The Blood

It is possible to write a poetry collection made only of the names of people kidnapped and killed in the last ten years. It would be near impossible to put together even in the most manageable way the lives of people behind those names. Their particular circumstances. The faster time goes the less clearly those names and those people appear to us. Poetry, even at its best, even at its limit, will not suffice. If poetry then will not do, if journalism will not do, if play as resistance is at a terminal end, and the horrors persist still, certainly Nigeria should implode. We should even be glad for the grace.

The Names

Alamu Folawe. Ojo Jonathan. Olatunde Zaccheous. Mary Akanbi. Rashida Tajudeen. Ahmed Ramoni. Hassan Azeez. Joshua Adeleke. Samuel Oyedele. John Olaleye. Michael Oyedokun. Mrs Oladeji. Abdulsalam Toyib. Baraka Abioye. Fatimo Jimoh. Sikiru Salami. Juwon Sunday. Soliu Salami. Emmanuel Oyedele. Idowu Taiwo. Christianah Akanbi. Ojo Joseph. Lydia Adewole. Testimony Jacob. Kehinde Kaosara. Sewa Seyi. Deborah Adebowale. Aisha Oguntowo. Leke Taiwo. Shuaibu Aliyi. Asa David. Balkis Ayanwale. Damilare Oderinde. Waliya Bello. Lydia Olohunloluwa. Ahmed Aliyu. Muiz Aliyu. Jomiloju Ogunlola. Pius Stephen. Hannah Ojo. Habibat Ayanwale. Agune Noah. Elizabeth Abadi. Tosin Abadi. Mary Gabriel. Jacob Gabriel.

From one kidnapping in May.

HumAngle made an almanac out of these names. Complete with data. Age, role, community/school.

The Kidnap

On May 15 two kidnaps happened simultaneously. One in Mussa, Borno, the other across three secondary schools in Oriire LG, Oyo. These occurrences are not new. Since the Chibok Kidnapping in April 2014, news of kidnaps have increasingly become commonplace. Between May 15th and July 10th, the 56 days the Oyo abductees spent captive in the Old Oyo national park, there’s been a beheading of Michael [redacted], posted on social media. “I saw him,” Samuel said, step-brother to Michael. “I saw his head cut off. I saw the dagger. I saw the blood.”

The danger of putting these lines into a stanza is obvious. Real life, real pain, is not an insurance for good poetry. Besides, any poet trying to write about the kidnappings and the history of blood in Nigeria, like the poets Razaq Malik Gbolahan, Michael Imossan, and Adedayo Agarau have done, to name a few, would suffer information overload. There is so much horror to go around and so much to regionalize, as BBC has helped to do!

However, reading horror regionally is one thing. It is another thing for one to read a coming-of-age poetry collection about a poet growing up in Southwest Nigeria between late 1990s and early 2000s, whose lines begin with: “It could be me whose blood is crying. A pestle pounding a skull in a mortar.” The Years of Blood, published by Adedayo Agarau, is one way to try and talk about Nigeria.

Books by Agarau, Gbolahan, and Imossan contribute to an ongoing conversation about (the history of) wound in Nigeria. You can get Agarau’s book here, Gbolahan’s book here, and Imossan’s book here. Or, via Masobe.

Going to AKE Festival

In 2022 I casually remarked to Ola that I felt stuck as an artist in the old, sleepy town of Ile-Ife. I had come to university there from Osogbo. Where things moved but life was hardly happening. But boredom in Osogbo wasn’t complicated, like that in Ile-Ife, by the need to study and pass exams when all I wanted was to write.

“I have a little money to spare,” Ola wrote to me. Could I get myself down to Lagos with it? I agreed. It would be my first time in Lagos. I had to pay for fare, registration for Ake Festival, intra-city transportation, and feeding. The money, with the savings I had and the debt I added to it, could never be enough.

I contacted Seyi asking if I could crash at his place. He agreed. So, for the next three days I stayed in Lagos, Seyi and I boarded a bus from a street on the Mainland, first to Obalende, then to Ikoyi – where the programme venue was. We did this each day. At night we slept like dogs.

In one sense, I was glad. It was my first time of seeing many adult writers gathered at one location. I also didn’t realize writers could actually have fun – I stayed too for Brymo’s electric live concert. In another sense, I felt out of place. Everybody, who didn’t already know themselves, were pleased to sit alone. The conversations were fast, intelligent. Everything clean, ordered, expensive. It felt like my sense of isolation in a place teeming with artists like me was because I didn’t know anything about the art of which I’m supposed to be a practitioner.

Hosting The First Edition

It is one thing to be a writer. It is another thing to try and curate art. I didn’t know this at the time in 2022 when I returned to OAU Campus from Ake Festival. I was complaining to Joel, a writer friend, about my isolation. About what felt like a waste of my money. But I also suggested to him the possibility of doing something like an art festival on OAU Campus.

I didn’t know anything about curating art. Inferiority had also set in anytime I thought of myself as a writer.

I only had Ake as a model.

So Joel and I, alongside our friends, spontaneously ran with the idea. Between the time of thinking and the time of execution, it was over one year, and we had these:

And then we had the second edition of the festival, 2025:

Curating the second edition was a big lesson for me, really, about the incredible work that art curators do, across the country and in the Nigeria. I spent so much time thinking and soliciting and selling and convincing and, all through the event, I didn’t sit down or even “enjoy” it. I was running around, because there were so many loose ends to tie, people to call, things to set in order – ensuring that each attendee, most of whom were students who didn’t know what an art festival looks like, gets a sense of it.

Moving On To The Third Edition

Many years before, I had read Zahrah The Windseeker. But it was in 2022 at Ake that I first encountered the Africanfuturist writer, Nnedi Okorafor. I then read two of her novels more: Who Fears Death, and Sunny and the Mysteries of Osisi.

I was fascinated by what she was doing in the books, and by the idea of Africanfuturism. So, when Ms Lola Shoneyin, under the Ouida-Publisher imprint of Phoenix, announced a workshop, which Nnedi Okorafor herself taught, I was quick to register. One of the things that stuck with me after the workshop was a point Ms Okorafor made – that she wanted to open up the genre, not confine it.

Armed with these facts, it wasn’t hard to convince Joel about the theme of this year’s ANA-OAU Books and Art Festival. Moreover, his undergraduate long essay examines two Africanfuturist texts – Abu Bakr Sadiq’s Leaked Footages, and Abdulkareem Baba Aminu’s Kill the Poet, Save the World.

So, our aim was clear: to introduce Africanfuturism to university creatives. This was still an idea I had to testrun, to please my cynical self, haha – also, courtesy of my wonderful writing mentor, Cara Waterfall. And based off the success of that testrun, Joel and I decided the theme of this year would be:

AFRICANFUTURISM AND THE NIGERIAN CREATIVE

* * *

It is still a few weeks before the event day: June 20th. It is the time to round off on planning new things, and start doublechecking, building plans B and C, and most importantly telling students about what we have.

The bulk of what makes our work easier is getting sponsorships for tickets, so we can give them out to students for free.

Joel and I have always made it a point to note that, whatever arts-related thing we do on Campus, must come to students for free. We understand the economic climate, and especially that any art form or curation that will last must speak across this climate – and to young people.

