Back in Seville

I cannot tell you what it means, or the strange paradoxical thoughts that run through my head every time I fly in and out of Seville. It holds such a special place in the recesses of my heart, somewhere that creates longing for things that will never be, and longing for things that of course, shouldn't be. Let's be honest, Seville is close minded, slow moving, stagnant in many ways, enchanting to the masses only because it is historically rich and culturally flamboyant. The way my old Spanish host brother speaks about it is reminiscent of what I said about my own Texas suburb when I was young and could not wait to break out of the cookie cutter brick houses and checkered roads to explore other parts of the world. He, like me, feels the burden of his hometown. Things are always romanticized by the foreigner around for the long weekend, while the true realities on the ground are apparent only to those with a long-term and more permanent view of the place. This is to say, I do not belong there forever.

Still though, Seville has its allure for me, both permanent and impermanent, like some distant, vague, second home now with a family that accepted me years ago and does again each time I come back. The brothers are like brothers, cousins like cousins, mother like mothers, and for brief moments of extravagance, it feels like I grew up there amidst them all. I find this remarkable because it embodies all I did to become apart of something so remote and foreign, which I say not to toot my own horn, but to state a fact about my existence. The articles for traveler magazines that write about food and flamenco and the old churches along the Guadalquivir and warm summer nights under the stars say nothing about what it takes, all the sacrifices you make, to call something like that your own in a language no one understands back wherever the hell you were before. "When are you going to move here, rent a flat, marry a Sevillana, and start a family?" one of the cousins asked me this time around. "We could be neighbors again," I responded smiling, and sometimes that seems like the best idea in the world.

The hardship is the reminders of course, that come in various shapes and sizes, that I'm not and never will be Sevillano, and the realization that in fact, I wouldn't want to be either. I will always come back, maybe for long stretches at a time, and go to clubs with Carlos and look at all the lovely people, none of which give a damn where you are from. I'll continue learning new words that probably aren't even understood north of the Andalusian border, but that generate a giggle each time they are said. I will take runs along the Guadalquivir and drink by the water on Calle Betis. I will talk in English with the newest American student living in my old bedroom and tell him how great his situation is and how much he could do with it even though we all know he will leave soon and forget everything. I'll take that Spanish girl to lunch again and again and toy with the idea of what if because it is fun and excessively irrational to think about, our own personal episode on "Espanoles por el Mundo," even though the table between us might as well be here to the moon. The view from the rooftop, or las Setas, or the highest church tower. The view from the river, or the bedroom, or a table out in front of Miami at night, peering down San Jacinto. So many views from so many different angles, and so many memories from so many different stages of life all rolling over onto one another.

I love these things but am utterly frustrated by these things. I believe after all these years that the allure sits in that paradox alone: I'm there truly, as much as I'll ever be, as much as I think someone in my shoes can be, unique, exotic, superb, but it all remains something just out of reach. For every beautiful moment of success, of recognition, of fluid adaptation, comes ten in rapid succession that bring you back down to Earth.

But that one moment is worth it every time. And that's why I'll always come back again. 

Those lights across the way

The 1970s flickering light display of the Intercontinental Hotel that comes through my kitchen window each night evokes a certain kind of nostalgia, for what exactly, I'm still not sure. My immediate thought, as I sit and write this now, is the radio towers across from Mt. Bonnell, that brought comfort on good days and bad days, cold afternoons and warm nights, that time back in Austin that might as well be another life. I must have spent days up there spread across various points and phases, on dates and with friends and more often than not alone, mulling life over, looking down at the expensive waterfront properties and wondering in the silence of the night what I'd need to get there too.

But the reds and yellows and greens could likewise be more Nigeria-centric, reflecting a time when this whole socio-economic Nigeria project was a hopeful enterprise, which comes when anything is new and fresh and yet to be tainted by things like basic human greed and selfishness. I've seen videos taken from helicopters high above Lagos when Nigeria had just become Nigeria, and in so many ways, my idea of those buildings in faded shades of roughed up colors is what I see across the way right now. The country has changed very little, but has also probably changed a lot.

