IN THE HOUSE MY MOTHER built for us, there is a room with a white desk.
It stands on two sturdy legs, its entire breadth bespeckled with brown powder patches, gray ash stains and faint smudges of blue ink; the body of a thing well touched. In the right corner sits the collected essays of James Baldwin, sat atop, the collected poems of Lucille Clifton. Ama Asantewaa Diaka’s You Too Will Know Me crowns the collection of a literary ancestry anchored in Black freedom. There are a hundred scraps of paper everywhere, my handwriting scrawled against them like commandments from a god. That white desk was my first kingdom. It was the first place the dream bore the weight of reality, where my words became instruments, powerful tools to bend this world and to set me free. Whenever I sat at that desk, the urgency of possibility coated my fingers and I began to write and write and write, with the seriousness of a person trying to break a hard thing open.
It stands on two sturdy legs, its entire breadth bespeckled with brown powder patches, gray ash stains and faint smudges of blue ink; the body of a thing well touched. In the right corner sits the collected essays of James Baldwin, sat atop, the collected poems of Lucille Clifton. Ama Asantewaa Diaka’s You Too Will Know Me crowns the collection of a literary ancestry anchored in Black freedom. There are a hundred scraps of paper everywhere, my handwriting scrawled against them like commandments from a god. That white desk was my first kingdom. It was the first place the dream bore the weight of reality, where my words became instruments, powerful tools to bend this world and to set me free. Whenever I sat at that desk, the urgency of possibility coated my fingers and I began to write and write and write, with the seriousness of a person trying to break a hard thing open.
*
Forced or eager exodus into strange territory is indelible in the history of every quadrant of the known world.
Toni Morrison (Home)
LIFE CAN BE A MYRIAD OF A THOUSAND POSSIBILITIES but there comes a moment where there are only two: stay or go. In Nigeria today, this is a question thousands of young people are asking themselves and there is one clear answer. We are leaving in droves. In November 2021, the Nigerian Law School posted me to Kano, the Northern side of the country where safety is like a long-forgotten dream. I knew I would never go but if I – saddled with a first-class law degree paid for by the blood, sweat and tears of my parents – did not go to law school, then what would I do? Who would I become? At this time, the dream was still a secret. I had not yet fixed my mouth to tell my mother that I would abandon the certainty and prestige of a career in law for this slippery thing called writing. Every time I said the word, it felt foreign in my mouth. In the urgency of the moment where a choice had to be made, I retreated into the safety of my kingdom and it was there that I prepared my application for a Masters in Fine Art in America two weeks before the deadline. I began my statement of purpose with a quote pulled from the preface of the Baldwin Collection on my desk, something that spoke directly to the turmoil that was my life in that very moment:
‘the only real concern of the artist, is to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.’
One thing about a dream is that you will surely receive guidance from your ancestors in your pursuit of them. As the word dropout became a source of panic and strife, the word writer gained gallantry in my mouth as the desk showed me that my words have the power to usher in a new season, to plant me in a new place and to give the bony body of my dreams some meat. In the house my mother built for us, there is a room with a white desk and that is where everything really began.
Toni Morrison (Home)
LIFE CAN BE A MYRIAD OF A THOUSAND POSSIBILITIES but there comes a moment where there are only two: stay or go. In Nigeria today, this is a question thousands of young people are asking themselves and there is one clear answer. We are leaving in droves. In November 2021, the Nigerian Law School posted me to Kano, the Northern side of the country where safety is like a long-forgotten dream. I knew I would never go but if I – saddled with a first-class law degree paid for by the blood, sweat and tears of my parents – did not go to law school, then what would I do? Who would I become? At this time, the dream was still a secret. I had not yet fixed my mouth to tell my mother that I would abandon the certainty and prestige of a career in law for this slippery thing called writing. Every time I said the word, it felt foreign in my mouth. In the urgency of the moment where a choice had to be made, I retreated into the safety of my kingdom and it was there that I prepared my application for a Masters in Fine Art in America two weeks before the deadline. I began my statement of purpose with a quote pulled from the preface of the Baldwin Collection on my desk, something that spoke directly to the turmoil that was my life in that very moment:
‘the only real concern of the artist, is to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.’
