UnStorying Africa

UnStorying Africa: An Unabashed and Praiseful Review of Dipo Faloyin’s Africa is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent

 

Having finished reading a gorgeous novel about Africa written in 2001, I found that this nonfiction book leaped into my hands as I was exiting a library, UnStorying almost everything the novel had imprinted on my mind. Just below the literary beauty of its words lurked the all-too-familiar “Africa and its natives” memes I’d seen and read as far back as my childhood’s monthly National Geographic photos to the more recent media extravaganzas and fundraisers for AIDS, famine, Invisible Children and other nonprofits trying to “fix Africa.”

The good news: hundreds of African writers have pushed back hard since 2001. Add to that the storm that George Floyd’s death sparked worldwide from the African diaspora and the success of Hollywood’s Black Panther, we should all have some faith that more opportunities to see the continent of Africa in its complexity, richness, and modernity and as an equal and vibrant member of the global family are, at last, approaching.

Africa is Not a Country is the detox my subconscious had needed for years. Two streams of UnStorying swept through me reading this book: One, erasing the tropes in content and image that have proliferated by and into the West; Two, how much these stereotypes have informed the present escalation of racism in the US. The urgency to UnStory “Africa” is crucial to both goals.

Don’t worry that you’re in for a book-length rant. The sections are varied and fascinating, ranging from satire to well-researched history. Despite that Fayolin wants to demolish the homogenizing of “Africa” and “Africans,” he has a great wit. His opening epithet:

Insert generic African proverb here. Ideally an allegory about a wise monkey and his interaction with a tree, or the relationship between the donkey and the ant that surprisingly speaks to grand gestures of valor. Sign it off: Ancient African proverb.

I immediately knew I was in for a good ride. Just how good, I couldn’t have guessed. The book’s thesis, the antidote to the generic, big-brush trope, of “Africa” and “Africans,” is this:

Not everyone is allowed a complex identity. Throughout history, individuals and entire communities have been systematically stripped of their personhood and idiosyncrasies, often to make them easier to demean, denigrate and subjugate—and, in some cases, eradicate. Being able to define yourself openly and fully is a privilege; it is a grace many take for granted.

Few entities have been forced through this field of distorted reality as many times as Africa—a continent of fifty-four countries, more than two thousand languages, and 1.4 billion people. A region that is treated and spoken of as if it were a single country, devoid of nuance and cursed to be forever plagued by deprivation.

Can you feel the familiarity of that last sentence? How little I’ve questioned that viewpoint, although I knew all along that it couldn’t possibly be a blanket truism. “Instead,” says Fayolin, “we have decades of the White Savior as the protagonist against some indeterminate warriors and crazed militants.” And he legitimately asks, “Why don’t we see images of the educated, the middle class, the thriving instead of the child that still needs the help of a foreign intervention?”

Never underestimate the power of images to lock in stereotypes! Although I’ve always insisted on teaching media literacy as a high school educator—mostly attempting to UnStory the swarthy and dangerous stereotypes of Muslims in the Middle East—I didn’t know where, or how, to begin to crack the code bequeathed to us as Westerns when it came to the continent of Africa. I wish I’d had this book in hand for my classrooms.

Each chapter in Africa is Not a Country promises to bring a context that is often missing in Western education and media to the fore. Part One is a love story about Fayolin’s home city, Lagos, Nigeria, swamping us with the particulars of colorful individuals and a megacity bursting with dynamism. Lagos is now at the top of my wanderlust bucket list.

Part Two covers the horrendous history I suspected but had never encountered in 18 years of schooling: The Berlin Conference of 1884, a three-month conference to avoid war between the 14 European nations angling for a land-grab of Africa under the premise of the “Three C’s: commerce, Christianity, and civilization.” Fayolin lays out a stunning chronicle (and I admit a little relief that the US wasn’t a participant).

Part Three premises that colonization wears a different face through the ongoing depiction of Africans as primitives unable to rule their own countries and the birth of the White Savior complex. In Part Four, “The Story of Democracy in Seven Dictatorships,” Fayolin doesn’t ignore the chaos that the continent has experienced. He can’t discuss each country from colonization onward, but it’s an important sampling in which he is able to draw clear lines into present struggles and successes.

