An Escapade to Nigeria

Poems Written on my December 2023 Trip to the Homeland

Introduction

Last December, I visited Nigeria to celebrate my father’s 60th birthday. Having turned twenty-one just a month earlier, this was the first time I had visited since I was just seven-years-old. My father’s party was a success and in the aftermath I was free to hang out with family and friends.

Together with my sister Demi, cousin Zainab, and Uncle Kunle, I spent time exploring my dad’s hometown of Abeokuta. One of my favorite experiences was the four of us climbing to the top of Olumo Rock, the site from which my dad’s hometown derives its name. My sister, cousin, and I also watched actor-writer-producer-director Funke Akindele’s latest movie, A Tribe Called Judah, spurring both laughs and discussion of poverty and economic development. Every minute detail added to our conversation that day, leading us to discuss politics, sociology, the state of African unity, and so many more topics. The diversity of perspectives really aided the conversation and inspired me to write a few poems, the first of which was written during a car ride with the four of us.

Conversations with Cousin Zainab

Politics is a dirty game

Ask the good-hearted man to eat a rotten
fruit in exchange for wealth and power, and
see how quickly his breath stinks.

Ask the rich man if he’s dipped his toes in
corruption, and listen out for when he begs
you to save him from drowning. 

Ask the learned man how many books it
took him reading before he realized he had
become the fool.

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Quiet Reflections

All this time spent away from home gave me the unique opportunity to self-contemplate in unfamiliar surroundings. I do intend to be introspective all the time, but I believe that its effectiveness has diminishing marginal returns without the presence of some external change.

This period in my life seemed like an inflection point. Months away from graduating college, I was confronted almost daily with questions about my future. I wasn’t able to answer these questions yet, and I’m still not able to answer them while writing this post. What I could do, though, was reclaim the power I had ceded to rising stress and unease by putting pen to paper. So while sitting in a hotel near the party venue that my parents had booked, I finished two poems that I had started months earlier.

OfficialTranscipt.pdf

I’m a grade A complainer
who espouses strong sentiments that I don’t hold myself to
and enumerates everything wrong in this world yet takes no action to change it.
 
I’m a top tier explainer
who professes a vast wealth of knowledge but has a mouth more rigid than my mind
and synthesizes others ideas at the right time.
 
I’m an unmatched entertainer
who utilizes humor as a means to mask my own lack of clarity and direction
and reframes wrongdoings as lessons to more easily rationalize my hard shell.

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As Long as Anguish is Expected

Can’t stop picking at the scab,
I’ve bitten down to the cuticle.
How long till the pain inside becomes a stab?
The voices in my head are sounding musical.
Wounded so easily by self-neglect.
The cure lies in me gaining an ounce of self-respect.

In the meantime, I think my mind can be subdued
as long as provision remains my portion,
as long as misfortune remains misguided,
as long as I reside where luck meets preparation,
as long as anticipation precedes dread,
as long as I’m fed a full meal of assurance,
as long as insurance remains unused,
as long as my perspective remains askew,
as long as my faith can be renewed,
as long as lifting the covers is something I can undo.

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Time with Mom

In the following days, my family split up. My dad stayed in Abeokuta to take advantage of the slower-paced lifestyle and to spend time with friends he’d not seen in years, my sister took a flight back home as to not use all of her PTO in one foul swoop, and my mother and I booked a hotel in Ikeja, Lagos State.

Ikeja, and Lagos State as a whole, were the opposite of Abeokuta. The roads looked like a Kafkaesque hellscape, the people appeared much younger on average, traditional markets were juxtaposed by towering skyscrapers just a few miles away. Despite this place being a bustling bastion of industry, I felt at peace. Perhaps this is indicative of my suburbia upbringing and its enduring effects on which environments I find comfort in, or maybe I just felt relaxed after all the pomp and circumstance of my dad’s party had passed. Regardless, this sense of peace led me to writing my final poem of the trip in a single sitting (something that I rarely do).

On the Nature of Evil

I think humanity evolved to be evil
in the same way our ancestors selected for aggression.
The societies that really held us as equals
experienced an irreversible regression.
 
I can’t recall a lasting social upheaval,
more than just a moment where people casted off oppression,
unlike the endless disagreements that turned lethal,
or the punitive fury exacted on minor transgressions.
 
Long before Europe endured the age known as medieval,
monarchs engaged in widespread political repression,
and now that we live beneath the arc of the bald eagle,
corporate interests leave the very nature of “good” in question.
 
Evil adapts, evil clings on, it camouflages as something regal.
Its combatants inevitably choose strained acceptance or abstention.
Evil diffuses, evil deeply embeds, it makes the foundation feeble
until the ground falls out due to this artificial tension.
 
Resting in pieces now lay a people without sequel.
The kind who uncovered the unseen on all possible dimensions,
whose highest pursuit was for every mind and body to be full
unlike this new testament of achievement, this boundless obsession.