It is why I am soliciting your financial support.

To support financially, please send us an email: anaobafemiawolowo3@gmail.com

To support in other ways, please send a Whatsapp message to Kiran (+2348106207216).

To know more of what we do, and have been doing, consider giving us a follow on Instagram here.

To get a ticket for yourself or your friends, click here

For enquiries, kindly send me a message here on Substack, or to my email: adepojuisaiahgbenga@gmail.com

Thank you.

Flyers Section: More On The Way

Over a period of five years I have written only a very few poems. In the paragraphs below I hope I will be able to convince you out of reading or writing poems at all. Granted: it may be impossible. At the very least I hope to help you reconsider the titles on your TBR, and help you slot in more literary-fiction novels >500 pages.

Anywhere I am, I always try, often unsuccessfully, to tell people that I am a novelist, without being anything else—not a poet or an essayist. A novel to me seems to be a combination of journalism, poetry, and anything else. So the title of a novelist has a sacral ring to it. However, a novel is hard to write and to complete. Thus it is difficult for people to see that you’re a novelist. My acceptance of the label of a poet is therefore a result of this difficulty. A product of my own despair.

My childlike prioritization of the novel above poetry comes from my teenage experience. I am writing about it now because, as much as I think it is a prejudice reasoned out to an extent, subjecting it to public criticism will afford me and hopefully you the needed distance to re-consider our biases. In the meantime, I also want to use it as a kind of response to the qualms I have with our recent direction as writers, contemporary Nigerian writers. That is, our easy tendency for the quotable text. Evaluation over analysis. Brevity over length. Thoughtlessness over insight. And the paranoia peculiar to us in a time when everything moves speedily over.

My antique thinking and even more antique prose may come from the circumstance of my first encounter with writing. I was fresh out of secondary school. Going to the university didn’t concern me. I had no idea social media existed. Failing my WASSCE also didn’t bother me much. I just stayed at home trying to get the most knowledge out of the least available resources. Whether novels or legal textbooks, my only criterion was length. Length seemed coterminous with knowledge.

Of course, even at the time, short things also had their insight. Nevertheless, their insight always seemed contestable. They seemed to invite argument rather than attentiveness. Due to their brevity too, there were less chances of boredom, therefore the impulse for response is condoned and even encouraged. For a child or a teenager, this is terrible, and even then I knew it was bad for me. In a lengthy literary-fiction novel nonetheless, this is different. Acknowledgement, the ability to hear another person out, seems like the most important criterion to finish reading this kind of a novel. There is boredom there, and tenacity, and the privilege to observe how reason happens, ingredients that seemed essential to building the perceptive intelligence of a young creative.

My earliest encounter with length was Gregory David Roberts’ 933-paged novel, Shantaram. The book began like this: “It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.” So begins by extension the torturous journey of both the reader and the protagonist across Australia, India, Afghanistan, a universe extremely populated with things and ideas.

Nothing on the author’s part could sustain the reader’s interest for that long. At least not entirely. Towards the middle of Shantaram for example, the narration eases expectedly into comatose prose. A symptom of the author’s fatigue. For a lengthy novel, even for a good book like Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the extent to which the author can sustain the reader’s interest is tragically limited. Fortunately, one can separate the writer’s ability from the reader’s, and identify what is lacking in both and what is surfeit—these two of which refer to and affect themselves.

To write anything at all seems to be a race against fatigue. Anybody who has tried to write anything seriously for long will understand this. At the peak of one’s energy, the writing just starts its slow downward curve, retreating into technically neat, and comatose prose. Variation, both in language, plot, and so on, might be a cure. I am thinking here of Vera Mutafchieva’s 1967 novel, The Case of Cem. Merging history with the polyphony of the court room without giving voice directly to the central character of Cem is an artistic ingenuity in the novel, because it allows Mutafchieva to experiment continually on the different layers of plot, language, slants, characters, and so on.

But this is a difficult skill. Harder both to get and to keep. Primarily because it takes time and attentive reading and an unending cynicism towards the surety of the novel’s architecture. It is more so for the writer that wants desperately to publish and move on to the next book, and equally for the reader itching to flip the page up till the end and give a “hot take”. In both cases, the idea and the playfulness of the novel remain lost.

As a consequence, what is lacking in all this? For both the writer and the reader, it is our ability to listen.

A novel possesses the power of play. Play as a way of thinking-through and thinking-with things. Speculation aware of its own speculativeness. A way of pointing towards the unstable in a world fixated on fixity. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book are novels that have taught me the importance of attentiveness. For Lolita, I solemnly believe Humbert Humbert is a pervert. He should be hanged, if possible. But all these thoughts are possible and even advised when they are being done in society, where categories, power structures, and marginality are important strategies of survival. Never, not in writing a novel or in reading one.

In the novel, everything is permitted. This freedom is dizzying. And it accounts necessarily for the vulgarity of the novel form. It possesses a contradiction, like the dialogue between the Ottoman sultans in The Black Book, which is supposed to be an advice to Galip, a fledgling writer if one thinks of the fledgling writer as a person trying to wear the shoes of dead or lost writers who are famously disciplined in their writing.

There, in the scene Adli advises Galip: “Do not use epigraphs; they will only kill the mystery in the piece.” In reply, Bahti says: “Go ahead, kill the mystery; kill the false prophet too who pushes mystery.” As Galip, himself on a twisted journey of self-discovery, merely observes, the most we can do is listen attentively, without the opportunity to affect Galip’s personality out of which comes his actions. We do not therefore need to resolve these contradictions, seeing that we cannot. We only acknowledge them.

From here it is easy to guess the personality of the writer of lengthy novels. That they are people who can sit down for years with other people holding caustic ideas without getting into conflict with them and even falling in love with them. Nowadays every contradiction needs a resolution or conflict. Even in a book, a character has to be politically correct. The reader can no more condone a book standing confidently on the other side of their ideas about the world and how the world works. We have become an unthinking mass. A work of art has to be for or against; it can’t be positional and provisional and playful.

Many things happen in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. For me, the most poignant of those things are precisely those things that offend me: the laughable cluelessness of Angel Gibreel, for example. Yet it is the novel form that most encompasses this playfulness around spectral entities, where this sacrilege is most trenchant! Where else can anybody think without censorship from the paranoia of causing offence? The violent response to that book is anticipated. One may anticipate it too, a replica of it, in novels that refuse to submit.

A poem falls short in this regard. In its different function, time is not a factor, and thinking is fragmented. I am considering Tade Ipadeola’s The Sahara Testaments and the equivalent in novel form, of the thing that the collection has tried to do. Ipadeola is a poet trained in the face of an enormous landscape. Thought equidistant with sound. A compulsory collection for any young poet or novelist serious with educating themselves. But the very thing the collection fails to do is the thing the form of the work cannot do. Suppose we examine the book and judge it on its merit, its success or failure would be another argument. Since here, I am trying to compare it with the novel form, and to argue that it is merely a component in the enormous architectonic possibility of the novel form, it is possible to talk about a lack, contiguous to that of the reader’s too. Which is, partly because of its limited range of personalities, its polyphony, the collection does not consider the provisionality of its knowledge. In other words, the element of play in the collection is rigidly unaware of its own playfulness. Its personality, like the personalities in Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, plays so as to decry, plays only to the extent of achieving an aim without creating a leeway towards a contention to its own play. They assume that they have anything important to say.

