dabba
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 13/Dec/2010 21:34, 34 days ago
When I lived in London– what a lifetime ago – and walked through that din of crowded streets, I played a really brilliant game.  I only ever played against myself, and I almost always won.  The game was to pick someone walking towards you in the street (or coming up the escalator against you) and fix a stare on their face.  You’re not allowed to look away until they’ve passed you.  And (unless you forfeit by looking away in fear) you can only lose if they look back at you.  I found this a pleasingly terrifying experience– rather like a rollercoaster or watching England bat to save a Test match over an appalling internet connection.  And, should anyone actually look up and notice my (presumably) unnerving gaze, I would be as bewildered as them, with a slightly sick feeling that I might be about to be in a fight.It’s a great game.Needless to say (or why the bugger would I be twittering on about it here?) this game doesn’t really work too well in Nigeria.  If you ever spend thirty seconds not looking at someone else while walking along, you can bet your bunions they’ll be staring at you when you look up.  And should you dare to not hear, or not bother responding to someone who says‘hello’ in any of many forms, you can be as sure as the impending end of Ricky Ponting’s captaincy that a thousand people will immediately descend upon you howling ‘he greeted you!  you didn’t greet him! he greeted you!!  WHY DIDN’T YOU GREET HIM??!?!?!?!’ until you’ve duly asked how his (or her) day, home, family, work, and elbow crooks all are.I notionally like the sense of community somewhere like Nigeria.  The fearful dark anonymity of the blind and battled multitude in a British city is something I’ve been tutored by Romanticism to dislike and educated by the Alan Bennett generation to blame for many social woes.  And I’m sure it holds a lot of truth (in the Bible – I think it’s Deuteronomy – if a woman is raped in a city and isn’t rescued, she’s as much at fault as her attacker because she can’t have cried out.  Set aside your indignation at the treatment of women for a second, and compare the‘cities’ of the early Middle East with those of modern Europe, where we’re actively advised not to shout ‘help’ because everyone will stay away).  So there’s a lot to enjoy in this kind of world.The kids from next door, for instance, come into our house all the time (even when I’m having a quiet poo with the door wide open to get some light in and stench out).  They play with us and accept food and drink from us.  Children generally everywhere are communal property and communal responsibility– whether in terms of holding them on a bus or giving them a jolly good beating for looking the wrong way.I hardly ever lock our front door if I’m just popping over the road to the shop.  Shop keepers are quite happy to let me take something if I haven’t got the money (or – MUCH more frequent, this – they haven’t got the right change) in the knowledge that I’ll come back with it.  There aren’t really signposts or information boards here – part of what’s supposed to make it a nightmare to travel around as a tourist.  But that’s because written information is the death of social interaction.  From finding it dizzingly disorienting and unnerving, I’d now be utterly confident travelling anywhere here (apart from Lagos bastard airport): just stumble off the bus, look around, and tell people where you want to go.  There won’t even be time to notice where your feet are landing before you find yourself in the right place.This is all very pleasant.  I can readily imagine that, were I born here (and particularly if I had the crucial power of not standing out by being King Paleface) it’d be magnificent.  There’s never any reason to really worry about anything very much, because someone else will help you.  (It’s interesting – to me – to link this across to the individuality index on the Geert-Hofstede scale that I mentioned in another post – and to the lack of planning / budgeting / generally taking some responsibility for anything here.)But I wasn’t born here.  Like Moses, I’m a stranger in a strange land.  I yearn to walk down the street and not be noticed.  To move about in a public place for– say – ten minutes, and not have to talk to anyone.  I’m a very introverted person, and I don’t favour interpersonal communication for any process.  I find it exhausting and frequently frustrating.  So I spend much of my time here being exhausted and frustrated, because there’s no getting away from it.  And I can’t wait to have children – really, that’s more or less how I define my life goals.  But looking after someone else’s kids – and feeding them, and entertaining them, and keeping them from breaking things – all of the time becomes wearing.  And I love the sense that everyone looks out for each other, but because I’m white and male that means I’m supposed to give everyone money and jobs.  And that doesn’t seem to me a terribly natural way to relate to one another.So it’s been interesting and useful to acquire a much more complex perspective on communal living than I had previously.  Particularly, I’m interested in how it seems to limit individuals’ identities, because everything is about how and to what end an individual functions as part of a community.  That’s something I’ve felt with increasing force in Anglo-Saxon: that an identity is something defined by performance within a context, rather than our post-Enlightenment and post-Romantic construction of some kind of relatively stable inner identity around which modernism and post-modernism have placed an increasingly complex array of mirrors and walls.  I know that I don’t find it comfortable, but I do find it very interesting, very demanding, and very sobering – like Douglas Adams’ Total Perspective Vortex (is that it’s name?  Pete?), it’s only through connecting with others that I have a self.  Descartes could not have been Nigerian.