Next month, my Nigerian family will gather in the United States for a wedding – or at least those lucky enough to get visas will. My cousin Ogechukwu, who works in a bank in Abuja, went to the American Embassy there a few weeks ago, and came out in tears. The visa interviewer did not once look at the documents she had so carefully assembled. Not once. She was told, “You don’t qualify” in an arbitrary fashion that did not bother to hide its arbitrariness.
As I write this, I have just spoken to my baffled brother, Chuks, our family clown, who is a legal resident of the UK, is married to a British citizen, has two children and owns a business and a home. He had gone to the American Embassy in London to renew his visa and was told he did not qualify because the visa interviewer thought he would stay on permanently in America. He gaped at the visa interviewer and pointed at his two-year American visa, just about to expire, with which he had travelled to Florida, Georgia, Michigan and Connecticut in the past two years. If he had plans of illegally staying in America, he would have done so already. The interviewer said, sharply, “This interview is over!” My brother was certain that the interviewer simply did not like Nigerian passports. Nigerians, after all, have a reputation for being alarmingly adept at different kinds of fraud.
I have many stories of travel on my own Nigerian passport. The immigration official in Copenhagen was convinced I was a prostitute, for example, because there had been a recent influx of Nigerian sex workers into Denmark and I was travelling alone on a Nigerian passport. I have learned to laugh at these stories, and to use them as dinner party anecdotes. Of the people who will potentially interview me at embassies and airports, I always hope that they haven’t fought with their lover that morning, that they don’t have a headache or a bad back or PMS, and that they have never received one of those poorly-spelled bank advance e-mails from a Nigerian pretending to be a government official because in my experience these, even more than whether I have the proper documents, will determine my luck.
Years ago, my mother, who had visited the US in the past, was inexplicably refused an American visa to attend my sister’s wedding; it was not at all likely that the mother of the bride would become a dependant of the American state as she had a good, long-term university job in Nigeria and her daughter worked as a physician in America. Her mouth still tightens whenever she looks at photographs from the wedding.
It is no doubt a difficult job to have to deal with so many visa applicants, some of whom must be obnoxious, but that a person can, by doing their job so poorly, cause the kind of aching sadness that has great emotional significance in people’s lives requires a greater sense of responsibility in some visa interviewers.
In the endless American public debates on how to handle illegal immigration, much has been made – and rightly so – about how important it is for immigrants to apply the right way and “get in line.” Perhaps immigration reform should also involve looking at the realities of that line, and should ensure that visa issues to people from countries on the economic periphery of the world are not based on the caprices of the visa officer but instead follow clear rules. Talk about one way to bolster America’s soft power.
My family spent our first US holiday in California in 1985. My professor father had taken on a short teaching appointment and my mother and all six of us children joined him for the summer. I was awed by America: tomatoes the unnerving size of apples, cans of soda miraculously rolling out of vending machines, lots of cheap shopping.
Of all the clothes, shoes and books bought for my brothers Okey, Kene and me, the favourite was a Michael Jackson jacket, a “pleather” replica of the red and black one he wore in the “Thriller” video. Back home in Nsukka, the small Nigerian university town where I grew up, that jacket caused a sensation.
My friends wanted to wear it for a few minutes, to touch it, to try the moonwalk wearing it. My brothers and I wore it insistently, even after the cold Harmattan winds ceased. Slowly the plastic leather crumbled and peeled. The red dulled, became mottled, took on an unsightly dark-grey shade.
I was sad reading about Jackson’s death – sadder still thinking of the many sadnesses of his life – and I remembered that jacket, how it represented an elemental celebrity, inspiring both pity and awe, of a kind we may never see again. I wish now that I had not joked so often about how he went from a nice-looking black boy to an odd-looking white woman.
In two weeks, I will be speaking at the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference in Oxford, otherwise known as TED. I had heard good things about past conferences, how inspiring and eye-opening they were, especially the one held two years ago in Tanzania. Still, only days after I accepted the invitation, I began to wish I hadn’t. The idea of having something insightful and potentially world-changing to say in 18 minutes – the time allotted for each speaker – seemed less and less reasonable. Then I began to wish I had done something tangible and pragmatic that I could talk about, such as building a school.
Instead I will talk about the importance of stories. And things have become even more daunting now as I have just been sent a heavy tablet of faux-stone from the conference organisers, with “The Ted Commandments” written in Biblical script at the top. Thou shalt not commit obfuscation. Thou shalt not murder PowerPoint. An American friend, who spoke there some years ago, said I had to start practising my speech. I have not. I feel a little wary of being over-practised, because it reminds me of memorising difficult bits of science in primary school and then promptly forgetting it all after blanking on a single word.
I’m dipping into Tim Weiner’s history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, a fascinating account of the agency and its tortuous entanglements in the world. I am amused to learn that the CIA funded tiny literary magazines in the “third world” to keep them from going “red.” I am tempted to write a letter to Leon Panetta, the present CIA director, to ask whether the agency might consider, as an homage to cold war days, making a donation to Farafina Trust, a nonprofit literary organisation recently started by Muhtar Bakare, my Nigerian publisher, and me.
Our first event, a free creative writing workshop sponsored by Nigerian Breweries, takes place in September in Lagos. We have big dreams of building libraries, of reinvigorating writing and reading. Nigeria does not have a reputation as a nation of readers. Yet I often see, particularly in small towns such as Awka and Nsukka, people clustering around a vendor’s table, reading magazines and newspapers they cannot afford and hoping to finish before the vendor loses his patience.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s story collection ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ is published by Fourth Estate
