Editor’s note: The Chronicle ordinarily refrains from publishing vulgar language unless it is judged to be an essential part of the story. In this story, the term President Trump used in his discussion of immigrant communities meets that standard.

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“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh:

For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds, casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself.”

2 Corinthians 10:3-5

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The chronic

America is a chronic condition.

At times its symptoms are hidden, and other times there are massive flare-ups — violent outbreaks reminding you, lest you get too comfortable, that sometimes the only difference between calm and chaos is the tone. The United States is great and its sun can be warming, but don’t take that as an invitation to look it square in the face unless you want to set the whites of your eyes on fire. America is filled with opportunities--- up to a certain point.

Being an immigrant in the United States, then, is also a chronic sickness, a sustained practice in dislocation, depending on your origin. Because as President Trump alluded when he made his “shithole countries” remark, there is, in fact, a hierarchy of worth based on nationality. Depending on where you’re from, foreignness is an evolving or devolving predicament that one manages to live with, having developed a cordial relationship with the possibility of complete catastrophe.

So as a sensitive, or self-preserving, or sanity-favoring immigrant, especially one with vulnerable status, I have to consume news by osmosis, a gradual and deliberate absorption of tense reports. I pick snatches here and there, from posts and Tweets, stealing glances at acrimonious headlines, simultaneously disconnected and informed but all the while crossing my anxious fingers. Because osmosis is the best way to learn that your home is a shithole checkered with huts and AIDS.

But how did I become vilified in America? Simple: before I was upbraided here, I was first diminished there — on the continent. So when I migrated here, I had already been flattened to a two-dimensional relief by the disgusting representations of my ballooned belly and fly festooned crown, images sold to the American popular imagination. This caricature was presented as portraiture, real and true. There is but a short trip from misrepresentation to discriminatory policies.

Of course, the usual suspects are always guilty: the politicians, profiteers and the policymakers, masterful in the art of transmogrification. However, these folks are only the end users of my reconstituted identity. The true content creators, those doing that subtle work of debasement, are shrouded under good intentions. Here is a short roll call: the media, with its matter-of-fact images of war-ruined scapes; Bono and his global compassion ministry, which literally centers him amidst black suffering; televangelists and international charities, asking for pennies; and the venerable Anthony Bourdain.

An alien in Lagos

For more than a decade, Bourdain has been America’s patron saint of obscure cuisines, interceding on behalf of the culturally ignorant. An onscreen interlocutor irreverently mediating foreignness to Americans, his show of practiced vitality — weathered jeans, T-shirt and a definite swagger — providing bonafides.

Onscreen, he daringly descends into tumultuous locales without concern for gastrointestinal safety, tucking into unnerving dishes with the recklessness of a blanche Don Quixote, all while drowning uncountable gulps of strong drinks to wash all that madness down. He fancies himself different, not the circus ringmaster conquering only the most sensational, crunchiest insect or slithering vermin. No, Bourdain is a cultural relativist, according the appropriate deference to those who are different while guiding his viewers a step past their discomfort into a scarier world.

He recently visited Nigeria. “It’s mad, it’s bad, it’s delicious, it’s confusing and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Bourdain said of Lagos in that episode from his CNN “Parts Unknown” show that aired in October 2017.

I am rarely sentimental, except about Lagos, where I was born — the dirt and dust of that city are forever caught in my eye, and I can’t blink it away. I’ve been 18 years without going back home, my movement hindered by “visa problems.”

Osmosis is how I apprehend Lagos now. I have WhatsApp text conversations in pidgin English with my schoolmates. I make phone calls to my parents, my mother inevitably ignoring me to carry on with some disembodied voice about kitchen matters, apologizing for being distracted even as she reassures me that she’s listening. I sing loudly to Davido as I cycle through New Orleans traffic (“I love you no mean say if you say make I put one hand for fire ... I go put hand fire”). Lagos comes in snatches, its smell stuck to the roof of my nostrils. Sometimes I crave it, and I march to find it.

Homesickness drove me to watch Bourdain’s lavishly exoticized treatment of my hometown. My review is regret — it’s a shame it was his voice that was the one to tell that story, an awkward, nasal vocalization narrating Africanity back to me.

In the episode he cut a dissonant figure: Tall, thin, tanned yet white, striding through a tumble of black bodies with the self-awareness of Moses at the parted Red Sea. His usual brand of charm, which plays well in an American context, only read as imperial. His tired and standard offer of a countercultural perspective, was cloying, and it dissolved — like sugar in garri— to reveal the expansive firmament of White Americanness he represents.

The mind of a chef

That hour of television was an acute fantasy of Africa, a regurgitated trope called up from the pit of a familiar Western stomach. The episode is perfect insight into mainstream American views of othered places — Africa or Asia, New Orleans or Compton — a story limned by limited outsiders and thus nonrepresentative, objectified and objectionable.