One thing about a dream is that you will surely receive guidance from your ancestors in your pursuit of them. As the word dropout became a source of panic and strife, the word writer gained gallantry in my mouth as the desk showed me that my words have the power to usher in a new season, to plant me in a new place and to give the bony body of my dreams some meat. In the house my mother built for us, there is a room with a white desk and that is where everything really began.
*
THE DREAM WAS DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE. In their Black spirit memoir, Akwaeke Emezi writes of the dream; ‘We want the work to sustain itself.’ A simple wish. The dream is to let my writing build my life. That the words flowing from my heart and my head transform into sustenance, into a life of brick and mortar. It seems like such a small thing but in the place of my birth, dreams have always been a dangerously precious thing. Precious because they are borne of messages whispered in our blood, known only to us, spurring us into a knowledge we cannot hide from. Dangerous because they put a fire in your belly, quickness in your feet and most of all dreams make it difficult for someone to tell you rubbish. And my god, do the people here like to tell you rubbish. To tell you that art is a futile endeavor that should be abandoned in pursuit of stability and routine. That you should bury your desires and do only what you can see around you. Yet everywhere I look is bleakness like a heavy fog hanging in the air, blurring sight, dulling senses, sinking selves. There is a terrible thing happening in my country at this moment. There seems to be a slow and steady erosion of everything good. Safety and security might as well be unanswered prayers. In 2022, all federal universities were shut down for almost the entire year as a result of the strikes. The naira is the weakest it has ever been and the scarcity of foreign currencies is at its very worst. It is a shitshow of the greatest proportions. As a consequence, it is the perfect place for dreams to die. Titilope Sonuga, in response to her hope-filled poem at the inauguration of the current president in 2015, wrote another poem after the hope of a messiah had soured into the bitterness of betrayal:
‘We do not sleep,
We are afraid of losing even our dreams’
And so I learnt the very first cost of my dream – I would have to leave home.
This did not appear to me as such a terrible thing, in fact a part of me longed for it. So on that hot December day, I put together all my documents, raking my eyes over everything over and over again to catch any typos, and with hope bubbling furiously in my throat, I sent off only one application to a school in the middle of nowhere in the United States of America.
‘We do not sleep,
We are afraid of losing even our dreams’
And so I learnt the very first cost of my dream – I would have to leave home.
This did not appear to me as such a terrible thing, in fact a part of me longed for it. So on that hot December day, I put together all my documents, raking my eyes over everything over and over again to catch any typos, and with hope bubbling furiously in my throat, I sent off only one application to a school in the middle of nowhere in the United States of America.
*
WE ARE SIX DAYS INTO MARCH of the new year – three months after my application was sent – the air is still dry from harmattan and my hair is in delicate twists that frame the sides of my face. It is nighttime in Lagos, there is purple eyeshadow on my eyelids, my body is clad in a little black dress and the pink gin in my cup is swirling in my mouth as everything around me loosens into lucidity. I am in a dimly lit restaurant in Victoria Island where the music is blaring from all corners at a party with my law school friends. I am immersed in the pulse of the ambience, my head swaying from side to side when an email drops into my phone that snatches me from the room.
Congratulations from the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program!
My mouth drops open and I am incredibly still.
The music fades away and tears of joy, and of the headiest relief I have ever felt, drop from my eyes in flowing torrents. I tell my boyfriend first. We rejoice together screaming. My friends hug me and I laugh and laugh, thrilled as the sharp sweetness of validation courses through my veins. I remember thinking to myself: the word writer feels mine now. My tongue wraps around it possessively and it becomes something I can claim with confident hands.
When I tell my mother my news, she smiles the strangest smile. She thanks God and tells me well-done, her smart daughter has done it again. Before my excitement has even settled, she looks at me with eyes stirred by a reluctant happiness and says, ‘I’m worried about how you will cope.’ Worry? We have just gotten news we prayed for and her first feeling is worry? What do we have to worry about? All I could see was good, a rose-tinted gaze that saw only validation, acceptance, possibility and nothing else. But you see there is a Yoruba proverb, ‘What the elders see sitting down, the child cannot see it even if he climbs to the top of a tree.’ While I was still lost in the otherworldly euphoria of dreams coming true, my mother was already calculating the costs, balancing things on a scale and as the number swirled behind her eyes climbing higher and higher she became worried of my capacity to pay the cost. She knew then, what I was yet to find out: there are things that look light until you carry them, and the weight ripples down your back until every muscle is taut with exertion.
