1.
There haven’t been many films that detail the life of any great Nigerian writer (at least while they are still alive) as Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún’s Ebrohimie Road: A Museum of Memory. A good documentary film, it is created on a seemingly bare, almost simple, premise from where emerges a complex build up. But like most things closely studied, we are shown an interesting paradox: is this famed “museum of memory” the said house on Ebrohimie Road, or do we find it in the man who lived in it? Is it in both? Is it possible, in any case, to separate the character Sóyínká from that house on this famed road?
In the short story, Soyinka’s Memory, by South African writer, Stephen Embleton, we learn how memory can be scarring or become a frightful thing. We understand that age may be a sudden dawn, and days may come when memories begin to wear grotesque faces. In the story, a fictional Wole Sóyínká admits a surprising vulnerability, similar to what may likely be evinced from the real man: “I no longer look at old photographs, you know. The shoeboxes have been passed on to family. I’ve taken down the picture frames,” the character says.
I recently encountered what I think may be a similar sadness as I scoured through delicately preserved, old bags, which contained some official documents, letters, a few photographs, and pages upon pages of carefully-scripted longhand. I was struck by the fact that this collection of my past had been hidden for over ten years. The earliest book in the pile is a once-famous brown notebook from secondary school which on its cover is the headshot of a man wearing a trencher. Underneath the open coffin of sellotape, the man’s cold stare looks back at me. The distant past, as well as the present’s temper, side by side, unblinking.
In going through old, personal items, one sometimes feels not nostalgia—oh no!—but a deep feeling of brutal sadness for years passed, and of things accomplished or left undone. Such memorabilia often register a belated sense of accountability or of closure. My books, the diaries, the jotters, and the photographs are old; and although not nearly as old as Sóyínká, they bear the same weight of time having passed.
The bags are themselves old, patted with dust, despite the security of the wardrobe. The dust is intrusive, like memory, busy body, invasive, and needy of things better forgotten. There is an intrusive crack on the staircase of Sóyínká’s house on Ebrohimie Road. (It is peculiar how seemingly ugly details, such as a simple crack in a staircase, or a mismatched colour on the wall, prod the recollection of a thing.) I ignored the folded edges of some of the papers in the bag. I let them be. Some parts break off. A half page bends in the middle of a book as though I had deliberately used it as a bookmark. I retain the malformations. There is a worn-out paper that is torn in the middle and missing a part. The torn paper is an old market list from Akwa Ibom on which I wrote down food items in red ink. I search for the separated piece, read from it and stare into a single time that has managed to split into two, demanding negotiation on its own terms.
2.
One of the first things I notice in my pile of old items are old glasses—the three or four of them, or different parts of them—stacked inside an old glass case. Bound with black leather, like the books, the sides of the holder are tearing out and falling lazily, its dry fabric rolling into itself, a viper biting itself. When I wear them, some of the lens is dimmer but they are nonetheless helpful. I pick up a broken-off temple and study it. It is the first pair I had bought at the end of university. When they still shone, the black lenses radiated like burning coal—and emblazoned in the sun, they granted me new sight. The world had rushed into my eyes in them, and I better appreciated the leaves in the trees and the beauty of the skies.
The temple is rough, and the black paint is worn. What is left is a greying or purplish underneath. Maybe red. Time reveals the truth of things, of people. The frame loops are roughened from months of applying and re-applying glue so the lenses don’t fall off. There is another pair underneath the small pile; it is in the middle as though forced into the space, succumbed. The pair is good. The frames are smoother. There are less rough edges. It now seems odd, the pair tucked in with the rest. I cannot remember when I bought them.
My eyes catch the receipt of my old HP computer, which last year, I recall accusing my baby sisters of breaking a hinge off when I allowed them use it. Admittedly, the computer had been overused and become volatile, and its battery died quicker. It also had bruises on many sides. The girls were in my house for their school holidays. They didn’t break it, they shot back. I threatened to have them repair it. Eventually, I returned home two sulking girls. But before they left, I repaired the bad hinge and gave them the computer as a keepsake.
47,000 is written on the receipt, in numbers, and in words. The seller adds “only” at the end of the words. I imagine that the word “only” diminishes the history that went into purchasing the laptop, the history it would contend in, as well as its contribution to a fuller sense of life. Of time, space, effort, sweat, and blood crunched into four letters. Nothing is just only. Everything emanates from mighty pools of lives lived. Every atom is important in the makeup of the whole. Everything matters.
In Túbọ̀sún’s documentary, the message is passed in the fraction of a split second, but long enough to communicate that often, the beauty of age rests in the culmination of all that has happened until the present moment. Túbọ̀sún’s film depends on the preservation—not exactly the absolute repair—of things nature deems necessary to phase out; that there is, perhaps, less need to return to what is transient. When Túbọ̀sún asks an aged Sóyínká if he could return and re-enact the pose on that staircase, the Nobel Laureate answers him, “not a ghost of a chance.” We may understand Sóyínká: memory may be a frightening thing to re-encounter on its own terms.
