An Inconvenient Prejudice

I’ll admit something I’m not proud to say: I have a prejudice against fat people. I’m a fattist. I have many excuses for my judgemental attitude. For a long time I felt that the obese were simply people who lacked my discipline. Why couldn’t they just get up every morning at 6 am and run several miles? Why couldn’t they just limit their breakfast to a single slice of buttered toast, lunch to one sandwich and dinner to water and a piece of chicken? I did.

It was many years before I realised that I struggled with disordered eating, but that never quite removed the taint of moral superiority that I had about my weight. Even in the times during my childhood when I lived in Nigeria and was derided for being too skinny (the traditional beauty ideal in many African countries is bigger and curvier than in the West) I could never quite shake the feeling that I was still better off.

But times they are a-changing. As looking well-fed is becoming easier to achieve in Nigeria, it’s becoming more socially desirable for women to be slim. The slang word Leppa, which used to be a derogatory term for a skinny woman when I was growing up, is now used positively. Women now talk of going on diets, and mornings in middle-class and affluent neighbourhoods are awash with potbellied residents marching about in jogging suits - exercising. And for the first time, I’m seeing obese children.

I have come to understand that obesity is not a lack of moral fibre. It’s an addiction. But unlike narcotics like cigarettes and heroin, its users don’t even know that they are junkies.

The Incomplete Revolution

As a woman of a certain age, I have started thinking about how I will navigate the delicate balance between family and career. I’m not married yet, nor do I have children, but I hope to soon. And the question of whether I can "do it  all" has been bothering me.

I have long been attracted to the bright side of academia – the lectures, the conferences, the prestige that comes with being called “Dr.” But I was always daunted by the amount of time getting a PhD required (5-7 years for a humanities degree) and the long tortuous road to tenure. Beyond personal fears of intellectual adequacy and sustainable interest in my chosen field of scholarship, there was also the problem of how I would balance having children.

Success: Redefined

Since I returned to Nigeria at the tail end of 2009, I’ve been preoccupied with the notion of success. How to get it, how to keep it and most importantly, how to grow it. For me, success was having a job that paid me lots of money, owning lots of nice things, living in a nice place and being in a relationship with someone who also had a lucrative job and lots of nice things. And, success was synonymous with happiness – once I was successful, I’d be happy and I could only be happy if I was successful. The problem was, I hadn’t taken much time to figure out what either “happiness” or “success” meant.

For most of us, success is synonymous with material wealth. You can tell a person is successful by their possessions – the kind of car they drive, the house they live in and the amount of money in their bank accounts. While happiness is usually measured by whether one has a significant other in their lives. And the assumption is that those who are successful and happy are superior to those who aren’t. That’s why there’s a billion-dollar industry in self-help literature that promises (usually in easy steps) to show people the paths to success and happiness.

But what if our definition of happiness and success is fundamentally distorted? What if, it is actually completely wrong?

In Japan, the Magical is Mundane

Japanese literature

I am fascinated by Japanese pop culture. Ever since I realised some of my favourite cartoons growing up were Japanese Anime, I was hooked. That fascination has since grown to encompass other parts of Japanese culture from movies to clothing, food and now literature.

I think the first work I read by a Japanese author was The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami in college. It drew me in with its haunting atmosphere and delicate tension. In it, we follow a man who is  looking for lost a cat, but at the same time considering questions of philosophy, religion and physics in an unpredictible world where anything can - and does - happen.

I recently read two more works by Murakami - Kafka on the Shore and Norwegian Wood - and three novellas by Banana Yoshimoto compiled into a collection called Asleep. They were all wonderful. Though they were written by very different authors about very different subjects, they all contained the same elements of mystery amid the mundane that kept me compulsively turning each page. I came away with the sense of clean, spare spaces, uncluttered lines, haunting sadness and endearing weirdness that I have come to associate with Japan.

What I loved most about all these works, though, is that in them the the lines between fantasy and reality don't quite match up. There is a comfortable blurring between the here and there, the past and present, the living and dead. In each of the novels I read, characters confront alternate worlds, ghosts, spirits and all sorts of supernatural phenomena with superb aplomb. They don't make a big deal out of it; it happens and life goes on.

And that, to me, is absolutely refreshing. So often in Western writing characters are defined by their struggle to understand and accept their encounter with the supernatural. But in many cultures, including my own, the supernatural is a given. Magic is real. Witches, spells, spirits and ghosts exist.

To read works that treat the magical with as much gravity as buying a loaf of bread actually heightens my sense of wonder. It makes me feel that there might be more dimensions to my own quotidian existence as well - like I too might be able to open my front door and step into another world. 

Black Science Fiction Movie Script Contest

On Wretches and Kings

Last year I read Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building about the residents in an aging building in Cairo, Egypt. What struck me about this book was how similar Egyptian and Nigerian societies – as portrayed in Blackbird by Jude Dibia – were. The same rigid class structures, the same juxtaposition of extreme poverty and wealth side by side, the same corrupt government systems. It was eerie.

Then last week I read White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, an amazingly well-written book about how a servant manages to rise to riches and power – by murdering his employer, only to see all the same issues mirrored there. That got me worried. How was it that three very different books about three very different parts of the world seemed to reflect the same depressing realities?

The Right to Racism

April was a weird month for me. I got some devastating news that sent me to some dark places inside myself for a while. And it didn’t help that April was also the month that several race-related news stories hit the airwaves (or at least broke into my conciousness). From the murder of Trayvon Martin, to the Swedish Golliwog cake scandal, the expulsion of Nigerians from South Africa, and racist reactions to a black character in the Hunger Games movie, it just seemed like a bad time to be black in the world.

It is easy to attribute the racism that spawned these issues to a few bad eggs, but that’s not the problem. There will always be racists. The real problem is that racism is not just individuals who don’t like other individuals because of the colour of their skin. Racism is built into systems of power and privilege. Systems that allow some people – because of the colour of their skin – to have more opportunities than others.

Some people – because of the colour of their skin – have the opportunity to live in nicer homes, grow up in safer neighbourhoods, attend better-resourced schools, and live richer, more fulfilling lifestyles than others. Some people always get the benefit of the doubt – if they mess up, it’s not automatically assumed that it’s because of a “cultural” or racial pathology. Some people – because of the colour of their skins – can turn on the television and always see themselves reflected back. For them, race is not something they ever have to think about, if they don’t want to.

And the problem I have with too many of these people is that, because they don’t have to live their lives circumscribed by their race, too often, they dismiss the experiences of people who do.