Cultural Narrative

Victor Olorunfemi
Prof. Okonta
Discourse
February 18, 2016
Cultural Narrative Essay: Continental Transition
It was March 2006 and I was 8 years old and a few months away from turning 9, my family and I had just stepped out of the airplane after landing in Indianapolis, Indiana and proceeded to enter an American airport for the first time after a 10 hour flight from France that was preceded by a flight from Nigeria. My family, consisting of seven would later continue and take our third and final flight that would take us to Wichita, Kansas, but for now, finding a place to urinate was far higher on my list of priorities. It did not occur to me then, but my quest to find a place to urinate would later stand as the first in a long list of subtle cultural changes that would lead me away from the culture of my home country. Today I am 18, and I have spent about 9 years in the United States and in Nigeria, so which country do I identify with more? Have I betrayed the culture of my homeland? The events that followed after I left my home soil are one that produces a stimulating answer.
The flight from Nigeria to France was a strange one as it was my first time on an airplane, but surrounded by people of the same color and culture, I had no problem finding the courage to move about the airplane and use the restroom as I pleased. Now contrary to popular beliefs that exist in the United States, there are restrooms in Africa, with closed doors and toilet bowls and everything you would find in an American restroom. For reasons unknown to me, in Nigeria, the term toilet room is used in place of restroom. So for the sake of getting my point across, I will begin to refer to toilet room in place of restroom for the duration of the essay. Now back to my predicament, I had no problem using the toilet room on the flight from Nigeria to France, but the flight from France to the United States would provide a whole new problem.
You see, in France the population is generally white so you can presume that the majority of the people on a fight from France to the United States will be mostly white. Now in my 9 years in Nigeria, I had never seen a white person anywhere else other than the television, not counting the albino twins that had black African parents that I would occasionally see in my city. So you can understand why on the flight from France to the United States, I could not find the courage I previously had to move around and use the toilet room as I pleased. After all, with the way my friends and the local propaganda had depicted white people, they were to be considered a superior race, so as a small African boy, I did not have the right to stroll about the airplane and use the toilet room. So what did I do when the fluid I had consumed earlier was burning a hole into my kidney? I did the reasonable thing and held it in, pushing the urge back as I continued to cringe in the uncomfortable leather seat as each painful minute passed by.
Finally we arrive at the airport in Indianapolis and I begin to look for a place labeled toilet room. 10,20,30 minutes pass and I am appalled and furious that American airports apparently did not have a place for urinating and things of such nature. I had walked by a couple rooms which I assumed were designated for rest for those feeling tired after a long flight which seemed sensible to me at the time because of the name given to the rooms. As it turns out, my dad had made the same assumption and had gone to the room hoping to relax for a bit before our next flight. It was here, to my dad's annoyance and my relief, that we made the discovery that in the United States; a toilet room is referred to as a rest room. This was where I would first learn that Americans like to assign different names to commonly accepted terminology, a learning curve that included one of my favorite things in the entire world.
Football was and remains an important part of my life, so you can understand my annoyance when I moved to the U.S. only to discover that I would now have to refer to it as soccer. My annoyance for the change rivaled that of my Dad when he first discovered that he would not be able to rest in the restroom. I desperately attempted to continue calling it football but once I realized it was a hopeless fight, I accepted defeat and began to use the American developed term of soccer. This along with the change of toilet room to restroom was the beginning of my slow integration into the American version of English that would force me to drop the 'u' out of color and the 'u' out of neighborhood among many other changes.
In Nigeria, English is the first language, however it is the British version of English due to the British colonization of the country until 1960. English stands as a common ground for the country because "Nigeria is a lingua Franca in view of its geographical spread couple with its over 450 languages, and the number of their speakers" (Sunday 6). Without the English language, the country's citizens would have difficulty communicating because of the large variety of languages. Therefore, Nigerian citizens grow up speaking English along with one of the over 450 languages depending on what region of the country you grow up in. This is common knowledge in Nigeria that we all speak English, so you can understand my disbelief when my teachers in the United States would at times ask me how long it took me to learn English considering I spoke and wrote it well. Surely, my teachers would be well versed and intelligent enough to know that English is the first language of many African countries including Nigeria right? Wrong. The questions about my English proficiency would continue until I was finally able to sufficiently make my self sound American enough, both with the way my voice sounded and with the terms I would use.
You see, when my family and I first arrived we all had thick African accents, so even though we spoke great English, people would associate the accent with a lack of intelligence. My parents are both highly intelligent people, my mother owned and ran her own private school in Nigeria and my father was an accountant for over 20 years. But soon after arriving in the United States and discovering that they were laughed at and made fun of because of their accent, they told my siblings and me that we had to make a conscious effort to change the way we sounded, it was too late for them to achieve but at least we could do it. This resonated with me immediately; I pushed every day to sound more and more American, forcing the accent out of my system to the point where it became a subconscious effort to sound American. The first 6 months were difficult but with each time my classmates would laugh at my voice and with each time another American adult would ask me about what the process of learning English was like, I knew that I had to push harder, I had to sound more American, I had to de-Africanize my voice if I wanted to successfully integrate into American culture.