Nostalgia is in the end, a personal emotion. It draws on your own unique longings and memories of what is and what was. It plays on your desire to feel those things again. Was it freedom you felt? Was it comfort? Was it wonder? Was it needing nothing but the cash in your pocket that would buy your next tank of gas to another small forgotten American town? Was it that sense of excitement flying over the landscape of a new country you didn't know yet but surely would soon? Was it this need, without logical explanation, to have someone in front of you again and be able to put your hand on their cheek? I have felt all those things, and many more, and more than anything now, as I sit here, I feel the need to throw 2014 in a sack and shake it around a little and there is no better place to do this than out on the open road.

New images sprout to life. In one such dream, I am weaving along the Pacific Coast Highway all the way up past Big Sur to Salinas, the true John Steinbeck country, and then continue all the way to San Francisco. And if I have gone that far I might as well keep going because off to the right on the map is Yosemite, where John Muir spent endless summers in his cabin, before dedicating his life to its preservation. It would be a shame to not sit and see what exactly all that was for. Further north still it's wine country, which is a part of any country I have learned graciously to love. And then perhaps a final culmination in Redwood National Park, where some of the oldest living things on Earth tower peacefully above the forest floor as they have for a few thousand years, if anything just to remind you subtly, when you start feeling big, as to how small you still are and how short your life is. "Oh shit, we just killed something older than Jesus," a druggy remarked to his friend after accidentally burning down one such tree recently in South Africa.

What about sleeping in a shady cabin in the woods, or my mom's couch, or my dad's spare bedroom, or the back of the old Nissan Versa shivering in the cold? What books would I pluck off my shelf and toss into the trunk and draw on at various points along the way? What does cold weather feel like to your ears and your nose (I have by now long forgotten) as you tie a scarf around your neck and throw a hood over your head?

These are all new experiences, and old ones. They are fresh starts, quiet spaces, views, smells, and sounds. They flash in and out of my mind in tandem with the lights across the way.

Johannesburg Nights

There is something wholly blissful about cold light beers on a rooftop, watching the middle afternoon sunlight turn to the extravagant colors of Sunday dusk. People constantly alternate between sunglasses and no sunglasses, hiding behind occasional pillars or the shadow of the person on their right. People laughing, standing, sitting, moving, buzzing, interacting, living. You can order your brunch now, or later, or after this beer or that bloody mary. You can have a drink now, or later, and who really cares; just whenever you feel like it but you should certainly have another. The DJ plays a song you don't really hear as anything but background noise and a beat. This peace, this casual conversation without any rush, is intoxicating. It is what in my mind Sundays are made for. It is one last beautiful man-made pause, a footnote, a moment of fleeting contemplation, before the rush of the week begins.

And then the day turns to night, which in my case might be the last sunset I will ever see in South Africa. That makes it all the more urgent, this being present in the various tiny moments of splendor. What follows is a flurry of packing and repacking and sporadic lunches that come when you usher yourself along quickly from one intermediary place to another, and then the trains and the cars and the customs line and its passport check with an officer who for the first time in your life, actually cracks a joke, and then another, and then you fly and watch Invictus on the plane, Namibia and Angola floating by out your right side window, but fixated on Morgan Freeman's depiction of Nelson Mandela, all because it feels right, that one last dose of a country before it is gone again and completely out of reach, accentuated in that final moment when the South African Airways flight attendant on the television screen in front of you says, "we wish you a proudly South African goodbye" in a lovely accent with a smile, all before falling again back into the chaos and the unearthly smog and the Third Mainland Bridge that shoots you out forcefully into the tremendous city of Lagos. But for those last few moments with good people and a beer sweating in your hand, on some deck that you could never find again, you can enjoy.

These were the Johannesburg afternoons and nights: that humble dose of civilization, where things - the little details people only appreciate if they have spent time to the truly dysfunctional and compromised countries of the world - function naturally and as they should until the end, and your entire being, the parts of you always on guard because everything is something - a risk, a con, a challenge, an obstacle - finally sits back and takes a breath and that is all there is. 

Abuja to Lagos

A chance set of circumstances put me next to a young American guy on the flight from Abuja back home to Lagos. He wore sandals and baggy pants, and sported an impressive beard, which by any standard satisfies the typical NGO look spread across Sub-Saharan Africa. In Nigeria however, nothing is as it seems, and I soon discovered he was into commercial farming, owning about 200 acres in the North of the country. When asked how a white American happens to end up in the middle of nowhere growing a variety of grains with four tractors, he said it was a random and unpredictable series of events.

