Tope Folarin on the Misguided Urge to Carve the World Into Binaries

When I was about six years old my father told me a fantastic, utterly incredible story. He said that when he was about six, maybe a bit older, he ventured into a small stand of woods near his home in Lagos, Nigeria and was startled when a tiny, human-looking creature, about the height of a small doll, stepped from behind a tree and began to speak with him. The creature had abnormally large eyes and ears, but otherwise looked human, with dark, shining skin and a roguish smile. My father told me he was so shocked by the sudden appearance of this creature that he simply stood there—he was terrified and yet he wasn’t; he knew what he was seeing couldn’t possibly be real, and yet the creature was talking to him, asking him if he wanted to play. Dad says he promptly returned home without saying a word to the creature, but he couldn’t bear to tell anyone what he had seen.

He continued to think about this creature for the next few days, until he gained the courage to walk back to the same spot to see if the creature was still there. He told me he waited a few minutes, and no one came, and then he heard his mother calling him, and just as he turned to run back home the creature stepped from behind another tree and laughed at him. Then the creature told him to return the following day so they could become friends. My father did, and he told me that the creature asked him to sit, and it walked up my father’s leg and arm and perched on his shoulder. He said the creature whispered all kinds of things in his ear, impossible things about what would happen in his future, and my father said every single one of those things had come true.

I loved this story more than any story I’d ever heard, and I earnestly believed it. I had always suspected that there were other creatures about, creatures I hadn’t read about in a book or seen in a zoo, and his story confirmed my secret belief that one day I’d meet a magical creature too.

My father told me a few more stories about this creature, and then he stopped talking about it until a few days after I turned 13. He was driving me to school and talking about something else completely—I can’t recall what now—when he mentioned the creature once again, in an almost offhanded way. He told me he often wondered what the creature was doing now, if it was still alive. And then he moved on to something else, but I was still pondering what he had just said. Surely he was pulling my leg. And then three words surfaced from the mass of questions swirling in my head:

But what if…

A few days after I graduated from high school I was sitting at the kitchen table with my father, discussing college—the fact I’d be leaving soon, and how he’d felt when he left his parents many years before—when he brought up the creature once more. He told me he’d seen the creature one last time a couple years before he left Nigeria, and that after their final conversation the creature turned away from him and dissipated as it walked off, until it was nothing more than a wisp of air among the trees. I rolled my eyes throughout the story, and when he was done I asked him why he insisted on discussing this incident as if it had actually happened. My father simply smiled at me.

As it happens, my father believes many things that can’t possibly be verified. He is a deeply religious man, and he fervently believes that every incident in the Bible occurred just as written. He believes we are surrounded by spirits that are actively engaged in battle for supremacy of Earth. Yet my father is also a firm believer in logic. When I was a child he would often lecture me about the importance of believing in things I could not see while, often in the same breath, exhorting me to master everything I learned in school.

As I grew older I became frustrated with my father’s unwillingness to choose one perspective or the other. How could one believe in evolution and the Genesis story of creation? How could he insist he’d had a friendship with a mythical forest creature while imploring us to master the nuances of Linnaean taxonomy? I knew there were some scientists who were religious, but their religion seemed quite different from my father’s—they seemed to believe that the stories in the Bible and Torah and Koran were merely stories, ethical guideposts that informed us how humans were supposed to conduct themselves. I knew too that many religious people believed in certain aspects of science—many would willingly travel to the hospital if they were ill, for example. Yet even in these cases people always more or less remained committed to their principles—religious people grudgingly accepted only the aspects of science that directly benefited them, and scientists reconceptualized religion to fit their notions of the space and time.

Aside from my father, and a few of his Nigerian friends, no one I knew seemed willing or able to fully ingest both perspectives, to allow these perspectives to flourish and grow in radically different directions within themselves. The successful people I admired all seemed united in their deification of reason. So that’s the side I chose.