It is in the field of postmodernism that one may try to consider whether this element of play and continuous self-reflexivity should be encouraged. I am not a theorist, and I am hardly a novelist. After all my talk above about why you should consider starting a very lengthy literary fiction novel, as a reader or a writer, I am thinking of Erskine Caldwell and Milan Kundera. Both of these writers are playful, and seem complementary. For Caldwell, he is playful, without showing his awareness. A slight human impulse becomes elaborate, and comic, alongside his sparse prose—as in, God’s Little Acre. It is Caldwell that says something along the lines of: a poet is a failed novelist. For Kundera, that playfulness gains a meditative, philosophical bent. He is conscious of the provisionality of knowledge in his works. To him a character is an object to think with, and he makes you aware of this, and that character is not a definitive thing—in the same way one can speak of, say, Azaro.

Check it out here.

Also see an excerpt of it below this post.

I want, deeply want to write essays like that. It takes time, it takes checking and re-checking. This feels necessary because, beyond assessing the soundness of my argument, I try to confirm necessity. Why is my argument important and why now?

Of course, this delays my writing and reading.

Right now, I am checking and re-checking Oyinkan Braithwaite’s Cursed Daughters. I have had only two false starts yet. I had considered using it as a second text for my undergraduate research, but deconstruction is a new terrain for me, and I can’t deconstruct two texts at once. The hope, however, is that I will still read Cursed Daughters, if possible with another book published last year, so I can do a comparative analysis.

Another book I am checking out is Kwame Dawes’ Sturge Town. I have returned to a few poems a few times. The language is clean, of the poems I have read so far. The images sharp, too. On this, as with poetry books generally, I hope to only throw in bits and pieces from there into my creative non-fiction pieces. (I have never really gotten the hang of reading a poetry book. Because I am terrified that, in the multiplicity of things to talk about, my review will continue ad infinitum).

Danke.

I am terrified of being myself too much. I have a quiet fear of madness. I weep and wail. I display on pedestal. A friend and I many years ago used to talk about the things we wanted to become. I always chose a museum piece. They have all the power. They have all the fame. They have all the glory. Yet they are private, absent, rigidly being there without necessity. Anywhere I am, I am observed certainly, accurately. There is nothing to do but dance and pray and sing and talk and laugh and wail and confess all your life and all your goodness.

In one of my poems from last year mourning him, I had written: “No use beating the walls. Loss has divined this.” In another poem, Mercy: “Shut sternum is forgiven need.” In another: “I am Lady Lazarus. Risen through the mortuary.” I had grieved many times, experienced the loss even more times, that now, when it is finally here, I am thinking maybe I should have written less poems, understood things less.

I have too many Daddy poems than I know what to do with.

Daddy

[Redacted]

Late December last year, I called for workshop applications. Themed Africanfuturism in Place Poetry, I wanted to look at three separate things for three weeks. What is Africanfuturism? What is place poetry? And then to combine the first two questions: What is Africanfuturism inside place poetry? I was looking to practice, with 12 other workshop participants, the work of seeing. Not just technology in the future but the ordinary places we know almost certainly.

There was no way to approach Africanfuturism without a recourse to Nnedi Okorafor. She has championed it. In her essay, Africanfuturism Defined, she gives an overview of the term. A 2020 Brittle Paper anthology, edited by Wole Talabi and titled Africanfuturism, practices that Nnedi’s definition with stories from Derek Lubangakene, T.L Huchu, Dilman Dila, Rafeeat Aliyu, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Mame Bougouma Diene, Mazi Nwonwu, and Okorafor herself.

I was looking to practice the work of seeing. Not just with technology in the future but with the ordinary places we know almost certainly.

A few years ago, I had attended a workshop organized by Phoenix, the Africanfuturism/Fantasy imprint of Ouida Publishers. There, Okorafor had mentioned that her definition of the term, and her stories, are not to confine Africanfuturism, to make her works the model the copies of whom other Africanfuturist stories should become. Instead, she was opening it up.

So, I isolated some of the basic ingredients of Africanfuturism— technology and mysticism— and we tried to play with them.

2

We tried dystopia.

Technology is a necessary ingredient, since Africanfuturism “is a sub-category of science fiction.” But in trying to skew optimism, we cut up a pea-size portion of the continent (Ile-Ife) and we began to fast-forward it. What would the city look like in 50 years? in 300 years? in 700 years? What can we see?

I tasked the participants to mention specific things they can see. I encouraged them to invent names for tech equipments whose names they didn’t know or which may yet be uninvented. Most of the writing was hopeful, though. According to the samples, the idea of mobility in the future would have changed. We won’t need bodies. Our minds would become data. The method of education would have changed; for instance, in the bodiless data of our mind, information would circulate infinitely. There would be only the simulacrum and simulation.

But I made dystopia the goal of the writing practice. There is the place of optimism, of course. Just not now, not in the first week of this workshop, because in tragedy we necessarily become more critical, and constructing anything at all is serious labour.

In tragedy we necessarily become more critical.

3

The next ingredient was mysticism. Or Africanjujuism, which Nnedi defines as “a subcategory of fantasy that respectfully acknowledges the seamless blend of true existing African spiritualities and cosmologies with the imaginative.”

In addition to how we have looked at Africanfuturism, I gave out a small take-home task concerning Africanjujuism: That everybody should write a love story, however brief or lengthy, whose fantasy is grounded in any local myth or culture they know. It could be the fine tattoo one often sees on our grand or great grandparents’ forearms or shins. What if those things glow? What can we imagine with them?

I don’t know what to expect from the task, not until they submit their stories/poems before the third workshop day, slated for January 24th. I only remember my own excitement the first time I wrote what I would later realize could be called Africanfuturist:

A 12-year old boy from my second novel had gone to see the dervishes with his father. The city he was born had lost its magic for many decades. That day, while in the arc of the dervish dancers, small spectacular things began to happen. A girl caught a baby tanager that fell from the truss; the dervishes began to go up through the opened roof into the atmosphere; the wonder of that old Northern town seemed to return; and there, the boy would envision himself to what would, after many years of exile and sorrow later, become the picture of a bionic human, flying across Gusau as one of its winged witnesses.

About The Workshop

This writing workshop is hosted by Isaiah Adepoju, in collaboration with Genevic Space and the Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. The workshop will be held weekly for three weeks— one is a virtual class— on OAU Campus.

The theme of the poetry writing workshop is: Africanfuturism in Place Poetry. The guiding questions for the workshop are: What is Africanfuturism? What is place poetry? How do we write a place poem? How do we re-imagine the future of place inside a poem?

The idea of this workshop has long been at the back of my mind. I aim for it to be a fun, engaging conversation for us young poets about carrying the life of place into our poems.

About The Host

Isaiah Adepoju is an Osogbo-born poet, an arts administrator, and a literary critic. He is the recipient of the Donald E Waterfall Scholarship Fund, the Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature, the Lagos London Poetry Prize, and a fellow of the UNDERTOW Poetry Fellowship, Ebedi International Writing Residency, and the Imodoye Writing Residency.

