I.
Mati Diop’s Atlantique (2019) opens on a sunny afternoon at a sprawling construction site on the outskirts of town. Labourers are perched atop half-finished buildings, one of which is a structure that seems to emerge straight out of a sci-fi film. “Muejiza Tower”, a dust-coated banner reads in English and Arabic. The soundscape is a cacophony of revving engines and mooing cows, of hammering and scraping, of a gently howling wind, and the voices of disgruntled workers gathering in front of the site’s administrative centre.
“Every time, it’s ‘just a bit longer,’” a teenage labourer in a powder blue beanie and dirty leather jacket complains to a man whose back is to us.
About a dozen labourers are swarming around the man who is now speaking with someone on the phone. A moment later, the labourers learn that the contractor has gone on a trip, leaving no money for their three-month-owed wages. They are furious. In a poorly lit office, one staff member explains that he’s also the contractor’s employee and is powerless to do anything.
“You know what? Keep the money,” Souleiman, one of our protagonists, tells him in Wolof. “But remember that we have families.”
“Our fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers depend on us,” another labourer adds.
To the group’s hearing, Souleiman explains to the staff that he is so in debt he can only return home at nightfall. “That money is our due,” he says, resigned yet composed.
In the next shot, the labourers are riding back into town in the bed of a pickup truck. Behind them, the tower falls away, so that we see how otherworldly it appears compared to the surrounding landscape. A sombre score begins just as the workers intone a call-and-response. As the score and their tempo rise, the camera cuts between the speeding truck and the ocean, hazy from mist and harsh sunlight. Souleiman, who struggles to join in the singing, lifts and lowers his head, shakes it at intervals as if to cast off his despondency. One of the workers is standing now, pumping up his peers. He shakes Souleiman’s head jocularly, a small attempt to loosen his mood. Trying again to join the singing but failing, Souleiman leans forward and yells into the void.
*
I first watched Atlantique at a small film screening in a three-bedroom apartment in Bariga, a suburb on the Lagos mainland. My first visit to the apartment, on a sunny September Friday about two years prior, was to interview with both the founder and project manager of an artist collective for a spot on a bus that was to travel the country by road. These road trips, usually transnational, were essential to how the collective functioned. Every other year, after a round of applications and assessments, an assembled cohort of writers, filmmakers, photographers, researchers, and other kinds of cultural practitioners took to the road, developing and publishing writings, photographs, and films in relation to a theme and how they were each experiencing and thinking through the journey. More broadly, the experience and the narratives that resulted from the trips fed into a larger mission of interrogating the borders – colonial interventions, really – separating African countries, identities, and cultural exchanges. That year though, the group was undertaking the second iteration of a national road trip during which they would sit with the question of Nigerian identity in relation to colonial cartographies and nomenclatures. This was the year of an ‘absentee president’ and protests over his absence, the year 82 Chibok girls who’d been yanked away from a school hostel in the dead of the night were released in an opaque prisoner exchange deal with the federal government. This was the year the secessionist ghost that had been quietly rousing itself in eastern Nigeria began haunting the rest of the country. The selected artists would set out from Lagos in the west, travel east, and then venture up north, writing and photographing whatever stories the road offered, populating a collective and nuanced response to the question of Nigerian identity. I did not secure a seat that year but, upon the founder’s invitation, began attending film screenings the collective hosted in the modest apartment with rustic furnishings, beige walls, and a floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookshelf that would, in time, deepen my artistic influences.
It was at those screenings, attended over nearly two years, that the world of African Cinema opened up to me. Like many millennial Nigerians raised during the spread of satellite television in the country, I’d grown up on a mixed diet of Western and homegrown films, television, cartoons, and telenovelas, all of which primarily served to entertain. At the Bariga screenings, however, entertainment was only a by-product. After every film, we entered hours-long conversations about the themes explored and waddled our way like amateurs through the films’ aesthetics. The conversations were sometimes heated and often wide-ranging: We discussed the state murder of Patrice Lumumba and David Oyelowo’s arresting performance in Ava DuVernay’s Selma; the price of revolt in Ousmane Sembène’s Moolaadé; the gaiety of young love and human-animal relationships in Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki; Black and African diaspora identities and, always, the politics of borders and movement.
Customarily, the founder of the group selected the films we screened, sometimes delivering access from his Berlin home if they lived behind paywalled film sites. Once a selection was made, the group’s project manager designed colourful flyers which were shared on social media so attendees could RSVP before the day and give us a headcount/feel for the kinds of guests we’d welcome – I’d joined a lean organising team and sometimes anchored the post-screening conversations by this time. Each screening, held a few times a month, would draw on average around 20 people, many of them writers like myself, but also filmmakers, photographers, curators, researchers, painters, and all kinds of artists.
