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PG-15, 107 m., 2023. Starring Evelyne Ily, Uzoamaka Aniunoh, Kelechi Udegbe, Emeka Amakeze. Written and directed by C.J. Obasi. Produced by Oge Obasi and C.J.

C.J. “Fiery” Obasi grew up on horror films and Stephen King’s novels.

This is why we wouldn’t be surprised about how he made his debut film Ojuju (2014), ranked 11th on IndieWire list of best zombie films of all time, the way he did. And why, three years later, he co-founded Surreal16, a self-descriptive film collective. Obasi’s arthouse genre films are stylized and surreal and his vision is fresh. He’s an auteur.

Mami Wata (2023) is a folklore. The Pidgin- and Fon-speaking people of the West African seaside village, Iyi, are devotees of Mami Wata, a water deity. But at the coming of a virus they face a crisis of faith as chaos breaks out. It is a profile of an ordinary people facing extraordinary times. A co-production of France, Nigeria and the UK, the film premiered at Sundance and has racked up nominations and awards from the Indie Awards, NAACP and FESPACO.

This is Obasi’s third feature and his most minimalist yet. (He cites Akira Kurosawa as an influence for the project.) His second feature O-Town, a crime gangster, is considered ambitious but self-indulgent. But he finds a balance here. C.J. is less fiery on this one. He satisfies his sensibilities without estranging his audience, luring them into his hypnotic vision as gently as he could. The result is a ravishing film that is as artistic as entertaining.

But he’s all over the film. Look at the sea attempting to roll into the camera and flood the screen. Those stubborn rolls of water at once invoke both Chris Marker (Sans Soleill) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariners”). See the close-up shots of women on breath-taking hairdos. That’s a feel of J.D. Ojeikere at his most evocative. After all all great films are personal to their directors. Every scene is a description of how they look at life. C.J. looks at life in a most artistic manner.

C.J.’s film is tasteful, his vision is vivid and his cues are exact. Something like Prisca’s boot-cut pants makes us feel like we’ve known we’ll see her use a sewing machine all along. Someone says: “You know say I dey scream.” Rich in subtext, that line preps us for a future cheating. And the tobacco pipe Jabi offers Jasper feels like a homage to Ousman Sembène, the father of African cinema. The monochrome palette and the laid-back tension of the first two-third of the film reminds one of Sembène’s Black Girl (1966) after all.

Mami Water script is one thing that elevates C.J.’s material into a parable. Especially of religion and politics. And remember this is Africa. At a point a white guy supplies guns in a truck to Jasper, a former rebel. That feels like colonialism all over again. But C.J. is also empathetic. His characters are people whose desires are at once clear, pure and dark. And look at the humour. The script allows for dark but sorry comic relief. Once, Jabi quips: “I no dey fear woman. Make you ask di one wey dey for ground too.” Di one wey dey for ground is dead. LOL. But the joke is on Jabi. We wish, if for a second, that he fears women. And that’s something about this film. The film is dark, almost grisly. But C.J. is smart. He allows for Lìlis Soares’ cinematography to pierce through the dark tone and give us one that is mystical.

Tunde Jegede’s score is sensuous and haunting. Not repeating the tension on screen, he echoes and extends the story. Take the brief succession of notes that plays now and again: DUM ta DUM tatata. Such motive best foretells the transition from drama to action. And Soares’ high-contrasted cinematography pushes the film into the realm of dreams. Ivorian Evelyn Ily, who plays Prisca, is sensitive, too. Little acts like the length of a breath or the curls of a lip advance the story and reveal her person.

Mami Wata is fantasy, thriller, drama, action, etc., etc. The genre I insist on is: classic. And for classics it’s not about the tag but the stuff. For Mami Wata that stuff is in part how it illuminates the way the dirtiest of our desires can become sacred and our purest profane. What’s more? That wisdom is spoken in black and white yet nothing about the film is black or white. Here is a folklore that is mysterious but not cryptic. Like the best of African proverbs. 𖦹

This review was first published in April, 2024, as part of The Great Nigerian Films (TGNF), a review series collecting my favorite Nigerian movies. My criterion is the quality of a film, but I am likely to pick a so-so film that is vital to film development and film studies in the country.

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PG-16, 104 m., 2018. Starring Anthony J. Bell, Chinaza Uche, Tina Mba and Bimbo Manuel. Dir. by Faraday Okoro. Scr. by Andrew Long and Faraday. Prod. by Oscar Hernandez, Bose Oshin and Faraday.

An Indian senior colleague once asked if an artist friend of mine studying in the US was a Nigerian prince, if his dad was a king back home, if he was disguising as a nobody. His real reply was to put a label on his studio door that reads: Nigerian Astronaut Prince.

Now that’s a thing.

Around 2016 someone sent an email to about 20,000 people. They said they were an uncle to a Nigerian astronaut who’d been stuck in space for the past 25 years. And they needed $3m to get Tunde Abacha, the astronaut, the first African in space, back home. The people who could help would get from the astronaut’s $15m salary. Typical email scam, a Nigerian prince is a scammer and is also the title of this film.

Nigerian Prince is a story of two cousins Eze, a Nigerian-American “visiting family,” and Pius, a scammer. Eze, Igbo by ethnicity, soon realizes he hasn’t been sent home by his mum to discover his root and not for four weeks. He’s probably here for fighting in school and will finish last year of high school here. First timer Anthony J. Bell, eyes a watery red, showcases that realization of being defeated by a parent’s simple lie. His pain bit me at the throat. And I could have welled up in tears if I stayed in my feels.

Now, Eze is stuck. His mum cancels his return ticket just as he arrives at the airport. The boy needs help to return. Well, you can tell who offers to help. And Pius, who keeps getting into scam-related troubles, needs help, too. He could even only resort to one last option: Eze. Funny how those who know him best keep warning him to not scam his cousin.

So this isn’t just about a Nigerian prince trying to escape repercussions. It’s also the story of a lost boy in a strange place, who’s forced to face himself. I wonder how much autobiographical the material of writer-director Okoro, who’s Igbo, Nigerian and American, is on his debut. This is good. One story deepens and nuances the other. We want a well-made yahoo-yahoo film. Not one that breathes on the surface of things. Okoro gives us what we want.

Maybe not entirely.

Beside Grace, a strict but loving professor, all we see is mostly negative. Corrupt airport personnel. Compromised police boss. And lawless constitution. Not to be mistaken. This is storytelling with good intent. But good intent isn’t enough. There need be counterpoints for some balance. Similarly, the music, especially during slow motions, can become overwhelming instead of emphasizing a feeling. But the soundtracked Nigerian songs better the experience. And the atmosphere of a Nigerian middle-class home is correct. I see the yellow bulb come on, I hear the hum of the TV and I watch heated water stream out of the kettle. I was there with Eze. I was also back in time and back at home.

Pius once tells Eze: “The people I scam, they are just as bad as me. They think they can make money without working for it.” Really, Pius? But Pius doesn’t do email scams. He does it all. Black money scam. Rice ticket scam. Fake arrest scam. Etc.

That Pius’ statement is key to how the film ends. (The plotting is impressive. In ten minutes we know everything we should and more: how the film will end. We just don’t know we do.) But it also signals how weak Pius’ justification for scamming is. He only has Nigerians’ unique quest for money to offer. It’s all about money. Nobody wants to be the man that pushes sand in a wheelbarrow on site. But if the man starts making money tomorrow everybody will start pushing sand. One does expect a richer motive from Andrew and Faraday’s screenplay. If only for empathy’s sake. But Pius is still fairly human. He’s still a con artist whose spirit we can envy if his hustle we can’t admire.

Nigerian Prince is culturally relevant, right beside Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come To You By Chance and Teju Cole’s Every Day Is For The Thief. Only a chapter of the latter addresses email scams, which counts. A film like this is long due. Now here, it is a useful, if flawed, one. I will recommend for all except the Indian colleague who, perhaps playfully, asked my friend if he was a Nigerian prince — and people like him. 𖦹

This review was first published in May, 2024, as part of The Great Nigerian Films (TGNF), a review series collecting my favorite Nigerian movies. My criterion is the quality of a film, but I am likely to pick a so-so film that is vital to film development and film studies in the country.

“A Walk in the Night,” the first story, which, published in 1962, is also the oldest and the longest, is itself a novella and the “other stories" are six short stories, usually six or seven pages long. They all recount stories of poor Coloured people, mostly Blacks, mostly living in the dregs of Cape Town that was District Six. These people live in dirty tenements reeking of urine and death. But they also wear gorgeous gowns and make advances at each other at cafés. The point being: poverty, discrimination, capitalism, etc.

But Alex La Guma approaches apartheid and racism and capitalism calculatedly. Surely, we see grumpy Black crowd speak back at racist policemen and young Black johns curse the cops and Lorenzo rant about being poor. Mikey's anger towards the white “juba” who “pushed him out” of his factory job believably motivates him to kill Uncle Doughty — an old white retired actor who lives in the Black neighbourhood, in a Black tenement — thereby setting off the title story major conflict. But what we mostly see is how the system has affected the lives of these people. How, for the system, they live in fear, in frustrations, in poverty. La Guma's stories are the more poignant for this balance. What we have is a people existing as a fact of life and not the political fact of a people solely poised against an oppressive system. They fight the system. But they live their lives.

A Walk in the Night and Other Stories is realism. La Guma understands the cause and effect principle of life-like fiction writing. Again, take Mikey's murder of Doughty. We hear “the feeling of rage, frustration and violence swollen within him like a boil,” which is “knotted with pain," bubble beneath the surface of the prose. And we know this internal conflict will soon spill over, so that when it does we don’t doubt it. This is unexpected predictability. We see what will happen but don't know we do. This makes the title long short story concise and the briefer stories complete. The fact that the plots are believably set up and set off makes this so. The six-page “At the Portagee's,” short as it is, is an example. The American writer Lydia Davis warns not to mistake volume for verbosity or brevity for conciseness. For her, a short poem can be verbose and a long novel concise. Of course, she credits the concise and the complete. A Walk in the Night and Other Stories is an example what she means by that.

Reinforcing this life-likeness is La Guma's descriptive power. His descriptions are almost exact to a fault. They are so immersive they spellbind the readers. Not surprising: the man is excited about the act of writing. In “Tattoo Marks and Nails,” someone believes “...you could reach out before your face, grab a handful of heat, fling it at the wall, and it would stick.” You could do the same to his sentences. They’re that palpable. His writing is vivid and vigorous and visceral; it revs up with verve.

La Guma, who was also a painter and a comic artist, describes in fact like an animator. He colours small details as if to cover up the fact that this is fiction. Joe's “trousers had gone at the cuffs and knees, the rents held together with pins and pieces of string, and so stained and spotted that the original colour could not be guessed at.” The descriptions can even be so true they come off as funny but never scornful. Frank Lorenzo for example has “an air of harassment about him, of too much hard work and unpaid bills and sour babies.” Descriptions are in fact one big source of humour in the book. Beside characters like Ahmed the Turk who speaks exaggeratedly, that is. He is the one who talks about the heat you could catch and stick to the wall or put on a biscuit to make a toast. Or precise pieces of petty realism like the canteen sign that says: “If You Don’t Eat Here We’ll Both Starve.”

Like his descriptions, La Guma's secret tying together of the stories is impressive — a sleight of hand. The collection is not a stories-in-a-novel, which is a novel where standalone short stories are deliberately woven into a whole. Still, La Guma can sometimes link a story to another, loosely, lightly. Forget the setting, which connects the title story to some of the shorter stories. Added pleasure it is to find a story related to another through the same joke the different characters crack. Or through the similarity between the names Willieboy and Willie. I bet these will qualify as those small pleasures of reading Paul Auster talks about.

Moreover, La Guma’s depiction of the poor and the oppressed, the scenes of their lives, the music of their emotions, the poetry of their thoughts, which earned him the nickname South African Charles Dickens, is cinematic. His sweeping, bird-eye illustrations of buildings and shops and night signs feel like long takes in a film. Through these literary wide and long shots he makes his neighbourhood suck in his readers. He lowers his readers into the mood and tone of District Six. And he makes them more present. And this established atmosphere suggests what we think will happen when a story is unresolved. “Tattoo Marks and Nails" is an example. “Blankets,” too.

But the resonance with cinema goes beyond camera-like descriptions. Consider “A Walk in the Night,” which is about a walk Mikey takes the evening of the day he was sacked. We cut from characters to characters and back again. This technique builds to the story's soulful end, which consists of snapshots of some vital characters resuming their lives after a long night, the story closing like the release of a long-held breath. For people like Mikey and Willieboy, that night is surely the longest of their lives. But it could be the reader's too. Like the characters who survive the night, you, the reader, must have felt discomfort, a pricking at your heart, throughout the story, and relief only at the end. That is a sign of a good piece of art.

La Guma writes with style and grace but also with honesty and humanity. He maintains a healthy remove from his subject. Teju Cole talks about the gift of being a stranger everywhere. La Guma possesses this. He settles into a familiar environment, where he was born and bred, but describes things and places and people as if seeing them for the first time. This measured distance cools off his writing. Allows him to be humourous without being scornful. Adding dignity to those he writes about. He has humour, but humaneness, too. The people from his book wear raggy jeans and greasy windbreakers and eat at cafés and go on dates and go to the cinema and go to the bar and rock long, luminous blue gowns on tall, shiny, Black bodies and sleep in dark congested rooms overflowing with babies and smoke cigars and drink cheap wine on credit and gather for food discarded fish at the harbour and, chased by white police men, skip over roof and get knifed and get shot and get beaten by abusive parents and call nonentities johns and jubas and baskets and hook-up and stand up for their kind and go to jail and argue football and politics and burgle and cry and joke and kill and live and die.

That is honesty.

La Guma's is fiction that, though by definition false, is true. Ghetto and countryside fiction that is not at all a jest, nor poverty porn. Graceful, truthful, respectful. His characters are people you'd meet and speak to if you could go back to 1950s and 60s District Six, Cape Town, South Africa. They are alive for life for they are humans. Now, District Six was in 1966 razed and rebuilt as a “whites-only” neighbourhood, thousands of coloured people were “removed,” the area was renamed. This mission failed, however: the place is now mostly unoccupied and desolate. Thank God for fiction like La Guma's. 𖦹

This review was first published June 2024 here on my Blogspot.

But this is Nigeria. Being gay, being queer, has been criminalized. This political atmosphere cannot be totally overlooked when reading a book like Arinze's. And yet these stories aren’t about the Same-sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA) passed in 2014. They are also not not about the anti-gay law. It is Arinze's stories that do not reduce love and romance and intimacy to politics. Still, we have to read them with this knowledge in the back of our minds, where Arinze rightly relegates it to. After all, people, family members in fact, often oppress Arinze's gay and bisexual men and boys with the arrogance of a state-backed hatred. See “Where the Heart Sleeps.” The African Magic kind of drama put up by Dubem’s family against Tochukwu is an example.

Arinze’s portrayal of gay relationship and intimacy is all the more nuanced. He offers not flat and simple stories of love but deep tales of intimacies detailed with complications and comforts. More so, the stories are placed within the context of family. As a result, we don't see state-sanctioned violence against gays but homophobic parents, siblings, relatives, acquaintances and strangers, who are sometimes physically abusive, sometimes emotionally, sometimes verbally, sometimes more, sometimes all. He has made sure to only offer the essence of life: love, beautiful and messy; people, flawed and loving and daring.

The way he peoples his book is one reason his fiction works. (Raymond Carver: “Fiction that counts is about people.”) His Chimamanda-like dramatic descriptions could interestingly sketch out a character’s interior. You pause, wondering that someone could map out “the shape of a familiar sadness” and that a wide and soft bed and its spotless white sheets could be “filled with a shapeless sadness” all the same. But his attentiveness to life is most refreshing. It is one secret way he fleshes out characters and captures cities and life altogether. Carver extols the writer that looks at things in “a unique and exact way” and finds “the right context for [artistically] expressing that way of looking.” Arinze doesn't only look at things exactly and uniquely, and express them artistically. He is also tender with the life he has invented, with his material.

Soft, subtle, he knows the littlest of acts that is a flicker of desire. He knows when and why and how a small, sweet stirring starts in a chest and what a voice husky with need sounds like. He knows how through a window a moon cuts cones on the floor. He knows how the orange and green vests of traffic wardens become squares of light in the evening. He knows those secret habits of cities and people, the minute yet intimate, the cool and the dirty, “like childhood rhymes.” He is that guy who has drunk up life in small measures, who finds pleasure in the fold of a curtain. Or the blinking, starry affect of Christmas hat lights. And this ensures the lived-in three-dimensionality of his fiction.

But the book is not all sensuality. The stories could be jagged and complex in structure. Most of the plots are fluid and blurred. They jerk back and forth between the past and the now, flashbacks interjecting the flow of life, a slice of the future stealing into the shape of things. Some of these structurally-roughened stories, usually told by a third-person narrator, in fact move now and again from a character’s perspective to another's. And the reader is often tossed here and there, now and then, like ping-pong. Consequently these stories are choppy, sketchy, fleeting.

The structure mimics the roughness of life, sure. Life, always in a knot like a bow-tie, isn't a straight line of events and this structure gives us that. But the structure has its limit. Take “Michael's Possessions.” Imagine if the confrontation between Adanna and Obinna has been shown and not reported. If it happens in the now, before us, and not in the past, behind us. Imagine such poignancy. It is easy to think this story should have been written in Raymond Carver's often straight-line narrative style. To favour another Carver's stylistic preference, such vital moment of drama could be hinted at instead of being shown at all, dipped below the prose's smooth but broken surface, and still be poignant. Even a tennis addict, whose head follows the played ball the most among the spectators, needs the ball to rest once in a while.

