Diaspora: Account of UK Illusions
By Elempe Dele
When he stepped down from the plane there in Lagos State after spending about eleven years in the United Kingdom, UK, he had with him just a novel; Robert Ludlum’s The Matarese Circle.
He was not as sad as one would have expected a returnee who had nothing much to his name. He left the airport with an air of someone who has been emancipated but he was not so excited.
He sat to a coffee with a friend in his mother’s motel and home, a place she had built several years ago and could not continue to manage effectively because of her age and aching joints.
Some old time friend was present in the house that has part of it structured for a brothel. The down part of the adjoining building was used as a parking lot, the upstairs was for the girls while the main house was were his aging mother lived.
According to him, when he decided enough was enough, he was leaving the UK finally, his relatives back home felt he was insane. They envisage him leaving that beautiful country with a lot of royal velvet to come home to ‘this place.’
The UK life according to him was an illusion. The first illusion was that of wealth. He was earning about £3,000 but inflation took away huge part of it then comes rent, council tax, transportation and energy bills. He said he was left with little as his savings if nothing from the ordinary didn’t happen. He couldn’t even send money home for the upkeep of his aging mother, and he couldn’t marry at over fifhty years of age. How would anyone know the system was not meant to make you rich but to keep your head just a bit above waters?
He added that in the city where he lived, bustling with humanity, he was depressingly lonely. Friendliness cannot be translated to friendship automatically. At work, the smiles are not like those you experience in Nigeria. Nobody smiles at you beyond the mechanical smiles that ends on the face. Who invites you with a smile to the recess of his or her small house for a dinner? Even in the pub, you mostly drink alone in misery, and perhaps get drunk and go to sleep at home, alone.
The UK is multi-cultural he admitted, and you need to adapt by changing your accent to be able to fit in and communicate effectively. If you are not in a group, you are then just an inconsequential individual.
He left Nigeria to have a balanced life but that illusion was destroyed when he settled down in the UK. His life was automated: wake up early, commute to work, work, close, commute back, sleep…and the mechanics is repeated again. He was not happy with his job as it was not satisfactory, it was consuming him like a cancer. The job was sapping him. He felt he was a tool for his employer, not a human being.
Unlike it was in Nigeria before he left; he craved those arguments that were very personal. Those heated debates and friendly banters. But in the UK, what he got were mono-syllable words to avoid confrontations and intimacy. ‘Sorry’, ‘thanks’. He didn’t feel these were genuine interactions. Nobody asked him about hia aging mother or if his villagers have water to drink. He felt deeply isolated, and this was killing him softly. He remembered those days in Nigeria going to NPA to take pepper soup with friends and there he will flirt with the sales girls. Or sometimes he will drive to Okerede Itsekiri to see the Odelis or on Sunday mornings at Owode.
While in Nigeria, it was just two seasons; the dry and rainy season. You could hang your shirt on your shoulders during the heat period and leave the house or sit under the canopy of a tree with friends and family. Or detain a hot drink during the cold rainy season in busy joint with real human beings. But in the UK, winter increases your isolation, you feel like dying in the dangerous cold. Its your cold, your lonely cold, your quiet cold.
He said whenever he is ill, he will need to go to a free healthcare facility as his mental health was deteriorating. What this meant was that he will have to wait for days or weeks or even a month to be attended to. Its not like our General Hospitals where you can be attended to immediately if you go early. Here, you wait in line to be attended to. This erodes your hope of survival especially when you know what ails you is deep inside of you.
According to him, there was nothing like living the good life there; it is a deceptive illusion. What is readily available is a fare into depression. If you are lucky to afford a holiday or vacation somewhere outside the UK, you might be able to escape the permanency of depression building in your head. You just have to get away to feel something, away from the loneliness, mechanics and absence.
According to him, he is back home, feeling less than a real Waffi Boy and not also feeling like a Britico. Maybe he will adapt now he is back, but for now, he is somehow like a stranger. Old friends are mostly gone away. They have grown up kids to care for, businesses to take care of, political meetings to attend and so much in their social lives he had missed for the past one decade.