For me, and I reckon for many of the attendees who were still at the early stages of their artistic careers, the Bariga sitting room became a classroom of sorts. The conversations, sometimes strengthened by older artists who visited at the founder’s invitation, were some of my very early lessons in understanding the place of art and artists in the world, and specifically, how independent films could engender deeply complex and reflective understandings of the world. It was where I learned from watching, say, Rita Coburn and Bob Hercules’ And Still I Rise or Horace Ové’s Baldwin’s Nigger, that a poem or a novel was often, and could be, more than a poem or a novel. That all art, at its core, was a narrative-making device. And that the greatest tragedy to befall an artist was not knowing, not thinking critically about, what sort of narratives one’s art, and life, was reinforcing or subverting. This notion was at the heart of many conversations we would have at those screenings. When I began moderating them, it often fell on me to dig up enough contexts surrounding the film so we could clearly unravel the narratives the filmmaker was attempting to reinforce or subvert.
In the lead up to our screening of Atlantique – whose Netflix acquisition made it the most contemporary film we ever screened in the Bariga sitting room – I learned that:
- Diop, who co-wrote the script with Olivier Demangel, was Mambéty’s niece. Our discussions, therefore, had to consider the relationship between both filmmakers and their treatment of similar subjects.
- Atlantique (renamed Atlantics for an English-speaking audience) had so far dazzled Western critics and viewers. Now, the space of the screenings treated the West’s praise-singing with scepticism. That a film or piece of literature had crossed favourably into Western mainstream media often meant that it had only lent or reinforced certain kinds of narratives about the continent, or that it had gone soft on criticising the reach of empire. So, in addition to discussing the film within the context of Mambéty’s Touki Bouki, we were going to discuss what about Diop’s commentary on boat migrations and teenage love – between Souleiman and Ada, the film’s protagonist betrothed to a wealthy but obnoxious suitor, Omar – had wowed the West as much as it had so far done.
It was mid-December when we screened the film, the last we’d screen in that Bariga sitting room, though we did not know it then. I recall that it was well attended and our conversation extremely lively. Attendees lingered well into the night, drinking, snacking, and trying to resolve the events that unfolded in the last half hour of the film.
*
It’s difficult now to remember the exact shape of the conversation from that evening. I imagine that we drew parallels with Touki Bouki – Diop has said that the film wasn’t an homage to her uncle but a comparison of two eras of mass migrations in Senegal. Though nearly five decades apart, Mambéty’s Anta and Mory and Diop’s Souleiman and his peers want to leave Senegal for similar reasons. But the stakes are clearly higher for Diop’s characters, high enough to attempt a route along which thousands have died trying to cross. We likely discussed Diop’s artistic choices in entering this conversation: the haunting motif of the Atlantic as a way to contend with the physicality and mental demands of making such a dangerous crossing, the turn to the metaphysical in order to offer an additional language and landscape with which to discuss the varied losses that sea migrations engender, the decision to lay claim, at the end of the film, to possibility in a place people are clamouring to leave – a glaring departure from her uncle’s coda in Touki Bouki.
Years later, I’d learn that the making of Atlantique began 10 years before its release. Diop, who is French-Senegalese, says she’d just returned to Dakar after being away for a decade and was witnessing the waning period of a feverish desire to migrate to Europe, a period referred to by the French phrase ‘Barcelone ou la Mort’ (Barcelona or Death). According to Diop, the city was charged with a “very ghostly atmosphere” thronging with young people who were there but not really there, with all kinds of arrivals and departures – including within her own extended family. That year, still coming into an understanding of Touki Bouki’s status in African Cinema, Diop staged screenings and film conversations around Dakar and traced the life’s journey of the non-career actors who starred in her uncle’s film. Two precursor films came out of that endeavour: Atlantiques, a short film released in 2009 and Mille Soleils or A Thousand Suns, which was released later in 2013.
I don’t recall that I was aware of nor had brought up Atlantiques, the short, during our conversation that evening. In the 16-minute film, three friends sit around a night bonfire in a brief but deeply complex conversation about boat migrations. Serigne, the film’s central character, has been deported to Dakar after making it to Spain in a pirogue and is telling his friends that he isn’t quite in Senegal any longer. Were a pirogue to set sail that very night, he tells them, he will get on it and reattempt to enter Spain. Even if it means dying. His friends are stunned. They push back, ask him why he’s risking his life, threaten to hold him back so he doesn’t die and is buried at sea, prod him about not saying goodbye, ask him if it takes courage to do what he’s done. To Serigne, the ocean is borderless and a boat migration is not a matter of courage. “There’s nothing but dust in my pocket,” he says to them in Wolof; no jobs to work and a family depending on him for basic necessities like food. It’d be far easier to make a life in Europe because more people there have jobs than people in Senegal, he argues, even if a little simplistic. One of his friends insists it is better to stay in Dakar, to strive toward whatever future is possible there. Serigne does not agree with this stance, but unfortunately, time will offer him not even the option to remain and strive.