The sentences, too, are long and tangled, like pasta. (He has said he wanted to write different sentences than Carver-like short, simple sentences while editing the stories for the collection.) Less full stops are used and many simple sentences are packed into a long one, clauses of adverbs doodling at the ends like ponytails. To be sure, they are simple in thought, stylish, controlled, rhythmic, but complex in structure. These sentence types help slow things down but not enough. “Alobam,” for one, is tedious. The story was published on Guernica before the book came out but I could not read it, then, no matter how many times or how hard I tried. The title story, now different from the earlier version out there, is another example. The new version is structurally mature and decorative, sketchy, flying, like a Delacroix's drawing. But the old version is more tender and more relaxed and more moving.

No matter. Arinze tells good stories peopled with humans in style. These people he does not indulge nor forsake. Life-like, he lets them suffer when they need to and afford them small mercies all the same. He is like an all-powerful, all-knowing God who doesn't lay claim to being all-good. Deliberate like a deity, he sets the laws of his fictional universe in motion and sits back to see things happen as programed. But things don't often feel programed, and when they do, they do due to the circumstances of life in the society represented in the book.

Again, take “Where the Heart Sleeps.” Middle-aged Dubem, a father of a grown-up daughter, chooses a man, who lives with him in his house, at least before the story begins, over his wife, who though not legally divorced now lives elsewhere. This story is both futuristic and realistic, futuristic for that kind of older Nigerian gay relationship, realistic for its overall aching sadness. Ijapa O writes that Kunle Ologunro’s “The Mathematics of Hooking up” is “queer fantasy.” This, too, is. Not because the love it narrates is so “perfect, so pristine” but because it is not yet a commonplace queer reality. It feels Hollywood, something out of American Fiction, a last-year film by Cord Jefferson, itself based on Percival Everett's 2001 novel Erasure.

Things can also seem programed by how the characters’ fate is determined. Arinze is often left with two choices on how to break them. Namely: heartbreak or rejection. The first by a man's lover; the second by his family or his lover's family. Rejection by acquaintances and strangers are almost default, of course. If someone has been broken by their lover, then Arinze is likely to offer the small mercy of significant acceptance by family. But if said person enjoys significant familial acceptance, then their heart is likely to be broken by their lover. After a while, this pattern becomes repetitive and predictable. But it is no fault of Arinze's. That is the reality of his characters’ society, our society. Accordingly, the book is sad, so sad we are relieved as much as refreshed when the final story, though a sad one, offers us a small surprise of happiness at the end, closing the book on that note, promising hope, offering relief. It shows how much Arinze cares about us and his characters.

That last story is vital. Lauren Groff talks of the invisible architecture of the best of story collections. The first story should ask a question or set up an argument. This question, this argument, is then complicated story after story until the final story “sends a sort of prismatic light [on the question, the argument] shooting back into daily life.” Arinze's book crackles with sadness, but ends, thanks to this final story, on a promise of hope, a hope that lingers long after you finish the book, a hope that shoots you back into daily life. You can't read this intimate epic and not think of Arinze as kind. His is fiction that isn't fake. ∆

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PG-16, 85 m., 2020. Starring Meg Otanwa, Gabriel Afolayan, Tina Mba, Judith Audu, and Demi Banwo. Dir. by Damilola E. Orinogunje. Scr. by Tunray Femi and Damilola. Prod. by Damilola, David Whyte, and Alimi Olalekan L.

“She’s so strong. She’s strong. She made it.”

That’s doctor. She helped Derin deliver her baby, Maria. The job of this film is to test the truth of those statements. Is Derin so strong? Is she strong? Will she make it? We need to know.

Derin and Fola are a young couple and they have just delivered their first child. Derin had complications and was operated on. She bled so much her uterus had to be cut off to save her life. All this culminates into post-partum depression, which is what the film is about. Co-writer-director Damilola L. Orimogunje has always had a thing for social issues. The couple of short films he made before this first feature of his address social concerns, especially those we don’t want to talk about yet. Take Mo, about sex work, for example. He’s that kind of conversation starter.

Maria was marketed as horror. (Damilola wants to make his money back.) This claim is weird but for the sound of the film. Close your eyes and watch the first scene again. What you heard is a horror movie. Beyond this, the music and sound gives us the feel of life. The distant sound of traffic and people, as well as careful detailing like the thin lace of stains on the couple’s old unbreakable plates, make the film real. The lighting is in fact soft and cool. The editing is smooth. But all this doesn’t deflect the gritty realism. Take the belt of black nylon Derin ties around her waist to hoist her bubbly belly. It’s a piece of sorry realism. (Dami ensured Meg added weight for a post-natal big belly.)

Dami is a student of cinema. He’s that guy that uses Federico Fellini as his Twitter DP. This is a plus for film lovers and the film itself. The former see what they had seen in their beloved movies being coated in new looks. Consider the second shot. Fola and doctor talk inaudibly behind the theatre’s door. They stand facing each other, each behind a glass panel that frames his/er profile head-to-waist, the closed door a straight line between them. Don’t go far. Kenneth Lonergan used this same framing at the hospital scene in his Manchester by the Sea (2016). We soon figure we need these kinds of subtle references. They’re a succour to the subject and the tone of the film. They’re a distraction from its sadness.

This is far from all. Dami’s passion for cinema is obvious in his influences. The fixed, stable camera and the frequent low camera position, the camera only a few feet above the ground, only above the characters’ gaze level, as well as the perfect compositions of most of the shots, are reminiscent of Yasujirō Ozu, the Japanese film master. Such choices fit the mood of the film and its patient pace. The soft colourful lighting, sometimes warm, sometimes cold, reminds one of a slightly de-saturated Wong Kar-Wai’s film. And this socially educative film, though sad, belongs to the same caliber as Tunde Kelani’s cinematic social and cultural studies. Dami shows off his influences without showing off. He’s like the best kid in class who asks or answers only vital questions. And we’re grateful for who he is.

“What is her name, Derin? Our child. Your child! What is her name? Because I have never heard you mention her name for once.” The emotional premise of the film climaxes when Fola says these words. The acting and the scripting is that excellent. The argument between Derin and Fola mid-film, during which Gabriel delivers those lines as Fola, is heart-breaking. And Meg, who plays Derin, is an electric fish. A quiet bolt of light, she doesn’t break her flow for once. She only slips deeper, shot after shot, scene after scene, into the inner life of her character. Overall, the story is quiet, deep and moving.

Maybe Derin is strong. The irony is everybody everywhere schools her on motherhood while she’s living it. They offer her tips on how to take care of her baby and herself. (Even Fola, compassionate as he is, once tells her to just have fun while at it.) They’re not interested in what’s wrong with her. We pity her for how little empathy she gets. But she doesn’t beg for our pity. And neither does Dami. She deserves it. This film is sensational. Not sentimental.

At the end we know why the movie is tagged horror. And we need the relief, if a false one, if only for film freaks, provided by the reference to Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 Black Girl. Dami’s is serious film and serious filmmaking. He wants to sensitize and he wants to make art. He does both on Maria. The result is a film that is well-made but also sad. This is not a movie you watch with popcorn and Pepsi. You won’t touch them. 𖦹

This review was first published online in April, 2024. It is an entry in the review series The Great Nigerian Films (TGNF), a collection of my favourite Nigerian movies. My criterion is the quality of a film, but I am likely to pick a so-so film if it is vital to film development and studies in the country. These films are a primer and a companion to Nigerian cinema.

The first paragraph feels, to me even, like a lie because I have truly been functional and I have done well with crowds, mostly in class, mostly at school, if fitting in, doing the bare minimum, counts. (School is the University of Ibadan’s Institute of African Studies, where I am studying for a Master’s in Cultural and Media Studies.) Since the three or so weeks I uploaded the post, I am only realizing that it is in fact true, in the most basic sense of the adjective. Life, indeed, has been slipping away from my grip, the activities of it all, the performance of it, but for a reason I have all the while missed.

During the last MFA application season, I applied to eleven schools in the US. All applications came back rejected. There are many ways to rationalize the rejections: Trump put a visa ban on Nigerians; the number of Nigerians picked significantly dropped this year; most programs only admitted one African student per session. But eleven is a stretch. After all, some people, few as they may be, got in, though they face a big challenge relocating to the US. To be frank, it must have been a delicate situation for both the candidate and the school: the student could not go in; the school could not bring them in. But I would rather, if anything, have an admission in hand and worry over visa, not both.

Here is the point: all the rejections, I have come to realize, congealed into an intense feeling of — not sadness but — exhaustion. I am tired of applying for things, pitching editors, reaching out to interview subjects, composing questions. I am in fact more than tired; I am traumatized, I am sick, sick with lethargy. I am burdened with a lackadaisical attitude towards all things that require putting myself on the line, though I cannot not also do that. I kept missing application deadlines without a pinch of guilt, without a care whatsoever. I am now a character quite unlike me, a character I have never before been.

The IG post, as is this substack, was about my latest profile at Open Country Mag. (Thanks to my low energy count, that IG post and this newsletter came way later than the profile, the IG post more than a week later, the substack more than a month.) In it, I wrote about Valentine Chukwuma, Nollywood’s highest-grossing editor. We had a primary interview on Google Meet on a quiet Ibadan Sunday, which would have been serene but for the generator going on in the next compound. I was at a friend’s, around UI Second Gate. The flat was on the topmost floor of a two-story building. I was sitting at a desk where, if I turned my head to the left, I could see the floored compound of the house where the generator was going on. All that height added to the vertiginous shock I experienced when I finally spoke to Chukwuma: he was very down to earth, he didn’t sound aware of his achievement. He had the air of someone who stumbled into box office success, though he did not exactly do, if you look at the matter from the right angle. He was in short the complete opposite of the person I expected to talk to.

Here, for a glimpse of what I mean by the above:

A few more paragraphs:

Read the profile here. It is my second piece for Open Country Mag. Read my first, a cover story, of Chude Jideonwo, here.

One last thing. I have a journo request: if you by any chance have Tunde Babalola’s email, please do share. I have spent months ransacking the Internet and social media for it.

Many thanks.

Although her later novels – three in all – explore topics other than the lives of Nigerians in Belgium, this is the material Unigwe draws on in her 2019 story collection Better Never Than Late. All ten interlinked stories in this small book of fiction are kinly-knitted portraits of Nigerian immigrants in Belgium: humane, intimate, intense. Yet individual joys and miseries are always happening within the context of families: marriages are breaking or are beginning to run low on love; fake paper weddings are being arranged; people are seeking a marriage or are seeking love in a marriage.

There is indeed a bigger collective than the family unit: everybody seems to know everybody or has heard of everybody or has crossed paths with everybody. A couple’s living room, Prosperous and Agu’s, where lavish meals are shared with friends and community, mostly provides a physical centerpiece, in fact – a Nigerian country the size of a living room buried in the cold of Europe. The couple themselves are the most central characters to the book, playing major roles in some stories, appearing as cameos in some others. Oftentimes their living room is where we get to witness the hardships this small group of Africans face for leaving for Europe but also the pains they are capable of inflicting: on themselves, their spouses, their hosts. For the latter, it is mostly the heartbreaks they serve the fake white wives married for a while for the sake of residency papers.

But the journey for them isn’t as much into Europe as into selves. “Do not be sad...” goes the concierge in Louise Glück’s poem “The Denial of Death.” “You have begun your own journey,” he continues. “Not into the world, like your friend’s, but into yourself and your memories.” This quote states explicitly the intrinsic logic upon which Unigwe’s fiction operates. Her Nigerian immigrants in Belgium are constantly in a search to find chipped and lost parts or, at least, to realize the loss. They are constantly in a search to uncover new or long-buried selves or, at least, the need to. At the heart of most stories is a sense of becoming or unbecoming, a sense of waiting upon a change, a sense of seeking, finding.

This is obvious even in their titles. In “Becoming Prosperous,” Agu and Prosperous leave Nigeria for Belgium in search of a better life when Agu’s supermarket is destroyed in a riot in Jos. But they soon discover in their misery in Europe that they have in fact gone there to watch themselves become “bags of rattling bones unable to become whole.” At least not yet. In “Finding Faith,” though, Oge has to come back to Nigeria to find something she loses when she loses her five-year-old son, which is masterfully symbolized by a teddy bear. She empties her deflated self, hoping to be refilled with life.

Time becomes a metaphor for this. It becomes the conceit most useful to all the pieces. You sense a clock ticking at the back of your mind as you read the stories: a change is always in motion. Take the highlight of the book: “Finding Faith.” Oge is a young mother grieving the death of her five-year-old son. The warped sense of time is smoothened into the skin of the plot. Flashback frequently cuts through to give us a piece of the horrible past, which feels all too present, which is, in fact, in the present. It’s a sad story of a most accurate emotional intensity. It represents the story all of the book aspires to tell.

But the story elements in some pieces are not optimally arranged, their timing dulled, lagged. Critical details or crucial chinks of the past or vital characters sometimes pop out of no where to rescue the plot, like cats out of a hat. In “For the Love of a Fat Woman,” Godwin’s grandma is picked from the village and dropped suddenly into the story. A lack of earlier mention or placement makes her an emotional deus ex machina. She pops out from the back of beyond, dragging along a sack of sand-encrusted mangoes and oranges: a most remote superhuman. In “Everyone Deserves Grace,” it is delayed introduction of a detail from Agu’s school days in Nigeria. Meanwhile, this detail is the catalyst for the character change that the story seems to be about. In “How to Survive a Heat Wave,” it is yet again the delay of a germane, university-days backstory that gives Añuli her emotional complexity.

Stringing many stories into one big, selfsame story made up of small, standalone stories is a paradox of will: the weaving, which must be deliberate, should feel like an accident, a coincidence. Unigwe does this well most of the time, if not all. Expectedly, major characters in some stories should appear as minor in others. But the delight is that she does this whimsically. In “Becoming Prosperous,” a Gholahan, who’s mentioned in passing, works at an abattoir. In “Cleared for Takeoff,” a Gbolahan is a central character, a single father of one who works as a carpenter after an injury halts his football career and, subsequently, his marriage. We are not even sure if the Gbolahans are one same person.

She also performs a double function with her weaving. She sneaks prospective subject matters into a current story, the topics waiting to be explored in full in later stories. In “Becoming Prosperous,” Prosperous – who, in reality, has long stopped being prosperous – briefly, self-righteously, mulls over how she did not, back home in Nigeria, maltreat her two teenage househelps as her neighbors and acquaintances did. Like fate, this subject bubbles up in the story after the next, which is the collection’s title story: “Better Never Than Late.” In its witchcraft accusation, physical abuse, pentecostal demon exorcism, it becomes utterly specific as well. Kambi is cousin to Agu, one half of the childless couple most central to the collection. Together with another cousin Ada, she accuses her 15-year-old help, Ijeoma, of tying up her luck with marriage. Ada, less educated but more spiritually mature, suggests Ijeoma has also tied Agu and Prosperous’ luck with children.

However, the sarcastic tone of this story (the church is called, in italics, The Holiest of Holies Jehovah Jireh Jehovah El Shaddai Evangelical Church of God and its pastor, Pastor Moses Elijah Samuel Okeke) makes the story almost unfit in a collection that is anything but sardonic. With its “Rabbi shaddai gram gram” spiritual language, the story feels like a hoax rather than a work of fiction; it feels like a piece of entertainment. Nonetheless, Pastor Moses is an entry into a Nigerian literary lineage that most memorably goes back to Wole Soyinka’s Pastor Jeroboam of The Jero Plays.

Perhaps this otherwise purposeful glueing falters in “The Transfiguration of Rapu.” A story about a Nigerian woman waiting for her husband to divorce the white woman he has deceptively married for passport, it is a story with explosive material. Perhaps if told from inside Rapu’s head, the story might have been a more emotionally-fraught portrait of a wife-in-the-wait. One feels Unigwe might have simply stuck to Prosperous’ point of view as a linking device.

The fiction is sad. The characters are always waiting for a change that might not come or that might turn out negative. Even when the change is positive, the realization that it has taken this long and cost this much gives off a sad undertone. Unigwe balances this out with humor. It is one way she textures her character, moulding them like dough until they spill into the reader’s consciousness. She deepens their interior lives by transcribing their funny, little thoughts, her sentences not strings of words but breaths of humorous but “true” worldviews. In “How to Survive a Heat Wave,” Añuli fumbles with the difference between atheists and unbelievers. “Here,” Unigwe writes, “she has met humanists and atheists (who she has been told are different from unbelievers, but she cannot remember how).”

The humor serves its most useful purpose in this same story. Añuli has been assaulted by a group of boys on the train. She cannot speak of the incident to her husband; the words are blocked off by fear, shame, humiliation. She sends for her two best friends Oge and Prosperous to tell them. But when they arrive, she brings out a bowl of unshelled melon seeds sent to her from Nigeria, declaring, “Ngwa, we have an egusi peeling party here!” Through the peeling party, she cases her trauma with backhanded jokes, the heater going on blast an xray of her internal weather. The story is a tipsy dance between a funny exterior self and a deflated interior self, a dance that tips into its fated climax by the end of the story.