Knowing the challenges operating out of Lagos, Northern Nigeria is hard to imagine. He enlightened me on a few of the things he deals with, including crime, lack of basic infrastructure, and spiders, scorpions, and snakes ("always watch where you step!"). A prominent Indian businessman was recently killed when a cobra came up through his toilet and bit him while on the pot. "The worst are the people though," he said. "I am always armed. Since all my staff are pious Muslims and I am Jewish, I was watching the Gaza crisis closely. Didn't know if one day they would all revolt and cut off my head as retaliation. Luckily nothing happened." The conversation had an oddly casual tone of voice when referencing such things the average population would hardly take so lightly.

We talked about his wife, too. He married a local Nigerian he met one day at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development while getting his land titles sorted, and fast forward to present day and his current flight will lead to another flight to watch her give birth to his first child. As a footnote, he advised me as a rule not to mess around with the average locals here, because there are a lot of diseases. I assured him I had no intention, though he was particularly concerned, in that case, about what I did for girls. We also talked taxes, which he hasn't paid in ten years. He doesn't expect anyone to come after them now in the remote corners of the Sahel. "But you're a suit and tie guy," he said as he motioned to my outfit. "You definitely have to worry about that stuff."

I wish I could have recorded the conversation. Too many jewels are now missing, lost forever, just hours and days later. All in all, he was the most ridiculous human being I have met in a long time and probably a little bit crazy, but he seemed happy, genuinely happy - that aura of confidence someone has when they need nothing from you or anyone else and are just along for the ride - and that is more than most can say in most parts of the world, and I appreciate that in somebody. The whole 55 minute flight got me thinking, or more helped me remember something I knew already, which is that there really are a million possible ways to live your life, more than one could ever dream up or think suitable for themselves, combining the big decisions and the little ones, and it really is never too late to wipe your slate clean, pick up the pieces, buy a ticket (yes, that part of it actually is that easy), and start the whole thing over again. Whatever it takes to find your own niche; whatever it takes to live your own life. No matter how far flung some people end up, and how off their rocker some people seem, I will always respect the hell out of a person who at the very least has the courage and the balls to try and figure things out - in practice by doing, and with much less talking, which is really the only way.

This Ebola Story

The Ebola outbreak in Nigeria came and went, in what many countries are adequately calling a success story in West Africa that could be a containment model for others. Given Nigeria's mostly collapsed healthcare infrastructure, underfunded and incapable of caring for its 170 million people, this news came as a surprise to many, not least of which me. The lingering effects remain - temperature checks at airports and mandatory hand sanitizer in restaurants - but people now return to the more pressing and dangerous aspects of business as usual in Nigeria.

This makes the conversation of panic circulating around America most ironic at a distance. From an airport lounge in Abuja, my attention was briefly occupied by CNN's fearful account of "Ebola in America," where Wolf Blitzer talked about hospital missteps in Dallas that could get another few infected. This follows an influx of social media accounts full of baseless arguments - doomsday scenarios that Ebola will go airborne and kill us all, despite the fact heart disease is much more likely to bring about our early death given the bad food my country continues to put in their mouths knowingly. I think there is a romantic association with Ebola, one of certain death and gruesome last moments - the epitome of a mysterious disease out of African jungles - and the 24 hour a day news culture of the United States always requires content. The fact is, Malaria does and will do more damage 1000 times over to this continent each year, but no one stays awake at night fretting about mosquitoes. Liberia and Sierra Leone are African tragedies that pose more a threat to American conscious than they do to American lives.

Being the only American passport in the room, I looked around curiously at Nigerians also watching the news. I am not sure what they were thinking. It's been a long few months, and this country has a lot on its plate, but I imagine to some extent there was a sense of amusement at what exactly Americans - with their nice hospitals and emergency response systems and qualified doctors - consider scary in a world full of unpredictable and improbable events. The things that should command our attention rarely do. 

Unraveling Nigeria, if you can

If Nigeria’s corruption had a heart, it would no doubt beat at the Transcorp Hilton in Abuja. As you sit with a coffee and charge your phone, you can almost feel the dirty deals and the suitcases full of cash being exchanged all around you in the light of day. I’ve heard up the road at the Sheraton – another five star hotel in Abuja – a particular bar is stocked with “nightcrawlers,” or, the most grotesque sort of prostitution that hits its heyday when oil workers are in town. There is a reason the word Nigeria is synonymous with these sorts of things.

