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My decision to go to the United States of America was a final act of desperation. In my village, Sa’ra, where I had been a schoolteacher until my shocking dismissal, I had initially seen myself as a bearer of light, regardless of the difficulty of doing so in that forgotten village. In Lagos, where I went to live with my father, I had gradually lost my faith in my dear country. I had briefly considered going to England to join my mentor and former principal at Sa’ra, Dr Lookout, but America reasserted the pull that it had always had on me.

At boarding school, we had fed fat on a diet of American movies, especially. Bonanza. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Mission Impossible. Charlie’s Angels. The Godfather. We used to steal out to the Ali Baba Cinema, named after its Lebanese proprietor, to entertain our young minds with the celluloid fantasies of distant worlds. The great nights were when Indian films were on show. Sholay was our favorite. We would go back to school singing and dancing our version of Indian songs. Also great were the Khung-fu films of Bruce Lee and the exploits of the larger Ali Baba. We knew all the actions by heart and could dramatize the dialogues with accuracy. But we kept going back because these films took us from our little corners of the world and transported us to distant spheres in which reality existed only at the summits of the imagination.

Nothing, it seemed, could transcend those heights – except the incomparable American films. For those ones, we did not only dramatize the dialogues, we actually tried out scene re-enactments and took our nicknames from our favorite characters. That was how I became John Wayne II. It was not always easy to earn the privilege of being addressed by the name of any of our favorite stars. There were usually a number of people hankering after the honor and the competing desires had to be settled at the football pitch after “lights out” by refereed contests of

strength. I was unfortunate to have the strongest boy in school also interested in being John Wayne. I was strong enough to defeat other contenders.

Many of us dreamed of going to college in America. For some, especially those with rich parents, the dream eventually became a reality. For others like me, who either had poorer parents or parents who saw America as a land-of-no-return, the dream either developed into a torment or petered out. By the time I got my honors degree, I had outgrown my infatuation with America. It helped too to learn that some of my classmates who did make the great journey ended up doing menial jobs in America’s college of suffering or in prison for crimes ranging from drug-peddling to credit card fraud. One of them was deported from America, tried for a time to settle in Nigeria, and then went off to Saudi Arabia with a cache of cocaine in his abdomen. The last we heard about him was the gory tale of how his head was chopped off, by a public executioner, in Riyadh. After that, I could not think of Saudi Arabia without seeing his severed head rolling down a gaping street.

Although I had almost outgrown my infatuation with America, that passion had become a greater craze nationwide than it was in our Ali Baba days. Now, more people were fighting to go to the college of suffering, as if their lives depended on it, than the college of honors and degrees. Some of my classmates at the university, including Chidi, my best friend, took off for this purpose. Chidi went to Los Angeles and kept trying to excite me into joining him. By the time he moved to New York, two years later, our communication had slowed down to an occasional mail – and soon seized altogether. Sometimes, when my affairs tottered on a precipice, I experienced a small revival of my old longing for this great country, about which Chidi had written: “This place is indeed worth all the struggle to get in.” But such feelings simply bobbed and ebbed, until I spent nearly three empty and emptying years in Lagos. In all that period, I was only employed, as a schoolteacher, for two months – the time it took before my employment was again suddenly terminated as a “statistical error.” The lure of America once more seized me, this time with such potency that I doubted that it would have made any difference if I suddenly got a well-paying job. Chidi had ended his last mail to me with a sentence that had always been on my mind: “Every man of culture must come to America.”

But going to America had become as difficult, even more so, than getting a meaningful job in Nigeria. The number of people plotting to do so was so high that if the visa section of the US embassy were to issue a visa to every applicant, the population of the country, the largest in Africa, would dramatically drop. The compulsion was not only the harsh times that we lived in but also the beacon of a better life that returnees, often visiting during the Christmas period, signaled in their personification of what we understood as the “Great American Dream,” the new language of the globe, the Testament of the never-impossible.

            But the visa section of the US embassy was not at all inclined towards issuing the highly prized visas indiscriminately. The rejection rate was so high that many applicants became strategists, procuring and discarding passports like bus tickets, acquiring and changing identities like peddlers in molue buses, inventing and reinventing stories like the last great raconteurs, and amassing all shades of ‘official’ documents like census bureaus. Sometimes, the most dogged made as many as ten applications, lived ten lives in only a couple of weeks, before finally being certified fit to be admitted into the United Paradise of America. The possibility that that day would eventually come, and the certainty that going to America was a life-changing event, kept them going.

            When I made my decision, therefore, I knew what I would be up against, but I reasoned that it was at least a struggle with the possibility of eventual glory. My father was skeptical, especially because I was uncertain where exactly I was going.

            “So, where are you going to stay in America? We don’t have anybody there.”     

“My friend, Chidi, has been there for five years now. I think he already has a green card.”

“Chidi, the one that married an oyinbo woman? You think he stopped writing you for no

reason?”

            Chidi had written, when he first relocated to New York, that he was getting married to an African-American woman. My father did not particularly care for the distinction.

            “She isn’t an oyinbo woman,” I countered. “And the break in our communication wasn’t entirely his fault. Sometimes, it took two months for his letter and my reply to make the journey to and fro Sa’ra. And I wasn’t as consistent in replying as I should have been.”

            “So, you don’t even know where he is now?”

            “I will find out. I will go to Enugu and get his address from his father.”

            “And then you’ll go and join him, just like that? This world is more complex than that, Etiaba. The farther away you go from home, the more complex the world becomes.”

            “I know life is never simple anywhere, but some places offer more opportunities than others. If Chidi doesn’t receive me well, which I don’t expect, I’ll take my chance on my own. I think he went there himself without anyone’s address.”