Better Never Than Late is above all a clean picture of how quickly a Nigerian dream can fester on foreign soil. It is an exploration of what can happen to a Nigerian self becoming or unbecoming in the snows of Europe. The book starts with an arrival and ends with a homecoming. But we know not to read more meaning into that. We know someone somewhere tomorrow will set out to Europe, in search of a dream, of a future, of a self. We can only wish that person reads Chika Unigwe’s book before setting out. The book has for them a caveat: that when what is lost is found, something happens. The concierge in Glück’s poem says, laterly, “Also everything returns, but what returns is not / What went away—” What returns is not what went away. No, not exactly. Returns come with lessons, and lessons change people. Here, always, is a vital book for anyone who cares. A sad, slim read that will have a crackling effect on its target readers. ∆

This review was first published May 2025 here on my Blogspot.

For a title, I go for Lesson Notes as a homage to my mum, whom I watched, while I was growing up, prepare endless lesson notes for her public school students, but also because of its accuracy in describing how I take and make these notes, how I am always going back to them for a recap, for an update, how the notes are one and same with the lessons I am learning of and about craft, only summarized.

Ultimately, this title suggests the heart of the project itself: that it is a life-long commitment since lessons, writerly or otherwise, are forever being learnt by the living. Ọjọ́ ikú l’ọjọ́ ìsinmi, goes the Yorùbá adage. Death is the beginning of true rest, that is. Death, indeed, is the beginning of true rest from anything whatsoever: work, romance, learning, etc. May death therefore be the end of this.

Read No. 1 here.

In “Ten Rules for Writing,” Amitava Kumar writes, “Get rid of it if it sounds like grant talk.” This piece, “Ten Rules for Writing,” appears in both Writing Badly is Easy and Every Day I Write This Book, Kumar’s two books on style. The first in fact is subtitled Notes A Report On Style. The essay has also appeared on multiple online sites in slightly different forms or titles. This is to say how truly Kumar might mean the content of the essay. He must have written it in good faith, although he, as he admits in his author’s note at the beginning of the first book, had himself at least broken one of these rules while writing the said book. Rules, again, for the nth time, can in the trade of writing be rigid and impractical, and we might be better off without them. But that is not the point.

Here is what follows the above-quoted sentence: “I don’t know about you, but I routinely produce dead prose when I’m applying for a grant. The language used in applications must be abhorred. Stilted language, jargon, etc. I’m sure there is a psychological or sociological paper to be written about the syntax and tone common in such things—the appeal to power, lack of freedom—but in my case it might just be because, with the arrival of an application deadline, millions of my brain cells get busy committing mass suicide.”

In another essay from Writing Badly is Easy — this one is titled “Language Is Your Friend” — Kumar writes: “Formal demands cramp our style.” By formal demands, he means grants, proposals, et cetera. He also uses a substitute for formal demands: “dull rituals.” A number of sentences later, he writes: “We can participate in such dull rituals when it is absolutely unavoidable but I want to make a case for writing that is bright or witty or entertaining.” Then, he quotes in full Eudora Welty’s March 1993 application letter to the New Yorker.

I like this approach to learning. I love to learn by samples. Or I best learn from samples. When I had to write — for The Guardian — my first one-character feature story last year, I read Otosirieze’s shortform features on Folio Nigeria to have a sense of how to structure my own article. There is something to be said about Otosirieze: he represents for me the best writer of features and profiles, short or long, especially long, in Africa. Pound for pound, I have not seen anyone who comes close. This is why, unprovoked but broke and abject and lacking in any form of hope, I applied January 2025 for an internship at Open Country Mag, the magazine he founded in December 2020.

I wish I can extract and compress all the things that stand out in Welty’s job application into keon-like rules or lessons. But I cannot. I am of course not worried about not being able to articulate all these especially since I might have also internalized them. After all, the qualities of art are incommunicable in any world’s everyday language, and I consider Welty’s application letter art.

I wish I can extract and compress, too, what might have stood out to Otosirieze in my application for internship since he mailed back, saying: that, truly, OCM neither announced nor publicly sought interns but it was hard to overlook people who took the initiative and well done to me for doing so beautifully; that my email demonstrated an attentiveness to literary culture, a quality he values; and that, more importantly, the skill and drive required to not only join but to benefit from being in their team. Then he said, “I will like to give you a paid position, the terms of which I can figure out after I read more of your work — which I’m enjoying — and we speak.”

But I cannot, and so I have made do with going back once in every while to use my mail to OCM as an intimate sample, as a personal sample, as a small but workable sample, for making sense “when millions of my brain cells get busy committing mass suicide” during formal demands, for undeadening my language when my instinct suggests otherwise.

Here, then, in full, the mail:

Dear Editors, Open Country Magazine,

I am aware that Open Country Magazine doesn’t give out internship positions, and, if it does, it is not publicized. But I must apply, try my luck.

While studying at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, Otosirieze, then of Brittle Paper, was for me and my friends the face of youth literature in Nigeria. Though we could access only a few of his fiction, his editorial works, exemplified on Brittle Paper and 14: An Anthology of Queer Arts, the two most accessible platforms to us of all places Otosirieze’s writerly and editorial finger reached then, was almost singular in promoting top-quality literature, especially prose, among young people, most of all hopeful writers like myself. Now, after about seven years since discovering Otosirieze, after he has, deservedly, won the inaugural The Future Awards Africa Prize for Literature, after he has gone to accrue shining degrees from sparkling universities, Otosirieze has come to represent something newer: the brain behind the magazine that is best covering today – perhaps – African Literature and Nigeria Cinema, Open Country Magazine.

Never before have I read stories so stunning and eloquent of African luminaries in an African Magazine, more so a Nigerian one, as those in the pages of Open Country Magazine. The spellbinding profiles of Africans, young and old, especially young, making grounds in literature, film, arts, community, and religion, are my favourite features of Open Country Mag. Because of them I now dedicate my Sundays to the magazine. The interviews and reviews, especially of movies, especially by Otosirieze, are also a highpoint. However, the profiles, a nonfiction form that wasn’t this popular or prominent before Open Country Mag, are the number reason I’m applying for the role of an intern at Open Country Magazine.

I have read how good a literary journalist Otosirieze is from Emmanuel Esonmsofu’s Notes on Craft: How To Write A Profile. “In African culture journalism, few people—personally I would say no one—writes better profiles than Otosirieze Obi-Young, the founder and editor of Open Country Magazine, where I worked since early 2020 before leaving this year. His profiles of Teju Cole and Rita Dominic are especially masterful; in the former, he began with a visceral evocation of an event where Cole announced his pedigree as a thinker and speaker of the highest order, predating the interests he would explore in his later work. Drawing the essayist’s wide range of interests into the picture, his ethos emerges, but quite unassumingly, only visible to the attentive eye. Dominic’s long, excellent career in Nollywood is also depicted brilliantly by Otosirieze, who enters into the psychology and technique that goes behind her many memorable characters.” These are Emmanuel’s words. But they could as well be mine. Only that I haven’t worked under Otosirieze. Yet. And so I’d better write mine.

Otosirieze’s profiles are stately stories covering the breadth and depth of their subjects. They are often long, but they are incapable of boring a reader. They flow, like liquid, like honey, the prose dressed in a clear, simple jacket of lettering. With empathy, with an unbiased attitude, they capture the complexities of their subjects, their contradictions, their philosophies. And slowly, steadily, clearly, the essence of their subjects, their characters, begin to simmer underneath the surface of the sentences, simmering until they float above the prose in human-shaped forms.

And structure, or form, is very vital to Otosirieze’s profiles. For writers, for example, he often structures the story around the books of an author. His profile of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie begins with an evocative scene of the burial of the writer’s mother at St. Paul’s, Abba, before taking on, one by one, the books that fill up Adichie’s oeuvre. Even the more obscure poetry collection and play, Decisions and For the Love of Biafran, respectively. (Marginalia: the first paragraph of the second section brilliantly introduces UN, Nsukka, and the Biafran War, the site and the war that are germane to Adichie’s career. The latter will be at the center of the most important book of her hugely successful career.) This structure is also obtainable in Otosirieze’s profile of Teju Cole. Such willingness to let the story decide its own structure is a joy to an attentive reader and a skill to emulate.

But Otosirieze’s ability to not vanish in the shines of the people he’s writing about is very key for me. Take “The Creed of Cardinal Arinze.” There, after having captured the near-mythical stature of His Eminence, he acknowledges His Eminence’s stance against gay marriage, women priesthood, etc., in the Church. Or “The Otherworldly Ways of Teju Cole.” After he’s intimated the readers with how Cole made a new path in African literature, he gets Cole to comment on the criticism often leveled against his writing. He writes, too, of Cole’s contrarian and controversial views, notably the PEN-Charlie Hebdo protest, and the novelist’s refusal to take on Nigerian matters in wide-ranging and widely creative and philosophical essays as he’s done those of America, his country of birth.

Now why must I intern at Open Country Magazine? One, I want to learn and practice profile writing, from and in, the magazine I have come to most associate with that longform genre in Nigeria, in Africa. Two, I want to be pruned by Otosirieze not only for profile writing but also shortform interview and criticism. The editorial quality of Otosirieze is evidenced by writers such as Ernest Ogunyemi, Emmanuel Esonmsofu, and Paula Willie-Okafor. Three, Open Country Mag‘s niche is mine, too. I’ve written about culture, taking special interest in African literature and art and Nigerian Cinema. (Publications and their links in Résumé/Portfolio; please find attached below.) To risk over communication, I have written about Alté artistes experimenting with fuji for The Republic Journal, about the painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (forthcoming from Guernica), I have blogged about Arinze Ifeakandu, Alex La Guma, Helon Habila, Dizzee Rascal, etc. And I have since last year written The Great Nigerian Films, a collection of reviews of my favourite Nollywood feature films. Other projects, especially my fiction and nonfiction writings, are included in the résumé/portfolio.

I have refused to write extensively about my background because such information is contained in my résumé, which has been attached to this mail. But for the sake of formality, here’s a 40-word, third-person bio:

Som Adedayor [I used to be Som Adedayor then] is African. He has been shortlisted for Iskanchi Magazine Prize and The Gerald Kraak Award. His writings have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Guernica, The Offing, adda stories, Lolwe, Efiko Mag, Minority Africa, The Republic Journal, etc.

I understand how hard it is for African magazines to secure funds, so I am willing to discuss compromises, financial or otherwise. Craft, experience, and publication are the most important things to me.

Thanks for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Som Adedayor ∆

But one of my sisters, during my registration for senior secondary school, added another name to my full name: Solomon. In lieu of Oluwatobi, she made it my first name. Part of the materials needed for the registration was birth certificate, and so we looked for it. When we brought it out, “Oluwatobi” was not on it. What was, in full, was Abegunde Adeleke Solomon. I can’t remember the order, but I think these were the names on it. (Or was it Abegunde Oluwatobi Adeleke?) At that point, I knew I was also Solomon, but anyone hardly called me that except for a man who was also a teacher at the public primary school my mum taught. I had never known I was an Adeleke. It was a discovery, but the name was easy to explain. The naming system my parents adopted for us consisted of a Christian name (in Yoruba or not) and a royal name (we have ties to the throne of some quarters in my hometown, Iwo, and my dad was recently installed Baba Oba of said quarters). Adeleke is my own royal name. Oluwatobi (The Lord or Christ Is Great), though not a Biblical or a Hebrew name, is my Christian name. Solomon, too.

But I hate Solomon. This is how I put it in an essay I’m working on:

Another reason it was easy to hate on the name is my loss of conviction in the God claim (which happened some years back), and, most consequentially, the fact that my identity as a Christian was now being slowly swapped for my identity as a Yoruba person. Rather a Christian name in Yoruba than one in Hebrew.

Elsewhere in the essay, I wrote:

To avoid unnecessary retelling, I will lift, before going into the second part of this substack, one last quote from the essay-in-progress:

Last year was an impressive year in my portfolio. With articles at Minority Africa, The Guardian UK (three: here, here, here), The Freethinker and, in form of a longform cover story, Open Country Mag, my literary journalism officially launched itself. On top of it, I won the Gerald Kraak Prize for my short story in adda stories, and became a contracted freelance writer at OCM. The pen name switch from Som Adedayor to Adesomola Adedayo happened after the Minority Africa piece, which was published in February. This means all my publications afterwards carried the name Adesomola Adedayo save for the Gerald Kraak which I entered for as Som Adedayor and therefore won as thus.

Due to circumstances that I cannot detail here, the name change was unsuccessful. Or it was unsuccessful because I eventually went to my bank and told them to stop it before the stipulated four months of vetting the CBN was to conduct on my financial identity matured. (This, the vetting, the sorry wait, is required for full or partial name change. Changing one or two of one’s three names, that is.) But of course, I got the awful impression that my bank was never going to change it. At that point, I realized it might be better if I only delete Solomon from my legal documents — which is what I shall do when the time ripens — instead of replacing Solomon with Adesomola and Abegunde with Adedayo. For one, the former is an easier process than the latter, and it also creates less disparities in my vitals, especially since I used to officially bear those two names.

Because I had resolved that it was needless to hurt my father’s ego by changing my surname, I had to reconsider my pen name. The last name — Adedayo — was fine. It was the only real way I can at this moment of my life memorialize my brother. But Adesomola, the first name, caused a little worry since, together with Adedayo, it constitutes a totally different name from the two I plan to have on my vitals soon (Abegunde Oluwatobi, that is). It might be a messy game of trying to prove my identity if and when I have to apply for things as a legal entity and need my creative outputs — publications, say, or awards — as evidence of expertise or skill. It would be easier, I thought and still believe, if the only disparity is my legal surname. Hence, the new decision to change, for the nth time, my publication name or, if you like, my byline.

I pestered (this was a technical problem the production team do not run into often) The Guardian to change the first name on my byline. They did but with a disclaimer. I corrected my name — when all longlisted writers were asked to edit, if they must, their names — on a short story prize page. (See the succeeding paragraph.) I have reached out to a couple magazines I published in for a name change, and I am, once again, in that liminal space of waiting for a name to take a different form. I have however not informed OCM (this will be a second time I’m requesting for a name edit, and my body recoils at that), but plan to do so soon.

I understand how multiple name changes as a writer might be brand suicide. But the only thing I can do about that is hope that the people can keep up and hope real hard that this better be the last time that I change my name. In this spirit of hope, therefore, I present myself to you: I am Oluwatobi Adedayo (born Oluwatobi Abegunde), a writer, a journalist, an artist. I won, in 2025, the Gerald Kraak Prize; I was shortlisted, in 2024, for the Iskanchi Magazine Prize for Experimental Writing; and has recently been longlisted for the 2026 Afrotondo Short Story Prize. Explore some of my publications here.

For a final word, I leave you with a small paragraph I wrote to a friend in an email: “Man, my names are going to be the end of me. LOL. I have, again, changed my pen name. This time: Oluwatobi Adedayo. But, hey, I am still me. If anything, I am glad anyone will call my name [those I identify with] at all — any of it, of them.” ∆

For a title, I go for Lesson Notes as a homage to my mum, whom I watched, while I was growing up, prepare endless lesson notes for her public school students, but also because of its accuracy in describing how I take and make these notes, how I am always going back to them for a recap, for an update, how the notes are one and same with the lessons I am learning of and about craft, only summarized.

Ultimately, this title suggests the heart of the project itself: that it is a life-long commitment since lessons, writerly or otherwise, are forever being learnt by the living. Ọjọ́ ikú l’ọjọ́ ìsinmi, goes the Yorùbá adage. Death is the beginning of true rest, that is. Death, indeed, is the beginning of true rest from anything whatsoever: work, romance, learning, etc. May death therefore be the end of this.

for Bolu

I, confused, frustrated, broke, was in a terrible form, in which I could not get a piece sold or published, when, in July 2023, shortly after finishing school, a US-based Nigerian friend and I compiled a list of essays on writing. We suggested essays we had read and liked or those we knew about but had not read. B., the friend, created an MS Word document, wrote in it the selected essays, titled it “Summer Food,” and shared me. We started reading them immediately. Most times, we read aloud and in turns on hours-long WhatsApp calls. Then we would discuss what we had learnt, sometimes immediately, sometimes after a while.

The summary of all I learnt is now contained in an essay: this. Did I need to read all these essays on writing to write better? Or: should I have just written more, edited more? If asked now, I will say the latter. I have come to realize all the stories and essays I tried to sell at the time are indeed shitty. The best of the pack, perhaps, is an essay on strangers. A collection of vignettes first written feverishly in my notebook after reading Emmanuel Iduma’s A Stranger’s Pose, it lacks a strong cohesive anchor. Many drafts of the essay are in the shape of what Tim Bascom calls “framed vignettes.” But that would have worked had the essay been a flash nonfiction.

Did I realize this while reading the craft essays with my friend? No, I did not. All I needed was plenty patience. I needed to let the essays and stories fallow, go off to read stories, essays, novels, whatnots; write other essays and stories; and then come back to the drafts.

Why then was reading about the craft of writing needed? To be sure, there were new insights gained as there was known wisdom reiterated. But then these insights, especially the already-known, were needed to let me know that what I knew about the physical act of writing were still true and I was only going through a bad spell during which almost everything I wrote was irredeemably bad. Not like I had realized this at the time. I had not. But as I read, sanity trickled into my mind little drops after little drops.

It has now become a habit to come back to this essay once in a while and remind myself of the things I already know, of the act of patience, of the promises I had made to myself while reading those craft essays; to let sanity trickle into my being; to give myself permission to hang in there when writing isn’t going well; to keep redrafting even when there is a rush to submit, a need to make a little from my writing.

Here, then, are the notes I collected when I was most frustrated with what I had chosen to do for life.

