Known and Strange Things Read online

  By the time I leave at the end of November, I have shot and developed more than eighty rolls of film. Back in New York, I examine what I have: almost enough for a book, but not quite. I begin to plan a trip back to Switzerland: I want to revisit Basel and Zürich. And how can I leave out St. Moritz or Sils Maria? I long for these places as though I were a doppelgänger of those long-ago mercenaries. Just a few more days, a few hundred more photographs, and out of the whole pile of thousands, I’ll be able to select the eighty that will go in my book. Fernweh: a sickness, a longing to swallow up the Alps or to be swallowed by them.

  July 2015. Late afternoon. A hotel room in Zürich. I’ve been out shooting all day and have made no good pictures. I remove my lens cap. I’m shooting with a Canon Elan 7 now, a lovely lightweight film SLR from around 2000. I pivot the camera on its tripod. Covering the front of the freestanding wardrobe in the room is a picture of a ship on a lake, beyond which are mountains. You could wake up suddenly at night in this room and, seeing that lake dimly lit by a streetlight, imagine yourself afloat: the slightly vertiginous thrill of being nobody, poised in perfect balance with the satisfaction of having, for that moment, a room of your own.

  I face the wardrobe. I open the windows behind me and increase the camera’s exposure setting slightly. A black lamp, gray striped wallpaper, the wardrobe, a foldable luggage rack, black light switches, a brazen handle on a black door. Arrayed like that, they look like an illustration in a child’s encyclopedia. This is a door. This is a ship. This is a lake. This is a mountain. This is a room to which you long to be away, a room redolent of fernweh. This is a man in a room, crouched behind the camera, readying his shot, far away from home, not completely happy, but happier perhaps than he would be elsewhere.

  Home Strange Home

  IN NOVEMBER 1975, when I was five months old, my mother took me home from America to Nigeria. My father completed his MBA and joined us a few months later. Growing up in Lagos, I began to invent memories of my place of birth, the small college town of Kalamazoo, Michigan. There was evidence in the form of photographs from those first months, and I had my American passport (pine green in color), a squeaky rubber puppy I’d played with in the cradle, and stories from my parents. I convinced myself that I could remember our one-bedroom apartment, on Howard Street. I even had a memory of the room at Borgess Hospital: it was just after five in the afternoon, and some Nigerian friends of my parents were there. I was born by cesarean section. The nurse pronounced me a “gorgeous Borgess baby.”

  In Lagos, I was a regular middle-class Nigerian kid. My first language was Yoruba, and I had Nigerian citizenship from birth. Yet I was also an American, the only one in the family—a fact and a privilege that my parents often alluded to. I didn’t dwell on it. I tried to wear it as easily as I could, like someone who is third in line to the throne: aware of extravagant possibilities but not counting on any particular outcome. From the age of ten or eleven, when political arguments with other boys at school became a part of life, I took the side of America. When classmates insisted that the Russians had a superior nuclear arsenal, I pitied them their nonsense. During the Olympics, I rooted for the USA, Nigeria being unlikely to win anything anyway. And at home my father spoke of NASA and Silicon Valley as though they were natural future steps in my progress.

  In the 1980s, Nigeria went from being the hope of Africa to being a poor and perpetually tense place. Inflation dragged most Nigerians into poverty. In 1990, in Liberia, the dictator Samuel Doe was tortured and killed, and a horrifying civil war began in that country. Who was to say that Nigeria wouldn’t go the way of its West African neighbor? “If that happens,” my parents said, almost in unison, “we’ll just drop you off at the American Embassy. You will be airlifted from there. Americans never abandon their own.”

  My parents meant this seriously. I loved their insouciance about it, and rehearsed the scenario in my mind: Nigeria in flames, my parents handing me over through the embassy gates, me in a helicopter rising over Lagos. Later, I would find a way to return and save my trapped family. The American passport (renewed, and by this time a dark blue) was the ultimate get-out-of-jail card.