*
Throughout the course of those two years, several films we screened resulted in complex conversations about borders: their nomenclature, their mediation through colonial forces and empire, the tenuous business of crossing them, the need to make them less rigid, the tragedy of access for Africans within the continent, the unique difficulties that plague Africans crossing non-African borders, and the need for more humane and nuanced narratives about the people who cross in whatever manner and for whatever reasons, particularly fleeing conditions resulting from globalisation and its more sinister or disruptive features. For a time, these conversations remained purely theoretical until 2018 when I finally secured a seat on a bus.
It was the first leg of a transnational road trip that was proposed from Lagos, Nigeria to Maputo, Mozambique and my first time outside the country. For over a month, we travelled through Rwanda, Cameroon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, traversing both land and air borders out of necessity. Then in 2020, just before the world went into lockdown, I was back on the road with another group of artists, this time for roughly 10 days in South Asia, travelling along Bangladesh’s western and eastern land border with India.
Unlike I’d theorised through our screenings, several border points we encountered did not often feature an imposing barbed wire wall, a sharp demarcation such as you’d find on a map declaring the end of one country and the beginning of another. They were porous in interesting ways, particularly in border towns where crossings are often a matter of daily logistics: schooling, commerce, and all kinds of cultural exchange. In South Asia, the border between India and Bangladesh – mediated, as most borders on the African continent were, through hurried and arbitrary colonial interventions with long-lasting and devastating implications – presented even more complexity. No sooner had we arrived that January than our Bangladeshi peers began to educate us: about Felani Khatun, a 15-year-old girl whose dead body was left for several hours in the barbed wire fence she was attempting to scale, a result of India’s Border Security Force’s shoot-on-sight policy, and even how the movement of livestock, cows especially, was implicated.
What fascinated me the most were border outposts, like the one in Jaflong, that functioned doubly as tourist sites with visitors posing for pictures, drinking water out of shaved coconuts with straws, picnicking, while border patrol mingled around working to ensure, in some arbitrary way, when a crossing into the other side was imminent, and potentially fatal. There were border stations where our identities held us up: in Bernaké, for instance, where a border patrol officer showed no knowledge of the agreement that allowed Nigerians into Cameroon for 90 days without a visa, or in Dhaka, where a co-passenger commented that we were being profiled after the Africans on the flight were plucked from a snaking passport control queue and our passports collected without a word of explanation. What began to crystallise for me with each road trip was that the terms dictating how borders were crossed were neither simple nor fair, and that on-ground realities often differed from official bureaucratic documents stipulating how crossings ought to be made.
We often interrogated, too, crossings born out of privilege (of birth, wealth, intellect, or social standing) and how the access these kinds of crossings granted could be wielded in destructive or constructive ways. To this end, borders were not obstacles to surmount for socioeconomic reasons. Absent the need for survival, crossing a border, literally or metaphorically, was necessary to deepen artistic practice, to subvert or reaffirm narratives, and, as Chinua Achebe wrote, to speak for oneself as African after centuries of being spoken for. Herein lay another possibility, a privilege especially afforded us because of our artistry: Borders could also become revolving doors that made for more expansive artistic production and engagement. But this access – to Europe and North America or other such Western countries – would always remain tenuous, contested, and would always demand honest reflections about its terms in relation to our histories and identities as Africans. It was one for which we’d have to answer again and again: What are you willing to give up to be here?
II.
When I returned to Atlantique again, four years had gone by and I was in my final term of graduate school in America. To conclude a course on film essays, our professor had tasked us to assay with a film of our choice and I picked Diop’s feature because I’d not stopped thinking about the film. Nor had I stopped thinking about those Bariga screenings which I’d tried to replicate in America unsuccessfully. When I left in late 2021, the atmosphere in Nigeria was eerily similar to that of Dakar in the late 2000s as Diop describes it. A feverish need to migrate to North America and Europe had so permeated a generation of Nigerians who were finding various means to get away from the country that, like in Senegal, the phenomenon had been given a name – japa, a Yoruba term that means “to flee” or “to run away”. Seeds of the era were sown during the pandemic year. A series of nationwide protests against indiscriminate extortions and extrajudicial killings by law enforcement progressed to capture deep-seated discontent about visionless governance, blatant corruption, and derelict infrastructure, all culminating in a murderous display of military might on the Lagos island. It was a jarring wake-up call for many that the country had nothing to offer its young, and even the basic right to live and strive, to demand more out of so-called public servants and systems, was under serious threat. Armed with different degrees of socioeconomic privilege, many, including regulars of the film screenings, began to seek better economic prospects and quality of life elsewhere.
