An act of rebellion
I should be in bed right now.
I've spent all day trying to drown the scratch out from the back of my throat, and at the first moment I feel nasal congestion coming on, my desk is festooned with orange juice from the office fridge. The onset of October with its wonderfully seasonable weather has carried on the winds that most familiar of companions, the common cold, so common it seems we no longer seem to bother with a cure. It is quite literally as common as the air.
But I just came back from a late night event in New York, and I'm still rather giddy with it. My introduction to the work of Alexis Okeowo came either in the form of a piece in The Guardian or this essay in Granta on Lagos. I do remember being entranced while reading it as this woman so minutely detailed the present reality of the city where my mother had spent so much of her past. As has become typical now of modern descriptions I read of Lagos and of Nigeria by other Nigerian writers, a twinge of jealousy pinches the heart. It is almost as if to say that in having greater access to this place than I do, they have somehow gained greater access to her, meaning my mother. It is an absurd and easily fixable issue. I work in a place now where I wouldn't have to save for terribly long to raise the funds and where vacation time is in ample supply, so the usual excuses of time and money carry much less weight. But I digress. Alexis's work enthralled me, first in various publications, then, more regularly, for The New Yorker primarily because they concerned Africans and seemed determined to show a reality in Technicolor. Her paintings weren't awash in the familiar brown and gray of desolation and famine. Nor were they cast in the shimmering polychrome of the Rising Continent. They contain gradations. Multitudes. They feel like talking at the Cookout or the Wedding Reception, where we don't have to put on airs. Where we can make fun of our governmental dysfunction or address internecine stereotypes or have those conversations so filled with referents it would take outside parties a year of education to understand. I think, reading her now and after having listened to her talk, the secret is that her stories aren't for the West as traditionally imagined. They're not for white people the way stories of famine and terrorism are meant to push guilt like bile back up their throats so that they vomit donations to a charity. Nor are they the type of dismissive hand-wave meant to catch the attention of the person with whose attention you are supposedly no longer concerned. This didn't mean that they weren't celebrations or appreciations of Africa and its countries and its cities. It's more to say that none of her writing feels performative or performed. It's just us storytelling.
Us.
On the first day of Fall, I went to a pumpkin patch with a girl. Nicaraguan. And I'd done a little bit of research beforehand as pumpkin patches were relatively alien to me, but she had a thing for pumpkins and had determined to do this thing on this day, and the circumstances of our meeting seemed to have dictated that we would do the thing together. So we went to the first orchard and she told me of her tastes while we wandered and found her pumpkins of the size she preferred. We went to another that had the orange things laid out in neat rows, bunched together, but ultimately larger than she liked. It was unseasonably warm. I had on a short-sleeved shirt. In the car, she played wavy music, something a little lighter than trap soul and some stuff with Spanish guitars sprinkled between R&B tracks and we watched the night descend on us in an open-air bookstore where I ended up picking up three more books than I'd intended. Something by Aravind Adiga; The Industry of Souls, which book I remember reading sophomore spring at Yale and being profoundly moved by to the point where even the thought of it stirs something primordial within me; and Elon by Paul Harding, whose Tinkers is one of the most beautifully written books I've ever consumed, and whose journey to the Pulitzer Prize for fiction that year I remember finding immensely affecting. A taco spot was our last stop before we returned to my place for tea and then parting.
It was an auspicious start to my favorite season, a time of year that I've admitted to a few people is emotionally tumultuous. But if I'm to endure ritual tumult, I could not ask for a better clime. The wind massages the season into my face, makes my beard feel useful. My hoodie and my jacket feel perfectly calibrated to accord me warmth. I feel purposeful when I stride because too long spent outdoors could bring on a cold, but it's still light enough to merit occasional perambulation. I don't necessarily say all of these things when detailing to others why fall is my favorite season. I find myself describing the time of year by what's not in it. No mosquitoes or gnats. No Jupiter-sized humidity bearing down on the shoulders. The weather doesn't punish you with perspiration. Rain isn't nearly as plentiful as it is in the spring. And the snow hasn't yet arrived to trouble commutes.
And before I know it, it's the first week of October.
Today was the 19th anniversary of my father's passing, and if I let myself think on it, the day is always attended by some jogging free of spiritual and emotional silt. Before I came to an awareness as to causes, the Black Dog would come barking, unsummoned but insistent nonetheless. And it would bark and bark and bark, and I'd be at a loss to explain to myself its arrival, its Germanic sense of timing. But then I realize what day it is and if I've not managed to busy myself into unthinking, I can ponder and realize and walk into epiphany. But there always seems to be good here.
