Seems soon is now a month apart. February ran on for longer than I am used to. A length that has little to do with the number of days, but their weight.
How are you in the home of your body?
The Lovers on Accra Street
XLII
I was late. The Abuja Literary Society’s open mic had been on for about 90 minutes by the time my friend and I made our way up the Congress Hall stairs, past a table of splayed tickets, into the room. We took two vacant seats in the front row. A spoken word artist was confiding in the room all the sexual heights awaiting a certain woman outside her matrimonial bed. I recognised him. Memories came to mind and I shared some of them in a whisper with my friend. I let the artist’s words replace what my mind retained from work—the week’s general meeting I had attended and prepared minutes for before making my way to Transcorp Hilton.
I was curious, at the end of his performance, when hands went up across the room. The host started calling the hands by name, and quick, frank reviews of the performance followed. Length, consistency, subject matter, voice, originality, presence, recollection, flow and audience interaction all came into question or praise. A flash fiction piece that kept with the Friday night’s theme of Female Genital Mutilation also received its review. I enjoyed observing the workings of this environment and how it offers to help artists refine their work.
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XLIII
I alighted from a taxi at a few minutes past seven. The law firm where I am an NYSC Associate is another five minutes away and resumes by 8 am. A man walked to the edge of a deep dry gutter like I did. I jumped. He sat. I turned to watch him lay his wooden crutch by his side and roll down the red and black sock on his right leg. His pace was ceremonious and the swollen wound on his exposed leg satisfied my curiosity. He turned his leg over like a perverse salesperson, ensuring that his goods remained damaged. He laid his wounded leg across the gutter and relaxed his posture before stretching out his arms and humming a pleading chant. And so, his day began. I kept walking to go and begin mine.
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XLIV
“The god of desire himself is traditionally called ‘melter of limbs[.]’ ”
—Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson.
“One I needed to destroy. / One to humiliate. / One against whose door / I knocked, still knock / to be let in, beloved. / This is the oldest poem / the older poet said, / outside the door of the beloved / asking to be let in[.]”
—An Otherwise by Solmaz Sharif.
One of the aptest confessions of love comes from Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts. You have punctured my solitude. In that confession, the door Solmaz Sharif’s persona is locked out of yields. May the door(s) you knock on open and when you are let in, I hope desire melts your limbs.
Happy Valentine’s Day in arrears.
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XLV
I would later see the man who was humming for alms wearing different socks on a Sunday afternoon. He sat under a blue umbrella, where the woman next to him ran her POS withdrawal business and another man enjoyed their company. The woman paid my enquiries the minimal attention distractions deserve. From their fond attention to him, I knew he was in the company of friends. He regaled them with a story involving himself and another man—who, if not for God and the crowd begging him, he would have beaten the life out of. The woman waved me and my thanks away after my withdrawal. I peeked under the table. His legs remained covered in long blue socks. I glanced, again, at this picture of a man making his friends laugh. Only the blue bump on his right leg hinted what Monday would reveal.
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XLVI
On Valentine's Day, I took a bite of a date and another of a coconut, then chewed. I am grateful to my senior colleagues for that gift. Nothing was the same after that milky sweetness.
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XLVII
The High Court sitting in Gwagwalada looks like the vacant mansion of a ruined sheikh. Traces of its lost glory remain in the building’s architecture and the heights of its faded columns. Time has left her pockmarks all over the building and peels its cream paint, one large sheet at a time, until layers of grey cement screeds peak through like bones in a gash. It is easy to believe no one comes here, except to mourn the sheikh or tell stories of how beautiful the mansion once was and cover the gashes with nostalgic emulsions.
Walking from the outside in is a quick journey across time. The high, faded columns give way to the more modern finishes of wooden doors and PVC-tiled ceilings. On the first floor, the offices leading up to the courts are demarcated with plywood and the floors are covered with dust-drunk rugs. Spiders inherit whatever pride the sheikh left behind and spin cobwebs across the ceiling. Indecisive lights make the cobwebs appear and disappear like dancers in a nightclub. In the courtrooms, many of the seats for counsels are in disrepair. Time has left her mark here, too, and the journey across her arrives at the same ruin. I am reading NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory while I wait for the Judge. When the bailiff announces his presence with a clear, ringing Court! I will close the book, rise and bow.