Seeds of my departure were sown earlier, however. I’d learned through the screenings about fully-funded graduate degree opportunities in America that would help me improve my craft as a writer. Months before we screened Atlantique, I’d half-arsed my way through two college applications at programs that looked like a good fit, both of which were rejected or rescinded due to pandemic-related funding losses the following year. On my second attempt, I’d saved up enough to apply to more than two writing programs across North America and Europe and to apply for an American visa when an offer came from Oregon State. With the visa approved, I made temporary accommodation arrangements in the college town I was moving to, packed my modest belongings, and had goodbye brunches with a handful of friends. When my savings ran out, my family generously paid for a one-way flight to Portland. And after I’d settled into my new life, the student stipend I received each month allowed me to cover rent and meals and, occasionally, to send some money to my parents back home.
Unlike Souleiman and his friends, I did not suddenly depart in the dead of night, unable to bid loved ones farewell. I did not leave my bed unmade, or a bottle of perfume awkwardly positioned on the windowsill, as if it would be picked up at daybreak. I did not enter that haunting night blue portal, did not watch waves as tall as a mountain pour down its wrath on a small wooden pirogue that held me or my dreams of artistic or economic success, delirious with fear and longing for dry ground.
“Access to resources shapes migration strategies,” writes anthropologist Philip Marfleet, citing Nicholas Van Hear’s 2004 paper on how money and social capital can shape migration. “The better endowed can buy a better quality of asylum,” while, especially in conflict situations, others like Souleiman and his peers, “settle for less attractive and less secure forms of migration and destinations.” In Touki Bouki, though less dire, Anta and Mory cannot also fund their dreams of migrating to Europe and becoming “big important people” who come back from a land flowing with plenty to flaunt their newfound wealth. Anta’s a student, Mory, a butcher and chronic debtor. Then, France was where to be as a young Senegalese looking to experience the world and taste a bit of Western paradise. As the pair gamble and steal their way through the film to build a bank of travel funds, a jingle-like score about Paris being “a little piece of heaven on earth” repeats and repeats. I recall that it drew laughs from the Bariga sitting room when we screened it. Here, as a motif, Mambéty repeatedly pairs the Atlantic Ocean with the image of an ocean liner or a mast that, overall, creates a warm and inviting portal, unlike Diop’s Atlantic, often choppy, captured at dusk or dawn, and ominous against dark or bleak-looking horizons. In the end, only Anta leaves for Paris and Mory, on the run from the police, remains in Senegal, his dreams of a wealthy utopia crushed.
America did come to feel like utopia, a kind of satirical one, once I’d spent time there. Or maybe I should say, Corvallis, the college town where I spent most of my three years in America. I did not know much about Corvallis or Oregon or the American West when I applied to and was admitted into a program there. The America I knew from television and music and books was an amalgam of New York and Las Vegas and California, big cities and cultures both like and unlike the town I arrived in. But I came to love it in Corvallis. The town was serene, very different to the maddening city I’d moved from. Nature was all around: towering hundred-year-old trees, vast mountain ranges, and landscapes extending as far as the eyes can see. The seasons were always shifting. During the fall, which I came to love the most, trees began a fascinating process of dying, saturating the town with vivid reds, yellows, and oranges before everything was stripped of colour and warmth. I fell in love too with my post-graduate job, which came after weeks of panicked applications and was a free bus ride the next town over. It paid better than the job I’d left behind in Lagos – because the naira had slumped even further against the dollar. I’d fall in love, too, with the house on the corner of 8th and Adams where I moved the spring after graduation, with the public library I could walk to in under five minutes, and with the group of writers and teachers with whom I was now in community. The opportunities for fellowships and residencies and conferences for writers, hard to come by back home, now seemed endless. It was indeed a utopia of sorts if you disregarded everything else that was hair-scratching about the town, and the country: the poverty, the open drug use, the homelessness, the freedoms that were not in fact freeing, the invisible extractive engine that powered the comforts I’d come to enjoy, the little daily alienations and nagging sense of not truly belonging. No matter, when I told friends and family that I hadn’t quite put any plans in motion to keep me in America after I graduated at the end of that term, they scratched their heads in amazement. It was America. Where else did I want to be?
The country I’d left in 2021 was in worse shape than the one I was going to return to, my family argued. Inflation had since risen from 15.6% in 2021 to 28.92% by December of 2023, and a career politician whose campaign had revolved around laying claim to the country and her resources was now the sitting president. According to the national statistics body, youth unemployment had declined significantly – from 33.3% in the last quarter of 2020 to 4.1% in the first quarter of 2023. But the figures did not account for broader reasons impacting said decline (a change in methodology), or that most jobs still could not fund basic needs considering how expensive everything now was, from food to housing and other sundries. Young Nigerians were working two or more jobs to raise money, selling their valuables, taking out loans, marrying white retirees, getting admitted into graduate and postgraduate programs, doing everything possible to leave the country, to find their own Instagrammable utopia and respite in the West. To the Nigerian friends I’d made on campus, it was a self-inflicted tragedy, shameful even, to consider returning home. It was America after all. Where else, really, did I need to be?