The anniversary comes right before my birthday. In the past, the two occasions bore witness to the massive swinging back and forth of moods. But there is an abundance of happiness in my life right now. Not just causes for happiness, but actual happiness. Tomorrow, for the second time, I will be watching Ta-Nehisi Coates speak on my birthday and doing it with two of my dearest friends, one of whom I attended a wedding with. An occasion wherein the groom spoke of black feminism in his vows and the bride charged onto the dance floor with her father to Petey Pablo, waving UNC-Chapel Hill flags. Then Thursday begins my surreal return to New York Comic Con, once an intern for Marvel and now as an author, yet the latest stop in this phantasmagorical odyssey.
Tonight was special. We were at the Tumblr Headquarters on East 21st Street and there were cushions in the rising rows where the audience was to sit while Alexis Okeowo and Miriam Elder, Foreign Editor at Buzzfeed, sat before a screen lit up with their Twitter handles.
Behind me in the audience were Alexis's parents. I'd been eager to see her as it would be the fulfillment of a promise I'd made to her back in June when she'd done an event in conversation with Souad Mekhennet, who had herself just written a book on jihad and journalism.
Just prior to this event, I spied and was spied by a woman I'd also gone on a date with and with whom I share quite a few friends and our reunion greeting was all genuine smiles and breathless "what I've been up to in the meantime" recaps with some "let's do something"s scattered throughout. And then a mutual friend of ours arrived, whom I'd not seen in a while, and we hugged then sat down for the event. And I listened to Alexis tell stories about how she told stories about Somali girls playing basketball and a Ugandan couple struggling to survive their time as child soldier and bush wife. And, later, of discovering that their son had overheard the couple telling their story to Alexis, the couple having found their first real opportunity to exorcise their experience. And throughout the event, talk of being unable to trust the Nigerian government's proclamations in the immediate aftermath of the mass kidnapping of the Chibok girls brought home the point that governmental distrust is, as the French would say, partout. The moderator related her own experience with Russia and its propaganda machine, and both women remarked on the peculiar pull their homelands had on them, Nigeria for Alexis and Russia for Miriam.
While in line, I ran into a classmate from my late night Arabic course, and my old college friend introduced me to a dear childhood friend of hers, the two of them having shared a childhood in Alabama with the author whose work we were celebrating this evening.
Later on, I met Alexis's effusive parents, who congratulated me on my upcoming book-birth and, upon hearing that mom is currently in Nigeria, commanded me to send her their best wishes. When I called Alexis's father "Uncle," the whole circle of us nearly collapsed in laughter. The room for the entirety of the evening was filled with those of the 2nd and 1.5 generation, and foreign accents gave the Q&A a global musicality. For several moments, I felt like an extra in an M.I.A. video. So young and beautiful and from a shared Elsewhere.
Words the whole night were spun around love and family and countries that were, blessedly, not America, and it felt for those hours like I was once again amongst comrades, those of us with feet planted in multiple worlds, those of us who had grown comfortable straddling boundaries of national and ancestral nature. Our passports are many-stamped, our food beautifully seasoned, our stories manifold and multiform.
I don't think about him much, usually in the service of some piece of writing, like a rumination on the grief-easing power of violent video games. What I find myself more often marveling at is how long I've gone without thinking or wondering at him.
It's perilously close to blasphemy to believe I would be a lesser person for his presence, but so much of my present existence can trace its genesis to his passing, to that point in time 19 years back where the grave was dug and the body buried in Nigeria.
In my younger days, I'd wonder how we would have talked about Vegas or whether I'd be different around girls, surer, less riddled with neuroses and grasping at perfection. In my younger days, I'd wonder if we would ever break through the barriers erected by the toxic masculinity in the culture he came from and the culture I was born into and talk about melancholy, about the shadows that lengthen with the seasons. I'd wonder if we would start to sound the same when we laughed, how he would have felt seeing so much of him grow inside me. Would he see, as I do, the same incandescence in our blood that touches the leaves in the trees on I-84 this time of year?
My younger self would've easily, readily, gratefully fallen into the prison of such wondering. Feeling caged by things like genetic determinism or the state of the country or the world, feeling duty-bound to despair.
It's officially October 4th, and maybe I've grown ornery enough that rebellion is less about righteous path-forging and more about personal desires and inertia.
