. A setting, that is—
Let’s just pick a cabin where everything runs on fire: couch, dresser, TV.

You will want to tie each desert you’ve seen to another desert you have seen,
knowing water is the same water everywhere. But life is vortex, not rotation:
Our witch is speaking a softening language of flowers—tulips meaning fame.

vulgar minds (marigold). win me and wear me (lady’s slipper).

i declare against you (belvedere).

i wound to heal (sweetbrier).

Now she has her powers in tens—Megastructures of hell grow miniature or masculine—
In terms of risk, the high forest zone of risk—

May flowers throw themselves before your feet
as if the devil is not
and yet

101
RECURRING NIGHTMARE

• snowflakes larger than milk pans
• eight-bedroom disaster mansion
• The Violin of Disgrace
• any upside-down rainbow

You mistake the Gold Coast for an island.
Road trips taken in dreams are different—
Every few miles, a human-related incident,
or Shiva trampling the dwarf of ignorance
and dancing the cosmos into existence.
The Midwest coming for the rest of your life:

What can you do about it now.

• On the radio, another infomercial for Teethfallingout.org

• On your phone, #greenbirds
celebrates the souls of martyrs
nesting in chandeliers hung from the throne of the almighty

• On billboards, 23 emotions we all feel but cannot name:

People are heartening, for example.
People are the actual, valid argument
against their abuses.

Your heart can't really explode. I mean,
I am sure it could.

102
FINALLY, YOU ENTER THE CASTLE OF MENTAL AND PHYSICAL
WELLBEING

Instead—the whitening of a normalized canvas.

(The pale spectaculum in bones.)

The spooky milk of bare wall & boring morning.

(Calibrated to cute.)

False pockets, which are the work of our current devils.

The mind the opposite of ink, as empty shopping cart.
Your cart soon full of God & Good Idea: conversations
about the logistics of lighting up plantations. About mass,

moving graves. About the mega-symptoms of madness
here within the sheer shambolics of a slavery economy,
leading back to a gigantic movement of American Evil.

Somehow, a singing of the good world each sunrise comes…

This we call — “DAY.”

103
ENQUIRY INTO THE LOCATION & NATURE OF HELL

We all know what we think of Vultures.
We did not know they have shadow life:
We are deprived of one or many faculties.

Awaiting the long-promised appearance
of crane-necked and goose-necked men:
War, our only mode of house and home.

How we have to live in the middle stage
of ritual: Meddlesome unicorns register
in the rare class of Things Never to Kill.

Of course, when it comes to animals—
always mistakes are made. Bible-colored
butterfly sets itself down clean on white

floors, no evident trauma, and just dies.
For the 352 active national emergencies,
send help. Prefaced by long fall and fire:

a sky so grey

even the stupid child knows it will rain.
We hum, gamble, break off into cliques.
Today is a day that could go either way...

104
HELL WITH THE LID OFF

A Lagos City Council ordinance says: MOVE!
In response, a caravan of squatters
Crawls 5 inches at a time—up and over—

Then back, just before the break of the hill …
Barely any time to press the gas, and rarely
Any fumes to add to the system of smoke

Breathed out of their sink-pit every night
As they talk about the best ways to live.
These men, these broke men:

Rocking back and forth over the law in a slow cradle.
You could say it’s a dance.
Even better, a study in ice.

The caravan tempts the limits,
Figuring it’s all going to relapse
Into a great pot of refuse, anyhow.

Trash is really just too much now—breaching outer space,
Breaking bits of satellite and slumming over astronauts:
Planet of loam and litter scattering in free choreography…

Trash, even in Antarctica—that cold like a beast.
You wouldn’t think it could hold anything spoiled:
But there’s nothing left clean in the anatomies of the wild.

Nothing staying pure—Nothing staying put—
Even the sacred geometry of the snowflake, when swallowed,
Melts into the rot of gut and bad thought.

105
ILL-STARRED

You ask me: “How will I know it’s you when we meet in a future life?”

