“Remember, my love, that I am watching you.”

“If you can’t pay the rent, go off to work with a proud step.”

I.

I have been meaning to write this newsletter since last week when the cold was a form of torment. Brother, I literally asked my friend for the number of a girl I dated for about a week in late 2021 (the same time I came to faith) and messaged her—just because, well, April is the cruelest month. Nah, it wasn’t libido, in fact I was low on libido; it was a desire to be held, perhaps to be sung to. I chatted the girl for a few days, then—driven by the torment—asked for a call. Just to hear the voice of someone I find attractive. What would the voice have done? There is a line in Logan February, but—again—it wasn’t libido. Perhaps their voice would have swooned me. But she was busy, praise God! But I write to you from a much more sober place, though the rain is falling outside my window (James Arthur?). I am in form. Form, yes.

II.

I like the way tea brews in a cup. I use this stainless cup that is multipurpose. I don’t boil water and then drop a bag of tea in it. Nah. I put water in my multipurpose stainless cup, drop the bag of tea in it, and put the cup on the gas cooker. And I wait till I begin to hear shhshrerere, like the sound of two children hushing each other. This was the same way I had coffee when I used to have it, I cook it. And I wait for the sound of hushing. There is something about warm tea: no milk, a trickle of sugar, sometimes no sugar, I add seeds from this honeyed ginger drink, Napa Valley. The taste but also the clarity of warm liquid pouring down the throat. This is the dream. To have tea to drink, or sometimes warm water, while rain falls outside my window.

III.

Fun fact. Once, I was broke. My gas had run out. Someone I was working for had sent me money but the bank was funny. The money did not come in until maybe three days later. (It was Naira Scarcity Time.) I did not want to ask my neighbor for her gas-cooker, because. Funny enough, I think I had bought fish and pepper, but my gas ran out while I was preparing the stew. I had some oats in the house. So, yeah. I put the oats in my multipurpose cup, lit a candle, and held it atop the candle-light until it cooked a bit. I drank that down straight, with honey. How long did it take to cook? I don’t know.  Say 15 minutes or less. But I was on my knees in my kitchen, by the flame, and it felt like I was in an act of worship. And I think I was.

III.

Outside the house, a man is flirting with a woman. This young woman who sells bad meat-pies and grumpy eggrolls. I am sure I won’t patronize her again. The man says she should visit him, he will put on AC for her, or fan. Now he is talking about how much she intends to pay her sales girl. She has a signboard out that says, “Sales Girl Needed.” They are talking muscles. She says, “I have muscles to carry my pregnancy.” They laugh. He says, “Don’t make me choke o.” I love listening to people like this. The lady loves to play Mercy Chinwo and Celine Dion. Now she is singing a gospel song. She stops and cries, in a childish voice, “Farida! Farida, how are you?” Then she calls the name again as if her voice where a gentle swing, pausing between each syllable, giving it a musical character, “Fah-rih-dah.” She returns to singing.

IV.

One of my favorite poems is “Poverty,” by Pablo Neruda. He says to his beloved, “You are scared of poverty. You don’t want to go to the market in the same worn shoes.” He says he does not want his woman (Matilde, Matilde Uruttia, the small woman whose body grew; earth, ocean, fields) to fear poverty. He says, “We are not fond of poverty as the rich would have us think. We will pluck it out like a bad tooth.” But the wife should not fear poverty. “Together,” says the poet, “we are the greatest wealth the world has ever seen.” It is a poor man’s love poem and it makes me cry now. It has never ceased to move me. If there is one book I can read without guard it is The Captain’s Verses. Do you fear poverty? I have a vision of the woman I want to marry, I don’t want her to go the market in the same worn out shoes. No, I don’t want to have a lot of money. I want to be able to take care of my wife and children, but I don’t want to be a millionaire in dollars or even a bestselling writer (I consider the latter an insult as a writer, to write a bestseller). Those are not things I desire. But I don’t want my wife to go to work in the same worn shoes. If she has three good shoes and I have two, we are good.

V.

This time last year, I was living in a room not quite far from here. Literally, that room was one reason why I ran mad in 2021. The walls, until they were plastered, had this gash in them as if they were gnawed. At the time, I was living with deep mental illness, I was in a state of mania, and the walls tormented me. Thank God for Jesus. This time last year, though, I was in good health, but my room leaked when rain fell. There is that JP Clark poem I love, about rain flooding the house when rain fell. It is not “Abiku,” though there is a line in Abiku also: “True, it looks through the thatch/ When floods brim the banks.” These two lines are some of the best in Nigerian poetry, argue with yourself. JP Clark’s “Abiku” is as good as any poem written anywhere in the world in the twentieth century. It ranks among the top ten finest poems written by any Nigerian. I can bet my heart. Anyway, my room leaked and my ceiling filled with rainwater and the room smelled damp. That was a serious education for me. One night I was on a call with Khalif, I had just returned from Abeokuta, rain had been falling in Lagos for almost a week. My room was soaked. Khalif was telling me some nice stuff, I told him I needed to write about the dampness of that room. I needed to put down the measure of that moment.

VI.