I prefer joy.
I've spent all day trying to drown the scratch out from the back of my throat, and at the first moment I feel nasal congestion coming on, my desk is festooned with orange juice from the office fridge. The onset of October with its wonderfully seasonable weather has carried on the winds that most familiar of companions, the common cold, so common it seems we no longer seem to bother with a cure. It is quite literally as common as the air.
But I just came back from a late night event in New York, and I'm still rather giddy with it. My introduction to the work of Alexis Okeowo came either in the form of a piece in The Guardian or this essay in Granta on Lagos. I do remember being entranced while reading it as this woman so minutely detailed the present reality of the city where my mother had spent so much of her past. As has become typical now of modern descriptions I read of Lagos and of Nigeria by other Nigerian writers, a twinge of jealousy pinches the heart. It is almost as if to say that in having greater access to this place than I do, they have somehow gained greater access to her, meaning my mother. It is an absurd and easily fixable issue. I work in a place now where I wouldn't have to save for terribly long to raise the funds and where vacation time is in ample supply, so the usual excuses of time and money carry much less weight. But I digress. Alexis's work enthralled me, first in various publications, then, more regularly, for The New Yorker primarily because they concerned Africans and seemed determined to show a reality in Technicolor. Her paintings weren't awash in the familiar brown and gray of desolation and famine. Nor were they cast in the shimmering polychrome of the Rising Continent. They contain gradations. Multitudes. They feel like talking at the Cookout or the Wedding Reception, where we don't have to put on airs. Where we can make fun of our governmental dysfunction or address internecine stereotypes or have those conversations so filled with referents it would take outside parties a year of education to understand. I think, reading her now and after having listened to her talk, the secret is that her stories aren't for the West as traditionally imagined. They're not for white people the way stories of famine and terrorism are meant to push guilt like bile back up their throats so that they vomit donations to a charity. Nor are they the type of dismissive hand-wave meant to catch the attention of the person with whose attention you are supposedly no longer concerned. This didn't mean that they weren't celebrations or appreciations of Africa and its countries and its cities. It's more to say that none of her writing feels performative or performed. It's just us storytelling.
Us.
On the first day of Fall, I went to a pumpkin patch with a girl. Nicaraguan. And I'd done a little bit of research beforehand as pumpkin patches were relatively alien to me, but she had a thing for pumpkins and had determined to do this thing on this day, and the circumstances of our meeting seemed to have dictated that we would do the thing together. So we went to the first orchard and she told me of her tastes while we wandered and found her pumpkins of the size she preferred. We went to another that had the orange things laid out in neat rows, bunched together, but ultimately larger than she liked. It was unseasonably warm. I had on a short-sleeved shirt. In the car, she played wavy music, something a little lighter than trap soul and some stuff with Spanish guitars sprinkled between R&B tracks and we watched the night descend on us in an open-air bookstore where I ended up picking up three more books than I'd intended. Something by Aravind Adiga; The Industry of Souls, which book I remember reading sophomore spring at Yale and being profoundly moved by to the point where even the thought of it stirs something primordial within me; and Elon by Paul Harding, whose Tinkers is one of the most beautifully written books I've ever consumed, and whose journey to the Pulitzer Prize for fiction that year I remember finding immensely affecting. A taco spot was our last stop before we returned to my place for tea and then parting.
It was an auspicious start to my favorite season, a time of year that I've admitted to a few people is emotionally tumultuous. But if I'm to endure ritual tumult, I could not ask for a better clime. The wind massages the season into my face, makes my beard feel useful. My hoodie and my jacket feel perfectly calibrated to accord me warmth. I feel purposeful when I stride because too long spent outdoors could bring on a cold, but it's still light enough to merit occasional perambulation. I don't necessarily say all of these things when detailing to others why fall is my favorite season. I find myself describing the time of year by what's not in it. No mosquitoes or gnats. No Jupiter-sized humidity bearing down on the shoulders. The weather doesn't punish you with perspiration. Rain isn't nearly as plentiful as it is in the spring. And the snow hasn't yet arrived to trouble commutes.
And before I know it, it's the first week of October.
Today was the 19th anniversary of my father's passing, and if I let myself think on it, the day is always attended by some jogging free of spiritual and emotional silt. Before I came to an awareness as to causes, the Black Dog would come barking, unsummoned but insistent nonetheless. And it would bark and bark and bark, and I'd be at a loss to explain to myself its arrival, its Germanic sense of timing. But then I realize what day it is and if I've not managed to busy myself into unthinking, I can ponder and realize and walk into epiphany. But there always seems to be good here.
