Earlier this year, I published a short essay, “The ABC of a Nigerian
Joke for Western Audiences”, that is surprisingly still travelling and
acquiring mileage online, especially in spaces of Africanist cultural
scholarship in North American academe. Every now and then, I receive an email
from a doctoral student or a colleague who has only just stumbled on it and
requires some clarification. The said essay was inspired by some White Western
Facebook friends who inboxed me, wondering what the fuss was all about as
Nigerians and other African nationals cracked up after I had posted a joke that
only cultural insiders would understand.
Here’s a recap of the joke. A policeman arrests a guy for urinating in a
place displaying the commonplace “Do Not Urinate Here” sign in Nigeria. The cop
fines the offender five hundred naira. The guy brings out one thousand naira
and asks for his change. Says the policeman to the offender: “urinate again. I
no get change.” I wrote “The ABC of a Nigerian Joke” to explore the postcolonial
cultural locatedness of this and other jokes. I made the case that humour is
the most difficult thing to translate; it’s very untranslatability making it
one of the most reliable ways of gauging cultural integration in immigrant and
diasporic communities.
Let me explain. I believe that Africans hardly find Oyinbo people’s
jokes funny and vice versa. You therefore know that your African friend has
truly integrated if he attends one of those gatherings where Oyinbo people
serve cookies, muffin, slices of pizza, celery, and dip, all displayed beside
three jugs of regular coffee, decaf coffee, and hot water for tea respectively,
and laughs at the appropriate decibel level when he hears jokes that aren’t
funny because they are not immediately translatable into his own modes of
cultural apprehension.
Appropriate decibel level is very important. If he laughs at the exact
decibel level and at exactly the same time as the rest of the room, he is
thoroughly acculturated. He has become an African oyinbo man. The jokes of the
host culture are genuinely funny to him. After one muffin, one piece of carrot,
one piece of celery, and a Styrofoam cup of decaf coffee without sugar, this
African may even rub his belly, yawn, and exclaim to his neighbor in the room:
“wow, I’m bursting. There’s so much good food here.” And he means it. He is
genuinely full for even his belly is now Canadian – or American as the case may
be – and no longer requires the heavy work out of kenkey, fufu or pounded yam
to be full.
However, if his own burst of laughter comes a couple of seconds later
than the rest of the room every time something funny is said; if his laughter
constantly bursts out a tad louder than the rest of the room, then he is one of
those Africans who remind you of the proverb: a tree trunk may spend twenty
years in the river, it will never become a crocodile. He is just laughing like
an automaton in order not to be the odd one out. The jokes ain’t funny. And he
is starving as hell. He is merely struggling to blend in that room, cramming
muffins, celery and dip into his mouth and wishing he had taken the precaution
of eating poundo and egusi soup at home before leaving for that oyinbo people’s
party.
“The ABC of a Nigerian Joke” made it to Professor Toyin Falola’s famous
pan-Africanist listserv, USAAfricaDialogue. One of the party chieftains of that
listserv, Professor Ken Harrow of Michigan State University, one of the most
significant Africanist thinkers of our era, a man whose work is my melody in
the business of theorizing African literatures and cultures and whose praxis
thoroughly inspires, wondered aloud why he laughed on encountering the Nigerian
joke about the policeman. Are you for real, I thought, as I read Ken’s
reaction.
Something would be seriously wrong, I thought further, if Ken Harrow, a
vieux routier of Africa, encountered an African proverb and didn’t find it
funny. After all, he got to Africa before me and has never really left. I
thought he had forgotten his own African insiderhood, earned over decades of
meticulous and thorough scholarly labour in the cultural vineyards of the
continent. Ken, it should be obvious to you why you laughed, why you found that
joke funny, I thought, as I made a mental note of waiting for an inspired
moment to pen a follow-up essay – this essay - in his honour.
Midway into a handsome bottle of Beaujolais to celebrate a particularly
good news today, December 6, 2012, my brain finally receives the creative bang
she has been waiting for in order to undertake this essayistic excursion in popular
culture in homage to Ken Harrow. Beyond the earned cultural insiderhood which
would open up Nigerian, nay African humour to an Africanist vieux routier like
Ken, making him laugh at the joke about a Nigerian policeman and the politics
of “change collection” in the postcolonial atmospherics of the checkpoint,
there are contact zones and meeting points of the collectively human which, in
hindsight, my initial essay, focused on cultural particulars, does not
adequately address. As culturally hermetic as humour is, such sites, zones, and
spaces of the universally human offer many opportunities for her to cross
borders without passport and visa requirements.
The bottle is one such location of the universally shared. I had
mentioned the bottle and a London pub in the earlier essay as indices of
integration if an African found the jokes there funny. I now hold a different
opinion. An African may find jokes in that particular location funny for the
reasons I am about to explore. There are universal modes of human sentience
organized around the symbology of the bottle and its contents. I am not talking
about the bottle in your living room or other private spaces. I am talking
about that object in its public life-world; in spaces where its phallic posture
on the table is generative of sensations, experiences, lore, and cultures that
can combine seamlessly into narratives of the universally humorous.
In the American/Canadian corner Bar and Grill, the Irish/English pub,
the French bistro or brasserie, the southern African shebeen (originally
Irish), the Ivorian maquis, the Nigerian beer parlour, burukutu, paraga,
ogogoro, or shepe spot, the bottle stands as humanity’s singular answer to the
eternal question of Babel. No deity can create Babel within the cultural actuations
or the bottle. In the domain of alcohol, the human experience tells Babel: we
are one people, one voice, one language, one humour. Indeed, I am yet to
encounter experiences and narratives of the bottle and drunkenness in one
culture that cannot be translated to and carried by the idioms of another. In
the domain of the bottle, humour is transculturally and transnationally funny.