As usual, my mother was right.
Congratulations from the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program!
My mouth drops open and I am incredibly still.
The music fades away and tears of joy, and of the headiest relief I have ever felt, drop from my eyes in flowing torrents. I tell my boyfriend first. We rejoice together screaming. My friends hug me and I laugh and laugh, thrilled as the sharp sweetness of validation courses through my veins. I remember thinking to myself: the word writer feels mine now. My tongue wraps around it possessively and it becomes something I can claim with confident hands.
When I tell my mother my news, she smiles the strangest smile. She thanks God and tells me well-done, her smart daughter has done it again. Before my excitement has even settled, she looks at me with eyes stirred by a reluctant happiness and says, ‘I’m worried about how you will cope.’ Worry? We have just gotten news we prayed for and her first feeling is worry? What do we have to worry about? All I could see was good, a rose-tinted gaze that saw only validation, acceptance, possibility and nothing else. But you see there is a Yoruba proverb, ‘What the elders see sitting down, the child cannot see it even if he climbs to the top of a tree.’ While I was still lost in the otherworldly euphoria of dreams coming true, my mother was already calculating the costs, balancing things on a scale and as the number swirled behind her eyes climbing higher and higher she became worried of my capacity to pay the cost. She knew then, what I was yet to find out: there are things that look light until you carry them, and the weight ripples down your back until every muscle is taut with exertion.
As usual, my mother was right.
*
THE VERY FIRST PROBLEM was getting a visa. My country, being the dumpster fire our leaders had willfully turned it into, no longer had the respect of anyone really and particularly on the front of foreign relations, we were extremely screwed. Embassies and consulates were either closed completely or in pitiable conditions. One of my friends had to forfeit a writer’s residency they were awarded in South Africa because the South African Embassy in Lagos closed without telling anyone, reopened in Abuja and held people's passports indefinitely without any updates. Essentially, they would kidnap your passport and you would have to pay a ransom to get it back, without any visa inside! As for the American Embassy, they simply did not have the capacity to bother with the swarming number of Nigerians who had something to do in the USA. In April of 2022, the earliest date for an appointment at the US Consulate was for the end of August – three weeks after the slated arrival date on my admission letter. The whole system was so turned on its head, there was no way up or down and to get an appointment date was like looking for water in a drought. With significant elbow grease and numerous payments to my mother’s trusted visa agent, I got a date for the 18th of July. The same day my baby brother was graduating from university and I had planned to be next to him celebrating. My ticket to London had already been booked. When I told the agent that I would really like to attend my brother’s ceremony and was there anything we could do to move the date, he looked at me like I just asked him to make a blind man see. With incredulous laughter dropping from his mouth, he asked me, ‘Are you the one graduating?’ to which I shook my head and he laughed even more, telling me I better be at the embassy bright and early on the morning of the 18th of July if I knew what was good for me.
My appointment was at 8.00am. The cab man and I left my house in Gbagada at 4.45am. It was pitch dark as I sat in the back of his blue Camry, my left hand firmly placed on top of the folder of documents my mother and I had meticulously arranged. The appointment confirmation letter. SEVIS fee receipt. My passport. Three passport photographs. My Form A-1. My admission letter from the school. Proof of my sponsorship and my receipt of payment. To forget any of these was to flirt with rejection and that was simply not an option. The US Consulate in Lagos is in Victoria Island, at the curve of the coast just where the ocean cuts through the city. When we got there, the sun had not risen. I remember thinking that because of how early we left home, we would be one of the first people to arrive there. I was wrong. When we got there at 5.18am, there were swarms of people already there, pacing up and down making copies of documents, going over every detail and praying that today would be their lucky day. One must be cognisant of the fact that The Consulate is something of a battleground where our people are often slain. There are long and endless queues where you stand and sit and stand and sit, being ordered around like cattle as tension spreads in the air. People are so tightly wound, so fraught with their desperation to leave the country that they cannot stand still. The interview room is the bloodbath. The representatives at the interview desks are notorious for their piercing gazes, intimidating questions and most of all for the song they all love to sing best; ‘Unfortunately, I am not able to offer you a visa today.’ Standing in line for my spot, I counted seventeen people before me who all had to listen to that song. A young woman in a blue dress with purple flowers who was going to study nursing at a university in Houston. Turned away. A young entrepreneur who was applying with his heavily pregnant wife to start a PhD somewhere in New Jersey. He was given a visa while his wife was refused. An elderly woman who wanted to go see her newly born grandchild in Dallas. Turned away. Inside that room, I watched so many dreams crumble to dust. I became so profoundly aware of just how badly people needed to leave. When my turn approached, I mustered everything in me to be calm, and to say everything the visa agent told me. When the embassy representative told me to return in two weeks to pick up my visa, my body sagged with relief as I marched out of the consulate and inside the car where I immediately Facetimed my mother to tell her.
