Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir

The future fans out in brilliance, powered by imagination and ego and
hope and a thousand other things, but all that glory can be condensed across
time into the choice to sit and write words down. It doesn’t even have to be
done well—that’s what revision is for. It just has to be completed. There is
such a space, a stretch of desert, between imagining something, writing it,
and then finishing it. Execution is a particular discipline, something built
out of corded rigor, tight and greased with sacrificial blood. There are many
components to this spell: how to make the task at hand the only one that is
real; how to work when you don’t want to; how to summon your want and
collar it for your purposes, setting it to work.
I bribed myself with the future. I dangled the things I wanted in front of
my greedy eyes, and in the flush of that desire I reminded myself that
writing five hundred words right now would reel in the world I wanted.
There is always something you can do right now; there is always a first
step, no matter how small it is. Seeds are often tiny, and it means nothing
about what they will grow up to be. You plant them anyway, and that’s what
making the work is.

I learned other things in Aba: that a mother you see once a year is a
stranger, no matter how much you cry for her in the long months when
she’s gone. That if my father is a man who will wield a machete at the
NEPA worker who came to check the meter, then I cannot tell him what our
neighbor who took my sister to the hospital after the pickup accident did to
me, because at twelve I am entirely too young for that kind of blood on my
hands. They treated that neighbor like a hero; he called my sister his little
wife for years. We can, I promise you, bear much more than we predict.
I told a friend some of this during a lunch in Lagos—not the parts about
myself, just about the bodies and the curfews and the ritual kidnappings
they called Otokoto and the time they burnt down the mosque and killed
every Muslim person they could find, murdering three hundred Northerners
in the two days after the lorries arrived with the bodies from Kaduna, when
we got five days off from school and stayed at home and saw the ashes in
front of the Customs House. I told her how a classmate had joked with me
then that I should be careful. “You know you resemble a Northerner,” he
said. I told her about the rumors of a Muslim man who could pass for Igbo,
and so when they came for him, he joined the mob and killed his own
people to stay alive, to prove he was one of us. I told her about the woman
next door, whose gateman was a shoemaker from the North, how she hid
him and his five-year-old son in their boysquarters. When the child heard
the noise in the street, he tried to run out to see what it was, but she caught
him and beat him and sent him back. He was five. We shared an avocado
tree with their compound.
We were sitting in Freedom Park when I said these things, and my friend
stared at me the whole time, horrified. “You’re making that up,” she said.
“Are you serious?”
“It was Aba in the nineties,” I reminded her. “I thought everyone in
Nigeria grew up like this.” I hadn’t expected her to be surprised. She was
Nigerian too, after all, and older than me. Surely, she’d seen worse things.
“No, everyone did not grow up like that!” She was agitated. “Why don’t
you write about this?”