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| Source: humboldt-foundation.de |
That “miracles” are not real is, I think, a secular
assumption that many of Tope Folarin’s readers will share. Some of us might say
that we believe in miracles, and we might enjoy indulging in the fantasy of
divine intervention, or biblical stories that describe Jesus’ ability to turn
water into wine, or a few loaves and fishes into many loaves and fishes. But to
turn one thing into another thing is the provenance of medieval alchemy, and we
are moderns. We might say we believe in angels, but we tend to put the lives of
our loved ones in the hands of doctors, instead of prayer. We believe in
science.
“Miracle” is just a word, of course. But we don’t usually
use the word “miracle” to describe the way an airplane carries someone across
an ocean, across the world, in a matter of hours. It’s not a miracle, because
it’s normal, and the word “science” tells us what the normal can be expected to
be. Science tells us that a plane without fuel will not fly very far, and only
when it does—when a plane without fuel is still able to fly—will we call it a “miracle.”
We don’t call it that very often, because that isn’t a thing that happens.
Otherwise, the flight of an airplane is just the sort of thing that can be
expected to happen, reliably, and through a process that we all could convince
ourselves that we understand (if we spent the appropriate time studying the
science of flight). And so we get on a plane, and get off, and no miracles are
seen or named.
That is not the end of it, of course; that’s only the
beginning. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a
miracle, as Arthur C. Clarke almost said, and a
common modern jeremiad is the demand that we notice how miraculous the modern
world is. If the world has been disenchanted by science, the death of wonder
and belief is apparently a reversible process. Louis CK’s riff on how amazing
technology is, for example, begins with the premise that we are all bored by
our ipods and cell phones, and he berates us for being unhappy with the
material splendor with which we are blessed. “Everything is Amazing and Nobody
is Happy” could be the title of a sermon, and it probably is; you have
everything you need to be happy, if you’ll just let yourself believe it. The
good news is that you’re already saved. And we laugh because we believe it.
On the other hand, when Paul Simon sings that “these are the
days of miracles and wonder” (the song is “Boy in the Bubble,” from Graceland)
there is real urgency in his voice, when he urges us not to cry. Technology has
not fixed everything; everything might be amazing, but people aren’t happy
because modernity also bring destruction. Especially against the backdrop of
Simon’s chipper use of South African township sounds, the figure of “lasers in
the jungle” or the “baby with the baboon heart,” remind us of guerrilla warfare
and the heart of darkness, that the miracle of a long distance call might also
be the remote-detonated bomb in a baby carriage. There are soldiers on the road
that takes us on our pilgrimage to Graceland.
* * *
Tope Folarin’s “Miracle” seems like an easy story, but I
don’t think it is. It’s a diaspora story, written by a diasporic Nigerian who
was born and raised in the United States—in Utah, Texas, Georgia, Maine—who has
spent time in South Africa but even more time in Great Britain, and whose
connection to Nigeria is at least an interesting question. Which is maybe what
a diaspora is, an interesting question; the question mark might be the most
important part of Countee Cullen’s “What is Africa to me?” and while Cullen
gives lots of answers to that question, none of them are as interesting as the
question itself, a question the poem never stops asking.
At the Caine Prize website, there’s an interesting
dissonance between the two ways Folarin is identified; on the front page,
he is contextualized as “Tope Folarin (Nigeria),” which is simple and
unambiguous, his name and his country. On the biography page,
however, he is the only Nigerian writer (of the four) whose biography does not
include the word “Nigeria”: his life consists, apparently, of being educated in
the USA and Great Britain, living in Washington DC, and associations with
Callaloo, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the Hurston/Wright foundation,
all more or less DC based. Is he American? Is he African? What is Africa to
him? These are good questions, I think, but only as long as they are
unanswered. Diaspora unsettles and mobilizes; it does not put down roots, but
tears them up to be seen.
In the story itself, the diaspora is a North Texas
Pentecostal revival service. It is a scene in which miracles can happen, or are
expected to. And a miracle does happen, the same way diaspora does: it’s there
when it’s looked for and named, but if you try to touch it, prove it, or test
it, you may find that it’s not what you thought it was. You may find nothing
more than the presence of its absence, the way we look for the word Nigeria in
Folarin’s bio page, and don’t find it. He was born a Nigerian, and he is a
Nigerian, but if we look for the content of that fact, if we try to
substantiate it, we will come up empty. That’s not what it means.