A 400 Level student of Literature-in-English, OAU, his poetry often explores place, family, and language. He is also currently co-curating the third edition of ANA-OAU Book and Art Festival.

You can read more about him here.

Workshop Details

• It is open to poets at all stages of their development.

• Between 10 - 20 applicants will be accepted into the workshop.

• Application to this workshop is entirely free.

• It is open to only OAU students.

• Applicants must be able to physically attend all workshop sessions.

• Students outside the Faculty of Arts are especially encouraged to apply.

• Applicants must be flexible enough to read workshop materials as and when due.

Application Criteria

To apply, kindly send a sample of two of your poems to adepojuisaiahgbenga@gmail.com

Timeline

Application Opens: December 24th

Application Closes: January 7th (Extended)

Decisions: January 8th

Workshop Begins: January 10th

For enquiries and/or sponsorships, kindly reach out to the contacts provided in the flyer. Thank you.

Tacitly, the criticism of critics against poems often points a cynical finger at the knowledge the poet carries into a poem. How the knowledge inside a poem becomes the knowledge of a poem. While the former is really about what is present and absent in a poem, what is named or unnamed, the latter— that is, the knowledge of a poem— is conditional on the promise in a poem. So, what is promise in a poem, if not the weight of absence supporting presence?

What is absence in a poem? What constitutes it? How is it constituted? These are questions only knowledge can answer, really answer. The extent of what is known, and how?

Say, we want to write a poem about a daffodil. We indeed write that poem, ten stanzas of quatrains. There is the higher probability that we have merely recycled knowledge, and not experienced it. In a sense, we have neither individualised nor localised knowledge. However, give that same poem, in 354 BC, to a reader and you may become their Soyinka.

This scenario would, of course, raise the question of the poeticity of a poem. Relative to context or not? Terry Eagleton makes a good argument on this when he concludes that “There is no ‘essence’ of literature whatsoever.” So that, a poem is not only any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly, but a functional rather than an ontological term.

All the above is a paraphrase of Eagleton. While it absolves the daffodil-writing poet from literary purists, it also demands from the poet the responsibility of putting inside a poem the argument for the poem’s craft. In other words, a poem behind which, very underneath it, there is the promise of something palpable. By which we may say the poem has knowledge— that is, it has something to say; it knows more than it actually tells; its absence is so weighted that it gives leniency to its presence.

All this is fancy talk.

If we say the goodness of a poem is relative, by which we mean the value judgements are inconstant, conditional on power relations current in the appropriate places, it should follow that: i) the knowledge one carries into a poem must agree with the present value judgements or must impose its own values, or ii) the poem would risk cynicism from the reader— has it any knowledge at all? any worth? any promise? any thing inside it ticking?

This need for promise in a poem, needless to say, is cultural and historical. At some point, obscurantism was thought a symbol of this promise. And there have been many literary traditions— which does not exclude Oral poets/ spokenword poets— which have tried to argue for the promise, the solidity, in its own craft. But even this search for solidity, for sense in a poem, which I have said is historical and cultural comes from certain cultures and certain histories- from which we may deviate, insofar those parameters and values are unsustainable in-context.

Then we may come back again to the dilemma: what language is most suitable to carry our knowledge? how do we distrust continually the language we use— expect it to snap from the burden of intimate experience? how do we experience intimately? For a bad poem is bad, to me, when its language is dishonest, on the assumption that there is experience.

Quarter way through, Cara Waterfall curated a template out of my motivation for writing and publishing on Substack for 30 days. Today being the 29th day of the challenge, I thought to follow her template and write about the thing I unlearned while in this challenge.

Only later into the challenge did I know it was one. Long before it, I write every day. And, at least, between late last year and August this year, I have written consistently every day. Mostly adding to my novel, but also just scraps in my journal. Very sentimental verse, too— that I can never read, for the sake of my sanity. But because they are private things and because I didn’t think of myself as writing consistently, I was able to write them, a lot. I didn’t go over my thoughts. Didn’t track the progression. Didn’t proofread after hitting “publish”. Writing in a journal and not thinking about consistency are incredibly easier than writing elsewhere, every day.

Publishing on Substack is a different game. It is a distant thing, a digital thing, something I cannot stack carefully between my books. There’s this distance there, an artificiality of the screen, and the constant reminder at the back of my mind that this is Day So-and-so.

This didn’t panic me. Of course I am always eager to write and post. But the eagerness now comes with an anxiety, the fear that this announcement of a challenge would make readers view my work cynically, as mere quotas, and not as window-gazing into a writer’s journal. Stuff so non-serious, so uneditedly so.

I weighed my options early into the challenge. Do I need this? Can I be consistent? Consistent enough and daily? Would my pieces be profound? It was at this time, when I became aware of the idea of consistency and profundity, that I really began to struggle, in a sense, with writing. Is this my last day of consistency? How about tomorrow, what will you write? To what extent is this piece good material? I went all along and all in with the certainty that, where there is no passion, skill would suffice. The challenge nonetheless is not about writing the best pieces but about writing things out. The cliche, the bad stuff, to put them here on Substack, with a few daily readers ready to spare 4 minutes for a near-absolute or total stranger.

Had I learned this sooner, that consistency is a myth conditional on whether, today, one would write something serious or profound or applaudable, my streak would have been easier. Less filled with nibbling anxieties.

The point, isn’t it all along?, is to write down the boring things that go on in a day.

Defining terms is a sport in politics. Here, dictionary meaning is quite useless. There are ways in which words are used. Ways words are meant. How meaning is understood, say, that is always inconsistent, that often escapes intelligibility. It is like, before a term is properly defined and communicated, the goal post would have shifted, determined in anticipation or overdetermined, and one would be stranded there, reaching out again for meaning.

For a local person, for whom following meaning with the sense organs is difficult, one is doomed to eternal amateurish politics. I mean me, I am condemned to amateurish politics forever, for I never seem to understand the simplest terminologies and their use. I constantly have to ask: How is this particular word used? What does this thing mean? Isn’t there a logical contradiction here? I embarrassedly assume the triumph— the triumphalism of 1 + 1 = 2, when 1 is idealistic, at best, and 2 is not convenient.

Idealism and realism are words I find so often used to distinguish ideas that I, at first, always went back to the dictionary. What is idealism? What is Idealism? What is realism, or Realism? Before I then apply them to the conversation. “No, no, no,” I would be told. “You still don’t get it.” And so, I just started listening more with my nose, picking up smell in the corners, the tight corners logic can’t reach.

Often I have to squeal, “Oh this is idealism!” but then it quickly becomes “Oh this is realism!” and then “Oh no no, it’s really idealism.” Beneath all my confusion lay the simple, unbending stubbornness that, to accept a definition as true, I must logically meet it at a centre.

This never makes sense to me at all!

What do you mean I have to not use my brain at all this time? Something I have depended on most of my life? You mean, there is a structure to follow? A routine? The way things are done? That is realism. The way things have always been.

