A week of apologies

I suddenly felt sick about turning in a piece lamenting the decline of lions when people are being killed daily. It is a feeling I have often struggled with since I started this column not long before Boko Haram began to terrorize the north. With the steady killings it feels wrong to write about anything […]

I suddenly felt sick about turning in a piece lamenting the decline of lions when people are being killed daily. It is a feeling I have often struggled with since I started this column not long before Boko Haram began to terrorize the north. With the steady killings it feels wrong to write about anything else. In the past week since my piece on lions was published, there have been several other attacks: 11 people were killed in an EYN church in Gulak, Adamawa, the Islamic scholar Sheikh Mohammed Awwal Adam in Zaria and his family were assassinated, and 20 were killed in Yobe. The killings escalate every day.
Despite the close links that phones and internet provides, being in America feels a universe away. I fret on twitter about a faulty internet router that means I have to plug my computer into an Ethernet cord rather than receiving internet wirelessly
“Tell me about Boko Haram, Carmen,” people who study Africa say. And as I begin to tell them, I see their eyes glaze over after two sentences. The topic moves on to other things like university politics and job talks and the cold, the abominable cold.
When I ask my students in the introductory African literature course I am helping to teach, the first words they think of when they think of Africa, they give me words like “desert, poverty, suffering, Nelson Mandela, corruption, music, dance.” “I know Africa is a “complex nation,” one student writes. Another talks about a picture of a “tribal boy” in an otherwise well put together presentation on a country in East Africa.
So much is dependent on positionality. I think of Boko Haram, and I talk about Nollywood and “Africa Rising” to these bright and earnest mostly white Midwestern Americans and a sizeable minority of international students from Asia. They tell me on the questionnaires I ask them to fill out that they don’t know much about Africa, but they want to learn. I want them to learn too. I try to explain colonialism and tell them optimistic things I don’t quite believe.
When I am in Nigeria, I critique those who call the fiction of poverty and violence in Africa “poverty porn,” who try to tell writers living on the continent what to write. Yet, in America, it is easier to understand the Afropolitan impulse, the compulsive desire to focus on the Africa Rising narrative by those living outside the continent. Because, there are so many stereotypes, so many one-dimensional portrayals. One wants these bright-eyed American students to see another vision, to understand the depth of history and politics and the reality of the thousands of languages and cultures in Africa, the largeness of the continent to the extent that sometimes the concept of “Africa” only makes sense to those on the outside looking in. To see actual people, not just stick figures in the news.
I try to stay offline to finish writing my dissertation, but it always tempts me back, the internet, where I can find friends in Nigeria waking as I write far into the night. The time difference means, though, that I see more of the posts of friends living in America. We are all so shallow and self-righteous online. Everyone condemning everyone else. “The Internet has revealed, perhaps enabled, spectacular hostility,” an editorial in The New Inquiry posits, “Now everyone is a bully and everyone is a target.”
 “I will write about the need to love all life, this week,” I think. “About how all things on earth are linked—how the destruction of creation on any levels leads to a disrespect that finds its climax in the destruction of human life.” I want to write something beautiful and loving and filled with light and hope, but it all feels so shallow.
As I am writing, I take a break and go online. I follow a link to an article by a British author Alex Preston “Boko Haram: sons of anarchy” about Boko Haram published in the men’s fashion magazine, GQ. It is written for a western audience. I go on a twitter rant, calling it exoticizing and Orientalist.
The tension rages within me. We need more reportage from areas devastated by Boko Haram. We need to hear the names of the dead. We need the same media coverage of massacres in Nigeria that much lesser tragedies in the West receive—the twenty-four hour commentary, not just the 8 word sentence scrolling at the bottom of the screen.
And yet I snap when I see “parachute” journalism. I find it easier to attack the cliches, which are aplenty, than to process the reality of what is happening. Preston quotes journalist Abdulkareem Haruna as telling him in 2013 that “He helped search the warren of underground tunnels the terrorists had dug beneath their base. ‘We found bodies with their hands tied together, their throats cut,’ he told me. ‘Piles of bones; decomposing flesh. On the shelves of the huts, there were jars and containers full of blood that made us think that Boko Haram had cannibalised the bodies. Down towards the river, we came upon shallow graves. It had been raining and as the water flowed over the mud, skulls were exposed.’” He writes too about the civilian JTF, who challenge Boko Haram.
His article, with all its flaws, gives us the words of people who are there.
A few hours after my twitter rant. I want to vomit.
I am right, but I am wrong. I am a critic. This is what I have been trained to do. I take texts apart. But such critique is too easy.
I feel I have been unkind, frivolous.
There are people dying. There are people murdering them. What does language and tone matter when people are being murdered?
It matters, but it doesn’t matter.
Another writer direct messages me on Twitter and tells me not to apologize—she says women apologize too much for saying things that need to be said.
I semi-apologize anyway.
I am angry.
I am sad.
I am far away.
It is not about me.
People are dying and I sit here in America writing about things I do not know.