When the lights go out in America and other thoughts on the last day of 2013

Suddenly, I hear my mother say, “Uh oh!”I feel ashamed of lazing in bed so late, so I get up and go to the bathroom to wash my face. But when I flip the switch to turn on the lights, nothing happens. I toggle the switch on and off, but there is nothing but darkness. […]

Suddenly, I hear my mother say, “Uh oh!”
I feel ashamed of lazing in bed so late, so I get up and go to the bathroom to wash my face. But when I flip the switch to turn on the lights, nothing happens. I toggle the switch on and off, but there is nothing but darkness. I turn to my mother. “Did NEPA take the light?” I ask.
Whenever I first arrive in America, I feel a need to complete activities before the light goes off—ironing, printing, computer work, even though I can count on one hand the times I have experienced the electricity go off in America. It is a subconscious urgency that can linger for years. When I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, while attending the university, sometimes I found myself trying to hurry up and put my clothes in the washing machine, before NEPA struck. Although the urge usually fades with time, I have to sometimes audibly remind myself that the electricity is here to stay. The previous night, my mother was looking for a plug near her chair so that she could use her laptop. “Just use your battery,” I said. “You can always charge later. You don’t have to worry about NEPA here.”
I think of what I told her the next morning as we sit in dimness, grey light from the overcast morning filtering through the windows, the electricity here in America most definitely also off. I realize how helpless Americans are when the lights go out. In Nigeria, though I never had a generator, I invested in a rechargeable inverter and battery that would run my laptop, small inkjet printer, and a few lights. As long as I have a couple of hours of charge a day, it gives me over ten hours of power. Internet modems enable me to go online even if there is no electricity. I can manage pretty well, unless there is no NEPA for twenty-four hours, in which case I have to start going about begging my neighbours to let me charge my laptop and phones.
In America, however, I realize, as the house gradually begins to chill, that without electricity, there is no heat in the house. There is no stove to cook with. There are no battery powered lights, though my sister does have a few decorative scented candles scattered about. As we are dependent on a wireless router plugged into the wall for internet, there is no internet to check the news whether this is a local issue or just our house, and even if my sister had a radio instead of depending on internet and television for news, there is no electricity to power it. With my sister gone to work, we don’t even know where the surge breaker is so we can check.
It is great to live in a place where electricity is constant. It makes possible the comfortable American lifestyle and an economic environment where businesses, small and big alike, can thrive. But the constancy of light also means that when it does go off, most Americans don’t know how to cope. Fortunately, although it is cold outside, we are in the southern state of Florida where the cold is manageable by layering clothing and piling on blankets. If we are desperate we can drive somewhere. But when Hurricane Sandy hit the northeastern coast of the United States in October 2012, thousands were left without electricity in their homes for weeks, facing life without heat in below freezing temperatures. (This is also a condition faced constantly by the homeless who live on the streets. Life for those who fall through the cracks in a wintry America is a truly miserable existence.)
This time, however, by 7:58am, only eight minutes after it had gone out, my father goes outside and sees maintenance workers checking the lines. They tell him that the whole apartment complex has gone down, probably because a squirrel has crossed the lines. By 8:13am, after only about twenty minutes, the lights are back.
***
When we first moved to Nigeria in 1988, we would call America once or twice a year. We had to go to the NITEL office and yell into a phone at a phone booth for the ten or fifteen minutes that we could afford. When my great grandmother died, our family in the U.S. sent us a telegram that took a week to arrive. Over the past twenty-five years, the communications revolution has shrunk the world more than any other time in history. As opposed to the week that it took us to learn about my great grandmother’s death in the late 1980s, in December 2013, my father was able to sit for hours on the internet phone Skype with his family in the hospital room where his mother was dying. He was able to speak to her one last time, after calling her over Skype every night for the past few years.
The other day I sent one of my friends in Nigeria a text from my American phone and a few hours later, after getting my text sent to her Nigerian phone, she called me from Dubai. Over the holiday season I have received dozens of Christmas and New Years messages. (Thank you to everyone. If I haven’t responded it is because it is difficult to text back using my Nigerian phone.) Around noon on New Year’s Eve, we speak with my brother who is currently in Capetown, for an hour or so over video Skype. While we shiver in sweaters in an overcast wintry Florida, he is in the midst of summer in South Africa, complaining about how his hotel room does not have an air conditioner. Chatting about the differences between the northern and southern hemispheres, one of us mentions how water goes down the drain in a different direction in the two hemispheres. I have heard it is an urban legend, but my father insists that it is true. We decide to conduct an experiment on webcam. My brother fills up the sink of his hotel room in Capetown, and we fill up the sink of my sister’s bathroom in Florida. Placing a toothpick on the surface of the water, we both slowly lift the stopper and the toothpick in our sink in Florida spins clockwise, while the toothpick in Capetown spins counter clockwise. There it is in real time—we can see the difference over video Skype. We are separated by half of the earth, attested to by this geographical phenomenon, but it is as if we are in the same room.
After my brother, who is eight hours ahead of us, finally hangs up as the sun dips behind Table Mountain, my mother and I drive to a few local stores to do last minute shopping for the big Christmas meal we are planning to cook a week late on New Year’s Day. As we pull into a car park, suddenly on the car radio, we hear spoken the words, “northern Nigeria.”Here, as we sit in an American Wal-Mart parking lot, preparing to go into a warehouse-like store where you can buy just about anything, we hear news of Boko Haram and Borno State, names twisted almost incomprehensibly in the American accent of the newscaster.
The world which only an hour ago was shrunk to the size of a living room suddenly seems very big again. I feel so far away. I look out at the large metal shopping carts left haphazardly in empty parking spaces of the asphalt car park. They are large enough to hold a homeless person’s entire life. We are hours away from 2014. I shiver in the cold.