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.
