Emmanuel Iduma /

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Emmanuel Iduma

a long essay on travelling & imagined romance

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I am grateful to Damilola Ajayi, Kola Tubosun, Jumoke Verissimo, Sokari Ekine, Emeka Okereke and Qudus Onikeku for their invaluable suggestions while I worked from an unsightly draft to this present version. Other free pdfs can be found on the download section of my website. Some rights are reserved. This e-book is protected under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported) licence.

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During the course of a road trip1, I addressed series of letters to V. in Nigeria, a woman I had met, at least fictionally. Once, after my return from an hour long walk in Libreville, I composed a long letter to her. It mattered little to me that a week had passed and I had checked my email a dozen times for a reply to the first. I was writing while engulfed with the wonder of reporting myself as a mirror walking down the road. My objective as I wrote was to see, to see again, those subtle elements that distinguished Libreville from Lagos, and perhaps fail in my attempts. And so, my first line was,

“When you set off on a journey of this sort, and when you declare that you would be writing about your experience, what sort of writing is expected?”

I hoped she would understand that I was interrogating myself, plumbing my consciousness for vestiges of kinship with the place our road trip had brought me. I knew I was

1 The 2012 road-trip of the Invisible Borders Trans-African Photographers‟ Organization was from Lagos, Nigeria to Libreville, Gabon. The mission of Organization is to tell Africa‟s stories, by Africans, through photography and artistic interventions.

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making a difficult demand on her, even more because the opposite of „difficult‟ is not „easy‟ but „impossible.‟2 Yet, I knew that even if V. fell short of my expectation, I would still strive to write the untranslatable. In that long letter, I expressed an awareness of what I could become:

A funny thought interrupted my awareness of similarities. I realized that I could be smoking while taking the walk. I could walk into the shop ahead and buy my first stick of cigarette. It amused me. I walked into the shop. I stood for close to a minute wondering if I could bring myself to ask for a cigarette. For the first time in my life, I thought of a cigarette as a practical habit, not an unhealthy one. Because it was a thought centred on practicality, there wasn’t the faint thought of morality. But I walked to the counter and picked a sugar-coated peanut, paid 100 FCFA for it, and walked out of the shop into the sun, where I took a photograph of the peanut, cupping it in my left palm.

V. knew I had not, ever, smoked. Reading that, she could surmise the journey was dangerous for

2 Credited to Anne Berger

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my mind, that I had pushed further the boundaries of my convictions. I wrote,

“I know I will become a souvenir of all I am encountering in Libreville. I know I will wake one morning in Lagos and remember something that was peculiarly Gabonese, or Cameroonian. There’s a subtlety in every city that may be missed. It is not, I discovered, a subtlety that is wholly attributive to the history of a place or its socio-politics. It is a subtlety that is formed by several interactive forces that cannot be defined. Sometimes formed by the image of what I could be back home, an image formed when I stand and look down from my window at a man wearing a suit, returning from church, a woman by his side.”

There was a persistent feeling while I wrote that I could never accurately mirror myself. I took that walk thinking of how to be true in a letter to V. – knowing that there were many who travelled across Africa wanting to take the exotic offerings in exchange for their touristic presence. I was disturbed that I was not giving enough in return, something beyond sightseeing – I was disturbed that I was seeing and not being seen. As I expressed these private thoughts to V., it

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seemed I was staring at the face of my inadequacy, an inadequacy to report. Once, when I had thought about this inadequacy, I recalled Teju Cole‟s words in „Blind Spot.‟3 “When we write fiction, we write within what we know. But we also write in the hope that what we have written will somehow outdistance us. We hope, through the spooky art of writing, to trick ourselves into divulging truths that we do not know we know.” I realized I was writing within what I knew and experienced hoping that I could outdistance myself.

3 Essay published in Granta, http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Blind-Spot

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In one of the earliest letters, I had written, “see, I could tell you about something I have termed the value of duality.” Then I stated how my definition of duality was influenced by Carmen Wong, who alleged she was “a mishmash and hodgepodge of conundrums and contradictions.”4 I had been thinking about duality in Libreville, after I was introduced to the fact that Nigerians, mostly Igbo, in tens of thousands had settled in the Francophone city as traders. And I am Igbo – I am an English-only Igbo who can comprehend Igbo spoken at any speed but is reluctant to utter any word of it, for fear of sounding incorrect. My Dad wanted us to speak English first, when we were born in the South-western Nigerian city of Akure, because he feared that we might become too „local‟ in an urban space, if we did not speak the formal language-of-prestige. So, we lapsed into an Anglo-consciousness. While writing, trying to make my point about duality, I found a clue in Ilya Kaminsky‟s essay on Mandelstam5, and on the lyric voice. She had written, “Mandelstam‟s life is full of dualities,