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XLVIII
By the entrance of Transcorp Hilton, there is a small garden of palms planted by reputable people. I looked longest at the one planted by Agbani Darego, as if traces of her beauty remained.
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XLIX
Abuja’s slick, dark highways inspire a peculiar hunger in me. If hunger is an awareness of lack, the awareness is only half as stunning as learning how deep the lack runs. Before the hunger, I did not know how accustomed I had become to driving my parents’ cars in Ibadan. How much I would miss being my sister’s chauffeur. How much I would yearn for a car to breeze through kilometres, past the hills, towards a setting sun adorned in dust.
I have had a few lovely chances to drive, but to soothe hunger is a long drive away from sating it.
.
L
With the exception of one former OBS1 member, all former OBS members from my stream are now split between two CDS2 groups—the Editorial Board and the FOIA.3 I belong to the latter. The former meet on Wednesdays, the latter on Thursdays. With the hours I spend at work, my Thursdays are hallowed. A good number of the fragments I write to you gestate through the week to be born on Thursdays. I shop on Thursdays, when the need arises. I indulge in long conversations and longer walks. I watch the city. I assess architecture. I revisit mental fragments of prose. I stare a little too long at scatterings of cow dung I encounter on my walks. I visit bookstores. I visit galleries and contemplate art. I treat myself to meals and quiet. I read.
I meet Mr. Moses, biweekly, for haircuts on Thursdays. He is a fine blend of gentle and fastidious. There is little need to be exacting with him. I simply watch. I keep an eye on our reflections as he works. I ask him questions. His answers are brief, but grow less reticent as he cuts. We are never without silence’s company. When it returns, I allow our silence run its course.
The salon’s TV is a ceaseless stream of music videos. There is the occasional whipping sound of a barber shaking out strands of hair from a salon cape before swaddling a customer. I enjoy the clipper’s hum behind my ear, the nibble of steel blades trailing over my neck. Our eyes meet in the mirror. I listen to how he lives in the salon for at least five days a week to attend to exclusive clients who come in for haircuts round the clock. How some clients want to look their best at 3 am, before zooming off to clubs to blow off the week’s steam. How he straddles the divide between that and what lies outside the salon for him. Outside the salon, he is a singer and songwriter, he tells me, in a voice that sheds monotony for excitement. I imagine how much a stage would transform him.
Our silence returns and I shut my eyes. The clipper hums, then quiets. The neck duster tickles my neck and face. I anticipate the hot towel and his gentle wiping motions. I imagine him travelling to his room in Mararaba for the two or fewer days he gets off work, with a song on his mind.
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LI
I was reading Teju Cole’s Strange and Known Things and sipping from my cup of hibiscus and lemongrass tea when I saw them, the lovers on Accra Street.
They sat a fair distance away from me but I needed only a glimpse to see how smitten they were with each other. Hands that should have held morsels of food travelled over bare skin and touched and tickled and caressed. They were beautiful and beautiful to watch with themselves. He had a fuller head of hair than she did and her fingers twirled and twisted his hair with the subconscious ease of attraction. He held her hand when she was not eating with it and her ankle when she sat cross-legged facing him. After their meal, she adjusted her posture again.
Her braided head came to rest on his chest and she stretched out her feet, facing the small adjacent field where white cattle grazed and a mango tree cast its leaf-patterned shade on their broad and narrow backs. Two calves lingered under the shade before a herdsboy wearing a raffia sun hat nudged them along with a smooth brown cane. She gesticulated and listened. He leaned at intervals to look at her expressions. She turned away from him playfully and laughed. For nearly two hours, they sat and laughed and talked. I heard nothing from that distance. I only watched them pilgrimage further and further into the world of lovers.
