What is my place in the world?
There was an afternoon drive on the corniche when I thought: this life I was living was unbelievable. I’d felt some version of it on my first morning in Dakar — rising slowly, as Saturday recommends of us. Around 2 pm, I took a 20-minute walk to a coffee shop, ordered a mocha and banana bread, ate in silence and then fell into conversation with the only other English speaker sitting there — an American woman working at the embassy. We began what would become a trend on my trip; a conversation about travel. In it, I uttered the unbelievable sentence of my travel plans for the next two months.
I slipped too easily into the garment of this life.
I remember one afternoon sitting on the balcony of Maison Kayser and feeling a little guilty for my life.
Around the corner, an altercation played out between a homeless woman and a security man trying to protect people from her existence.
Then there was me, sitting in a new country, drinking coffee and doing (on an expensive computer) something called work.
It felt like a betrayal of the place I came from - to live so comfortably in such luxury.
Later that week, I met Maguette at Surfer’s Paradise to watch the sunset together. After he told me about his work — first as a doctor and now in development — I asked him a question.
Do you ever feel guilty?
Mags stopped practising medicine for a not-uncommon reason. Medical practice in many parts of the Global South is heartbreaking. As one doctor I interviewed two years ago put it:
“ I realized that I’d spent so many years learning how to save lives, but no one told me that I was going to work in a system that was designed to take lives”
The job of a doctor, along with being an attempt to prolong life, also becomes the continual witness of its end. Mags, shattered by that witnessing, chose the privilege of stepping away from it. I asked him about guilt because I had been thinking a lot about guilt.
I first entered a plane when I was about 12. By this point, the summer vacation had become a regularly scheduled escape from my real life — in Ojuelegba, in close proximity to lack.
All of my childhood was spent bouncing back and forth across the line between middle and lower income. My family was right on the line with certain symptoms of privilege. One example was travelling for the holidays, necessitated by my father living elsewhere in the country. Many of my neighbours never travelled. Many of my schoolmates travelled (out of the country) all the time.
It was pretty early on that I started to witness the type of expansion of imagination travel offered. The simple change of scene, from our block of flats in Lagos to our duplex in Port Harcourt, changed what kind of house I could dream about living in as an adult; what kind of neighbourhood: noisy street or quiet estate; what kind of leisure: none at all or bicycle riding.
On one of these trips, I conjured the first image of the life I wanted to live. Taking notes from my father, I wanted a job with an official house and a car. A job that paid 1 million naira a month: as large a number as I could think of at the time — enough money to send my children to school.
Life didn’t need to be many things when I was younger. It didn’t want to be many things, except domestic.
Maybe I truly believed that mine was going to be the life of the average Nigerian. I was born here, I lived here, I started a family here, I died here, and nothing truly interesting or noteworthy happened to me. Yes, I travelled; I saw (and only saw) parts of the world: some places in Europe, some of the shine of the gulf, and maybe even a bit of the Americas. But really, my life was only one book, a simple book with a simple plot. Maybe at 12, I expected this for my life. It’s all I knew a life could be.
It is the great deviation from that expectation that challenges my belief. I feel somehow that my life was informed to be an ordinary average one, never causing any great spark in the world.
But this life is not a single book with a simple plot. I have transcended that, broken away from it. Now, I find myself in search of ways to live a life that is something else — that is many things.
And it’s a daunting quest to figure out what that life is.
Something I didn’t realize is how small the world feels from within Nigeria. The scale is so tiny. I think travel expands me. And I didn’t even realize I needed expansion.
There are certain questions I ask myself now that would never have come up if I did not travel. Some of those questions bring, along with the need for answers, responsibility to a world bigger than myself. They also offer answers to some of my more domestic questions
For example, a recent question I’ve been asking myself is about the use of money in romance. Is it my job to send women money and take care of women with money? Is this how I want my relationship with women to be?
When you live and date in a city like Lagos, it’s a question that comes up a lot. It’s easy to uphold and participate in certain relationships between men and women.
Now, surrounded by new questions about what kind of person I want to be? and my responsibility to the unhoused members of my community, the question of money in dating feels so silly.
Another question (about money) I’ve been asking myself is:
Do I want to be rich?
I think travel helps me decide what kind of person I want to be. It brings up yet-to-be-articulated questions about my participation in a world bigger than me.
So do I want to be rich?
I think the answer is not particular.
Wanting to be rich feels like wanting to use money to buy isolation from the world’s problems; not really wanting to use money to fix them which is maybe what I want to do with money.
Travel is my biggest interest of great expense but even that I don’t want to do in a wealthy way. I don’t want to travel simply to see the world, the beauty of the world, the richness of the world.
I want to understand the world, my place in it, what can make me better, and what I can make better.
By this point in my life, I’m not new to travel. That’s the thing that truly confounds me. Today, I live a life where travel is almost mundane. At 12, my relationship with the unbelievable experience of a plane lifting off included making peace with death. Saying the shahada to ensure heaven should I be greeted with the need for it. Today, earphones in, pre-selected playlist cued, I ignore the flight safety demonstration and read (rather too casually) the entire time as the plane vibrates and creaks away in defiance of gravity. Over the next 5 weeks, I have 5 scheduled flights. Possibly 2 more in the three weeks after. It is a different kind of life, this one.
Maybe that’s why I felt guilty on that balcony in Dakar — I was living a different life as if it was the life I had always known. I still feel like an impostor living this life but maybe it doesn’t matter how I feel.
I have all these new symptoms of a privileged life — all these new questions of what I want this life to be. A life I want to live responsibly.
How can I wear this privilege in a way that doesn’t spit in the face of the world’s suffering?
Who should I be when so many other people don’t have the privilege of wanting to be anything?
Maybe asking questions is a good place to start. Maybe these questions will close gaps for me and help me close gaps for others.
