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KWENU: Our Culture, Our Future |
THE IMPARTIAL OBSERVER
Brothers, defuse!HANK ESO
Sunday 21 January 2007
“Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.” -- Lucius A. Seneca In Moral Essays, On Providence
One week ago Ms. C, a dear friend and fellow writer, called me up to ask if she could drop by for a chat. I obliged. She came by less than twenty minutes later, evidently burdened. As we sat to talk, she produced a piece by another colleague in the world of punditry, Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo, titled, “Just before you kill your wife,” and asked if I had read the article and what I thought of it. She then proffered an emotional and denunciatory rejoinder she had sent to Mr. Okonkwo, which to her chagrin, Mr. Okonkwo had reacted to with a terse reply, “You may be right.”
At issue, was the recent report of one Emeruwa a 41-year-old Nigerian man in the state of Maryland, who had killed his wife Ochulo. Such stories were becoming commonplace and troubling. There had been similar recent events in Georgia, Texas, and now Maryland. Such heinous crimes – not necessarily of passion-- were in the Nigerian context not part of the mainstream culture. Indeed, uxoricide were considered in the Igbo custom, ochu and alu – a sacrilege and abomination, and the penalties were extremely severe. Mr Okonkwo in his satire, while chastising and cautioning those Nigerian men who might be tempted to kill their wives, reminded them “that those who committed alu, abomination, do not reincarnate.”
Evidently, in her anger Ms. C. totally lost sight and sense of Mr. Okonkwo’s satirical and as usual well-written and balanced piece. Indeed, she was so incensed and believed that he treated a serious matter with levity. She was raging for an open debate and wanted to drag me into the fray as if to validate that Nigerian men customarily support their counterparts who engage in spousal battery. She was equally vexed at Okonkwo’s allusion that the deceased lady was a nurse and that some Nigerian women in America who are nurses, and as such have acquired more earning power had become oblivious of Nigerian customs relating to marriage and the place of the wife in the scheme of things. My response to Ms. C was that there were two sides to every coin and story. In this case, there would always a male and female perspective. I noted also, that many Nigerian men and women frequently take the same side in the debate about our increasingly tortured self-destructive ways. Finally, I disabused her of any notion that Mr. Okonkwo was by any measure biased against women or a misogynist. I encouraged her to read his recent book, Children of a Retired God, to discover the man’s mettle- and his overall turn of mind.
I also reminded my interlocutor, that while Nigerians in America no longer enjoy the idyllic family settings they were accustomed to at home, due to societal pressures and common place liberties in America, a majority of Nigerian men do not beat their wives, talk less of killing them. Ms. C got my point, but was nonetheless bothered, that the Nigerian communities in the USA were being nonchalant about these happenings and were not even engaged in the debate on how to address them.
But she was wrong. The debate has been raging out there. Perhaps she missed it all or maybe, they were not as animated, as she would have liked. Indeed, as far back as 2004, several other Nigerian pundits and I, had debated the issue on this site, having been conscious of the many accidents waiting to happen. (See “What Do Women Want”; “Destructive Tendencies a.k.a. “egwu mgbashiriko”; “American Dreams ..a nightmare?” and Acho Orabuchi’s “Do women really know what they want from men?” ) It is gratifying that even at the risk of being branded misogynists, we asked questions and got answers. In her piece of Thursday, April 15, 2004, titled “What do women want? Thank you for asking”, Adaoma Carolyn, offered an insight to what women want from their men. Such desires are universal, and as such do not exclude Nigerian men who live in America.
Another hard truth, is that spousal abuse and uxoricide is also not peculiar to Nigerians in America. Such ignominious acts should be condemned in every instance. But it needs to be flagged also, that in the case of Nigerians, even though in fact, these men who kill their wives are American citizens, it frequently becomes the case of “man bites dog”. Evidently, the stories sell well in the media when the captions and slant focus on the Nigerian immigrant angle. But that is not the essence of this piece.