            “The way you’re talking, are you sure you’ll ever come back if indeed you go to this America?”   

            “Of course, I will come back.” My father meant so much to me, but I hardly knew then whether I would indeed come back or not.

His consent marked the beginning of my struggle. I made a trip to Enugu to get Chidi’s address. Fortunately, his father knew me well and had looked on our friendship favorably. He was surprised though about the state of communication between his son and me, as much as he was perplexed by the fact that his son kept writing about visiting home without doing so. 

When I returned to Lagos, I sent off a letter to my old friend about the great decision that I had made. When I did not get a prompt response, I sent another letter. Still, no response. It occurred to me then that perhaps he must have changed his address or that his father had mistakenly given me an old address. Once more, I made a trip to Enugu. The matter was too weighty to be discussed on the phone. To my surprise, Chidi’s father showed me a letter he had received only a few days ago from his son, from the same address to which I had sent two letters. Were my letters getting lost in the post office? But why should they? Usually, outbound mails were safe; the ones that were routinely tampered with were incoming mails. To reassure me, Chidi’s father wrote a letter and asked me to send it together with my own. Back in Lagos, I promptly did so, this time sending the letter by courier. A month passed, and still no response.

            Confused, I ran to Leftie, a street-smart childhood friend who now ran a prosperous fraud factory. He would know how someone like me without even a letter of invitation could get an American visa. He did, but he wanted a fee that I could not afford.

            “Look, Leftie, I don’t even have the money for the ticket yet. I don’t have the kind of money you’re talking about. Can you help me as a friend?”

            “This is business, Etiaba. Can you pay half?”

            I could not.

            “How then do you hope to get to America?” he wondered. “I wish I could help, but there are other people to take care of.”

            “All right, can you lend me the money?”

            “Lend money to someone going across the Atlantic?”

            “But people do it, I know. I can pay you back when I start working there.” 

            “That was before, my friend, before Nigerians got even trickier. Maybe you should rethink your decision. America is just a country, my man.”

            “That’s like saying that Mars is just a planet,” I retorted.

            I considered seeking out Malik, a college classmate who had become a much-sought-after prayer contractor, but I did not have any faith in his prayers. Besides, the visa racket, getting bigger all the time, was such that I did not want to turn up on the other side of the world with a fake or celestial visa.

            Dr Lookout came to my rescue. He had been disappointed that I was not coming to join him in England, but he got over it and sent me the address of one of his friends and former classmate whom he said he had already spoken to on my behalf. I presented that address to my father as Chidi’s, and swiftly sent an email to this fellow who was to send me a letter of invitation. He was doing so, he wrote, because he had the highest respect for Dr Lookout, and he hoped that I was worthy of his esteemed friend’s faith in me. “A lot of Nigerians come out here and act crazy, and I don’t want to get caught up in that mess.” First, I was startled, then depressed, but finally I told myself that that must be American-speak, the virtue of a country in which people freely spoke their minds. What mattered most anyway, I chided myself, was that this fellow, Tunde, had even responded at all. My uneasiness did not completely go away though.

            Tunde sent me the invitation letter that I needed. I was almost set for the battle of wills at the visa section of the US embassy. My father secured for me the financial documents that were required, and I was finally ready. I set out for the US embassy one early morning in February. The visa section would not open until seven a.m., but by the time I got there at five a.m., there was already such a crowd that my hope of being interviewed that day began to recede.

It was a waiting theater in full swing, complete with gatemen who made deals with applicants and influenced who got interviewed and who did not; wait-and-take photographers who served those who had put off taking a passport-size photograph until too late or had come with photographs a few centimeters longer or shorter than the precise specification; food vendors who supplied the hungry and the peculiarly frightened with nourishment; traders who sold or rented queue spaces, canopy spaces, benches, even pens; beggars who cajoled the applicants that God would recompense them for seeing to the need of beggars but that the visa section of the US embassy could not be trusted to reward their quest; preachers who spoke of a greater heaven, which no one was interested in right then. I did not have much more than the visa fee, so there was no question of buying a space in the queue from touts who must have stayed in line all night 6

or of bribing the gatemen.

The next day, I came back at three a.m. The day after, at one a.m. On the fourth day, I came at seven p.m. and spent twelve hours in a dead queue before the visa section finally opened for the business of the day. It was in that queue that I began to wonder about America. The embassy itself looked quite neat, but the stench from the gutters outside – and the vicious mosquitoes they convoked – made me wonder. Was it simply that the embassy made a fastidious distinction between its territory and the immediate vicinity? Also, there was the discomfiting notice, almost as big as a billboard: “The possession of a US visa is no guarantee that you will enter the US.” Was this another case of American-speak or a ploy to build a double barrier mocking all the pain of getting into the visa section?

I wondered most because of the story of the man who had spent fourteen years in America, was brutalized and crippled by the police, and subsequently deported to Nigeria. He had erected a shack outside the US embassy, plastered with notices denouncing America as the land of hate. He matched the graphics with a rhetoric meant to destroy anyone’s illusion about America. “Yeah, you’re gonna meet John Wayne in God’s Fucking Country alright, but he’s gonna come at you like a white cop sticking your blackness up your arse. And don’t think for a minute you’re gonna get away with only meeting John Wayne. You’re gonna meet Charlie’s sniffing angels too, only they’re gonna come at your paycheck as the IRS, with the fury of God’s own thunder. And that’s not all, oh no, not by a long shot. You’re gonna meet the Godfather too, only he’ll smile all over you real nice and offer you a deal you’ll never forget because that’ll be his cue to the deportation cowboys called the immigration service.” It was as if he was speaking to me.