I would ask who made it this way, and why. I want a good historical story, so I always ask why. But history in politics, I have come to learn, is never a straightforward thing. There’s myth there. Fantasy there. A bit of lore. Footnotes and cross-references for quantitative research. All these constituting politics’ stark realism. To point out the idealisms of this realism is to, in turn, question a way things have been. To harass automaton. Try to get it speaking and thinking. No matter the questionability of its continued use, the automaton of politics is liked by profiteers and affiliated relations. A quiet, unopposed nepotism.

To meet it at the centre with one’s head is to begin to ask it so-and-so about its existence. To observe it a priori. To strip away history and so to strip away bias from 1 and turn it into the concept that it is, a way of supposing and speculating, a method of asking questions about perception, the perceiver and the perceived.

What is the ethics of permutation, for example? How do we imagine and situate national politics within campus, for example? For example, for example, for example.

I had won the Dallas Scholarship Award for OAU students last session. Awarded to about 50 students out of over 1300 applicants, the Scholarship committee organizes a mentorship scheme that pairs three scholars with a mentor for a period of time.

My default reaction to anything is bemusement, and I was expecting deeper bemusement when I joined the call. She sat middle-aged and braided behind the screen. Was she looking for her glasses? Would she talk slowly, tasting her words? How come she is a professor in the sciences without glasses?

She introduced herself. OAU Alumnus. Vice chancellor. Deputy Vice Chancellor. Director of so-and-so. Linkages. PhD. Double Masters. Resident abroad. Mother. And she spoke very clearly. Outlinedly. Warmly taking turns for our introduction and beginning first with our CGPA. What point are we this semester?

I have only ever had to tell two people my CGPA. Even then only privately. It is not the best, and it is not the worst. So, I said it straight: So-and-so point so-and-so CGPA. Worst case scenario, of course, which I had settled for. Partly because it is not a bad score, really, considering the things I have been involved with. The serious business of not dying.

I didn’t say all this, but she started from there. From the things I didn’t say. The comfort of a worst case scenario. Then on to some shocking things she had discovered reduces any one’s chances of academic success. Cooking and washing, for example.

She just said, “Isaiah, you did not come to the university to cook or to wash clothes.” I had come into the university from a place with a certain culture. I had been told there that the university was where I would finally learn those manners I so lack. Where I would be forced to grow up. Trained for the world. All these and the general “Study hard and early.”

But any university student would say, especially from my part of the world, that doing well in any examination requires beyond studying hard and studying early. Structure is needed to efficiently order and assess priorities. And culture informs priority as much as goal.

There is also the question of moral values I have had to battle with at the expense of studying. The different adulty things I was told the university ought to teach me— like how to cook, wash, clean, curate a small life on my own terms, which includes study, of course, just not enough of it or enough but with less rest, combined with the nagging need for social work, politics, associations, fellowships, etc., which are all signs of a working man. And all these I did.

Recently, it got so terrible until a friend saved me by instructing me to just give my clothes to the laundry person. That I was not lazy, honestly. That I was not a spendthrift, honestly. That my morals are still in place. Honestly, I am not lying, she said.

I would have wanted this call during my first semester on campus. A one-to-one thing with a professional. A feedback system. Someone willing to give you a hand. A model to want to become. Advice intentionally anti-/re-cultural.

Nouns are powerful tools. With them we curtail freedom. Benign and an easy favourite, they create a system of difference and relation in the world. We give names to things not only to identify them but also to mark their boundaries. For something that has been characterized, when it behaves out of character, it begins to look like it is no more its own self. This is not very dissimilar to us as people.

Nouns are ways we put life into categories. These categories help us navigate living, assure us of self-preservation, because in any world in which everything is unstable, uncharacterized, this delicate thing called livingness— this thing keeping us away from “brain-dead”— is constantly in the face of harm. This fact makes nouns powerful. Because all our intelligence is powerless against namelessness— something we cannot isolate away from ourselves.

Relate that a little with how we label ourselves as artists or lovers. Compare it with the foregoing: how we name an object outside to isolate/distinguish/differ it, versus how we name an object inside us. While we do the former for circumscription, we do the latter for emphasis. We label ourselves artists, for example. We label ourselves theoreticists or dancers.

But what does it mean to be an artist? Does it mean one’s life is entirely artistic? Or does one devote one’s entire time to art? Is there no time for the boredom, the back-breaking boredom of doing laundry? A time when there is no curiousity? When we slip cleanly without sound into the tedious crowd we so abhor for their tedium?

What are we in those times? By calling ourselves artists or lovers or doctors or fathers, without being absolutely this or that, have we not hindered our own fluidities?

Last year, I had the epiphany I was a writer. Just like, almost like Salman Rushdie. At 21, with a book published, and another “more serious” book in the draft. And I have struggled terribly with the times I was not doing what a “writer” ought to be doing, which is writing. However, writing is only one activity I do out of tens of other equally pleasurable activities. It is unjust, selectively so, if I label myself a writer. Alternatively, I would only do so towards certain ends.

It is a convenient thing, nevertheless, to assume an identity for whatever ends. To do otherwise is to make peace with disorder. Non-structure. The possibility of ensuing insanity from all the chaos.

I think that chaos in this sense is really freedom. For freedom is neither negative nor positive but an intensity the soul must learn to allow.

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I registered for a course this semester the first three classes of which the lecturer spent outlining the problems of studying the course in a time when African Literature has moved past the foundational premises of the course. So now, the idea of Commonwealth Literature as a course is to destroy the legacies re-constituting the Commonwealth, leaving the self-destruct sequence for last. It’s like in those lovely movies where the hero kills herself to save the world.

The hero has to ensure however that nobody really remembers the condition of her death. Or else she wouldn’t have really died. A death that is beautiful and yet hard to watch, because it occurs repetitively and less absolutely, and one can only live for so long. Anything that is discursive, anything in the academia generally—they take time.

A friend that studied the course last session wrote a good essay on this. There, he asks the question about the function of the existence of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. How does it insist on the heritage of British imperialism? Very decolonial-sounding. £5,000 or decoloniality?

But arguments like this are really old school in academic circles. Popular media only need updates after academic essays have been translated into accessible English. How do we translate academic essays for popular consumption? Many concerns that Otosirieze raised in his Twitter Space about the direction of African Literature have been answered in a few essays here and there in the academia. But translation is one thing, curating these essays into a collection is another. (Suppose there are a truckload of some 300 young critics ready to respond and act on these essays?)

I believe strongly that there are vital things to learn in ones and twos from the academia, and the academics. Tolu Daniel is a shining example. And, while Oko Owi Ocho knows the academia a little too much, Ernest O Jesuyemi knows it a little too little.

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I swear I have held on to you. Held on to you so much that you have divided my life into two separate, equal parts.

A life of righteousness, for you’re uncompromising.

A life of guilt-sinfulness, for I am uncompromising.

The more I become myself, the farther you go.

How long now, you bastard?

‘25

Ah, I am forceful and unbending, possessive and entitled to all of your life. Won’t you worship me? I am the altar and your pagan god. Subtle, persistent, pliant, cunning. I turn on myself and eat my tail, my toes, my stomach— I will not stop. I have a fanatical obsession with my body. So, if you know who can save me, give me their address. I wish to sit with them at a table and be cunning and subtle and forceful and, please pray that I am discovered.