Rather, the goal of this piece is the advocacy for restraint and an appeal to my brothers to learn to defuse situations that may end in disasters for their families. The ability to defuse takes courage, vision, and strength. When a marriage shifts from its blissfulness to an adversarial relationship, it behooves the man to understand what he is dealing with and the fact that the American family law for now, is wittingly or unwittingly designed to be stacked against him. Being an immigrant does not help matters also. The way to survive such conflicts is to learn to defuse the situation and even pay the high price of walking away with your dignity intact, even if with only the shirt on your back. That, may seem like a prescription for being wimpish or a cop out. But in essence, it means that you do not become the next evening or breaking news headline and that you will never have to explain to your children and your ex-in-laws, why you had to kill their mother or daughter to prove that you are a strong man and in control. Hence, when conflict beckons and the die is cast, we must remember the admonishment by Lucius A. Seneca, “Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.” So, brothers, be strong enough to defuse!
I am not an apologist for the uxorious doctrine. But I am realistic enough to understand certain concepts in the intercourse of male-female relations. This is, perhaps, what an old man saw and experienced, that when he was asked the secret of his long and happy marriage, he responded without any hesitation, “if you want to be happy, do what whatever your wife want”. As men, we often feel the need to be macho. Fair enough, but consider this. Chinweizu in his classic, “Anatomy of Female Power, defines a macho as
“a strutting factotum with bulging biceps, stone-dry eyes, brains that are ruled by his gonads, and an ego indoctrinated to believe that he is the lord and master of the woman who rules him.” He also defines as the opposite to macho, “the modern Musho” – “the new and feminal man, [is] one of that breed of diffident men who have been bullied, guilt-tripped, ego-bashed and penis-twisted into pram pushing, diaper changing and breast envy.”
I do not fully subscribe to all the theories that Chinweizu postulate with regards to male-female contextual relations, especially as it pertains to the sacred or traditional order of matrimony. However, I accept his premise that double standards exist. We see this in the way the Nigerian society treat women in a marriage as well as the way the American society, laws and legal system treat men when they are in conflict with their wives. This, is the crux of the many current conflicts resulting in a spate of uxoricide. As Chinweizu, long observed, “the brunt of the double standard is borne, not by women, but by men”.
A Call for a Debate I join those who have called for a broader debate of this issue. Why? In her write-up on this issue, titled “Save Our Sisters” which Ms. C. shared with me, she had this to say:
“the dynamics of the Nigerian marriages in America is complex. The Nigerian culture, mainly traditional, the man repressively rules: even in the 21st century women are still struggling to raise their voices. This orientation is being transposed into the American society, and of course the result is tragic.”
Continuing, she notes that:
“the Nigerian man has yet to learn how to live with the assertive woman, some have resorted to extreme violence to control her …. The women at the highest risks are the ones who have been sold into a sort of slavery disguised as marriage. These are women married to men who live in America, likely to have divorced an American woman, goes to Nigeria to remarry. They most likely seek out a professional woman, especially in the medical field. The rationale behind this is to get a woman with a good potential of bringing in high income (nurses who can work double or triple shifts, doctors, pharmacists or lawyers).”
Attractive and persuasive as this hypothesis may seem, and granted that it may be true in some instances, it is a gross generalization and blatant reductionism as to why Nigerian men go home to marry. If it is true as Ms. C suggests, that materialism is the driving criteria for Nigerian men going home to marry, she evasively left unanswered, what motivates or compel these women to marry men who return from America. I shall return to this later.
