Late-summer gleaning

Osonye Tess Onwueme was and is a fireball. I was teaching her plays, and I booked her for a week as Artist-in-Residence at Smith. My students feared that white and African-American students could not do justice to plays written for and about African women. I knew from reading interviews with Osonye that she didn’t agree, but I wanted my students to hear it from her. She happened to arrive the week after I submitted my resignation letter. 

Osonye strode into my life like royalty in jewel-toned African head-dress and flowing robes, and when she felt intensely about something, she broke into dance. This happened during our first conversation, and she told me, “It is cruel to force the body to contain itself; if you feel joy and you don’t dance, it will give you the headache.” I told her I knew more about headaches than about dancing, and she yanked me out of my chair and began clapping, singing, and teaching me African dance right then. I found my shimmy and shake, and by the end of her week-long residency, she had persuaded me the stars were in perfect alignment; her appearance in my life was no accident; and I needed to apply for a Fulbright, go to Africa, study Igbo culture, and become a consultant for anyone who wanted to produce Nigerian plays in the USA. “You are the person I have been looking for, my sister!” she declared. I was hooked.

The Fulbright application was due in August, and I threw myself into it. I pursued Nigeria and Nigerian theatre as wholeheartedly as Osonye danced. I read every Nigerian play available in English. I read the novels of Flora Nwapa and Chinua Achebe, the plays of Wole Soyinka. I studied the Igbo-Yoruba conflict and the Igbo-Hausa conflict, and most ardently I studied Igbo women. The play that drew me to Osonye was The Reign of Wazobia, and in 1991 there was no internet, no Youtube, but now there is a one-minute video that features both Osonye talking about that play and a group of students and faculty rehearsing it. 

I drafted a proposal for a Fulbright year in Nigeria. Osonye connected me with scholars and artists she knew there, and they prepared a welcome for me at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. My beloved friend and colleague who taught costume design, Kiki Smith, who had saved my hash several times already, wrote me a slamming recommendation letter, as did several other friends who were artists and academics, and badabim-badabam, I was made a Senior Fulbright Scholar posted to Nsukka. 

I had a lot of ends to tie up. In a meeting with a tax accountant I lamented having more debts than assets. “You paid serious money to work at Smith,” he explained. “I’ve been doing taxes in this town for many years. I know how modestly you’ve lived, and I know what department heads are paid. They never did right by you.” He patted me on the hand sympathetically, and I left his office feeling somehow affirmed. I hadn’t just imagined I was being screwed. I paid full tax plus 28% to withdrew money from my retirement account to pay my debts. 

Seth started university studies but dropped out because he fancied himself a car mechanic. He was a drummer in an alternative rock band, a skateboarder, a free spirit, and at 19, he told me, he was ready to start life on his own. He moved into a friend’s basement, and we found a new home for his dog with the groomer who had been clipping him for six years and said Tom was the sweetest dog she’d ever known. I had a lover, a gorgeous, brilliant woman sixteen years older than I, and we agreed to put our relationship on hold for a year so I could do this wild, wonderful thing.  Kiki Smith organized a huge send-off for me, Smith planted a tree in my name by the college archives, and I put my winter clothes and all my belongings in storage, grew my hair long so it would be easy to care for, and packed only my lightest, airiest clothes. I shipped boxes of books to Nsukka. With my first check from the Fulbright folks I bought my ticket to fly to Nsukka in September, and in August I attended a briefing in Washington, D.C. where I was told about the dangers of cerebral malaria. I was required to sign a pledge that I would take a malaria-preventive drug called Larium throughout the year I would be posted in Nigeria, and I was on my way.