Everything is omen and all numbers relevant:
If you pass a man sweeping some entranceway
and your eyes meet

and you have a little flurry of a crush and he feels the same—

That’s me. Showing symptoms of generational curse:
bowlheaded or illiterate until 7, the age of salvation.
Then at the funeral for an enemy of the state: You,

lucky enough to be invited. I might be the cardinal.
I may weigh as much as a thousand lesser nightjars.
You will say you want to talk about God. I will say,

“We’ll get to that.”

Observe a stranger to diagnose virility and politics, how she handles a drink.
Train yourself in those details analysts extrapolate after surveilling prisoners:
Sadists prefer new and sturdy footwear. Inmates hoarding candy? They’re sweet.
Like a crow, identify the animals last seen near your dead as possible dangers.

Then the magnesium of the self,
dark uranium of who I really am:

(Look at me to see a black rainbow of human vice.)

Make a study of this collection of poetry—your primer for our coming iteration:
In the remakes of our lives, we are trapped in molds cast when we were young
and hated ourselves. You will know Me: Mary-Alice, sheepdog of information.
You will recognize me by bushmeat-for-sex behaviors. My classical Unevolvia.

Remember to stay in the present, which is bluegrass and the prospect of violence.

(This is why I can’t fully get on board with reincarnation:
The next thing that always happens is... We are terrible.
Instead of Do Not Resuscitate, we really should propose
this alternate instruction—Please Do Not Reincarnate.)

106
Repeat after me a prayer for no other lives forthcoming:

“I BEG PERMISSION TO RETURN
TO MY MOST FINAL DEATH.
GOOD NIGHT, PLANET EARTH.
GOOD LUCK, HUMANITY.”

107
POETRY MANUSCRIPT NOTES

—The quote “I hold death in my pouch: I cannot die” from “Ode to Our Unnamed Moon”
(line 15) is attributed to the Nigerian musician Fela.

—The phrase “twilight- and night- flying white moths” from “Ode to Our Unnamed Moon”
(line 2) is adapted from an exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles.

—The phrase “Good night, Planet Earth. Good luck, humanity” from “Ill-Starred” (lines 32-33)
is adapted from a message sent by the Chinese Lunar Rover Jade Rabbit.

—The following sources are referenced within the poetry manuscript:

Pool, Bob. “City of Angels’ First Name Still Bedevils Historians.” Los Angeles Times [Los
Angeles, CA], 26 Mar. 2005, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-mar-26-me-
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Raffaele, Paul. “Sleeping With Cannibals.” Smithsonian Magazine, 1 Sept. 2006,
www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/sleeping-with-cannibals-128958913.

Serpell, Namwali. “The Zambian ‘Afronaut’ Who Wanted to Join the Space Race.” The New
Yorker, 17 Aug. 2017, www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-zambian-afronaut-
who-wanted-to-join-the-space-race.

108
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation is a hybrid critical and creative work wherein I present original ethnographic and genealogical research alongside mythology. I begin by providing background context for the historical, political, and social complexities of my native Nigeria, a nation with origins as intricate and multi-storied as my own. My research recounts stories from various traditions that generations of my family have handed down; I conducted this investigation into our heritage through an ongoing oral history project. The span of the first chapter reaches far back into tribal (pre)histories. The nomadic narrative moves to the West and back again to Africa via my impressions of the 憁otherland? (as a place/an idea) formed from journeys returning Back Home. Within these migrations, I relate my research on my indigenous cultures.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Daniel, Mary (author)

Core Title Negrolands: anticolonial aesthetics for the lands of the Blacks

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Degree Conferral Date 2021-08

Publication Date 07/17/2025

Defense Date 05/11/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag anticolonial,OAI-PMH Harvest

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor St. John, David (committee chair), Bridel, David (committee member), Handley, William (committee member)

Creator Email madaniel@usc.edu,maryalicedaniel@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC15613320

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