Americanah

“But I believe miracles totally work? I know my aunt was cured of cancer in her church?” Doris said.

“With a magic handkerchief, abi?” Zemaye scoffed.

“You don’t believe, ma? But it is true.” Esther was enjoying the camaraderie, reluctant to return to her desk.

“So you want a promotion, Esther? Which means you want my job?” Zemaye asked.

“No, ma! All of us will be promoted in Jesus’ name!” Esther said.

They were all laughing.

“Has Esther told you what spirit you have, Ifemelu?” Zemaye asked, walking to the door. “When I first started working here, she kept inviting me to her church and then one day she told me there would be a special prayer service for people with the spirit of seductiveness. People like me.”

“That’s not like entirely far-fetched?” Doris said and smirked.

“What is my spirit, Esther?” Ifemelu asked.

Esther shook her head, smiling, and left the office.

Ifemelu turned to her computer. The title for the blog had just come to her. The Small Redemptions of Lagos.

“I wonder who Zemaye is dating?” Doris said.

“She told me she doesn’t have a boyfriend.”

“Have you seen her car? Her salary can’t pay for the light in that car? It’s not like her family is rich or anything. I’ve been working with her almost a year now and I don’t know what she like really does?”

“Maybe she goes home and changes her clothes and becomes an armed robber at night,” Ifemelu said.

“Whatever,” Doris said.

“We should do a piece about churches,” Ifemelu said. “Like Esther’s church.”

“That’s not a good fit for Zoe?”

“It makes no sense that Aunty Onenu likes to run three profiles of these boring women who have achieved nothing and have nothing to say. Or the younger women with zero talent who have decided that they are fashion designers.”

“You know they pay Aunty Onenu, right?” Doris asked.

“They pay her?” Ifemelu stared. “No, I didn’t know. And you know I didn’t know.”

“Well, they do. Most of them. You have to realize a lot of things happen in this country like that?”

Ifemelu got up to gather her things. “I never know where you stand or if you stand on anything at all.”

“And you are such a judgmental bitch?” Doris screamed, her eyes bulging. Ifemelu, alarmed by the suddenness of the change, thought that perhaps Doris was, underneath her retro affectations, one of those women who could transform when provoked, and tear off their clothes and fight in the street.

“You sit there and judge everyone,” Doris was saying. “Who do you think you are? Why do you think this magazine should be about you? It isn’t yours. Aunty Onenu has told you what she wants her magazine to be and it’s either you do it or you shouldn’t be working here?”

“You need to get yourself a moisturizer and stop scaring people with that nasty red lipstick,” Ifemelu said. “And you need to get a life, and stop thinking that sucking up to Aunty Onenu and helping her publish a god-awful magazine will open doors for you, because it won’t.”

She left the office feeling common, shamed, by what had just happened. Perhaps this was a sign, to quit now and start her blog.

On her way out, Esther said, her voice earnest and low, “Ma? I think you have the spirit of husband-repelling. You are too hard, ma, you will not find a husband. But my pastor can destroy that spirit.”

CHAPTER 50

Dike was seeing a therapist three times a week. Ifemelu called him every other day, and sometimes he spoke about his session, and other times he did not, but always he wanted to hear about her new life. She told him about her flat, and how she had a driver who drove her to work, and how she was seeing her old friends, and how, on Sundays, she loved to drive herself because the roads were empty; Lagos became a gentler version of itself, and the people dressed in their bright church clothes looked, from far away, like flowers in the wind.

“You would like Lagos, I think,” she said, and he, eagerly, surprisingly, said, “Can I come visit you, Coz?”

Aunty Uju was reluctant at first. “Lagos? Is it safe? You know what he has been through. I don’t think he can handle it.”

“But he asked to come, Aunty.”

“He asked to come? Since when has he known what is good for him? Is he not the same person who wanted to make me childless?”

But Aunty Uju bought Dike’s ticket and now here they were, she and Dike in her car, crawling through the crush of traffic in Oshodi, Dike looking wide-eyed out of the window. “Oh my God, Coz, I’ve never seen so many black people in the same place!” he said.

