I was at a funeral recently where, quite unexpectedly, I found myself seeing things I might ordinarily have missed.
I had been traveling all day. I rarely eat breakfast, and because of the timing and circumstances of the journey, by nine o’clock that evening I was completely famished.
We were at a wake-keeping and service of songs. I had noticed the buffet table earlier, but the delays, interruptions, hymns, speeches, and shifting order of events familiar to these gatherings made it impossible to know when dinner would finally be announced.
Eventually, hunger won.
As everyone stood for another hymn, I quietly slipped through the door and into the night. I searched for a nearby restaurant, chose one, drove there, ate quickly, and returned perhaps thirty minutes later.
To my surprise, dinner had apparently been served almost immediately after I left.
The tables were now littered with its aftermath: plates of unfinished food, bones, crumpled napkins, disposable cutlery, remnants of jollof rice, moi moi, meat and stew. What struck me was the color of it all. Across the room stretched a strangely monotonous landscape of browns, reds and oranges—the remains of what we comfortably call “Nigerian food.”
It was an odd moment.
Had I stayed, I would almost certainly have been doing what everyone else was doing: eating enthusiastically, grateful for the familiar food and perhaps even congratulating myself on the opportunity to enjoy Nigerian cuisine.
I would not have noticed anything.
Distance changed the view.
For the first time, the familiarity of the scene became slightly unsettling. I was suddenly glad that I had missed the free-food bonanza for which these gatherings are famous, because standing outside it allowed me to see something I had not seen before.
And then my eyes began to travel beyond the plates.
Earlier in the evening, I had realized that, apart from one or two cousins, I knew almost no one in the room. This suited me. I was in no mood for small talk, so I found a quiet corner and began watching people.
There were adult nieces and nephews, children of Nigerians I had known for years, whom I could scarcely distinguish culturally from the Black American young people among whom they had grown up. In dress, speech, mannerism, gesture and social bearing, there was little immediately apparent that located them within an Igbo world.
At one point the master of ceremonies reminded us that we were Nigerians and that most of those gathered were Igbo.
Strangely, without that announcement, I am not sure the room itself would have told me.
It has not always been this way.
Their parents, born and raised in Nigeria, carried Nigeria with them almost involuntarily. You could often see it before they said a word. Something remained in the body—in gesture, dress, accent, social instincts, humor, expectations, even in the way people occupied a room.
Their children have inherited something different.
And suddenly those abandoned plates of food seemed connected to a much larger story.
These generations do not necessarily know how extraordinarily rich, varied, colorful and geographically specific our food traditions actually are.
They know what has survived the journey.
What we call Nigerian food abroad is often a compressed version of an enormous culinary world. The diversity produced by locality, season, markets, forests, rivers, farms, fresh leaves, herbs, vegetables and ingredients available within hours of harvest cannot simply be transported intact across continents. The freshness of food at home—the immediacy of it—is almost impossible to reproduce abroad.
And so an entire generation has grown up eating a diminished version of the original and, understandably, experiencing that version as authentic.
It is their truth.
Their parents, living with the circumstances they were handed, could often do little better. Immigration, work, distance, availability and changing airport regulations gradually brought an end to the era when Africans arrived from home carrying what seemed like entire markets inside their luggage—leaves, spices, dried fish, vegetables, seeds, powders and mysterious parcels whose aromas could announce themselves long before the suitcase was opened, sometimes assaulting the olfactory sensibilities of the uninitiated.
Those suitcases were funny.
But perhaps they were also something else.
They were vessels of continuity.
Food was only the most visible manifestation of what I was beginning to notice.
For many in the room, Igboness appeared to have become something adjacent to ordinary life rather than the structure within which life itself was understood. It could be summoned for weddings, funerals, naming ceremonies, clothing, music, food and moments of communal identification. It could locate you when location became useful.
But one could also step out of it.
This is one of the peculiar conditions of diaspora: culture can gradually become an accessory to the lived life rather than the architecture of that life.
The first generation did not necessarily intend this. Many were simply trying to survive, assimilate, succeed, educate their children and give them opportunities unavailable to themselves. Some aspects of the old world were consciously discarded; others quietly disappeared because there were no institutions capable of carrying them forward. Still others were edited because they seemed inconvenient, embarrassing, backward or incompatible with the demands of the new society.
Their children inherited the resulting curation.
And their children will inherit a curation of the curation.
This is how broken inheritances become traditions.
Nothing necessarily announces the rupture.
People will still gather. They will still wear isi agu. They will still serve jollof rice. They will still dance. They will still bury their dead with great ceremony. They will sing songs whose deeper meanings may already be fading. They will celebrate “our culture” with genuine affection.
Nostalgia will remain fully operational.
Yet nostalgia is not the same thing as continuity.
Standing in that room, I began to recognize a distinction between cultural performance and cultural habitation.
Communal occasions could remain visibly Nigerian or Igbo while the actual structures governing everyday life—how we understand personhood, family, obligation, success, education, beauty, wealth, community and belonging—had migrated elsewhere.
The culture had not disappeared.
It had become episodic.
And increasingly, it was being reinterpreted through the very Western frameworks into which earlier generations had worked so hard to assimilate. Even our expressions of cultural success could become decorated versions of Western aspirations: their measures of achievement, their symbols of arrival, their hierarchies of prestige, dressed occasionally in our clothing and accompanied by our music.
We had not simply become them.
Something more complicated had happened.
We were learning how to become them through us.
That realization forced me toward an uncomfortable question about my own work with Okpara House.
Do the people I am writing for actually care about what I am trying to recover?
It is easy to assume that because something has been lost, those who inherited the loss must necessarily desire its recovery.
But what if they do not experience themselves as having lost anything?
What if cultural recovery is attractive only when it can be made fashionable, beautiful, prestigious or socially useful?
What happens when recovery asks for something more difficult—attention, study, obligation, reconsideration, or the surrender of assumptions that have made life comfortable?
Diaspora offers a particular privilege: the ability to enter and leave culture.
One may embrace what affirms identity and quietly abandon what imposes obligation. Culture becomes available without necessarily being authoritative. Heritage may be celebrated without being allowed to interfere significantly with the architecture of one’s modern life.
And perhaps this is where cultural amnesia becomes most difficult to recognize.
It does not always look like forgetting.
Sometimes it looks like remembering.
There are the clothes. The food. The music. The funeral. The wedding. The language spoken in fragments. The names. The jokes. The photographs. The declarations of pride.
Everything appears to be there.
Yet underneath the visible inheritance, the deeper structures that once gave those things coherence may already have disappeared.
The brokenness does not remain broken forever. Human beings abhor a vacuum. Each generation repairs the gaps with whatever is available around it. Eventually the substitutions acquire familiarity, then legitimacy, and finally the authority of tradition.
What began as adaptation becomes inheritance.
What was inherited as fragments becomes culture.
And cultural amnesia completes its work when no one remembers that anything is missing.
That evening, I had gone looking for dinner.
I returned to find myself looking at inheritance.