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…

#AnIncredibleLoveStory #NSW6

Main Auditorium. National Centre for Women Development. Central Area. Abuja.

Dike Chukwumerije Live on the 14^th of Feb 2016…

Get your tickets.

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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.

#NSW6.

14 Feb 2016.

Love and Poetry Live.

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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.

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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?

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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 

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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.