In Part Five, “There is no Such Thing as an African Accent,” Fayolin lays out the basic script of almost every literary and film treatment with Africa as its basis, swinging from satire to the eventual, inevitable cost in human lives. Even the venerable literary magazine, Granta, published an issue featuring Africa without a single African writer in it. The late Kenyan writer, Binyavanga Wainaina, replied with a scathing and satiric response that has been seminal in changing things since. It was titled, “How to Write About Africa.” His advice includes:

Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu,’ ‘Zambezi’…Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas,’ ’Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’…Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘real Africa’, and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the West…Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissance. Because you care.”

Part Six depicts the continuing theft of Africa’s cultural heritage. In “The Lootings,” he claims that 90% of that heritage—plundered and taken forcefully from various kingdoms and tribes—remains in museums in the West that yet claim the artifacts are part of “world heritage” not necessarily belonging to their countries of origin.

Let us be clear on this point: the arrival of loot into the hands of western curators, its continued displaying our museums and its hiding-away in private collections, is not some art historical incident of reception, but an enduring brutality,”

Dan Hicks, curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.

Part Seven is a love story to the West African dish, Jollof. Part Eight: “What’s Next?Indeed, what’s next? If you are a consumer of Western media and education, every page of this book will surprise, teach, and UnStory—much as irony, much as well-founded indignation of ongoing injustice. Most importantly, I now understand that so much of what the West has absorbed about the continent of Africa fuels the present racism in the US.

Extensive footnotes gave me confidence in Fayolin’s backing up his claims. The book is broad enough and deep enough to offer both specific (but not comprehensive) histories of the brutal fracturing and colonization by the West, the continuing theft of the continent’s treasures in Western museums, and the continuing colonization of “Africa” by Western media. The book is a radical UnStorying of what I had absorbed over my lifetime. My relief and gratitude are great. I will return the library book, but purchase copies for my library and friends. The paperback comes out in November.

Hold Still (An Excerpt from my Memoir, Set Adrift)

For some, meditation provides an immediate sense of calm. Eyes closed, they may see shimmering lights or bright pastels, their bodies loosening into the peaceful rest they’ve longed for.

I am not one of those people. For me, meditation began as a surprisingly jolting activity—a forced listening to the bullhorn of my all-too-familiar narratives, chowder of feelings, and fantasies. My mind’s chatter is relentless. Something like the radios installed in each North Korean home. You can turn them down, but never fully off.

It’s not just the psychotic who experience internal voices. Who hasn’t had wakeful nights and said the following morning to a friend, “I couldn’t turn off the voices in my head!” It shouldn’t surprise me that the same where to and what next fantasies fueling my actions daylong blare more starkly on a meditation cushion, maybe even more so because they are pressed up against sitting still, clamoring at the starting gate of my race forward. I plan various cabins in the country room to room, exotic trips to foreign lands, trekking adven- tures. Sometimes the residue from something thoughtless said to a friend haunts me. Other times a burn from the perceived insult by a family member circulates and recirculates.

In Buddhism, I learn there’s a concept for all this mental proliferation: papancha. In the Pali language from which it originates, the etymology comes from the image of a drop of dye on a fabric—the ink seeps in all directions of weft and warp until the fabric is ruined. We see the world through the stain of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the stories we tell ourselves about others.

Unsplash Photo by Pawel Czerwinski

But here’s meditation’s eventual redemption—I am able to see more and more clearly how my mind grabs the chaos of experience and shapes it into narratives almost instantaneously. With my eyes closed on a meditation cushion in a quiet, darkened room, those incessant voices that rarely stop become less and less believable. Their tones and lapses shadowy, slurred, repetitive, loud, soft, high, low. Faces known and unknown. They come and go at random, and they blow out of proportion according to old scripts and emotions. An echo chamber clearly generated from inside, not outside.

I am learning that we suffer from a kind of virtual life, distress not so much from direct experience as much as from rewinding past events or fast-forwarding a possible future on a movie screen inside our skulls.

When he is young, my son asks me, “How do you know your dreams aren’t reality, and reality isn’t your dream?”

Indeed. How do you know? I am less and less sure myself.

Of Selves and Stories (an excerpt from my just-released memoir, Set Adrift)

What if the cohesion of a life is much like water, a fluid mixing of past, present and future? In this flux, there’s no such thing as chronology. Where does any person’s story begin? With parents, absent or present? Grandparents? One hundred generations before your birth? A dramatic tragedy? Like the wind, no isolated origin point exists to a life.

Story is agitation, the waves born from invisible winds, imposing motion and meaning on a vast ocean. In my favorite Hindu creation myth, the universe is a boundless and tranquil sea of milk, and only through its churning by angels and demons, good and evil, does form, and hence story, arise.