June

It is 00:06. I am most pure. The day has just gone. In here the change is indistinguishable. Sultry and dark, cluttered with papers, curtains drawn, the door shut. I churn and turn on a straight bed. I cannot fall asleep. Do I realize Astatke’s Tezeta is a song of sorrow? Praise asked me how I have become an animal of passion. How have I become an animal?

Last night, you wrote to me about windows. I wrote to you about doors.

July

In a church group, H– Daniel Band, Afolabi sent a fuck-you finger emoji alongside the message: “Above is our duty roaster for July to December 2025 please let everyone of us check our name and the day we are to officiate.

May God bless us and straighten us to his will in Jesus name.”

September

Dear Professor Bernadine,

My name is Isaiah Adepoju. Blah blah blah.

September

She turned abruptly to me and widened her arms. “Hug.”

My head hung loosely across her shoulder like the tip of an axe would hang on a plank. She broke into an excited laugh. In the darkness she went out and into shape. Sometimes I didn’t see her shape at all. Only heard the ricochet of her laughter like a prolonged warble.

Ajigbona was small and enclosed like a quiet conversation. The people minded their business. They dozed in empty shops, lolloped down the steep, jagged road, or drove Singer machines across yards of dirty crepe.

I first came here in 2023.

November

What has happened to me? I have loved myself too much.

Jacob

(a poem)

There are things to put into consideration.

Size of coffin, size of deceased. Durability

and stuff. Cost effectiveness too.

What if we also divided labour?

Pricky at first and bloody, we could be

agreeable afterwards. The same reason

has brought us, an arithmetic intelligence.

No use beating the walls. Loss has

divined this.

     Suppose we retrieve the wooden years.

This quarter of varnished cedar. Candles sturdy,

burning low and keen, divided equally

between hands.

ON JACOB:

I have developed a bitter relationship with poetry over the years. Majorly because poetry makes nothing happen. The poem above is an example. I have a draft of them, edited written rewritten re-edited for over two years now. About 40 poems written since my brother went missing. Yesterday was his birthday. I saw a post of his picture. To be wished a happy birthday on one’s own birthday! My mother came around to my place and we went up and down the campus. Looking for a place to sit and talk and eat. We talk about him casually now. Not with emotion but as a point of reference. A placeholder conversation while we pore for another.

ON POETRY:

The Jacob story is merely one out of many. From them I am developing my own theory of the use of poetry. Doing poetry. For any emotion that I have, which is palpable, suddenly feels light, ungraspable once I put it into lines. I was seated once beside a friend I needed to speak with and I was writing poems about this consuming need to speak. Poetry has not made me speak. Doing poetry is always a source of private pleasure. Not a thing that enables me to speak, to act. All these seem an entirely different thing: writing a poem and doing something. Not as a reader but as a writer of poems. For outside the beauty of a poem, however we may define that beauty, there is only the opposite of a poem’s beauty: boredom, untidied anger, routine, disinterest, all the bad untranslatable stuff one cannot translate, no matter the effort, into poetry. It is as if to be a poet is to be two things of the same entity: to write poems and to act poems. So that writing poems or even poems cannot be therapeutic. But an understanding, or the mere presence of a subject matter in a poem, can cause a chain of events.

ON JACOB

Have I done anything? Yet? Have I understood something? Are there chains of events? Or even a chain? I am unsure about all these. My lines get better but all that I feel is still static. Unchanging. Uninterestingly dull and repetitive. Always a numbness. Even as the poems get sharper. Even as I derive a secret pleasure from this “raw material”, and I fear that all of what poetry does is to give to the poet (to me) a source of continual delight over even my catastrophes. How do I go through pain when pain, the attention I pay to it, thrills me?

THE BEST LESSON: Show Up Every Day

In the piece at some point, Cara writes:

A writing life is built on presence — the daily decision to show up for yourself.

Over one year ago, Emmanuel Esomnofu had tweeted also that the writer’s primary responsibility is to show up each day. Show up for that idea. That story, that fragment.

For about two years now, I try to write every day. Creative non-deep stuff. A piece of dialogue. A paragraph of description. Practicing slant and rhythm. Experimenting openings.

My story titled “Love is Embarrassing”, which is a combination of two stories, started as an experiment on paper. The simple story template is: Two young people try to have sex on the night of October 20th, during the #EndSarz protest.

I have overworked it as I have overworked pretty much everything else. Writing is always the most fun for me when I do it every day. Do it playfully. A play which I realized one can only discover when one puts in consistent time into creative writing, not as investment nor even with faith, not with the belief that something good will somehow yield, but as something the hand can do with only a little bit of brain— I waste so much paper doing free writing or whatever that is. And soon the brain leans into the routine. Begins to do its calculations. A good way to while away good time.

Like walking during leisure. One can observe the world with one’s eyes. One can feel wind manageably. One’s mind roams, goes free and ahead. But all that freedom is conditional on certain routines the body performs. Like one step going after the other repeatedly for a long time. The hands swinging the same way too. Hands don’t swing creatively. They just swing. Eyes dart too, left, right, right, left, uninterestingly, which cannot turn inwards out of boredom. Yet, all these must surrender themselves to this mechanics, just so the mind can bound freely.

Cara Waterfall has made a generous comment here about the 30-day writing challenge and even curated a structure out of it. I really wish I had that structure when I started the challenge; I will be happy to do this challenge again with that structure in mind. If you need help writing consistently, I highly recommend reading her comment and following her prompts.

I used to love the lack in this story. The plainness. The clean arc encircling— “It must be the story of want that gives perspective to my life, hardly wanting for anything now.” This is one of my stories of want I like to tell. And I used to think I loved telling it because it functioned as backstory. A kind of contrast to my present.

All this is not entirely true, at least now. There is a character we seem to unconsciously take with certain types of stories. With the sadness of a family tragedy, one expects a happy story “to balance it out.” The same when you talk about suffering at some point in time, one begins to ponder: “thank God all of that is over now”, or “what did you now do about it?”, or “what lesson did you learn from it?” or “how did you make that leap from there to here” or “how do you intend to make that leap?”, etc. Surely, suffering cannot exist for its own sake. We must assume its use. Similarly when you talk about impoverishment.

Everybody wants to give you a hand. Some eventually do, and they may be shocked to realize they have done neither a good nor a bad thing. And those who go on, looking away, share the guilt of not giving a hand. Suppose the latter have, they would have done neither a good nor a bad thing. Only moved.

This kind of attitude stems from a complex of belief about friendship and responsibility. According to this belief, friendship is often about responsibility. But that responsibility is always the responsibility of and to a specific thing and not to another. Such that friendship begins to hang on how deeply we feel responsible for the friend and the friendship. How much we can give ourselves away in responsibility.

What this does is ignore our own self and the possibility that our help, even when it is offered with the right motive, may be unneeded, maybe even destructive to the friend. That, in any friendship, maybe there should be provision where help is not offered, whether as advice or material, but help as one’s presence. Only our presence. Calls that say: “I see you going through stuff. I am rooting for you.” Messages that say: “Happy birthday, my love” without any gift.

I love to tell stories about myself. A lot. A half of them includes stories of lack, partly because lack is half of my life. Were it to be a story of provision, I would still be telling it just as vigorously. So it cannot be the lack or the provision in my stories. Stories hardly need help, but presence, first. Attentiveness. Which is the only good help we can offer it.

