A HOLIDAY LIKE THIS...

Sometimes, when the heart breaks, it breaks softly, like a rain drop on a hard surface, shattering into a million pieces; an anguish vibrating at a frequency too high for the human ear. Yes. It is in that sense that I answer, “I am fine” when what I really should say is, “It’s been a difficult year”. But if every human spirit is a forest, within that forest are many trees destined to die in drought, no doubt. But also a tree or two with roots so deep they bow their heads to hurricanes and raise them again when calamity has passed. For as fragile as we are – bodies of clay, clinging desperately to a spinning planet – we are built to last; because we carry within us – forget sun and wind – the most renewable energy source of all.

Yes. So no matter how tired you are at the end of the day, the tireless sound of children at play, their laughter naturally immune to the vicissitudes of life, could still be all it takes. Or catching the whiff of something on fire, you know? This could be all it takes – the whiff of akamu, pregnant with the memories of many a childhood breakfast. Did you not know? There are excitements you think you have forgotten, pleasures you think you have outgrown, until you hear that sizzle, the one boiled meat makes when it is sitting in a pan of hot oil violently protesting its conversion to fried meat… Ah! This could be all it takes to re-charge the heart, sometimes.

More powerful, I tell you, than the most powerful machines man has ever built. For, tell me, which jet engine, after a grueling cross-Atlantic flight, can be ready to fly again just by closing its eyes and listening to ‘Mo Sori Ire’ on repeat? These people who think that money makes the world go round have never tried to heal a heart so broken it cannot eat, or drink, or tell the difference between two pillows, one stuffed with ostrich feathers and the other with mama’s old wrappers. On a day like that, it may be only Bob Marley who can turn the soul from despair. Tell me, which one of us has not sat in the darkness before, singing songs from the past just to re-awaken a zest for the future? Eh?

So, do not underestimate the power of sitting up to watch the sunset or sitting down to watch it rise. Or of driving kilometers into the past to visit the home you grew up in, where your parents still live perhaps, and even if they do not, my sister, do not underestimate it still, just how long the spirit can linger over the places True Love has been. Yes. Do not underestimate the power of scrolling through your phone, in search of those you really should call more often, for sake of those magical conversations you used to have, longer than any kerosene lamp could ever burn. Did you not know? Getting down on hands and knees so the children can ride horses, simple as it is, can heal the spaces the WorldWideWeb has built between us. So that when we get back up and log back on, and type ‘Lol’, it would be because we have actually – and genuinely – laughed. Yes.

This, my friend, is the sort of Holiday I wish you when I say it, from my heart – Merry Christmas.

Image taken from:

http://www.9jafoodie.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Akara-Nigerian-9jafoodie-Recipe-.jpeg

FROM THE MOUTH OF BABES

My 4 year old asked me a question. She said, “Daddy, do you know who my best friend in class is?” I thought about it for a while, then asked, “Is it Aisha?” She shook her head. “Is it Esther?” She shook her head. She has not yet known me long enough to know that I don’t like guessing games. “So, who is it?” And she said, “Sean.” Sean? Who the hell is Sean? But this is not what I said. What I said was: “Why? What is it about Sean that you like?” And she thought about it for a while, then said: “He’s neat. He’s nice. And he does what I say.” And I in turn shook my head quietly and said, in the privacy of my own mind, lest ‘they’ say I am not being ‘sensitive’ – Women!

So, let me get it right, you want me to wake up in the morning and, before I have even finished rolling out it, to make the bed? Come home in the evening, remove my shoes and put by the door, remove my socks and put in the laundry basket, empty my bursting bladder then carefully put the toilet seat back down and not forget to wipe it over once with antiseptic wipe before shutting the door carefully behind me? Bloody hell. Boys like Sean make it hard for the rest of us.

True. Take this issue of ‘niceness’. Left to me, I shall tell you once – I love you – at the start of the journey, and feel absolutely no compulsion thereafter to re-visit that conversation unless and until the underlying state of affairs changes. Not so? But no, not this Sean fellow. I know his type. They will come and sit with you in the kitchen, forming they are washing plate, making those of us who honestly prefer to be camped in front of the TV look like assholes.