My appointment was at 8.00am. The cab man and I left my house in Gbagada at 4.45am. It was pitch dark as I sat in the back of his blue Camry, my left hand firmly placed on top of the folder of documents my mother and I had meticulously arranged. The appointment confirmation letter. SEVIS fee receipt. My passport. Three passport photographs. My Form A-1. My admission letter from the school. Proof of my sponsorship and my receipt of payment. To forget any of these was to flirt with rejection and that was simply not an option. The US Consulate in Lagos is in Victoria Island, at the curve of the coast just where the ocean cuts through the city. When we got there, the sun had not risen. I remember thinking that because of how early we left home, we would be one of the first people to arrive there. I was wrong. When we got there at 5.18am, there were swarms of people already there, pacing up and down making copies of documents, going over every detail and praying that today would be their lucky day. One must be cognisant of the fact that The Consulate is something of a battleground where our people are often slain. There are long and endless queues where you stand and sit and stand and sit, being ordered around like cattle as tension spreads in the air. People are so tightly wound, so fraught with their desperation to leave the country that they cannot stand still. The interview room is the bloodbath. The representatives at the interview desks are notorious for their piercing gazes, intimidating questions and most of all for the song they all love to sing best; ‘Unfortunately, I am not able to offer you a visa today.’ Standing in line for my spot, I counted seventeen people before me who all had to listen to that song. A young woman in a blue dress with purple flowers who was going to study nursing at a university in Houston. Turned away. A young entrepreneur who was applying with his heavily pregnant wife to start a PhD somewhere in New Jersey. He was given a visa while his wife was refused. An elderly woman who wanted to go see her newly born grandchild in Dallas. Turned away. Inside that room, I watched so many dreams crumble to dust. I became so profoundly aware of just how badly people needed to leave. When my turn approached, I mustered everything in me to be calm, and to say everything the visa agent told me. When the embassy representative told me to return in two weeks to pick up my visa, my body sagged with relief as I marched out of the consulate and inside the car where I immediately Facetimed my mother to tell her.
*
EVEN THOUGH I KNEW I HAD TO LEAVE LAGOS, I refused to pack my bags. As the days raced by, I was overcome with such strong nostalgia and it felt like I was about to lose something whose value I had only just realized. I was leaving Lagos at the very same moment I finally settled into it and made it mine. I was a very different girl from the 20-year-old that returned home at the start of the pandemic in 2020. In those two years, I had learnt to drive, strengthened my fractured relationship with my mother, began law school then abandoned it, built rock-solid friendships, battled a chronic illness, and fell hopelessly and entirely in love. I had built a life I was so proud of. And I was about to leave it all behind. But I was not alone in this. So many of my friends were leaving too. Ahu was moving her entire family. Femi too. Bibi. All around me people were leaving home in pursuit of lives that would bear better fruit. We uprooted ourselves, seeds and seedlings aching to be nestled in new soil just for the chance to grow. When the land is entirely bare, even brown grass is sought after. Half a loaf, they say, is better than none. As the days drew nearer, I could no longer postpone my preparations. The first things I packed were my books. I selected twenty of them to take with me. My mother had food made for me, all my favorite soups: ofada and efo riro stored in ziplock bags and frozen a week before I left. Fried ram meat. Smoked fish. Smoked chicken with gizzards. In my last few days at home, my mother was in a frenzy of preparation. No emotional hugs or sad speeches, she kicked into action looking over every document, reminding me of things I should not forget, methodically preparing me to go to a place where her hands could no longer reach me. At the airport my bags were overweight and because I could not let go of my food, I let go of the books. Of the twenty I