When I caught my first glance of them, I was taking a break from Teju Cole—after reading his A Reader's War—to consider some sobering implications. Seeing them, my thoughts moved from literacy, its futility and human evil to photography. A handful of the essays in his collection explore the art form and I imagined what it would mean for a different, knowing eye to photograph the lovers. I looked away, poured myself another cup of tea and flipped to a glossy page showing Teju Cole’s photograph, Rome (2008). I traced a thumb over the blurs—blurs I would later return to with the words of his essay, Angels in Winter, in mind. A while later, I reached for my cup. I relished its tart citrusy aroma before sipping. I took a bite from what was left of my French toast loaf. I watched them and smiled as I chewed. I sipped till my cup was empty and tucked a serviette around my loaf. I looked away from them and resumed reading.
To recall the lovers now is its own glance—across months and time’s shifting distance.
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LII
As an accessory to Abuja’s many roads, traffic lights abound in what is perhaps the highest density in the country. All the traffic lights I have seen rise from a black and yellow drum-shaped base, bearing in red letters the discomfiting testimony of intricate and often demeaning foreign relations. China Aid For Shared Future.
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LIII
“Now he looked at couples—in restaurants, on the street, at parties—and wondered: Why are you together? What did you identify as essential to you?”
—A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
In The Happy Years—the fifth part of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life—Willem makes the astute observation that within every relationship was something unfulfilled because relationships never provide you with everything. It is easy to interpret this as an affront to the modern gospel of you can have it all. An affront that says you can only have all that matters. However you interpret it, what remains true is that people draw up a conscious or subconscious list of qualities when choosing partners and what differs is how many of those qualities they deem non-negotiable, essential.
After making his observation, Willem identifies the qualities that he and his friends have prioritised in their partners: Roman—beauty, sweetness and pliability; Malcolm—reliability, competence and aesthetic compatibility; and himself, in his relationship with Jude—conversation, kindness and intelligence. All understandable and idiosyncratic essentials. Roman, though, is the only one for whom beauty was an essential quality. Arguably, none of them consider the same qualities essential, yet, while competence, intelligence and aesthetic compatibility could be grouped in roughly the same category, beauty, kindness and conversation would resist that categorisation. Interestingly, Roman was also the first of them to get married and he did so to a woman who while beautiful and loyal, was famously unintelligent.
I wonder if there’s a tie between youth and the consideration of beauty as a virtue, as an essential quality. If the mark of a mature eye is that it stops prioritising physical proofs of beauty and learns that beauty is no longer something to behold but something one could do.4 I think of the lovers now and wonder how important beauty might be to them. What would they leave unfulfilled for beauty’s sake? If the crux of William’s observation is that something is always sacrificed, then there is a third question to ask the couples you know.
Why are you together? What did you identify as essential to you? What did you sacrifice?
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LIV
Walking toward the FCT High Court one morning, I saw a small poster that read Police is your friend, do not make them your enemy.
How friendly.
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LV
Even as I read Donna Tart’s The Secret History, Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money and Leila Aboulela’s River Spirit; and revisited parts of Anne Carson’s Decreation, Aria Aber’s Hard Damage, Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, Solmaz Sharif’s Customs and poems by Pamilerin Jacobs I still spent time reliving A Little Life.
There is something I want to say about A Little Life that I have yet to find the language for. I have drafted attempts and turned away from them, as one does from promising doors that open into the wrong rooms. Perhaps it is not yet time.
As always, I know too little.
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LVI
I made you a playlist with songs of love and negotiation. Yearning and argument. Lust and lure. Resistance and confession. Songs that turn away and those that linger. All to get the beloved to open the door. All to be let in.
Enjoy.
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LVII
Thank you for being here.
Be tender with yourself.
.
Love.
Ọbáfẹ́mi
Orientation Broadcasting Service.
Community Development Service.
Freedom Of Information Act.
Paraphrased quote from The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.