*
In my research of Diop’s film, I’d come to find that, just as we had been, Western media and viewers were most riveted by the metaphysical dimensions of Atlantique. About halfway in and spirits have run amok. For Souleiman and his fellow labourers, the portal of the Atlantic has closed in and their dreams of a better economic fate in Spain are now buried deep in the ocean. Or so it seems. One night, uncontained by the vastness of that politically charged body of water, their spirits possess the sisters and lovers they left behind. In these bodies, they continue their demands for the three months’ wages owed them. Even in death, their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and lovers will be cared for.
In several reviews, the “zombie” was a commonly used framework to explain the film’s supernatural turn, the girls’ possession framed as a reclamation of agency in conservative Muslim society. In syncretic Islamic lore, however, their possession was more an embodiment of the jinnī – spirits created from fire, existing in tandem with and influencing the material world for good or bad. Initially, friends and family are stunned by the strange illnesses that befall the girls, by the blisters and sandy feet they wake up with. But the purpose of their possession soon becomes clear.
At first, Mr Ndiaye, the contractor of the building project, is dismissive when the possessed girls come asking for what the workers are owed. Then he feigns ignorance about his debt until they remind him of the exact figure owed, and the construction project. He doesn’t budge and instead lobbies the police to make arrests. So, the spirits set his house ablaze and promise to do the same to his beloved tower should he continue to owe them. When his resolve breaks and he brings the money to the cemetery as instructed (32 million CFA; around $55,000 in 2021), they demand that he dig each labourer a grave. “That’s the real work!” one of the spirits taunts him as he digs graves that will be empty by daybreak – the kind of fruitless work the dead labourers were subjected to before their doomed crossing.
I’m thinking of another scene we may have overlooked during that evening’s conversation. Ada and Omar, set to wed in a few days, are at a beachside bar. The night before, there is a storm. Midway through a scramble to take in clothes from lines at the back of the house with her mother, Ada gazes absentmindedly into the ocean, clothes cradled in her arm, as it rages about in the bleak night. No one has heard from the boys yet. There at the beach with Omar, she appears overwhelmed by worry or impending grief. This is when she is gifted an iPhone Omar promises will change her life. She rolls her eyes and puts it back into its box. Omar jets in and out of the city presumably for work, and wants to make a reluctant Ada into a more sophisticated version of herself. Here, she refuses to indulge in the afternoon leisure and instead lies on a sofa, her face partly covered with a blue towel, trying to block out, it seems to me, the sight of Omar as he swims laps in the sea. The shot is lengthy and so up close we see Omar’s naked torso cut effortlessly in and out of the ridged ocean surface.
What was Diop trying to say here other than juxtapose Omar and Souleiman’s physical encounters with the ocean? What else but that, in the same body of water, both men vying for Ada’s love and devotion share two different fates largely determined by how much wealth and social status they have and what power or safety both acquire for them? Consider, for instance, that for migrants like Souleiman and Serigne, this treacherous journey through the Atlantic or Canary Island route comes, too, at a monetary cost paid to the smuggling operations complicated border politics have allowed to flourish. Numbers from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime reveal that, in 2021, it cost at least $530 (slightly more than the cost of my one-way flight ticket to Portland) for Senegalese migrants to travel by boat to Spain and at least $1,800 for migrants of other nationalities exiting through the coast of Senegal.
On the night of Ada’s wedding to Omar, in a house so lavish Ada’s friends marvel at and photograph oblivious to her misery, a fire outbreak disrupts the ceremony. Issa, a superstar investigating officer, is called in to find the arsonist. Mariama, Ada’s conservative friend, claims to have seen Souleiman at the ceremony and he becomes the first name on a short list of suspects. Neither Ada’s nor his mother’s insistence that they have not heard from Souleiman since his sudden boat trip convinces Issa otherwise. In the course of his investigation, Issa discovers that strange, inexplicable things are happening in and through him, all of which culminate in an intimate night with Ada, after she comes to accept that it is Souleiman who has returned and taken up space in this man’s body.
Were we to take this possession and this intimacy literally or read it metaphorically? Was Ada intimate with Souleiman or Issa? Was Issa a willing participant in the events of the night? What were we to make of Issa whose braggadocio turns into pitying meekness as he wanders the streets of Dakar by the end of the film? What did Diop intend for us to make out of this in understanding Ada’s trajectory from naive teenager-in-love trying to contend with her lover’s costly and crazed departure to young woman to whom the future belongs?