Indeed, in its very defiance and transcendence of the curse of Babel,
the bottle becomes demiurge, creating art - universal art, transnationally
funny art - in the figure of the rambler. In country music, the character of
the rambler is a player, an irresponsible figure who breaks girls’ hearts and
never stays. Don Williams calls him a “rake and ramblin’ man” in his song of the
same title. Don Williams’s rambler knocks up a girl and refuses to accept
responsibility:
You know I’m a rake and ramblin man
Free as an eagle flies
Look at me now and tell me true
Do I look like a daddy to you?
In Zac Brown Band’s super hit song, “Colder Weather”, the rambler is as
irresponsible as his elder brother in Don Williams’s song. The heartbroken girl
who is left behind in Colorado says to the rambler in “Colder Weather”:
You’re a ramblin’ man
You ain’t ever gonna change
You got a gypsy soul to blame
And you were born for leavin”.
If country music condemns the rambler as a patriarchal breaker of female
hearts, the bottle redeems him as an archetypal lone figure, a singular human
habitus of the universally funny who harms no one. All he does is enact a
personal drama of redemption from alcohol – or of redemption through alcohol
consumption. Whether he is running away from or towards the bottle, the
alcoholic rambler is generative of narratives and experiences which carry
humour across cultural and transnational boundaries. In America, we encounter
the rambler as the redemption-seeking persona in Tom Paxton’s classic folk
song, “Bottle of Wine”:
Bottle of wine, fruit of the vine
When you gonna let me get sober
Let me alone, let me go home
Let me go back and start over
Ramblin' around this dirty old town
Singin' for nickels and dimes
Times getting tough; I ain't got enough
To buy a little bottle of wine
Notice the self-identification as a rambler at the beginning of the
second stanza. Now, why does generation after generation of French citizens go
about in France believing that this funny, all American rambler is French? It
speaks to the translatability of the idioms and humour of the bottle. Graeme
Allwright, a New Zealand singer who moved to France in 1948 and subsequently
became a famous French singer, translated Tom Paxton’s song to French and
released it in France as “jolie bouteille.” It became and still is one of the
greatest hits of French folk tradition. What got lost in translation – wiped
clean from French memory – is the fact that “jolie bouteille” is a mere
adaptation/translation of an American original by Tom Paxton. In essence, the
American rambler has been so seamlessly appropriated by the French, who
converted him to a “flâneur” and sent him on errands of redemption from the
bottle, with zero trace of his American origin. If only Tom Paxton had thought
of making the rambler drink Budweiser instead of a bottle of wine!
Why is the transition from rambler to flâneur so easy? The answer is
simple. One may be a consumer of cheap and inferior California wine in America
while the other consumes superior merlot in France, their narratives and
experiences of the bottle generate humour that can find a natural home in any
culture. Hence, we encounter this alcoholic rambler in the Yoruba imagination.
Also a loner like his American and French booze-cousins, he is however not
seeking redemption from the bottle. He is defiant. His redemption lies in
claiming the bottle like the portion of the Nigerian Pentecostal Christian. He
is wealthier than his Western cousins in America and France and does not need
to sing for nickels and dimes to be able to afford his booze. Thus, the Yoruba
rambler gets to boast in Kollington Ayinla’s song:
A f’owo mu oti ki ku s’ode
Gere gere, ng o dele mi o
(He who pays for his own booze
Is not condemned to the outdoors
Somehow, I’ll stagger drunkenly all the way home)
Ebenezer Obey’s rambler ups the ante. Like Kollington’s, he is also
wealthier than the American rambler and the French flâneur. He is not seeking
redemption from but through the bottle. He is not sure that alcohol consumption
is legal in heaven; hence, he evinces the imperative of the earthly precaution:
Haba ma muti l’aiye nbi
Ma muti l’aiye nbi
Boya won ki mu l’orun
Ma muti l’aiye nbi
Boya won ki mu l’orun
Ma muti l’aiye nbi
(I’ll drink my fill here on earth
Just in case they don’t drink alcohol in heaven
I’ll drink my fill here on earth)
Obey’s rambler does not doubt the ability of hedonism here on earth to
take him to heaven. His only problem is the fear of the unknown: will there be
alcohol in heaven when I die and go there? However, he is not going to travel
to that celestial destination via the way, the truth, and the life proposed by
the Christian Bible. In his humoristic transgressions, Obey’s rambler is
clearly a man who could easily earn an OBE from the Queen of England in
recognition of the earthly Eucharistic gloss he has placed on drunkenness, that
very English of national traits. Speaking of English drunkenness, Elizabeth
Renzetti writes in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper:
“The English have more words for drunk than the Inuit have for snow,
perhaps because it is as much part of the landscape. On a given night, you
might be bladdered, legless, paralytic or rotten with drink…I thought I’d heard
them all until British Home Secretary Theresa May used the phrase “preloaded”
on Friday to announce her government’s war on binge drinking. Preloading refers
to the act of getting hammered before you go out to get hammered – that is
stocking up on cheap booze from the grocery store in order to be good and
wobbly by the time you hit the bars.”
Now, why am I in stitches reading Renzetti’s description of the English?
The Canadian is making this Nigerian laugh by describing the English in
registers that are brokered by the universal signifyin’ of the bottle. If she
makes me laugh, I am sure she is immensely capable of making Ken Harrow, the
American, laugh with precisely the same registers. American, Canadian, French,
English, Nigerian: the bottle speaks only one language but we can all
understand it in our respective languages. The bottle is not Babel. She is
Pentecost. We all hear her speak in our respective languages.
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