Hello, Good Afternoon, I said. She let me in, leading me to a stool by the trolley, methodically, with a smile, like a church usher.

She went drawing close the curtains. I just finished cleaning, she said. She looked in a wall mirror, drew the straps of her top over the brown strops of her braziers, and raising her jaws, she rubbed white paste of cacatin down her neck. I was wondering when you would come, she said. You are an awfully silent person, she said. She paused. She noticed the cards. Have you come to play cards? She asked. I would have answered had she not opened the fridge, staring into the yellow cold inside. I ought to travel tomorrow, she said. To my mother’s. But she said Lagos is still so hot. She doesn’t know what the police might do. She paused, then drove her hand into the fridge.

As she placed a plastic tea cup on a square of rug beside me and began pouring zobo into it, I said tepidly, My father also told me to stay in school until…. My voice trailed away. She was kneeling in front of me, her reddened fingers pressing the dark brown of her knee caps.

Are you a religious person? She asked me.

It depends, I said. My father pastored an orthodox church 23 miles away.

Good, she said, because I am not a religious person either.

She pointed at the cup. Drink up, she said. She came back after she cleared the cup and knelt again. There was a small knot at the centre of her lips. The opening was dark.

So, should we have sex? she said. The knot parted, revealing teeth and ridge and a spread of pink tongue. I stood up, shocked, staring, then after a moment, I sat back down. Her face showed nothing, impersonal as a mathematical equation. Have I overreacted? I thought.

She said, I’m sorry if it feels sudden. Her lilting tone suggested excitement, an earnestness. I couldn’t blink. Are you rattled? She said. I thought you might be rattled, she added. Answer me.

I composed myself. No, I am not rattled, I said.

She leaned back. Then would you have sex with me?

I couldn’t speak. She tapped my knee, sitting.

It’s okay. I understand. Please don’t try and explain. I understand.

After a moment of odd silence, her face in my foreground, dark, gleaming, twitching, withdrawn, sober or sobering, I stood up to leave.

I’m going upstairs, I said.

Would we see tomorrow?

Maybe.

At the door I froze. I couldn’t go. I had refused her out of shock, and nothing else. I hadn’t refused her, even. She had only taken my shock for refusal. And I had taken her cold earnestness for motive. The coldness of knob was seeping into my palm. She was lying down now, on her futon bed, quiet, pliant. A narrow dim panel of light, falling through the louvers of glass, drew up like a quilt to her feet. She was scribbling into multiple sticky notes with an eyepencil.

There was no sound in the room. Only the dull rustling of paper and the scratching of pencil.

I considered a subterfuge. So I said, Could we stroll out?

#

A barricade of wood and signboards blocked out Olaiya junction. Painted in red across the tarred road and the pavement were the words: #EndSARS. Only a few people were walking. On the pavement they lolloped, heads low, holding a basket or a hand, floating across gutters and disappearing like impossible twigs in the road. Across the road, down Akindeko, the empty shops pointed their awns like uncut fingers or fez caps into the slope of road, chickens fluttering under the fingers, a bit of sunlight too, papers floating in the heat and in the dust, over and under the Olaiya bridge like the protest was also about papers being allowed to float anywhere they liked.

We passed under the bridge. Fine, silver aluminum metals coated the round sturdy pillars. The boko-haram net discouraged okada riders from reaching out their hands to touch the paint. Accidents around Olaiya junction had risen by 12.6 percent after Oyetola built the bridge. Most were because okada riders loved to enjoy the underbridge coolness, straining to touch the paintings, while a Dangote truck was rumbling down from Freedom Park.

All of that was over now. Thank God. The sweet roads were now reserved for long strolls.

In the early weeks of the protest, crashes pulled me to the window, my nose pinned to the metal bars, observing pockets of people trundling by in indoors clothes and flip flops, mostly silent, like they were doing a prayer walk. I looked down into the compound that morning, and saw Kofo peeping into the metal door’s keyhole. The edges of her head were bald and shiny, lolling from a small yellow neck, her back curved like a taut bow behind her flapping black blouse. I had thought about putting my fingers there, in the skin of her empty back.

In Akindeko the women gossiped about sex and politics, about family and rotten girls and yahoo boys. Beside the stall of Iya Modamoda, a woman hopped on the edge of a dry gutter, her head thrown back in laughter. At Rasco a bridge rose, small, slight, towards the State Library. The river there, which burst the veneers in June, now coursed thinly, parting around boulders and quartzites, slushing on screes of fine stones. We walked past, unable to speak, our heads low, as if ducking for an invisible lintel.

At Old Garage, she slipped her fingers into my curved palm, at the door of its sweaty room. I thought she wanted me to take the fingers in, hold them, and warm their cold in the privacy of my hands. Past the pigpen at Fakunle, past the vast fields of jutes, her sturdy face broke, unfurling into a smile.

Back indoors she sank into the bed. Her unsteady breathing rattled in her throat. She is asleep, I thought, and made to leave, but paused, unable to move, and tears welled up behind my eyes, and I thought to cry. The rug rubbed my sweaty feet. I could lie on it and cry for a moment, I thought.

You cannot leave too, can you? She said in a melancholy voice, out of a pale and shy face. With a palm she thudded the space beside her. Then come, she said. Sit here with me.

Her warm, supple flesh rippled like cloth. She may not be breathing at all, or she may be breathing through her pores. She crossed her left leg on my lap, nuzzling up to me, with her head arranged on my shoulder blade. Her body was frail, like the body of a child, her quiet sudden and absolute. She could have fallen asleep.

Kofo, Kofo, I said. Are you asleep?

She nodded no.

I would also like to have sex with you. My voice broke and shuddered. I love your honesty, I continued. Some women would’ve taken advantage of me. But you’re different. I might even be in love with you. You’re the kind of a woman one marries. You won’t pack your load when I shout. When I slap you, you’ll slap yours. You will abuse my mother and call her unfortunate. I think I love you, Kofo.

Finally, when her reply came, it was the just-awake mumble of a pubescent.

I am just tired, she said. Let me sleep.

With the back of her left palm moving conscientiously across her face, her neck, the cave of her chest, she said, My body is hot. I might get sick. I think I am dying. Or it could be my period.

An embarrassed laugh, like a long scoff, spilled from her mouth. I placed my right palm on her neck, warm and soft, fleshly.

I didn’t think she was dying. Her eyelids drooped over her ash-coloured pupils, her voice trailed off mid-sentence, her mood erratic, but nothing suggested dying. Death is more methodical. This one, was fatigue. I thought she was making a joke to kill time. And so it was to participate in her game that I unwittingly said: Death is hardly the end, don’t you think? Then she sprang up, her face twitching with curious excitement.

You are a religious man, then. You believe in heaven, don’t you?

Yes, I do.

Well, I don’t, she said, the excitement waning. Death is nothing but endless sleeping.

I was embarrassed by her unintelligence. That is childish thinking, Kofo.

