In 2022, I escaped. I always escaped, and I had the mind to keep running away. Coming to the US was like running away from my home, though that home is still a part of me. My home is a mark I cannot wash away. I carried my home in my bag through the Miami Airport. In my duffel bag, there was an old diary with the names of people I had met back in Nigeria. Each name in the diary has its own significance, each name has its own history of the time I had spent with those people. 

There is this thing about leaving home. You leave home when everyone is in their bed, sleeping. You always leave at the time people wouldn’t ask you questions, like: “Where are you going at this time of the day?” “Are you traveling or something?” “When will you be back?” These are questions I didn’t have answers to when I was leaving. So, I left home at night. I left Lagos when the city was sleeping, and people wouldn’t know I had escaped. Only my father, my mother, and Solomon, my friend, were at the airport to wave me goodbye. I stood outside the airport building, holding my mother’s hands, and I didn’t know if I would ever see her again. I smiled at my father, wondering what was going through his mind. He didn’t say much. I perceived he didn’t know what to say. Solomon was jovial as always, trying to make me laugh. But even amidst that laughter, there was uncertainty hanging around me like clothes on the lines.

I heard the whirring sound of the aircraft at takeoff. The sound, to me, is like the mourning sound of a widow, or a widower, the sound ignited a kind of mourning in my mind. I mourned my departure. I mourned my home and everything in it. I nurtured the memories I had with my father, and how he would say, “I have prayed for you. You shouldn’t be afraid.” Growing up, I was a timid child. I was hardly seen. I always disappeared into corners of the house, away from prying eyes of people. My father’s words had a way of reassuring me. At the airport, I realized I was facing the world without my father, I realized I would be alone, and there was nothing I could do. 

I was born at a time when the military government was drunk on power in Nigeria. I was born at a time of hiding from the invisible hands of military dictators. I was born to hide. I hide from people. I hide from danger, and maybe too, I hide from good luck. I didn’t use to believe in luck, for I thought luck was something you don’t work for, something you don’t struggle to get. But even being lucky is an act of struggle with your destiny, a kind of struggle with your being. In the struggle, you find luck sitting at a table, waiting for you, and people like me, we tell luck, go sit elsewhere. 

The military junta at the time I was born made people go on self-exile. People couldn’t just stay during the time of Ibrahim Babangida. On the streets, people referred to him as Maradona. Diego Maradona was an Argentinian football player known for his exceptional dribbling skills and scoring a goal against England in the 1986 FIFA World Cup with his hand, which was popularly called the “Hand of God.” Ibrahim Babangida had a shrewd personality, and it was during his time that Dele Giwa, a foremost journalist in Nigeria, was killed with a letter bomb, and every finger was pointing in Babangida’s direction, but nobody could speak against him. He promised Nigeria an election that would usher in a civilian president. His promises looked good, and he conducted an election, but cancelled the election results midway through the process, plunging Nigeria into chaos. I was born at this time when the Nigerian president was a Maradona; he promised this but did something else. It was an uncertain time, and that uncertainty made children of my generation lose hope. The slogan of the popular presidential aspirant, Moshood Abiola, was “HOPE ‘93.” Hope and luck are subtle, contradictory words, and you cannot be too sure when you have them. I am always looking above my shoulders to see when they run out of my life.

I became an alien in the US—an alien is a stranger, an unwanted intruder, sort of. I didn’t want to imagine what people thought of me, or what the immigration officer thought of me when I told him it was my first time in the US, and I didn’t know the document he was asking for. The long trip to the US was humbling, too, and I wasn’t ready for the long queue of aliens at the airport. Did I want to leave Lagos, for this new place? I couldn’t answer my own question. It is not like I can become a poet at home. 

Nobody cares if I write poetry or not, nobody is interested in the work that I do. Nobody loves poetry. Many people believed that writing poetry was an expressway to poverty. They asked me questions like: “Have you ever seen a rich poet in Nigeria?” “Have you ever seen someone so successful as a poet?” “What exactly do you want to do with your poetry?” These people are right, but I wasn’t writing for wealth. I was writing for me; I was writing to become everything I can be, and it is through poetry I find my true self. The US is a place that gave my writing a home, a home that Nigeria couldn’t give it, a home where I can be proud to talk about poetry and no one laugh at me or think I’m stupid. At that time, at the immigration office, I realized that I preferred to be an alien because I loved poetry more than I loved home. I loved the pathway of poverty more, and I became an alien when they stamped my passport, an alien from another country—trying to create a world that he carried in his duffel bag across the Atlantic Ocean. 

The Atlantic Ocean reminded me of everything slavery, and how ships brought people like me across the world to plantations. I looked through the window of the airplane and I imagined people buried in the belly of the ocean, the faces of my ancestors I wouldn’t know. To be an alien is to be invisible. You are always left out of important discussions. Even if you are present, you are always looked at with disdain, and eyes that say: “You aren’t welcome here, go back to the hole you crawled out from.” At every point, you must keep proving to people that you are there, and not a ghost they cannot see. You must show your worth to people so they may accept you into their clique. 

I hate cliques. I think cliques create divisions; people not part of cliques become “other.” I didn’t understand what it means to be “othered” until I got to the US. America has a systemic way of “othering” people into classifications with an imagery scale of preference. On this scale, I’m the least because I’m a Nigerian, black skin, and some even think: “Only God knows the university he went to in Africa,” and “Why does he have that thick accent?” I remember one of my students asked me a supposed honest question about Nigeria: “Are the universities in Nigeria that good?” He was fed with the illusion that there is no place like America. I asked him why he asked the question, he said: “Every Nigerian he has met is always smart.” The question, unknown to him, comes from the American classification of people, like me, Nigerian, as “other,” separated from the commonwealth of intelligence and knowledge. But he realized Nigerians are smart, and they must have great universities.

As an alien in America, I’m conscious of my duffel bag and how the people in my bag are still important, always important. Each night, as I lay in bed, curled up like a cat because of the cold, I think of my family and friends, far away from me. I think of the loneliness that clings to me in my room, and the silence around me, and I ask myself: “Do you really want this life?”