Blackness in America
The problem with Anthony Bourdain.
The chronic
America is a chronic condition. Sometimes its symptoms are hidden, and other times there are massive flare-ups — violent outbreaks reminding you, lest you get too comfortable, that sometimes the only difference between calm and chaos is the tone.
Being an immigrant in the United States, then, is also a chronic sickness, a sustained practice in dislocation, depending on your origin. Because as President Trump alluded when he made his “s—hole countries” remark, there is, in fact, a hierarchy of worth based on your nationality. It is an evolving or devolving predicament that one manages to live with, having developed a cordial relationship with the possibility of complete catastrophe. Even in the more recent and polite past, when words were less rancorous, trust that this empire is still chugging along.
So as a smart, or self-preserving or sanity-favoring, immigrant, especially one with vulnerable status, you have to consume news by osmosis, a gradual and deliberate absorption of tense reports. You pick snatches here and there, read posts and tweets, steal a glance at acrimonious headlines, simultaneously disconnected and informed but all the while crossing your fingers. Because osmosis is the best way to learn that your home is a s—hole checkered with huts and AIDS.
But how did certain (read: black and brown) immigrant bodies become illegalized in America? Simple: Before we were upbraided here, we were first exploited and diminished there — on the continent.
The first step is to flatten whole people into two-dimensional reliefs. The American imagination first had to be filled with disgusting representations of ballooned bellies and gaunt terror. Africa was re-created in the image of despondency. Next, consume then discard. This next step is also the final step; there is barely an intervening period between the two.
This is the short trip from misrepresentation to discriminatory policies.
Of course, the usual suspects are always guilty: the politicians, profiteers and the policymakers, masterful in the art of use and discard.
The task of objectification, however, that subtle work of debasement is done by the slickest, fairest and least suspicious of them all: the media, with its matter-of-fact images of warruined scapes; Bono and his global compassion ministry, which literally centers him amidst black suffering; televangelists and charities, asking for pennies; and the venerable Anthony Bourdain.
An alien in Lagos
For more than a decade, Bourdain has been America’s patron saint of obscure cuisines, interceding on behalf of the culturally ignorant. An onscreen interlocutor irreverently mediating foreignness to Americans, his show of casual vitality — weathered jeans, T-shirt and a definite swagger — providing bonafides.
Onscreen, he daringly descends into tumultuous locales without concern for gastrointestinal safety, tucking into unnerving dishes with the recklessness of a pasty Don Quixote, all while downing uncountable gulps of strong drinks to wash all that madness down. He fancies himself different, not the circus ringmaster conquering only the most sensational, crunchiest insect or slithering vermin. No, Bourdain is a cultural relativist, according the appropriate deference to those who are different while guiding his viewers a step past their discomfort into a scarier world.
He recently visited Nigeria. “It’s mad, it’s bad, it’s delicious, it’s confusing and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Bourdain said of Lagos in that episode from his CNN “Parts Unknown” show that aired in October 2017.
I am rarely sentimental, except about Lagos, where I was born — the dirt and dust of that city are forever caught in my eye, and I can’t blink it away. I’ve been 18 years without going back home, my movement hindered by “visa problems.”
Osmosis is how I apprehend Lagos now. I have WhatsApp text conversations in pidgin English with my schoolmates. I make phone calls to my parents, my mother inevitably ignoring me to carry on with some disembodied voice about kitchen matters, apologizing for being distracted even as she reassures me that she’s listening. I sing loudly to Davido as I cycle through New Orleans traffic (“I love you no mean say if you say make I put one hand for fire ... I go put hand fire”). Lagos comes in snatches, its smell stuck to the roof of my nostrils. Sometimes I crave it, and I march to find it.
Homesickness drove me to watch Bourdain’s lavishly exoticized treatment of my hometown. My review is regret — it’s a shame it was his voice that was the one to tell that story. An awkward, nasally voice narrating Africanity back to me. His figure cutting a dissonant scene: Tall, thin, bleach white striding through a tumble of black bodies with the selfawareness of Moses at the parted Red Sea. His usual brand of charm, which plays well in an American context, read only as imperial. It is a cloyingly counterculture pose that dissolves — like sugar in garri— into the greater firmament of White Americanness as soon as he interfaces with Africa.
The mind of a chef
That hour of television is an acute fantasy of Africa, a regurgitated trope called up from the pit of a familiar Western stomach. As such, the episode serves as a perfect example of American views of other places — be it Africa or Asia, New Orleans or Compton — painted by outsiders and thus nonrepresentative and ultimately objectified and objectionable.