What? She made as if to lie down, but straightened to her feet. Let me show you something. For the next few minutes, we went through a pile of neatly-folded file from her box. They were medical reports, used pens, sticky notes dangling down old notes filled with blue ink. She handed me different papers, saying, I’ve done series of tests, the last was in April, though, at Seventh Day Adventist. My eyes darted through the prints without understanding. I couldn’t concentrate. Her eager sadness had turned into testiness. She was flipping through the papers, shouting, rumpling the sheets, reading and repeating the doctors’ comments, her diagnosis, random things on randomized sticky notes, her eyes squinting.

Cirrhosis sounded benign on the mouth. That distant morning as I watched her, she suddenly turned back to look at me at my window, and said good morning. Cirrhosis was the soft curl of her lips, gentle against the teeth. The spilling smile.

There had been nothing peculiar about her face. Nor about her carriage; she was languid and slow, terrifyingly ordinary. But her voice. Sadness tangible in its tenor, yet innocently elusive like jelly slipping through fingers. Over the next few days her voice distracted me at morning when she spread linens in the compound, and when she caught me staring and said her greetings, I hid behind the drawn curtains, wilted to my toes.

Now she hovered behind me, speaking to me in that voice, helpless, resigned. I couldn’t concentrate and out of frustration, I grew restless and squeezed the paper I was holding, balled into my fist, while she yelped and winced.

At some point you have to stop worrying about all this nonsense! I cried, my ribs sharpened by exhaled breath. She didn’t lift her eyes off my balled fist. Embarrassed by the entire situation, I released the paper from my fist. She picked it, straightened it against her lap. Then she took it to the window ledge and straightened it some more, in silence, without looking this or that way, working her hands conscientiously on the paper like a maid smoothening the creases off a checkered shirt.

The afternoon sun, turning rust-colour, lighted very gently on her sweating forehead, above a grimace. A crash outside drew her eyes out through the panes. Two voices were speaking hurriedly outside, their feet resounding. They were all gathering at Lekki, they were saying, their feet receding like an applause behind a shut door.

You don’t understand, she said to me. You can’t understand.

Although it was a lie, I said I perfectly understood.

I paid so much money to get tested, she said. I thought it was HIV. I nearly missed my school fees. My friends said I was stupid, my paranoia. But I knew. They don’t understand. I was happy it was not HIV. My mother would kill me.

She raised up the creased paper, examining it in the light. Then she began slotting it back into the file, putting it back into her box.

I was saying, Do you use drugs, though? My brother had it. But he survived it.

But she was saying, as if I had only opened my mouth without speaking: So, if you’re scared of contracting disease from me, you won’t. I test myself frequently. I have no disease.

She was pulling me by the collars back into bed.

Nonsense, nonsense talk, I said, not angrily, but quietly, as if I was persuading a child to eat.

You said you would have sex with me, didn’t you? I love you too.

She was giggling. I love you, she said. Ever since you came to this house.

Do you use your drugs? I repeated. Are you listening to me at all, Kofo? Can you hear me?

Stop shouting, she said weakly. Don’t be so loud. Her head was swinging. She spluttered some words. Finally she formed the words. It’s already late stage, she said. I am dying soon, I told you. When I was leaning back, she said, Now don’t be a sexist. I am not a typical girl. I will kill you if you think I am a typical girl.

She took off her blouse and draped them neatly over the trolley. Then she took off her skirts, then her pants, then she took my cold, clammy palm.

Don’t be an idiot, she said angrily. Then she said gently, Is this your first time?

She unbuckled my trousers, unbuttoned my shirt, and stuck her tongue into my left ear. I tried to reason with her. She was relentless, determined, leading my right hand into the left cup of her braziers. Her neck was wide and long, excruciatingly long, ending in clavicles and dank curved shoulders, smelling of cinnamon. My fingers unclasped her braziers, and caught the falling breasts, and knotted and kneaded round the pointed budge, and the globule of tissue inside. So this is romance, I thought.

Kiss me, kiss me, she said, and I tried to kiss her on the lips. She drew back her head and led my head like a difficult pendulum to the crook of her thighs, warm, dark, a good tool for murder through suffocation.

But I loved being suffocated between a woman’s thighs. I would lie lifeless on her laps, running cold from my fingertips. What did it mean for a man to die? I thought. Foucault said death was the final eclipse of thought in sex. A tremor of the soul, he wrote. I would shake inside, at the bloody orb of my soul, humping and puffing like a hand giving you a spoon and retrieving it, putting the cold metal into the hotness of palm only for a moment, like Kofo had done to me with her fingers at Old Garage, having sex with me without my knowledge, wide awake beside her, lines seamed across my forehead.

I thought, finally, I would take her, possess her, shake away her sadness, satisfy her, a child full of warm milk, when she prodded my chest with her right thumb. Go now, she said, going under the blue bedsheet, quiet.

Without turning to me, she said, Would you come tomorrow?

Dazed, all my excitement turned liquid, seeping through my pores.

I think I might be dying, she said. Her breath sharpened, like a wheeze.

I was wearing my trousers, buckling my belts, buttoning my shirt.

Do you think the protest would end soon? I have to go home. I miss my mother.

I told her I didn’t know.

At the door, while I was about to step out, she called me. And right before she fell asleep, silently snoring or just wheezing, she told me she loved me.

After long hours of arguing in my flourescent-lighted office, I stepped outdoors into the veranda. The evening was a most-bright gold thing in the lawn of Aud 2. Against the white-faded Humanities Building. The air palpable and fine. I wanted to go into that atmosphere. I was 2 floors above ground. It would be only a little fatal. Twisted tendons. Smashed head. Probable death after suffering. A terrible, mad suffering.

I imagine those people who die out of the impulse beauty induces. The impulse to run towards. To shout or whimper. The impulse to move against reason towards the object. The very thing, the boring, ill-advised thing literature is always telling us about. About people in tune with what is beautiful and pure and killing.

I just finished reading Ben Okri’s book, Astonishing the Gods. Typical of Okri to write a book out of human understanding. But the narrator himself has been told that, to understand a thing, one must not try to understand it. Paradoxical at the time of reading. But all the book, all the story I don’t understand come back to me cleanly at their time and in their moment.

A spiritual guide would be telling me: “Many fine evenings have killed you many times. Many times you must refuse to die completely. There are many more evenings to come. Beauty is much suffering and much pleasure.” That kind of true, cryptic stuff!

But there is still truth in that assumed statement. In one of my dancy-dancy poems, I wrote: “I cannot behave casually with an end/I cannot behave casually with my end.” Many things kill me daily. My feelings skyrocket. Anything I feel I try to feel completely without the privilege of return. Even so with beauty.

I love to admire. I love my eyes. My senses. Beauty— that ungraspable, pleasurable murdering thing! I love not to curate or caution my relationship with it. I like to experience it. But with all my senses working, overwhelmed as they are by work, I always feel irrepressibly dead. Like my life has ended. And to be plucked away from my position of observation is to be resurrected. A daily Lazarus.

Admiring anything fully is incredibly difficult. It is to refuse all other life and insist on this one and, when that relationship turns bitter, to continue one’s gaze. Deep deep down deep to the depths. One runs the risky of being called melodramatic— even if melodrama is also as much a question of audience and theory as it is a question of performance and actor. And so, every day one must refuse beauty. One must refuse to stay longer, a little longer, in the condition of death.

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