A KINGMAKER'S WISE WORDS

 GRACIANO ENWEREM'S HIGHLY INSPIRING (PINNED) POST OF WEDNESDAY JANUARY 26, 2022👇

I said my first word at almost 5.

I stammered and stuttered and was very scared of speaking in public, but have you watched any of my performances? I looked nothing like me!

I stayed on my own at a very young age but was truly independent in 2014.

I studied English and Literary Studies for 11 years instead of 4 (I'm even depressed whenever I talk about this. I haven't healed, I only moved on).

I published my first book, SPOKEN WORD POETRY-101, 10 years after writing it but I've sold almost 9,000 copies.

I made my first 1 Million Naira pretty late. "How late?" Compared to my PEERS, my journey hasn't been very FRUITFUL.

I'm yet to buy myself a car or complete my own house. And yes, I'm still celibate.

I know that I'm that land left to fallow, so I wait.

I wait knowing that it's only a matter of time and like Sefi Atta said, Everything Good Will Come.

I'm working passionately while I wait.

So, if you don't see me around where we used to chat, know that I'm working.

If I don't smile anymore or I do that listlessly, know that there's this frown that accompanies work for a grown-ass man who is towing a popular path.

I might look calm up here and out there but like the duck, oh, I paddle like MAD!

My status, like my hair might change... Low, fro, plaits or dreads, but one thing that will remain forever, is this my resolve to keep doing this one thing I'm good at and be stupendously successful at it. This is my waiting game. 

Dear Royalty, I ask you, are you willing to die for what you believe in? Is faith only what you've been taught in the Sunday School that you always arrive late to?

HOW GOOD IS YOUR WAITING GAME?

DESERTION!

 Desertion by Abdulrazak Gurnah is a beautiful book. - Book Review 

It's funny that I think of it as being beautiful given some of the tragic events therein. The book's main themes seem to be love, tradition, belonging, and cruelty.

The book is history repeating itself in different generations because every main character experienced a form of abandonment. The unveiling and revealing of the complicated connection was a thing of beauty. The romance stories were well told and not in your face. The tension of the affair made you feel the characters' emotions.

The mirroring of characters such as - Rehana and Jamila, as well as, Aunt Mariam and Aunt Halima, was well done, alongside the running metaphor of desertion, an ever-recurring motif in the book.

If the book had a relationship status, it will be "it's complicated." And if the book was told as a real-life tale to a "Nigerian Deliverance Pastor," he would term it as "ogun idile." I don't know how best to explain this term in English, but it literally connotes a "generational curse" (or something like that).

It was also a rich portrayal of the social life in East Africa especially the Islamic culture. But also a clash of Indian and African cultures, as well as, the English culture. The book's setting in colonized East Africa also seems like it indirectly built a case against colonialism.

The author's usage of vocabulary was also awesome.

However, the big jump in the timeline made it a bit disjointed and led to a good part of the stories being told rather than shown. There was so little told of the affair between Pearce and Rehana, and yet it was this singular affair that had a ripple effect on the next generations. Also, to a large extent, the female gender view was negated. It would have been good to get Jamila's perspective and see a bit of her world like it was done for Rehana, her grandmother.

The sections that were narrated by Rashid, lacked the "energy" of the previous sections. His link to the main story was "loosely" based on letters from Amin. I didn't feel sorry for him when his wife left because we never got to "meet" the wife, and neither did we experience their romance. The love affair between him and Barbara could and should have been explored a bit more.

It was too convenient for Rashid to be the one to connect the dots and put the whole story together. A bit more showing than telling, and the story would have unraveled more naturally.

But still, it was a "gorgeously devastating" read.

Signed

Olumide Holloway (King Olulu) 

BORROWED FATHERS

 

BORROWED FATHERS

 

There were men who corrected me

before they ever asked what had made me that way,

their voices becoming walls in rooms

where I was only trying to understand

what it meant to belong somewhere.

 

I learned to read footsteps before faces,

to know the difference between anger and tiredness,

to keep my questions folded under my tongue

because some houses teach children

that silence is another form of good behaviour.

 

I watched other boys lean against their fathers

like the world had already promised them somewhere to fall,

while I carried my questions quietly,

like a stranger carrying luggage through an airport,

never certain which door was mine.

 

Still, Allah knows the rooms I survived,

the names I swallowed, the nights I outgrew,

and if childhood gave me no permanent shelter,

perhaps that is why I learned

to build one inside myself.

By

Nasirudeen Isola Muritala

HOW A MOTHER CALLS YOUR NAME

 

THE HOUSE I WASN'T RAISED IN

 

I know my parents by blood,

but blood never taught me how a father enters a room,

how a mother calls your name from the kitchen

or how a child falls asleep between two people

who have nowhere else they would rather be.

 

I grew up learning family

from the outside of other people's windows,

watching fathers carry sleeping children from cars

while mothers fixed their collars at the gate,

wondering what kind of warmth requires no invitation.

 

At Eid, I learned the choreography of belonging,

the greetings, the embraces, the plates passed around,

but somewhere beneath the fragrance of food

was a question I kept folding like a prayer mat:

what does it feel like to be somebody's little boy?

 

Now I am older than the boy who asked that question,

but sometimes adulthood opens the same old door,

and I stand there with my hands in my pockets,

still waiting for a childhood

that never learned my address.

 

By

Nasirudeen Isola Muritala