Pretty, dirty and dignified

The short story, Checking Out, by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche (I didn't know if the writer were a she or a he, till I saw a picture of her's) reminds me of the movie Dirty, Pretty Things (2002) directed by Stephen Frears. 

Both narratives have a Nigerian at the center of the immigration saga that unfolds. And both are set in Britain, and show the heartless attitude that Britain shows toward those who arrive at its shores from other worlds.

But what binds the two narratives together, in my eyes is the sublime dignity which form the core of the characters'--the "dirty," yet "pretty" people, who dot the margins of the nations' landscape but have to remain hidden.

In Adiche's story, the illegal Nigerian immigrant Obinze is the son of an University "staffer" back home in Lagos, Nigeria. He has a nice middle-class life, yet wants to have more--he wants to have more choices, he muses--and migrates to the UK in search of a life with a wider arc of choices. Tragically enough he migrates with a 6 month visa, which does not grant him the right to work for a living. So, Obinze works illegally with a fellow Nigerian's ID. 

His first encounter with the dirt underlying the illegal immigrant's experience is the inevitable toilet.

Obinze gets a job cleaning toilets in a real estate agent's office in a London building.

The job goes well till a moment of reckoning arrives:

The toilets were not bad--some urine outside the urinal, some unfinished flushing. So he was shocked, one evening, to walk into a stall and discover a mound of shit on the toilet lid, solid, tapering, centered, as though it had been carefully arranged. It looked like a puppy curled on a mat. It was a performance. He thought about the famed repression of the English. There was, in this performance, something of an unbuttoning. A person who had been fired? Obinze stared at the mound of shit for a long time, feeling smaller and smaller as he did so, until it became a personal affront, a punch to his jaw. And all for three quid an hour. He took off his gloves, placed them next to the mound of shit, and left the building.