The Alienated Migrant – Samuel Kọ́láwọlé’s ‘Adjustment of Status’ (on the Caine Prize Shortlist 2024)


AiW Guest: Ekari Phiri.

AiW note: Ekari’s piece continues our 2024 Caine Prize Shortlist Reviews series (the complete Caine Prize series is here), today, of Nigerian writer Samuel Kọ́láwọlé‘s shortlisted story, ‘Adjustment of Status’, published in New England Review, in Summer 2023.

NB: Our reviews may contain spoilers! Read ‘Adjustment of Status’ in full, available via the shortlisted stories page on the Caine Prize website.

C. Caine Prize

Samuel Kọ́láwọlé’s short story ‘Adjustment of Status’, published in the New England Review and shortlisted for the 2024 Caine Prize, is a tale about the disillusionment that often confronts African migrants in the West. Kọ́láwọlé’s central character, Folahan, leaves his wife and three children, and a managerial position at a cement factory in Nigeria for Lawrenceville, Georgia, in pursuit of the “American dream”. Reading his ordeal, one could think of characters that appear in the popular reads of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) and her novel Americanah (2013), or Okey Ndibe’s Foreign Gods, Inc. (2014). Nigerian protagonists move to the U.S., only to experience a deep nostalgia for home, often forcing them to return and readjust to a post-diaspora life.  

While on the surface, ‘Adjustment of Status’ tells what is perhaps by now a familiar kind of story, its short form offers a space that is in sync with the spirit of its age, exploring the theme of migration through the chimeras of choice that weave around our ambitions, fantasies, freedoms and truths. As Kọ́láwọlé makes clear, Folahan, “and many others just like him, had been drawn by the allure of the West, convinced that life there was better and that nothing could be worse than the conditions they lived in, so they left, abandoning what was left of their dreams” (175). Predictably enough, Folahan quickly discovers that his plan of filing for a green card through the “procedure known as adjustment of status” by procuring any one of the many “spouses to hire” he has heard about before sending for his family, is unrealistic. Instead, he ends up with an “under the table” arrangement, preparing dead bodies for burial, while lodging in “small, formaldehyde-smelling room” in the basement of a funeral home (174).

One of Kọ́láwọlé’s fresh takes is in the narrative organization. He opens the story in Nigeria, with the ‘returned’ Folahan witnessing a funeral from Mama Nkechi’s roadside paraga bar, “almost penniless” after two years in the States. Self-aware of his part in his status as an unspecified “been-to”, he has already been back for three months without informing his family (172). With this spin, Kọ́láwọlé immediately capitalizes on the title’s irony, by giving us a character whose status is adjusted downwards instead of the upward mobility that movement to the West promises for many African migrants.

Of striking interest is the story’s retrospective exploration of “the dream” from that low vantage point. What follows is a nightmarish vision of the life of an undocumented immigrant in America, completely lacking personal freedom: “[w]henever he went out, he was sure to make himself inconspicuous” (174). He has no medical scheme, driver’s license, apartment, nor bank account, because having such risks him deportation. Along the way, he must manage the flattening racism of privileged Americans such as the “nosy white church ladies”, asking him “what Africa was like” (175). This not only epitomizes the dispossession and forced invisibility of ‘illegals’ in the States, but also alludes to the invisibility of African identities in the West. 

The choice Kọ́láwọlé makes in Folahan’s job is another finely tuned representation of his being in this netherworld of the undocumented, both physically and metaphorically. “Folahan’s job as a washer of the dead [has] no official designation, and its legitimacy [is] questionable” (174), just like his existence in America. However, paradoxically, this is also where dignity and self-justification lies. He remembers reading “somewhere” about “the traditional trade of mghassilchi … [who] washed and shrouded the bodies of the dead for religious burial” as an honorable profession, rewarded by God. His employer’s professional care to show respect to the bodies they handle together at work, “no matter their condition”, means Folahan “sometimes imagines Bill as a mghassilchi too” (176, stress in the original). Through the ritualistic attention to the corpses of Americans, Folahan dignifies himself and Bill together, the man who turns a blind eye to Folahan’s legal status, diminishing him while gaining respect as an elder of the church in a “white saviour” role and exploiting him for cheap labour in the process. When Folahan wonders “if it was worth it—if he’d made the right choice” (175), the author depicts America as a place of existential quandary, especially for the undocumented.

Kọ́láwọlé also magnificently elevates the narrative of Folahan’s downfall by directing the reader to the specific effects of his alienation, zeroing in on his loneliness and longing. As Folahan misses home and the everyday intimacies of his marriage, Kọ́láwọlé utilizes sexual imagery and innuendo, and Folahan’s experience in an “erotic massage parlour” (178), exploring his struggle to satisfy his desires, and how his desperation eventually descends to his deportation. As such, the combined issue of sex, satisfaction, want, guilt and (legal) status is complicated by Kọ́láwọlé in an interesting manner. With a wry comment on “happy endings” (178), America is a place where all is possible but where actual needs cannot be satisfied, emphasizing the exclusion and desperation that Folahan lives through.  

