Diary of a Border-Being , New York.

Somewhere in Between. Lagos, 2012

 

I have been in New York for two days. Just before arriving here, I got back from a seven- weeks road trip from Nigeria to Gabon. I was still fresh from the journey, barely 24 hours in between my return and my take off to New York. I am in this buzzing city now; everyday waking up to the liveliness of a city that never sleeps. Sometimes I wonder, who are these people? Everyone to his or her own, paths and streets are packed with people, using the same space, living the same moment, yet one could be millions of worlds apart from the other. Running to something, shopping for something, buying pleasure. Nothing is for free, even giving is not a given. Someone said to me, “I think we have run through ourselves”, meaning I guess, “I think we have ran out of ideas”. Ran out of ideas. But that’s not the worse part. We have run out of reasons for which we are running. Evolution is cool, innovation encouraged, but when at the detriment of human relationships, when everyday we get lonelier, yes we get used to loneliness. When everyday we get more afraid, we get used to fear. And as we pursue happiness, with our heels to the back of our heads, happiness is just one step ahead.

Who are these people? What do they want? Do they want something, or are they fuelling the hell they set-up for themselves? Well all these can be justified by the fact that humans should always be in constant activity. Yes, constant activity. But activity or de-activity? I think they are the same but of alternate end.  Are we in activity or de-activity? Yes, we are here to undo ourselves. But the final result ought to be happiness, and if you are sad, miserable, depressed, afraid, anxious, bitter, jealous, greedy, gluttonous, war-mongering, malicious while you are at it then something is just not right. There must be something to show for all of these toiling – something much more than the self-exertion to keep up with appearances, something more than a 15 minutes of fame, something sublime and noble, the prize after the race. Something worth running for, something we should be running to. So you see, the running is not the problem. It is not the worse of it all.

And everyday, my tongue loses a taste bud. My nerves become more taut, tending towards lifelessness – a pre-death, death by the dose. I know I should be glad, some say I am privileged, last night someone called me lucky. Yes, I am all of that and more, but I am not luckier than those who are not writing from the 16^th floor of a plush apartment in Manhattan. I don’t feel that kind of luck. I guess I am lucky to be here and with all I see, and all I feel, and with all the sheer helplessness against mass inclinations, I still have a part of me that could ask this question: Where are we running to? And who is on our heels? To be alive is to ask questions. Yes, we are question-generating entities, an embodiment of questions of which the answers fulfills the purpose of our existence. Is it not by this that we evolve? Dissolve? And the world revolves? In this journey, those who ask questions will never lose their way.

These are my reflections on the morning of October 15^{th 2012}, while in New York. These are the ponderings of a Border-being

Diary of a Border-Bieng - Libreville Gabon

Traversing the Mist | Tiben - Cameroon | Emeka Okereke | IB 2012

This morning, I woke up at some few minutes after 5.am. My head was pounding with a slight headache and for the umpteenth time, I slept in my clothes with my wallet and keys in my pocket. But I woke up to the dawn of the morning in Libreville, and looked out the window. I was hit by a pleasant view accompanied by a pleasant feeling. That inner excitement that comes with being in a new place, the excitement of knowing who I was even though I didn’t know where I was. Sounds were a mishmash of speeding cars, and the crows of roosters, as if the city was in struggle with the countryside in attempt to determine which best represents it. But Libreville is a city of many facets. The rich are richer with the too-good-to-be- true cars and plush appearances, while the poor are very poor, minding their business mostly in the "quartier populaire" which is not the most popular part of the city.

Since we arrived here, I must say that there is, and has been something really strange about being here. I shouldn’t experience this strangeness given that I speak enough French to easily get around in a Francophone country. Yet, it feels like those moments where you are at your clumsiest. Perhaps this will straighten out. I don’t know.

When we arrived here the Nigerian presence and especially that of the Igbos was a shocker, the extent to which they have integrated. We spent time at  "La Gare Routiere" where they have their shops and daily business; we ate at an Igbo restaurant and mingled with some of them. We came to learn that the relationship between Gabon and Nigeria dated as far back as the Biafran war when many Igbo families fled to Gabon and did not come back after the war. Since then there has been subsequent generation of Igbo-Gabonese. A new dimension is formed from this circumstantial intermingling of peoples - it gave rise to " Francophone Igbos". This I find quite interesting within the discourse about borders. Borders are always there; an attempt to affect it only shifts it to another position in the map - be it the physical map or the socio-cultural. 

Borders are, at face level, what divides us. But profoundly, it is equally what brings us together to contemplate the possibility of co-existence. And in that process a third dimension is formed which in itself produces another demarcating line, another border, but at once, an intertwining of different people and perspective. Therefore borders are what they are: vague and immaterial as entities. It is not the end result of a process of demarcation and unification, but a function within that process. Borders are shifting lines that emanates as a result of the necessity to individualize, socialize or classify, but never the cause of it. This is why borders will be found everywhere and anywhere human beings make the attempt to transform or transcend existing state of being. It is like a double-edged sword and will conform to whatever form for which it becomes useful. Therefore, what is left to us is to decide to what use we could put this shape-shifting entity called borders, but never if we should ever use it at all. 

The Van is the Asset, The Access.

As we moved from one city to the other and then from one country to the other, one thing is more constant than any other: The van we are travelling with. In nowhere has it (the van) become more physical than in traveling from Nigeria to Cameroun and Gabon. It became a symbol for the impossibility that occupies the minds of many. Everywhere we go within Cameroun and Gabon, this huge 4-meter-long van of is imposing and difficult to be unnoticed, but much more is the Nigerian matriculation number of our vehicle. One could tell that for the Nigerians living in Cameroun and Gabon, Nigeria is a faraway home, one they can visit only after about 6 months of pre-planning and pre-saving. And for the Cameroonians and Gabonese, it is just that Anglophone country with their Anglophone brothers further away than France. 

We see the disbelief that shrouds their countenance when they spot our van in Douala, Yaoundé or Libreville. Some of them walk up to us to ask if we have truly travelled by road to these places or if we had to fly in our van by air. I am tempted to believe that the mere sight of our van must have caused a jolt of their sensibilities and their perception of proximity. I am assuming (rightly an assumption) that in spotting our van, they could now draw a line, a path, indeed a  road, in their minds from Libreville to Lagos. It becomes a possible line; a line, unlike a hypothesis, has every tendency to become tangible. This was made possible by the presence of our van than of us. 

In contemplating this, and the tedious and near-impossible nature of this traversal from Lagos to Libreville, coupled with the metaphorical importance of the van as a constant entity-in-motion harboring human beings who were bound to adjust to the events of the journey, the van becomes a Tunnel, a passage way for which it was possible to move from A (Lagos) to Point B (Libreville) in sometimes roadless conditions and we are obliged to adopt the van as a living space, sleeping and eating in it for about three days in a row. For me, it is difficult to see any interval in the journey from Lagos to Libreville; it is a single line knotted together by the constant displacement of the van.

Therefore the role of our van on this year’s trip has gone beyond a mere means of transportation, but in essence has become a symbol of that Trans-African line which in spite of all obstacles and challenges have managed to offer an alternative by which this journey becomes real and imagined.


Written during and under the framework of Invisible Borders Trans-African Road Trip Project 2012.
 www.invisible-borders.com

Copyright: Emeka Okereke