![]() ![]() ![]() It was not a choice – my chocolate-coloured skin saw to that – but it became a revelation. In Nigeria, I had often thought about who I was – writer, dreamer, thinker – but only in America did I consider what I was. ![]() This plurality, this mix of those voluntarily and involuntarily American, living on land that did not belong to them, gave birth to a churning that magnified rather than diminished identity. I was struck by the excess and the newness, by the flagrant contradictions, but mostly by how identity as an idea shaped so much of American life.Īmerica is indeed unlike any other country in the world, not in the kind of triumphalist manner of those who speak of “exceptionalism”, but because while it was created from violence like many other modern nations, it also claimed plurality, an unusual notion for founding a nation. From my first days, I watched and read and learnt. Yes, it is hackneyed but America truly was, for me, about chasing and catching my dreams. Nineteen years old and fleeing the study of medicine at my Nigerian university, I longed to be a writer, to live a life of the mind. America fascinated me as America fascinates every newcomer. ![]()
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