Migratory Animals (36 page)

The flecks of white would grow. The next puff would blow out bigger ones, real snowflakes that you could see. Snowflakes that, as they passed through the light, looked like real snow in the yellow pool of a streetlamp in a Wisconsin winter. Watching them fly and flutter and fall softly onto the combed heads of her friends, Flannery would almost forget she had no health insurance of any kind. Almost forget about everyone they knew who'd been laid off, about her dying sister, about climate change and the religious riots happening near Kunle's mother's village. About the fact that she had betrayed him. Not forget, but almost forget.

Because when Flannery arrived in Nigeria for the first time, fearful of the chaos and danger she felt surrounded her as she stepped into throngs of people waiting outside the airport fence, it had been nighttime. The consulate driver picked her up, and they pulled onto the highway with military escorts, a lead and follow vehicle, heading into Lagos proper. There was something insane in the image of them barreling down those weaving and washed-out dirt roads in all their conspicuous, glorious first-world splendor. She couldn't imagine what the people they passed must have thought. But she thought they were beautiful. Everything was just as poor and crazy
as she'd expected—plastic tables and oil lamps and people drinking and dancing, selling food, children darting through the streets—but more joyous. Because she'd forgotten to expect joy.

Flannery would continue to watch the snowflakes as they spewed out near the ceiling, before they fell, and she would cry and feel ashamed of the crying. She would see Kunle to her right and allow their eyes to latch together for a moment until the sound of laughter broke the fishing line of their gaze. She loved him. She was exceedingly imperfect and yet she hoped he would still love her back. Forgive her. Have faith that she could change. The snow would feel cool and real as it hit her cheeks. The silo would be gone, and she would suddenly be in the Sahel, a yam farm stretching into the distance.

Flannery would look around at Kunle and all her friends as they stood in the middle of West Africa, covered in the lightest dusting of snow, faces tilted upward to a God most of them didn't believe in and who probably wasn't there. Flannery might stumble under the dizzy weight of the white, cold flakes, but that wouldn't matter. It wouldn't even matter if she fell. She would be home.

About the author

Meet Mary Helen Specht

About the book

The Seed of a Novel

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Photo by Erica Nix

B
ORN AND RAISED
in Abilene, Texas, to librarian parents,
MARY HELEN SPECHT
holds a BA in English from Rice University and an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College, where she won the award for fiction. Her writing has been anthologized and appeared in numerous publications, including the
New York Times.
She has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the I-Park Foundation, and the Dobie Paisano
Fellowship Program, and she has also lived and worked in South America and Africa. Specht currently teaches creative writing at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas. She enjoys live music, traveling by bus, goat pepper soup, elote, snorkeling in Barton Springs, paying for things with coins, receiving postcards in the mail, reading and lolling about in hammocks, hiking, meditating, bumper stickers, and drinking wine from a bota.

Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at
hc.com
.

Adapted from an essay first published in
Bookslut.

Ibadan,

running splash of rust

and gold—flung and scattered

among seven hills like broken

china in the sun.

—J. P. Clark

T
HE SEED OF
M
IGRATORY
A
NIMALS
was planted during my Fulbright fellowship to study West African literature in Nigeria in 2006 and 2007. I'd come to believe that American writers and readers tended to be too insular, mostly reading and writing for a native audience. With this in mind, I embarked on a reversal of the usual migration, choosing to study at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, an institution that many of the literary titans of Nigeria had passed through at one time or another.

In Ibadan there was a canteen called Flavours that served the best melt-your-mouth-off goat or fish pepper stews—the goat soup overflowing with juicy chunks of meat, the fish laid across the bowl from eyeball to tail in triumph. This was one of the many cafés where I came to know a circle of young Nigerian writers and lovers of books.

One evening toward the end of the dry season, clouds flirted with the scorched earth and, as dusk fell on the canteen, we watched dozens of lightning flashes streak the sky, each a slightly different shade of white, blue-white, silver-white: the Yoruba sky
god Sango's fireworks extravaganza. We ordered Star beer or Guinness, pepper soup or
isi-ewu,
flares of phosphorous matches lighting Bensons or sometimes the menthols called White London.

Earlier that day the writer Rotimi Babatunde and I had been invited to speak to our friend Kunle Okesipe's students. (My character Kunle is not based on this real-life Kunle—they merely share a cool name.) I'd shown up at Kunle's school in the Eleyele district of Ibadan to discover that by “his students” he hadn't meant the students in his English class but the entire secondary school. There was no auditorium or microphone, just two hundred teenagers lined up in a field with rows marked off by white stones. We stood above them on a concrete slab. I yelled about what it was like growing up in West Texas, about writing what you know while also imagining yourself into the lives of others. Writers need empathy first and foremost, I remember saying, repeating what other writers had once taught me.

During the Q&A, the Ibadan kids were unforgiving. I'd figured they'd want to know about the United States, but they were more interested in stumping me: What is the difference between prose and fiction? How many different types of poetic meter are there? Can you define hyperbole?

