By Obi Nwakanma

Mbonu Ojike’s book, I have two countries (1946), is a classic text of transnationalism and transnational identity. It registers the dual conundrum – the doubleness, or betterstill, the “Janus-faced” condition of existing in two places at the same time.

One place claims your body, the other, your soul. It manifests the situation of the “double-gaze” and the “double-tongued” all clearly symptomatic of the ambiguity, and perhaps in fact, the ambivalence of double self-referentiality.

The body is labored and the weight on the soul is enormous. I know, because I exist in that condition. Just recently, this past summer, I moved from St. Louis, Missouri, to Orlando, Florida to join the English faculty of the University of Central Florida in Orlando. It’s a huge University – America’s second largest university with over 56,000 students.

Truman State University in the small town of Kirksville – Missouri’s elite, highly selective Liberal Arts College, where I’d been teaching is of a significantly smaller scale. UCF on the other hand is a vast enterprise with an intriguing history.

From its beginning as Florida’s University of Technology it has grown into a behemoth tied to developments in Central Florida, including the Kennedy Space Center nearby, and with the demands of a large metropolitan university. The move from the American Midwest of tornadoes and flash floods to coastal Florida of the hurricanes is unsettling.

Every move is unsettling. No less, adventurous; an Odyssean quest. It has felt symbolic in two important ways particularly for me: it was with a little shock that I realized, on moving from St. Louis, that I’d lived longer in St. Louis than I lived in Lagos where I began my professional life as a journalist before moving to the United States. Yet Lagos still feels vivid and essential. Time in America has on the other hand been as though on a spur.

Time was damaged by an act of terrorism on September 11, 2001. I was in graduate school ten years ago at the Washington University in St. Louis when those attacks occurred. I saw the world change in America. I had arrived to a different America; or at least, to a different sense of America. The America I met on moving from Nigeria seemed more humane and carefree. The change has been startling. 9-11 has the ring of an emergency summons; of a state of fragility and insecurity.

It is ‘Ekwensu” – the alarum of violence and chaos and disorder. In my experience it has placed America on a permanent state of emergency. The weeklong memorial this week of the anniversary of the event has once more highlighted some of the great losses that America has suffered from that tragic attack on it by terrorists.

Of the greatest losses, I think the most significant and most tragic seems to me to be the profound but I hope momentary loss of values – the great values that have made America a great shining light to the rest of the world.

It is the loss of the central value of freedom and liberty. I cannot but sometimes feel a terrifying sense of entropy – the decay of the moral force that America once offered the world; the feeling that everyone -but particularly the classic outsider: the immigrant marked by difference – is under watch; viewed as dangerous and potentially subversive. Travellers to America are marked; fingerprinted, profiled and digitally archived.

The American congress in the flush of the moment erased hundreds of years of legislation that protected civil liberties and granted extraordinary powers to law enforcement institutions that can now, without warrants in fact, search your home, arrest you, tap your phone, and do all kinds of terrible things. It has the uneasy feeling of a police state.

It is the America that I never imagined, now driven to excess by fear. On the other side of fear is also the extreme nationalist exceptionalism that has driven the United States to wars, fighting shadowy forces. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2011 attacks, President George Bush declared a “war on terror” and a war on other sovereign nations.

There was a cockiness to American power. Every critical, cautionary voice against the American enterprise of war has been made out to be “anti-American.” For many of us, the great value of America was not in its military power but its cultural power – a power over the mind. But in the excessive high of post cold-war triumphalism, the US government unleashed the full power of its arsenal on an invisible and slippery foe. It is called “shadow boxing.” America has borrowed money to go to war. America is thus stymied in war. The hawks who want war are unwilling to pay a war tax to fund their pastime.

The effect today is that America is broke and going through a very rough economic patch – high unemployment; incremental poverty; massive national debt; political jingoism etc. But there is a good part to this: it is that the US has the strength to turn its mistakes into valuable lessons. That is the strength of America. It is true the US is going through a rough patch, but as the history of that country illuminates for us, it will bounce back.

It will because Americans are capable of soul-searching; but above all they have a full sense of the destiny of their nation. It is indeed just as Mbonu Ojike wrote of America in 1946 in his I have Two Countries: “Against the declining forces of reaction and hate are the overwhelming forces of progress and kindness.” What lesson can Nigeria learn from this?

Three weeks ago, there was a terrorist attack on the United Nation’s building at Abuja by a shadowy group called “Boko Haram.” Much has been written about that attack and about Boko Haram. I will not bore the reader of this column with much more.

But something, quite unique to the Nigerian moment of terrorism seemed fascinating to me: it was the Nigerian reaction. There was a sense of public fatalism; not dread; not even outrage. The shock, to be quite true, was mooted, I think, because Nigerians have lived daily with state terrorism, so much indeed that violence of any scale no longer shocks them.