All previous moments, days, months, years, decades, and generations lead to the meager slice of reality we stand beside and point to as my story. We inhabit the motion of progressive fictions and even if they lash and capsize us, we forget that they will inevitably spend themselves on some shore like sea wrack and, like our own bodies, vanish.

If you’re lucky, story and relationship are life-long conspirators amplifying the good. I was not so fortunate—a multitude of stories had to be abandoned to discover relationship and intimacy. And yet, I also had to imagine my lost parents and story them out of the phantasmal.

We become the people we think we are—that’s why stories can be dangerous and even self-defeating. Other people can also become who we think they are and that’s why stories can be disastrous. We can’t help but use stories to connect, but beware, stories will use us. They did me, that is, until they didn’t.

The Violence of Ideals

 “Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening.”

                      Martin Buber, I and Thou

In an ideal world, two words—violence and ideals—shouldn’t land anywhere near one another, but a teacher of mine, Frank Osteseski, author of The Five Invitations: What Death Can Teach Us About Living More Fully, brought the paradox to my attention during a dharma talk some years back. It was a gut punch I’ve never forgotten. I don’t remember the specific context of that talk, but having taught for decades, he must have watched how his students weaponized ideals against themselves. Being good Buddhists, they probably tried to restrain themselves from using ideals in judging others, but it’s a carte blanche on ourselves. Who would know except for what is revealed behind closed doors with our teachers and therapists?  

Despite how we may appear in our social media, we Americans are experts at secretive self-flagellation. Decades ago, a group of Buddhist teachers from the West gathered at the feet of the Dalai Lama and tried to explain the lack of “self-esteem” rife among their students: apparently, the phenomenon made no sense to him at all and it had to be explained over and over. Buddhist Psychologist Tara Brach, says that many of us live continually under a “trance of unworthiness,” so there’s value in unpuzzling and perhaps UnStorying the fuel. Although I now know better than to believe my internal stories of unworthiness spawned by unachievable ideals, when that hypnotic stupor finds me, the volume happily increases to grab center stage until I intentionally stop it.

All of us want to be happy, and (almost) all of us want to be known as kind, generous, and good. Not feeling like a “good person” hurts. Although there’s been a slight drop in US suicide rates in the last few years, according to the CDC, overall suicide rates from 2010 to 2020 increased by 30%. No single idea or approach can lasso and uproot such a deep part of our psyche. Perhaps UnStorying in this instance means not so much to transcend words, but to complicate a single narrative about cause and effect to unmask the full extent of our confusion and sloppy and damaging mental fabrication. 

Photo by Ante Hamersmit

Some ideas towards complicating the narrative of unworthiness: Self-flagellation harkens back to the country’s puritanical heritage (still?!). Has Original Sin taken on a new guise as White Guilt for slavery and continued racism? It probably should, but how, in practical ways, do we begin reparation? Matthew Desmond, in his book Poverty by America, argues that capitalism’s visible brutality on the poor inescapably poisons the virtue and psyche of the rich. And yet another layer: Consumer culture in which we’re never quite healthy enough, wealthy enough, slim enough, smart enough, happy enough. Comparisons are ubiquitous. Is “Never-enough” the lingua franca of global capitalism? All these aspects of society feel so big, so endemic, we don’t know how or where to begin to redress them. I find myself defaulting back to the personal level.

Not long ago, I encountered a former high school student of mine working as a barista. While he made my latte, he whined, “Mrs. Conover! This adult thing is not what you all cracked it up to be!“  I laughed, but he was right. We aren’t honest with one another as adults or with our children. The poet Maggie Smith said it directly in her poem, “Good Bones”: The world is at least/fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative/estimate, though I keep this from my children.” With so many self-help tools and therapies at our disposal to try and make life conform to our ideals—whose fault could falling short of them be but our own?

My current wondering has another suspect arena: radical individualism versus the fundamental need for belonging. We want to be seen as special, as unique individuals, but we also want to belong, so we story the way we should be according to our ideals and find the people who hold the same values. Although this approach seems natural, it will always reject a great portion of humanity, including ourselves. The writer Mary Pipher says that the most important thing for any American to do is to slow down and talk to one another.

Perfectionism is where idealism finds its softest target in me. I’ve let perfectionism invade arenas too numerous to name–from my plans for the day, to what I said to another person that might have offended, to the big-brush life reckonings. And what is the engine behind perfectionism but a relentless micro and macro horizon of ideals? Elizabeth Gilbert in an interview with Kate Bowler on the podcast, Everything Happens, says, “Let’s call perfectionism for what it is: terror.” There it is again—the harshness of ideals—the need to belong and the fear of not belonging by not measuring up moment by moment, day by day. It’s an exhausting, losing, battle for control. 