We fear poverty. We do. My former house was an experience in poverty. The house was crowded. I lived in a below low-budget self-contained apartment. But my case was fair compared to others in the house. There was this Igbo family that I remember now as I think of Neruda’s “Poverty.” I can still see this old woman, in her fifties surely, smiling at her husband. They share a single room with three of their children, two boys and a girl, but their love has kept them young. Their “life” is not soft, but the way they looked at each other. When the man returned from work bearing his bag, she would be waiting to smile at him. To welcome him with those Igbo words that release honey in the belly. Love is powerful, bro; I was thinking the other day, when a poor man marries a beautiful, good woman, he feels rich. “Together we are the greatest wealth that the world has ever seen.” You know, to look into her eyes and think, “If I was blessed enough to have you, then God will bless me with anything. Every other thing will fall in place.” It is sad that Job did not have such a woman. So sad.

VII.

Yet I feel incredibly blessed to be single at this point in my life. Between yesterday and this morning (in fact for about a week now), I have been getting some soft blows from life: results, rejections, tiredness. Stress. Stress. And I am glad that I don’t have a young woman to complain to. I can resist being weak. I can resist needing care. I can resist bothering somebody with my Super Stories. I feel very selfish about my suffering, because it matters to me. I can cry at a news and then wipe my face and read Shakespeare and talk to myself like a brother. I have developed this relationship very well. I mean, today, though I woke up to a message from a woman I love checking up on me (note: we have no relationship; her name is Anjola, she has inspired good poems, very good poems), I did not have to tell her anything. I just had to read six chapters of Ecclesiastes: Vanity upon vanity. I needed to hear a humanist perspective from Scripture for my hurt to dissolve. Also, I have found that the resilient work of Shakespeare is good for me at any point in time. I can read Shakespeare when I am heartbroken and I think I would be detached from the hurt. Reading Shakespeare requires the mind to be active but it is also such a deep pleasure that your soul clambers out of your chest and marries the letter.

VIII.

I pray for grace to live above lust. One of the books I am reading is The Fall of a Sparrow, a 1998 novel by Robert Hellenga. Grounded in an actual historical event (a terrorist attack on a train station in Bologna, Italy, in 1980), it follows a Classics professor whose family is torn apart by the death of their daughter from the attack. The language is a mastery of simplicity and plainness. There is a scene where Professor Woodhull is tempted by his former student, whose mother he had an affair with when he was younger. Woodhull thinks of what his “standing lights,” Plato and Aristotle and Tolstoy and C. S. Lewis, would advise him to do; then he damns them and goes ahead to do what he “cannot” resist doing. The pagan character of the affair reminds me of another story I read last week: “Pagans” by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, from the collection of stories, A Lovesong for India (I love the first story in the book so much, I think it is genius; another story in it inspired my short story, “The New Messiah’s Son”). In “Pagans,” a man is sleeping with his wife’s sister, and has been doing so for years. Other than the fact that the story overshoots its mark in terms of prose, the subject is perverse. I have been reading the Pentateuch and God says, “You will not sleep with a mother and her daughter.” I have that line in a poem titled “Hunger,” “What is it about hunger that keeps us coming?”

IX.

I need to learn Italian. I have been reading Dante’s The Divine Comedy, and I know that I am missing a lot by reading it in translation. The story is there but the language (which is the poetry) is not. There is a scene in the third Canto of Inferno, where Dante sees this being come in a boat to carry those described by Revelations as “neither hot nor cold, I would spit them out of My mouth.” Dante says they lived for themselves. The demon, Charon, tells Dante that “a lighter vessel must carry you.” That line struck me and I used it in a poem. Do you want to be a superstar? I asked myself this morning. My answer was no. Why not? Because there are no superstars in God’s kingdom. A lighter vessel must bear you, else you will go with Charon.

X.

I have been listening to sensible conservatives a lot: Jordan B. Peterson, Matt Wash, Michael Knowles, and Ben Shapiro. I watched a conversation between Peterson and Susan Blackmore today and I realized, “Peterson actually makes his case very clearly. He speaks more clearly than several other psychologists.” I used to feel he uses too many words to say simple things, but I think I am not correct, at least not all the time. The world is going bunkers, my bro. All these young, unschooled individuals with bloated egos who think because they know the name of Marx and have heard of Darwin they know what is best for them without thinking it through, they need to be responded to. I love some postmodern thinkers, though I consider them wrong on many points. But their mind fascinates me. Think Hayden White, the philosopher of history I have the greatest respect for (I read him when I need a trigger to think) and Johnston Whittle. Yet postmodernism and neo-liberalism (plus neo/ cultural Marxism) is a waste of everybody’s time. Nigerian literature began to decay when academics began to use theories to read Soyinka. That is the truth. Our poetry went down the hill. Today, poetry is losing substance because of the same reasons. We want to create opportunity for a group of people because of their race or because “they exist at the margins of society,” without much consideration for the quality of the work they are making. Creating access is good: I am an African. But don’t give me access because of who I am, give me because I deserve it. Go out, my brother, and sit with your life, and understand that you are nothing but your blood and your sweat made worthy by the grace of God. It’s what I say to myself: sit with your life.