Daniel’s Story
“Now I’m a completely different person, but I don’t know how I got here.”
This is the 5th edition of Inverted Blackness, a photoblog documenting Africans living in America.
DANIEL: “There’s something about the style of expression in America that I find fascinating. Sometimes I would like to say something in a very specific way, and my residual communication style from growing up in Nigeria takes over. Converting that style of communication to a canonical American style tends to be a bit difficult. And so, sometimes, I’ve been told that I can sound very crass and direct and rude. And I just have to explain that I did not mean to be rude, it’s just that something is lost in translation. I understand the ‘American’ humor, I understand the ‘Nigerian’ humor. When I try to convert one to the other? No way. I would say, though, that when I don’t try to bridge the gap—and just pick one style or the other—it feels a lot more comfortable, more natural.”
“I find that you have to be comically polite in America. I don’t remember the interpersonal stakes being so high growing up in Nigeria, but that’s maybe because we were teenagers. Here, you have to have some—what do you call it?—some boundaries. This is by no means a bad thing. But it does imply that the means don’t justify the end. From my experience growing up in Nigeria, if you had a moral high ground, you could be smug about it. You could be direct about it. But here, even if you think you have the right perspective, you still have to have a decent level of innocent curiosity because lived experiences can hold so much more weight than the perceived sum of all experiences. It can be frustrating, but it’s beautiful at the same time. This culture certainly provides a great atmosphere for the pursuit of knowledge. You might have the moral high ground, but you most likely don’t have the ‘intellectual high ground’ because it’s impossible to have all the perspectives.”
“I’ve had a good experience in this country so far. I haven’t had a shocking, life-altering experience. I’ve just had little changes, little deltas of experiences, that have compounded over time. Now I’m a completely different person, but I don’t know how I got here. I’ve been metamorphosized.”
Daniel grew up in Nigeria and relocated to the United States when he was eighteen. He currently studies for a Ph.D. in Economics at Brown University.
Thank you for reading Inverted Blackness! This photoblog publishes stories and photographs of Africans living in America, offering a glimpse into the African diasporic experience in the United States.
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