In Bourdain’s hyper-realized conception, Lagos is full of commendable hustlers MacGyvering an existence out of chewing gum, sunlight and psychedelic funk music. There are some deftly coded scenes, pretending neutrality but signaling difference: Commuter motorcycles weaving through congested traffic, weaving between exasperated, sweatsoiled street vendors, all to the beat of vaguely uplifting music, car horns and harsh voices blaring.
But he can only contain himself for so long before giddily shocking his viewers with what they expect. There is the gratuitous, ritualized slaughter scene: The neck skin of a soon-to-be-decapitated sheep is pulled taut and a sharp knife tears open the animal to reveal the bloodiest of red splattering. This casually macabre picture is spliced with violent images from a local wrestling match where ferocious loin-clothed men are pummeling each other gleefully. We are transported between dead bleeding animals and dark warring men so quickly we can’t tell which is beast, which is happy or who all is dead. It’s dizzying.
And all of this is vomited on you, a sort of fact, without context.
Well, here is the excised context: We are not so much shown Lagos, in its spectral fluorescence, as we are inserted into the mind of Bourdain. And it is a partisan gaze posing as impartial.
Ostensibly Bourdain is a translator, but at that he is mediocre, as evidenced in the frequent flatness of his subjects, their narrative arcs bending conveniently either to victimhood, or victory through gluttony. Where Bourdain’s magic really lies is in his capacity to formulate the most updated representation of readily consumable alterity.
Bourdain doesn’t need to know Africa to do his work; he just needs to understand his customers, America and the appetite for a revamped experience of darkness. They want to touch, taste, smell it, watch it burn and then stand under the shower of its exfoliative ash, feeling it fall gently on their skin, cleansing them of all guilt except curiosity.
Mr. Bourdain’s real work then, captured in these sharply edited visuals, is the faithful reproduction of any representation of Africa that permits its consumption. At this work, he is a master, breaking sweet people down from complex to simple sugars, all the more digestible, all the more delicious. This is a conqueror.
The center of the world
Object Permanence is the knowledge that objects still exist even when out of one’s sensory purview. We aren’t born with this perspective. Rather, we grow into it. Yet our congenital self-centeredness never really perishes. We may understand intellectually that other people exist, but their existence seems concocted for our enjoyment.
In the mid-1990s in Lagos, before cellular phones were as common as gala — that ubiquitous and addictive sausage-roll street snack — most home-phone handsets were tethered by coiled cords, an infinite string of alternating elbow macaroni clipped to a cradle. When I was young, listening to my parents talk on the phone, I was convinced that all their acquaintances, the ones they greeted with cheery salutations, lived inside those tangled phone cords. I pictured microscopic rows of homes filled with shrunken family friends, miniaturized to fit conveniently into our home-phone line, their mission without respect to any other ambition was to answer my parents’ greetings. Similarly, Africa has existed for Bourdain as a place set in pause until he says hello.
While Bourdain is an obvious metaphor for America, for whiteness — consuming and modernizing at an Olympic pace its schemes of pillage — he represents the inescapable truth that the individual is a site of culpability. That the ancient lust and covetousness which propels empire, Europe and the United States is a human condition which at critical mass creates a magnificent host of tyranny.
The end of Anthony Bourdain
At stake here is not the description of Lagos, or Africans. It is about who gets to create us and what those representations mean for our lives, a lesson that extends from cable television to food writing to everyday interactions. The world has a way of turning on the careless words of fools.
Lagosians would be the first to tell you that the city is mad, and Nigerians can opine for forever about the intractable s—holeness of the country, but we don’t quite mean it the same way as Bourdain or the president. Our madness in this s—hole is a lived experience, the distillation of uncountable personal and collective histories brought to bear in a terse description. It is borne from an insoluble frustration which dissolves into laughter at the comic fruits of the dysfunction.
For Bourdain, madness is a salivating prospect, something to be collected, good only for gossip, a story to broadcast. An hour of cable television.
But as Nigerians say, “It’s not his fault, I don’t blame him.” Bourdain is what he is because of who he is — insert proverb about leopards and spots, zebras and stripes.
There’s nothing Bourdain can do to change his work or fix his gaze. He is like everyone else, limited by his history, identity and experiences. Wherever he is, he assumes the center, pushing all narratives to the periphery; all other lives become his supporting cast. No matter how carefully he narrates, he will always remake the world in the image of his privilege.
There’s only one thing Bourdain can do: He can commit to a figurative death. And then let the next woman who tells stories about the world be someone whose center is externally focused. Someone who has had a history of putting together the things that have fallen apart.
Turn off “Parts Unknown” (to whom by the way?) and instead Google Yemisi Aribisala. Google “Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds.” Because we all deserve to see the world — not just her world, but the entire world — through her eyes.
“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh:
For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds, casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself.”
2 Corinthians 10:3-5 At stake here is not the description of Lagos, or Africans. It is about who gets to create us and what those representations mean for our lives.