3.
Inside a burgundy envelope branded with the University of Lagos logo, I find three photographs. The first photograph, of me and my classmates in nursery school, is sepia. The pupils stand in three rows. I am at the back. It is the only photograph from childhood I remember taking. A rush and bustle to reach the spot where there are shrubs by the side, or trees? Loud music playing behind the fence? We are guarded, temporarily, from the streets. There seems to be a space in my mind reserved, God knows why, for my teacher who stands in the photo. I now notice she was a beautiful young woman, maybe younger then, than I am now. Her face is eaten up by sticky decay. The card is grotesque and oddly-coloured, damp and putrefying.
J.P Clark’s exhortation of Ibadan remains relevant today. “Running splash of rust” gives the idea of a doggedly impressionistic painting. The roofs are still rusted into deep brown, the colour of dark chocolate. Sóyínká’s house on Ebrohimie Road is still much the way it was when he lived there, like a splash of rust—and possibly how the previous occupant before Sóyínká had left it. Túbọ̀sún tells me he was unable to find out who lived in the house prior to Sóyínká. “One of the yet unknown things,” he said.
The shrubs outside stand as guards. There is still the mocking sign of the cross on the door. I use “mocking” because when one considers the Yoruba sculptures and deities on the staircase, one sees the double dealing of a mischievous patron to Èṣù. The terrible, and altogether terrific, aspect of Ibadan lies in its resistance to gentrification. (In the University of Ibadan Staff Club, where I often spend time with acclaimed zoologist, Professor Mark Nwagwu, the waiters are not “waiters” but rather “stewards.” In the campus, too, there is a clear-as-day effort by the system to stick to the old ways or retain a colonial shadow.) The cracks on the staircase defy repair, even though they could have been repaired a long time ago. An iron door could have replaced the wooden one. But the wooden door remains. A distortion of what is memorial is always troubling; an interruption of progress. Chisom, a classmate, still holds the famous handkerchief in the photograph. She used to dance like breeze, her limbs splaying easily, her feet nimble. There is Eze, a stocky boy who was more bully than ally. I hold the photo with care. Before keeping it back, I focus my phone camera on it and take a picture, extending its lifespan by digital magic, stamping on it some sort of permanence.
4.
It is the perplexing nature of existence that one thing will be superseded by another, as we learn from Walter Ong’s evolution of orality in the phenomenon of the tension between secondary and primary orality. The fusion after a brutal, inevitable contact brings about that reformation and change that is only possible, even permissible, with evolution. Túbọ̀sún’s film ends with a campaign to preserve the house on Ebrohimie Road. Professor Nelson Fashina reveals that the management of the University of Ibadan plans to build a shopping mall behind the famed building; a construction that may lead to an eventual demolition of Sóyínká’s former home.
A flash goes off and the memory of that childhood photo is moved towards a secondary phase, a more permanent one. The defeat of the primary. Memory, sometimes, is movement, the successful bonding of one with another, less so the cutting off of it. What is the real, true essence of a thing that goes before if there is no tangible trace of its exit? How do we value what is in absence of what was? I remember Eze’s face even till today, almost three decades apart. I wonder what he looks like now. I wonder at a probable moustache, and a bullish, pimply face. I imagine that a good man had come out from him.
I peer at the wall behind me in the card. I remember standing to be photographed. Before it became bad, the photograph was a clearer card. It showed me leaning my neck upward, higher than everyone. I remember thinking, “what if I don’t show in the photo? What if the photographer does not capture me?” And so the photograph captured me on tiptoe. My mother asks me sometimes, why I stood that way. I needed to be in the photograph, I tell her. The wall behind me may have been demolished now. The building might not be there anymore. I have never gone back there. I wonder where the pretty teacher is, her yellow dress in the picture matching the coconut brown of her skin, her hair designed in neat plaits. Is she living the life she yearned to live? Has life been kind to her? Was she still in the school, if it still stands? Did she find the man of her dreams? Does Chisom still dance, moving with the wind?
5.
In the second photograph, shot in 2011, I wear a short afro. Sister Tolulope stands beside me, her smiling face looking directly at the camera. Brother Solomon Ogedegbe stands in the middle. He wears that famous frown. Another brother looks away from the camera. Another stands confidently, his torso a bit askew. I wear a shy, content smile. We have just completed a grueling Sunday School quiz contest and won second place. Ogedegbe, our leader, and the oldest of us, deemed it right that we won. I texted him on Facebook in September 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The photograph in his display profile is of him wearing a sad smile.
In Ebrohimie Road, we find hope in the resuscitation of the memory of a full life. Kelani’s epic camera work comes into fitting play: the colour grading, the camera movements and varieties of shots, in the focus on things the eyes may naturally wander from. One feels they are watching a Leon Gast title. The documentary unearths several questions. Do we become older leaves needing separate globules of dew? Can we survive recreating the past? Can we put old wines in new bottles? But, perhaps, the most important question it asks is: “is it all worth it?” And so we move with the days, growing older until we become new versions of ourselves.