I. People

What does Zadie Smith say about writing in the essay “Something to Do”? She posits that the deepest answer to the question of why she writes, perhaps why we write, is that it is something to do, something to fill up all this empty time. For her, “there is no great difference between novels and banana bread.” “They are both just something to do.” This is not casual rhetoric or a rude dismissal of people’s regard for writing. It is a bold confrontation with the writing life, from which those who could might scoop up some wisdom. After all, we know there are differences between Things Fall Apart and boiled corn. Just as there are differences between Smith and Dr. Shoe, a cobbler from a former church of mine.

But there are things to pick off her submission. For one, it helps me strip writing of mysticism. Being a writer does not make me special. I am human still and will be even if I cease being a writer just as I was before I became one. I see this as an underlying injunction to be humane towards people and to not think my life conditions, bad or sad, good or gay, special. No one should be looked down on because I am a writer and they are not. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that every man he met was in some way his superior and in that he could learn from him. If the context had been respect instead of learning, Emerson could have said something like: every person he met was just as human as he was and he could for that respect them just as he, being a human, deserved to be. This – thanks to Smith – is my belief.

Apropos people: Lydia Davis’ second charge in “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits” is to centre one’s interest in one’s work. To write or note from things that interest me. Never from what I should be writing and noting. She writes: “Let your interest, and particularly what you want to write about, be tested by time, not by other people – either real other people or imagined other people.” She thinks people, both literary people and plain people, often think their opinions superior.

She might have implied, too, later in the essay, in a different context, that caring about what people think is self-censorship and thus kills originality. She believes originality comes not from laboring to be original but from working, at the very least, on my character and not inhibiting my instincts or thoughts, so far they don’t harm people’s feelings. “Disregard what other people may think (but not what they may feel).” My individuality is at stake if I care what people think. This is why I must not. This is why, also, most of my writerly learning should be on my own. This is why I must be mostly self-taught. Here, by the way, is Davis’ final recommendation in the essay: “Finally, maintain humility with regard to language and writing.”

Now back to Smith. There is another lesson suspended in her insight. Unlike the former reorientation of hers, which is about the ethics of writing, this is about the practice. The hint is that the craft is not special either. There is at the base of everything no greater difference between the suya vendor across the street and the guy crafting poems in the adjacent building. Sure, the latter’s poems about white Sabo-Lagere buses dallying in traffic might tomorrow become a classic on the transience of life while the former might only be tending to the stuff of the belly. Similarly, there is no great difference between a programmer and a writer. All are doing something. All are stuffing life with meaning.

Once I realized this, I could be set off by a remark from David Finchers’ The Social Network (2010). In Zuckerberg’s (Jesse Eisenberg) California apartment, Sean (Justin Timberlake) flatly tells Eduardo (Andrew Garfield) that Zuckerberg has been coding for 36 hours and is now just taking a nap. That was it for me. Fired up, I WhatsApped B., texting:

bruh, just saw the social network. there is a scene where a character informs another character that zuckerberg has been coding for thirty-six hours, and is only just getting a nap. that was it for me. i wantto do hours of writing. i wantto write long, hard, big. i wantto be writing, rewriting, editing, for four, six, eight, ten, twelve hours. i want to be obsessive.

Call it the burning paper effect, but I am determined to burn forever.

II. Classics

With dark humour and self-mockery, Italo Calvino answers the question the title of his essay asks in “Why Read the Classics?” But, first, he gives a set of definitions, all of them not unconnected, of what a classic is. He intuits that a classic, a book which has not finished – and in fact cannot finish – saying what it says, is a book people don’t read but reread. It is a book that, all things equal, is read not out of respect or duty but love. For him, a classic does not teach people what they do not already know. Such book, already in the public consciousness, is part of an interior logic of life. Anyone who reads a classic is only relearning what they, having been raised within the culture, already know. Ultimately, Calvino proposes each person invent their own library of classics.

I would say that such a library ought to be composed of half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count – leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries.

The answer to the question the title of the essay asks? Well, he thinks to read the classics is better than not to. He doesn’t justify this. But the scanty, understated reasons I imagine he gives idle away in some folds of the essay, preceding the answer itself. Then, to anticipate any objection that curating personal classics is not worth that much trouble, he himself defeats such activity by quoting Cioran. In the quote, Socrates was learning a tune on a flute while he was supposed to be preparing hemlock with his colleagues. Seeing this, they asked him what good it would do him if he knew the tune before he died.

I believe Calvino.

But the question now is: how do I as a writer curate my collection of classics?

III. Family

I have a question in mind when I think of family as a writer. How do I as a writer curate my collection of classics? Italo Calvino half-answers this: my personal library could be composed of half the books I’ve read that have counted for me and half I propose to read and presume would count. The unanswered half is: how do I presume the books I propose to read will count for me? Or better still: what kind of books should I propose to read?

For this I seek a reset in Austin Kleon’s concept of creative lineage. Steeped in Marcel Duchamp’s skepticism in art but faith in artists (“I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.”), the concept requires that I pick a favourite writer and study everything about them. Then I find three writers this one writer is influenced by and study everything about them, too. I could repeat this as many times as possible. To do otherwise, to study the history of my art form (writing, etc.), as it is on its own, is to choke. Dead or alive, the members of my creative lineage will walk me through just enough history. Besides, history is personal. We know only the part we choose to know. After all, choosing is everything, and everything is chosen. This is a sentiment shared by Ben Lerner.

But I find this fine concept stuffy. Not that it is not expansive. It is. But it is expansive in one direction. For Austin, up is the only route. For me, up is but only a route. I am freer if my writerly family spreads out in every direction including up. If Austin suggests I look up at the writers my favourite writer looks up to, I also want to look down at those writers that look up to my favourite writer. This might help detect what is mostly copied or easily appropriated from my favourite writer. This is necessary since I wouldn’t want to copy what these writers are copying from my favourite writer or in the same way they do.

So far, the top and the base of the family tree only include the writers that are biologically related to my favourite writer. First, at the top, above my favourite writer, are the writers that my favourite writer looks up to. Then, at the base, below my favourite writer, are the writers that look up to my favourite writer.

The two sides of my family tree, then, include those writers who are not biologically related to my favourite writer. Those, that is, my favourite writer does not look up to and those that do not look up to my favourite. If the former group, naturally selected, are biological members of my family, this latter group, cherry-picked and chosen, are foster members of my family. They include other favourite writers beside my first favourite writer. I could place them on either side of my first favourite writer.

But, of course, these writers on the foster sides of my family could be picked, in proxy, by my favourite writer. If I could understand what my favourite writer looks for in a piece of literature and what kinds of writers excite them, I would collect a foster family that my favourite writer, if asked, would have selected for me or, at least, would approve of.

Thus: the other half of my collection of classics, those books I propose to read and believe will count for me, are those by my family: foster or biological. My personal library is set for life, its section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries intact.

IV. Doubled

I find WEB Du Bois’ idea of double consciousness handy when I think of myself as a writer. It is redundant to dwell on the importance of reading for myself. Everyone knows I can’t write if I have not read. I can’t be a writer if I’m not a reader. It is superfluous to dwell on this. But I will for a moment before I circle back to double consciousness.

Linguists have told us that of the basic communicative skills – listening, speaking, reading, writing – reading, which comes before writing, is second to the last. The first and the third – listening and reading – are called receptive skills (we receive information) and the second and the last – speaking and writing – productive skills (we produce information with them). If the former are absorbent, the latter are projectile. To indulge Noam Chomsky: a baby will project and produce infinite communicative exports from their stash of finite language inputs received and absorbed. The baby will speak continuously based on the limited things they have heard. The baby will write continuously, too, based on the limited things they have read. The point I am struggling to make is not that what the baby should hear or read be limited. The point is unlocking the interior logic of language.

The question, then, is: how as a writer do I read?

In “Homage,” JM Coetzee sets up an example of how a writerly reading is done. When, in 1961, at the age of 21, Coetzee settled, after a fresh South African undergraduate degree, into a London job that ensured that, from nine to five every Monday to Friday, he was immersed in computer language, he understudied the cinema of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, boundless in its pushy ambition to transcend even the realm of impossibility. He decoded the inner working of the great Faulknerian sentences that plane the cloud of thoughts so unbelievably, so unpredictably, so flawlessly, that all breath is held, pushed, pushed, held, and, finally, killed: all “a formula for perception racing beyond language, language just barely keeping touch with the movement of the mind.” He unlocked the layered magic of Samuel Beckett’s sparse syntax shaped by a military orderliness. (“The thought was like a ravening dog; the prose was like a taut leash.”) The list goes on, endless. Maybe there is no great difference between a programmer and a writer? I would guess so. Every writer is a programmer coding human language. Looking at Coetzee’s slim presses of skeletal prose, so vividly displayed in Disgrace and The Books of Jesus, the bet in fact is clear.

Teju Cole invokes Coetzee when, in Eight Letters to a Young Writer, he offers: “Read slowly, like someone studying the network of tunnels underneath a bank vault in preparation for a heist.” But how to really do this? This, as per Davis, means reading closely and stopping to analyse how a writer achieves an effect, be it music, imagery, sentence length, be it plot, humor, or endings. With pencils or highlighters, I could ring or color those left-branching clauses that ferry a reader smoothly and sonically to the small nucleus of the sentence. A beautiful example of this is done throughout Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style – a book Davis highly recommends.

I am envious of Coetzee’s fastidiousness. I look at the small old man, and I realize that, until I begin to parse prose and poetry as he does, analyse books like Davis suggests, unpack sentences like Tufte will, I am not yet a writer and never will be. Yet I cannot parse every book I propose to read like this. If I do, the ghost of Calvino will laugh at me as I fade away into the timeless cloud.

I seek solace in Lydia Davis. Per Davis, I have to read a lot. I have to read different kinds of books across different periods. But I have to read in different ways. Some books I have to read closely, detecting all the while how a writer handles a situation or an aspect of the story as well as how they achieve an effect. Others, I merely lose myself in, sucking on the narrative juice. Naturally, my cut of personal classics belongs to the first group, which is a closed class of books. The other is an open class and includes all other books.

But here comes the paradox. Can I merely lose myself in a book? Can I merely enjoy a story? Can I read a fine phrase and not notice? Used to reading books deeply, my interior modulator is always open, consciously or not, picking up writerly frequencies. I could suppress it. But open it always is.

For me this paradox is best explained by the concept of double consciousness. When I’m reading, I’m writing. Pompous and self-centred, my writerly mind takes charge and, to suit my style, sentences are rephrased, paragraphs reframed, and techniques are reconfigured. Adjustment is ad infinitum.

The reverse, too, is true. When I’m writing, I’m reading. The interior logic of language I have so far glimpsed from all the books that inform my practice provides the thumbprint for the patterning of the new text. Writing is going over such interior logic, such guiding principles, once again. Really, when I am writing a piece on craft, such as this, self-addressed as it is, I am applying some of the mechanics that went into the craft essays and pieces by Calvino, Coetzee, Smith, Davis, Kumar, Cole, etc. Writing my craft piece is rereading the mechanics of their craft pieces. Writing mine is learning about theirs – if for a repeated time. To write, V.S. Naipaul has claimed after all, is to learn.

That Naipaul quote, culled from his literary-cum-travelog autobiography Finding the Centre, is taken out of context and out of tense. Here, in full, is what Naipaul means: “To write was to learn. Beginning a book, I always felt l was in possession of all the facts about myself; at the end I was always surprised.” But it doesn’t matter. The point is made.

Being a writer is being doubly conscious. Writing is reading. Reading is writing. I’m a reader when I write, I’m a writer when I read. After all, Virginia Woolf submits that one should read a book – should one desire to read such book well – as if one were writing it. The gap between writing and reading is close, closed, closeted. There is in fact no gap at all.

V. Love

I imagine the books without which I will die are a palpable proof of my narcissism. Such books mean a lot to me. They are a part of me, an extension of my ego. If I write a piece influenced by these books, I suppose I’m writing a love letter to these books and their authors. Maybe every writing is a love letter in disguise. Maybe every writing is a love letter. The obvious: I love these books. But maybe I hate them as well?

Calvino submits that everything Jean-Jacques Rousseau thinks and does is very dear to his heart. Still, everything fills him with a stubborn desire to contradict him, to criticize him, to quarrel with him. I assume Italo is suggesting that, when I write, I am re-writing the books in my circle of classics not necessarily in form of a love letter disguised as influence but as a riposte to the things that, because of who I am, I have dared to reject about them. How, then, with the right mix of brashness and arrogance, could I have bettered a book already in its best form?

For me, then, the fun – or the task – becomes finding the balance between adoring a book and shredding such book so as to rebuild it into a thing that won’t be more adored. I’m hung between loving and killing the things I adore, loving and killing my darlings.

My books thus become an attempt to love and hate these books that I so much love. My writing becomes a vain act of bettering writings that – already in their best forms – cannot be bettered.

VI. Readers

In a Greenlight Bookstore reading by Teju Cole, who conversed with Amitava Kumar, a lady asked Cole about the man in sky-blue cap who pops up a few times in Every Day is for the Thief. The man appears with either one eye closed, blinded or bad. Five times in the book, Cole said, when nothing is happening, either in a crowd or in a quiet moment, the narrator sees and describes this man. If closely observed, the reader sees that he is the same person. Cole jokes that the lady has found the punctum, the Barthesian concept for a small, almost unnoticeable part of a photograph (or, of course, a piece of art) that pierces or punctures the viewer in some way. Every work of writing is layering, Cole offered, and, paraphrasing Milan Kundera, went on to say there should be something for the reader who is willing to read the book four times, which maybe they might not catch on the first three readings. The logic is: there are certain things for people to catch on the first reading, and there are things to be caught on the second, but there are things that are maybe just for the writer.

I find a story recounted in Cole’s essay “Shadows in Sāo Paolo” similarly refreshing. Gabriel Garcia Márquez was asked who the best reader of One Hundred Years of Solitude was. Cole recounts what Mázquez had said:

“A Russian friend met a lady, a very old lady, who was copying the whole book out by hand, right to the last line. My friend asked her why she was doing it, and the lady replied, ‘Because I want to find out who is really mad, the author or me, and the only way to find out is to rewrite the book.’ I find it hard to imagine a better reader than that lady.”

Useful, too, is Calvino’s proposition that we all create personal libraries containing books that count or will count for us. For one, this could serve as a good measure to guess who I write for whenever I do. Perhaps the person whose small collection of classics a piece of mine will be a part of is my implied reader? Maybe every writing is a search for that one reader who is willing to know who is mad between themself and the writer? I’m not sure, I don’t know, I never might, but my guess is: yes.

It could be dejecting to think that I write for a single person whenever I write. Conversely, I find this comforting. Books are promiscuous. A book of mine could become part of a person’s or a million persons’ small slews of classics. The point is confiding in that one person. If I successfully address that person, the work will flirt and worm itself into the lives of countless others who are just like my ideal reader. But if it does not, nothing — to entertain a Pascalian sense of humour — is all I’ve lost. The point is to write that one good book.

But how to?

In the poem “A Gentleman Compares His Virtues to a Piece of Jade,” Michael Ondaatje writes: “Solitaries spent all their years/writing one good book.” That is how to.

Towards the end of his response to Theodora, Cole said that the man in the sky-blue cap was inspired by the bicycle-riding character from Kryszystof Kieślowski’s Dakalog. He meddles with nobody’s business and only drives past some scenes in every instalment of the ten-part limited series. Cole’s sky-blue man, like Kieślowski’s bicycle guy, is an angel witnessing the narrator witness Lagos. Maybe every piece of art is a remaking of the pieces it is influenced by. Maybe every writer is looking for who is mad between themself and their influences? As the paradox goes in Ben Okri’s novel The Freedom Artist, there are books that are read only by writing them.

VII. Nothing

In “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits,” Lydia Davis enjoins me to regularly take notes. She suggests some things to observe and note down. “Observe your own activity. Observe your own feelings (but not at tiresome length). Observe the behavior of others, both animal and human. Observe other types of behavior, including that of municipalities. Note technical/historical facts.”

In a Hong Kong Book Fair chat, Ben Okri suggested that, in place of the most dramatic things in their lives, young writers should learn how to write about nothing before slowly learning how to write about something. Then he asks the audience to give examples of nothings. “Waiting for the bus. Buying the milk. Drinking a cup of tea. Sitting in an empty room. Before sleeping. Washing your hair.”

I see Okri’s suggestion as a summarization of Davis’ recommendation. My activity could be nothing or something. Just as the behaviours of other people, animals, the weather and municipalities as well as a technical or historical fact. But beside this, I suspect both Ben and Davis imply that writing elevates nothing into something. “There is no such thing as nothing in the human experience,” Okri later said. “It is all something.” I believe him. Something is nothing well written.

Later in the essay, while discussing how a story can grow out of a taken note, Davis offers her story as an example:

“Caramel syrup or caramel drizzle?”

“Sorry?”

“Caramel syrup or caramel drizzle?”

Long pause for deliberation.

“I’ll take the drizzle.”

Later, she walks away with another airline employee, the empty cup in her hand, the caramel drizzle inside her.

And then she turns out to be the attendant on our flight—her name is Shannon—so her caramel drizzle will also be going to Chicago with us.

In a different essay and in a different context, “A Beloved Duck Gets Cooked: Form and Influence I,” Davis offers an entry from Kafka’s Dairies.

The picture of dissatisfaction presented by a street, where everyone is perpetually lifting his feet to escape from the place on which he stands.

Then she offers two stories of hers, “Lonely” and “Hand.”

Lonely

No one is calling me. I can’t check the answering machine because I have been here all this time. If I go out, someone may call while I’m out. Then I can check the answering machine when I come back in.