Enervating and Sobering realities “Nigerian Man Kills Wife” is no longer a shocking and rueful American story line or the aberration it ought to be. It is now bordering on a scourge. One death is far too many. In 1994 or thereabout, I recall that Rev. Fr. A, a Nigerian Catholic priest writing his post-graduate desertion had devoted ample time to conducting interviews on the trouble with Nigerian marriages. His subjects were cross-denominational. Having played counselor, confidant and confessor to many couples in crisis-prone marriages, having encountered so much anger, resentments, brutality and violence and having witnessed the quantum leap in separations and divorces, he decided to find the root causes of this growing scourge. Naturally, he was concerned about the erosion of the Nigerian culture, family values and the diminution of the importance of both the nuclear and extended family in the US. Furthermore, he was particularly stunned about what he had encountered within the Igbo family settings in America, being himself an Igbo.
Rev. Fr. A, therefore, set out to defuse this cankerworm – or at least to grasp how to defuse the problems. I recall that he insisted on interviewing Nigerian Igbo couples, those who admittedly had a troubled marriage and those, like my spouse and I, who were considered as having a “stable marriage”. The interviews and encounters were open. For us, it was more of an extensive no-holds-barred discourse that lasted some three hours. I raise this point only to show that troubled Nigerian marriages in the US has been with us for a while and that the debate on how to address them though marginal, had also been in the works.
This said, it needs to be underlined that marital crisis that become extreme is not peculiar to Nigerians at home or abroad. Neither is the case of spousal abuse, which should never be tolerated in any shape or form. But it also needs to be admitted that there are time bound cultural values, which are associated to marriages in Nigeria – a country where monogamy is routinely practiced, but where polygamy is not illegal and is practiced by Moslems, atheists and traditionalists. In Nigeria some of those that do not belong to these three categories, also find the convenience of having more than one wife.
In exploring the root causes of marital crisis in Nigerian families in America, Rev. Fr. A looked intrusively at the negative impact of counter-culture, the transplant of personalities, societal values, and expectations when juxtaposed with the liberties, values and the norms that are prevalent in the American society. This was inevitable. After all, Nigerians by custom place more emphasis and value on traditional marriage than on the civil or so called “white weddings”. As I recall, two questions seemed fundamental in our discourse with him on the issue of the Nigerian family crises, which were becoming manifestly violent. First, “Were Nigerians inherently prone to violence in their marriages than other immigrants?” Second, “Were such violence a critical factor and product of stresses and conflicts arising from American norms, values and the society at large, including the environment and circumstances which Nigerians found themselves?”
Regardless of what the putative answers were, we knew then, that there was a deep and troubling problem – a cancer of sorts—within our community. Regrettably, it was then not being aggressively tackled. So marriages broke up, women got maimed, husbands were put out or sent to jail, and the kids were shipped off to foster homes. Meanwhile, those involved and their trenchant supporters and advisers played the blame game while savoring their nugatory victory . The crisis was utterly confounding. It became inevitable thereafter, for some men to begin asking, “What do women want?” This was a question with a fatuous ring to it. But it was also genuine and a product of profound concern and quandary.
Recent uxoricide committed by Nigerian men – that is American men of Nigerian origin—in Georgia, Texas, and Maryland unmasked the widening fault lines in the lives of some Nigerians who have been transplanted to America. Of course, the attending issues, which form the root causes of such conflicts, can be traced to the prevailing dissonance in cultural values and norms. The situation calls for understanding. It begs for empathy. Consider Ms. C’s evaluation of the Nigerian man caught in this quagmire.
The Nigerian man in America is in constant turmoil. His existential anxieties could be overwhelming; he faces pressures from here and Nigeria. .. He is expected to care for his nuclear family here and extended family in Nigeria; the demand often causes him conflicting priorities. He wants to show his peers that he can afford an ostentatious lifestyle when he’s really up to his neck in debt. … Unfortunately for him he cannot share comradeship with his African –America brothers because he’s not as passionately involved in the struggles of the aftermath of slavery. He goes back and forth to Nigeria, the only place he can be himself. He is a stranger in the community in which he has lived for the past ten years and would probably live for another ten. He does not understand his American-born children; they speak a different language… I feel for the Nigerian-born man; at the end of the day his innate desire is to validate what his culture has trained him to be. No wonder he snaps when his wife tries to introduce an authenticity that does not meet the traditional role of a woman.