* * *
“Miracle” begins with an inherited “we” narration. It
will eventually become clear that the protagonist is a young boy, but at the
beginning of the story, we only know that he is part of an “us” which is being
composed by a pentecostal revival service. “Our heads move simultaneously, and
we smile at the tall, svelte man who strides purposefully down the aisle to the
pulpit,” he writes; “Once there, he raises both of his hands then lowers them
slightly. He raises his chin and says let us pray…” And they do.
This kind of religion is easy, inherited. To be a part
of that “we” is simply to melt into the crowd, and for the first six pages of
the story—until almost precisely the half-way point—the protagonist is part of
the crowd, no different from everyone around him. Then, suddenly, he is. It
begins with the Preacher’s discussion of miracles:
“I do not perform these miracles because I wish to be
celebrated. I perform these miracles because God works through me, and he has
given me the grace to show all of you what is possible in your physical and
spiritual lives. And now God is telling me; you, come up here.
We remain standing because we don’t know to whom he is
referring.
“YOU! You! You! YOU! Come up here!”
We begin to walk forward, shyly, slowly. I turn around
suddenly, and I realize I’m no longer a part of the whole. I notice, then, that
the lights are too bright, and the muggy air in the room settles, fog-like, on
my face. Now I am in the aisle, and I see the blind old man pointing at me.
“You, young man. Come here. Come up here for your
miracle!”
I just stand there, and I feel something red and
frightening bubbling within me. I stand there as the prophet points at me, and
I feel hands pushing me, forcing me to the front. I don’t have enough time to
wrap up my unbelief and tuck it away…
This passage is the first hint we have received that the
main character has any unbelief. It is also the moment when his “I” is
distinguished from the crowd, when he is suddenly face-to-face with the
question of what he is to do, as opposed to what “we” are doing. He becomes
aware of his own body, in fact, in the same moment that his reader becomes
aware of him: “we begin to walk forward, shyly, slowly. I turn around suddenly,
and I realize I’m no longer a part of the whole.” A “we” takes the first step
forward, but an “I” finishes it.
Why does the boy walk forward? The miracle which the
preacher promises will turn out to be a laying on hands that is to cure his
asthma and his poor vision. It does not. The preacher—who is apparently blind—gives
the impression that he can see into the boy’s soul, but this impression, too,
can be taken apart with a little skepticism.
Something is ailing you. There is some disease, some
disorder that has colonized your body, and it is threatening to colonize your
soul. Tell me, are you having problems breathing?”
I find myself surprised at his indirect reference to my
asthma. But now the doubts are bombarding me from every direction. Maybe he can
hear my wheezing? It’s always harder for me to breathe when I’m nervous, and I’m
certainly nervous now.
“Yes sir,” I reply.
“Ah, you do not need to confirm. I now have a fix on your
soul, and the Holy Spirit is telling me about the healings you need.” He
brushes his fingers down my face, and my glasses fall to the ground. Everything
becomes dim.
“How long have you been wearing glasses my son?”
“Since I was five, sir.”
How skeptical should we be? The preacher is meant to be
physically blind and spiritually far-sighted, but of course, it could easily be
the reverse; having picked this boy out of a crowd, he could have heard his
wheezing and deduced his bronchial disorder, whatever it is; he could have seen
the thick lenses of the boy’s glasses, or (if he really is blind), he could
have felt them when he touched the boy’s face. The scene is written to allow
both readings, to suggest that the preacher could be a fraud, while also
allowing for the possibility that he is not. But perhaps that’s not the
interesting question. Perhaps the interesting question is this: when the
preacher pointed, why did the boy feel singled out? When he was called, why did
he respond?
* * *
If we are secular readers, if we expect the most
demonstrative and miraculous forms of Christianity to be exposed as a frauds,
then the title of this story leads us to expect to see the miracle debunked.