4 Carmen R. Wong, „Getting it Straight‟ in Border-Line Personalities: A New Generation of Latinas Dish on Sex, Sass, and Cultural Shifting, ed. Michelle Herrera Mulligan and Robyn Moreno (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 205. 5 Published in Five Dials, Issue 25

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arguments, contradictions. A Jew born in Poland, he was Russian poetry‟s central figure in the twentieth century. A Modernist, he openly defended strict classical forms. He wrote in rich, formal verse structures. Then sometimes he didn‟t. He rarely titled his poems. Sometimes he did. He kept more than one version of the same lyric, and sometimes inserted the same stanza into different poems. He composed aloud and recited to his wife, who wrote the poems down. Mandelstam was Russia‟s „most civilized poet‟, „a child of Europe‟, yet he found his „fullest breath‟ not in worldly European capitals but in exile in the provincial town of Voronezh.” In that early letter, I told V.,

“You must know, that sometimes the question is simple, and it isn’t. The question that had actually played in my head for a long time, after hours at Gare-Routiere, a commercial hub in Libreville, hours spent mostly with two Nigerian traders, was “what does it mean to be Nigerian?”

I thought of it afterwards, realizing that the standpoint is to question Nigerianness when faced with testimonies of people who expressed the need to be somewhere other than Nigeria, yet remain Nigerian. And this „somewhere other than Nigeria‟ is not a European city – an

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important reminder, because one of the stories grossly under-told is that of trans-border Africans, continental migrants. In my letter, I narrated more about those Nigerian traders that claimed they were persecuted for being Nigerian, their hurt bothering on discrimination, fitting into xenophobia. This persecution was as a result of many factors: One, Nigerians, at a certain time in Libreville, about three years earlier, were notorious for fraudulence and armed robbery. Two, Nigerians had overpopulated Gabon, numbering, in the traders‟ estimation, more than two times the Gabonese population (a recent figure was about 1,500,000; about a third of that number was the population of Libreville). And third, the Nigerian government, unlike their Chinese and Moroccan counterparts, had not made infrastructural investment in Gabon. Nigerians were then accused of taking from the economy and giving nothing in return. There is also what Mia Couto wrote. “My border situation, between cultures, does not come from being the child of Europeans…The ambivalence of African[s] … should be seen as positive, an efficient mixing of blood, a means of finding their own solutions. It is an enriching departure point in the creation of an identity which can only be

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conceived as dynamic and changing. To be both inside and outside is a privilege in a world in which frontiers are disappearing. To be at the same time indigenous and alien puts them in the position of a privileged visitor, the seamstress of different cultural cloths.”6 I have a feeling that when she read that, perhaps as a tangential quote, V. might have sighed: a sigh of malcontent, knowing there was much I was saying that she was hardly interested in, pushing me further afield from her heart. I figured that those traders were mishmashes of what it meant to be Nigerian in Gabon at that point in time and what it could mean to be Nigerian in Gabon in another, say, two decades. With my companions, I had met Ugochukwu, a Nigerian married to a Nigerian who had studied in Belgium; their daughter was about ten. The ten year old was standing at an intersection, in the middle kingdom of what her parents were in Nigeria, what they were in Gabon, and what she could become as a product of those two elements. In that sense it is a state of flux that defines the little girl‟s Nigerianness – and equally that state of flux defined Onyebuchi and Morris,

6 Mia Couto, ‘African Issues: Fleeting Identities’ in Emergency, pub.

MUSCAR and ACTAR (Barcelona: Spain, 2006), 179.

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the two traders I met, defined their extent of being Nigerian. My letter went on to argue that the essay on Mandelstam spoke in a trans-figurative sense because it located the lyric poet outside, and inside of his time.

“It put a hyphen on his life, defined him, for instance, as a modernist and then as a postmodernist. And the interesting fact, as Kaminsky reported about the poet, was that he always struggled to capture the unspeakable in the language of his day, and because of that attempt, he was said to have ‘intuited’ language, living on the threshold of inarticulacy.”