  War never came. We faced a slower disaster: a corrupt ruling class, crumbling institutions, armed robberies, bad universities, despair. When I graduated from high school, my parents gathered up their savings and decided to send me to college in the United States. We considered various places, but I was destined to end up in the one town they knew and trusted: Kalamazoo. I arrived in the fall of 1992, and for the first two weeks I couldn’t understand the language, which seemed to be an accelerated version of English, with bizarrely flattened vowels. “Mop” was pronounced “map”; “map” was “mep.” It was equally difficult to make myself understood. I did know about The Cosby Show, MTV, and baggy pants. I had anticipated something of the liberty and recklessness epitomized by sixteen-year-olds who drove their own cars (and I was soon to exercise my own liberty by choosing to be an art historian instead of an astronaut). But I was astonished by the Phil Donahue show, by how little sense of shame people seemed to have; and I was more than astonished by the black-white divide.

  The journey to Kalamazoo seemed like a journey of return, the opposite of exile. A direct flight from Lagos to JFK, followed by a daylong train journey across the Midwest, had brought me to the town where my parents were married, the town where I was born and baptized. I had no anxiety about legal documents. Picking up my Social Security card was an afternoon’s errand. I got a job at McDonald’s, and banks gladly loaned me money for college. But, my first evening on campus, as I wandered around in what seemed like intolerable cold, it suddenly struck me that everyone I loved on this earth was almost six thousand miles away. I was flooded with panic, like a young boy in a helicopter being pulled away from all he’d ever known. Seventeen years of invented memories abandoned me. A sob ascended my spinal cord.

  That evening, I began to invent new memories for myself. These new memories were all about the home I had left to come back home: what I had liked about that other life, and what part of it I was happy to be rid of.

  The Reprint

  IT WAS A small village in southern Germany. It was a summer’s day. From an old turreted tower, on the green hill that was separated from the village by a sluggish river, the sound of bells negotiated the afternoon. I was drowsy in that carillon sound, looking out a window that framed the hill, and it seemed as though the sound came from all the green hill and not just its tower. Then the window suddenly shuttered, and I woke up in a darkened room in Brooklyn. The bells continued a few seconds more, until I reached across to the dresser and silenced them. The clock said 5:00. I had gone to bed with my mind on James Baldwin: somewhere, he tells the story of traveling into a small Swiss village that had never seen a black man. In the strange logic of dreams, Switzerland had become Germany, and Germany had dissolved into Brooklyn on the morning of November 4.

  I padded around the house so as not to rouse my wife. I made the last of the coffee her uncle, a kindhearted Jesuit in Pune, had sent us, and prepared the things I was taking to the polling place with me: ID card, camera, voter registration. I returned to the bedroom and asked my wife for whom I should vote. Flipping her pillow round to its cooler side, more or less still asleep, she said I should return home immediately should Obama lose. She feared riots; but it would be unlike me, she knew, to avoid one.

  It was still dark when I stepped outside the house. The first faint pink traces of daylight were beginning to smudge the sky above the park opposite our place. I walked up to Sixth Avenue, then the six short blocks to Fiftieth Street. The neighborhood, through which I had walked countless times in daytime and at night, was different at first light. There was a light coating of frost on the cars, and the houses had a Georgian aspect, an air of Bloomsbury gentility. On each block, I saw one person or two, out early, sober and fitted for the yards of work. Two East Asian women rolled a cart across the street, fussing over its load: aluminum cans that t
hey had spent the night collecting and sorting into large bags. The women were as habituated to the hour as I was a stranger to it.

  The polling station, a high school, had just opened. There were five or ten people crowding at the door, but each showed a registration card and was swiftly ushered in by the uniformed police officers. I smiled when I saw the name tag of one of the officers. I said, “Florida. That’s an auspicious name on a day like this, Officer.” It was 6:10 A.M., and he was not in the mood. Voting was easy: antiquated-looking levers and knobs, which I soon figured out how to work. The poll workers outside argued in Chinese. I voted straight Democratic as planned, except for where I had the choice to select Working Families. I was done in five minutes: it felt like something accomplished, something weighty, and also like some stubborn pride finally released. I was part of the system now. I was moved to see the hall filled with my neighbors, at this hour, some of them with young children, pursuing that vague ideal called civic duty. When else, I tried to remember, would people willingly gather like this without the promise of entertainment, religion, or money? By the time I came out of the building, day had fallen fast, light had spread across the sky. I walked through the quiet streets, picked up some breakfast rolls at the Mexican panaderia, and headed back to the apartment.