What shall we do? We are in competition with Sean, this Sean who will do as he is told. “Sean!” Shouted in soprano from downstairs. And if Sean is anything like me, he will clench his jaws and mutter (even though the probability of being over-heard is zero), “Ooohhh. Why must she shout my name like that, eh? Can she not come upstairs and call me, eh? What is all this?” But still jump up at the next, “Sean!!”

Yes. If Sean is anything like me, he will have a frown on his face, and will walk as if someone is pushing his waist from behind. And when he gets downstairs and finds her standing at the sink, and she turns and tells him to bring the insecticide from the upstairs he is coming from and come and hunt down the cockroach she spied from the corner of her eyes dashing behind the cooker, he will swallow the urge to bang the kitchen table and shout, “Nwanyi a, ishi a di gi mma?” Instead, he will say in a voice throttled by bottled-up frustration and the need to make love later that night, “Ok”. No. Not Sean. Sean will go up and come back to kill the cockroach, all the time whistling Bryan Adam’s ‘Everything I Do, I Do It For You’ under his breath. Bloody Hell!

(Deep breath). There is no need for an elevated bp. Yes. My brother, I shall not sit down here and be lying to myself, no, not here in the privacy of my own mind. Yes. If this Sean survives kindergarten, and primary school, and secondary school, and University, and the long, long line of babes waiting to relegate him permanently to the ‘friendship zone’ for being ‘too nice’; yes, if he is able to hang on to this his excruciatingly annoying ‘niceness’ through that season of pimples when the babes in his class will prefer the boys that hide behind the bush to smoke igbo; if his own advent of testosterone does not corrupt this his natural instinct not to confuse aggression with strength, or gentleness with weakness; then – eziokwu! – if I ever open my front door and find him there, I will only hold the cutlass, but I shall not threaten him with it. Yes. But are these things not still far in the future?

WHAT SHALL WE DO TOMORROW?

I do not want to lie on that final bed – the one from one which neither you nor I will rise again – and find myself unable to shake this singular thought out of my head: ‘Dike, how would it have felt beneath your bare feet, the grass outside this window?’ You know? How everyone stays on ‘The Path’? I do not want to lie there thinking softly – Why did I stay on The Path? You know? How they wink at night, our flickering dreams? On and off, like fireflies, so people watching say you’re not…realistic, the way you go chasing after things that carry no guarantee of being caught.

What’s the point? I ask in return.

Of waking up? If the sun will only travel the same course, and set in the same place – what’s the point in waking up? Once, you see, I was a child. Now, I have one. And, soon, they will have theirs, and I would have become the grandfather vaguely remembered in the quaint features I only acquired in old age. Imagine it. To become a blurred picture, a somewhat familiar name at the root of someone else’s family tree. They will not know me. Just like I will never know them, no matter how many bottles of aromatic schnapps they empty on my behalf. Yes. When the sun will only travel the exact same course, and set in the exact same place – don’t you ever wonder – what’s the point?

It is true. I will not wait till I have reached that wicked bend where the road has grown too narrow to swing my wagon around. Tonight – with the back of my head nestled in overlapping palms, and Gloria Estefan on repeat singing about days of glory, those unforgettable moments when we stretch beyond breaking to reach for the skies – I’ll think these thoughts. These damned thoughts! Tell me. Why did I work so hard at a job I never liked; stay so long in a love I hated? Stand with hands behind my back, decades and decades, with words in me I never said back? Because – you see – there, at the tipping point of earthly life (no need to wait and see) time suddenly becomes what it’s always been – irreplaceable. And why did we waste it? Afraid of the dark. Why were we so afraid of the dark, when it only held all the things we had not yet discovered?

Why?

So, I sit up tonight and dare myself to think of tomorrow with courage and faith. Yes. Before it is lost, tell me, what shall I do with it – my strength? These arms? You know? They cannot be just for feeling my way cautiously, for laying firmly on the shoulders of the person in front of me, so I can be guided, exactly, into their tired tracks? Tell me – where shall we go with these legs? Before they need covering to keep from freezing. And time walks past – silent as a thief – on its way to that place from which it never returns? Yes. Before these hands begin to tremble so badly I am no longer able to hold your beautiful face between them? Tell me, my love, what shall we do tomorrow?

