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8STRANGERS ARE LIKE THE MIST LANGUAGE IN THE PUSH AND PULL OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA PAUL STOLLER Yeow harandang no, nd’a a mana bia, a ga woyma. (Strangers are like the mist; if they haven’t disappeared by the morning, they will surely be gone by afternoon.) —SONGHAY PROVERB Issifi Mayaki is a stranger in New York City. Born in a small village near Tahoua in north central Niger, Issifi has lived in New York City for almost twenty years. He comes from a Hausa family of religious clerics who, besides having taught the Koran to the children of the village, have long been engaged in long distance commerce. As a young man Issifi left Niger and took up residence in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, where his father taught him the trading business. He sold watches and traded kola nut. In time, he began to buy and sell African textiles—especially to American diplomats and Peace Corps volunteers. He set up a small African art shop at the Abidjan market. Having heard so much about America, he decided to seek his fortunes in New York City. And so he traveled to New York with a large and valuable inventory of antique cloth, which, due to a misunderstanding and a degree of naiveté, was stolen from him. Stuck in New York City without the resources to return to West Africa, he resiliently found an apartment, got an informal loan, and in no time at all found himself on 125th Street in Harlem, selling audiotapes and compact discs of popular music under the marquis of the Apollo Theatre. In time, he began to invest again in cloth, which he bought from West African suppliers (Stoller 2002). Issifi continues to sell cloth in Harlem. Because trading affords him a decent living, he wears fashionable clothing, uses a Blackberry, and drives a relatively new car—a good life in New York City. When he came to the United States, Issifi left behind a wife and three children, who continue to live in his natal village near Tahoua. Now that 159 Strangers Are Like the Mist cell phones are commonplace in rural Niger, Issifi speaks to his family once a week. He has not seen his father, mother, wife, or children in almost twenty years. Issifi also has had an American common-law wife, who has a child from a previous marriage. They lived as a family in a Harlem apartment until two years ago, when Issifi returned to the single life, complaining that an American woman could never understand an African man. Issifi is tired of the complicated life of a stranger in New York City. In a recent conversation, he said he longed to give up “Western life” and return to Niger, where he would live simply and study the Koran. He said that in the United States he felt very much like a stranger and that sometime soon, like the mist, he would simply like to disappear and find himself at home. Many people in Niger and Mali, in fact, like to say, “Strangers are like the mist; if they haven’t disappeared by morning, they will surely be gone by afternoon.” For any immigrant, the notion of “home” continuously pulls on his or her sensibilities. Like the patient suffering from a disease that has no cure, immigrants are often in a state of continuous liminality . In the liminality described by the late Victor Turner (1969), a person undergoing an initiation ritual is “betwixt and between, neither this nor that.” Once a person is initiated, however, the liminal status ends and he or she rejoins society with a changed but clear-cut identity. No matter their legal status, professional standing, or educational level, most immigrants never fully escape their liminality. Like patients whose chronic illnesses are in remission, which places them forever between the end points of health and disease, most immigrants are continuously betwixt and between the poles of home and host country—caught in a vortex of conflicting desire and obligation. Indeed, even if they have been long settled in New York City, most of the West African immigrants I know continue to miss the smells, tastes, and sounds of home. Many of them pine for athome , face-to-face conversations with friends and family. Are immigrants ever “home” in the host country? In the end, immigrants may well be like the mist. In time, they might dissipate into the air. For almost twenty years I have followed a...

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