A book for would be migrants to America

Emmanuel Olawale’s The Flavor of Favor: Quest for the American Dream, is an inspirational and illuminating memoir filled with practical examples on how to survive as a migrant in the US. The author, during a recent visit to Nigeria, shares more about writing it.

PRESIDENT Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration reforms notwithstanding, a number of Nigerians are still nursing the dream of migrating to the United States of America, the so-called God’s own country. For the people in this category, a book they would do well to read and thoroughly digest before embarking on the quest for the golden fleece is Emmanuel Olawale’s The Flavour of Favor: Quest for the American Dream. A Memoir.

Divided into two parts and comprising 11 and 12 chapters respectively, the book is as good as a memoir. Inspirational, illuminating and filled with practical examples, it is a story of faith, faithfulness, determination, hard work and discipline by a young man, who resolved to succeed in a strange land without cutting corners.

It chronicles the author’s life in Nigeria and his arrival in the US at age 20; it tells how he juggled multiple jobs, while also trying to obtain a college degree. The memoir further details Olawale’s experience as a young immigrant growing up in a rapidly changing world and how he eventually graduated from college with honours, earned a law degree and became the first African-American to be nominated as a candidate for judge by a major political party in Delaware County, Ohio. Essentially, it is a book worth reading for the prospective migrant to the US.

But, what is the motivation for writing it? Speaking in an interview during a recent visit to Nigeria, Olawale, who has since established his own thriving law practice in the US, explained that he wrote the memoir published in 2015 by Flowery Flow Publishing “to inspire because of the track that my life took. There were many struggles but on hindsight, everything that I went through had a meaning.  Some of the experiences I went through and that I perceived as negative later turned out to be positive.  It’s a book that if you pick it up, you will feel inspired and hopefully, you will be able to achieve your goals.”

But isn’t he too young to have written his memoir at this time?

“Wisdom has nothing to do with age,” he begins. “If you go through the book and what I’ve been through and the wisdom that have come from those experiences, you can tell that it’s an old soul living in a young man.”

He shares several experiences in the memoir with some of the standout ones, including losing his job as a clerk in a law firm a week after his wedding and working for a woman who refused to pay him. Though he has forgiven her and hopes she finds peace wherever she is, he took a lesson from the incident. “Now that I’m an employer of labour, I don’t joke with their pay because I know what it’s like to work and not get paid. That’s what I took from the experience. I have three other lawyers and a paralegal working for me at the Olawale Law Firm.”

Another incident Olawale recalls in the memoir is being resourceful while job hunting. After noticing that he wasn’t getting any call backs from the law firms he was sending resumes and job applications to, he realised that his non-western last name might be the issue. Consequently, he devised a solution.  “I changed the spelling of my last name Olawale on my resumes, cover letters and job applications. I introduced an apostrophe between the first letter ‘O’ and the second ‘L’ such that it read ‘O’Lawale’ or ‘O’Wale’. They started calling me, giving me interviews but when they saw it was an African, they still didn’t give me the job. But that process too, set me on the path of saying I wouldn’t depend on the average American for my livelihood forever. That was what pushed me into my own practice so that no matter what, I would decide what cases I would take and how I would make a living.”

Providence also saved Olawale from being a victim of the 9/11 attacks. Back then, he was working as a security guard at a store at the World Trade Centre but happened to be off duty the day the terrorists struck. “I just feel blessed that I wasn’t part of those who perished. I feel blessed and I feel favoured and some of the happenings in my life, have been the grace of God, luck and favour but then, what you call luck is when opportunity meets preparation. If there wasn’t some preparation before then, some of these things wouldn’t have happened. But, I thank God I wasn’t in the tower on the day it crashed.”

For the prospective migrant to the US, Olawale warns that there’s no substitute for hard work and having the right work values. Citing his own case, he says: “My first job was when I was like 14 years old; my parents didn’t even know about it. I left home very early in the morning to go and lift head pan as a labour at construction sites; I did other things like selling fish rolls in traffic. A lot of us Nigerians don’t have that sense of dignity in labour; we look down on some things that can build our character. Most people, they transfer that mentality over there.”