Images taken from:

http://www.zengardner.com/wp-content/uploads/maxresdefault122.jpg

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l0dsfujEPd1qzyrwvo1_500.jpg

BROKEN PIECES

It is possible that you too have had an experience like this. You meet a girl. Let’s imagine we’re teenagers here, the unimaginative sweet sort still a fair number of years from the awkward first brush with sex. So, it’s mostly long strolls through dusky evenings and, once in a while, the holding of innocent hands. What you DO do constantly - is talk, as if the silence was something to be afraid of.

To be honest, for you, the silence is something to be afraid of. Because stretch it out long enough and she’ll say, “I should get going. I’m sure my mum has started looking for me”. But, one night, you sit on the bonnet of a car parked outside her compound till it is almost midnight. And afterwards, under the most brilliant moonlight you have ever seen, you run home. And the many kilometers are like nothing. All because she hugged you – it was the first time – before you set off.

Many years later, you find yourself lying on a mattress looking up at the ceiling, and it is this exact memory you’re dwelling on. Because between then and now, you have experienced the trauma of hatching, and – honestly – if you had to run home now, at midnight, you would be peering cautiously into the bordering darkness all the way, knowing there could be a million and one things lurking in there. It makes you wonder now, why you did not realize it then, just how fragile, how rare, innocence is. How could you have let it go? Just because her parents moved to a new state, and you went to a different University; and didn’t always have the time to write back. Yes. She stopped writing, eventually.

And now you think – because, in the intervening years, you have acquired the ability to compare – so now you think, “She is the best”. Do you go and look for her? You go and look for her. And they make you wait a little before you see her coming out from behind a half-open door. And, to you, it is as if the years never were, as if she was even now just slipping out of the back door of her parent’s house into a dusky evening, ready to set off on a long stroll with you, to hold innocent hands again, and talk unceasingly. But she stands quietly in front of you instead, and asks, in a quiet voice, if you remember the last time you spoke. You don’t. She does. “I told you” – she says – “I will not wait anymore for you”.

It is on that day that you learn this lesson. That Time is like the Greek proverb – “You cannot step twice in the same river”. It is NOT like how you used to take your chocolate and hide it away so that, after your brothers had finished theirs, you could bring yours out and eat it very slowly in front of them. No. You cannot do this with a perfect moment. Yes. You cannot come to a junction where the road branches right, and then say, ‘I will go Left first. And when I have tired of its adventure, I will come back to this very junction and then I will go Right’. No. You cannot do this.

Not that there is not always an unpredictable Grace hiding somewhere in the wind, bringing new seeds repeatedly for the ones we let slip through the holes in our pockets; but that - truth be told - no two happinesses are the same. And once you have looked into the eyes of Sorrow, go where you may afterwards, but you will see that you will never be able to forget it completely, what you saw in there. Yes. This is what our humanity is. Did you not know? A brilliant mosaic, made beautiful by how we arrange them – our broken pieces. So, let me say this slowly, do not miss your turning, my brother. And if you do, look ahead. And do not miss your turning.

‪#‎AbujaNSW5‬ 

Images taken from:

http://previews.123rf.com/images/kakigori/kakigori1501/kakigori150100004/35355044-Beautiful-young-African-American-woman-hugging-man-with-tender-love-and-passion-Stock-Vector.jpg

http://www.effectiveui.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Same_River_Twice.jpg

WHAT IS POETRY?

 Poetry is when, after seeing a woman pass, instead of just thinking quietly to yourself, ‘Wahala!’ you go home, sit down, take a piece of paper and write: “Without a doubt, you can stop a star in its celestial track. You! Twist it round for chance to see that glorious back. Shall I describe it? Swing and wobble, shake and tremble; that thing behind you will put me in trouble.” Yes. This is Poetry.