Despite it being obvious that Folahan loses in his move, ‘Adjustment of Status’ does not glorify one place over the other. The paradoxes of physical relocation he encounters and the internal movements in his consciousness are among the ways that Kolawole balances the representation of America and Nigeria. Through reports of a bomb blast in Ikeja, Lagos, early on in the narrative present, we come to understand the numbing effects of violence in Nigeria: “This was how people constantly dealt with the waves of misfortune in this country” (173). Moreover, in Folahan having read the Arabic word ‘mghassilchi’ – literally, ‘washer’ – there is a direct intertextual reference to Sinan Antoon’s self-translated 2014 novel, The Corpse Washer: a young protagonist must return from his goal of studying in Europe and his artist’s life in Baghdad to his father’s traditional Shi’ite trade, making his living washing and shrouding the mounting corpses of the Second Gulf War, during the American occupation of Iraq. Art, geopolitics, domestic issues, religious and territorial conflict – all enter the narrative through Folahan’s limited experience, with the prosaic sensory poetics of the house of the dead as the constant backdrop. 

In this way, through Folahan’s eyes, Kọ́láwọlé’s representation of America revisits, to question, freedom of movement in more ways than one, considering the possibilities of physical and economic, but also intellectual and creative, cultural mobility. Recalling the concept of Afropolitanism (theorized nearly two decades past in Taiye Selasi’s widely-read 2005 essay, ‘Bye-Bye, Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?)’; followed in 2007 by Achille Mbembe’s ‘Afropolitanism’; and more recently seeing renewed valence in academic research), while ‘Adjustment of Status’ remains true to Folahan’s somewhat naive choices, only hinting at other potentials in the brief mention of a character Folahan stays with on his arrival in America – “Gbadebo, his friend who was a graduate student at Emory, in Atlanta” (175) – ultimately, the story suggests that the discontinuities of being both ‘here’ and ‘there’ cannot be reconciled. Acceptance for African migrants, either as legitimated citizens of America, or ‘citizens of the world’, carries too great a risk in what we witness of Folahan’s destruction of potential.  

‘Adjustment of Status’ therefore does its job in muddying the idea of ‘greener pastures’ abroad, especially America, as a place of salvation for Africans struggling with quotidian challenges on the continent. Kọ́láwọlé’s positioning of the plot – across the different times and specific to particular states in each country, also regularly broadening out our gaze to “America” and “Nigeria”, and the more symbolic geographies of “Africa” and “the West” – makes it clear that an African migrant encounters both physical and metaphorical borders when they try to navigate the world.  Kọ́láwọlé also paints a bleak picture for those whose desire will never be enough, not enough to guarantee integration to their chosen societies, not enough to lead to the gratification the dream appears to promise. With a sureness of touch from Kọ́láwọlé, in a balanced narrative that depicts the wider world around the protagonist as well as that inside his head, Folahan’s predicament strikes a cautionary note, resounding in particular in these, our current times.  

Ekari Phiri is studying for her Masters in Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Malawi. She conducts research on Gender representations in African literature, among other emerging issues in literature from the region. She teaches literature at the University of Malawi.


Samuel Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. He is the author of a new, critically acclaimed novel, The Road to the Salt Sea. His work has appeared in AGNI, New England Review, Georgia Review, The Hopkins Review, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Harvard Review, Image Journal, and other literary publications. He has received numerous residencies and fellowships and has been a finalist for the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, International Book Award, has been shortlisted for UK’s The First Novel Prize, and won an Editor-Writer Mentorship Program for Diverse Writers. He is a graduate of the MFA in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts; and earned his PhD in English and Creative Writing from Georgia State University. He has taught creative writing in Africa, Sweden, and the United States, and currently teaches fiction writing as an Assistant Professor of English and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

Samuel’s website is here: https://samuelkolawole.com/

Photo credit: Samuel Kọ́láwọlé by Jess Dewes, courtesy Caine Prize.

Gain even more insights into ‘Adjustment of Status’ from the writer’s perspective, with Samuel’s ‘Words On / Caine Prize’ 2024 Shortlist Q&A, coupled with more in the shape of a twinned Q&A with the story’s publisher and editor at New England Review, Carolyn Kuebler.

Read ‘Adjustment of Status’, along with all the stories shortlisted for 2024, via the Caine Prize website, or by clicking direct on ‘Shortlist…The Stories’ image below.

For more on the 2024 shortlist and the changes to the format of the Prize, looking ahead to its anniversary edition in 2025, visit: https://www.caineprize.com/.

Samuel Kọ́láwọlé‘s ‘Adjustment of Status’ – ‘Words On / Caine Prize’ 2024 Shortlist Q&As


All our ‘Words On / Caine Prize’ 2024 Shortlist Q&As
– find them, with all our coverage so far, here

With thanks to all our Caine Prize 2024 Shortlist story reviewers this week; and special thanks to Wesley Macheso; and congrats to all those shortlisted for the 2024 Prize.


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