Hand

Beyond the hand holding this book that I’m reading, I see another hand lying idle and slightly out of focus—my extra hand.

The stories and the diary entry above are somethings only because they’re well written nothings. One way to do this is to trust Viktor Shylovsky, who, in “Art as Technique,” posits that good art forces us to see life anew. It defamiliarizes life and disabuses us of the automated perception of it. Of the above Kafka’s diary entry, Davis writes: “In just a few words, he offers a different way of seeing a commonplace thing.”

In the spirit of and in homage to Lydia Davis, I have attempted in my notebook some nothings. Some of them are below.

Wet

He is tired of making his point. He stops his speech mid-sentence. By now, his shirt is soaked at the chest with sweat, his thought wetting the parsley patterns.

Off

The bird softened her spread out wings and took off, flying into the future.

Big

I wonder what big questions of life are concealed in the softness of his big beard.

Spill

The bucket idles in the corner of the room, its water threatening to spill over.

Seated

The bus stops a stint after Popoola Filling Station in front of the line of shops and vendors selling corn and walnuts. The man beside me at the front seat steps down in his jeans and white polo, and walks towards a triangle of short street side bush. There, he urinates, emptying all the water he has drunk all day. He comes back when he’s done. When seated, he begins to eat the walnuts he bought from the vendors who earlier approached the bus, filling up his water-empty belly. The bus soon taxis off, and the man carries the walnuts in his belly into the rest of the journey while the bush drinks his water.

Rush

We are in the cab, a red Nissan Micra. We are on to Iwo Road from New Garage. We are six, the driver and five of us passengers, two in front, three at the back. No one talks. We only keep an expanse of tarred road rushing away from us.

Slow

Outside, the rain is scanty but steady, a slow music on the concrete downstairs. Behind the closed louvers and white-painted burglar proof, the curtain is a splash of condensed cream and a disbursement of brightly-coloured flowers. Patiently, it floats back and forth. The motion is slow, painfully so. But it communicates well with the swirl of breeze in the small room.

Colourful

The flat-screen TV on the left at Remight Viewing Center is dulled in colour. Perpetually tinged, it has a woozy orange hue, as though, up beyond it, a cracked yolky sun about to spill over is permanently frozen in time. The people living life inside it have their figures retraced slightly with colourful shadows that sometimes whorl about them.

VIII. Recap

EMMANUEL IDUMA: “Memos on Nonfiction”

LYDIA DAVIS: “Thirty Recommendations for a Good Writing Habits”

ITALO CALVINO: “Why Read the Classics?”

J.M. COETZEE: “Homage”

TEJU COLE: Eight Letters to a Young Writer

T.S. ELIOT: “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

VIKTOR SHLOVSKY: “Art as Technique”

ZADIE SMITH: “Something to Do” ∆

I. Ruwi

On the track “BagBak,” off the album Big Fish Theory (2017), Vince Staples infuses so much Black joy in three small words, the longest of them only three letters long: “We on now.” The rap on the album is set to electronic house music, so that as Staples raps in between fast-paced thuds, the scene in your mind is that of a nightclub — the moshpit is red with party lights, and sweaty Black bodies swirl to the beat in unison, their party cups raised high up; they spit out the words of their MC’s sacrilegious poetry with a resounding spite, not even a single care left in their bodies; they, being Black, are of course angry at the state of things, but they pour away their anger into the dark of the night in exchange for joy.

As the beat roars like the sound of many waters, Staples raps, on the opening verse:

But, no. Staples is not praying. He is not scared, not tonight. The tone with which he raps the line in fact has an acquired affectation of mockery, if not a dare even. The police, an incongruous presence in a moshpit, has nothing on Staples. Tonight is for joy, and no uniform can spoil that.

“BagBak” is as conscious as joyous. Here, Staple mixes both pleasure and politics, protesting in bangers. I will highlight three lines. When he says, in those three lines,

the sentiment is home truth. Here, in Osogbo, I finalized my applications to MFAs, having started in Ibadan. One of the last schools I submitted to, Rice University, asked for a 300-word essay in response to the question: “How have you demonstrated an ability to engage in social justice practice? What are your areas of growth?” In response, I wrote:

Staples gets wickedly exciting when using repetition, which is a technique that best foregrounds his political dares:

By the time the track ends, the mood is charged by an octave of bodily protest:

II. Byei

Early on the track “On the Rvn” (featuring Offset), Young Thug raps: “If the opp come, I get to squeezin’ on the mop.” This is the first line of the chorus after the intro has told us that Young Thug is on the run. The line after that reiterates the intro, in fact: “I’m on the run, bitch, I just took off on the cops.” So early in the track and so much promise of violence already. There is already, in fact, the stuff of action films: car chase, cops, opps, fights, probably gun fights. “If the opp come, I get to squeezin’ on the mop.” If the enemies (rival gang?) come, Thug will get to mop the tiles and squeeze liquid (dirtied soapy water) out of the mop.

Here is the scene Thug builds in a rap line of eleven words. The apartment is clean, big, and painted white. The interior is well-furnished, all furniture and curtains all white. It is morning. Outside, the sky casts a low milky shade over the lawn. Thug, in a white roundneck over white shorts, is in the kitchen, eating cereal from a white bowl, his dreadlocs splaying across his wide back. Then suddenly, a screech eats into the tarred packing lot, and then a gunshot shatters a window. Thug ducks on reflex, a hand hitting the cereal bowl with the action, smashing it, the smashing sound mixing with the sound of shattering glass. Crouching behind the cabinet, Thug produces a pistol out of thin air. More gun shots, more shattered windows. But Thug stalls, luring his opps into sight and clean shooting range. When they steal into the sitting room, he takes them all out, all three of them, in a quick, clean move that involves ducks, runs, and zero aims.

Chest heaving slightly, darkness flaring in his nostrils, he goes over to the dead bodies, blood from their hearts pooling on the tiles. Thug checks if he knows the faces, collects IDs and cards. He deposits their guns and their cards into a garbage bag, and stows it away, and then contacts his nigga to come tow the dead men’s car away. Then he picks up his mopping stick and bucket and begins to clean, the thick hair of the stick licking blood off the tiles, water and soap and blood stinging his nose.

“If the opp come, I get to squeezin’ on the mop.” The line tells a story, but with no climax. It is a clean, elliptical narrative. What we get is the beginning (the enemies arriving) and the end (Thug mopping the tiles). This is rapping about violence without spilling a drop of blood. This line, from the first track on the EP, also called On the Rvn, connects to, and completes an arc with, the last track on the EP, “High” (featuring Elton John), when Thug says, on the latter track: “He said he bleeding, where the stain? (where is it?)”

III. Wereng

In “Wenski,” Zaylevelten raps, in the third line of verse two: “I don para, para don go promise my mama Bently.” He says it in a high note and with a dry tone. The picture the line conjures is familiar. In a lower-class home, where the breadwinner is probably a single mother, the boy child, in a moment of “paternal” clarity, understands fully, perhaps for the first time, the sacrifices the mother makes to put the family in shape. The boy child sees this, and weeps, having all this while repaid the mother’s selflessness with truancy at home and school and even at church, having shirked responsibilities and duties wherever she has demanded them of him.

Now he feels the weight on her shoulders and weeps bitterly. Sadness sags his own quaking shoulders so much that he promises to take the weight off her shoulders, promises his mother and, if the case, his siblings a better future, and promises as well to never have anything to do with his runaway father, if his father had run away and not passed. Then suddenly, he is angry at life, at everything: his father, his government, his community’s richest family.

When Zay says those words, the strain in his voice ferries his anger from those moments of paternal clarity, and yet conveys the humorous nature of outsize promises one makes in the throes of their emotions, those promises one likely regrets when emotions are hush and eyes are cleared, similar to those a wannabe flirt makes during the best sex of his life. For Zay, he probably laughs, when the mood warrants it, at his promise to his mother, but this promise is also the reason he cannot now stop grinding. This line is probably the funniest most serious line in his oeuvre and the year’s most relatable line in Nigerian rap for most of his listeners, at least. ∆

A friend introduced me to Coetzee in my first year in the university. His paperback copy of Disgrace got into my hands (it is hard to imagine he had given it without a fuss), and Coetzee entered my life thus. B., this friend, is a dogged fellow, willing to follow his admiration of a writer to a scary end. He was in love with Coetzee. He studied the man all day, all night. And then he started mimicking him. I, too, started to do so; B. influenced my taste and that of other friends and would-be writers in our circle.

The sentences are precise, pointedly sharp, so sharp they could leave blood lines on the finger tracing them.

Soon, I was capturing my fleeting life as a campus boy in third-person-styled journal entries the way the John (Maxwell) Coetzee character in Summertime does. Coetzee's (both of them) prose is flat and dry and is emptied of drama. The sentences are precise, pointedly sharp, so sharp they could leave blood lines on the finger tracing them. The plot is unclogged, and the pace is fast. This is why his novels always come out slim, each almost always a skeletal form of its full story.

It has been a while I understudied Coetzee — I read his latest novel The Pole and Other Stories last year — but, longing for his clean brand of prose fiction, I dipped into Youth two days ago and, later, Boyhood, which is now my current fiction read, this and Raymond Carver’s minimalist masterpiece What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, a skeletal short story collection. But while I paired both books, I realized I needed something more than the quick-fire prose of Coetzee and the unsalted fiction of Carver. I could not catch up with the former’s pace (I am in no mood for speed); the latter’s understated domestic drama, I could not settle down to.

For succor, I turned to Lydia Davis's nonfiction. I read and finished yesterday Into the Weeds, a book-length essay about why she writes, penned originally as a Windham-Campbell lecture. The patience of her sentences exudes like oud, and the sentences themselves (usually formal, long, and compounded, but always clear and shiny like varnished wood) ebb and bobble. They stream out like vegetable oil through the mouth of a jerry can. But her content, whether in an essay or in a short story, is far from what is conventionally interesting.

The book, Det uoppløselige episke element I Telemark I perioden 1591–1896 in Norwegian, is a box of a book, but Davis read it with zero prior knowledge of Norwegian and eventually taught herself the language.

The essay I started after Into the Weeds, for example, is called “Learning Bokmål by Reading Dag Solstad’s Telemark Novel.” It is not as long as Into the Weed but also very long. In the essay, Davis learns Norwegian — Bokmål is one of the two major textbook Norwegians, meaning “book language” — by reading the book of the essay title. (This is how James Wood describes the novel in a New Yorker essay on Solstad: “‘The Insoluble Epic Element in Telemark in the Years 1591-1896’ (published in 2013, it’s the novel with which Lydia Davis taught herself to read Norwegian).”) The book, Det uoppløselige episke element I Telemark I perioden 1591–1896 in Norwegian, is a box of a book, but Davis read it with zero prior knowledge of Norwegian and eventually taught herself the language. It was a laborious project, and her retelling of it, in the essay, is probably almost as tedious (especially to readers who are not interested in language, since she focuses solely on the linguistic aspect of the exercise, playing a Grammar professor), but what is irresistible is her calm, surefooted prose. One specific pleasure of reading the essay is to witness her thoughts collect in cool, unrushed clauses and, eventually, line up like pretty plastic ducks on her stream of consciousness.

This prose made me want to write. Soon, I browsed my mind for material and in no time saw that I could write a memoir, like Coetzee, of my childhood. I could fictionalize it, the way a journalist “fictionalizes” a profile. (Some of Coetzee's most obvious techniques of fictionalization are the present tense and the third-person pronoun.) But I am to write factually. This idea, apparently inspired by my recent reading of Coetzee, then led me to a journal I kept, in 2022, during the height of an ASUU strike, as a final-year student at Obafemi Awolowo University. This is perhaps a later entry, I told myself, into a multi-volume autobiographical book that can begin with this memoir, if I eventually get to write it. By 2022, I had shaken Coetzee off my prose, and so this later journal entries were different in style than the ones I penned in my second year, which, like those penned by Coetzee in Summertime, were collectively titled Notebook. For one, I wrote the newer entries in first person and allowed more color and dough into the prose.

But something else was different. The newer entries were live writing. I wrote and published them, instantly, after a few rounds of edits, on a blog. I had since deleted them, contended with what they had done in public. I am going to republish them here on Substack, week in, week out, to have them, if anything, in public once again. To have them, too, serve as a visible motivation to write the memoir. The entries, written over a period of four months, came to about 16,700 words and 28 entries in all. That is not much (I used to think the journal was bulkier and longer), but it needs not be either.

For an introduction, I have, one, overstayed my welcome, and, two, I have not introduced the journal at all, but I also need not, since they contain, unsurprisingly, journal entries, and as with journals, the reader knows to expect that the period journaled will reveal who the author was at the time, how they frequently become someone or something (if the change is not too slow), and how the seeds of who they are or might be at this moment might have been planted then.

One last thing: the title I have gone for is Schooldays, which is inspired, apparently, by Coetzee’s autobiographical three-piece book but also by his allegorical trilogy The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus, and The Death of Jesus, which I collectively call The Books of Jesus. For the sake of Substack, I have subtitled it Diary of a University Finalist, which is the original title but which I hate — both as an original title and as a subtitle — because it spells out the book, rather boringly. This is why I prefer one-word titles. I like the finality of a single word, if a good one (Boyhood, Summertime), yet I like its open-endedness: you never know what to expect, though there is plenty to infer. In fact, I am going to ditch the subtitle altogether. Better a short introductory note than a dour tagline. ∆

“I am sorry now, Rachel.” Senior James stood behind senior Rachel, who bent over a window ledge, his groin against her backside, which shot out and curved like the half of a bracket. “I've been tired these past few days. The sports and all,” he said.

“Before then nko?” Senior Rachel sing-sang.

“Before then? I had a lot on my mind. I still do. I think about my dad a lot.”

“But it doesn't mean you should keep avoiding me.” Senior Rachel pushed him back a bit with her behind. Senior James detached from her for a while. But he soon gently pressed himself into her.

“I’ve not been avoiding you, Rachel. You know what’s up,” he said.

“What’s up?” She paused, expecting a response. But when she got none, she said, “Well, you don’t have to avoid me just because I said you don’t last.”

“And?” he said, cutting her off.

“And what?”

“And that I'm not too big.”

“Omo, you take my words too seriously o.”

“I’m just saying. It’s not like I think you mean it.”

“Well, I don’t. So you don’t have to avoid me. OK? Ṣe you know you’re my baby, my big, baby boy?”

Senior James spread his hands, waiting for Senior Rachel to turn and enter his embrace. She did, and they hugged and kissed. When she squatted and reached for his belt, I turned and melted away.

I don’t like that Senior Rachel is always making Senior James beg her. Senior James is like my older brother. Back home in Ibadan, our families are family friends and parishioners. I am in All Souls Catholic College because of him. Senior James’s mummy is dead. And his daddy, a professor at the University of Ibadan, is mostly at the Staff Club, talking African Literature and getting drunk. When senior James finished primary school, his auntie, Auntie Mary, who is based in Ile-Ife, arranged for him to school in Ife. Auntie Mary said Senior James was a child and needed a mother figure. The family agreed he could board at All Souls. At least she could check up on him and show up for him, she said.

My parents always want me to be around Senior James. They think he'll be a good influence on me; he competes in interstate Maths and sports tournaments. So when I finished primary school two years ago, I was on first thought brought to All Souls. My mummy handed me over to Senior James. “Listen to your brother,” she said. And to Senior James she said, “Take care of your brother.”

Senior James always gifts me things like game consoles and crocs and helps with all things school. He lets me play eFootball on his Samsung A55. And I always want to inhale his fragrance that smells of foreign fruits and sleepy olive oil any chance I get. Even at times I catch myself thinking about him. It happens mostly during the afternoon Maths periods. Baba, our elderly Maths teacher, will scrawl questions under an underlined “Classwork” on the white board and start gazing through the window at nothing, solving the problems in his head. I’ll look at the equations tangling like bad noodles until I can no longer see them again. Then I will begin to see Senior James’s butterscotch face with the shiny, black buzz cut and the sharp square hairline. But I will snap out of it immediately I remember senior Rachel.

I wish Senior James will do something to stop begging Senior Rachel. He looks like a child when he begs her. He looks like a thieving child caught by the glare of a police torch. And there is always a small, wicked joy twinkling in the black her eyes when he’s begging her. She will wear the beginning of a smile, only releasing it when she's accepted his apology.

Today, Senior James and Senior Rachel are standing together behind the assembly, backing us and facing the school gate. They are catching late comers and asking them to kneel down, pick litters or frog jump to the assembly. But I know they are also talking. I look back at them from time to time. Senior Rachel has that little pair of twinklings in her eyes whenever she looks back or comes around to inspect the assembly lines. She had it, too, when she was earlier applauded on the assembly for representing the school at a state All Catholic Schools debate competition. She and her deputy speaker, Senior Ali, had come first and they were both called out to the assembly podium. Fr. Peter had shaken their hands and taken photographs with them as five hundred bright-eyed students, in rows of sky blue tops and on navy blue downs, kept on clapping. But Senior Rachel didn’t smile. Only the twinkling kept on flickering like tiny sun rays on glass, brightening her dark, smooth round face with a pointed, soft-looking jaw.

Now senior James has folded his arms across his chest and parted his long, sturdy legs a little, forming a tall caret. Senior Rachel is doing most of the talking. Her lips are moving rapidly. I am looking back so much that I can’t remember when we started saying the Daily Prayer for All Souls Catholic College. I only hear the one, big amen at the end. Then as the rows of students file into their respective classrooms, I see Senior Rachel walk away from Senior James. Senior James makes to follow her but stops as soon as he unfolds his arms and lifts a leg, glitching like a character from GTA.

