Migratory Animals (37 page)

During my first month in Nigeria, I arrived early for a seminar and pulled out a ratty paperback to read. Everybody's heads swung in my direction. Where did you get it? Can I borrow it? Can I make a copy of it? Books were valued in Ibadan in the way one values something hovering on extinction.

And yet Ibadan's important history of nurturing authors—though the facilities and intellectual support were remnants of what they once had been and the newer generation composed of what Jeyifo called “the unfortunate children of fortunate parents”—still inspired. There was the echo of myth. Of barely lingering magic.

When I got together with my Ibadan literary crew, we shared works-inprogress and argued over politics; we told bad jokes and drank too much Star beer; we sometimes left the canteen with our arms flung over each other's shoulders in affection.

I would tell Kunle I'd enjoyed his play about the pompous professor, but I thought the ending, where he threw a woman in a wheelchair up against the
wall, might be taking things too far. They would critique my retelling of the Handsome Man folktale, where a village woman follows a handsome stranger into the bush only to discover he's a spirit who borrowed his human parts. In my version, the handsome man was a white woman.

“I think your dialogue in pidgin was okay,” said Rotimi. “But you need to make the bird a parrot. In Yoruba tradition the parrot is always the gossipmonger.”

In the fog of beer and conversation, we could almost forget that the world had changed, Nigeria had changed, and literature itself had changed. My friends sitting across the table were the inheritors of Ibadan's past, for better or for worse.

On one of those nights, I tramped back behind the canteen to piss in the only bathroom available, the gully. There, tucked into the cuff of my jeans, was a lone firefly winking against the backdrop of denim. And I remember thinking:
These days, even in this decaying city during these decaying times, are sometimes magical, too.

On my return to the States, I lived alone on a Texas ranch for the Dobie Paisano Fellowship and continued writing about Nigeria with the goal of completing a creative nonfiction book. Several essays from this stage were eventually published, including “How Could I Embrace a Village” in the
New York
Times.
I didn't want to portray Nigeria one-dimensionally, when in reality it is a country with rural huts and modern houses, dirt roads and concrete flyovers. I had notebooks full of descriptions from my time living there, and I combed through them, looking for details that would do the most work to reveal the country's complexity.

However, along the way, the book changed on me. I became less interested in writing about what
was
and more interested in writing about what
if.
During this time in Texas, I was also watching the economic recession ravage people, many of whom were well educated and hardworking, people who'd always expected adult lives at least as successful as those of their parents. And I was thinking a lot about place while living at the ranch, and I wondered, what if an American woman felt she'd finally found her place in West Africa but wasn't allowed to stay? What if she returned to a homeland in trouble? I was a fiction writer by training, so I shouldn't have been surprised when the
what if
s pulled me back in and
Migratory Animals
was born. I am grateful for it.

I
N WRITING ABOUT
N
IGERIA
, I've struggled with the question of whether it is possible to write, as Edward Said asked, about “other cultures and peoples from a . . . non-repressive and non-manipulative perspective.” This is a question I explore in my online essay “The Challenges of Writing Global Fiction,” and I'm still not sure I can answer it fully; however, I
think
there is an opportunity for writers from the developed world to write about the developing world in a way that is productive, especially when these writers use the opportunity to explore their own privilege and maybe even culpability. That said, it is almost impossible to entirely escape being part of the “Western gaze” when writing about other cultures. I believe the most important action writers and readers can take to ameliorate this situation is to support—by reading, reviewing, promoting, assigning to our students—international fiction written by nonwestern writers. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discusses in her amazing TED talk, the danger is perpetuating a “single story” about any given place. If there is a multiplicity of voices, native and nonnative, writing about a country or culture, then there isn't the same pressure to provide some impossible “objective” viewpoint. The beauty of fiction, after all, is in the opposite, in its subjectivity and ability to refract the world through many prisms.

