June, in Passing
on the world cup, xenophobia and the ongoingness of life
June was strangely calm. By calm, I mean all I really had to do was stay on business, as the kids say these days. I turned a year older. I started putting together plans for the release of my debut essay collection. I taught a masterclass. Got called “lazy” on Twitter for floating a thought experiment, all in a day’s work. I read a little, wrote a little, and tried not to get distracted by the hundred little anxieties that accompany waiting for the next thing to happen. There was another kind of anticipation too. I knew this summer would feel different. Academic life trains you to think of friendships seasonally. Every May and June, someone graduates, someone moves away, someone returns home, someone begins another fellowship in another city. Before long, you realize that the people who made a place feel like home for you have quietly disappeared one after another. I knew this was coming, so perhaps the loneliness has not surprised me as much as I imagined it would. There is something oddly peaceful about learning to keep yourself company.
The FIFA Club World Cup has also been on. It is the biggest edition yet and is being hosted across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Watching it, I have found myself thinking more about the ways politics influences football. Politics has remarkably long legs. It walks into everything we do, even the things we imagine exist outside it. This is perhaps why I am still shocked at the State of the Humanities Report that was published some weeks ago where these claims were erroneously repeated. The politics in this year’s World Cup reared its head in everything. From the organization and arrival of teams at their individual venues and the uneven treatment of teams, in the different expectations placed upon players depending on where they come from. Maybe I notice these things more because Nigeria is not playing. It is easier to watch without the emotional investment of supporting your own country.
Still, I cannot stop thinking about passports. What an international passport can buy you. The ease with which some people cross borders while others remain trapped inside bureaucracies that seem designed to remind them where they belong. Even at the highest levels of sport, after all the trophies, the fame, and the money, there are players who still have to negotiate a racism that is not particularly interested in hiding itself. Achievement, it turns out, does not always purchase dignity. I think immediately of Breel Embolo, the Switzerland international who was stopped upon arriving in the US for what I can only assume to be questions surrounding whether his claims to be an actual Switz international were real because of his Cameroonian heritage.
I have also been thinking again about the xenophobic attacks in South Africa. I wrote about them briefly in my last newsletter, but I have found my thinking shifting, however slightly. One of the responses that often emerges from Nigerians and Ghanaians is to remind South Africans of the solidarity offered during apartheid. We remember the scholarships, the financial contributions, the diplomatic pressure, the refuge offered to exiles, the support for liberation movements. These histories matter. They should not be forgotten. But I wonder if that rhetoric misses something. The people leading these current attacks are often not the political elites who inherited the benefits of international solidarity. They are frequently people failed by post-apartheid South Africa itself. People living with unemployment, inequality, and abandoned promises. Their response is tragic and indefensible, but perhaps our appeals to history fail because they are addressed to people whose lives were never transformed by the histories we invoke.
Their own rhetoric is revealing. They tell other Africans to go back and fix their own countries. It is an ugly sentiment, but it insists relentlessly on the present. It refuses historical debts altogether. It is almost as if the liberation histories preserved by our governments belong to one class of people, while the frustrations animating these attacks belong to another. I have found myself returning to Fanon and Sylvia Wynter, particularly their suspicion of the Black bourgeoisie and the ethnoclass. Both ask us to pay attention to the distance that often opens between political liberation and the people in whose name liberation was supposedly achieved. Perhaps that distance is where some of these contradictions now live. I don’t know that this is the right way to think about it. It is simply where my thoughts have wandered these past few weeks.
This month some of my work appeared on both The Common Reader & Transition Magazine. I was also in conversation with the incredible Akal Mohan for Ubwali Literary Magazine where we talked about writing essays, African Literature and a few other things. I hope you find the conversation as generative as it was for me.
I also received emails from scholars and readers who were very generous with their praises. It felt odd to read some of these emails, but it also made me happy to think about the bigger picture of how I am not writing to the void. It is very fulfilling I have to say.
Because I keep getting requests for the books I am reading, I will try to keep a list here for anyone who cares. This month, my favourite read by every means was Tolani Akinola’s Leave Your Mess at Home. It left me stunned in ways I didn’t expect and I might do a review if I can get to it. The other books on my to-be-read pile include The Husbands by Holly Gramazio.
Meanwhile, summer has finally arrived in St. Louis. It feels as though it began only yesterday. The sun has been relentless these last few days and promises to remain so for a while. I intend to stay indoors as much as I can. There is reading to do, outlines to sketch, and a handful of projects waiting patiently for me to begin.
Until next time.