By Ifetayo Ayodele
There is a Nigerian superstition that sometimes wears the clothes of common sense: bring your spouse from home. The reasoning is usually straightforward. Somebody from Nigeria will understand our culture, respect family values, know how to greet elders and understand why an uncle you have never met suddenly has an opinion about your marriage. There is also the belief that a Nigerian living abroad who is single is somehow less marriageable than one who is brought from Nigeria. America, in this arrangement, becomes part of the matchmaking process. “He is in America.” “She lives in America.” “He has his papers.” “She works in healthcare.” “He has a house.” Somewhere between “he has a house” and “she is in America”, character sometimes disappears from the conversation. This is the territory Olukorede Yishau enters with his new novel, ‘Black Market’.
The title itself is clever. It is a translation, or transliteration, of the Yoruba expression “Oja Okunkun”, a phrase sometimes used to describe marriage. A dark market. A place of transactions. A place where, perhaps, you do not always know exactly what you are buying. That is quite a title for a novel about two Nigerian couples in Houston whose marriages are entangled in family pressures, secrets, betrayal, trauma, ambition and the peculiar complications of life in America. But the more I think about the title, the more I think Yishau may have stumbled into something much larger than the marriages in his novel. He has stumbled into one of our national habits: our tendency to confuse location with character. We do it with jobs. We do it with education. We do it with wealth. We do it with marriage. A man becomes more attractive because he lives in Texas. A woman suddenly becomes a better wife because she is in London. Someone who could not raise a decent conversation in Lagos is described as “doing well abroad”, as though immigration has rewritten his personality. A man who was irresponsible in Nigeria is expected to become responsible after landing at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Apparently, the immigration officer is also a character-development officer.
This is what makes Yishau’s intervention interesting. He says he began thinking about the story after moving to the United States about five years ago and observing the long-standing practice of Nigerians abroad returning home to find spouses. The reasons are familiar: cultural compatibility, shared traditions, family approval and the belief that people from home make better spouses than foreigners. There is also the assumption that a single Nigerian already living abroad somehow does not make as good a spouse as someone who can be brought from Nigeria. Yishau, however, noticed something that should not require a novelist to tell us, although perhaps it does: bringing someone from Nigeria does not necessarily guarantee a good home. Marriage has never respected international boundaries. A bad marriage in Nigeria is still a bad marriage. A bad marriage in Houston is still a bad marriage. The difference is that Houston may respond to that bad marriage differently.
There is another matter here that Nigerians do not like discussing enough. We have turned migration into a national mythology. For decades, the Nigerian dream has been exported as an American dream: leave, get there, work hard, send money home, build a house, buy a car, bring your family, post the Christmas photographs and repeat. What we do not often discuss is what happens between the photographs. There is loneliness, cultural dislocation, marital strain, parenting pressures, financial obligations, the burden of supporting relatives and the pressure to look successful. There is also the fear of admitting that things are not working. The Nigerian abroad can become a performer, because everybody at home must believe he is doing well. After all, he is in America. How can somebody in America complain? This is one of the cruel jokes of migration. You can be broke in America and still be considered rich in Nigeria. You can be lonely in America and still be told how lucky you are. You can be struggling in America and still be asked when you are buying land. You can be drowning and somebody will call to ask when you are sending school fees. And if your marriage is collapsing, please do not mention it. The family has already announced that “our brother abroad” has made it.
Yishau does not, however, set out to lecture anybody, and that is important. He says he does not write to moralise. He wants to present his characters “in their flawed glories” and leave readers to make their own judgments. Good. Literature should not behave like a Sunday sermon. The novelist should open the door and let us look inside, and then allow us to argue about what we saw. There will certainly be arguments about ‘Black Market’. There will be readers who sympathise with one character and despise another, while others will change their minds halfway through the book. Some will see themselves in the characters. Some will see their neighbours. Some may even close the book and call somebody. That is when fiction has done something useful. It has stopped being merely a story and has become a mirror, even if the person looking into it does not particularly like the face staring back.
Because the questions Yishau raises are not small ones. Has bringing spouses from Nigeria actually produced better marriages? Have these marriages escaped the ordinary troubles that confront every other marriage? Does someone who cheats in Nigeria become faithful merely because the plane lands in America? Does a violent person become gentle because the address changes? Does somebody who lies in Lagos suddenly discover honesty in Houston? And what about the person being brought over? Does she know why he really wants her? Does he know what she really expects? Are both people entering the marriage for the same reasons? Or is one person looking for love while the other is looking for companionship, immigration, family approval, financial security or simply an escape from Nigeria? These are uncomfortable questions, but uncomfortable questions are sometimes the ones worth asking. Yishau says he wants readers to decide what they make of the story, and perhaps that is exactly the right approach because there is no single explanation for why marriages fail. People enter marriages with different histories, expectations, wounds and ambitions, and sometimes those differences remain hidden until the wedding photographs have faded and ordinary life begins.
There is also a warning here for those dreaming of migration. America is an opportunity. It can provide education, jobs, security and possibilities that may be difficult to find elsewhere. But it is not heaven, and immigration is not a magic eraser. Whatever you refuse to confront in Nigeria may follow you to America. Your habits will travel. Your temperament will travel. Your insecurities will travel. Your unresolved childhood wounds may travel. Your bad relationship with money will travel. Your inability to communicate will travel. Your temper will travel. Even your mother-in-law may travel, if she has the visa. The new country can give you a new address, but it cannot automatically give you a new character. This is why the idea that importing a spouse from Nigeria will automatically produce a successful marriage deserves scrutiny. The country where the spouse was born may tell you something about culture, but it tells you very little about the person you are actually marrying.
None of this means that Nigerians should stop marrying people from home. There are thousands of successful marriages that began with exactly that arrangement, and it would be unfair and intellectually lazy to suggest otherwise. The point is that geography should not be mistaken for character. A Nigerian passport does not certify good character, just as an American address does not certify good character. A green card certainly does not come with a marriage guarantee. Love, compatibility, honesty, emotional maturity and mutual respect remain stubbornly old-fashioned requirements, no matter which airport you arrive through. Perhaps that is the bigger conversation ‘Black Market’ should provoke. We need to stop selling migration as a cure for everything. If Nigeria worked better, Yishau argues, fewer Nigerians would leave simply in pursuit of the mythical “greener pastures”. People would still travel, of course. They would go to study, to work, to explore, to join spouses and pursue opportunities. But desperation would not be the principal travel agent. That is a national issue, not merely an immigration issue. A country that loses millions of its young people because they believe their future begins only after departure should be asking itself difficult questions. Why are they leaving? What are they running from? What are they hoping to find? And what happens when they discover that the new country has its own problems waiting at the airport? Perhaps that is why ‘Black Market’ is such an apt title. We often enter marriage with information we do not have, assumptions we have not tested and expectations nobody has discussed. We enter migration in much the same way. We buy the dream and discover the price later. Sometimes the most expensive things we carry across the Atlantic are not the things in our suitcases. They are the things inside us.
Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).
