barka da sabon shakara
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 12/Jan/2011 15:47, 34 days ago
There’s a brilliant little Hardy poem – like most of his poetry, its genius lies in its simplicity and quietness: it asks you to bring as much as it offers.  It tells the story of the narrator going into the same room twice– the first time, before his wife has died; the second, shortly after she’s gone.  And it describes the look of the place in what I remember as fairly spartan detail (I don’t have it to hand, but I’m sure it’s readily accessible on t’internet).  It ends by asking‘what difference, then?  Only the underlying sense / Of the look of a room on returning thence.’ I find it potent: an elegantly sad and small way of rehearsing that common theme of ‘a person I loved has died; so why does the world continue as normal’.  But I also find that it catches with a charming disquiet the sensation I always experience when returning home after a longish holiday to a space that’s remained undisturbed in my absence.  I’m reasonably sure this happens to other people, partly because I’m confident in a hopeful kinda manner that I’m not more like Thomas Hardy than I am the average human being.  That’d be an alarming indictment of my personality.  And partly because Jen at least understands what I’m talking about.Anyway, I love that sensation: a kind of making strange of the familiar, like the use of language in a Hopkins poem.  Sometimes, I try to generate it artificially by tidying up a lot before going away for the weekend but it never really works.  It’s all over the place for me now, though: returning to a house I’d recreated in my memory many times - and shown photos of to all and sundry – and which became (with electricity and water flowing like Canaan’s milk and honey) unsettlingly, surprisingly, marvellously homely.I’m feeling the same little giddy shocks of glee now with all of the many things that make me feel that Kaduna could be home.  Arguing with anokkadadriver; long-horned catle holding up the traffic; the life-affirming burn ofpepe; the birds and lizards; the steady winging of massive bats; the turn on a bike towards home, when suddenly everything opens out and the evening truly is spread out across the sky; the laughter. And the same little moments of realisation, of remembering (and it’s not – for me – an unpleasant remembering) that I don’t understand this place.  Colleagues greeting me (and each other) with bear hugging delight after parting for three weeks– and the death of a colleague’s younger sister over Christmas which explains such joy at meeting following a short separation.  The new year unrest, which has expressed itself so far in several bombs in Jos and my all time favourite place to eat fish (Abacha barracks in Abuja), and the gathering clouds of fear as the election approaches with seemingly inevitable violence.  Schools here are thrown into chaos– not for a week or so to allow everyone to remember what joy feels like in the snow – but for at least a month: they’re used to register voters in advance of the elections. Secondary children can easily be paid to stir upwahalla, and nobody (well, almost nobody) wants the election to be marked with the blood of children and streets blocked by panicked parents.  So schools did not open a week ago, as planned– and won’t now open until the start of February. NIgeria is remarkable, and alarming, and strange– and, for the first time in several months, feeling like home.