My class has filed into JSS 3A, but we’re still unsettled when I see Senior James walk towards my desk. His steps are steady but not fierce. The class quietens down. All eyes glitter with respect and anxiety. Then one boy, Segun, says: “Good morning, Senior.” Senior James thumbs him up, and a few students echo the same greeting. Senior James half-mindedly smiles in response. The class heaves down a little, and the noise that quietened down earlier picks up volume again. All this while I am focusing on the svelte build of the approaching figure. He’s moving fast, but in my head he’s moving like a Bollywood actor dancing in slow motion. I don’t realize when he reaches my desk, bends down, his elbows resting on the desktop.

“How far?” he says, jolting me awake.

“Good morning, Senior James.”

“Good morning,” he says, swallowing. He dips a hand into his side pocket and produces a neatly-folded piece of paper, saying: “For Rachel. Give this to Rachel for me.” He slips it into my breast pocket. Then he looks at me as if to say something. But he changes his mind and pulls himself up and leaves.

I pat my pocket, trying to decide when best to give Senior Rachel the piece of paper. I could go now or during break time. I have barely made up my mind when I stand up and, looking at senior James’s receding head in the window, his hair curling at the crown, I bring out the piece of paper from my pocket, unfold and read. Senior James's big, fat ugly but legible words read, in capitals: I’M SORRY, RACHEL. I’LL MAKE IT UP TO YOU. PLEASE LET’S MEET AT RETRO BASH DURING SIESTA. I stand up and make for the door. I start to fold the paper back. I fold it into four, forming a new, soft rectangle. Then I stop at the doorway and tear up the message, and throw the shredded pieces into the plastic dustbin idling away in the corner. The dustbin has just been emptied, but there are a few pen and pencil nylon wrappings and squeezed pieces of paper hastily thrown into it this morning. The shredded pieces whirl in the air and settle into the dustbin, nestling within the nylon wrappings and squeezed pieces of paper. ∆

My girlfriend works at Almond Bank. She’d attended to me when I went to upgrade my account six months ago. I saved her number with Almond because I collected it in a hurry and was too stunned and happy to ask for her name. We started dating after two months of meeting, but I haven’t changed the name. She says she finds it cute. She finds many things about me cute. She calls me cutie or baby or babe. She says I have baby hair. She says I smell like a baby. I told her I use Cussons baby oil. But she says it’s not about the oil. She says I really smell like a baby. And she says she likes my voice. She says it’s calm and relaxing.

My girlfriend won’t have sex with me, but she always touches herself to my voice. The first time she did she said on WhatsApp:

“Can I wank to your voice?”

I paused, knitting my brows. Then I texted:

“Do you want to?”

“Ofc I want to.”

I called on WhatsApp.

“You’re so eager. It’s cute,” she said when she picked. I heard her stand up from the bed. Next I heard the wardrobe open and close. It was in the quick of an April night, and she was at home. I heard her settle back into the bed. She said to keep speaking. I kept speaking, saying things I saw us doing together in the nearest future. I could by now hear her soft purrs and the vigorous movement of her hand. I couldn’t tell if it was a dildo or just her fingers. She was making sounds, and her voice was thinning out.

My girlfriend talks about her ex-lovers all the time. And whenever she does I look at her with a dampness in my eyes. But she doesn’t seem to notice. She’ll talk about Bodunrin’s spotless mocha-brown skin and his fine, fine dreadlocks. Once she said his dick is really, really big. And then she’ll talk about Wemimo’s soft palm and sinuous fingers and how oily and moist those fingers are whenever Wemimo puts them inside of her. She says Wemimo knows where best to touch. I don’t like that she talks about her ex-lovers in the present tense as if they are still doing what they used to do to each other. But I don’t complain. She will talk about how much the movie Challengers reminds her of her last relationship. She says I should see it. She says that’s the best I can come to understanding their relationship. She says Tashi reminds her of the person she was in the relationship. Actually she somehow looks like Zendaya, who played Tashi. Though she’s very dark, she has Zendaya’s svelte body and her hollow face. I will listen even though I have a lot to ask her about, ask of her. I will listen, saying nothing, asking nothing.

Today, my girlfriend’s telling me how weak her period has made her. It’s a Monday, but she’s called in sick at work. We’re on a WhatsApp call.

“Babe, this is unbearable,” she says.

I say nothing, not even sorry.

“I feel like I’m dying. Urgh. Well, thank God I’m speaking with you. Imagine life without you. Babe, don’t leave me, you hear?”

I say nothing. I let her talk. I listen. I’m sitting on the bed, laptop opened between my spread-out legs, my back against the headboard. My AirPods are plugged, and my phone, an XR, is on the laptop keyboard. Low but steady, her voice pours into my ears.

“What are you healing from?” I say.

“Hun?” She says.

“You’re healing from your last relationship. So what is it you are healing from?”

“Babe, not now, please.”

“When, if not now?”

“Babe, abeg now.”

“OK. But when do we get to fuck?”

“Babe?”

“When do we get to fuck?”

“I don’t know where this is coming from, babe. But soon. We’ll be together soon. We’ve talked about this many times. Very soon, we’ll be together.”

“Hmm,” I say and go quiet.

“Babe, we shouldn’t be doing this right now. Not now, please. OK?” she says.

Silence. Then she says, with a whimper, “Babe, let me take some ibuprofen. Give me a second. Don’t cut the call o. Just hold on.”

I hear her pull herself off the bed. Faintly I hear the fridge open and close. I think she wants to take the tablet with cold water, but I don’t tell her to stop like I always do.

“Hi, babe,” she says when she’s taken the drug. “Did you miss me?”

I say nothing, not even yeah. But she goes on: “I have this fantasy of going to work in Tashi’s sport jersey. OMG, I still have some of Wemimo’s sportswear here. I think I will look hot in them.”

I say nothing. I only minimize the artist interview I’m working on on my laptop. I log into my Sflix.tv account and start playing Challengers. I reach for my phone and IG Zendaya. Then I collect myself from the bed and go for my Fun Time lubricant in the wardrobe. I get back into the bed, reach for my phone, and start scrolling through Zendaya’s pictures. The movie is on low volume so that I still hear my girlfriend. And like that. With my girlfriend’s voice in my ears, Zendaya’s pictures in my face, a throuple making out in my front, I press some lubricant into my palm. ∆

Over the past couple years, I have formed the habit of posting on WhatsApp, from time to time, in a paragraph, the impression a book or a film I’d just finished has on me. I post a screengrab of the film’s profile on Letterboxd, showing the film poster, the logline, and the director’s byline or, if a book, a screengrab of its Goodreads profile, which is basically the book cover, and then I caption that with a paragraph. I don’t know exactly what the word or character limit of a WhatsApp caption is — I couldn’t get a definite answer on Google, but my longest so far, a paragraph on Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), which I had to cut short a few times before it stayed within limit, is 185 words and 1023 characters — yet I enjoy the frustrations of killing words so that the weight of the paragraph can float. Most of the times, if not all, the paragraph, its fluff cut off, becomes tighter, its energy more charged.

The ephemerality of those statuses, too, give them — false or not, I do not know — a sense of urgency. After 24 hours, they vanish, lost to the transience of life, their disappearance echoing the effect of their brief existence, perhaps. But because of this, also, I do not have many of them anymore. It took a while before I started copying them in my notebook. Even then, I am sometimes too lazy or too forgetful to paste them. And I have also never liked the idea of posting public reviews on apps like Letterboxd or Goodreads. If I had, the apps would have kept those paragraphs for me.

In the spirit of showing a bigger audience than my status viewers while still bypassing the Letterboxd or Goodreads route, I have decided to publish a selection of these paragraphs here on Substack. The ones below are all on books, and are eight in all. (I will publish a selection of those on films later.) I call them micro essays because I don’t like the ring of “micro reviews.” When I asked the internet, what I saw is different from what I have here. Besides, they are supposed to be “impressions” and not reviews even when they read like one, and indeed they do, because I have to rate them (on a scale of five stars), since I archive them on such social cataloging apps. Here, then:

Collected Plays 2 (The Lion and the Jewel; Kongi’s Harvest; The Trials of Brother Jero; Jero’s Metamorphosis; Madmen and Specialist) by Wole Soyinka

Soyinka is a first-rate playwright. He proved his genius again and again in plays after plays that have become classics or canonized. His grasp of the dramatic form is impeccable: flawlessly-spun webs of plots, characters with deep affect and complex humanities, etc. This collection contains five of his most comic plays, some farcical, some satirical, most both. However, the last of them, “Madmen and Specialists,” though comic on the surface, is dipped into a deep waft of sadness. It is my least favorite: I found it too self-absorbed. Overall, Soyinka, throughout the plays, does what Achebe said his generation would do with English: “unheard of things.” Soyinka’s English with a Yoruba flair is poetry, a most accurate display of the language’s sarcastic bent and, perhaps, its music. A true grasp of its worldview.

Questions of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop

I always feel like a cheat when I finish a book of poems. Lengthwise, the reading feels too easy, too cheap. No matter. Poetry has so much depth that plenty pages become excess. Here, in Bishop’s collection, you find gems like the title poem, which, together with Warsan Shire’s “Home” and C.P. Cavafy’s “The City,” is almost the first thing I think of upon entering a new place or when I think of travels. Ted Kooser said a good poem changes the world around you; you read a poem about a mouse and you never again look at mice the same way. There are poems here that alter your perception of the world, of life: poems about sandpipers, dirty filling stations, burglars in the hills of Rio de Janeiro. “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” asks Bishop in the title poem. “What childishness,” she continues, “is it that while there’s a breath of life/in our bodies, we are determined to rush/to see the sun the other way around?” Read this book today, and see beauty the other way around.

Nollywood by Jonathan Haynes

A long walk to freedom. Pardon the joke. Only mostly unknown history and unfamiliar academic field — Nollywood, as a history of a nation’s popular art and as a scholarly field, is, for me, both at once — makes the read somewhat slow. Regardless, it’s worth it. I’ve mostly approached films through their formal affect, feeling for structure to get at the heart of the story: I seek out the shape to tell the substance. But I’m growing weary, lately, of this approach. This is the state in which I read Haynes’ essential book. The obvious question would be: do we really need to eke out genres claimed to be Nollywood-specific and call them a “local” name that captures their specificity? For contexts, this happens in almost every culture. Anyway, I don’t know. However, these genres, though very well examples of (“glocal”) film genres, are in fact given their names by the Nollywood audience and marketers-cum-pirates. Above all, this is prolly the best monograph, so far, on Nollywood from a genre approach (or not).

Between Starshine and Clay by Sarah Ladipo-Manyika

Could easily have been a fiver, but a bit of fangirling (think Wole Soyinka and Michelle Obama chapters) sadly cost me a star. Most of the interviews, twelve in all, find me concerned, inspired, and full of admiration for the big people interviewed and written about. With the final chapter, a travelog about the coldest continent on earth, the book ends as heartwarming, the final piece itself ending with the warmest of codas about the coldest of trips.

Better Never Than Late by Chika Unigwe

Portraits of Nigerian immigrants in Belgium: humane, intimate. The stories are interconnected, and a couple’s living room, where lavish meals are shared with friends and community, provides a physical centerpiece — a Nigerian country the size of a living room buried in the cold of Europe. Here, we witness the hardships they face for choosing to leave for Europe but also the hurts they inflict on their hosts — the fake white wives, that is. For me, the journey isn’t into Europe but into selfhood, in a search to find chipped and lost parts or, at least, to realize the loss. But the story elements of some of the pieces aren’t optimally arranged, and there is a story whose material wasn’t explored enough: “The Transfiguration of Rapu.” The former is worse: some critical details or crucial chinks of the past or — even — vital characters pop out of no where to rescue the plot, like cats out of a hat. Regardless, Unigwe’s is a vital read. A sad, slim book of stories that’ll have a crackling effect on its target readers.

Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff

A decent survey of Wolff’s lifetime stories. A book of stories is always conflicting: you can’t love all the stories; you can’t hate all the stories — at least not equally. Out of 31 pieces, most of which are of average length or just long, those I did not so much like struggle to reach two or three in number. But I know deep down that they, too, like the rest of the stories, work. For me, it’s always the deep, exact clarity of a Wolff story, the real of the fiction effectively real. A Wolff story, even if up to a hundred pages, always remains a story: something small but whole, a reality curled up in paragraphs. Moreover, I am awed by the range and depth of his subjects. He can write a story about anything, and he can write it well.

The Things Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

As if to prepare myself for what to come, I have been re/reading CNA’s shorter works since the buzz around Dream Count. Perhaps I will take on the three novels before reading the latest book. But there’s only so little time in someone’s life. Anyway, I think of Chimamanda’s stories as miniature novels. She’s said, jokingly, that she’s incapable of writing short novels. She just might be incapable of writing short stories that are indeed short. And I’m not talking about length or volume; quality or feel might just capture that. Her stories are so filled up with backstories, with the past; with, in fact, the future; with characters stuffed fat with lifelikeness. This, I have confirmed on reading this book of stories for the nth time. Plus, all good things about CNA’s fiction: the carefully-molded prose, the care lavished on her characters, the weight of history sizzling like heated fat inside the prose, etc., etc.

The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi

Formal excellence; emotional accuracy; impeccable awareness of the weight of its own delicate subjects; clean, precise language, sharp as a knife, clear as milk. Prose poetry at its best. One of the very best collections, if not the best, I’ve read all year. Definitely a fiver. ∆

He’s planned to read her during their date today to see if a relationship with her is workable. He's no fool. He knows. He knows how overly religious every fine lady from Obafemi Awolowo University is and how hectic it is for someone like himself to date them. He still hurts from his last relationship, which ended more than a year ago. The girlfriend had just become a student fellowship co-pastor, and she wanted for them to become a God-fearing couple. Though he was attending the same fellowship she was co-pastoring, he wasn’t convinced that there was a God. He told her he couldn’t bring himself to believe or do the stuff in the Bible anymore. She asked why he couldn’t say he was a bloody atheist from the onset. She broke up with him, and he stopped attending the fellowship. So, today, he'll read the new lady, who’s a Muslim.

They meet at Orente Grills on campus. By ten. It’s a chilly Tuesday morning, and sweater-wearing students still rub their palms together as they order Orente special coffees. They, too, order theirs, hers with a cube of sugar, his with a spoon of honey. They sit on stools, sipping coffees, making small talk, the steam rising like smoke from cigarettes. Afterwards they dump their empty cups in the bin and make a second order. Donuts for her, sprinkles of sugar on the backs. Hot dogs for him, zigzagging ketchup squeezed on the skins. Two each. Plus a disposable cup of milkshake each. She pays with her card, folds the receipt into her pause. She’s called this her treat. Orders in hands, they step out of the glass door and sit on the park bench inches away from the door.

Sitting, she says, “You don’t like sugar, do you?”

“Why would I eat sugar when I have you here?” he says with a shrug. She giggles, a tear of donut in mouth.

The breeze has picked up. Coldly it licks their faces. His dark face has whitened and, she, she's caught harmattan in her wig. He sips from his straw as he twists and untwists his overgrown stubble. Then his hand raises to touch his 8-inch hair he’s left unbraided for a long while now.

“I like your hair,” she says, stopping him.

“I should have braided it sef.”

“Oh, it’s not bad like this. I even thought you were freeforming this time.”

“No, I’m not.”

“I think you should.”

“Really? I don’t think I’d like it.”

They’re both halfway through their milkshakes. And they’ve each finished one piece of their snack.

This is the first time they’re hanging out since nearly half a year when they met at the English departmental lobby, on a queue during the departmental excos elections. He’d looked long at her before he realized her face matched the one on the lost student ID card he’d found and carried in his wallet for days. She thanked him and collected his number, playfully promising him one.

They couldn’t get past general questions on WhatsApp at first. What was her name again, his name? Oh, she was a Muslim? Couldn’t have imagined. Him? Not so much a church goer. Of course, same course, same department; different classes, different programs. He was reading Language, 400L, he said. She, she said, Literature, 300L. And then they turned to each other’s status viewers. She was mostly posting memes and her pictures, her sun-kissed, iPhone-snapped face shining like porcelain, skin soft like peace. He told a friend in a voice note that a sure face card who is a meme freak couldn’t interest him as much. What does she bring to the table?

They have in fact not chatted until about two weeks back when he needed Aki & Pawpaw memes for his final-year project proposal (the professor who supervised him had given him the topic, much to his chagrin), which is also when he cut off the lady from his class everybody thought he would date for reasons he cannot now pinpoint. She told him not to worry. She’d got plenty meme plugs. That was it. For the first week they chatted late into the night. They slept off to each other’s texts and woke up to each other’s texts, backs of phones still warm, batteries almost dead, the world a purring device.

Soon they’d fixed a date for today – here.

“You don’t take beer,” he says. “I'm not sure I asked why.”

“It’s bitter,” she says.

“LOL. Imagine. I was thinking you’d say something like you’re allergic.”

“I’m not o,” she says, chuckling.

“In my head I thought we’d take beer and pepper soup at New Buka until you said we should meet here.”

“You don’t like here?”

“I’m with you. That’s all that matters.”

“That’s too much sweet mouth for someone who doesn’t take sugar,” she says, giggling.

They drink in silence. They’ve by now finished their snack. His skin toughens as the breeze quickens. He dips a hand in his cargo shorts pocket and produces his phone. He checks the time, places the phone face-down beside him, begins to circle the back with the tip of his forefinger. Then he stops, rubs his palms together, says:

“Have you seen Challengers?”

“Hun?”

“The movie, the one Zendaya’s in. Have you seen it?”

