Excerpt from The Vist by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"The American president was wearing too much makeup: her chocolate face powdered a shade too light, mascara clumped on her lashes, the smudge of berry lipstick like a small wound on her lower lip. She looked hastily prepared—her weave lank and in need of tonging—and she blinked at the cameras as she spoke. Before, this press conference would have been background television noise for Obinna, and if he did listen at all, it would’ve been desultory and perfunctory. Now, he watched closely, volume turned on high. He had always found it silly how many of his friends here in Lagos proudly ignored Nigerian news stations and watched only CNN, knowing more about the American Congress than they did about the Nigerian Senate, but he, for once, was behaving like them. He began obsessively watching American news about a month ago, after his old friend Eze called to say he was coming back to visit. The Male Masturbatory Act was all they seemed to talk about on the news, the forty-year-old law being challenged, with quick-talking pundits speculating about what the Supreme Court’s decision would be. And today it had been announced: male masturbation would remain illegal, punishable by up to fifteen years in prison.

The American president’s face was in close-up as she said, “I applaud the court for this just and moral decision. We must never lose sight of what this is about—a waste of a potential child.”

She sounded too dramatic, but better that than the Nigerian president, she with her ill-fitting wigs and gaudy jewelry, who always read haltingly from speeches in a flat monotone as though she were seeing the sentences for the first time on camera. In the background on the TV screen were groups of men, Black and white and Asian and Hispanic, in suits, in hoodies, in T-shirts, holding placards. Respect the bodily autonomy of men. Government hands off my seed. Our Body Our Choice. Obinna didn’t understand why Americans always made a fuss over things that should be left unsaid. Male masturbation was technically illegal in Nigeria, too, but men did it all the time. Men had needs after all, he had done it many times himself, but everyone kept it quiet. The American who had challenged the law claimed he wanted to live in his truth and stop hiding the fact that he masturbated; it was his body, and he should be able to do whatever he wanted with it. Live in his truth sounded silly to Obinna, and why did Americans always have to make everything public? Still, he wanted to have a more sophisticated opinion about the decision, something that would impress Eze. He wondered if Eze still tinkered with old engines, old clocks, anything that had once worked and no longer did. Remembering how much Eze loved machines, and especially how he loved fixing and bringing them back to life, brought Obinna a poignant feeling of nostalgia, for a life that used to be..."