In Bourdain’s hyper-realized depiction, Lagos is full of commendable hustlers MacGyvering an existence out of chewing gum, sunlight and psychedelic funk music. There are some deftly coded scenes, pretending commonality but signaling difference. For example, in the very opening sequence, we witness a sweat-soiled street vendor weaving through congested traffic, ducking a commuter motorcycle as he balances his wares exasperatedly, all to the hectic beat of kick drums, car horns and a minstrelized narration.

Then Bourdain eventually sheds his thin veneer of the relatable other, and he leans ever so surely into his non-malicious prejudice, giddily shocking his viewers with what they expect. There is a gratuitous, ritualized slaughter scene: The neck skin of a soon-to-be-decapitated sheep is pulled taut and a sharp knife tears open the animal to reveal the bloodiest of red splattering, rich and full of leaking life. This casually macabre picture is spliced with violent images from a local wrestling match where ferocious loin-clothed men are pummeling each other gleefully. We are transported between dead bleeding animals and dark warring men so quickly we can’t tell which is beast, which is happy or who all is dead. It’s dizzying.

And all of this and more is vomited on you, a sort of fact, without context.

Well, here is the excised context: We are not so much shown Lagos, in its spectral fluorescence, as we are inserted into the mind of Bourdain. And it is a partisan gaze posing as impartial.

Ostensibly Bourdain is a translator, but at that he is mediocre, as evidenced in the frequent flatness of his subjects, their narrative arcs bending conveniently either to victimhood, or victory through gluttonous eating. Bourdain’s magic lies is in his capacity to formulate the most updated representation of readily consumable alterity.

He doesn’t need to know Africa to do his work; he just needs to understand his customers, America and the appetite for a revamped experience of darkness. They want to touch, taste, smell it, watch it burn and then stand under the shower of its exfoliative ash, feeling it fall gently on their skin, cleansing them of all guilt except curiosity.

Mr. Bourdain’s real talent, captured in these sharply edited visuals, is the faithful reproduction of any representation of otherness that permits its consumption. At this work, he is a master, breaking sweet people down from complex to simple sugars, all the more digestible, all the more delicious. This is the modern conqueror.

The center of the world

Object Permanence is the knowledge that objects still exist even when out of one’s sensory purview. We aren’t born with this perspective. Rather, we grow into it, yet our congenital self-centeredness never really perishes. We may understand intellectually that other people exist, but their existence seems concocted for our enjoyment.

In the mid-1990s in Lagos, before cellular phones were as common as gala — that ubiquitous and addictive sausage-roll street snack — most home-phone handsets were tethered by coiled cords, an infinite string of alternating elbow macaroni clipped to a cradle. When I was young, listening to my parents talk on the phone, I was convinced that all their acquaintances, the ones they greeted with cheery salutations, lived inside those tangled phone cords. I pictured microscopic rows of homes filled with shrunken family friends, miniaturized to fit conveniently into our home-phone line, their mission without respect to any other ambition was to answer my parents’ greetings. Similarly, Africa seems to exist for Bourdain as a place set in pause until he says hello.

While Bourdain is an obvious metaphor for America, for whiteness — consuming at an Olympic pace and modernizing its tactics of pillage — he also represents himself. Bourdain is the inescapable truth that the individual is culpable. That the ancient lust and covetousness which propels empire is a human condition embedded in even the most applauded hosts.

The end of Anthony Bourdain

At stake here is not the description of Lagos, or Africans. It is about who gets to create us and what those representations mean for our lives, because the world has a way of turning on the careless words of fools.

Lagosians would be the first to tell you that the city is mad, and Nigerians can opine for forever about the intractable shitholeness of the country, but we don’t quite mean it the same way as Bourdain or the President. Our madness in this shithole is a lived experience, the distillation of uncountable personal and collective histories brought to bear in a terse description. It is borne from an insoluble frustration which dilutes our laughter at the comic fruits of the dysfunction we criticize. Ironically a dysfunction created by policies which benefit Bourdain.

However, for Bourdain, madness is a salivating prospect, something to be collected, good only for gossip, a story to broadcast. An hour of cable television.

But as Nigerians say, “it’s not his fault, I don’t blame him.” Bourdain is what he is because of who he is — insert African proverb about leopards and spots, zebras and stripes. He is a white American man.

There’s nothing Bourdain can do to change his work or fix his gaze. He is like everyone else, limited by his history, identity and experiences. Wherever he is, he assumes the center, pushing all narratives to the periphery, all other lives become his supporting cast. No matter how carefully he narrates, he will always remake the world in the image of his privilege.

Well, there is one thing Bourdain could do: he could commit to a figurative death. Then the next woman who tells stories about the world can be someone whose center is externally focused. Someone who has had a history of putting together the things that have fallen apart.

If you want to learn about Lagos, Nigeria or Africa, and beyond, close your ears to the President and your eyes to “Parts Unknown.” Instead read “Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds“ by Yemisi Aribisala, because, to paraphrase Rakim, this is how it should have been done, when you’re documenting places identical to none.