When I began countless rewatches of Atlantique, I found myself pulled back again into the film’s final half hour, trying to resolve those lingering questions. Perhaps, this was partly why I’d wanted to write about the film all along. Not until I made a jolting realisation while rewatching one of the film’s most poignant scenes for the umpteenth time. The boys, who we can see as they once were only through the mirrored walls of a bar they frequented with their lovers before their departure, are recounting the devastating end to their journey – there are semblances in this scene to Serigne’s account in the 2009 short of deadly mountain-high waves and the hallucinations of being lost at sea. On this plane, Ada and her friend, Dior, who runs the bar, are the only fully bodied presences in this scene. Tears are streaming down both their faces. As Ada listens to one of the boys recount Souleiman’s admiration and devotion to her, about Souleiman’s biggest regret embarking on the journey, it strikes me that the eternal grief of not having said goodbye, of not having properly resolved one’s ties to a place, is also at the heart of this film.
In retrospect, perhaps some of my reluctance to begin the process of trying to gain permanent residence in America came down to this. When I sat down for goodbye coffees and brunches with a total of five friends at four different times, when I told my parents I was going to America to get a graduate degree, when I bid my sisters goodbye at the airport on the day of my departure, it did not occur to me that I was doing so permanently, though I’d wondered when next we’d see one another again. There were many other friends with whom I couldn’t or wouldn’t have coffee dates, a host of extended family members who’d only learn I’d left for America after my departure. A portion of my library had stayed back in Lagos, just as old clothes and other personal belongings had remained in abandoned heaps and old trunks in my childhood home in eastern Nigeria, which I hadn’t really said goodbye to when I moved to Lagos to pursue better economic opportunities. There was also a persistent wariness, in my seemingly unresolved departure, that life back home would change in some irrevocable way and I’d be absent from it, be even more devastated by the event because of that absence.
*
By the time I graduated from the writing program in June 2023, I’d already attended several online immigration sessions seeking to guide international students like me on their next steps post graduation. Most of the pathways to permanent residency presented at these sessions, which often did not capture options for non-STEM students like myself, required a job offer. But I’d come to learn that American employers were often reluctant to hire anyone for whom they needed to file work permits or deal with the opaque machinery of US immigration. There were other lesser-known pathways to explore as an essayist but also many unspoken options: I could apply to a postgraduate program and buy myself more time; I could date, marry, and file as a spouse to an American; I could convince or pay an American to pose as my relative or spouse and file on my behalf; I could join the military. I did not belong to a genuinely at-risk demographic, say, queer Nigerians or political activists, but I could engineer a story that presented me as one and seek asylum.
All told, timing was crucial. Which was why I was already racing against the clock when I began compiling an application in earnest only six months before my student visa expired. There were very few ways to deal with the black hole that was this system. The safest bet was to outsource the challenge to immigration lawyers who spoke US immigration legalese and knew how to work with the system to not only get clients what they wanted – to remain in their little piece of heaven on earth – but to help them buy time in the lengthy limbo before most application decisions arrived. The other, less advised but not impossible, was to sink oneself into the rabbit hole of US immigration web pages or YouTube channels or WhatsApp groups or Reddit threads or $150 online courses gathering information, compiling and self-filing an application. I could only afford the latter.
For several months, I went to my day job as a local news reporter and afterwards, sat up until midnight or later working on an application that made a case for why I was an individual with extraordinary ability in the arts who planned to continue working in the arts to remain in the country. This, according to the immigration service, was evidenced by a degree of skill and recognition substantially above that ordinarily encountered to the extent that a person described as prominent is renowned, leading, or well-known in the field of arts. In translation, this meant having won certain kinds of awards or been written about in certain kinds of media or earning a stupendously high salary. Setting aside the external factors that make these scenarios possible or impossible for a person to attain, many favourable immigration decisions, I’d come to learn during this period, were often a matter of having told and supported a convincing story. So after the application was returned for “improper filing” I sat across from an immigration lawyer whom I paid a $200/hour fee to ask why it was returned but also whether I’d told and supported a convincing story. There were a few loopholes, the pleasant lawyer pointed out, but with a little more work, and if I filed in another category, I could try convincing the American government that I was an alien of extraordinary ability. It was not exactly legal advice, but the firm could work out a stronger application packet on my behalf for around $7,000, a price tag I most certainly could not afford on my local journalist salary, which I was soon to lose.
III.