Yet, Kaminsky emphasized, “from the inarticulate comes the new harmony.” Then, I reemphasized – that from the inarticulacy in addressing the question of being Nigerian in Gabon a new harmony was coming into view. That I am aware of the need to bring the knowledge of existent dualities to the attention of many; so that in trying to understand what it meant to be African, more and more people could locate themselves within the possibility of living in a country other than theirs, places apart from their origin, appreciating the freshness of the duality that would subsequently occur.

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V. must have sighed again, paused from reading the rest of the letter.

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My first letter to V. had been after we arrived Douala, a four day journey from Calabar, the largest Nigerian city before the Cameroonian border. The mud that covered most of the road leading out of Nigeria into Cameroon climbed to our ankles, sometimes higher. It had been nightmare as carnival. We danced to Nigerian pop music in the mud while our van was being towed by old, yet solid Hilux vans. Yet I was constantly drawn to parallels – that in one breath we were the same people who had travelled the world for photo exhibitions, published novels, attended Ivy League universities, and were now confined to a muddy road, moving at snail speed, spending the night covered in smelly mud. From it the incident, I wrote the scenes into the words that made up my first letter to V.,

“In that mud, pushing the van, helping to shovel out mud, burying our feet in the mud, I felt that if I would be true to the situation, I needed to forget who I was before those moments. Each of us had to forget our qualifications, the acclaims our work had received, the comfort of our beds, rooms, our social status. We needed to focus on the job we were carrying out: surely performance demanded taking new identities for the

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duration of its act. We had become like everyone else in that pathway during the 22-hour period we spent; people who drove past with motorcycles, vans, jeeps, people who walked back. By entering into that space, and doing everything possible to pass through, we became one of them. The sinking mud assured us of our ordinariness.”

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We talked a lot about the dynamics of spontaneity. Emeka Okereke, founder of Invisible Borders, and I – and in a fit of wonder, I related a sum of our conversation to V. It was a very short letter, two paragraphs, the shortest of all that I had written. I expressed a concern: I was on the trip with photographers and filmmakers, I was tasked to write. But I wanted to record in the same manner photographers did, because photographers do not have the luxury of returning to their rooms to reflect on what they had seen. They created art on the go and I wanted to write in a similar manner, achieving the profundity that I saw in the photographs of my travel companions. I was particularly disturbed because I had read Barthes7 – in front of a photograph, our consciousness does not necessarily take a path of memory, but the path of certainty, the photograph‟s essence is to ratify what it represents; no writing can give that certainty, because it is the misfortune of language not to be able to authenticate itself. I told V. I would fail as a writer, especially a writer writing in African cities, if I could not capture the frenzy I was seeing, the state of flux,

7 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, (New York: Random House,

1993), 85

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the intrepid attempt at survival. I told V. I wanted to write what I had seen, what I see. Writing as imagery is the only way I think language can (try to) authenticate itself.

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The fact was that, in our trans-African trip, difference meddled in our interactions. Mostly Nigerians, one of us a South-African, another Mozambican, another Rwandan-Dutch, another Equatorial Guinean, we trafficked in the consciousness that although we were in the broadest sense „African,‟ our particularities could not be ignored, seeing as it was blatant and manifest. Yet V. became a labyrinth where I flung my perplexities; the labyrinth and the act of flinging being my second self. I related to her the questions about difference I found most intriguing. I wrote another letter to V. speculating difference, within the openness of a public cyber café in the Institut Français building in Libreville‟s commercial district, we were readying to begin the journey back. I began the first line thus: How do you bridge otherness when the most useful, practical tool is lacking? And paused with a sigh, hoping she would do the same as she read. Then I continued:

I am resolute in understanding language as the voice of socio-culture; language is a voice that evokes the feeling of being present. There is some practicality in that

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understanding. How do you bridge otherness when the most useful tool is not in your possession? Faced with this problem, an x in the algebra of a short stay in Francophone cities, I struggled to overcome this kind of frustration that is laced with surliness.

In a provision store in Libreville, close to Hotel le Perchoir where we are staying, I had requested, through gestures and repetition of the word „credit‟, for airtime to be transferred to my phone, 2,500 francs. The owner of the shop, a Muslim, whose face always betrayed an inscrutable knowingness, brought out his phone and asked me to type in my number. I did. That was the first time I was transferring airtime by phone, on previous occasions I had used recharge cards. The shop-owner transferred airtime to the number I typed. A minute passed, and I did not receive the airtime. In another half-minute, it became clear that I had transferred airtime to the wrong number. It was not a problem of communication; in Libreville, as in Douala and Yaoundé, I lived distractedly, conscious of how soon my visit would end. I knew I was there and not there. I highlighted the last sentence, formatted it as bold, so that V. would think about it some more,

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find unparalleled wisdom, as remote as that possibility was. I related other experiences without logic, only seeking to add tags of „difference‟ to encounters that confirmed a measure of foreignness. I wrote about food.

