The Grass is Greener Syndrome

In my reading of The Belly of the Atlantic for tomorrow's class I seemed to find so many interesting quotes in every page range except the one that was assigned to me. So I hope my classmates take advantage of all those good words during our mystery game tomorrow! As an African, I personally identified with many of the moral lessons Fatou Diome incorporated into her book.  Many times, African parents/elders will use the most round about statements to get a moral message across to you, and many hours of contemplation later you will realize the meaning behind their coded messages. For example, on page 25 Diome says, "Grandma told me that in the secrecy of the home, an elephant becomes as light as a butterfly".[1] After reading this section, I immediately wanted to title my blog post, "Float Like and Elephant, Sting like a Bee," and delve into a discussion about the way we as women often stroke men's egos and make them feel needed even when they aren't. To comment on how we as women, though very knowledgeable of how to handle lives on our own, seem to go out of our way to ask for help just to seem more "feminine". 

But instead I thought it would be better to share my thoughts on a few quotes on pages 25 and 26:

“In paradise, you don’t struggle, you don’t fall ill, you don’t ask questions; it’s enough to be alive, you can afford everything you desire, including the luxury of time, and that automatically means you’re available. That’s how Madiké imagined my life in France … He persisted in imagining I wanted for nothing, living like royalty at the court of Louis XIV. … He wasn’t going to feel sorry for a sister living in on of the world’s great powers after all.”

Most of my family, with the exception of a handful of aunts, uncles and their children, is still based in Nigeria. I’m very fortunate to get the best of both worlds, because anytime I go home to Nigeria I get to meet new cousins and family members that I wasn’t able to visit the time before. On the other hand, I meet new faces that are expecting a gift, be it a new phone or a pair of shoes or a dress. Now don’t get me wrong, it feels great to be able to go home and spoil my family members with the surplus of things I have here in the states, but it is a big burden to play the role of Santa every time I visit. Though my family in Nigeria is not suffering or wanting for much in their lives, they still expect presents, both monetary and material, every time my family and I visit home. In their minds, life over here is much too sweet not to share some of our good fortune. It’s as though they think money grows on trees here in the states. It never seems to baffle me! And what’s even funnier is the second I try to mention some sort of struggle I face, they brush it off as if I, being based in the states, don’t ever face hardship of any kind. So for me, it was incredible simple to understand her sentiment when her brother didn’t seem to want to take time and see that her life in France wasn’t all everyone else imagined it to be. She described it perfectly on page 26, “The third world can’t see Europe’s wounds, it is blinded by its own; it can’t hear Europe’s cry, it is deafened by its own. Having someone to blame lessens your suffering, and if the third world started to see the west’s misery, it would lose the target of its anger.”

---

[1] Fatou Diome, The Belly of the Atlantic (2006), 25