  I lay in bed and was soon asleep. A text from Siddhartha woke me up at 10:00: “It’s a beautiful day. The ancestors are smiling.” It felt true. I switched on the television, looked at early voting reports on MSNBC and CNN, but that all felt false, and I switched it off. I intended to head out later, and I decided to pass the next few hours in solitude and silence, bracing myself, trying not to admit to the nervousness I felt about the outcome of the election. Later, making lunch, I read some sections of Derek Walcott’s long poem The Arkansas Testament. I heard in my mind’s ear the troubled and beautiful rhythms, heard a meditation on being present to a place and unwelcome in it. I caught my breath especially sharply at some lines late in the poem, lines that seemed exact to the moment:

  And afternoon sun will reprint

  the bars of a flag whose cloth—

  over motel, steeple and precinct—

  must heal the stripes and the scars.

  In the late afternoon, when I finally left the apartment again, my neighborhood in Brooklyn was quiet. There were no signs of the absorption and jitteriness that seemed to have seized hold of me and many of my friends. It was business as usual: the men lounging outside the minicab office, the Dominican restaurant, the Mexican remittance agency. The day, warm for the time of year, had been overcast and was now beginning to darken. I took the N train to Union Square, to pick up a lens for my camera. Walking down Eighteenth, sometime around 5:00, I felt the strangeness of time, the way one sometimes does. Soon, I knew, there would be some kind of permanent change in the collective psyche. And yet, at that precise moment, it was still hovering out of reach, this knowledge we all hungered for, like a cookie jar stashed on a high shelf. Time was like an expert card trick, a bait and switch invisible to the naked eye. I saw quiet anticipation in the faces that blurred past me in both directions. In the elevator of the camera store, a FedEx deliveryman was speaking to one of the employees. He said, “I just don’t think that was necessary.” The employee said, “It was funny though.” The FedEx guy shook his head. “No, it was cruel. She already made a fool of herself, all by her own self. No need for prank calls.”

  He was muscular and short-statured. Outside, next to his truck, I asked him if he thought Governor Palin would return in 2012. “I don’t think so,” he said, “they’ll use her and toss her away. Anyway, it’s not my problem.” But did the elections hold any special significance for him? “I’m thirty-seven years old,” he said, “I’ve never voted before. I’ve been waiting my whole life for this, for the opportunity to vote the way I did today.” A large statement, but more astonishing because of how common it was. It was true for me, too, in a way. I thought I had strong rational reasons for having opted out of all the elections for which I’d been eligible since 1992. But something not strictly rational was responsible for the pragmatic turn now in my thinking. Something had driven me to the polls that hadn’t been there before. If I still prided myself on being skeptical of mass hysteria, I had added to it something else: the idea that participation, rational or otherwise, mattered. I had voted not because my doing so could change the outcome, but because voting would change me. Already, like a mutation that happens quietly on a genetic level and later completely alters the body’s function, I could feel my relationship to other Americans changing. I had a sense—dubious to me for so long, and therefore avoided—of common cause. And not only with the millions of strangers who had pulled levers, filled in sheets, and touched screens that day, people like the black FedEx guy, but also with particular public figures, living and dead, like James Baldwin, John Coltrane, Philip Roth, and Carolyn Heilbrun, as well as with personal friends in the city and elsewhere. Assorted characters who had in common only the accident of citizenship. I was a part of what they were part of, in a new way.