 An ideal is a decision or assumption of how things should be. More than six decades into this life, I’m finally starting to notice: life seldom conforms. “Nothing, not one thing, hurts us more—or causes us to hurt others more—than our certainties,” says Maria Popova in The Marginalia. Maybe we can UnStory these certainties, attuning to our heart’s inclinations, and looking to use the qualities of our ideals for navigation in life’s seas instead of a sink-or-swim metric.

Try this on: Maybe all the scrambling towards our ideals is just another face of love—the wanting to belong and not knowing how to other than by being something better, something more. We can forgive ourselves for that: the need to love and be loved.

For an UnStory Corps essay, this has been a lot of words! Here’s a single word: ease. Can we hold ease—the slowing down and the connecting—as a quality to cultivate? The word has a built-in resistance to being idealized. I know when I’m clenching to an ideal because it feels, well, a lot like clenching. Not only does my body constrict, but my mind as well: curiosity flees, and my vision of life and joy flatlines. Ease has broad existential ramifications as well as an almost instantaneous somatic release. The untangling of the cage of how things should be, how others should be, how we should be. Ease is a quality that can UnStory both the body and the mind of ideals. My friend, Henrik, signs off his emails like this: Everybody! Calm down! It makes me smile.  

The Cave That Ate My Words

The truths are not screaming. You must listen carefully and you must be lucky.

Enrique Martinez

Recently, I found my way to a cave retreat in the Cochise Stronghold, a jewel of a small, granite-rimmed basin within the Dragoon Mountains of Arizona. Just those names coming off one’s tongue conjure up a certain power of place. That power is palpable everywhere around the Stronghold. The area features hundreds of “fracture caves,” and thus the ability to, long ago, help First Americans hide from and fight the cavalry, and the ability now for the Dharma Treasure Retreat Center to send visitors off into caves for retreats of various lengths. Here in the USA, there are yogis meditating in caves for months at a time. Echoing the First Americans, they’re hard to find and they like it that way. Dharma Treasure even boasts a Thai Forest monk who caves it 6 days a week and comes down for alms on Saturdays.

Those of you who hike in the desert have likely felt scraped clean by the cloudless sky juxtaposed against towering rock slabs and elephantine boulders.

At the beginning of my solo trip, with no distractions and a sudden be-wildering silence when my guide left me, I soon found myself speaking aloud for company. It seemed a very human gesture, like raising my puny fist to the sky and declaring, “Hey, Nobody! I’m here!”

Not for long answered the rock.

The desert’s stillness is overwhelming to us moderns, even though we must know—in the abstract at least—this auditory landscape as our ancestral base. Although some of us beg for more stillness and quiet in our lives through meditation or prayer, the Dragoon version felt too enormous to rest easy. At least initially. I think of the poet, Marie Howe, who said in a recent interview with Krista Tippet that it “hurts to be present.” Present-ness is my personal mantra these days, but this present-ness was impersonal, massively impersonal.

The actual climbing into the rock, into a cave for shelter, cooking, and sleep stunned me further. I felt I’d entered a mouth that swallowed not only the very last of my words, but also my thoughts, even the few needed to start a twig fire, blow up my pad, and unpack my sleeping bag. I managed, but the cave made no promises to protect me from scorpions, rattlesnakes, and cougars. All that remained of me in this environment was attention, wide-eyed attention for most of the night.

Our lives are so often “virtual,” translating the intimacy of direct experience into the metaphor of language, braving the world with shields of ideas. “As soon as we are spinning a narrative about something, we are no longer seeing it for what it is. We are not capable of doing both things at the same time,” says writer Jeannine Ouellette. That’s a bold statement that never felt truer to me than in the Dragoons. My thoughts had no audience—not even me after a time. I felt continually forced into the great question of Zen, “What is this?” When you ask that of a desert, emptiness responds.

These rocks rebuffed any attempt to wrap them in narrative. So did the century plants, the shin daggers, the manzanita, and the cat claw shrubs. How did they get here? How do they survive here? The story of how these rocks came to be, and what they represent in terms of geologic time—no less galactic time—is beyond anything I could conceptualize.

During the coldest hours before dawn, it occurred to me I had a lot of ancestors to thank over the millennia who managed to rise above survival to create civilization. When it takes so much time to simply fetch water, gather sticks and nurse a fire for a hot drink, that lighter in my palm—representing the evolution of comfort—became an astonishing accomplishment.

