A Bit of Difference Read online

  Praise for Everything Good Will Come

  Winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa

  Finalist, Multicultural Fiction, Independent Publisher Book Awards

  Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award—Honorable Mention

  “A literary masterpiece... Everything Good Will Come put me into a spell from the first page to the very last... It portrays the complicated society and history of Nigeria through... brilliant prose.”

  —World Literature Today

  “Skillful … impressive debut novel…Thematically, her work is wide-ranging and yet powerfully focused, the different areas of concern drawn together so that they inform each other… Again and again Atta’s writing tugs at the heart, at the conscience. At the same time, reflecting the resilience of the Logosians whose lives she explores, humor is almost constant, effervescent, most often with a satirical slant… There are no delusions in Atta’s novel, no romanticisation or overstating of a case. Her work stands as a paean to her central character’s strengths and her determination to combat oppression.”

  —The Sunday Independent (Lesotho, Africa)

  Praise for News from Home

  Winner of the NOMA Award for Publishing in Africa

  “Atta demonstrates a fresh, vital voice in these 11 stories that move fluidly between pampered Nigerian émigrés and villagers grinding out a meager subsistence. Atta's characters are irrepressible… Atta movingly portrays these conflicted lives and gorgeously renders a wide spectrum of humanity and experience.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review and featured author interview)

  “Nigerian-born Atta’s prize-winning novel, Everything Good Will Come (2006), was about a young woman’s coming-of-age in Lagos. Now Atta lives in the U. S., and this powerful collection is about the search for home… Never messagey, the wrenching contemporary stories are universal in their appeal and impact.”

  —Booklist

  “Sefi Atta's steady, quiet, and yet bold narrative voice is unwavering in its dedication to craft, originality, and last but not the least, truth. Truth, that is, in artistic rendition of our lives. (She) writes like one who has lived the life of each single character in her dazzling collection of short stories. The reader comes off with the sense of a story teller who is so in tune with the suffering and other life happenstances of her characters, that the reader is bound to find a commonality with them—be it cultural, psychological, social, or human.”

  —Mohammed Naseehu Ali, author of The Prophet of Zongo Street

  Praise for Swallow

  “In Atta's spirited and large-hearted second novel (after the collection, News from Home), two young woman office workers navigate the rapids of the urban jungle of Lagos… Tolani's tale encompasses towns and villages, corruption and superstition, deceit and loyalty, all beautifully layered and building toward a wallop you never see coming.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Nigerian-born Atta, now living in the U. S., excels at telling stories of her native land, this time centering on bank clerk Tolani Ajao and Rose, her friend, roommate, and colleague at Federal Community Bank in Lagos, with interspersed accounts by Tolani’s mother, Arike, in her native village of Makoku… Atta captures the sights, sounds, and smells of her native land in the 1980s, with its War against Indiscipline in effect, as it straddles Western ways and native customs. A meandering novel with a painful punch.”

  —Booklist

  a bit of

  difference

  sefi atta

  An imprint of Interlink Group, Inc.

  Northampton, Massachusetts

  First published in 2013 by

  INTERLINK BOOKS

  An imprint of Interlink Publishing Group, Inc

  46 Crosby Street, Northampton, Massachusetts 01060

  www.interlinkbooks.com

  Copyright © Sefi Atta 2013

  Cover image copyright © Funmi Tofomowo-Okelola 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic/digital means and whether or not transiently) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Atta, Sefi.

  A bit of difference / by Sefi Atta.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56656-892-0

  1. Single women—Nigeria—Fiction. 2. Homecoming—Fiction. 3. Life change

  events—Fiction. 4. Nigeria—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3601. T78B5 2012

  813'.6—dc23

  2012012204

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  To order or request our complete catalog,

  please call us at 1-800-238-LINK, or e-mail: [email protected]

  For my father Abdul-Aziz Atta,

  forty years in memoriam.

  Reorientation

  The great ones capture you. This one is illuminated and magnified. It is a photograph of an African woman with desert terrain behind her. She might be Sudanese or Ethiopian. It is hard to tell. Her hair is covered with a yellow scarf and underneath her image is a caption: “I Am Powerful.”

  An arriving passenger at the Atlanta airport momentarily obscures the photograph. She has an Afro, silver hoops the size of bangles in her ears and wears a black pin-striped trouser suit. She misses the name of the charity the photograph advertises and considers going back to get another look, but her legs are resistant after her flight from London and her shoulder is numb from the weight of her handbag and laptop.

  She was on the plane for nine hours and someone behind her suffered from flatulence. The Ghanaian she sat next to fell silent once she mentioned she was Nigerian. At Immigration, they photographed her face and took prints of her left and right index fingers. She reminded herself of the good reasons why as she waited in the line for visitors, until an Irish man in front of her turned around and said, “This is a load of bollocks.” She only smiled. They might have been on camera and it was safe for him, despite the skull tattoos on his arm.

