Proudly Nigerian

In possession of stolen lucre, Brume Lauva takes a big step and decides to run away from the life he as always known: a life of consistent failures and from a girlfriend who shattered his heart and his last feeble grip on a broken dream.

Lagos, he believes, would offer another chance at life; where he could mend his broken heart and start to dream again, But en route to his land of promise, a fatal bus crash occurs, and Brume is the only survivor – without a scratch. He flees the scene of the accident and hitchhikes his way to Lagos.

From a suspiciously cheap Hell’s Kitchen walk-up, Nigerian editor and winner of a Toni Morrison Publishing Fellowship Ekong Udousoro is about to begin the opportunity of a lifetime: to learn the ins and outs of the publishing industry from its incandescent epicenter. While his sophisticated colleagues meet him with kindness and hospitality, he is soon exposed to a colder, ruthlessly commercial underbelly―callous agents, greedy landlords, boorish and hostile neighbors, and, beneath a superficial cosmopolitanism, a bedrock of white cultural superiority and racist assumptions about Africa, its peoples, and worst of all, its food.

Reckoning, at the same time, with the recent history of the devastating and brutal Biafran War, in which Ekong’s people were a minority of a minority caught up in the mutual slaughter of majority tribes, Ekong’s life in New York becomes a saga of unanticipated strife. The great apartment deal wrangled by his editor turns out to be an illegal sublet crawling with bedbugs. The lights of Times Square slide off the hardened veneer of New Yorkers plowing past the tourists. A collective antagonism toward the “other” consumes Ekong’s daily life. Yet in overcoming misunderstandings with his neighbors, Chinese and Latino and African American, and in bonding with his true allies at work and advocating for healing back home, Ekong proves that there is still hope in sharing our stories.

Akpan’s prose melds humor, tenderness, and pain to explore the myriad ways that tribalisms define life everywhere, from the villages of Nigeria to the villages within New York City. New York, My Village is a triumph of storytelling and a testament to the life-sustaining power of community across borders and across boroughs.

From Zamfara up north to the Niger delta down south, with a finale in Lagos, this collection of stories and a novella respond to and amplify the newspaper headlines in a range of Nigerian voices. Men, women, and children speak out to us from these stories, from immigration centers and police barracks, from street corners and maternity wards.