They stopped at a fast-food place, where he ordered a hamburger. “Is this horse meat? Because it isn’t a hamburger.” Afterwards, he would eat only jollof rice and fried plantain.

It was auspicious, his arrival, a day after she put up her blog and a week after she resigned. Aunty Onenu did not seem surprised by her resignation, nor did she try to make her stay. “Come and give me a hug, my dear,” was all she said, smiling vacuously, while Ifemelu’s pride soured. But Ifemelu was full of sanguine expectations for The Small Redemptions of Lagos, with a dreamy photograph of an abandoned colonial house on its masthead. Her first post was a short interview with Priye, with photographs from weddings Priye had planned. Ifemelu thought most of the décor fussy and overdone, but the post received enthusiastic comments, especially about the décor. Fantastic decoration. Madam Priye, I hope you will do my own wedding. Great work, carry go. Zemaye had written, under a pseudonym, a piece about body language and sex, “Can You Tell If Two People Are Doing It Just by Looking at Them Together?” That, too, drew many comments. But the most comments, by far, were for Ifemelu’s piece about the Nigerpolitan Club.

Lagos has never been, will never be, and has never aspired to be like New York, or anywhere else for that matter. Lagos has always been undisputably itself, but you would not know this at the meeting of the Nigerpolitan Club, a group of young returnees who gather every week to moan about the many ways that Lagos is not like New York as though Lagos had ever been close to being like New York. Full disclosure: I am one of them. Most of us have come back to make money in Nigeria, to start businesses, to seek government contracts and contacts. Others have come with dreams in their pockets and a hunger to change the country, but we spend all our time complaining about Nigeria, and even though our complaints are legitimate, I imagine myself as an outsider saying: Go back where you came from! If your cook cannot make the perfect panini, it is not because he is stupid. It is because Nigeria is not a nation of sandwich-eating people and his last oga did not eat bread in the afternoon. So he needs training and practice. And Nigeria is not a nation of people with food allergies, not a nation of picky eaters for whom food is about distinctions and separations. It is a nation of people who eat beef and chicken and cow skin and intestines and dried fish in a single bowl of soup, and it is called assorted, and so get over yourselves and realize that the way of life here is just that, assorted.

The first commenter wrote: Rubbish post. Who cares? The second wrote: Thank God somebody is finally talking about this. Na wa for arrogance of Nigerian returnees. My cousin came back after six years in America and the other morning she came with me to the nursery school at Unilag where I was dropping off my niece and, near the gate, she saw students standing in line for the bus and she said, “Wow, people actually stand in line here!” Another early commenter wrote: Why should Nigerians who school abroad have a choice of where to get posted for their national youth service? Nigerians who school in Nigeria are randomly posted so why shouldn’t Nigerians who school abroad be treated the same way? That comment sparked more responses than the original post had. By the sixth day, the blog had one thousand unique visitors.

Ifemelu moderated the comments, deleting anything obscene, reveling in the liveliness of it all, in the sense of herself at the surging forefront of something vibrant. She wrote a long post about the expensive lifestyles of some young women in Lagos, and a day after she put it up, Ranyinudo called her, furious, her breathing heavy over the phone.

“Ifem, how can you do this kind of thing? Anyone who knows me will know it’s me!”

“That’s not true, Ranyi. Your story is so common.”

“What are you saying? It is so obviously me! Look at this!” Ranyinudo paused and then began to read aloud.

There are many young women in Lagos with Unknown Sources of Wealth. They live lives they can’t afford. They have only ever traveled business class to Europe but have jobs that can’t even afford them a regular flight ticket. One of them is my friend, a beautiful, brilliant woman who works in advertising. She lives on The Island and is dating a big man banker. I worry that she will end up like many women in Lagos who define their lives by men they can never truly have, crippled by their culture of dependence, with desperation in their eyes and designer handbags on their wrists.

“Ranyi, honestly, nobody will know it’s you. All the comments so far have been from people saying that they identify. So many women lose themselves in relationships like that. What I really had in mind was Aunty Uju and The General. That relationship destroyed her. She became a different person because of The General and she couldn’t do anything for herself, and when he died, she lost herself.”