*

My favorite film of the 21st century is Certified Copy. It was written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami, the great Iranian filmmaker who died in 2016. At the beginning of the film we meet James Miller, a writer who is in Italy to deliver a lecture about a book he has just published, entitled Certified Copy. The premise of his book and lecture is that modern society has fetishized originality—original paintings, original documents, original ideas—at the expense of copies of these originals which, he argues, are just as valid because they transmit the same messages and feelings. As he speaks, a woman enters the hall with a young boy and sits on the front row. The boy soon becomes restless, and the woman and boy depart, but not before she leaves her contact information for James. Later James meets her (she is never named) at her shop, where she sells copies of famous works of art.

During their conversation they carry on as strangers who have just met, who are perhaps interested in something more than friendship. She and James decide to drive around aimlessly for the day. Eventually they find themselves at a café and begin to bicker. James departs to take a call and at this point I am loath to say anything more, because this is the most important scene in the film and—I believe—in 21st century cinema, but I must. So please, if you haven’t seen Certified Copy, stop reading this and find it.

The shopkeeper approaches the woman and says she can tell James is a good husband. The woman does not correct her. She plays along, and as they talk the woman even refers to James as “my husband.” The shopkeeper then approaches the woman and in so doing obscures our view of her. She whispers something in her ear. She moves and the woman appears before us again, seemingly the same as before. James returns from outside and the tenor of their conversation shifts. As time progresses it becomes clear that James and the woman are actually married or playing at being married. They wander around the town and see other couples, some of them young and in the throes of young love, others on the verge of marrying, and still others who have evidently grown old together. At the end of the film they arrive at the hotel where they honeymooned 15 years before. They find their hotel room, regard each other, and then James faces a mirror. The film ends.

Watching this film was a revelation for me—both because I instantly saw a path forward for myself as a human being and an artist, and because I sensed my childhood had provided me with a unique insight into Kiarostami’s message. The moment I finished viewing the film I began to search for reviews, and after reading about ten or so my theory was confirmed—just about every reviewer was concerned with determining the precise nature of James and the woman’s relationship. Had they spent the first part of the film feigning a meet cute when they were actually married, or did they decide to act as a married couple during the latter half of the film as a kind of game? Both sides had their arguments and evidence, but not one reviewer considered the obvious answer—that at the beginning of the film James and the woman had just met and they were married. That at the end of the film they were acting as if they were married and they were actually married. That all these realities were simultaneously true.

*

Why are we in the West so deeply uncomfortable with and?

One could argue that our insistence on classifying existence into distinct categories of real or unreal, of scientifically verifiable or completely implausible, saved us from ourselves. Before we arrived at our present moment, our reality was often unruly and wildly unpredictable. This version of reality was thrilling, suffused with wonder and possibility, but it could also be terrifically frightening. Spirits could swoop down and possess you at any moment, and you could never truly trust your senses because all kinds of things were happening just beyond the realm of your awareness. We eventually managed to tame reality by developing rigorous ways of thinking that relegated those former disorderly aspects of reality to our dreams.

The grand irony of this century, however, is that the intellectual strategies we employed to escape the unreal have brought the unreal back to us. Computer scientists and engineers have created augmented reality programs that will soon alter the way we interact with our environment, and virtual reality programs that will whisk us away from our environments altogether. For decades now, our storytellers have been informing us that we must maintain a strict line of demarcation between our reality and the fantasies that will come to populate our lives in the future. In films such as The Matrix and Vanilla Sky and WALL-E, virtual reality is presented as a potentially dangerous and dangerously addictive technology that must be used cautiously or not at all. The message of these films (and many other films and books besides) is essentially the same: humans must remain tethered to the here and now, to the world of rationality that was so carefully crafted by our forebears.

