BECAUSE EVERYTHING WAS BEING SWALLOWED BY MEMORY
(Excerpts from my 2018 journal)
JANUARY
· I will like to state that this journal is one of the ways I have chosen to battle the curse of memory which is forgetfulness.
· I am entering 2018 with a different kind of fear, a fear that numbs.
· The inertia is also a curse. I find that I am unable to steer myself towards the dream I want to build. I am only floating. A subject to the forces of movement.
· My Mondays arrive with a different brand of heaviness. The kind that fills the heart with want and longings for beginnings…
· If living is the accumulation of memories, what then is the fate of the lives we have lived but didn’t curate?
· If I am quiet enough, maybe I will hear my heart sing?
· I am fascinated with the word ‘longing’. It appears to carry all the elements of desire within itself. And the way it rolls off the tongue like it is a word waiting to be engulfed by the lips of a lover. A waiting word.
· The morning was unusually bright and I was like a rainbow and my colour was laughter in different hues and intensity and I was gifting it without hesitation like I am the connoisseur of laughter and colours, like there are no days when I run empty and look for light in bends, like there are no days when my heart is heavier than my body…
· I said ‘you have to let go of nostalgia’ but Kemi Falodun replied ‘what if nostalgia is the only lens through which the past can be viewed, do we still let go then?’ I had no words.
· I am also fascinated by the ability of the self to pick bits of people and own them. I mean the subtle loss and remodeling of language and habit to fit that of a lover.
· I am grateful for all the people that offer me bits of lights (albeit unknowingly) to make the dark days easier to bear.
FEBRUARY
· I don’t want to curate any of these days. I don’t want to remember them.
· I think I will be asked if it broke me and I will not have an answer.
· Remember Syrio from Braavos when he said ‘what do we say to the god of death?’
-sometimes, I find strength in my throat and scream ‘not today’ into the ears of the universe.
-sometimes, it is a weak muttering.
-sometimes, the doubt comes in the form of silence.
· Tonight, I was the conversationalist, the explorer, the novice, the muse. I could close my eyes, will my body into water and flow into any man I wanted to be. How beautiful is that?
· I have been reading Safia in ‘First Quarantine with Abdelhalim Hafez’.
· It is a fascinating thing how we always arrive fully clothed into conversations protected by a veil that is meant to shroud us from the world and how slowly, words open us up and we are suddenly naked, the way we truly are.
· I will like to confess now that I have been held captive by a poem for months, a poem of conversation. I have been trying to converse with Adonai in a poem but he won’t talk back to me.
MARCH
· I think Adonai wants to speak to me now.
· Taking life in little sips because I am afraid it would burn my tongue if I take it all up at once.
· ‘Every song is worship to a woman’. That was probably the opening line to something that could have been a love poem but I have been battling the desire to write about love or lust.
· My Tuesdays are constantly filled with things that scare the void away.
· I caught a new song and it’s a love song and I still don’t understand how songs make me feel warm and soft.
· My sister called to remind me about old memories that we were almost forgetting and I laughed and laughed and it felt like we were children again.
APRIL
· The month of protest and silence.
· I was there.
· We staged a protest all dressed in white coats, singing anthems and rebelling against a system that wanted to break us.
· Ile-Ife.
· The most fascinating thing about Ile-Ife has been how conversations with Moyo always spiral into either poetry or philosophy or science. A careful examination of the mundane, probing layer after layer, seeking for a semblance of depth, something to not forget.
· Ife mornings leave the air I breathe heavy with nostalgia.
· A photograph is the ultimate reflection of truth — words can overshadow the truth or meanings, they can become lost in translation and nuances. But a picture? There is no hiding from that.
· Portrait of the poet as a journeyman. Portrait of the poet as a sinking man. Portrait of the poet as a void.
· I keep running into these images:
-Men huddled in groups and smoking. Talking more than laughing.
-A shelf of books I may never read.
-A ceiling giving way from inside, held in place by black tape.
-A broken door.
-Broken roads.
-Broken people.
· It is impossible to exhaust writing about the body.
· In a text message, O asked, ‘Do you think love in itself is a simple thing?’
· I tried to convince a woman that the new god was more love than fire but she wouldn’t budge. She desperately wanted him to be fire.
· There was a lady at the gallery who was playing music that I didn’t pay much attention to because the room did not need music to be filled since there was too much art in it already and every piece felt like a star in a dark planet.
· I met K again and he was a different man this time like he caught fire and he told me how he wants to see the world and breathe all the different airs and how this movement has to be now. When I shook him, I couldn’t feel the warmth but I knew for certain that there was a fire coursing through his bones, the kind that can only be quenched by movement.
MAY
· ‘There is a tide in the affairs of me, which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyages of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries’ –William Shakespeare (Julius Caeser).
· Alcohol exaggerates the blur, the numb or whatever shade of grey you are carrying inside.
· With every road journey I embark on, there is always a heavy air of uncertainty in my head and an overall heightened awareness of the imminent. I don’t sleep during the journey. I like to think that I’d want to be present at my own death. I do not want the translation to be sudden.
· The quiet in Ado-Ekiti is not the same as the quiet in Ife. The quiet in Ife is not the same with the quiet in Ibadan.
· The men at Uptown Bar are wooden figures from a distance…
· My mother thinks god is so big that heaven cannot contain him.
· I have been reading Baldwin. I feel like he is the answer even though I do not know what the question is.
· The mystery of the truth is how from afar, it appears like a thing that can be easily kept in a palm, that will endure the silence but you move closer and suddenly you begin to doubt what you will do because the truth alters both itself and its bearer.
· I may have seen the light but I am looking for an encompassing word.
· I write because I seek alternate ways to exist.
· I keep losing all the portraits of happiness I thought were infinite.
· I am on the mountain for a second time and I conquered it this time.
· Why does art require validation?
· In the morning, I was thinking of dance as a means of communication between bodies. And despite the absence of syntax, how bodies open up and close and bend and impinge — one on the other, simply on the instruction of sonance!
JUNE
· How many times have you confronted the roots of your trauma?
· Al-Baqara (The Cow)
· I am reminded of the magic of translation.
· I have been performing grief through silence.
· ‘…those men, raising their children, eating their greens, crying their curses, weeping their tears, singing their songs, making their love, as the sun rose, as the sun set…’
· I have been trying to teach my body that this tiredness is also necessary for my survival.
JULY
· ‘I am the one who taught you Obito’s words and I was about to waver again…’
· I don’t know if the poem begins with a woman or with water but there are days I have confused the softness of the woman with the fluidity of water.
· In how many ways can a man be disillusioned? –Dami Ajayi
· ‘We will write impossible things’ — TJ Benson.
· N had a bit of light to give out today and it was good to hear her laugh like that. I don’t have enough light in me to gift her when her days are dark so I run into silence instead.
· G brought news that a cleaner woman died of a kidney disease. I don’t know her name but I remember her from my former room, her voice waking us up and reminding people not to pour water on her while she is working. In a way, I never thought about her dying. I had come to accept her as one of the constant things in this place. But people are not things…
AUGUST
· I have not been curating my days
SEPTEMBER
· The tiredness is like a prison-room with a single window overlooking a river and I am a prisoner trapped in the room, full of envy for the river, free to move anywhere…
· 25 on a 25.
· ‘I will rewrite this whole life and there will be so much love…’
· Playing the music on loud because one is trying to shut out the sadness but the sadness has shut itself inside the body with the song and now the body has become a battleground of rhythm and silence.
· I have too many memories trapped inside songs.
OCTOBER
· I forgot where I was going with this…