“I’ve seen it.”

“The make-out is weird. Two boys and a girl.”

“Oh, I actually haven’t thought much about the film.”

“I see.”

“Is it a movie you can see again?”

“I don’t know, honestly.”

Silence. Then he says:

“You think locs will fit me?”

“It will, actually.”

“Will you like it?”

“Well, it’ll be fine on you.”

“So you’ll like it?”

“Yes, I will.”

Silence. She’s sipping from her straw, he’s looking into space. She should’ve gone. She has a class by twelve. It’s well past twelve now. But he knows they’re both ignoring time, shaming physics. And so he sits there, inhaling her presence. ∆

What if you get to live today forever? No care can be given to the morrow, no regret can be carried over from the previous day, because they both do not matter. All that does is this day, which you will live on repeatedly. The clock clicks at six in the morning, the radio comes on, the morning warms up for a blizzard. What if, like this, you live in the middle of a cosmic glitch and the day is frozen, doomed to repeat itself for life, the world forever stuck in your perspective?

This is what happens to Phil Connors (Bill Murray), the weatherman at the center of the film Groundhog Day (1993; directed by Harold Ramis). Grumbling, the narcissistic TV man leaves Pittsburgh with his producer, the newly employed Rita (Annie MacDowell), and cameraman Larry (Chris Elliott) for Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to cover the Groundhog Day festivities, in which Punxsutawney Phil, a groundhog, predicts the end of winter: if it sees its own shadow, six more weeks of winter; if not, an early spring. In short, he is going to spend a day he hates in a place he hates, covering an event he hates around a people he hates. But then he falls into a loop and lives that day over and over.

On the first day, he is unaware, as we are. On the second day, he thinks he’s experiencing a déjà vu. (Mrs. Lancaster, the elderly waitress at his breakfast-and-bed, tells Phil, when he asks if she ever has déjà vu, that she will check with the kitchen.) By the evening of the fourth day and the morning of the fifth, when he realizes he is trapped in a time loop but thinks it not too seriously yet, he plays into his role, childlike mischief rustling through his balding hair. By the fifty-seventh minute into the film, after a series of carefully-curated romantic experiences with Rita leads to a sound slap in every version of the day (“That’s for making me care about you,” she says after the first slap), a sadness descends upon him, now desperate to break out of the loop — a sadness so intense we acquire it.

This phase comes before the suicidal spree. Knowingly, he has no fear dying: he steals the groundhog and, driving, plunges the truck off a cliff, the vehicle landing on its own roof, blowing up; he steps into a bath and drags a plugged toaster into the water, electrocuting himself, cutting the light off at his lodge, his face all the while a spreadsheet of frustration; he jumps off the roof of The Pennsylvania Hotel building, batman-like, falling in style into an inconsequential death, his coats flapping, his muffler flailing. “I didn’t just survive a wreck,” he tells Rita at a restaurant in one version of the day, spitting disbelief on her face, horror on the waitress’. “I wasn’t just blown up. I have been stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted, and burned.” More meaningfully, he tells her yet again, back in his room: “I have killed myself so many times I don’t even exist anymore.”

What he feels at this point is not sadness. Sadness may have descended upon him like snow, but he feels within him a genuinely humane confusion at existence or the absence of it. He feels what we all feel from time to time: existential dread. This is the success of the film as a piece of absurdist art. Not the depiction, though great enough in itself; but the stirring of the dread within us, making us to doubly live it, inside of us and on a screen: an experience that re-alerts us to life itself. Or lack of it.

The phase that comes after this — as indicated in the little line he tells Rita in his room — is the one of change. He replies with poetry, smiling, when the gentleman at the top of the stairs asks, as he always does in every version of the day, if Phil is off to see the groundhog; he empties his pocket to the elderly beggar he meets every morning at the street corner; he brings a tray of coffee for his co-workers; he sculpts an angel from ice with a saw, excited Countians his audience; he plays the piano unbelievably beautifully; he references Chekhov while reporting, the crowd around him a puff of held breath away from death; he becomes a county hero, loved by all, saving lives: a man from being choked to death on a piece of meat; an elderly man from a fatal cold; a trio of old ladies from flat tire; a child from a tree, who never says thank you.

In the phase after this — not so distinguishable from the last one — he allows himself fall in love with Rita. In the evening in one of the versions of the day, in a park filled with snow, he snow-sculpts Rita’s bust. When he turns the face to Rita (to us), we catch an unutterable desire in the pupilless eyes, in the arcs of the eye brows, in the hair spilling down the head, like an angel’s. But this desire is not that of the sculpted; it is the sculptor’s. The artist, feelings bursting loose out of his fingertips, a lick of a sweet future trapped under his nails, is desiring the art. “How could you do that?” asks Rita. “I know your face so well I could have done it with my eyes closed,” he says. “It’s lovely,” says Rita, “I don’t know what to say.” “I do,” he says. “No matter what happens tomorrow or for the rest of my life, I’m happy now, because I love you.” “I think I’m happy, too,” says Rita.

While in Osogbo, I came to Ibadan to attend an exhibition and to pick up my recorder for an interview I was to have. On my way back to Osogbo, three days later, I saw some of Groundhog Day on my phone in the bus and finished it off one or two days later, on my sister’s couch. But on my second watch, now familiar with what to expect, I caught something else in the film.

Four times in the movie, for a few seconds each time, he is shown: at 17:14; at 46:31; at 46:56; and at 48:09. The only thing he says throughout the film, though thrice, in three different iterations of the same day, the third time off-screen, is a three-word question: “For you, miss?” When he utters it the third time, off-screen, had he been shown, he would have been shown five times in the film.

He works, in a black tie and a dark green waist coat over white long sleeves and black pants, at The Pennsylvania Hotel, where Phil catches Rita on some evenings, and he is shown, all four times, there. Softly, he, once while cleaning a glass cup, turns his face, briefly but coolly, to Phil and Rita (the former impressing the latter), and, shaking his head calmly, smiles a sweet, gentle smile.

He is tall, he is elderly, his beard is greying, he has a balding low crop of hair, the same length as his beard, and his waiter uniform fits well — maybe if he was at the center of this universe, he would have been a model, but he is not. Played by John M. Watson Sr., he is as good as the only Black man in the film, and he is my punctum, a small tear in the film’s concern. In a loop, his four minutes (if we exaggerate his appearances to a minute each) are too infinitesimally small to be consequential to the veins of the film, but he is to me a break in transmission of whiteness, a tiny break but a break all the same — a black presence in a white world.

A lot of times — if not most — it is easy, often subconsciously so, to reduce Black bodies to their struggles: African Americans, for one, are seen as a shorthand for racism, and Africans as relics of colonialism and as peoples marked by the brunts of failed government. They are reduced, too, to stereotypes which are a direct consequence of their struggles. Nigerians are resilient and adaptable, but such qualities came at the cost of the government’s failure to provide for its citizens’ basic needs: in lieu of 24-hour light, for example, they culled light, even with unbearable petrol and diesel prices, out of their generators; the news of people cooking, in the last years of the last century, on beverage tins stuffed with wood shavings when they had no money to buy kerosene, during the Abacha regime, still break out of the past once in a while. In the UK, an African-sounding name, I read in a Louis Henry Gates Jr. interview, could mean no job for the bearer when their file is being considered for employment. Yet Black people, some of the few in there, succeed in the corporate world, excellently and beyond. They, however, probably would not have to work as twice as everybody and get half the credit if there wasn’t an unfavorable system to beat. Both reductions, worst of all, often strip the individuals of their humanly personal struggles, and dissolve them into the collective struggles their kind face.

This is not to say that people do not suffer racism or were not colonized or are not facing the havoc of a heartless government, but that these people who go through all these are not what they go through but people going through terrible things. Struggles need to be acknowledged, but not at the expense of humanity. This is the root of the struggles in the first place: it’s easier to break people whose full humanity has not been acknowledged, easier to undress them of their human beingness. It is easier, also, perhaps, to break a race or a group, who can easily be thought of as a stat, than an individual whose face can be beheld. James Baldwin, edited: “No one, after all, can be seen or acknowledged whose human weight and complexity cannot be, or has not been, admitted.” (“Seen or acknowledged” mine.)

There are a couple of other Black people in the film, dotting the story with their flitting, almost-invisible presence: the Black man, young, dressed for snow, in green pants and black beanie, showing up at about 12:13, entering Gobbler’s Knob, where Punxsutawney Phil predicts the weather; another, visibly older, at the same Gobbler’s Knob, at 14:32, also dressed for snow, in grey hoodie with furry cap, showing up his grey-haired face in the crowd, a Black face in a sea of white; another at 14:40, same place, at the edge of the frame, in glasses, before stealing out of view a second later; the woman at 14:46, in the same crowd, in red lipstick, whitish earrings, and long, flowing hair. There are others who are nondescript or vague: the back view of a possibly young man, at 5:47, hooded, walking springily, a swag in his gait, that I suspect to be Black; another suspect or two or three at 6:08, possibly elderly. There are perhaps others, too, who might have been lost in the grain.

The elderly waiter, then, is the only Black man whose presence is legible, who enjoys repeated showings, no matter how small the count. He is almost as good as the only Black man in this white film, in this white county. Hence, the temptation to reduce him to his struggles or to stereotypes (Zora Neale Hurston: “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background”), or, more likely because he is a minor character in a movie, the urge to spend him no thought, but I held back, and asked myself, instead of turning him into a worm in a quicksand: why this job? What universe is the center of? What about his family? What time loop is he in? how to put a smile on his face? What day does he hate, what place, what people, what occasion? What part of his past makes him cry in the night? Is he gay? Does he sing at his local church, if he has one? How brown are his eyes?

And so while Phil runs amok in his self-centered white bubble, the film running time jerks at the points of this dark-skinned human being’s appearances, and those four dots of time, in an ocean of infinity, are enough for me to behold his face and imagine the full glory of his humanity. For me, his appearances are the film’s highlight. ∆

On Tuesday, July 22, I stepped into the multipurpose dance space at New Culture Studio, Mokola, Ibadan, by 12:30pm. I was there for Portrait of an Artist as a G***l, Amaka Obioma’s multimedia exhibition, an eclectic series of works across video, photography, beadwork, object art, poetry, and body art. Straight at the end of my vision, as I darkened the doorway, were two people: a guy and a lady. They sat on wooden chairs, at the end of the space, their backs to the doorway, talking. The voice, though low-pitched, reverberated in the studio. The space is silent but for them. The only other sound is that of an industrial generator going on somewhere in the neighborhood. The space is however silent enough to feel sacred. From my distance, I bowed to them in greeting. They replied. I looked around. There were pictures, framed black, on the wall. At a corner, on a stool, a chair in front of it, was a small retro Sharp TV and a Samsung DVD player. Not far from it, on the wall right of it, hung a circular mirror, synthetic stems of leaves around it like a garland.

Just then I saw the exhibiting artist, Amaka Obioma. The other artist, Cheryl, the body artist who is featured in the photographs and in a final piece of video art, was not yet around. Obioma sat on a studio bench against the back wall, obscured from the doorway, busy with her phone. I asked if I was not too early or too late. She said I was on time. But I had come too late. The show began three days ago, on Sunday, July 20; today was the last day. The silence told me most people had come on the opening day and on the second day. Later, I overheard Obioma and Cheryl say exactly that. By the time I would leave, a number of people would come in, too, one after the other. Soon, Obioma asked if I would just look around at the works, and I did.

The Nigerian artist Amaka Obioma is one of the new wave of young performance artists from Ibadan, some of whom started performing in October, 2022, after a workshop by the world-renowned veteran performance artist, Jelili Atiku. In person, Obioma has an easy air about her and a big smile that makes her suspecting stares friendlier. But when she’s performing, she is changed. Though still calm, she acquires a focused, deeply introspective look, her body moving through her gestures with a seamless rhythm, a self-possessed aura enveloping her. Later, during an after-party at an open field bar after the exhibition, we got into a conversation and she said, unprompted, that she enters a different mode when performing. “I become possessed,” she said.

A multimedia artist, Obioma’s practice, which, in addition to performance, includes film, photography, and fashion, is grounded in ideas such as viscerality, materiality, spirituality, ecology, and collaboration. She explores transcendentalism, human connection, feminist concepts, and the corporeal body as art. The same intensity, awareness of her African heritage in her choice of costumes and props, her unorthodox approach to arts, that have characterized her projects can be seen in the new show. Some of her reoccurring symbols such as screens and mirrors (she frequently explores themes of identity: personal, spiritual, or artistic) reappear here, too.

I answered Obioma’s request that I view the pieces. I started from the pieces on the wall against which she had placed her back. To her right, some feet away, were beads patterned into decorative shapes. They were hung on nails directly placed atop a studio bench like the one she sat on. On the bench are more photographs slipped into protective glasses, sheets of poetry, a sheet of the artist statement, shirt buttons, some facing down, some up, and plastic sea shells placed in between. I started with the artist statement. It is epigraphed by a Frida Kahlo quote: “I am my own muse. The subject I know best.” The show is faithful to the quote. While the viscerality here is not as painful as it is in Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, it aspires to the force of Khalo’s corporeal work and is effective nonetheless. The quote remains, however, the perfect introduction to the show, an encapsulation of the experience about to be had.

The photographs feature the body of a lady in nature, sometimes from the back, sometimes from the front. She’s in black briefs, and a weightless piece of fabric, the yellow of an egg yolk, is tied around her chest, the knot at her back, its two ends long like a muffler. The head is crowned with dreadlocks of average length. The body is wired with beads, the arms, the belly, the neck. In every picture, the face is not captured. We could see the back of the head, but never the face, in full or in profile. This subject is performed by Cheryl, the body artist. (She performs, too, in the short piece of video art that is played for viewers after they are done engaging with the other pieces – a performance so surefooted and so grounded in the idea behind the show.)

This mindful depiction of the body is one of the first things that stood out in the show. (Obioma took the photographs: the dour, tinged sheen over their surface, which reflects the mood of the show, attests to Obioma’s confidence and inclinations to multiple mediums.) The body has been centered, the subject has been scantily dressed, ample flesh has been shown – the belly, the arms, the thighs, the legs – yet the body has not been sexualized. This is so because Amaka has brilliantly employed beadwork. The beads on the body and the beaded patterns hung on the wall communicate this sense of self-adornment and self-aware elegance. They show us a body that is self-contained, a body made of, as one of the poems declares, “dust and magic, deep deep poetry.” They communicate a self-possession that isn’t self-indulgence: a self at home in its body.

The short video reinforces that case. In it, a youthful body – Cheryl’s – is alone in nature, chirpings of birds in the air, greens everywhere, leaves and trees. For a while, she circles a tree. Her steppings are elegant. A knee goes before the other. The thighs, long and sinuous, as if sculpted by Modigliani, weave themselves into motion. The waist swirls. Leaves crush under her feet. Birds chirp up above. Sometimes, she’s sat on the ground, striking some yoga-like postures, the bones on her back like pearls. The highlight of the video comes at about half-way through. At that point, she sits, and the camera fixes its gaze on the center of her head. The rest of her body, her shoulders, her back, becomes a secondary focus. Then the dizziness starts. Her neck, her head, her dreadlocks, swirl sideways, slowly, for several seconds, as if in a drunken state. She is enchanted, and she is enchanting. At first I thought the moment was cameraed in slow motion. But it wasn’t: Cheryl was acting. Later, Cheryl explained she was improvising. She was, she said, just being in the moment. She was being present. That single moment is both an embodiment of the rest of the video and Cheryl’s artistic sensibilities: visceral, grounded, graceful. The video is an emphatic final punctuation mark of the show. Cherly’s is a piece of raw and confident art performance.

All this still holds true despite the fact that there was a power cut, and I could not therefore see the video on the TV set. I saw it, instead, on Obioma’s phone. When she explained I should have watched the video on the TV if not for the power cut, she asked if, for me, the video tied everything together. “Absolutely, absolutely,” I said, a big smile on my face.

The video was shot by Obioma. She wrote the poems, too. In 2022, she told me. I asked if she had printed them as they were. She said she did. She had not edited them. I could see that. You could easily question the quality of the poetry. The untitled poems, if alone, would have been weak, in fact. But here is a multimedia, multidisciplinary show in which every form contributes to the total affect of the experience. Hence, the show makes the poems strong. The poetry is indeed a key piece of the show. Some of the poems are confessional, declaring the persona’s love for someone. They are full of vulnerability. They air the emotional life of the persona. This is a brilliant counterpoint to the central idea. It balances the centering of the physical body (one half of a selfhood) with its emotional state of being (the other half of a selfhood). The cosmic athomeness that the video embodies had earlier been signaled to me while I read the poems. In one, the persona answers a self-posed question thus: “I am incarnate reimagined/Made of ultimate matter/Derived of past purpose…Lodestars of its beginnings…” Similarly, the sea shells and the shirt buttons placed in between the sheets of poetry and glass-plated photographs, Obioma explained, represent materiality. They are the things in the world. Their presence counterbalances the ephemeral nature of the body or performance art.

Surprisingly, the collaborative approach to capturing self-hood in a show titled Portrait of an Artist as a G***l proves to be fruitful. The choice to make the photographs bear no face and the video contain no face is one of the most informed decisions of the show. The effect is that what is being represented here is not a body but the body. It is an ideal self-hood, an ideal bodily beingness. Often, a face is a spreadsheet of emotions. A lift of a lip, a blink of an eye, and an emotion is signaled. Including a face in the photographs and video, if the right face is not made, might have come in the way of the intended mood and tone of the show. In the end, the two artists have it both ways. The show is both a portrayal of an ideal self-hood and also their joint portraits. Cheryl, the performer, supplies the bodiliness; Obioma, the poet, supplies the emotionalities.

