I want to write this essay. This is the third day. My progress is a mere sitting and staring, as though I have a pact with the page not to stain it with words.
A welcome distraction, my phone blinks with a message from Bashir.
The text message excites me. Bashir sells used books along the express road, three streets from my house in Unguwan Bissau. I have been buying from him since last year when I discovered him on a stroll, but it has been three weeks since I heard from him. In the past few months, I have met authors I may never find elsewhere: Virginia Woolf, Amy Tan, Bessie Head, Joan Didion, Ian McEwan, Dionne Brand, and Irving Layton. But more so, it is a reminder that I have been indoors for days, trying to write, and I’ve received an invitation to behold the world outside of my room.
Unguwan Bissau is a flaunt of brown uneven roads, unpainted walls and brown roofs; cigarette butts; boys and girls in huddles, buzzing from burnt weed wraps tucked between their fingers; open shops with bottles of hot drinks winking from their dark interiors; an Igi Odon tree standing like a giant skeleton over a display of tomatoes, vegetables, cocoyam, potatoes, red pepper. Amidst this, a grinding machine squeals to emphasize the importance of its existence. The junction ahead tells another story of five roads conjoined like siblings. Tricycles, bikes, cars negotiate for space. The express road is a beehive of prattling bikes, shushing vehicles, horns, and conductors shouting out destinations: Kasuwa, Kakuri, Gonin, Gora, Barnawa, Narayi.
“Hundred, hundred naira,” Bashir’s voice rings above the din. His teeth are sunshine on his face when he sees me.
“My oga, you don come?” I let out a light chuckle. His black hand wraps around mine in welcome.
The books are on the floor, side by side. I begin to pick them up one by one. Lying beneath two old books is this one. The author’s name screams in white on a red strip at the top of the front cover. On the bottom right, the title reads: Go Tell It on the Mountain. A song with the same title rings in my head:
Go tell it on the mountain,
Over the hills, and everywhere,
Go tell it on the mountain,
That Jesus Christ is Lord.
And slowly my formative years crawl in on me.
“Go Tell It on the Mountain” was a Block Rosary Crusade Prayer Meeting special at Our Lady Queen of the Most Holy Rosary of St. Monica’s Church, Malali, in the northern part of Kaduna. We sang it with rapturous verve in those innocent periods before the Sharia crisis of February 2000. I spent much of it in church, a trek away from Unguwan Godo, where I was staying. The craving to be in church was the culture for most kids at that time. It had the mix of religiosity, play, and sometimes, fighting. But religiosity was the umbrella. The church building spread on a large expanse of land with vegetation on one side. In the season of their bearing, the trees offered us guava, mangoes, cashew, and bananas.
After the six o’clock Mass, we’d troop into the prayer room on the left wing of the church and set the altar. Three people, specifically a brother and two sisters, Lucia, Francesco, and Jacinta —a replica of the three children of Fatima—led the prayer, which was usually a decade of the rosary. Afterward, we sang several songs before taking a Bible reading. Each day had programs. Fridays, for instance, were for questions and answers. It was also the day for collection.
Offer something good to God.
Offer something good to God, Children of Mary.
I served at Mass. Sunday Masses were always a delight. They earned you some bragging rights among other altar boys and girls. Legion of Mary meetings owned my Saturday mornings. In those days, the sentiment was that I was going to be a priest. My papa and mama looked forward to the day I would be ordained as one, after the Order of Melchizedek. It wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life, but it felt right to dwell on it until I decided what I did.
I exclaim in Bashir’s face and hold the book up like a trophy. This feeling has taken me so unaware, I have forgotten how short I am of money. Buying books is not a show of being affluent, but a mark of courage, a love affair, which, in most cases, leaves me drained of my finances.
Bashir pulls a bench for me to sit. The book is a 1985 edition by Laurel Books. The author’s face has a demeanor I have come to associate with him.
My first encounter with Baldwin was in 2015 when I was a laborer in a block factory in the United Arab Emirates. At break time, the first post I read on my phone feed was a Paris Review interview with Baldwin. I went back to work with a feeling for which I did not have a name. Weeks later, I was given a sick leave because I had fractured my middle finger. The feeling manifested again as an existential turmoil. First, I was a philosophy graduate in blue coveralls pushing a wheelbarrow in another man’s country, a ridicule to all the Marxism I had studied in university. My writing was a series of blank pages; I realized I could have died in the accident without writing a thing. My fear of death was rooted in my experience of the Sharia crisis, which ended my childhood in ways my adult self still grapples with. Over the years, the distraught child and the unprepared adult in me have struggled for reconciliation. In the midst of all this, Baldwin awakened in me an urgency I had lacked—write.
While I began to write in spite of the ache in my hand, Baldwin popped up again in an essay: “The New Lost Generation” from a collection Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, which, in its relentless questioning, is both blazing and honest. To be a writer is to question, to confront and shed the self of all pretense. As Baldwin notes in the interview, “the goal is to write a sentence as clean as a bone.” So we stand before paper mirrors and undress. Slowly and deliberately, in short sentences, like musical notes. Or in the drawn-out hum of long sentences, and offer it to the world as art, a creation. While it is not in our hands to determine what this nakedness does to the reader, it gives a sense of belonging to the self: “…a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this departs from that of others.”