“I have lost the sense of what my food was before I travelled. I now eat only because I have to; but once in a while I eat from my heart, as I did when I was served fried plantain with omelette. My stomach filled easily, and I began to watch others eat, content with seeing the uneaten portions of their food, and knowing that minutes before I had been eating that same food. It had not been the same feeling in similar situations – when I was offered groundnut soup in Libreville, ndole in Douala, boiled cassava in Yaoundé. For the most part of my stay in Libreville, I had eaten chicken meat, and drank orange juice, pleased with a monotonous feeding system.”

Food, I declared, emphasized difference in a complex way; we ate what we were not used to for the sake of adventure or discovery, other times for the sake of hunger. But somewhere in our heads, for new food to be enjoyed, its taste would have to remind us of food eaten in the

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past. And therefore, arguably, we ate whatever our mind accepted. I told her I was often frustrated by the genial and dismissive manner we were sometimes treated by the residents of the cities where we made stops, as soon as we were confirmed as people who came to go. In my head, there was an expedient distinction to be made, between „visitor‟ and „stranger,‟ although both words were synonymic to each other. A visitor, unlike a stranger, is tasked with finding the crack in the surface where otherness meets normality. It is not enough to do in Rome as the Romans do; I am always attempting to do in Rome as Nigerians do, and yet be accepted in Rome. I want to be unfamiliar with Yaoundé and yet not be greeted with contempt. In closing, I confessed that I had met people who confirmed the possibility of visitor-not-stranger – two Cameroonian visual artists Landry Mbassi, Em‟kal Eyongakpa, and the manageress of a motel in Douala. While they acknowledged our unfamiliarity, sometimes teasing us about it, yet every time they seemed to admit us as participants in a city we were scheduled to leave imminently.

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My last letter to V., written from Mamfe, Cameroon, as we headed back to Lagos was fragmented in imaginary notations. I was coming to the end of weeks of travelling, in which I had suspended convictions about safety, convenience, and solitude. There was, as a matter of fact, an extensive range of things to speculate and reflect upon, a feeling that enshrouds me to this day. In writing that final letter, I hoped to render in words my wonder at how my travel companions and myself had become as Cormac McCarthy described, each other‟s world entire. The dystopic experiences of a father and a son in McCarthy‟s novel, The Road, I wrote, was surprisingly the major comparison that seemed trite most times I thought about travelling with people with whom I shared a present, no past, and possibly no future, in a van that was in every sense a tunnel through which we reached towards artistic ideals – to travel by road from Lagos to Libreville making photographs and short films and writing reflections that questioned African modernity, the concept of borders, and art for social innovation. I was one with these people, sharing rooms, dinner, laughter, disgust, sharing every bit of myself. I asked V. if she understood how I could

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strip myself of everything except the consciousness that I was a member of a family for a limited period – because that was what I did. I expressed the hope that I was not being melancholic, speculating on fleeting togetherness; that instead I was highlighting the richness of forming temporary (maybe permanent) friendships, convinced by the value of collaborative energy, by the knowledge that African artists could achieve more by being more than themselves.

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Once in the van – the location eludes me – I remembered a quote she had emailed me, in the days when our affair was not at the brink of collapse, as it was during the period of my absence. I was thinking about wandering when I remembered the quote: “…a precious warning: don‟t forget that everything is not here…see the innumerable, listen to the untranslatable.”8

8 'La Venue a l'ecriture', in Helene Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon and Annie Leclerc, La Venue a l'ecriture (Paris: Union Gencrale d'Editions, Collection 10/18, 1977)

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It must have been at Aba, South-eastern Nigeria, after the first ten hours of the journey, that I began to fantasize about a nonexistent lover back home. Yet, I believe it was those imaginary letters to V. that helped me transcend our wander.

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Emmanuel Iduma was born in 1989, holds a degree in Law from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, and has been called to the Nigerian Bar. He is co-publisher of Saraba Magazine, editor of 3bute and content management supervisor of Invisible Borders. He works as a manager of creative projects in Lagos.