IFÈ

*** Arrival ***

Ifè does not open her arms to welcome you the way Ìbàdàn would. You know this because you notice how she takes you in slowly, cautiously, like a coy lover telling you to learn the language of her body before yearning to speak to it.

But when she finally lets you in and you learn all her songs and her stories, and when you leave (as we all must, ultimately), Ifè plagues you with nostalgia so crippling that you begin to give yourself to all the things that remind you of her.

These things are not cardinally lifeless as you have been made to believe that things must be or in the sense that things have been described to be. These things are -for the lack of a better word- infinite, in the way stars are; absolute, immense.

*** Moon(s) ***

The first time I noticed the moon in Ifè, it was the night of a full moon. Then I remembered my friend (the moon) in Ìbàdàn that peeks into my room at 5:00 a.m through the window and I wanted to ask this moon in Ifè, do you remember me from Ìbàdàn?

It was a Friday night, weeks after our initial encounter that I would spot the moon again, about an hour to midnight. It was different this time, a half moon and I loved it, wholly, in its incompleteness and I wanted it to love me back because it felt like we were kin and this moon must know that I am missing something too. And it was a good night to indulge (in the things that make me feel) because everything was marvelous and graceful — almost surreal and if I could paint, by god, I would have painted that night.

*** Uptown Bar ***

The men at Uptown are wooden figures from a distance. Upon entering, the place reveals itself to you and one starts to understand that lights — coloured lights, like darkness can also hide the truth.

There was a lot of smoke from men who sat round square tables. The smoke escaped from their nostrils (or their mouth depending on the way they liked it, sometimes alternating routes) quickly, like it was too dark inside there and I remember looking at their eyes hoping that it’d become a window for me to peer into the number of lives they had lived, but I couldn’t see beyond the sclera.

Happiness is cheap there, depending on what brand of it you drink or smoke.

***Figurines***

All the things around me have been begging to be written but I cannot write them the way they want to be written. Because it was also in Ifè that Moyò taught me that pictures are the ultimate portrait of truth, not words.

But I must try-

• The dancing man at the car-park. How he is so faraway but the music keeps bringing him back, how I desire to be returned like that to the things that make me remember.
• The gate-man at the gate of the hotel who greets me with his voice full of expectation, like he is waiting for something that wouldn’t come to him if he doesn’t beg for it and I have been wondering- ‘Why me?’, ‘Does it look like I have this thing?’, ‘Why is your voice so heavy with expectation?’. But I am not a stranger to expectations like that, it is also present in my mother’s voice when she raises it up to god.
• The old man we encountered on the mountain, who set apart a portion of it for himself. And when we passed by, he held a cutlass half-threateningly, half-supplicating that no man desecrates his safe place, his altar. How I wanted to ask him if he has forgotten what the Psalmist wrote about Yahweh’s earth ‘ The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein..’, how I kept quiet for fear of my own safety and instead set further to conquer the mountain.

***Dusk***

Ifè is a town always in a hurry to sleep.