  This edifice threatens to collapse under its own weight. All these generalizations and self-contradictions are part of the empty rhetoric I hate about politics. Can those quickly flipped levers really mean so much? Don’t I basically prefer things that have no meaning? The conflict was present in my mind as I got back on the train and headed midtown, to Rockefeller Center. My spiritual practice, to the extent that I have one, takes seriously the idea that one should avoid false refuge. The idea that change, in its most elemental form, could come from without was offensive to me. And yet, I felt different for having sullied my pristine record with partisanship. I felt healthier. That was the nub of the thing: I had been trying to stay pure, to have the correct idea, and had made the best the enemy of the good. Now voting for Obama, in spite of my strong objections both to some of his ideas and to much of the system in which he functioned, was a declaration, mostly to myself, that we participate in things not because they are ideal but because they are not.

  Rockefeller Center was wretched. In the maze of underground passages leading up from the subway to Forty-Seventh Street, there was a large glass-fronted shoeshine place. I saw four pink-faced men seated in a row, and four red-jacketed brown-faced men stooped over cleaning the shoes on their feet. Then came the plaza itself, brilliantly lit, full of tourists and hawkers, and, in one section, television broadcasters. The ice rink was being prepared as a giant map of the country. Around its rectangular perimeter was an unbroken rank of American flags. Red and blue lights played over the flags, and onto the skyscrapers around, and the effect was like the toothache one gets from chewing ice. Mascots in donkey or elephant costumes mugged for photos, and workers on scaffolds put the names of the presidential candidates into place. What was it that was damaged in my brain, that reading a Caribbean poet on a grim journey made me feel more American, but a flag-filled funhouse of a city block provoked me to anger? I walked away from Forty-Seventh, onto the Avenue of the Americas, northward, alongside the solid and unblinking many-eyed bank buildings, until I came to Central Park South and Fifty-Ninth Street, then west to Columbus Circle, which was desolate and rather beautiful. I put Nayyara Noor’s “Aaj bazaar mein,” a ghazal written by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, into my iPod. I went into the subway and took the A train.

  Harlem was where I would find whatever it was I was looking for tonight. In “The American Dream and the American Negro,” an essay he published in 1965, Baldwin had noted the following:

  I remember when the ex–Attorney General, Mr. Robert Kennedy, said it was conceivable that in forty years in America we might have a Negro President. That sounded like a very emancipated statement to white people. They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard. They did not hear the laughter and bitterness and scorn with which this statement was greeted….We were here for four hundred years and now he tells us that maybe in forty years, if you are good, we may let you become President.

  Forty years put u
s at 2005. This was year forty-three, around 8:00 in the evening, and the result was still in doubt. The Harlem-bound A was peculiar. Never before, on countless trips between 59th and 125th, had I seen so many white people on it. It was one of the simplest anthropological gestures in the city: entering a train and seeing who gets on and gets off where. The A train, the D, the 7 to Queens: folks generally went with their own kind. The mass exodus of Chinese at Grand Street, the Indians in Jackson Heights, the Poles and Russians in Bay Ridge. On most days, there’s nothing but black people at the 125th Street stop. This evening I saw blond white boys in Obama shirts, russet-haired, pale-skinned women with camera equipment, and Asian hipsters in skinny jeans. My disappointment deepened, not on the bus across from St. Nicholas to Lenox, which was all black, but at the Lenox Lounge, which, for the evening, seemed to have been taken over by white people with expensive-looking Canons and Nikons. A man with a large video camera marked with a Reuters sticker wandered around, getting footage of the few locals in attendance.

  My mood soon improved, with the arrival of a Sugar Hill lager, and my dinner: catfish stuffed with shrimp, and a side of collard greens and yams. Some friends I had arranged to meet soon arrived, as did more local color. These latter I searched for signs of “laughter and bitterness and scorn,” but things had perhaps changed since Kennedy’s prediction. The dominant registers were deep seriousness and muted festivity. Before long, more than half of the people in the bar were African American, some dressed for the occasion in Afrocentric clothes. The man from Reuters had by then wandered off in search of blacker pastures. The television was set to CNN.