  I am powerful, she thinks. What does that mean? Powerful enough to grab the attention of a passerby, no doubt. She hopes the woman in the photograph was paid more than enough and imagines posters with the prime minister at Number Ten and the president in the Oval Office with the same caption underneath, “I Am Powerful.” The thought makes her wince as she steps off the walkway.

  She has heard that America is a racist country. She does not understand why people rarely say this about England. On her previous trips to other cities like New York, DC, and LA, she hasn’t found Americans especially culpable, only more inclined to talk about the state of their race relations. She has also heard Atlanta is a black city, but so far she hasn’t got that impression.

  At the carousel, a woman to her right wears cowry shell earrings. The woman’s braids are thick and gray and her dashiki is made of mud cloth. On her other side is a man who is definitely a Chip or a Chuck. He has the khakis and Braves cap to prove it, and the manners. He helps an elderly man who struggles with his luggage, while a Latina, who looks like a college student, refuses to budge and tosses her hair back as if she expects others to admire her. There is a couple with an Asian baby. The baby sticks a finger up her nostril while sucking on her thumb.

  It takes her a while to get her luggage and she ends up behind a Nigerian woman whose luggage is singled out for an X-ray before hers is.

  “Any garri or egusi?” a customs official asks the woman playfully
.

  “No,” the woman replies, tucking her chin in, as if she is impressed by his pronunciation.

  “Odabo,” the customs official says and waves after he inspects her luggage.

  The woman waves back. The camaraderie between them is tantamount to exchanging high fives. Before 9/11 he might have hauled her in for a stomach X-ray.

  “Will you step this way, ma’am?” he asks, beckoning.

  Walking into the crowd at the arrival lobby makes her eyes sting. She always has this reaction to crowds. It is like watching a bright light, but she has learned to stem the flow of tears before it begins, the same way she slips into a neutral mood when she sees Anne Hirsch holding that piece of paper with her surname, Bello. She approaches Anne and can tell by Anne’s involuntary “Oh,” that she is not quite the person Anne is expecting.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Anne says, shaking her hand.

  Anne is wearing contact lenses. Her gray hairs are visible in her side part and the skin on her neck is flushed. She looks concerned, as if she is meeting a terminally ill patient.

  “You, too.”

  “Now, is it… Dee or Day-ola?”

  “Day.”

  Anne may well begin to curse and kick and Deola would merely take a step back. It surprises her how naturally this habit of detaching herself from her colleagues comes. They walk outdoors and into the humidity and racket of the ground transportation zone, two women in sensible suits and pumps. Anne waddles—she is pigeon-toed—and Deola strides as if she has been prompted to stand up straight.

  “How was your flight?” Anne asks.

  “Not bad,” Deola says.

  Lying like this is also instinctive. She wouldn’t want to come across as a whiner. A bus roars past, the heat from its exhaust pipes enveloping them.

  “Did you get enough sleep?” Anne asks.

  “I did, thanks.”

  Anne regards her sideways. “I’m sure a few more hours won’t hurt.”

  Deola’s face has revealed more than she would like. They head toward the loading bay as Anne suggests she go to her hotel and start her review the next morning.

  “If that’s all right with you,” she says.

  “Of course,” Anne says.

  “Thanks,” Deola says.

  She has been working at LINK for three months, following a lackluster stint in a consultancy that specialized in not-for-profit organizations. LINK, an international charity foundation, has a hierarchy, but not one that encourages rivalry as the accountancy firm she trained in did. LINK’s money comes from well-meaning sources and goes out to well-deserving causes. She is the director of internal audit at the London office and Anne is the director of international affairs at the Atlanta office.

  Anne leaves her at the loading bay and returns with her car, a cream-colored Toyota Camry. The mat on Deola’s side of the car is clean compared to Anne’s, which is covered with sand. Anne has changed into sandals and her feet are pale, even though it is summer.

  “So how is Kate doing?” she asks, as she drives off.

  “Kate’s very well,” Deola says. “She’s back at work this week.”

  Kate Meade is Anne’s counterpart in the London office. She is pregnant with her second child and was sick with toxoplasmosis.

  “It must be catching,” Anne says.

  “Toxoplasmosis?”

  “No, pregnancy, I mean. When last we spoke she said someone else in London has been on maternity leave. Pamela?”

  “Pam Collins.”

  “It must have been hard, with all the absences.”

  “Pam will be back soon.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. She’s just had her baby.”

  Deola could be more forthcoming, but she prefers not to talk about her colleagues. Pam is on maternity leave until the end of the summer. The administrative department has been in a state of backlog. There was some talk about hiring a temp, but Kate decided not to. They had a temp from New Zealand once before and he took too many smoke breaks.

  “Ali and I would like to have one,” Anne says. “What did Pam have?”

  “Um… a boy, I believe.”

  “Ah, a boy. That’s what I would like. Ali wants a girl.”

  Deola assumes Anne is married to a Muslim man, which makes her regret her moment of anxiety when, on her way to the bathroom on the plane, she saw a man who looked Arab reading an Arabic-to-English translation dictionary. He was dressed in military khakis. She was not the only passenger giving him furtive looks. Now she wonders if he was working for the US government.

