It was auspicious, his arrival, a day after she put up her blog and a week after she resigned. Aunty Onenu did not seem surprised by her resignation, nor did she try to make her stay. “Come and give me a hug, my dear,” was all she said, smiling vacuously, while Ifemelu’s pride soured. But Ifemelu was full of sanguine expectations for The Small Redemptions of Lagos, with a dreamy photograph of an abandoned colonial house on its masthead. Her first post was a short interview with Priye, with photographs from weddings Priye had planned. Ifemelu thought most of the décor fussy and overdone, but the post received enthusiastic comments,
especially about the décor. Fantastic decoration. Madam Priye, I hope you will do my own wedding. Great work, carry go. Zemaye had written, under a pseudonym, a piece about body language and sex, “Can You Tell If Two People Are Doing It Just by Looking at Them Together?” That, too, drew many comments. But the most comments, by far, were for Ifemelu’s piece about the Nigerpolitan Club.
Lagos has never been, will never be, and has never aspired to be like New York, or anywhere else for that matter. Lagos has always been undisputably itself, but you would not know this at the meeting of the Nigerpolitan Club, a group of young returnees who gather every week to moan about the many ways that Lagos is not like New York as though Lagos had ever been close to being like New York. Full disclosure: I am one of them. Most of us have come back to make money in Nigeria, to start businesses, to seek government contracts and contacts. Others have come with dreams in their pockets and a hunger to change the country, but we spend all our time complaining about Nigeria, and even though our complaints are legitimate, I imagine myself as an outsider saying: Go back where you came from! If your cook cannot make the perfect panini, it is not because he is stupid. It is because Nigeria is not a nation of sandwich-eating people and his last oga did not eat bread in the afternoon. So he needs training and practice. And Nigeria is not a nation of people with food allergies, not a nation of picky eaters for whom food is about distinctions and separations. It is a nation of people who eat beef and chicken and cow skin and intestines and dried fish in a single bowl of soup, and it is called assorted, and so get over yourselves and realize that the way of life here is just that, assorted.
The first commenter wrote: Rubbish post. Who cares? The second wrote: Thank God somebody is finally talking about this. Na wa for arrogance of Nigerian returnees. My cousin came back after six years in America and the other morning she came with me to the nursery school at Unilag where I was dropping off my niece and, near the gate, she saw students standing in line for the bus and she said, “Wow, people actually stand in line here!” Another early commenter wrote: Why should Nigerians who school abroad have a choice of where to get posted for their national youth service? Nigerians who school in Nigeria are randomly posted so why shouldn’t Nigerians who school abroad be treated the same way? That comment sparked more responses than the original post had. By the sixth day, the blog had one thousand unique visitors.
Ifemelu moderated the comments, deleting anything obscene, reveling in the liveliness of it all, in the sense of herself at the surging forefront of something vibrant. She wrote a long post about the expensive lifestyles of some young women in Lagos, and a day after she put it up, Ranyinudo called her, furious, her breathing heavy over the phone.
“Ifem, how can you do this kind of thing? Anyone who knows me will know it’s me!”
“That’s not true, Ranyi. Your story is so common.”
“What are you saying? It is so obviously me! Look at this!” Ranyinudo paused and then began to read aloud.
There are many young women in Lagos with Unknown Sources of Wealth. They live lives they can’t afford. They have only ever traveled business class to Europe but have jobs that can’t even afford them a regular flight ticket. One of them is my friend, a beautiful, brilliant woman who works in advertising. She lives on The Island and is dating a big man banker. I worry that she will end up like many women in Lagos who define their lives by men they can never truly have, crippled by their culture of dependence, with desperation in their eyes and designer handbags on their wrists.
“Ranyi, honestly, nobody will know it’s you. All the comments so far have been from people saying that they identify. So many women lose themselves in relationships like that. What I really had in mind was Aunty Uju and The General. That relationship destroyed her. She became a different person because of The General and she couldn’t do anything for herself, and when he died, she lost herself.”
“And who are you to pass judgment? How is it different from you and the rich white guy in America? Would you have your U.S. citizenship today if not for him? How did you get your job in America? You need to stop this nonsense. Stop feeling so superior!”
Ranyinudo hung up on her. For a long time, Ifemelu stared at the silent phone, shaken. Then she took down the post and drove over to Ranyinudo’s place.
“Ranyi, I’m sorry. Please don’t be angry,” she said.
Ranyinudo gave her a long look.
“You’re right,” Ifemelu said. “It’s easy to be judgmental. But it was not personal, and it was not coming from a bad place. Please, biko. I will never invade your privacy like that again.”
Ranyinudo shook her head. “Ifemelunamma, your problem is emotional frustration. Go and find Obinze, please.”
Ifemelu laughed. It was what she least expected to hear.
“I have to lose weight first,” she said.
“You’re just afraid.”
Before Ifemelu left, they sat on the couch and drank malt and watched the latest celebrity news on E!.
DIKE VOLUNTEERED to moderate the blog comments, so that she could take a break.
“Oh my God, Coz, people take this stuff really personal!” he said. Sometimes he laughed aloud on reading a comment. Other times, he asked her what unfamiliar expressions meant. What’s “shine your eye”? The first time the power went off after he arrived, the buzzing, whirring, piping sounds of her UPS startled him. “Oh my God, is that like a fire alarm?” he asked.
“No, that’s just something that makes sure my TV doesn’t get destroyed by crazy power cuts.”
“That’s crazy,” Dike said, but only days later he was going to the back of the flat to turn on the generator himself when the power went off. Ranyinudo brought her cousins to meet him, girls who were close to his age, skinny jeans clinging to their slender hips, their budding breasts outlined in tight T-shirts. “Dike, you must marry one of them o,” Ranyinudo said. “We need fine children in our family.” “Ranyi!” her cousins said, abashed, hiding their shyness. They liked Dike. It was so easy to like him, with his charm and his humor and the vulnerability openly lurking underneath. On Facebook, he posted a picture Ifemelu had taken of him standing on the verandah with Ranyinudo’s cousins, and he captioned it: No lions yet to eat me, folks.
“I wish I spoke Igbo,” he told her after they had spent an evening with her parents.
“But you understand perfectly,” she said.
“I just wish I spoke.”
“You can still learn,” she said, suddenly feeling desperate, unsure how much this mattered to him, thinking again of him lying on the couch in the basement, drenched in sweat. She wondered if she should say more or not.
“Yes, I guess so,” he said, and shrugged, as though to say it was already too late.
Some days before he left, he asked her, “What was my father really like?”