One Writer's Beginning

I didn’t write as a child. I didn’t even become an avid reader until I turned 13. Each time I recount this experience to people, I always imagine what runs through their minds. Then you should write more. Some might think. You have your memories as a child with you, still. When I started reading, I tried to reinvent the lives of writers I read. I created their childhoods, their struggles with the writing process, and their views of life. These shades of nuances, and the love of it, sunk me into more books, into biographies that helped sprout the lives of the people I admired before my eyes. I soon began to see life as a source for creation, as a place where, by some alchemy, you could turn words into worlds.

This abiding admiration didn’t drive me to write, however. It left me worried. I was worried because I couldn’t put my thoughts to papers, and that I could only breathe life into the already existing or once existed life. Often, I would sit at the table and stare into a blank piece of paper for as long as the creation process weaves from the beginning to the end, like a painter brings a piece of art work only begun with a slight stroke to life. But the words wouldn’t come. They would leave me bewildered. Wondering like an audience that had just seen a magician turned a piece of white handkerchief into a flying dove without uttering a word.

Children with repressed childhoods are hardly creative, Dr James Dobson, an American  psychologist, once said. When I heard this, it disturbed me so much that I couldn’t suppress the urge of plotting my growing process from childhood. It was a childhood where you would always find me in a pool of vibrating siblings who had love for music, dance and people. As the last child, they carried me along and, by default, I picked an interest of listening to radio stations from them. This would later ignite a spark that drove me into a brief stint with the radio. Through them, I met Josites, as we called residents of Jos, who had confidence to pursue any dreams. They wanted to study in America despite having poor parents and struggling grades. They chased success in music till they got to Lagos. They dropped out of secondary school. Together, they formed a part in me that should have been bold enough to see life as a varying process; a part that I may have felt too ashamed or uninteresting to visit; a part that I was constantly comparing to the worlds in the pages of my most admired books.

I had a magician father. As an accountant with Leventis stores, he would always come back home with sweets, of glossy wraps, in his inner pockets. Asking us to close our eyes, the rains of sweets would come splattering down from the high ceilings. It amazed and excited us, the splattering and our scurrying. They were the most intriguing parts of the magic. And we all played along even when my older ones later discovered his tricks. He had this fleeting humor any child wanted to respect and keep. He and my mother had a way of laughing at life.  Mother would always joke about how the heat in Maiduguri once pulled out her hairs, replacing them with heat rash. Father had just been transferred to Borno. It was the early 90s. Still they hold an endearing memory of Borno, which they love to share to this day.

Writing is reflecting. I see it with the same solitary process with which I see prayers. When you sit to write, the screen or paper staring blank at you awaits your confessions or requests. It is a process that calls for reflection, for you to think deep and breathe life into it without expecting criticisms and judgment from screen or paper. Let that come from the audience who may share the same inner twitch of confessions as you do, but are too timid and ashamed to do that. They are those who prefer to have people pray and fast on their behalf.

I starved myself from writing at a younger age because I wanted to write in the voices that I read. This might have come, inauspiciously, from the fear of becoming too boring; from hiding the childhood memories I was never denied having; from fear of failure. As a beginning writer, I preferred to shield my little beginnings with the shame and tribulations of others. It hadn’t dawned on me that writing involves seeing life as a whole. I began to write, and write convincingly, when I began using the tools that I got from reading others’ works; when I began creating a world, in my own words, with these tools.