Over these few days I spent in the desert, the aperture of the question—what is this—opened up. My curiosity simultaneously chased after it and hid from it, reminding me of the definition of awe: reverential respect mixed with wonder and fear. It did hurt to be present against that edgeless frontier of amnesic blue, scorching sun, and rocks that literally scraped the skin off me.

Then again, I felt so alive. Despite the hundreds of hikes, the dozens of nights camping, and many trips to the deserts in Utah, I had never felt quite so disturbed—in all the best ways of waking up—by nature as I did in the Dragoons.

I came back a day early to the Stronghold. When I saw the buildings, the flock of chickens scratching in the yard, a few cars parked in the shade of trees, the laundry line with the semaphores of personhood, the things I recognized as human comfort, I both missed and felt relieved at what I’d left. I did not wholly succeed in sustained attention to that unstoried silence in my cave for long, but I’m mighty intrigued and curious now to return and meet it again for a longer time.

Back in the Stronghold, I found a rock and couldn’t help myself with a bit of graffiti. I had to give it some words:

Later, the resident monk suggested I write on the other side:

When Henrik, the resident cave yogi, left for the mountains the next day, he managed to get cell service from a perch up high and sent me a text that completed my learning: “When I’m in the mountains, I am the mountain.”

Self and Other: Learning to Surf

On our thirty-eighth anniversary vacation, Doug and I drove up the east side of Baja in a futile search for coral reefs that weren’t dead. Each trip into the water with snorkel, mask, and fins made us that much sadder. Thus, on the actual day of our anniversary, 66 and 65 years old, looking for some totem of celebration rather than a reminder of our complicity in wrecking the world, we gave up the search and signed up for our first surfing lessons in Cabo del San Jose.

At the surf shop, a bachelorette party from our region back home—Coeur D’Alene—circled around the lovely bride-to-be who’d stepped on a sea urchin during their lesson. They were bubbly as champagne, vacationing in the sun while their hometown shivered in November’s clamp down. The bride focused on her foot, digging the tiny spines out with a needle the surf shop provided. Her friends were giddy with some days of unfettered girl fun, an open bar at their hotel, and the promises of bright horizons for all their imagined futures.

We shared their excitement, and then I mentioned that today was our 38th anniversary. Their group conversation stopped. One asked what we’d learned. What advice did we have? We’d never been asked this before, not by our peers, and certainly not by young adults.

My words came fast and unblinking: know that you’ll be wrong almost every time with your partner, about almost everything. 

Did I just say that? 

The nods of understanding all around took me aback. Apparently, what had taken me nearly four decades of marriage to learn, they’d already had enough experience to see for themselves.

My husband chimed in with a single word of advice: “Patience.” He was speaking from the long view wherein both people, eventually, come to acknowledge their misperceptions and exaggerations of the Other. For the first fifteen years of our marriage, these confessions happened only after the boil of an argument, maybe hours after. Sometimes not fully until two days later. In the meantime, both of us hoarded our righteousness like treasure. 

But it hurt. The Buddha said carrying anger is holding a hot ember in your hands. Who can deny that? The world is divided into those who think they are right. That’s a joke. But it’s not. 

There is everything to celebrate about our decades years of knitting a life together, not only two thriving children but also our mode of defusing conflict. There is no perfect person, but there might be some perfect ways to sculpt relationships over time. “Anger,” jokes The Sun writer Sparrow, “is a natural, organic expression of life, like lima-bean sprouts. It’s only when anger gets ornamented with ideas that it becomes dangerous.”  Those ideas proliferate in the after-argument stew of rumination into two bleak and lonely cages of me versus you. 

These days, the white flags of surrender go up before arguments get traction. Does anyone really “win” an argument and manage to feel connected to their partner? 

Now, all it takes is for one of us to ask, “How’s your heart?” and there’s nothing left to say. That heart–maybe we could call it wisdom–which used to hide from our tension like the dog did, steps in front of Righteousness with humility, in a grandmotherly sort of way. She’ll notice both people in their separate cages and sigh. Her kind gaze says it all: Life’s too short. Suddenly, Righteousness feels not only too costly but even silly and a little shamefaced. 

Don’t be afraid to be wrong. As Sparrow says, we are “just primates arbitrarily wearing clothes.” Our understandings will always and forever be partial. Let go. Maybe that’s a fuller way to understand the uselessness of right and wrong, me versus you. Letting go. 

How’s your heart?