Who I Am, Who I’m Not
by: Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene

To brave New York’s temperamental winter, I was clad in my calve-length winter coat, a brightly-colored scarf, sweaters beneath my coat and dark turquoise gloves.  Shortly after entering work but before I had the chance to finish defrosting from the winter chill, I heard a passionate and unexpected:

“My Nigerian sister!  I’ve been waiting to meet you!”
“What a beautiful greeting,” I said smiling, my head turning towards the stranger’s voice.  
When we were closer in proximity to each other, she asked, “Are you Yoruba?”
“No,” I responded to this incredibly familiar and annoying question.
“You Igbo?”
“No.”
“What are you?”  
“I’m Urhobo and Ijaw.”  
“Oh, I’ll hug you anyway,” she said, opening her arms to me.  More than a little taken aback, I look at her stunned, thinking, did that really just come out of her mouth?  
“Wow,” I said pulling away from her, “that was really imperialist of you to say.”
“I’m just kidding—”
“Wow.”
Joking and trying to regain the familiarity of a few seconds ago, she remorsefully said, “That was messed up.  Let’s start over…”

Every time people who aren’t Nigerian find out I’m Nigerian, without fail, the first question out of their mouth is one of two: “Are you Yoruba?” or “When did you move here?”  In order for me to be Nigerian, I must have been born in Nigeria right?  When I say, “No I was born in the states,” then I usually receive, “Oh, so you’re American?” to which I respond, “No, I’m a Nigerian who was born in America.”  When you find out someone is Jewish, do you ask them when they moved here from Israel?  Or since the first Jews were from Africa, does one ask them if they’re from Egypt, Ethiopia, Morocco, Algeria, Libya or Tunisia?

She and I started over; we hugged and chatted briefly before she headed into a meeting.  That encounter stayed with me.  Those words came out of the mouth of a young, Igbo woman, a queer Igbo woman meeting me in the states.  I cherish the community of queer African friends I have and I especially nurture my relationships with queer Nigerians—I automatically treat them with a certain reverence because we share a homeland.  In my opinion, we don’t have time to quarrel over ethnicities when we are so far away from home.  Even when we are on our own red soil, eating eba and egusi soup, under our hot Nigerian sun, fetching water to bathe, to cook, to drink, even then when our Nigerian identity is in the majority, even then we don’t have time to quarrel over ethnic rivalries.  Our ethnic and religious differences have been causing conflict that causes our red soil to glow with a different shade of red and this breaks my heart.  So many of us left our homelands, or are children of those who left their homelands, to go to the U.S. or Europe in search of education and work to support ourselves and our families.  Many of us long for home but haven’t been home in years due to how much it costs to visit—the cost of trips home include more than an expensive plane ticket but also the gifts everyone expects, the bills many will expect you to pay for them, the “loans” asked of you that will never be re-paid, this person’s school fees, that person’s rent and so on and so on.  Everyone thinks we are rich in Europe and Ah-meh-re-kah.  Many of us long for home and have not returned in many years because we know we can’t be out about our sexuality and/or gender identification to our families, villages, cities, country.  Given these realities of LGBTQ Africans abroad, why are we wasting our time with this ethnic rivalry bullshit?  No, it’s not a joke to disparage or belittle an ethnicity just because we’re in the numerical minority.  It’s sad that we allow the ethnic groups in the numerical majority of our country to define what our country is.

We simplify our African identity for westerners.  People who aren’t Nigerian usually haven’t heard of the Niger Delta, of Port Hartcourt, of Warri, of Sapele, of Edo.  What they have heard of are the Yoruba, the orishas, Shango, Obatala and maybe they’ve heard of Fela.  Even as they mispronounce his name, but yes, they’ve heard of him.  The same people with the oil from my Niger Delta land in their gas tanks haven’t heard of the land that oil hails from.  Nneka, a Deltan Nigerian singer/emcee articulates this ironic interconnectedness perfectly, “Accept the fact that…we are your pillars that make your ceilings stand.”

This is the point at which I feel the conflict and tension between identifying as a Black person in the states (because I’ve spent most of my life here and feel so connected to American Black culture) and being African, specifically Nigerian.  I would much prefer people didn’t try to create some kind of intimacy with me by throwing the only ethnicity they know about Nigeria at me or telling me that they named their first child after the first president of Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe (true story) or telling me they have Nigerian friends.  I don’t care and I think it’s completely irrelevant to our relationship how many Nigerians’ phone numbers you have in your cell phone.

For a long time, I’ve simplified my identity for the people I encounter who are not Nigerian.  I simply identify as Nigerian.  It’s only when I speak with Nigerians that we talk about what ethnicity I am and they are with the understanding that there are many ethnicities; we talk about what parts of the country we’re from, our foods, our clothing and so forth.  I’ve recently become more specific when I speak about my culture, not because I feel obligated to tell everyone I meet my life story, but because I am no longer interested in my silence about the specificity of my ethnicity and culture being assumed to mean I belong to a Nigerian ethnic majority.  On a continent with the population of a little over a billion, Nigeria has 155 million inhabitants.  This means that approximately one in every six Africans is Nigerian.  Nigeria is the most populated African country and the eighth most populated country in the world.  Criteria for what “ethnicity” means includes, but is not limited to, a group of people who share language, customs, traditions, religious/spiritual beliefs and/or land.  Nigeria is a complicated place and depending on who’s doing the counting and defining of what “ethnicity” means there are between 250 and 619 different ethnic groups in Nigeria.  Despite this, too often what is Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo is presumed to be all that Nigeria is.  And it is not.

I was annoyed and hurt by what this young, queer Nigerian woman said because I just expected more of her.  I didn’t expect her to break my heart that Friday morning.  I wanted to feel some solidarity and sisterhood, not have a reason to roll my eyes and suck my teeth muttering “Na wa o” as my beautiful Igbo people are known to say.

As a very proud Ijaw and Urhobo woman, who hails from the Delta region of Nigeria, I have no interest in allowing anyone to place their ignorance of or assumptions about my culture upon me.  Furthermore, and much more importantly, I intend to publicly raise up the name of where I am from, right down to the villages, because we are precious and unique.  I have so much love for all the ethnicities in my country, I just think we should all get a little more air time.

Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene is a Nigerian dyke performance activist, poet, dancer, essayist, playwright and actress who uses her poetry to address issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, imperialism, love, self esteem and family.  Yvonne has self-published three collections of poetry, toured nationally and performed in over 25 u.s. cities.  Her one woman show, Volcano’s Birthright{s}, debuted in May 2009 in New York City.  For more information about her work & future performances of her one woman show, please visit www.myloveisaverb.com.  Video blog: www.youtube.com/AfrocrownDiva

Contact her at: myloveisaverb@gmail.com