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America. We
celebrated the changing of the seasons with a barbecue. The kids love
things that come off the grill. We had hamburgers, chicken, hot dogs
and steak. I cooked the steak the way my American foster parents taught
me; introduce the meat to the fire enough to race the blood juices in
the steaks to medium rare glory. And like their American forefathers
and foremothers I fed my children bloody strips of meat hot off the
grill.

They loved it, the little carnivores, Oh yes and the corn and
the plantain. They loved the corn but were indifferent to the
plantains, big bananas they called them. Change is hard. In America. We
live in a land where people with strong opinions stuck deep in the
rigid ways of the land devise engineering experiments that dream of
mixing the rich, vibrant colours of our humanity into a cloying palette
of meaninglessness. The result deceives and lulls the senses away from
where the real communities are. Subversively people are forming
neighbourhoods a la carte. Here in America, I don’t know my physical
neighbours and I don’t care. If I need a cup of salt I will order it
online. Long live the Internet! The spirit lives on my monitor screen.

There is a yard
sale down the road, past the blonde kid manning the lemonade stand.
They sell used languages and broken cultures and my people come in
broken trucks to buy tee shirts and dying books that will go to die in
Africa. Buy one get a free hot dog. And some lemonade. I bought shadows
of our former language and the owner of the hot dog stand gave me a hot
dog some ketchup and some mustard and I said Hola! America wishes to
sell Africa’s carcass to my grandchildren.

Welcome to the new world,
say hello to Babylon, the ultimate blender, mixing little bits of truth
with gallons of lies, mixing skin colours to produce virtual vitiligo,
mixing sexes and sexuality to produce nothing. America, take our
children, these rejects from the indifferent gods of the land of my
ancestors. They stumble through the land of their birth, these brand
new warriors, pants at their knees, knees rubbed raw from worshipping
the gods of the dollar. They speak in the funny accents of the
masquerades that raided my father’s yam barns in his sleep and they
mock me, scandalise me behind misty veils of nuances and insincere
platitudes. And we ask you, father, we ask you mother: What have you
done? See what you made us do? Did you not say: Go to America, they
will like you over there? America has snatched our offspring from us
and like a hungry hyena, made away with our jewels dangling merrily in
her steel jaws. Here in America, we see our children, they don’t see
us.

What the eyes see confuses and aggravates our anxieties. Looking
away in sorrow, I shudder at the past, hug my son and hold him close.
He is only eleven years old. I remember my chores as an eleven-year old
boy – splitting firewood, getting water from streams, going to the
market, baby-sitting fellow babies, and maneuvering my way around
adults sporting dark, dark issues. Oh Nigeria. It was not always
suffering.

There was some smiling – through the tears. Oh Nigeria. You
should see my little son, he is every inch the spitting incarnation of
our ancestors; every cell of his, every muscle, every attitude, that
face. Oh that face, may our enemies never catch up with him at that
junction that houses ethnic cleansers, he would not stand a chance of
survival. But hear him speak; watch him eat; he is an American, no ifs,
no buts about it. Goddamn it, he is an American.

What have we done? My
friend, she lives in Nigeria, her daughter goes to school here in the
United States. The other day, as she listened to her daughter speak in
her new “perfect American accent” she broke out in grateful song to her
Lord Jesus Christ, she clapped, hooted and hollered with joy, her
daughter’s vocal cords had been liberated from the tyranny of that
“igbo-made” accent that followed her like an unwanted guest from
Nigeria. She will throw a big owambe party to celebrate the blessed
event – the graduation from the shame of our being. I shall invite you
to the party. We are living witnesses perhaps to our own irrelevance
because we are not managing change well.

It is our turn perhaps to be
hunted, captured, skinned alive, kept alive long enough to supervise
the annihilation of what stands, what once stood, for us. For, even as
the world browns, we have ensured that this is still not our world.
First, we will let them bake us into willing caricatures, and then they
will kill us off. Have a glass of lemonade. And a hot dog. Do you want
fries to go with your hot dog? Here, have some mustard; it gives your
hot dog some taste. Welcome to our America.