I’ve been to Abuja multiple times now, for this and for that. On my recent trip, the national petroleum corporation was on strike over pensions, and so, with all the gas stations shut down, our driver was forced to buy on the black market, side of the highway, at three times the price – from the same people who would normally be working at the gas station, now simply siphoning out of the station’s tank. Across the road, cars were lined up behind an Oando petrol truck, the driver having pulled over and partaking in the same exercise. The company gets its cut at market price, and the employee, or thief, or whatever you call it, pockets the rest. A good day for him, and just another day in Nigeria.

The Federal Capital is a world away from Lagos – organized, paved, and feeling like a real Western city. It was built for government some years ago after colonial rule, when rich policymakers basking in the glow of new oil money from the Delta decided they needed something more functional away from the messy metropolis they alone had created. With this in mind, I find Abuja the most tragic as I fly out at night. You see one perfectly manicured circle of light, and then complete darkness as far as the eye can see. In a country of 170 million people (though no one knows the exact number), there are also people as far as the eye can see, but still no lights. And this again, is Nigeria; the insulated bubble and all the rest that is forgotten.

Screams for equality are echoed all over the world, in varying degrees and stages, but it cannot be much worse by any construct of reality than what happens in this country. Champagne bottles are popped by hands roped in Rolexes every Friday night at Spice Route or Escape, while the infamous Makoko Slums sit just up the road, hovering above the water on stilts and built with layers of trash. Back in Abuja the election campaign has informally started with banners – which teeter on outright propaganda – lining the highways and bridges and lightposts. “Having performed so well, Nigerians demand…” it says, with a smiling President in his trademark hat looking out gleefully at nothing. I was told before arrival that Nigeria is the best example of what happens when a country does everything wrong. Hopefully, by way of this example, the newly rebased biggest economy in Africa can instruct a few others on how to do things right.

It’s no surprise then that bombs go off in the North and school girls are abducted (and still not found) and the formidable force of Boko Haram expands their caliphate and takes more ground in the country, mirroring the brutality of ISIS in the Middle East. In Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, Richard Dowden challenges Westerners who sigh at another news story on violent Africa, apathetically changing the channel, accepting as a subtle half-truth that “that’s just is how they are in that part of the world.” He argues:

“… I sometimes feel Africa is not violent enough. If Africans fought back sooner against theft and oppression instead of allowing themselves to be slaves to the rich and powerful, Africa would be a much more peaceful place. Instead, African patience allows exploitation and oppression to thrive until everyone loses their temper and explodes.”

Marginalization creates a vacuum that must be filled by something. This can be a movement for good, such as when Martin Luther King marched on Washington and peaceful protests bred the despicable black and white photos of America in the 1960s. Likewise, it can be an Islamist assault on Western education, fought against by underpaid defense forces accused by Amnesty International of torture and outright human rights abuse. As always, the people who lose out most are the civilians and families just trying to go about their lives but stuck hopelessly in the middle.

I go back and forth on a seesaw that balances the realities that made up my former life – Starbucks, football games, homecoming mums, television shows about weddings, television shows about people with sex tapes, hearty evangelical churches the size of stadiums, white picket fences protecting gardens and green space – and what I see out my window these days. Most businesses write on their gates, “please do not urinate or defecate here,” and I think this is a distinctly Nigerian problem. Most houses write “this house is not for sale,” combating a typical Nigerian con, dubbed a 419, in which fake agents sell houses already occupied, and the unsuspecting movers show up one day surprised someone already lives there, and has lived there for years; the fake agent is nowhere to be found. It's true that the deeper you dive into any issue in Nigeria, the further the rabbit hole runs.

And more: I've seen sheep and chickens muddle their way through city traffic; I've sat in Lebanese armored cars; I've sat with the Ministers who make this country run; I have stood with the guy selling gum and mints outside the bar, hoping he will eat tonight; I've talked with the guy at the American consulate who denies and approves visas that get people out, or keep them in; I've danced with two extravagant young newlyweds, who's names I still don't know; I've drank too much Hennessy with a prince. And I've seen the lives of the rich and the poor weave their way in and out of one another unlike anywhere in the world, and somehow, in a way that transcends comprehension, it all works; messy, corrupt, wrong in every way, tragic because it could be done better, but it works and people survive which is all we can do in the end.