packed, only twelve went with me. At the airport, my mum and my boyfriend W helped me arrange and rearrange my bags, taking away my favorite books and clothes until my suitcases were the right weight. The three of us lingered in the airport, having a meal in some funny looking restaurant, taking selfies and talking about nothing, trying our hardest to delay my inevitable departure. As we walked towards the immigration line where they would have to leave me, I hugged W so tight I felt the ridges of his ribs with my fingers. His beard tickled my forehead as my eyes began to sting in preparation for the imminent flood. My mother didn't hug me. She’s not one for emotional displays. She simply placed her hand on my shoulder and said see you soon. She walked off before I could say anything back and now when I think deeply to remember her face in my mind’s eye, I see that she was trying not to cry. As I sat on the plane, I couldn't help but think that my dreams were asking me to give up the warmth of my mother’s hands clinging to my back as I woke up next to her in the morning. Asking me to give up the steady warmth of my lover’s hands as he embraced me every time I cried. Asking me to give up the simple pleasure of sitting with my sister on our balcony as we talked carelessly in the night breeze. Alone and far away in the clouds, I became intricately aware of the tactility of community, of all the ways those immediately surrounding me used their hands and their bodies to enshrine me in a space of safety. It dawned on me how moving thousands of miles away would immediately strip me of that. I began to weep. Sobs that wracked my chest until I exhausted myself to sleep. When I opened my eyes, we were descending into Amsterdam and I was one step further from home, and one step closer to my dream.
*
THE FLIGHT FROM LAGOS to Iowa was twenty two hours and I felt every hour pass. It was a rough flight for more reasons than one. For one, the flight coincided with my first period in over ten months since I had been on hormonal medication for endometriosis. The cramps were so strong they made me dizzy as I gripped the edge of my seat in mind-numbing pain. At the bathroom in the Schiphol airport, a bloodclot the size of a ping-pong ball dropped out of me. The entire expanse of my lower abdomen was aflame with pain. My mother had put my painkillers in my purse, so I threw back three of them with some apple juice and dragged myself to the boarding gate taking us to Chicago. Exhausted and jet lagged at the airport, I was directed to customs where they poked and prodded my food like hazardous material, eventually informing me that my fried ram would not be allowed into the country. As the TSA lady's blue-gloved hands proceeded to throw my food in the dustbin, I did not know when tears began to drop from my eyes. The sense of deprivation and loss I felt in that moment was so profound. To see something so valuable to me, something that my mother carefully prepared for me to be thrown away so flippantly tipped over my already fragile emotional state. Sniffling and weary, I began to put myself and my remaining food back together and made my way to the connecting flight finally taking me to Iowa.
I arrived at the Cedar Rapids Airport and my father called me, told me to slip off my slippers and put my bare feet on the ground. He prayed with me, willing the land to favor me, breathing life into my dream with me. Dreams are never tended to solely, with only one pair of hands. They take the forever sprawling branches of a multitude of hands planting and nurturing, reaching and tending until the seed flowers into bloom. Like the hands waiting to welcome me at the airport, to laugh with me and cushion the hardness of the first few days I spent at The Travelodge because my lease wouldn't start for another eight days. I hated that white room smelling of dampness and the stale smell of bodies long gone. The floors were covered in the ugliest brown and orange carpet I have ever seen, the blur of color and curves faintly reminding me of vomit. I can never forget that carpet. I stared at it as I cried for the first seven nights. Nighttime was the worst. The six-hour time difference meant everyone I loved was asleep at that time. No one to call or text. I would stare at the pictures on my phone and weep with longing, my shoulders would heave as I cried, my mind struggling to remember the joy dancing in my eyes in all the pictures.
