Friday, January 29, 2016

WHEN LOVE IS YOUR MUSE...

It’s not only about a corner table in a nice restaurant with that bottle of wine you injured your atm card to buy. I know; we all look beautiful in candlelight, I know. But Love is not only about this, the sides we turn to the camera, pouting in ways that persuade others to organize elaborate evenings all in the hope of snagging a kiss at the end. Me too, I know how it is, to sit distracted through dinner, wondering if all this eye gazing and finger grazing will amount to anything tonight. But Love…is not only about this.

It is not only about crying yourself to sleep. Please, do not lie to me, with your bullshit talk about how nobody can ever make you cry. I tell you, a broken heart (if your heart was truly in it) is worse than the sting of an unexpected slap. And the sting of an unexpected slap is one thing that never fails to dislodge a tear. But Love…is not only about this.

Or the levels of self-humiliation we are willing to descend to in the face of their reluctance to say ‘yes’, or their determination to say, ‘no more!’ Ah, these are private matters, you know, the number of times we check their facebook page each hour for clues. And though we come out, lift both hands and swear it never happened, behind the same doors we burst through to tell our lies – God knows – we’d been down on both knees begging to be taken back. But Love…is not only about this.

Tell me. If you spent a bit of almost every night of your years at Uni leaning against the hostel wall, gisting – in fact, growing up – with the same three guys, and now, even though Time has put cities and careers between you all, you will still never fail to answer that call – is this not Love?

Tell me. If you are alone only because you’ve been asked to pay a price for companionship that made you think of your father, how he used to sit out in the evenings with your mother, and the ease with which the night – when it finally fell – settled in the spaces between them; so that, now, you cannot help telling anyone who asks, “If I cannot have this, then, let it be” – is this not Love?

For the sun rises because of its love of adventure, and sets because of its love of the night. And the iroko bends because of its love of the wind, and straightens up because of its love of the sky. Do you think this is only poetry? That a woman’s nose will double in size, and she will spend miserable mornings with her head half down a toilet, that her bones will creak with the weight of a child whose tumultuous entrance into this world will split her open in soul-trembling pain, and yet once she puts its lips to breast all things, all things are forgotten? And you think this is only poetry?

No! True, I have not found a more prolific muse. From the way it makes us giggle at absolutely nothing, to the courage it gives us to be ourselves, to give ourselves to causes others have since abandoned; Love is that inspiration long enough to go round the equator, tall enough to reach to the Artic and down to the Antartic, to stretch to the moon and keep going. And if Love starts telling stories just as we get to Pluto, it would still be talking when we reach the edge of the known Universe… But do not despair, my friend, for with this poetry, we shall keep up. With it, I swear, we will follow…

Main Auditorium. National Centre for Women Development. Central Area. Abuja.
Dike Chukwumerije Live on the 14th of Feb 2016…

Get your tickets.

Image taken from:
http://www.awakening360.com/content/images/articles/1874.jpg

Friday, January 22, 2016

TRUE LOVE

The first time I wrote a book, someone said, ‘That’s great. Take it to your Dad. He’s Chairman of the Education Committee. He can get it on the curriculum.” And I said, No. Not because it was wrong. But for what I think success is, not so much as what you achieve, but how.  For the rot in Nigeria is not a person, but the little compromises we’re groomed to make at every entrance, no matter how minute the elevation it leads to, to get in. Yes. Never enough to say – Judge me sir. And if I am good, let me pass.

Have you ever tried insisting on this? You will find what I have found – a hunger in the land, a crippling hunger that’s blunted the edges of our spirits. No. This is not poetry. This is a description of an all too common fear, one that regularly advises us against acting out our deepest intuitions, all because ‘the naira is falling’, and ‘interest rates are rising’, and ‘there are no jobs’. So, rather than see a seed and let it grow, we demand of it a bribe – first – so we can ‘feed our children’.

But who has not also been a victim of this thing we all do? Tell me how many times it has been said to you – ‘Oh, yes, I know you’re the right person for the job, but…’ ‘Oh, yes, I know you’re telling the truth, but…’ ‘This project, this concept, is a beautiful one, I know, I know, but…’ Too many buts on the road to Paradise; turning faces from the sun, bending us all into hunchbacks with rote responses to the big questions of Life. But diversification is not the top-down policy you think it is, sabotaged only by an unimaginative government. No. It is you too who continues to sit behind a desk accepting what a monolithic economy gives you to do.

For people are people, you know, we like to travel with the herd. But sometimes – and this is also true of people – the heart may nudge you towards an idea you cannot find in any textbook, a career that does not yet exist. And on the morning after it does, you will wake up and find yourself toying with this mysterious belief, one that nothing you know or ever experienced can explain, that – connection or no connection, masters degree or no masters degree, empty wallet or no empty wallet – there is enough power in your focused mind to do what you just dreamed.

Honestly, many of us will consider this for a few seconds…this inexplicable urge to begin to pursue something we do not presently stand a chance of becoming… then laugh out in derision, and continue with Life. Yes. But for those who will still wake up the next day, and the day after, and the day after, with the same thoughts knocking on the windowpane of your hearts; let me say this. Should you decide to grasp it with both hands, that urge to live from inside out, and begin to use it to strike repeatedly against the cold and hard and unyielding ground of this country, you will discover something I am even now discovering. That there is nothing in the world that is more frustrating. Yes. That there is nothing in the world that is more satisfying. Yes, yes. It is always like this with our acts of True Love.

14 Feb 2016.

Love and Poetry Live.

Image taken from:
http://jennifercovington.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/follow-your-heart-print.jpg