  She has reservations about the orange alert the US is on. She has referred to the alerts in general as Banana Republic scare tactics, like Idi Amin or Papa Doc trying to keep people in check with rumors of juju and voodoo, and has compared the Iraq war casualties to Mobutu sacrificing human blood to the gods to ensure his longevity in office. She is in the US to learn how the Atlanta office managed their launch of Africa Beat, an HIV awareness campaign. She and Anne talk about the UK launch, which is a few months away. Her colleagues in Atlanta have not been able to send all their financial records by e-mail or to explain figures via the phone.

  Stewart “Stone” Riley is the US spokesman for Africa Beat. His biography reads like a rocker’s creed: born in a small town, formed a group in high school, suffered under commercialization, was crucified by the press, rumored to be dead, rose again in the charts and the rest of it. He claims he is influenced by rhythm and blues. Deola has heard his music and it sounds nothing like the R&B she listened to in the eighties, music with a beat she can dance to. In London, the spokesperson for Africa Beat is Dára, a hip-hop singer. He is Nigerian, but because of the accent over his name and his tendency to drop his H’s, Anne mistakes him for French West African. Deola tells Anne he is Yoruba.

  “Dára?” Anne says, stressing the first syllable of his name instead of the last. “Really?”

  “His name means ‘beautiful.’ It is short for ‘beautiful child.’”

  “That’s appropriate,” Anne says. “He is very beautiful.”

  Deola does not know one Nigerian who thinks Dára is beautiful. They say he looks like a bush boy, not to mention his questionable English. It is almost as if they are angry he is accepted overseas for the very traits that embarrass them.

  “Do you speak the language, then?” Anne asks, hesitantly.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you were British.”

  “Me? No.”

  She tells Anne she was born in Nigeria and grew up there. She went to school in England in her teens, got her degree from London School of Economics and has since lived and worked in London. She doesn’t say she has a British passport, that she swore allegiance to the Queen to get one and would probably have got down on her knees at the home office and begged had her application been denied.

  “You see yourself as Nigerian, then,” Anne says.

  “Absolutely,” Deola says.

  She has never had any doubts about her identity, though other people have. She has yet to encounter an adequate description of her status overseas. Resident alien is the closest. She definitely does not see herself as British. Perhaps she is a Nigerian expatriate in London.

  “Atlanta doesn’t have any programs in Nigeria,” Anne says.

  “London doesn’t either.”

  “I suppose that’s because you haven’t been approached.”

  “Actually.” This slips out with a laugh. “The management team doesn’t trust Nigerians.”

  Anne frowns. “Oh, I’m not so sure about that. It’s the government they don’t trust, but it’s a shame to hold NGOs responsible for that. I mean, they are just trying to raise funds for… for these people, who really don’t need to be punished any more than they have been already.”

  Deola tells herself she must not say the word “actually” again on this trip. “Actually” will only lead to another moment of frankness, one that might end in antagonism. Nor will she say the words “these
people” so long as she works for LINK or ever in her life.

  She tells Anne that Kate Meade is considering a couple of programs in Nigeria. One is to prevent malaria in children and the other is for women whose husbands have died from AIDS. The London office funds programs in Kenya, South Africa and other African countries that have a record for being what they call “fiscally reliable.”

  “Do you like living in London?” Anne asks.

  “I do,” Deola says, after a pause.

  “It’s very European these days.”

  “It is also very American.”

  “How?”

  “You know, with hip-hop and the obsession with celebrities.”

  Anne shuts her eyes. “Ugh!”

  Sincerity like this is safe. As a Nigerian, Deola, too, is given to unnecessary displays of humiliation.

  “Do you think you will ever go back to Nigeria?” Anne asks.

  Deola finds the question intrusive, but she has asked herself this whenever she can’t decide if what she really needs is a change in location, rather than a new job.

  “Eventually,” she says.

  z

  Atlanta is more traditional and landlocked than she imagined it to be, with its concrete overpasses, greenery and red brick churches. She had envisaged a modern, aquatic city because of the name, which sounds similar to that futuristic series that was on television in the seventies, Man From Atlantis. Downtown, she counts three people who are mentally ill. The common signs are there: unkempt hair, layers of clothing and that irresolute demeanor whether they are crossing the median, rolling a pushcart up Ponce de Leon or standing by a dusty windowpane. It is like London of the Thatcher years.

  Her hotel is on Peachtree, some ten minutes away from the Atlanta office. Anne will shuttle her there and back tomorrow. She thanks Anne for giving her a lift from the airport and arranges to meet her in the lobby the next morning. At the reception area, she joins the line and checks into a single room with a queen-sized bed. She inspects the room after putting her suitcase down. She prods and rubs the furniture and unclasps her bra. She needs to buy new underwear. She knows a Nigerian couple in Atlanta she could call, but she finds them enamored with consumerism—cars, houses, shops and credit cards. They brag about living in America, as if they need to make Nigerians elsewhere feel they have lost out.