“The melancholic sees the world itself become a thing: refuge, solace, enchantment.” — Susan Sontag
I GENUINELY THOUGHT ABOUT HOME for the first time the day I arrived in Owerri. The path to 13 Ayeni Street back home still appears dusty in my mind’s eye. The road, flanked by tall speargrasses and unevenly mowed lawns, has a fine-grained texture to its soil, and smells like wet groundnuts when it rains. I still get strong whiffs of the smell of the weathered paint from the peeling walls of our compound. The clapboard shacks and little restaurants. The mud pools, as I walked past people watching me from doorways. The bat-eaten mangoes among the decaying skeletons of crusted, yellowing leaves. This was how Owerri felt. Everything had a lush about it. The cars, the hotels, the deshabille girls queuing up with randy guys to get food at Kilimanjaro.
I walked into a pocket of space at a kiosk and tried eating my moi-moi which I’d bought from a hawker; in my left hand, a copy of Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau. I read his poetry hoping it would unravel the tightness in my stomach. I read for some time before discovering it was almost nighttime. From where I was ensconced, a club with a monstrous collage and bright lights, came to view: California, it read. By how listless and disconnected I was from Owerri, I felt the need to reintegrate myself with my new terrain. What better way than by visiting a club teeming with people, all high-spirited and with diverse ideologies. I closed my book and walked in.
It’s Saturday morning. The girl I met at the club, who smoked so much it hurt her throat, sat on my wicker chair reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace, looking irritably at my torn arabesque curtains. The radiance from the sky spreads on our semi-clad bodies. The corrosive humidity of the air, the sunlight pulsing to our heartbeat. I felt a sense of excitement and lightness that a reading culture was present in Owerri, a place I’d perceived to be driven primarily by financial motives. Have you read War and Peace, I asked, trying to start a conversation about the book concealed behind her varnished nails. “No, I am not much of a reader,” she said as she lit a cigar. I was disappointed. For no reason at all, my gaze lingered on her pack of bubble gum resting on my makeshift table crafted from a paint bucket and a glass panel I scavenged in the corridor.
I sucked air through my teeth and went into the bathroom.
After a light shower, I put my clothes on and picked a stick of cigarette. I headed out for a walk into the labyrinthine streets of Owerri. I did not know the girl’s name, or if we did anything last night.
Lately, I have been searching for something I can’t quite tell, accompanied by the haunting shadows domiciled in the dune of the mind, or merely just a reawakening. Something is happening to the way I write and perceive my poems. My poems are becoming less affectionate. And I think this is because the world is becoming more overwhelmed by the people who occupy it.
Yesterday, I told my colleague at Imo State University: “I am tired, and my tiredness comes from the fact that nothing excites me anymore.” He blamed it on the mundane routine of having to wake up to take a cab or bus to work—which, interestingly, he loves very much. I find it rather fascinating—both puzzling and quite disturbing. No less fascinating is my recent preoccupation with songs produced in the 20th century. In a quest for solace, I have been listening to Dylan, Simone, Guthrie, Simon & Garfunkel, trying to make sense of the world shifting a little to the sides through a string of tunes, ballads of lost ghosts, gospels, the existential, oral traditions.
Confessing there is a problem is the first step to solving it. I quote Herman Melville’s Moby Dick to myself: “Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.” I haven’t prayed much. Still, I expect. Maybe I have been asking too much of the world. I cannot count how many fights I have gotten into with a girl I love. And I cannot say the silence lingering in my heart isn’t affecting my craft. Sometimes I think of M, and I begin to imagine if what Plath described in her poem “Bucolics” is true: “All afternoon these lovers lay / Until the sun turned pale from warm, / Until sweet wind changed tune, blew harm: / Cruel nettles stung her ankles raw.” Do women change with seasons? I am very often distant, and I just want to fall back to where it all began. But it is the longing that kills me every time. The paranoia of time ebbing away without getting anything done.
It’s the fourth month, and I must confess, I have written nothing. I have felt nothing in the process of writing. Writing to me is feeling. I have been to NYSC camp, seen girls, watched the sun turn its back on us to welcome the moon, eaten stale boiled cassava, but I cannot say I have felt something. Maybe that’s why I am reading Komunyakaa. The first thing I did was to look for the translation of the words “Dien Cai Dau,” and when I discovered it meant “crazy” in Vietnamese, I wasn’t too appalled. I was, in fact, disappointed.
We go to poems to seek refuge, but when refuge becomes a somewhat unfamiliar place, what does one do? Or when the rock we run to refuses to shelter us, what becomes the next course of action? I imagine myself as Komunyakaa describes the soldiers of the Vietnam War in his poem “Camouflaging the Chimera.” Branches tied to my helmet, face painted, rifle sullied with mud from a riverbank. It’s intense because even the memory of how I got to the point where my life is a battle scene is lost within the story itself. The need to interrogate the very struggle we find ourselves in and how to find freedom is important, I have noticed. Sometimes, it’s more about what it actually is than what it looks like.
Have you ever felt like the world and everyone in it was moving on without you, I asked M one time during lunch. Her quizzical expression told me she simply would love to have one meal without my existentialisms. But isn’t the world designed this way, for us to worry?
I have had to think of certain occasions worth holding on to in the sponge of one’s memory—Owerri, for example, reminds me of the Biafran War and the proximity to a timeline of “almosts.” The gradual death of the self and the escape of liveliness from that which unites us. And for the first time, this infinite loop of uncertainties felt all right; I think Komunyakaa was most grateful. In his poem “Thanks,” he reconciles his helplessness with gratitude: “Thanks to the tree / between me & a sniper’s bullet.” I am forced to believe that in this poem, everything happens for a reason, and maybe that is the gift his collection has for me. The sense of ennui creeping up my chest serves a purpose. The dissatisfaction I get from everyone and everything must be guiding me somewhere. But where, in that spatial or temporal frame of the mind, do I find solace and respite?
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Prosper C. Ìféányí writes from Owerri, Nigeria, where he works at Imo State University. His works are featured or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, New Delta Review, Salt Hill, Strange Horizons, The Offing, and South Dakota Review. His microchapbook is Sermon (Ghost City Press, 2023).