The things I see and imagine
1 March. I became friends with a woman across the street. Because the heat had refused to leave us, I had moved the chair in the room to face the window and taken to staring past the iron bars to the world outside, willing the wind to blow into the room and at my face. …
For days, I’ve been struggling with how to blog in times like this. Blogging being the sharing of my thoughts with the world, and that becoming difficult because chaos, as it always does, was driving me to silence. When there’s a lot to take in, a lot to comment on, my reaction often is to …
There were two survival mandates for the month of June. One of them is already in jeopardy. You drank hot things, took hot showers, closed the windows, and turned off the fan, turning the room into a stuffy mess. Yet, the cold found you. Thus starts the jeopardy: first an itchy throat, then a runny …
Last week, in a mail to I, I wrote: "I've spent too much money replacing lost or broken things this year." Since I sent that, I've thought about the sentence sans 'money'. At the time, I was writing about my lost internet modem, but I could have been speaking about everything else. I've lost friends, …
They wanted Civil War because the wind was fighting with DSTV and winning—as it always does. I reluctantly obliged, because I wasn't ready for When did you return? How was your journey? This headache started as a suggestion, which I foolishly accepted, but it is now threatening to end the day without my permission. I …
It's been a bad year of reading: abandoned novels, unfinished story collections, and a Pocket filled with things that might never be read. But there have been a few delights in it, like The God of Small Things, which I finally read after P's encouragement and will return to before the year runs out. I also …
Everytime I come home, I vow not to return to Lagos. Nature has accomplished what gunshots couldn’t. The bats, chased away by the rain, have been replaced by birds that can actually sing. Sad they didn’t come early enough to save the mangoes. In vain I try to be as contemplative in Oshodi as I …
Sometime last month, I found myself deeply frustrated because I couldn’t remember Sofia Vegara’s name. Every other detail of hers was present—the buxom body, the exaggerated accent, the terrible supporting movie roles—but her name stayed on the edge of my consciousness, refusing to come forth like I was summoning it with a wrongly-worded spell. This …
Continue reading "Memory Portals, or How to Remember Sofia Vegara, or Something…"
Don’t you know I need a man in my life? She said. No you don’t, I replied, twisting my feet on its outer arch—something she’d never liked. I thought the case against him was obvious: the man was making promises he had shown no signs of fulfilling. To make matters worse, he made the promises …
There is something about Lagos, about this human chaos, about entering danfos and and crawling into kekes and jumping on okadas and pushing against bodies reeking of sweat while dancing between pungent puddles, that makes me wish I could read minds.
ifeOluwa's rambles 