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.

For a Gone Brother

The last time I saw Abubakar was last year. On that day in late June, after
a lecture, he had hurriedly summoned the class to inform us of an impending
'calamity' that would soon befall our university. This calamity, he said,
was stemmed from the sinful and unlawful practices that students and
lecturers displayed. Everyone laughed about it. Like Abubakar, unperturbed
by jeers, had always made us laugh.

It was a bright sunny afternoon. But a gloom loomed in his eyes. The type
which spoke of a man who delirium had detached from the spinning world. A
man who had fallen sick.

I had an affable relationship with Abubakar in our days in 100 level. A
stoic-broad man with a broad smile. I was particularly drawn to him by the
boldness he wore in the classroom and an alluring spirit he exuded outside
the lecture halls. He  was often bold enough to attempt question no one had
a clue answering, even if it was wrong. Abubakar soon became likeable to
some of the lecturers who admired his courage; and some of us were
attracted to his simple, unassuming character. He was, in turn, opened to
those of us he trusted. He shared his stories; he had plans for the future.
He loved. But his demeanour didn't make him care whether he was loved in
return.

In 200 level, Abubakar started withdrawing. He withdrew from the class and
sometimes shielded himself with a week-long melancholy. Such inward battle
came with the price others around him had to pay for: a constant obsession
with an 'acclaimed lover', accompanied by hallucinations. He became
increasingly quieter, often wearing a cold, morose attitude. He nagged at
little altercations and hardly spoke in a class he once controlled with a
sense of humour he never knew he had. And was never told he had.

Abubakar is gone. He just left. And has been eight months gone. He left, I
think, after that afternoon he prophesied doom on our school. He left,
perhaps, out of the fear and paranoia that comes with dementia. He's been
sick, everybody knows, but nobody cares. Instead, we talk about him as if
he were here, as if everything was alright. We have forgotten, it seems,
about how normal a being he was, and still is. I marvel at how quick we are
to burn the bridge that links our past to our present.

Abubakar has a disturbing present that is fast erasing his gleeful and
promising spirit from our minds. We should help him connect back to the
world and this can possibly happen when we begin wishing him well. When we
begin to truly care.