The student orientation program I arrived early for, served the purpose of making my otherness crystal clear to me. Here I was already home sick, already frazzled and now being barraged by an avalanche of instructions and warnings, all the things we must not do lest we lose this bright shiny chance we had been handed. The one thing that kept me grounded was the heat. It was sweltering hot when I arrived. The heat licked my skin and sometimes I would close my eyes and convince myself I was still in Lagos. I wore the same dresses, styled my braids to fan out all over my face. The sun and heat and warmth grounded me and gave me the strength to brave new days as they came. The sunrise tickled my eyes and I was ready to see what the new day offered. Classes began. Reading lists unraveled and I did not see any of my people inside them. The curriculum was white as the snow that lined the roads in winter. In those first days, wherever I went I kept a book of Black women poetry on my person. On my desk, Titilope Sonuga’s This is How We Disappear sat permanently. Before I went to bed, I would run my eyes through Lucille Clifton’s collected works, reminding myself of my literary ancestry, from the words that birthed my own words, from the minds that nourished my own mind. I started to learn just how closely I would need to keep the words that ushered the dream into being in the first place. Being here meant the call to champion Black voices was louder than ever, if not I would lose myself and the dream. Yoruba people say that the stream that forgets its source will dry up. Nighttime is still the worst of it. I FaceTime my mother at least twice a day. I need to hear her voice and hear her laugh. My brother calls me just to see that I am not crying. W is my very first call in the morning. We sit in silence as I watch him braid his hair while I flip through Peace Odezie’s His Only Wife – the only book by an African woman I’ve read in its entirety since I came here. The only one. So many voices compete for the audience of my mind and there is an overpowering one that I meet in every reading list, in the syllabus, woven into the very bricks of the buildings: the voice of whiteness. The voice that constantly forces me to explain myself, to bend my tongue to speak in an accent that isn't mine, one that demands that I prove my capacity to speak English, to prove that I am worthy of being here. The voice that threatens my dream, that suffocates it, starves it as I fight to water the seed in soil that was not made for me.
Yet I must grapple with the truth that I came all this way to settle myself into this very world, giving up everything I knew and loved, sacrificing safety for a dream. So now I live with the language of losses, like a person who knows that their roots have not yet settled in new soil, like a person who is always looking for their source. FaceTime calls have replaced hugs and even if it means I will starve, I save all my money for flight tickets back home. I will starve to see my people. But my mother will not let this happen because my freezer is filled with food, a hot spoon of white rice and ofada reminding me that there is love at home and that this time, this season is for the tending of the dream and I must pay the cost. I was so eager to come here. Childlike in my wide-eyed glee. My mother’s slanted eyes of caution make so much sense to me now. The feeling is not regret, it is the weight of a heavy realization: that your dreams can cost your happiness, can cost you all the smiles that start from your eyes leaving you with shallow, fragile smiles that crack under every weight. Now I am trying to learn that hope can co-exist with sadness. That gratitude for space to write your stories can exist with a longing for home so sharp that it slices you open until your face is an endless stream of tears. Yet I, the fruit of my mother’s womb now planted in foreign soil, I write through my tears letting water mix with ink to birth words from my wounds, to honour my dream with action, to write even as my entire being pulses with pain. I tell myself again and again, words like a talisman I wrap around my neck: I am deeply anchored in my people. I come from a lineage of formidable storytellers. This work is in my blood, and tumultuous as the waves of whiteness may be, they will never swallow me whole.
I arrived at the Cedar Rapids Airport and my father called me, told me to slip off my slippers and put my bare feet on the ground. He prayed with me, willing the land to favor me, breathing life into my dream with me. Dreams are never tended to solely, with only one pair of hands. They take the forever sprawling branches of a multitude of hands planting and nurturing, reaching and tending until the seed flowers into bloom. Like the hands waiting to welcome me at the airport, to laugh with me and cushion the hardness of the first few days I spent at The Travelodge because my lease wouldn't start for another eight days. I hated that white room smelling of dampness and the stale smell of bodies long gone. The floors were covered in the ugliest brown and orange carpet I have ever seen, the blur of color and curves faintly reminding me of vomit. I can never forget that carpet. I stared at it as I cried for the first seven nights. Nighttime was the worst. The six-hour time difference meant everyone I loved was asleep at that time. No one to call or text. I would stare at the pictures on my phone and weep with longing, my shoulders would heave as I cried, my mind struggling to remember the joy dancing in my eyes in all the pictures.