These are very revealing and subjective conclusions. The situation described consists of more than fleeting strands of veracity in terms of their reality. But these views also call into question the commitment of the women involved, to their marital vows of “for better or for worse”. Like religion, culture is inculcated in individuals, and is therefore hard to shake. To many, walking away from ones culture for the sake of convenience is tantamount to betrayal. Like one’s family or national history, culture has a three-dimensional purpose; to educate, to serve, and to preserve one’s ancestral, ethnic or national identity. In this context, let me now return to a point I broached earlier. Nigerian men go home to marry not because there are no eligible women –Nigerian, American, or others—in the US to marry. They do, because they genuinely seek partners whose values are like theirs, rooted in the norms and culture in which they were brought up and in which the parents were married and mostly stayed married. The same can be said of the Indian Diaspora. Another reality which people gloss over, is that recent studies have indicated that as much as 30 percent of African-American women will never get married due to a dearth of eligible husbands. Ditto Nigerian women at home and in the Diaspora.
Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk Talk is cheap. Blame is cheaper. The time has come for Nigerian men and women confronted by the ugly realities and divisive challenges posed by their sojourn in a foreign land to come to grips with the hard facts. The time for denials is over. We have for long been in a state of denial -- our men and women and our shrug-it-off community have all been in denial. The basic denial starts when the initial marital differences and challenges manifest at the personal level and continue, until the bodies are being shipped off to the morgue and the other spouses are on the run or in manacles. Our community is also culpable. Back home the elders would naturally intervene. Here, it is “mind your business”, whilst those who goad their fellow men and women “not to take the crap” take far more “crap” behind close doors in their own homes, yet strive to build bridges of tolerance and reconciliation, presumably for the sake of their children. But we need to admit at this juncture, that our collective distance and indifference has become palpable and is a contributing factor to the growing marital violence raging in our midst. Let’s look at it this way, if it would help. But for the Grace of God, those Nigerian couples caught in such maelstrom could be you and me. That it hasn’t happened does not confer us with any immunity. After all as they say, “this is America”.
There is also need for us to recognize that the situation some of our compatriots have found themselves is worsening. Also, some of our reactions compound the situation. In the discourse or the debate, we rarely seek a common ground as much as we hang on to the extremes. Comments like, “Our women, especially those nurses have become uncontrollable” or “ Our men can’t handle the success of their wives-they are control freaks who want to dominate and subjugate” are utterly defeatist and unhelpful. They only stoke the amber of discord.
We need to recognize also, that whilst every marriage has its ups and downs, those Nigerians who allow their marriages to bottom out and reach the sorry point of physical violence, mayhem and uxoricide are in the extreme minority. Nonetheless, because of the extensive publicity given to these matrimonial crimes, some would like to infer that the collective identikit of the Nigerian male in America is increasingly tending towards being misogynistic, a wife beater and a wife killer. Nothing could be farther from the truth and such hurried conclusion and broad brush borders on the surreal.
“This is America” is a counterproductive, sad and overworked cliché in the Nigerian lexicon. It is one that has taken its toll also. In the context of emulating our American hosts, we need to contemplate Alan Whicker’s observations: “American manhood may have kicked out the first Redcoats, defeated the Indians and conquered the moon, but the truth is they are now retreating in hopeless disarray before their womenfolk”. Indeed, for all the good and values this great country can rightly boast of, that phrase, an incessant and primordial refrain for some quasi-liberalized Nigerian women, is conclusively negative, both in its intent and message. The native born American woman may have overcome, but in reality until very recently, there were many “men only” rooms and clubs -- the United States Senate included.