When he sets the story in a Pentecostal church service—and names it a
specifically “Nigerian” brand of charismatic Christianity—Folarin sets up the
secular reader to expect that this 419 scam will be exposed for what it is, a
set of desirable lies. There is a whole genre of this kind of writing, in fact;
in Nigeria, the classic examples might be Wole Soyinka’s The Trials of Brother
Jero and Jero’s Metamorphosis, a pair of plays in which a charismatic preacher
is both shown to be a predatory fraud—confiding his artifice to the audience—and
uses his fraudulent power to gain political power. In the first play, he is
merely a charlatan lusting after women; in the second play, written and set
after Nigeria’s first military coup, Jero has becomes something much more
dangerous, something much less comedic: he’s become an explanation for Nigeria’s
failures of democracy, which, along with a deep and secular contempt for
religion, has been the great theme of Soyinka’s career.
Soyinka wrote the Jero plays because he knows that
miracles are not real. But along with the confident atheists (and latent
unbelievers), some of Tope Folarin’s readers will actively believe that
miracles are real. For those readers, as Kola Tubosun puts it,
this story may come across as a slap in the face:
“If you are a devout pentecostal church-goer, you would
probably force your laptop close as soon as it is all over, and head to church
for a confession of sins, or a needed exorcism for the sin of indulgence. Tope
Folarin has just eased you into empathizing with a churchgoer whose faith wasn’t
strong enough to set him free, who laughed at the pastor’s theatrics even as he
wished that they would yield fruitful results, and who in the end relapses into
the ways of the flesh to deal with carnal troubles. If you are reading the
story on a sheaf of papers, and as soon as you read the last sentence you
crumple the sheets and throw them as hard as you can against the nearest
object, you might be a Nigerian Christian.”
Wole Soyinka really dislikes these kinds of Christians.
He dislikes Muslims more, of course; like the rest of the New Atheists, he
seems to believe that all religions are equally bad, but Islam the most of all.
But you can’t read Soyinka writing about religion and not get the deep and
basic antipathy he has for “religion” as a category, and especially for its
politicized variants. When he asks “can religion peacefully cohabit with
humanism in the 21st century?” he mainly means political Islams like Al Quaeda
or Boko Haram—as you have to read very little between the lines to observe—but
his secularism is also, itself, political, in the way that it expels religious
belief from politics and subordinates it to its functional use value.
For a secularist like Soyinka, then, a de-politicized
religion is not necessarily a bad thing. At best, religion can be a comfort or
an aid, a useful fiction and a literary commodity. It can help bring people
together, help them live at peace with each other, and it can even teach us
useful ways of living in the world. For Soyinka, in other words, religion is
just “culture.” And when it exceeds the bounds of the cultural—and begins to
pry into the political—it is a bad thing, to be mocked, opposed, and destroyed.
* * *
Is Tope Folarin this kind of secularist? Kola Tubosun
suggested that devout Christians will view the story as an assault on their
faith, but if they do, the grounds on which they do so are much less certain
than if they hurl a Soyinka book across the room. For all his brilliance as a
writer, Soyinka has an intense faith in his own ability to ascertain the truth,
and it’s this faith that empowers him to write off the religious as credulous
fools or crooks. If you are one of the people he’s talking about, and if you
feel anger towards him for dividing the world into sheep and goats, then you
are not wrong to feel attacked. He has judged you and found you wanting.
Folarin’s address to religious faith is much more
complicated. As he explained in an interview
from 2007—when he was a Rhodes scholar—Folarin’s faith was (at least
then) something he could no more disown than he could fully identify with. As
he wrote:
It’s something I struggle with a lot. My parents are
Evangelical Pentecostals, so they are very vocal in their beliefs. There’s
nothing like being in a church while the music is pumping and everyone is
believing at the same time. It’s this amazing, transcendent experience that
really can’t be replicated anywhere. I appreciate that aspect of it.
Obviously, there’s always this internal debate between
the stuff that you’re learning and the beliefs that you’ve had for a very long,
long time. Like anyone else, I really struggled with that in college. I read a
few books when I started college like Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I was
really angry after reading that book for a number of things. Religion was one
of those things. I saw my parents as accepting a framework that had been
foisted onto them centuries ago, not really questioning that at all, so I did.