The anniversary comes right before my birthday. In the past, the two occasions bore witness to the massive swinging back and forth of moods. But there is an abundance of happiness in my life right now. Not just causes for happiness, but actual happiness. Tomorrow, for the second time, I will be watching Ta-Nehisi Coates speak on my birthday and doing it with two of my dearest friends, one of whom I attended a wedding with. An occasion wherein the groom spoke of black feminism in his vows and the bride charged onto the dance floor with her father to Petey Pablo, waving UNC-Chapel Hill flags. Then Thursday begins my surreal return to New York Comic Con, once an intern for Marvel and now as an author, yet the latest stop in this phantasmagorical odyssey.
Tonight was special. We were at the Tumblr Headquarters on East 21st Street and there were cushions in the rising rows where the audience was to sit while Alexis Okeowo and Miriam Elder, Foreign Editor at Buzzfeed, sat before a screen lit up with their Twitter handles.
Behind me in the audience were Alexis's parents. I'd been eager to see her as it would be the fulfillment of a promise I'd made to her back in June when she'd done an event in conversation with Souad Mekhennet, who had herself just written a book on jihad and journalism.
Just prior to this event, I spied and was spied by a woman I'd also gone on a date with and with whom I share quite a few friends and our reunion greeting was all genuine smiles and breathless "what I've been up to in the meantime" recaps with some "let's do something"s scattered throughout. And then a mutual friend of ours arrived, whom I'd not seen in a while, and we hugged then sat down for the event. And I listened to Alexis tell stories about how she told stories about Somali girls playing basketball and a Ugandan couple struggling to survive their time as child soldier and bush wife. And, later, of discovering that their son had overheard the couple telling their story to Alexis, the couple having found their first real opportunity to exorcise their experience. And throughout the event, talk of being unable to trust the Nigerian government's proclamations in the immediate aftermath of the mass kidnapping of the Chibok girls brought home the point that governmental distrust is, as the French would say, partout. The moderator related her own experience with Russia and its propaganda machine, and both women remarked on the peculiar pull their homelands had on them, Nigeria for Alexis and Russia for Miriam.
While in line, I ran into a classmate from my late night Arabic course, and my old college friend introduced me to a dear childhood friend of hers, the two of them having shared a childhood in Alabama with the author whose work we were celebrating this evening.
Later on, I met Alexis's effusive parents, who congratulated me on my upcoming book-birth and, upon hearing that mom is currently in Nigeria, commanded me to send her their best wishes. When I called Alexis's father "Uncle," the whole circle of us nearly collapsed in laughter. The room for the entirety of the evening was filled with those of the 2nd and 1.5 generation, and foreign accents gave the Q&A a global musicality. For several moments, I felt like an extra in an M.I.A. video. So young and beautiful and from a shared Elsewhere.
Words the whole night were spun around love and family and countries that were, blessedly, not America, and it felt for those hours like I was once again amongst comrades, those of us with feet planted in multiple worlds, those of us who had grown comfortable straddling boundaries of national and ancestral nature. Our passports are many-stamped, our food beautifully seasoned, our stories manifold and multiform.
I don't think about him much, usually in the service of some piece of writing, like a rumination on the grief-easing power of violent video games. What I find myself more often marveling at is how long I've gone without thinking or wondering at him.
It's perilously close to blasphemy to believe I would be a lesser person for his presence, but so much of my present existence can trace its genesis to his passing, to that point in time 19 years back where the grave was dug and the body buried in Nigeria.
In my younger days, I'd wonder how we would have talked about Vegas or whether I'd be different around girls, surer, less riddled with neuroses and grasping at perfection. In my younger days, I'd wonder if we would ever break through the barriers erected by the toxic masculinity in the culture he came from and the culture I was born into and talk about melancholy, about the shadows that lengthen with the seasons. I'd wonder if we would start to sound the same when we laughed, how he would have felt seeing so much of him grow inside me. Would he see, as I do, the same incandescence in our blood that touches the leaves in the trees on I-84 this time of year?
My younger self would've easily, readily, gratefully fallen into the prison of such wondering. Feeling caged by things like genetic determinism or the state of the country or the world, feeling duty-bound to despair.
It's officially October 4th, and maybe I've grown ornery enough that rebellion is less about righteous path-forging and more about personal desires and inertia.
I prefer joy.