I do not wish to be misunderstood. America has great values, Nigeria does too. America has varying and rich cultures worth emulating. Ditto Nigeria. But America has norms that are in conflict with norms and mores in Nigeria. Of this, there can be no questions. Unquestionably, it is the intercourse of and juxtaposition of such norms that creates conflict and challenges. Of this, there is hardly any doubt.
What to do? Adapt. What is called for is a balance; the balance to be proud to be called an American, but also to be proud that one is originally a Nigerian. Second, we must recognize that there are things one can get away with in Nigeria that would not be acceptable or tolerated in America and vice versa. In Nigeria the man is the head of the family, regardless of his social standing and earning power. In America, this concept is notional in that many see marriage as a partnership or convenient contractual relations, in which love and intimacy may be shared, but with the prior exclusion of sharing of wealth and other material resources. This is the precursor to the high rate of divorce in this nation. It literally translates into the diminution of the moral stake, fiber, and other imperatives that hold marriages together. In Nigeria, as in Singapore, corporal punishment is not frowned upon. However, attempting to administer it in America, is to risk accusations of child abuse.
It is well known that in Nigeria even the most highly placed of professional women – doctors, judges, lawyers, politicians educators and bankers – still place optimal value in their primary role as wives and mothers. So why has the scenario become different in America? As I said to my friend Ms. C, there is always two sides to a story. On this issue, there will always be the female and the male perspectives. What I find reassuring is that it has not been an all-men-for-men and all-women-for-women debate.
There is no denying that the Nigerian male faces an uphill task in America. For most, particularly the Igbo man, while not necessarily intent on subjugating the womenfolk, the Igbo culture created separate interactive strata for both. In family affairs, some matters are exclusive to women and some to men. When women make a foray into these areas on the assumption that they enjoy independent wealth or have higher earning power, conflict ensues. I have heard it said by some women that “we are our own worst enemy”.
Some women openly admit –often as an afterthought- that beyond being in denial about their “dark ugly sides”, they may have allowed their fellow women to egg them on. So, rather than pursuing a collaborative dialogue, they opt for the adversarial posture which includes, calling the police, putting the man out with a restraining order, and using the law to retain community property and the children. In doing these, they dehumanize, humiliate, debase and figuratively castrate the man, reducing him to an animal and thus compelling his worst and raw basic survival instincts to emerge, with the attending brutality, violence and perhaps even murder. Some men, however, are also culpable and unhelpful to their cause. They indulge in the “Jasper Syndrome”, by allowing their wives to be the bread winners, without themselves bringing anything to the table – not even a helping hand with parenting and everyday house chore. Sorry guys, you can’t have it both ways.
For the records, I make no excuse for any man who allows himself to be goaded into violence. It is wrong, extremely wrong to lay a finger on a woman, talk less on one’s spouse despite the scope of the adversity one confronts. The first slap or punch is one too many and as such, must never happen. Knocking around one’s spouse can in no way be a sign of strength or one’s masculinity.
Man to man, let me say this. Brothers, we must learn to defuse. For those who are so inclined, please bear in mind the unintended consequences of your actions. Resort to physical abuse has never solved any conflict and won’t solve yours. Dissected any way, it will only produce more TROUBLE! When we begin to consider violence as an alternative to dialogue and discourse, it becomes a self-fulfilling answer and unfortunately a consuming and destructive one at that. If push comes to shove spare that punch and save your dignity and family. Brothers, defuse! Walk if talking will lead to punching or murder. No amount of material wealth is worth killing for. Defuse, brothers defuse! Peace!
With neither anger nor partiality, until next time, keep the law, stay impartial, and observe closely. ------- Hank Eso, is a columnist for Kwenu.com (New Jersey). His commentaries on Nigerian politics and global issues have appeared in The New Times (Lagos), African Profile International (New York), The Nigerian And Africa Abroad, (New York), African Market News (New Jersey) and in Gamji.com.
© Hank Eso, Sunday 21 January 2007 Email: hankeso@aol.com |
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