By the end of my college experience, I had come full
circle. I had a financially difficult time in college. Although it ended well
(getting the scholarship), I had actually been kicked out of school for
financial reasons when I got the scholarship. I entered my senior year and I
wasn’t even sure if I’d graduate. The only thing that really got me through was
faith and the belief that it was not going to end that way. There was a reason
I was going through the trouble. There was a reason it wasn’t going well. I
just had to persevere. There’s no way I could have done that on my own, just
believing in my own ability or faculties to get through it. It was a help to
believe in something external and higher and more powerful than I.
I’ve quoted this response at some length because Folarin’s
accommodation of uncertainty is something you’d never find in a political
jeremiad for or against religion. People like Soyinka and Brother Jero sell the
simplicity of certainty in an uncertain and complicated world, because it is a
great comfort to be told that the world is divided between the knowledgeable
and the ignorant, or that your political enemies are either credulous fools or
foolish infidels. It is also a great comfort to believe that the things you
believe are based in reality, in facts, in empirical truth. We know that God is
real because look around you. Or, we know that there is no God because, again,
look around you.
In that passage about his struggles with faith, Folarin
lives in doubt. This is a hard thing to do, and much more uncomfortable than
Soyinka’s glib and often very sloppy generalizations. To have faith and to
struggle to know whether to have faith in that faith, this is truly difficult:
to come to terms with one’s doubting belief, or the extent to which one’s faith
in unbelief is itself a kind of faithful blindness. The hard way to believe is
to start with the grounds of your unbelief. And the hard way to un-believe is
to start with your own credulousness.
* * *
True faith does not need miracles; Doubting Thomas
believed when he could put his fingers in Christ’s wounds, but it’s the point
of the story that this miraculous proof was only necessary because Thomas
lacked faith. Doubt needs a miracle, but faith—belief without reason—does not.
In the story, the protagonist marks his progress from “we” to “I” by the
passage from unbelief to faith:
I begin to believe in miracles. I realize that many
miracles have already happened; the old prophet can see me even though he’s
blind, and my eyes feel different somehow, huddled beneath their thin lids. I
think about the miracle of my family, the fact that we’ve remained together
despite the terror of my mother’s abrupt departure, and I even think about the
miracle of my presence in America. My father reminds my brother and me almost
every day how lucky we are to be living in poverty in America, he claims that
all of our cousins in Nigeria would die for the chance, but his words were
meaningless before. Compared to what I have already experienced in life,
compared to the tribulations that my family has already weathered, the matter
of my eyesight seems almost insignificant. Of course I can be healed! This is
nothing. God has already done more for me than I can imagine. This healing isn’t
even for me. It is to show others, who believe less, whose belief requires new
fuel, that God is still working in our lives.
What kind of healing does the boy need? His eyes have
glasses, and his asthma is not life-threatening. And the fact that his eyes
remain unhealed, that his breath remains labored, this is as unimportant to him
as the question of whether or not the preacher was truly blind. “The prophet
performed many more miracles that day,” he writes, but he’s not referring to
the miracle of healing or knowing. That’s not what religion is for, and it
provides no certainty. Instead, the miracle occurs after wards: “My father
beamed all the way home, and I felt that I had been healed, in a way, even if
my eyes were the same as before”:
That evening, after tucking my brother and me in, my
father dropped my glasses into a brown paper bag, and he placed the bag on the
nightstand by my bed. “You should keep this as evidence, so that you always
remember the power of God,” he whispered in my ear.
The next morning, when I woke up, I opened my eyes, and
I couldn’t see a thing. I reached into the bag and put on my glasses without
thinking. My sight miraculously returned.
The miracle is not the fact that
these lenses restore his sight. The miracle is what the glasses become a
reminder of, the “we” that his brief experience of isolation brought into
focus. Only as an “I” could the meaning of that “we” truly become apparent,
just as only the total lack of proof could prove the existence of faith. To
believe, even knowing that you lack a reason to believe, that is
faith. To call glasses miraculous, exactly when science provides an
all-too-satisfying explanation, that is faith. And to be Nigerian, even when
you’ve barely lived in Nigeria, when your passport and diplomas and
associations all say something else, well, that is a kind of faith, too.
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