My sister, do no think too far. It is in the tempestuous flow of our ever-evolving language. That is what I told a young classroom. For I had asked for metaphors and been presented with – ‘Peter is as strong as a lion’, ‘Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow’. And I thought to myself – Really? Are they still using these things to teach Poetry? Even when they know that none of these children has seen any in real life – lion, lamb or snow? So, I laughed and said – Is that how your mother insults you at home? Tell me, how does your mother insult you at home? And one boy raised his hand and said – My mother always says, Why will you never sit in one place, this boy? You chop dog leg? And I told him – That is Poetry.

For how else could I make him understand? Yes. How else can I make you understand, that understanding is not the same thing as understanding the meaning of every word I use? Not when the objective is to make you see – to see the darkness as I see it, to force your hand up to your chest as if it was your own heart in danger of breaking. For we are not so different, you and me. The same palpitations wake you up too, like rain drops on a tin roof, or the low rumbling in the distance – of fear, of relentless thoughts running tight circles in your head, whispering, ‘You will not make it’, over and over again. Just that I sit up and put them down, those things we both have say to ourselves to get out of bed in the morning. Did you not know – written or whispered – that they are Poetry?

As are the moments we wish would never end. Like the minutes before the rain catches up with the wind, when it is just the trees at your window rustling in anticipation. Tell me, how do you express the feeling? Of waiting for a storm? Of lying beside a child and feeling her fall asleep to the disjointed sound of that your join-join story? I tell you, that is why we cannot mind these people who go about acting as if wealth is only ever something you can write a figure against in your column for assets. How? When each of us has at least one memory of a moment we wish had never ended. How?

So, do not think of it as something Shakespeare wrote. My brother, look to the left. Then look to the right. Now rub your eyes vigorously and try to see the things you see every day – houses with fingers dug into the sides of the earth; children giggling beneath dull trays of groundnut; women standing like rocks against the rain; men squashed together in a small bus, laughing out loud as it puffs its way up a hill in second gear. It is everywhere, this thing. True. You may search till tomorrow and find not one person on a soapbox anywhere calling out – ‘Romeo, O Romeo, wherefore at thou, O Romeo?’ – but this our Poetry? It is everywhere…

#‎AbujaNSW5‬ . Ladi Kwali Hall. 800 seats. 1 mic.

DON’T LISTEN TO SAD SONGS

I know you know this. But can’t help yourself on a night like this, when Whitney makes perfect sense. Everyone falls in love sometimes. And you don’t have to plan it either, don’t have to enter it into your schedule so your phone can beep at 6:32pm: ‘Hey, hey! It’s time to fall in love.’ No. Some people walk straight in, no knocking. You know that right?

The ones that take the seat next to you, just as the lecture is about to start, and leave the second it ends. And you think nothing of it. Not even when it happens again the next day. And on the third day, your pen stops midway, out of ink, it’s the only reason you turn to ask if she has a spare. She’s pretty. You take her pen politely, flash a smile, and by the time you return it have found the courage to say – My name is Dike, by the way.

The ones you become friends with in that random way life likes to create order. So you’ve been bumping into each other for a while now - going in opposite directions at the door to the library, finishing your meal as she’s walking into the canteen – but when you meet again at the tuck shop, you linger there, this time, and talk. Then find out you’re heading the same way. So you walk along, this time, and talk. And when you get to the junction where the path splits, you linger there some more. And talk. Till, one day, you get there when the shadows are long, and are still standing there when the moon comes out.

Tell me, when did you fall in love? It’s like trying to see the sun set, trying to mark the exact second when dusk becomes night, or dawn becomes day, like trying to draw a straight line just there where the waves pause then begin their retreat. For now you think of her as soon as you turn away; the moment your hands unclasp - not a second more - you begin to miss her. It is a dull ache, sometimes, when the time between now and next time seems infinite; and then, at the oddest times, a lunatic surge of pure excitement - you think of her and gasp.

But she is your friend. Do you know what I mean? She will rest her head on your shoulder and cry her eyes out for the one she loves who will not love her back. How do you interrupt her? How do you interrupt this perfect evening of suya and warm coke to say your heart is beating way too fast? So, you don’t. But she notices and cannot understand it, the way you keep looking away, how you laugh but no longer into the full length of that carefreeness she desperately wants to share with you. So, she tells you to tell her. One night, she begs you to tell her - Who is this girl that is breaking your heart?

