John Makuchi: “American Lottery.”
Cameroonian John Makuchi’s “American Lottery” in Your Madness, Not Mine: Short Stories from Cameroon, shows the devaluation of the African American, thanks to the media which distort the black diaspora. In this collection of short stories, Makuchi captures the gender, ethnicity, class and linguistic tensions in the postcolonial Cameroon. Her story “American Lottery” dramatizes the various levels of marginalization that a black person suffers in the current era of corporate capitalism. Paul, the narrator’s younger brother wins the "Diversity Immigrant Visa Program” lottery that grants a visa to the United States of America. Paul’s sudden disappearance from the narrative the moment he leaves for America marks his dehumanization and exile. The story also studies the silencing of the African Americans by Africans whose imagination is limited to whiteness.
The narrator laughs at her own community which seems to figure Paul’s success in the US in terms of getting not just black friends from the continent, but a white girlfriend. Narrator lingers at the description of the imaginary photograph that the village conjures into existence and sees itself admiring in the near future: Soon, we will receive pictures taken with his brothers and sisters: Cameroonians, Nigerians, Ethiopians, Eritrean, Egyptians, Black South Africans, Kenyans, Senegalese, pictures with some Black Americans, and of course a picture with the inscription on the back that says, “a friend” – a white woman, her hand around his waist as they both laugh and show their teeth to the camera. She will look so beautiful, almost too happy, as she holds firmly onto my little brother, our African son. And then the years will go by. And the parties will fade into bitter memories, figments of our imagination. (92) While expressing the deluded excitement of the villagers, the story suggests the artificiality that Paul could be living in. Through her satirical tone, the narrator leads us to question the logic behind the visa program: “ Some bogus thing about an American immigration lottery that to thousands of aliens! Who are aliens? Where do aliens come from? I ask myself.”
When we first meet the character, he is expressing a shared desire among the post-colonial subjects to relocate to the Western metropolis. Although the people are aware of the exploitation and denigration that the West has visited upon their country, they see the metropolis as their home. The Anglophone part of Cameroon wants to go “home” to England, while the Francophone section desires to go to France. The writer focuses on the irony of a community that denies their own homes to constructs illusions of home in exile. Paul’s dream has a sense of novelty because he does not want to go to the traditional destinations of the postcolonial: “No, America was the place to be….He needed to go away to a place where murderous thoughts would not be invading his everyday dreams….to a place where he would stop feeling, thinking, or believing that secession was the only option open to a minority ….” (76) The narrator regrets having not hidden the forms that facilitate Paul’s alienation. She feels guilty of condemning her brother to the invisibility the black person is reduced to in America. Despite the alienation that awaits Paul as “a Permanent Resident Alien of the United States of America” (93–94), the community is beside itself in celebration of his supposedly good fortune: “America! Their own son, their own friend, their kinsman, was going to America. The frenzy, the joy. Imagine. He will soon be rolling in dollars, their tongues wagged. The very bed on which he will lie will be made of dollars, they chanted.”
The irony resides in the way the story is structured. We have already been shown in the story what America does to the “aliens” who go there. Peter, once a dreamer of the “American Dream”, knows what America does to its black victims:
Then his brother who had left for America when he was barely ten had come back home for the first time after thirteen years, THIRTEEN YEARS! And bored holes, like those left behind on plantation leaves after the passage of hailstones, in his perception of America and the world. His brother had shattered a dream, a child’s dream. His brother had come back home a different person, a stranger: the way he walked; the way he smiled at people; the way he talked, the way he talked to people, the way he ate, what he ate, when he ate; the way he dressed, what he wore…Who was this person? Peter had wondered. (80)
The narrator has shown the readers the reason behind the village’s celebration of uprootment. Through media products, America has been able to market the positive aspects of its culture while suppressing the negative elements. So brainwashed is the community that the people no longer know places by their real names but by names branded on them from films and soap operas shown on the national TV. The story is a complete satire on American neo-colonialism or modern slavery in Africa.
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