The Disappearance of Onijah Robinson

Another prisoner of love.

Missing. Miss thing of the sudden celebrity we now call virality, acquired during a quickening in her cellular turnover and the mirror neurons of spectators as a new archetype attempts parthenogenesis. A sudden birth of Venus in furs or hijab, in Onijah’s case, shrouded in the currency of readily glamorized black madness that will be discarded as spontaneously as it is embraced then venerated, made caricature, then idol, for entertainment. Onijah’s erotomania brought her from New York to Pakistan, where a man she had been catfishing on the Internet using a photograph of Nicki Minaj waited to take her as his bride. Shortly after her arrival this man went into hiding to escape her advances. Onijah would remain in Pakistan for months, half searching for him and pining and planning to have his child, half intent on adopting Pakistan as her new homeland and guarding her delusion with the aggression of a speculator or colonist. Between hospital visits to address her persistent hysterics and and an entourage of concerned medical workers who became friends, most notably “Shabana,” Ms. Robinson held press conferences and demanded capital to restore Pakistan’s terrain and live there as a kept woman— I need twenty k, by this week, in my pockets, in cash, that’s a demand to the government — she repeated over and over into a swaddle of microphones. The people of Pakistan and the rainbow nation of digital latchkey children on the world wide web, welcomed Onijah as a matriarch and spiritual guide, reminding them to try outrageous things, boosting the morale of Pakistani natives because this is the most gracious PR the country has received abroad in decades. Black Americans watched attentively and contemplated their own trips and resettlement there, realizing how gentle and accommodating the locals were to a stranger between crisis and transformation. The party had to end eventually, the bureaucracy intervened, her temporary visa expired, and Onijah was placed on a flight to New York with a layover in Dubai. The final live video in which she is clearly identifiable features her threatening to put a cigarette out on someone who appears to be a citizen of Dubai trying to reprimand or bully her. There is an illegible and alleged clip of her being escorted off of a flight after that, and the rumor has it she was detained. She was disappeared.

For a couple of weeks tiktokers kept her name circulating, eagerly hoping for a triumphant next scene or some kind of update proving she’d made it back to the U.S, or anywhere, safely. None have come. The inquiries have now diminished into lackluster punchlines and moralizing about her irreverence as if she deserved carceral measures for the episodes that were briefly their favorite show. Do you ever consider how street performers, buskers, the insane, and exiles in distress often deliver the best conceptual art you’ll ever see, in passing, how in pathologically being themselves, they hit the unrehearsed missing black notes Rahsaan Roland Kirk once incited and left hanging in the air for them like the fangs of decomposing lions at a museum’s gate? And we thank them with a frenzy of eyes, near-reckless adoration, imitation of their beauty in lesser ‘professional’ artworks that make it into museums and galleries and archives, and then our own stunt, collective amnesia, followed by bargaining with god for the next circus act so we don’t have to remember leaving its predecessor for dead on the journey from virality to a prison or unmarked social graveyard in the Emirates. Do you ever lament for the misappropriated charisma of women like Onijah, who have now transcended gifs and memes to which they were once annexed to become animated action heroes tracing their own disasters until they lose access to phones and the Internet and go underground. This is the great casual tragedy of black fame on display at its most crude and cruel, a tightly coiled spiral both upward and downward that is often mistaken for come-up when it’s actually ritualized energy siphoning. It puts me in the mind of “Nenobia, Queen of Brooklyn” a nurse who went viral for rapping Jay Z lyrics impeccably and repping Lil’ Kim on an impromptu interview in Union Square and was dead by suicide a few years later, having crested into Internet celebrity that forced her to play that character we met one afternoon, forever. It’s as if these women are marks in a modern ritual sacrifice.

Traces and terabytes of Onijah’s life force will decorate the Internet interminably, will have inflected our muted entitlement with her spoken ultimatums and made us braver and less hospitable to our own deprivation, more belligerent and incensed about almost anything, but the woman herself, having offered that essence to the world for attention or as a cry for help or an expression of her liberated will, can now recede into the inevitable backlash and endure the psychic shutdown that allows the idea of her to prevail. She can anticipate an eternity of paying for a few months of cathartic outbursts that almost took her from escaping reality to altering it. We do owe Onijah the stipends she was demanding on camera, for the exploitation of her breakdown for content and new language, A crypto coin in her honor was announced last month, shirts with her face on it are everywhere. We pay to look at art we forget as absent-mindedly as we’ve dismissed her charade as passé, to own pin-ups and statues and recordings we identify ourselves or fractions of our egos within. Why wouldn’t we pay to watch her ruin her life to save it, and vanish. We’ve assembled larger search parties for demons we’ve banished on purpose, just to make sure there’s a body. Nobody will save you in real life if the version of you they believe they love is your likeness or mask online, your avatar, cannibalizing the natural self like a vulture for views. That this saga began with a woman who’d convinced herself she’d fallen in love is harrowing evidence of the dangers and blisses of the sentimental imagination. We hope she makes it out of love alive.