A Notebook of Lost Memories

               
I recently had a list of books that I wanted to reread sent home. A few days later, the list came back with a couple of books. Behind the list is my father's thin but legible handwriting: could not go any further; carton too dusty. Among the books sent, however, is a notebook that I had once used when I started reading and when I was beginning to scribble down ideas that swirled in my head as inspiration for what seemed like writing struck. When I called to thank him, I did not bother to ask what informed his decision to include the notebook, or if it had been mistakenly added; he, in turn, did not say a word about it. His decision, whatever must have prompted it, has decided to take me on a tour of how I collected the literary pieces that awed and inspired me as a teenager.

It is a red-covered long note with white pages divided by blue horizontal lines. The edges of the sheets are now a fainted yellow from what seemed like an exposure to sunlight. The first page was dedicated to a quote by Maya Angelou, one of the few women in whose words I had understood that language could pull an enormous power that could trigger a change. The five pages that followed were not dissimilar from the first. Just that the quotes had come from random writers and poets who nothing, but their craft must have moved me to have an excerpt of their works written down. Edgar Allan Poe, Anton Chekhov, Earnest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston all had a few lines from their poetry, essays, short stories and autobiographies directly lifted and quoted. What struck me most was that as a beginning and inexperienced reader, I had found comfort in quality words and courage to have me led by these words to a destination that I could not tell; a place where no prescience could inform me of its safety, or risks.

The middle page is a bit busy with list of books and beside them were start and finish dates of each book. Their Eyes Were Watching God caught my attention. I had started reading it in February and had finished it in three days. Now I remember it was not such a book with much contents. Written in Haiti during her stint as a folklore collector and an anthropologist, Zora succinctly tells the tale of Janie Crawford, whose quest for identity takes her on a journey where she learns what love is. The book had nourished my curiosity about Zora. Later that year, in September, I would read Dust Tracks on a Road- an autobiography of her's. Through that I met other writers and poets like Langston Hughes. I would come to know the Harlem Renaissance as a period when a community of fastidious black writers and poets possessed the power of words and had also learned the economy of words to say so much in so little pages.

In 2005, a period when Jos was plunging in and out of series of sectarian crises, I had read autobiographies of Fredrick Douglas, Maya Angelou, and had taken a swift turn, during that same year, to read short stories of Checkhov, Poe, Woolf and Welty. In Welty's stories, I found a smooth blend of relationship between the white and the black race. To this day, I marvel at her gift of imagination; at how she carved out existence between different people with seemingly struggling and flourishing lives. They had all, in a strange manner, equipped my laboratory of words to describe experiences that someone within my age gap may have found uneasy to describe then. The black American authors had painted the horrors of slavery and emancipation of blacks in so clear terms that I could not stop explaining the travails beyond the content of history textbooks to a group of horrifying classmates. And so when Jos began experiencing a relative calm, and everyone saw peace and healing, I saw a town of smothering ruins. I met a people who still harbored hatred, but literature, my feeble mind must have oddly believed, could help bring solace to the minds of these people. Welty's works had exposed me to a realm of possibilities.

Flipping my notebook reveals further books that I must have read at random places and varying times. In class. At my father's desk in office while he worked on Saturdays. During long vacations. When I'm hurt or just having the fleeting moments of moodiness. Some I remembered by instances that had provoked them; some are hazy, but I try to figure out by vaguely written timelines. These books and stories and poems all had a significant impacts in me as a beginning reader who would end up becoming a budding writer. I didn't just want to read, now I realize. I wanted to become a better reader. The reason must have stemmed out of the desire to recount, to retell and to chronicle; or otherwise, I wouldn't have kept a notebook that I couldn't have told what I would make of it today.

I held the notebook in my hand and the thought of how it all began flooded me with memories. The red cover back is beginning to get dotted with white spots -- the signs of having been held for a long time before being packed. The edges are becoming rough, as if constantly browsed by termites. It smells of damp and the ink from written words are becoming erased with time. Poring over it for the last time, I turned to the last page. Amidst dates, names of books and authors scribbled, Langston Hughes' Dream Deferred loomed. I read it again and it felt new, like words carefully spoken by someone who has not spoken in years.