The student orientation program I arrived early for, served the purpose of making my otherness crystal clear to me. Here I was already home sick, already frazzled and now being barraged by an avalanche of instructions and warnings, all the things we must not do lest we lose this bright shiny chance we had been handed. The one thing that kept me grounded was the heat. It was sweltering hot when I arrived. The heat licked my skin and sometimes I would close my eyes and convince myself I was still in Lagos. I wore the same dresses, styled my braids to fan out all over my face. The sun and heat and warmth grounded me and gave me the strength to brave new days as they came. The sunrise tickled my eyes and I was ready to see what the new day offered. Classes began. Reading lists unraveled and I did not see any of my people inside them. The curriculum was white as the snow that lined the roads in winter. In those first days, wherever I went I kept a book of Black women poetry on my person. On my desk, Titilope Sonuga’s This is How We Disappear sat permanently. Before I went to bed, I would run my eyes through Lucille Clifton’s collected works, reminding myself of my literary ancestry, from the words that birthed my own words, from the minds that nourished my own mind. I started to learn just how closely I would need to keep the words that ushered the dream into being in the first place. Being here meant the call to champion Black voices was louder than ever, if not I would lose myself and the dream. Yoruba people say that the stream that forgets its source will dry up. Nighttime is still the worst of it. I FaceTime my mother at least twice a day. I need to hear her voice and hear her laugh. My brother calls me just to see that I am not crying. W is my very first call in the morning. We sit in silence as I watch him braid his hair while I flip through Peace Odezie’s His Only Wife – the only book by an African woman I’ve read in its entirety since I came here. The only one. So many voices compete for the audience of my mind and there is an overpowering one that I meet in every reading list, in the syllabus, woven into the very bricks of the buildings: the voice of whiteness. The voice that constantly forces me to explain myself, to bend my tongue to speak in an accent that isn't mine, one that demands that I prove my capacity to speak English, to prove that I am worthy of being here. The voice that threatens my dream, that suffocates it, starves it as I fight to water the seed in soil that was not made for me.
Yet I must grapple with the truth that I came all this way to settle myself into this very world, giving up everything I knew and loved, sacrificing safety for a dream. So now I live with the language of losses, like a person who knows that their roots have not yet settled in new soil, like a person who is always looking for their source. FaceTime calls have replaced hugs and even if it means I will starve, I save all my money for flight tickets back home. I will starve to see my people. But my mother will not let this happen because my freezer is filled with food, a hot spoon of white rice and ofada reminding me that there is love at home and that this time, this season is for the tending of the dream and I must pay the cost. I was so eager to come here. Childlike in my wide-eyed glee. My mother’s slanted eyes of caution make so much sense to me now. The feeling is not regret, it is the weight of a heavy realization: that your dreams can cost your happiness, can cost you all the smiles that start from your eyes leaving you with shallow, fragile smiles that crack under every weight. Now I am trying to learn that hope can co-exist with sadness. That gratitude for space to write your stories can exist with a longing for home so sharp that it slices you open until your face is an endless stream of tears. Yet I, the fruit of my mother’s womb now planted in foreign soil, I write through my tears letting water mix with ink to birth words from my wounds, to honour my dream with action, to write even as my entire being pulses with pain. I tell myself again and again, words like a talisman I wrap around my neck: I am deeply anchored in my people. I come from a lineage of formidable storytellers. This work is in my blood, and tumultuous as the waves of whiteness may be, they will never swallow me whole.
*
THERE IS A ROOM on the ground floor of my apartment building where I now live in Coralville, a mile away from Iowa City. The walls are bright orange and I go there to write. My desk is flush against that orange wall and every single time I sit there, I remember the white desk in my room in Lagos that made this moment possible. I remember the things that have come to life because I have sat down to write. I am reminded of kingdoms where I reign supreme, where my hand is the god of eternal downpour and worlds are woven into existence by the dexterity of my fingers. I am reminded of the African women who wrote poems that showed me the power of words, how they heal and transform and resuscitate even the most deeply buried things. I, like so many young African writers today, are paying for our dreams with the currency of displacement. We walk into rooms where our legends are paid no mind, where our stories are unknown, where our names are mangled. But we have dreams. Serious, heavy dreams that demand action and by God they will come to pass, even if the victory finds us battered and bruised.
Mofiyinfoluwa O. is a writer from Lagos, Nigeria whose work delves into emotional interiorities, womanhood as an embodied experience and the redemptive force of memory. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Black Warrior Review, Lolwe and elsewhere. She is a second year candidate on the Non-Fiction MFA at Iowa where she is at work on her debut collection of essays.
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