Work and love

I have noticed that most of my newsletters begin with “I.” I notice this kind of things. Forgive another “I.” But I was going to say, I have been drinking a lot of coffee and writing very little, even though what I desire to do is write. “Glory be,” I shared on my WhatsApp status yesterday, “when you write five hundred or seven hundred words.” I have seldom felt as talentless as I have felt in the past couple of days. But, as Baldwin said, talent is overrated. One wrestles frost and heat to get the work done, if it’s worth it.

It’s like love, and work is love (for me). I began a newsletter yesterday but stopped. It began thus, “I am convinced that there are only two Seasons in the life of any man (I don’t know how it is with women). There is the Season of Love, and there is the Loveless Season. All other seasons are minor and can be classified under those two “Seasons.””

I was playing James Arthur’s “Car’s Outside” when I wrote that. Now I am playing Jacob Banks’s “Slow Up,” which has that line, “Love is just a decision. The choice is yours.” I don’t usually play Banks (or James Arthur), unless I am feeling how I have been feeling for some thirty hours. For this weather, I have Banks’s “Unknown to You” to go with his “Slow Up” and James Arthur’s “Naked,” which I sang crying a little late last night.

But I was talking about work being love before I brought in the two Seasons. Yes, work is love, and love is work. One works at what one loves. If you cannot work at it, no point, you don’t love it. Get up and go. If you love the work, you will do it with every breath and bone in your body. “Fatigue is just an excuse,” said Kobe Bryant.

I was on the Seme border a couple of days ago. It was evening and I was drinking tea close to the border. (I love drinking tea or coffee on borders.) Around me were these men. I was thinking about the hardness of the lives that men live. Real hard. And I asked myself, as late daylight drained from the sky, and women bearing baskets passed and went their way to Krake, “Do these men have loves in their lives?” I was asking because I was thinking about someone. “Do these men, who have wandered far from home, one sitting on a wheelbarrow, one bare but for shorts, having washed what may be his only shirt, some lying down on cardboard, the man selling tea, do they have loves in their lives?”

I know a Mallam (a friend and neighbor) at my place around Iyana-Iba. He never talks about a woman. He left Niger in 2000. He goes home maybe once or twice a year. He must have a wife back at home, in Niamey. How does she cope? How does he cope? His brother married this very young girl, who has a baby for him. His brother, too, is like one of the men on the border. He wanders. He left Nigeria in 2023 and went to Algeria.

“But these men are not loveless.” That was my conclusion. They work. They commune. A woman may not be the thing at the heart of their love, may exist on the fringe, on the edge of the circle of their lives but they are not loveless. They love the day, drink tea, smoke, talk. They love something other. Who says one has to love a woman to know love?

There are times I feel that “the love of a good woman” is an overrated thing. And there are times I am desperate to have it. However, I never despair over the love I have for literature. Work will serve you as long as you work at it. It never falters in meeting the need that it can meet. It is inadequate but, on most days, and for now, it is sufficient. And when the weather is “Naked” by James Arthur, I like to think I could go spending my life like those men on the border, wandering and wondering at the sky; that poetry and prayer will suffice.

Christian Wiman said when he was young all he wanted was to be a great poet, and he would shut out anything—love (the love of a woman), money, family—he would shut out anything to get his work done. And he did shut out things. “The cost is your life,” Rumi wrote. I try to do the same, but how easily I lay it down for a possibility—the possibility of a love; and yet my love is a paltry thing, how I hardly ever get anything for the expense.

I should go and pick my flask of hot water from Mommy D. and get back to work.

In other news, I have an essay in the latest issue of The Republic, an essay on Yoruba architecture. I am in the issue with my brothers—Emmanuel Esomnofu and Ancci. Notes on Craft won’t appear this month, but expect my conversation with Ancci very soon. 🔹