In true Nigeria fashion – the naija factor, as some people call it – not even leaving is easy. On Friday night, after being lied to for two hours, it turns out all flights back to Lagos are full, except a protocol officer in a yellow vest promises two seats on the last flight out – Dana Air, which had its license suspended last year after its corrupt CEO neglected safety regulations and a plane fell out of the sky. We pay double the price and then some; it’s the only way, and I wonder what I’ll do at some future date in another country where a handful of cash does not solve all your problems in one go. Next to the officer, a guy sits at a computer wearing a shirt with a better motto, one that speaks to all this terrible mess, the place that should fall apart but never does, the chaos of Nigeria’s infallible heart, constantly beating all around us. “The ghetto is my reality, am from the city where your hustle determines your salary.” The plane takes off, and lands sometime later, and the country keeps stumbling along. 

In and Out of South Africa

Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope over 500 years ago, circumventing Arab traders and successful finding a sea route from Europe to the East Indies. This cemented the legacy of Portuguese naval might, and proved at the time, that Africa did indeed have an endpoint. It was named "Good Hope" later, replacing "Cape of Storms," almost suggesting "good luck" given the number of shipwrecks that occurred in those unpredictable waters where ocean and currents smash together. It is one of the real landmarks of human existence, still serving as a halfway point between journeys for boats long at sea, and still carrying some romantic obsession in modern times. The obsolete lighthouse looks out from the bottom of the world, flashing its light in the fog and the rain, all the way down to Antarctica.

And so the tip of South Africa blossomed before me, some 500 years later, like a bright beacon of civilization in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Out beyond the colonial blocks of Cape Town, it felt as though the many worries of my life twisted and turned around Chapman's Peak Drive, before spinning off into nothingness or falling down the cliffs right into the sea. Past the Portuguese padraos all the way to the Cape, I hiked the last remaining cliff to the end of it all, where every nationality converged for seemingly the same picture. Then I meandered my way back down the peninsula to Boulders Bay, Simon's Town, and Fish Hoek, all lovely little formerly Dutch and British communities with one foot in the past and one in the present. The panoramic views sprout again over each hilltop. At one lookout I overhead someone say, "eventually you just stop taking pictures because the beautiful views don't go away."

Thoughts of Nigeria are everywhere these days, that corrupted, intense, mess of a place always dancing on the brink. Two greater paradoxes do not exist on one continent: the majestic view of Table Mountain reaching into the sky and dubbed a new wonder of the world, and then as an afterthought that one time I saw a woman with spread legs and a hiked up skirt peeing aside the public highway in Lagos, sheep scurrying about in the urban background. I was told from the beginning you have to get out of Nigeria to remember the world is not like Nigeria. You have to get out so it does not break you. Thus the Rainbow Nation of South Africa was as necessary as it was desired for a few bright days in September.

I got excessively drunk with strangers in old wine country around Stellenbosch one afternoon, stumbling along in and out of a five-farm tour. Wine terminology, the procedures, the protocol, and the elevated status of reds and whites and pinks, it still tends to be over my head, but I can appreciate a good drink with the best of them. I can mimic behaviors, nod when asked for thoughts, pretending to know what I'm doing, and hours later and by days end, none of it matters anymore. Nine of us who began the day with a reserved greeting passed a bottle of white around the back of a van laughing at the end, and Ebola and pollution and traffic and corruption and poverty and dirt and inefficiency and the entire terrible world of Nigeria seemed very far away and like it would never come back to me again. "Wine brings people together," our tour guide said at the beginning, and reminded us of again at the end.

In one great culmination, I almost burst into tears at breakfast on my last day when a waitress brought me an omelette and big latte and I realized how fresh and good and affordable it all was, and even more, how much the deep crevices of my body had missed and nearly forgotten exactly what real food was. It is amazing when you wake up and realize the simple things one country can make you appreciate. And likewise, there is no feeling more terrible than boarding an airplane that leaves the best place on Earth for another stint in the worst. My black South African waitress laughed when I said I live in Nigeria, telling me she was not aware white people chose to live there, and I do follow her logic at times. However I remain firm in my belief that there too remains great value in the dark parts of the world, and returning to the dark parts of the world again. Even if there isn't, it's sure too late to go back now, so we might as well make the most of it until the end of it all comes, I pack my bags, and run off somewhere else.