When migrants like Serigne and Souleiman do make it to countries like Spain and, by some luck, escape the immigration apparatus that is vehemently intent on keeping them out right there at the borders, whether land or sea, it is not long before they’re disabused of the notion that there are better jobs to work there compared to Dakar. At least to some degree. Both might be surprised to find their presence, as Marfleet puts it, “both reviled and tacitly accepted” in economies that thrive off the cheap and vulnerable labour they afford while treating them as less than human. This revulsion is also enacted in nomenclature. No figure is more reviled in contemporary conversations about immigration than the “illegal alien”, the immigrant who arrives, often in flimsy boats from the so-called Third World, to “steal jobs” and “commit heinous crimes” and who constitutes a contamination of the pristine façade of cultural polish and civilisation in these countries. This alien, once they arrive, must find means to argue for their legitimacy, something most never do despite years of gruesome labour and measly pay, most of which ends up back home so brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers can be cared for. Or, increasingly, they might perform extraordinary feats like risking their lives to save a citizen so they can be rewarded with legitimacy. When they are legally admitted aliens – a term the Biden administration moved to have removed from immigration vocabulary in favour of the more humane terms “non-citizen” or “migrant” – they must prove that they are super human in their fields of endeavour, that their presence is unequivocally of benefit to the country, that they must buy into the American Dream and eschew human ordinariness at all costs. Here, again, is another product of borders as I’ve learned: that it is impossible to do away with them but at the same time, their policing inadvertently classifies humans into sub or superhumans to determine the terms and conditions of access.
After I visited the lawyer, I explained to a friend that I was going to fuck around and find out. I was going to take the biggest swing I could possibly take with the visa application. I knew a handful of people – many of them strangers in a WhatsApp group for international students seeking permanent residency – who’d applied for and obtained the visa by proving they’d met at least three out of a 10-point criteria that included national or international prizes/awards, membership in exclusive professional organisations, and press features. Convinced that I could prove at least three of these, I began a premature and rabid career retrospective, assembling everything I’d ever written, exhibited, or been awarded. There were carefully worded reference letters from peers, superiors, teachers, from the secretary of a professional body to which I belonged. I researched the American local news decline hoping to convince a faceless immigration officer that my work as a local news reporter was critical to the cultural cohesion and civic health of the college town and surrounding cities I covered. It was important to the United States. Because timing was crucial, and with financial help from family, I expedited the processing timeline of my 100-plus pages application packet from however long these things took to 15 business days. By this time, I had about five weeks left on my student visa.
In looking through my career, I wasn’t convinced of my own extraordinariness nor did I really care to be. Eight years, in the grand scheme of things, was only a short time and I was a late bloomer; my best work was still firmly ahead of me. But I was optimistic that the application would be positively reviewed, that I wouldn’t receive what I’d learned was a dreaded foretaste of denial: a request for more evidence. I’d Googled the coveted card that was at the end of the process and downloaded a widely shared sample I looked at occasionally as if it were a digital talisman. Most importantly, I hoped the frantic work that had gone into preparing the application would be rewarded. There’d been many calls to immigration lawyers my friends recommended, to friends of friends who were also in the weeds of an application, to friends who were sometimes less than forthcoming with the help I needed. There’d been sleep paralysis episodes, permanently puffy eyes from a lack of sleep, and chapped lips from improper nutrition and stress. There’d been terrors from thinking up the worst deportation scenarios if I chose to overstay my student visa to see the application process through to only one satisfactory end. And there had been terrors thinking about the immigrant limbo before then, during which I would most certainly provide cheap and vulnerable labour to survive and pay government taxes while being treated as less than human.
In addition to expediting the processing timeline, I’d also expedited the delivery of the application packet to the immigration office where it would be processed. I waited with increasing panic for the text to confirm the packet had been received and the review process had begun. But with each passing day, the packet appeared to be stuck in some logistical limbo, so that seven days later, I returned to the post office to inquire about the delay. It was empty when I arrived early that afternoon. After explaining to a kind staff member how pressed I was for the parcel to get to its destination, she went into the back office to find out what was holding it up. Holding my gaze when she returned, she explained that deliveries to the address were often in bulk, unsurprisingly, and it was likely to have been received but the online status was yet to be updated. The only way to truly confirm was to call the immigration office. As she spoke, I realised I’d begun tearing up. I remember asking myself over and over again as I left the post office why I was doing this, remember thinking that I was too exhausted to keep going, remember knowing at that moment that I could neither afford to nor did I want to fight any longer to remain in this utopia.
When the text confirming the immigration service had received my application finally arrived, it was only four weeks to the expiration of my student visa. I’d already said half of my goodbyes by then – to my newsroom colleagues, to friends and classmates, to the university campus, to the cafés and restaurants I loved to visit downtown, to the farmers’ market, to my home, to a portion of my library, to Oregon’s coastal towns, to Mary’s Peak, the first trail I ever hiked in Oregon. The dreaded request for more evidence would arrive shortly after – the government needed more convincing of my exceptionalism – and in December, about three months after I returned to Lagos, a final decision was made on the application. I’d never know all the details, given that I’d left the country by this time and did not receive a mailed response, but I reckon what arrived at my former doorstep three weeks after a formal decision was made found my claim to extraordinariness wanting, and kicked me out.