The way the pieces have been arranged, the garlanded mirror is what you come to before you watch the video. When I came to the mirror, I did not look. I said, a smile on my face, “What about the people who have a phobia for their own image?” Obioma smiled back, said some people that have come to see the show said they could not look at themselves in the mirror. In retrospect, that moment sealed my disposition to the mirror: it should have been placed chest or body level, not face level. After all, the show is concerned with the corporeal body, not face. This, however, does not dull the enchantment of the show.

Portrait of an Artist as a G***l is a powerful experience, an art of artists in sync in spirit and in vision. Their shared vision enriched the show and spoke of the good fruits of an informed collaborative effort. Every piece of art speaks a unique language. A good piece, therefore, must speak its own language lucidly and, beyond that, must make its viewers understand it but must not teach the viewers how to speak it. Mood must be felt, not spelt out. Emotions should touch, not overwhelm. This was how I felt standing among the pieces of art. I felt, I was touched, I knew. For the thirty or so minutes I spent in the space, I was suspended in the essence of the show, and I communed with my inner self, my selfhood washed up from my psych, brought ashore, as if by the wave, like a sea shell. ∆

Portrait of an Artist as a G***l at New Culture Studio, Ibadan, 20-22 July, 2025

Originality is indeed the summation of all we have seen before but not together. Davis’ early-days influences explain her self-only approach to fiction. When Davis began writing, she was writing conventional narrative short stories. But she struggled with the form. She had little joy and pleasure writing them. They were hectic and sometimes took years to finish. It might not have helped that both of her parents were writers who published conventional short stories in The New Yorker. But she also had the presupposition that if one wanted to be a writer, the choice was between prose and poetry and, if prose, between short stories and novels.

Then, gradually, the subjects of her stories became less conventional, though she continued to write the formally conventional short stories, which she did for several years more, until, at 26, she read a collection of stories by the American prose poet Russell Edson. The collection is titled The Very Thing That Happens. The stories thereof, like most Edson’s stories, are brief, funny, absurd. They feature people and animals and things in constant and equal interaction. Most especially, they feature estranged families feeling through life. They are kitchen sink realism meets toilet seat surrealism. Appropriately, Edson jolted Davis into alternative possibilities of the short story form. Then she started writing, every day, paragraph-long stories. Some of these “adventurous” pieces would fill up her early, slim small-press books.

Emmanuel Iduma started his latest nonfiction book as a novel. Before he went to work on that book, which in its published form is called I Am Still with You, Iduma had just finished work on A Stranger’s Pose, a lyrical, experimental travelogue. A Stranger’s Pose has no plot. It’s a collection of oneiric fragments about places visited in discontinuous trips, alone and in a group, on the African continent, complete with photographs and ruminations on photography. So, for the new book, Iduma had to first transition from having worked on a book that relies on dream logic to the life-like feels of a plot.

This was difficult. After three chapters of what was supposed to be a novel, he became stuck. He couldn’t advance. Then he turned to writing, every day, a hundred-word microessay inspired by photographs. He was bidding time. Then, again, every day for a month, he turned to writing randomly in a notebook: an attempt “to uncover the heart of the novel.” That, too, turned out not to be about the novel but a disjointed record of his observations and readings. The story he wanted to tell is of his uncle who enlisted for the Biafran army during the Nigerian civil war but never came back home. This is the person Iduma was named after. To find the form for his story, he had to look elsewhere. He had to turn away from journaling and note-taking. He had to turn away from literature. He had to turn to a different art form.

I, too, have been struggling for the past nine months to come up with a form for my Substack posts. Years ago, when I first came across Substack, I thought the pieces to be published there should, naturally, take the form of letters. A Substack owner could shape whatever they’re writing about as a letter to their readers. Afterall Substack is a newsletter platform. That seems obvious enough, but I have always been fascinated with the letter form itself.

In 2019, I wrote letters to people around me, seven, eight, or nine in all, most of them my then-coursemates in uni, some of them from my recent past. Perhaps this love of the letter form had been inspired by such literary works as Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Teju Cole’s Eight Letters to a Young Writer, two booklets I had studied by then. There were also letters by dead writers, most of which I must have started but didn’t finish. There was also a book of letters between JM Coetzee and Paul Auster: Here and Now: Letters (2008 – 2011). I occasionally dipped into the book but didn’t finish it either.

Later, in mid 2022, I read Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir. The memoir is written as a collection of letters penned to people in the writer’s life. Despite the colorful writing, the beautiful stories, the creation of selfhood, etc., what I found most affective about the book is its form. I enjoyed the book, but I liked the form better. I still do.

Meanwhile, I’d also started exchanging emails with someone before reading Emezi that same year. This person was at the time out of the country. I, too, was off WhatsApp, off social media. Intercontinental phone calls were expensive, and so the only way we could communicate was via emails. For more than a year, we frequently crafted long mails to each other and continued, in fact, for a short while, after the person was back in Nigeria.

Nevertheless, when I wanted to try out Substack, I couldn’t shape my substacks as letters. But that decision to shape or not shape my substacks as letters came much later. Before the need to make the decision, I had to first determine if to use Substack at all. In late 2023, one or two months after finishing uni, I had decided to start freelance journalism. A friend, who was already freelancing, advised me to self-publish some articles online as writing samples. He said to use Medium, but I considered a number of choices. At first it was between Substack and the more traditional blogging sites such as Blogger, WordPress, Medium, and, laterly, between Substack and Blogger.

I chose Blogger. What I was most after was a place to write and think and connect with readers without the anxieties of, as on Substack, likes or, as on Medium, claps. I needed to be away from the noise on social media, which I was already doing. To make Blogger a space for silence and introspection, I turned off comments and dialed down the theme and the typeface to a minimalist white-and-black look.

At the same time, I thought of my Blogspot on Blogger as a desk: hard, thick, and shiny. Which is one way to think of the kind of writing I was – I am – doing over there, mostly journalism and criticism: listicles, reviews, essays, etc. They have to be fact-based, and, in turn, these facts give them hard edges. Soon I knew I had to do some softer writing elsewhere. Which led me back to Substack.

But being back on Substack meant deciding on the form my posts would take. As mentioned earlier, I could not bring myself to shaping my substacks as letters to my readers, perhaps because it seemed like the default and I was in doubt, as I always am, about things that told you what to do with them, rather than the other way round, things that required little or no thoughts from you, but also perhaps because I didn’t think I would frequently experience enough letter-worthy things to pleasure my readers with for an indefinite period of time.

After twelve years since reading Rusell Edson’s The Very Thing That Happens, Lydia Davis read, on the train, a poem by the American poet Bob Perelman. Titled “Seduced by Analogy,” the poem is a poem alright but has a grammar lesson in it. There, Perelman is telling the reader to use the infinitive with the verbs “afford, agree, arrange,” but says to use the gerund with “practice, imagine, resist.” Right there on the train, Davis, who is a seasoned translator of non-English European literature into English, began a story in which she taught French. She’d written the story in English, but she incorporated French words and ideas about language.

Several years ago, Davis had a similar experience reading David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interview with Hideous Men. The book contains a set of interviews in which the interviewees’ answers or responses have been written out at length but the interview questions have been left blank. Davis thought this an affective form, and, years later, after being called on a jury duty, she deployed the form to write a story about the experience.

Davis’ sensibilities about form or structure developed in similar patterns through, over the years, studying the off-center works of eccentric writers such as Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Clarice Lispector, Regina Ullmann, Thomas Bernhard, etc. Sometimes the chance encounters needed or need not be with books. Her sourced forms are many a time peeled from life itself. She appropriates, for one, emails, both hers’ and others’. She borrows the shapes of family trips and translators’ conferences.

Davis’ stories are authentic and confident both in content and, most importantly, form. But her hands had not always been firm and steady. The shaky hands of hers when she was in her mid-20s and below steadied over the years until, finally, fervently, they became the sure holddown on style that they now are. They are now so sure that, perhaps sentimentally, I have an irkling that Davis, now 77, might one very soon day get a call on her phone telling her she has won the Nobel Prize. This is because a single writer’s search for a form of her own has led people like me to think of fiction differently, to expect that our expectations about fiction be subverted, to enter a short story and come out the other end changed: about life and people and things and all the stuff fiction is based upon, but also about fiction itself.

Critics believe that a group of Nigerian artists called the Art Society mainstreamed the postcolonial modernist movement in Nigerian art scene, particularly between 1957 through 1967. Products of Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology (NCAST), Zaria, the first Nigerian art institution to award degrees, these artists – Uche Okeke, Damas Nwoko, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Yusuf Grillo, Okechukwu Odita, and Oseloka Osadebe – adopted natural synthesis as theoretical framework, seeking to create a blend of European modernist, formal aesthetics with their native, indigenous art-making cultures, which, being neither none nor both, is a new thing unto itself. Their approach was to be at once suspicious of Western modernist formalism and distrustful of sheer sentimental nativism. Though this worked, most of the works they made during this period are characterized by experimentation and a search for style.

Take Uche Okeke, the society’s president when it officially launched in 1958. In Egbenuoba and Monster (both 1961), Okeke blended the solid, figural forms of Igbo carved mask with an expressive, fauvistic color work to depict not too dissimilar portraits of two capped men, complete with dramatic facial features. Yet, that same 1961, he made Ana Mmuo (Land of the Dead). In it, Igbo body art and traditional mural and pictorial elements he might have drawn from Western artists such as Paul Klee supply the affects of the painting. The painting’s supposed spirits are fluid, formless, line-only figures dancing across nondescript colorful shapes of red, orange, and yellow. Ana Mmuo is a brilliant, soulful depiction of Igbo cosmology.

Yusuf Grillo is my favorite of the Art Society group. His mathematically shaped color planes, his usually cool, muted color palette, his anatomically stylized, sculptural figures, complete with ovoidal heads, flared shoulders, and long, angular necks, affect me in a way I cannot articulate. See Oloogun (1960) and Harvest (early 1960s). His interest in early European avant-garde art is evidenced by the influence the works of artists such as Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani might have had on his work. Picasso’s cool “Blue Period” paintings might have sharpened his color sensibilities, and Modigliani’s long-necked, bell-shouldered female figures might have informed his own formal elegance, but his singular vision to approach his portraits of Yoruba women as stylistic expressions in lieu of a documentary or ethnological representation is fulfilling. There is that mystical gene that connects all his figures across canvases to each other like the one connecting, say, the mammies in the Greco-Egyptian Fayum portraits. But, of course, he, too, was, at the time, testing out ideas.

Consider, then, most importantly, the works Demas Nwoko, whom the legendary art critic Uli Baier championed as the most compelling and innovative of the Art Society artists, made during this period. His painting Nigeria in 1959 (made in 1960) aptly depicts the tension between European colonialists and their African subordinates on the eve of Nigerian independence. In a matter of hours, the former, three in number and sitting on chairs in the foreground, would step out of power and the latter, four in number and standing behind the white men, a standing, umbrella-holding man in their middle, would take charge. While the white-skinned Europeans’ faces are marked by unhappiness and frustrations, the dark-skinned Africans, who have blotches of paints for eyes and mouths, bear arresting faces that come off as spooky.

But about a year later, Nwoko made a painting in which he departed from this thematic preoccupation. Children on Cycles, made sometime in 1961, shows an undramatic scene of four bicycle-riding girls. Three of them ride while one is only a passenger. They are trying to outmanoeuvre an approaching lorry. Of the painting and of Nwoko, Emmanuel Iduma writes: “I love this painting, but hesitate, too, with its focus on an undramatic scene. I can sense in the painting a burst of talent yet to find an urgent thematic focus. Or, no. It is not that Nwoko’s talent was yet to find its thematic thrust, as much as the possibility that he struggled to find a form of art-making fitting to his concerns. I estimate this because of another painting Nwoko completed a year or so before Children on Cycles.” The earlier painting he speaks of is Nigeria in 1959.

The artform Iduma turned to when he turned away from literature was painting. He turned, specifically, to the works of Nwoko, acquiring a lesson on form from the painter’s career arc. Iduma approximates that Nwoko’s painterly engagement with politics might have made the painter restless to the point of stopping, in the late 1960s, to make work as a fine artist. Nwoko is today more known for his architecture and furniture, the functional arts he turned to when he stopped making fine art. Iduma found this trajectory a lesson on the mutability of form.

By his account, considering the collective mood of Nwoko’s paintings convinced him of the approach to represent his curiosity about his namesake uncle and the Biafran war. He realized the circumstances surrounding the fate of his uncle were mysterious enough, and so he turned away from fiction – which requires abstractizing – and chose nonfiction. “Writing fiction hadn’t been false, for nonfiction isn’t truer than fiction; but I’d seemed to row at the shallowest region of the narrative stream, where the water wouldn’t reveal its deepest enchantments,” he writes.

To be sure, Nwoko’s style slightly varied during this period just as did his Art Society colleagues. In circa 1960, he painted White Fraternity. In it, a figure, formless, starkly dark, two-dimensional, is trying to tear apart four white and yellow hands solidly interlocked and connected by a web of arteries. The colors are contrasted and exaggerated, the figure theatrically depicted. There are thorns and flowers and a root-like artery system. It is also political commentary: it has been interpreted as being about South Africa’s apartheid, the cultic cooperation of the white race to exploit black Africa, and the latter’s improbability of breaking free. But then the figural exactitude of Nigeria in 1959 and Children on Cycles is gone.

Not long after coming back to Substack, I decided the form for the posts to be no forms. This meant approaching fiction in the style of Lydia Davis. The posts could be fiction or nonfiction, but, first, they had to be brief, and, second, they had to be contained in found forms, forms appropriated from multifarious sources. By February, 2024, I published my first post. Modeled after Félix Fénéon’s fait divers and Teju Cole’s small fates, it’s a collection of metro news compressed into, at most, three lines. The second post is a satirical dictionary of Nigerian stupidities and trivia. The third is a collection of microfiction inspired by Davis. On and on, the stories accrued, the forms fanned out. There was later a very short memoir, a real letter-turned-fiction, an idea for a news story, a fictionalized dead person’s biography. But I got tired. Or, perhaps, I got stuck. The writing of these little stories, some of which I had indeed written before then, stopped exciting me. Then I realized I had not found the form I was looking for.

By September, 2024, which is now nine months ago, I published my last post on Substack, the ninth post on there. After that post, I slipped into a state of stasis. In silence, I bidded time as I looked for form, waiting. Later, during his search for form, Iduma realized something: “that the form of a book is as determined by the years spent drafting it as by spells of stasis.” I, too, have realized the same, and I can only be grateful someone had best described what I was to experience. But I have also realized that form is determined by the things one read and observed, the things one kept themself open to, during a period of stasis.

My struggle with form is smaller and less important than that of Davis’ and Iduma’s: Davis’ is for a life’s work, Iduma’s a book. But it helps that I have them as models. Better, in fact, that their search for forms were of great measure and of greater stakes. During the time of waiting, for example, I had, like Davis, kept myself open to many types of writerly shapes, sniffing for form. From Wema Bank creative notifications to Minority Africa eclectic newsletters to A Long House affective dispatches and back to the Substacks I read religiously, I sought out the blueprint for any text I read, in case a shape might appear behind the wall of letters.

Sometimes it is best to let things tell us what to do with them, I have come to learn. Dismissing or doubting the built-in purpose of things might lead to searching for what is not lost. Worse if the search yielded no lessons. I cannot exactly remember when I realized that the form I had been searching for was indeed the simplest form Substack posts could take: newsletter. I do not mean the dramatic letters a writer writes the readers of their books or works. There is to be no “Dear reader” or its equivalent. There is to be no “xoxo” letter ending. Simply, the newsletters will be updates about my life as a writer, as a creative. They will be fieldnotes, dispatches, observations, about the things I’m up to, the things that have affected me the most. Think of it as an equivalent of a reporter’s notebook.

When Iduma was stuck on his novel, he decided to pen in a notebook his impressions of what the novel was supposed to be. But soon, his notes became a disjointed record of what he’d read and observed. This is what my Substack henceforth shall be: a record of books I’ve read, movies I’ve watched, arts I’ve seen, music I’ve listened to, things I’ve loved, things I’ve made, things I’ve lived out. The “disjoinedtedness” of Iduma’s notes opens up something freeing about my future substacks: the dispatches about my life as a cultural and creative being are allowed to be disjointed. Each piece will look within for its own logic, yet the pieces will fit into a family connected by a mystical gene, but space is also to be made for exceptions that might never happen.

Lydia Davis thinks Rusell Edson wrote some brilliant stories but also some unsuccessful ones. She thinks that this might have something to do with the way he wrote. Edson had noted that his stories were pieces working out their own form from within – pieces, that is, in search of form. He didn’t quite know what to call them, and he resisted the label of prose poems, though he is still at times called the father of American prose poetry. It is possible that this internal search for form affected the quality of his stories as well. Anyway, his method was to write about 10 different stories in one sitting. He would then come back to reread them and keep the one or two successful ones. Usually, if an interesting first line came to him, the rest of the piece was easier. Which means one or two stories with the best first lines got kept. This account is given by Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bone. Davis quoted it secondhand in her Portland Arts and Lecture Series, which is titled “A Beloved Duck Gets Cooked: On Form and Influences I.” This lecture later appears in Davis’ Essays One. In it, Davis quotes Goldberg, who states that one of the interesting first lines that once came to Russell is: “A beloved duck gets cooked by mistake.” ∆

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