To this aim, I encourage everyone to explore the diverse and brilliant array of Nigerian authors easily available at local bookstores. If you're unfamiliar with Nigerian literature, here are some good places to start: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beautiful tour de force
Half of a Yellow Sun
tells the story of the Biafran civil war through multiple points of view, from the Nigerian to the Western, the powerful to the powerless. In the memoir
You Must Set Forth at Dawn
by Wole Soyinka, revel as this very public intellectual and Nobel Prize winner holds up an Ibadan radio station at gunpoint for not broadcasting correct election results and runs into the daughter of Nigeria's most infamous dictator at Wimbledon, among other adventures. While less canonized than his more famous
Things Fall Apart,
my favorite Chinua Achebe novel is
Anthills of the Savannah,
which is set in a postindependence unnamed African state where the educated protagonists must confront the question of whether it's possible to live good lives in a country where corruption and oppression are the norm.
Political Spider and Other Stories,
edited by Ulli Beier, is culled from the pages of famed Ibadan literary magazine
Black Orpheus,
and the stories are by many of the best writers of Nigeria's independence era, including Ama Ata Aidoo. If you're looking for more Nigerian fiction writers from this “golden” period, consider exploring
the work of Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Femi Osofisan, and Amos Tutuola; if you're interested in more contemporary stories and novels, try reading Rotimi Babatunde, A. Igoni Barrett, Teju Cole, Helon Habila, Chinelo Okparanta, and Ben Okri.

Huntington's disease entered as a thread in my novel when, while driving to visit my parents, I heard Charles Sabine, the former war correspondent, speak on NPR about his family's experiences with the disease and his difficult decision to get tested. I knew about HD already from studying the life of Woody Guthrie, but I was particularly moved by this radio piece. It got me thinking about how Huntington's disease, inherently a horrific situation where children watch their parents die slowly from symptoms that they have a fifty percent chance of inheriting, is a twisted and magnified version of what we all go through on some level: watching our parents age and die, knowing that, in a way, we are watching our own futures. If you're interested in learning more about Huntington's disease, I encourage you to listen to Charles Sabine's story on the NPR website. In addition, I was aided in my research on this topic by Alice Wexler's
The Woman Who Walked into the Sea: Huntington's and the Making of a Genetic Disease
as well as her more personal
Mapping Fate: A Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic Research.
Huntington's disease is also a very
powerful thread in Joe Klein's excellent biography
Woody Guthrie: A Life.

Two other nonfiction books that I used in researching this novel were
The Noonday Demon,
a moving and informative book on depression by Andrew Solomon, and
The Bedside Book of Birds,
Graeme Gibson's beautiful anthology of literary and visual representations of birds throughout history and myth.

T
hank you to my secret agent Emily Forland, who championed this work with such enthusiasm; to my insightful, discerning, and patient editor, Emily Cunningham, and the rest of the HarperCollins family; to everyone who read early versions of the manuscript, especially Dalia Azim, Sarah Bird, Dave Brice, Ellen Garcia, Jessica Grogan, Charlotte Gullick, Erin Hamilton, Margo Rabb, Dawne Shand, Tyler Stoddard Smith, Kirk Walsh, Amanda Eyre Ward, and Chris Zarate; to my teachers, particularly Pamela Painter, who taught me how to enter the “House of Guns”; to my students, who allow me to see the world through their eyes; to everyone who touched my life in Nigeria, especially Rome Aboh, Wole Adeleke, Rotimi Babatunde, Chris Bankole, Mr. Clement, Tariye Isoun Gbadegesin, Ayobami Kehinde, Sam Krinsky, Kunle Okesipe, Kathy Okpako, Toja Okoh, Ayo Olofintuade, Josiah Olubowale, and Krystal Strong; to my wonderful family and friends, especially Josa and the Chezmarcs, who sustained me with beer and tacos, sofas to sleep on, incredible loyalty and warmth, and who “let” me mine from their lives.

I am deeply grateful to those individuals who aided in my research for this novel: climate scientist Dr. Kerry H. Cook from the University of Texas's Jackson School of Geosciences; the talented weavers Ann Matlock and Patricia Day; neurologist Dr. Sunil Cherry; and especially, Leslie Morris, Annie Murray, and the others from HD
families who shared their stories with me. Any errors or misrepresentations are my own. The Fulbright Program, the Dobie Paisano Fellowship, the I-Park Foundation, and St. Edward's University all helped make this work possible with their generous gifts of support. Thanks also to the Austin Public Library.

Most of all, I thank my parents, Alice and Joe Specht, who, with offbeat grace and humor, gave me everything.

Cover design by Gregg Kulick

Cover background art © Shin Tukinaga/Getty Images

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MIGRATORY ANIMALS
. Copyright © 2015 by Mary Helen Specht. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Title page art by Tristan Tan/Shutterstock, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Specht, Mary Helen.

  
Migratory animals: a novel / Mary Helen Specht.

pages cm.

ISBN 978-0-06-234603-2 (paperback)

I. Title.

PS3619.P4365M54 2015