*
In the final scenes of Atlantique, Ada wakes in Dior’s bar alone after a night with Souleiman’s ghost embodied in Issa, who is now long gone. Dior is setting up tables. Outside, a new day is beginning and the ocean appears a little less haunting. Ada puts on a shirt and, breaking the fourth wall to gaze at us through a mirror, begins a monologue. We know she has been transported into another plane because of this; mirrors have so far indicated to us that an irrevocable shift has happened in our characters. Her monologue reinforces this. The events of the previous nights have changed her. She’s no longer a girl for whom choices would be made, to whom life will happen. She has been reminded of who she is, who she’ll become; Ada, to whom the future belongs. It is a hopeful note on which to end a film like this. Perhaps we acknowledged this at the screening that December evening in 2019. “I didn’t want to imprison my characters in a pessimistic perspective,” Diop said about that ending in a conversation with Bidoun. “You can’t reduce Senegalese youth to migration and loss because that would confirm, to a certain kind of viewer, that Africa is doomed, that it’s destined to perish.” This, to us, was the triumph of Diop’s film. But that was seven years ago. I wonder, had the screenings carried on, what we would think of Diop’s coda today, how we might place Atlantique beside more recent independent African films still trying to capture the nuances and complexities of border crossings and mass migration phenomena happening all across the continent, especially the political, climate, and socioeconomic drivers that increasingly uproot people from home.
The Lagos I returned to initially looked like the one I’d left, as if it were simply thawing from a prolonged freeze. In the first week, I was swindled, cat-called, and experienced the slow and apathetic churn of Nigerian customer service. It was only a matter of time before I began to see how it had indeed changed for something worse. The inflation was much harder to grasp on ground. I wondered often how people were faring and carrying on. I’d also come to feel bereft not just of personal relationships – four of the five friends I had said goodbye to three years earlier had left permanently – but of that artistic microcosm that succumbed partly to the global pandemic that took hold a year after but, and maybe more crucially, the modern pressures of migration. Our Bariga community won’t be the first nor will it be the last.
On a call, Amanda Madụmere, filmmaker and co-curator of a similar screening community called The Screen in Transit, told me about the vacuum her nomadic screening project sought to fill after the co-curators of another nomadic screening community all migrated. Theirs, founded in 2016, had created a similar space that, in the absence of storied film festivals and other such distribution channels, gave independent African films an intellectually curious audience. Together with two other co-curators and several partners, Madụmere has since brought small audiences two pieces of independent African Cinema, contemporary and classic, every month and watched these films spark hours of fiercely argued conversations. This is the unique fodder these kinds of films afford because they’re not intended for commercial audiences and therefore pointed in the kinds of political commentary they can make or engender. Our conversation was a reminiscence of my time in Bariga, but also a rekindling of hope that, perhaps, I might find something like what I’d lost.
*
For many months after I returned, people often asked directly – or wondered privately – why I was back home. This return was, after all, not to be even slightly compared to the reverse mass migration of the 2000s when young Nigerians, buoyed by a freshly minted democratic government, an oil boom, banking industry consolidations, and economic reforms, flocked back to the country, optimistic about her future and eager to be a part of it. I found the question laughable sometimes, curious at other times, and wondered if people assumed or were truly ignorant about the complexities of legal migration, particularly in an increasingly anti-immigrant and far-right atmosphere like the one I left behind in the US. “My visa expired,” I said often in response. There was simply a price for access I was unable and unwilling to pay then, and here I am now.
I recall chatting with a Nigerian postgraduate student whom I’d met in Oregon several months after I returned to Lagos. She’d have loved to be home, she wrote, until she learned I wasn’t visiting but was back for the foreseeable future. “That’s sad,” she said, then added that returning home was honourable because then I’d be able to reenter the US when I could rather than “being an illegal resident and suffering.” “I admire your courage,” she wrote again. I told her I didn’t think it was sad and that I believed I could make a life for myself anywhere. It has not always been the case but it is a belief that makes life a little livable for me. But living in constant anxiety of being found out, becoming an illegal alien in the wake of a second Trump administration, was certainly not how I envisioned my 30s. It was not a matter of courage in the end. There were privileges that afforded me the choice to go and those same privileges now afforded me the chance to return, to not place my life on hold waiting for a card that said I was exceptional and hence worthy of this slice of heaven on earth. I’m taking advantage of that choice until I no longer can. Or until home truly becomes, for me, the “mouth of a shark” urging me to leave, to run because “anywhere is safer than here.” It won’t be long now.
*Photo by Live Kaiah on Unsplash