But here, at Bashir’s roadside shop, a newer feeling settles in me. Baldwin is a book in my hands. He is sitting next to me and his stare is much closer. It blazes with that unmistakable rage, an unrelenting conviction: “. . . I am not your nigger. I am a man.”
In the days when rejections pile in my mail, or I am stuck in a piece for a long time, I am struck by the questions: Am I a writer at all? Have I wasted time trying to be one? Could I have done something else with my life even if I do not know what it could have been? Am I not some fraud with a couple of publications parading as a writer? Or am I not dynamic enough and writing is a barrier? When everything turns blank, and I am thrown into wondering if I am not just a passenger in my own life, Baldwin pops up. Anger is art, a refusal to be stifled. His stare is an invitation to be present. If I am here, in this moment, who am I? I am a writer even if all around me is not alright.
The first two sentences of the book have a tinge of the religiosity that I clung to when I was much younger: “Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father did. It had been said so often that John, without thinking about it, had come to believe it himself.”
I was also expected to be a child of piety, to become a priest. But that prescribed yearning is no longer a house I live in. It has been replaced with a questioning self, more aware and even angrier. I find relief in feeling my belief is a jacket I can wear and have a say about how it fits on me. Going to church is less an obligation for me now. Not going has not made me an atheist, a nonbeliever in the metaphysical, or anything like that. When I sit at Mass, I want to ask: Why do we name our collection groups according to the teams of the English Premier League? Why does the priest have to do a sermon when he could just sit and let us think about the reading? Why do we have to turn to God for our needs when the church turns to us for her needs? Those used to be musings I beat myself up for indulging in. But writing has given me more access to them. I can now reflect on them not with the eyes of judgement or guilt, but with a more humane gaze. And this has made me truer to myself. I still love the Mass, but as a personal choice rather than from an acquired norm. I love it when the priest sprays blessing or sings the Eucharist. Or the choir chants the hymns. And the congregation illuminates a heavenly bliss.
The novel is a solemn invitation to prayer for the character John. As such, it awakens in me a certain religious mood, just as Augustine’s Confessions does, not in the conventional sense of being a theist or not, but in an all-encompassing manner that aligns with what has become my conviction: to write is to pray. Sometimes, this prayer is sitting and staring, ruminating on a sentence the whole day, cringing over a published work and wishing I’d never written a thing, getting rejections, losing faith in my craft, failing at a project, missing a deadline, winning a contest, falling in and out of love, finding a classic in an unexpected place, taking a stroll. . . and these are burnt offerings which the universe does not reject. To pray is to live.
Bashir’s voice rings about. A small crowd of customers has gathered. I pay him.
“Oga, na only dis one you go take?” asks Bashir.
“Dis one don do. I no see any other one wey I like.”
I walk home amidst the blare of traffic, my nose tickled by dust. A tingle of accomplishment dances on my face. Books are spirits. They know you need them. Whether you know it or not, they conspire with the universe on your behalf to make themselves available even in unexpected places, such as a roadside bookshop in Sabo.
John is someone I want to meet, someone I have an affinity with, someone whose life I have already known. I want to see how he fares in a world where his beliefs are owned for him. I want to see how, if at all, he outgrows them. Does he revolt, refuse the name given to him, fight, forgive, and create something new for himself? Or does he accept himself as he is?
At the mouth of the junction leading off the express road, a chorus of beseeching from men on motorbikes floods me: “Oga you dey go?”
Their voices relay a yearning louder than the prattle of their bikes—a quest to live. I imagine one or two of these men could be writers or artists, and this is their means of staying alive. This existential need echoes Baldwin: Write. Find a way to keep alive. While I have not become a priest in the Order of Melchizedek, Baldwin offers an alternative: a priest of language. In writing, the writer offers words on behalf of humanity. And I am a partaker of that offering.
“Oya, make we dey go na.” One of them kick-starts his bike, expecting me to straddle it. They compete to shoulder the responsibility of having a passenger. “Oga” is not necessarily what I am. Yet in their world, I am. My face dissolves into a smile, for I am also saying, hey, I am not too different from you.
I walk past them and back into the interior of dusty roads and brown roofs. I kick an empty milk tin by the road. It tumbles to a stop ahead of me. I get to it and kick again. John would do this. The boy I was would too. These days, dreams are the places I meet him. My chest squeezes when I wake as I hold onto that innocence during those dull afternoons, rainy nights, and harmattan soaked mornings. He is reminding me of the origins of my writing. Sometimes he gives me a story title, like this essay’s, and leaves me to flounder about for the body; sometimes, a pot of disorderly scenes which become clear over the course of the day; sometimes, a full plot in which I am officiating a high mass; sometimes, it is a classroom, and a teacher is speaking, but the boy is not listening because he is building a castle in the teacher’s mouth, or it is a math test and the boy’s paper is blank because he is still questioning the point of finding x; sometimes, it is a complete book with no title; sometimes, he offers me food like a blessed host.
Life is a dream. Writing is the table at which dreaming and waking reconcile. I am still the boy even as an adult. Adulthood is the vocation of childhood. In writing, the boy is no longer lost or drowning under expectations that are not his or terrified to speak his thoughts. He is home.
When I meet the boy again in my next dream, I will tell him I understand. I will tell him about Baldwin too. And I think he would smile and say, like Baldwin: Yes, write.