So you tell her. I am in love with you. And when you see her face fall, you scramble to add – But it’s okay. I’ll get over it. And it makes her smile again, tentatively. And you know in your heart – watching her smile tentatively - that you will never see her smile completely again. I tell you, no two feet can be as heavy as these, the ones that have to carry you away from the scene of a broken heart; oxygen punched out of both lungs, hurting in that place that has no definition.

On that night, do not listen to sad songs, my friend. And when you lie down and, after a while, begin to hear it, that voice that likes to whisper on repeat – you will never find love, you will never find love, you will never find love – yes, you may allow it to make you cry. But while at it, gulp down a breath or two as well, and say it out loud – ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ For these things, you see, will always pass.

Images taken from:

http://www.360nobs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/falling-in-love3.jpg

http://recoverysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/dealing-with-heartbreak.jpg

THIS IS FOR YOU

For those who have ever lost children, the kind no one expects you to cry over. Just because they were not squeezed out of the birth canal - eyes shut, hands bunched into tiny fists, drawing in a first breath. Ah! If you have ever heard it, you will know that though he tries with all the air his lungs can hold, the voice of a newborn is always soft. But sometimes – God help us – we lose them long before even this. Yes. For those who never got to hear their babies cry, this is for you.

A child begins in one’s mind. Let no one tell you different. In the many nights you lie awake thinking. Some people are more fortunate than others. Don’t you know? Some people never have to wonder if everything is okay. I tell you, that question, it will lead you back to many memories. Of how you ‘saved’ yourself like they told you to. And you will ask – Is this now my reward? Of how you didn’t ‘save’ yourself like they told you to. And you will ask – Is this now my punishment?

Till the morning in the bathroom when – hallelujah! – a different answer is there in your hands. Tell me, do you know that morning? So quiet, you can hear yourself breathe? Do you know it? To believe and, in the very same instance, not believe? To look into each other’s eyes, as happy for the moment as you are fearful of the future? Let me tell you - even now, when all you have is double lines on a piece of plastic, you do not call your baby, ‘It’. No. She is a girl. You know this. You know this because you have seen her already, in all your waking dreams. And you know what she would sound like, that day when she first calls you, Da…Da.

I tell you, these are not the only things you are able to imagine, even now, though your gynie has not yet pointed to a distinct quiver on the grey monitor and said, ‘Do you see it? Eh? That’s your baby’s heartbeat.’ Tell those who do not know, there’s no longer wait than for that 7^th week. And, while we wait, we keep it quiet. Why share the news when we have not yet seen her heart? So, sometimes, our child will live and die only between us. And we will sit there quietly, quivering lips, and listen to yet another doctor saying, ‘Don’t worry. Do you know how many people it happens to? Don’t worry. You will have another one.’

And I thought – Can I not stop, even for a little while, sit on this bench right here and mourn? Which taboo will I be breaking? For you never saw the light. You never saw my face. You never reached out and took a fistful of my beard. That is what babies do, you know, when their heads can still fit in the small of our palms; they turn those heads, each time we graze a finger against their cheeks, they turn those heads towards our fingers, with mouths wide open - did you know?

That there is a security camera somewhere that holds proof of my everlasting love for you? Not that you will ever watch it. Or laugh at me, a grown man, hunched over an ATM, weeping. I do not know how to cry. What I do is grit my teeth, and swallow hard. And, still, it surprises me, so much so I take a startled finger to my cheeks each time to verify. Tears? Hah. They help us let go. Because life walks around like that, you know, putting things into the hands of some, and taking things out of the hands of others. What can we do? So, I cried for you on a Sunday afternoon. And let life take you.

Yes.

For you, our unborn children, whom they say we are not to mourn; only to forget – quickly, quickly – and move on.

This is for you. 

Sculpture - "Memorial For Unborn Children" by Martin Hudacek

Image taken from: https://evenifministries.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/memorial-for-unborn-children.jpg