One month ago…

Well, I’m at Heathrow airport. I’ve left Nigeria; I’m out of Africa. It’s been a hard couple of days, with strong overtones of weirdness and hints of relief. I’m pretty overwhelmed right now, actually. Everyone told me about culture shock upon returning — I don’t know if this is culture shock, I probably wouldn’t call it that. When I first came to Nigeria, I was completely baffled and alienated by the culture. Returning home, I’m entering a culture that I’m quite familiar with. I’m not entirely out of practice, having spent many a lonely Nigerian night engaging with Western institutions in my imagination. The images in mind’s eye during these sessions didn’t seem particularly strange. Really, I’ve got two decades in Canada to my six months in Nigeria, so this should be no surprise. I’m not exactly a child raised by hyenas coming to the city for the first time. I may have lived in Africa for half a year, but I did with a laptop, iPod, and a fairly extensive wardrobe.

So yeah, I’m not feeling alienated exactly (at least, none moreso than I did before I left!) But I keep flashing back to scenes in Kagoro or Kafanchan, scenes that are massively incongruous to my current environment. I’m having trouble reconciling these two worlds, trouble believes that they can possibly exist in the same universe. I feel like an inter-dimensional traveler who has seen things so absurd that the people around him think he’s mad. I’ve ridden cloud dragons through a marmalade wormhole, and I’ve bought a venti dolce latte at Starbucks, but never the twain shall meet.

Mind you, I don’t mean to exoticize Nigeria. Canada and Nigeria are equally insane and complete bullocks, each in their own utterly unique way. Canadians take SSRIs and threaten humanity with overconsumption; Nigerians don’t believe in AIDS and drive death-machines at a zillion miles an hour. On the other hand, most of us are basically decent people, trying to be comfortable without screwing things up too significantly for everyone else. But the devil’s in the details, and the differences in this demon are quite… drastic.

More later — the plane is leaving.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 7:55 pm and is filed under Nigeria. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.