At Flavours that night, I asked Kunle what the students had to say later about our “speeches.”

“They thought Rotimi was more arrogant than you,” he said. “And some people”—he laughed—“were confused as to how your parents could possibly be from Liberia.”

Despite my attempts to speak slowly and enunciate—I knew from experience my American accent would be difficult for the students to understand—I hadn't anticipated the phrase “my parents are librarians” might cause such confusion.

“They thought Mary Helen was less arrogant than I was because they only understood every third word she said.” Rotimi wasn't fat but spherical—a jolly pastille—and he spoke quickly, with a slight stutter, frequently interspersing his words with laughter. He was the most successful of our literary circle, having already had several of his plays staged in London, along with awards from numerous international fellowships like the MacDowell Colony and the Rockefeller Foundation.

“Or maybe it's because the superior can afford to be self-effacing,” I replied.

“See, the Liberian isn't arrogant at all.”

The students at Kunle's school never asked me why I'd come to Ibadan to immerse myself in African fiction, because they knew there was no city on the continent with the charmed literary history of their hometown. It's a city that, while virtually unknown in the States, played such an important role in the emergence of English-language African literature that I was inspired to
move there after graduate school in the same way writers used to swarm the
quartiers
of the Left Bank.

My first encounter with Nigerian fiction: holed up in a bone-chilling Boston winter, I was drawn into Ben Okri's novel
The Famished Road,
a frenetic, meandering novel of magical realism in which the “scumscapes,” where a boy named Azaro lives in abject poverty, are permeated by the dazzling images and machinations of the spirit world. I learned that the title
The Famished Road
alludes to a poem by Wole Soyinka (which is, in turn, indebted to a proverb): “The right foot for joy, the left, dread / And the mother prayed, Child / May you never walk / When the road waits, famished.” I had to find a way to get there.

In Robert M. Wren's
Those Magical Years: The Making of Nigerian Literature at Ibadan: 1948–1966,
he avers that no other university town in the world has “produced a similar cluster of distinguished authors.” There are dozens of renowned writers (Flora Nwapa, Elechi Amadi, Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare, Remi Raji, and many more) who at one time or another have made their way through Ibadan, but the four heavyweights to whom Wren alludes are Wole Soyinka (playwright/poet/novelist/biographer—Nobel Laureate), Chinua Achebe (whose
Things Fall Apart
adorns high school and university reading lists everywhere), Christopher Okigbo (the modernist
poet who died tragically in the Nigerian civil war), and J. P. Clark (known primarily as a poet, though he wrote a number of plays, one of which was first directed by Soyinka and involved the live sacrifice of a goat). Even two of the biggest names in African literary criticism had come out of Ibadan: Biodun Jeyifo and Abiola Irele.

As an anthropologist passing through town on research told me once: “In the Ibadan of the '60s and '70s, everywhere you went, literature was in the air.”

The British established University College in Ibadan, or UCI, in 1948 as one of three full-scale institutions of higher education in Africa to confer degrees from the University of London. One purpose of this program was to educate an African civil service elite as part of Britain's policy of “indirect rule.”

UCI became the University of Ibadan after Nigeria's independence from Britain in 1960 and attracted talent regionally and globally. The city of Ibadan was also the hub of West African publishing, and it was there in the late '50s that the German Ulli Beier and South African exile Ezekiel Mphahlele started the literary magazine
Black Orpheus,
encouraging an African literature built on indigenous models rather than British ones. Today, the publication's list of authors reads like a Who's Who of anglophone African fiction and poetry.

In May 1967, months after a bloody coup led by a northern Nigerian military
faction, the eastern part of the country, calling itself Biafra, seceded, igniting a civil war that lasted almost three years and left hundreds of thousands dead. The war scattered the Nigerian writers—Achebe, Okigbo, and Gabriel Okara went east to support the breakaway state, while others, including Soyinka and J. P. Clark, remained on the federal side. Clark once remarked that the war dispersed “atoms that should have collided to make a nuclear charge.”

By the time I arrived at UI, extreme financial straits—precipitated by a series of kleptocratic governments—had led to perennial strikes, overcrowding of classes and residence halls, the almost total lack of laboratory equipment or texts, and the crumbling of infrastructure. From the moment I stepped on campus—via a back road because strikers had blocked the front gate—it seemed obvious that Ibadan's “magical” years had long ago rung down the curtain.

The classrooms were stifling, despite the open windows flanked by frangipani trees; there was rarely electricity to run fans or computers. And there was the problem of books—where to find them, how to afford them. The collection in the library was old and most volumes devastated by the tropical heat. The selection at the two decent local bookstores (in a city of over a million people) was not much better: Who was going to spend the equivalent of two weeks' worth of food on one novel?
Most of the graduate students passed around photocopies and abandoned the idea of keeping up on the latest scholarship. Even if they had the money, it was near impossible to order journals or books online without a credit card, or to convince international websites they were not just another Nigerian scammer/prince-in-distress.