Such a perspective, however, conveniently elides a few uncomfortable questions. Among them: certain members of marginalized communities might be tempted to spend a significant amount of time in a constructed reality in which their history isn’t plagued with tales of oppression, and in which their present isn’t a daily, constant struggle to prove their humanity to those who will never truly believe they are human. Is this acceptable?

Here’s another question: what are we supposed to do with the very real emotions we experience while we are embedded in virtual—which is to say unreal—spaces? Are these emotions real? If so, should we carry them with us when we return to our real world? And if not, how are we to dispose of them?

Our current answers to these questions, the last one in particular, aren’t very satisfying. Consider for a moment how we handle certain crimes against reality that happen now, in our web 2.0 world. If someone falls in love with someone else online and subsequently discovers that the person they fell for misrepresented some crucial aspect of their identity—their race or sex, say—our typical response is to invalidate the entire experience. None of it was real, we say.

And yet it happened. The expressions of love and love itself.

There is an alternative, one expressed by Abbas Kiarostami in Certified Copy, and by my father over the course of my childhood. One could say that it is acceptable and understandable for members of marginalized communities to wish to inhabit this reality and another. As for that online relationship, one could say that it was not real and it was.

*

I’d been working on a novel before I watched Certified Copy, but after watching that film I knew I had to write a novel that integrated reality and unreality unapologetically, and without an explanation that would double as an appeal to rationality. I realized I had to write an and novel.

And I did. I’ve already spoiled one of my favorite movies of all time, so I might as well spoil my novel too. At the midway point of my novel, my protagonist—who, because of his skin color and culture, feels profoundly marginalized from those around him and who, for this reason and a few others, has spent much of the novel wondering if he is losing his grip on reality—decides he can no longer write about himself. He decides, instead, to write about a character who shares his name but is not him. He decides, in other words, to write fiction.

My protagonist writes the next section of his book in third person, because, after all, he is writing about someone else. But then his character meets a girl. The third person narration continues, and then, at a crucial point in their meeting, when he gazes at her for the first time, the first person returns. “I look at her for the first time,” he says. The writer has inserted himself into his creation. Into a virtual, unreal world. He resumes narrating in third person, but by the next section the third person narration has been displaced by first person once more.

While drafting this section of my novel, I hoped this sequence would occasion certain questions within the reader. Specifically, who is narrating the first-person section that appears immediately after the third-person section? My protagonist? His fictional avatar? My answer, of course, is both. Yet I knew that because I was writing right into the center of our societal blind spot, that vast, untrammeled space that resides in the slash between either/or, the possibility existed that my readers would choose one answer or the other. I also knew that many of my readers would avoid these questions altogether, and they would disregard my protagonist’s declaration that he is no longer writing about himself.

In this framework, everything that happens after his declaration is merely an extension of his story. And the chapter that ends the book, in which Tunde returns to Nigeria to reconnect with his mother, who left him and his family twenty-three years before, would thus be shorn of other possibilities. Like the possibility that my protagonist has simply written his ideal version of reunification. And like the possibility that he has written his ideal version of reunification and inhabited it at the same time.

*

I called my father a few days ago to tell him I was writing this essay. I asked him if he remembered the creature he’d told me about a few times when I was growing up, and if the creature had a name. He paused and then he told me he didn’t remember much of anything that happened back then, it was so long ago. I asked him if he remembered telling me about the creature and he laughed and said he’d told me all kinds of things. I was deeply unsettled after I concluded our call. I’ve thought about his story for many years now, and as I’ve grown—as an artist, a thinker, a human being—this story has become a kind of lodestar. Many of my ideas about my relationship with reality—and our society’s as well—spring directly from conversations I’ve had with myself about my father’s friend from the forest. Somewhere along the line I started to believe that my father was telling me the truth.

I was beginning to doubt myself, and then the answer to my quandary lit up the inside of my mind as if it had been there all along: the creature did not exist. And it did.

My feelings about this creature are real, very real, and they, in turn, have created something real—the essay you’ve just finished reading.