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We find great, profound relevance in Túbọ̀sún’s film. There is an intentionality for him in being vulnerable; he captures aspects that are far from being wholly anthropological and historical, and immerses in the more empathetic and introspective, for indeed, the house on Ebrohimie Road is not as much Sóyínká’s nemesis than it is Túbọ̀sún’s. In Ebrohimie Road, where the suddenly concerned present fuses with the perpetually traumatised past, Túbọ̀sún finds his ikigai, which, in the end, is an essence of art: a confluence between the created and the creator.
6.
In the bag, a passport photograph of myself in secondary school shows an angry face, an untamed field of beard across my chin, with my school shirt, a grey affair, exposing my white-washed undershirt. Another passport of my first year in the university shows a calmer face; a lost version of me whose eyes I looked into and missed. I missed that person, before the fall of adulting. What would the winter of my younger self tell this fall? It may say, “You heated too fast. You burnt out too quickly. See your mind now unaware of the warmness of winter.”
Amongst piles of paper, I go through stories I wrote in longhand many years ago. But photos tell a different kind of story. In the third photograph, I wear my matriculation gown and stand behind a background which has prints of logos and brands of all kinds. I wear a frown, much like Sóyínká’s on his photograph on the staircase. My beard is trimmed. I sport a different look. My cheeks are thinner and my face is trimmer. I have a new haircut. I am Sizwe Bansi, reborn, a decade younger.
I carefully read the first draft of “Rusty” to remember the story. It is of the rat, Rusty, living in the home of a retired doctor, and narrated from its perspective. It gets trapped in a mouse board later in the story and manages to escape by chance: a kick made by Alhaja, the vicious wife of the doctor. In 2017, it became my first published short story. It was the first time seeing my name on a printed byline, or any byline at all. Years passed, and I moved past Rusty, who was caught on the springboard of my growth. Rusty’s escape signalled mine. Rusty’s story was perhaps mine. Its escape, the enabler of my own freedom.
I find some scribbling in a jotter. The writer, whoever it was, writes repeated Ws that interlink to resemble the rippling tides of mighty seas. It must have been a child or a tormented adult. It may have been one of my sisters when they were little. There is a humanoid drawing of a child with abnormally big ears. The documents tell me I have lived lives concealed from remembrance. Encountering memory is reaching back into time. It is songs. It is photo cards, a part cut out with the spurt of vengeance. It is seeing numbers in phone books and knowing there will be no one on the other end to respond if you dialled them. Encountering memory means facing the demons of regret.
Ten, twenty years from today, I may dread opening these books and seeing these photographs. I fear I will be too cowardly to confront the people I would see. I fear the old becoming new. I fear I will have forgotten who the people in the notes are. I fear time will vote off things important to remember. I fear I may see phone numbers again, resounding in the annals of the dusty paths of my mind, and be too afraid to dial them. I fear these books and photographs may become graves in which I would have buried parts of myself. I fear that one day I may burn the photographs, make a mockery of them and stomp them underfoot. I fear I may take down picture frames from the walls, like Sóyínká. I fear I may be forced to reach out for cracked staircases to repair.
Is love tantamount to forgetting? What roads have I taken over the years that have led me here? (I could not be anywhere else.) I fell in love with writing. The dashes and slashes in ink in these books tell of the hate for the weariness that comes with the thing one loves. It is in the broken sentences, in the forgotten stories written in longhand, in the doubts poured out on the pages. It is years and years of walking a single path and following all the directions it allows. Love is in keeping the straight line and not moving away. Age, love, and time are slow dawns which creep into the fibres of a person’s life. One day, one feels them, against one’s will.
7.
The initiation ceremony into the Italian mafia is peculiar. To become “made,” the initiate indulges the omertà by placing his hands over the burning flames of a saint’s photograph. The years have moved past, and you watched it go by. But age refines you. It adds something that could hitherto never come. A photograph is then a baptism captured in one split second, in which there is a transference of form, separating what is from what may be, or what was. The photograph is a ghost that stays when the subjects go.
Through the simple, yet conniving ritual of the click, subjects gain permission to live again. It is the process of possession. It is the omertà, the fusion of two separate things, however different, into one. The mafiaso, for instance, in practice, is far from being a saint. Possession is Sóyínká’s demigods satisfied with being within rocks and sticks, mounted on earthly, cracked staircases. It is gods gaining new forms but retaining their power.
Túbọ̀sún describes a profound scene in his essay. He shows Sóyínká a photograph where the latter sat on the doorsteps leading up to the wooden door. He writes, “Soyinka himself had lost memory of where the original photo was taken.” But all hope is not lost; Túbọ̀sún shows Sóyínká something that brings light to the cave: the crack. With the help of that crack and an accompanying video, Túbọ̀sún informs us that “he finally acquiesced.”♦
Edited by Carl Terver.
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Nzube Nlebedim is the founding editor of The Shallow Tales Review. He is the author of At Night Men Take the Lonely Way Back Home, a collection of thirteen creative nonfiction essays on time, roads and roots.