To put it frankly, American-born citizens can be extremely ignorant to the cultures of the rest of the World, especially African culture. "American thinking about Africa seems to be as ignorant today as it was before the great era of African studies" (Paul 2). This is an attempt to explain what took place in my early years in the United States. Despite my superb test scores on English test and my excellent English, to my American classmate, my accent meant I was primitive and less intelligent. I experienced this first hand with each ignorant question my classmates would ask about Africa before I had successfully de-Africanized my voice. They would ask me what it was like to live in huts, what it was like to hunt for wild animals everyday, what it was like to hold a spear, what it was like to live in a jungle. Now I could have told them the truth and told them I knew just as little as they did but that would give me no enjoyment. I found their ignorance amusing so I fed their imaginations and would tell them about the countless amounts of Lions I had hunted and killed, the amount of spears I had personally crafted, all lies but enough to feed their ignorance. It would be much later on that I would realize that my lies were detrimental to my culture, but at the time it served as a source of enjoyment as I continued to de-Africanize my voice. The true irony though is that with each attempt to de-Africanize my voice, I was distancing my self from my culture.
Along with de-Africanizing my voice, I discovered that it would be best to go by Victor, one of my birth given middle names rather than, Kolade, my birth given first name. It is common for people of my culture to have an English middle or first name due to the British colonization of the country up until 1960. Along with this, it is common in my culture for children to be given names in the native language that have an important meaning behind them. However, upon my arrival into the United States, I quickly discovered I could no longer go by my native name, a name, which means, "bring honor" in my native language. The problem was Kolade looked far too much like "Kool-Aid" (a popular American juice) to my American teachers and classmates. They would not make the effort to ask me about the proper pronunciation of my name or once they did, they would continue to purposefully mispronounce it. They would jokingly refer to me as "Kool-Aid", taking the meaning out of what is truly a wonderful name. So my parents decided that the process of integrating into American culture would be far easier if I just went by my middle name, Victor. The process of replacing my birth giving cultural first name with a more American name was one that helped my integration into American culture in the time that followed.
Years had passed and I sounded as American as any of my friends, I had successfully de-Africanized my voice but had lost every bit of my culture during the process. The combination of my early teenage years and some of the American friends that I made was one that distanced me the furthest from my culture. I was now joining in on the jokes and making fun of Africa and everything African, even though I knew it was ignorant and false, I could not restrain from joining in on the jokes. Looking back, I cannot help but cringe in embarrassment at the level of ignorance I showed, most evident by a Facebook post I made after 6 years in the United States, a post where I said "In Africa we don't have Polo. We have Holo, a man on a elephant carrying a spear." A truly ignorant statement I made during my freshman year of high school, a post that received 11 likes, 11 more people that would continue to look down upon Africa and Africans. You see, the joke was on me now; I had turned my back on my culture.
The problem is language is deeply rooted into culture, so once you begin to start referring to things in different ways in order to adjust to a new environment, the way you think culturally changes and it eventually distances you from your culture. A prime example of this is with my 13-year-old sister and my 10-year-old brother. Yoruba is a language that both of my parents, my two older brothers and I all speak and understand fluently, however, neither my little brother or sister can speak the language. The language was their last true connection to Nigeria and the culture, without the ability to speak the language they are distant from what it means to be Nigerian. My mother is partially to blame for this. She was afraid that they would grow up not speaking English well or that there proficiency with the language would be affected if it were not the only language spoken at home. My mother as a result was strongly against speaking Yoruba around the house, so we all had to speak English, a practice that led to my younger siblings' inability to speak Yoruba. As a result they do not relate with Nigerian culture, they do not understand the music, they do not understand the traditions, they do not understand the proverbs of the culture, the only thing left that is Nigerian is the last name they carry.
Thankfully there is still hope for my culture and me. As I have gotten older, I have been able to keep some parts of my culture thanks to my parents. Nigerian culture, like most of Africa is based around respect for those you consider your elders, like in Nervous Conditions, Tambu had to carry a water-dish for her elders to wash their hands based on "relative status of everybody present" (Dangarembga 40). It is very common to have rules and traditions like that in Nigeria. For example, when handing something to or accepting something from a parent, you are never to use your left hand because it is perceived to be an act of disrespect. Also, you are to greet family members by saying good morning as you see them every morning. This and some other cultural rules are still things I follow when I am back home with my family.
Today as I am, I am afraid that I identify with the United States more; this is why I strive to speak the Yoruba language with my older siblings, why I strive to be able to read the language, why I strive to abide by some of the cultural rules. Everyday I spend in the United States is another day I spend away from Nigeria; another day I subconsciously distance myself further from my culture. I hope that the day I do return to visit, I have the overwhelming feeling of coming back home. I will forever hold on to my country in my heart, it as made me who I am today, it as affected every decision I have made, it gives me a strong sense of pride in who I have become, and although I have lost some of my culture, I could never betray my homeland.






Work Cited
Danladi, Shaibu Sunday. "LANGUAGE POLICY: NIGERIA AND THE ROLE OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE 21ST CENTURY." European Scientific Journal 9.17 (2013)ProQuest. Web. 24 Feb. 2016.
Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions: A Novel. New York: Seal, 1989. Print.
Higgins, Paul. "Climate Change: A Conflict between Science and Ignorance." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 95.8 (2014): 1266. Web.

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