The Desire to Leave

     The short story, "Checking Out," by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, provides the point of view of a disadvantaged minority many people ignore. The main character, Obinze, is an immigrant from Nigeria, in London, struggling to gain citizenship in the UK. The political situation in Nigeria is at a bad point, and Obinze tries to obtain a visa to emigrate to the US, but is denied each time, which causes him to end up in London. His desire to go to the US stems from a commercial on tv called "Andrew Checking Out," where Andrew "checks out" of the country as if was a hotel, and leaves for America. This inspires Obinze to do try to do the same, and he fantasizes about what his life would be like in the US.

    Most of Obinze's desire to leave Nigeria comes from his vision of the US. He sees it as a utopian-like society where he is free to do and speak what he wants, and can drink all the Fanta he wants. He imagines the intellectual conversations he would have about literature with his friends and neighbors in the Harlem neighborhood of NYC, and obsessively pours over the websites of American universities. It is a paradise compared to the tensions and issues he faces in Nigeria, and it fuels his desire to leave. He never gets approved for a visa, however, and ends up in London instead.

    Once Obinze is in London, he is met with a different world than the one he knew in Nigeria, and it isn't entirely what he expected. He finds friends in a job at a delivery service, but they are far from the intellectuals he imagined himself hanging out with. They never know his actual name as he has to use someone else's identification card to work as his visa for the UK expired and his only option to stay is to gain citizenship by participating in an arranged marriage. Obinze traded the political issues of Nigeria for the social issues of the UK, but his desire to leave Nigeria was so strong he chose to engage in illegal activity to stay in London. In the end, he is arrested for his illegal residence, and sent back to Nigeria.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Poem to Write About

     Poem number 20, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in his book, A Coney Island of the Mind , is quite a beautiful masterpiece. Ferlinghetti perfectly uses rhyme in the poem to make it flow and connect ideas together in ways that may not have been previously imagined. Besides that, however, he uses the beautiful imagery of a candy store, with its many colors and inviting sights, to depict a childish innocence, and the exact moment it disappeared.      The first few lines of the poem invite the reader into the innocence of a boy who goes to a candy store. The reader is given visions of jellybeans that "glowed in the semi-gloom" as well as licorice sticks, tootsie rolls, and "Oh Boy Gum." It seems like a paradise for a child, when all they ever wanted was something sweet to make them happy.  After that last line about the gum, however, the visions of the candy die away like the dying leaves when the boy sees the girl walk in. The final lines of the poem, "Out...
Read more

Inclusiveness Today

      There was recently a video I watched of a joke about millennials in a job interview. In it, the girl was on her phone, was al little rude, and seemed clearly out of place for the job as her definition of trained in technology was social media and Siri. She expected everything to go her way, even when she was told she wouldn't be hired. While the video does provide a good laugh, there are a few things that can be recognized following the theme of equity and inclusiveness from both sides of the interview.     Starting with the girl, she wasn't being very inclusive towards the interviewer. She automatically expected him understand her point of view and judge solely based on that. She did not do research about what the job qualifications entailed and attacked him using a perceived defense mechanism when he told her she wasn't going to work out. People today tend to follow a pattern similar to this. While the video showed an extreme in this case, many...
Read more