Hunger and Poetry

Over the rustic distances, between my self-doubt and the lost manuscripts; the Symean Years as I call them, I lugged from places to people. The stretch of a decade and a half, in which I sulked for lacking so greatly in the resources I needed to satiate basic needs. I often stop by the windows of a few friends to ask for money with which I could buy bread, not books, even though I had a hunger for both. I wasn’t as young as someone who couldn’t work for his own bread. I did spend hours on jobs, from the menial to the crass, tagged with pays not enough, most times, to feed an ant.

              I can’t remember, exactly, how old I was at the time, though I realized earlier that I was the favorite son of Alice, a single mother who lived by fishing alone, having memorized the art of the creeks made visible by the sea she had known. And the men who loved her would row a hundred nautical miles to buy from her. Not because they wanted her as men do want women. But because they felt pity for her.

          That pity still shudders in my bones whenever I think of how much she suffered in raising a family with a man whose absence became for her a kind of hope; he had just been admitted into a Nigerian University in the Northern part. A rare feat and he couldn’t possibly promise a lesser future. Fifteen years or more into his rather bright quest for a degree in sociology as I learnt, skinny, in front of our small shack facing the river, with the sun turning the evening into orange, the sky dimming its white and blue clouds in alignment, I murmured, quite demurely, “mum, I want to become a writer when I grow up.” She looked at me through the blur of her own pairs of sea-brown eyes blankly, yet gabby. A hundred questions spooling off her tired lips, illustrating what she didn’t know in series of brilliant gestures. One still traipses down the unpaved lane of my Syma memories. She held up an imaginary pen between the wrinkles on her thumbs and slowly, yet frantically, with grit, scribbled invisible words on the sweet evening breeze, to say it the best way she could. It reminded me of the year she dropped out of school, because she was pregnant with her third child. I was that third child that made her sponsor, my uncle, question her cognitive bends.

                 Yes, a writer, I nodded to the spectacle she made with her thumbs and the evening breeze; someone who holds a pen down on paper and thinks the best thing to do with it is to change the world from what it is to what it should be. Perhaps, one who sells confessions bound in books for a living. She smiled an ordinary smile, the import of which was not completely clear. Perhaps, it was the euphemistic attempt to indicate I was into the mystical hovering over my own head. I have had books read, listened to my teachers talk about Chinua Achebe. I also knew what poetry was, and I had put a cluster of letters or more together, in a way that I now describe as wobblers, and had called them lines of poem. It amazed me that I could, in spite of the dramatic in-and- out- of-school experiences I had, attempt such noble acts. In spite of the duty to be with my mother and help in the absence of a father. I almost couldn’t falter in the story in the years that followed.

              Around 2015, the dreams that I had arrived from wherever they had been, as I sat on the front porch of the little apartment I had rented. After my graduation from the University of Benin, I had successfully, with the mercy of someone- I- know -who- knows- someone, dumped myself into the white-collar bin as an Education officer with the Delta State government. I was outdoors at the early dew-laden hours of the morning of a certain notorious Monday, preparing to be a stay-at-home as directed by the head of the office. This meant that I had to be at home to face the hunger cries of the baby I had brought into this world. I had nothing as much as the mother. Barely six months into the job, my newfound joy, rumors started littering the state civil service that salaries would be delayed to bolster the government's retrenchment move. It was a gambit. Thousands of workers were already relieved of their jobs before the public announcement. We, myself and my co-workers, had been walking to work on a rope that we knew would snap, or had snapped and we didn’t know.  It was on that porch, with the cold morning breeze, forebodingly icing the whole of my being that I heard clearly the sound from a faraway Lucille Clifton: I made it up, here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand: come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed. My survival instincts bloomed suddenly. I couldn’t forget how death had wanted me many times and couldn’t have me for once. I knew I wasn’t built to break. Life wouldn’t let me live; death wouldn’t let me die. I have trotted out to get to the brink of each and returned to where I had begun the journey.

                I sat there and brooded the clouds open to let the sun touch the first flowers of the day, seen in sets of pink, purple and white. It hung like a tulip unfurling its morning blessings with such serenity I never had since the day my salaries became a plaything for the government’s sadistic thumb. Lifting one strained foot after another, with much clumsiness, I went inside, in search of my phone. Where I stood, before the wardrobe, I turned back tearfully and stared at the small gift that was my daughter, and saw, for the first time, the path I thought I should be walking on. With trembling hands, I reached out to my phone, unlocked it and started reading the manuscripts of poetry I had written, holed up in a folder for a long time. More years than ten I can remember. I opened up my Gmail account and sent a few of them to different publishers. I had said to myself weeks before, that if this hope of getting published do not save me from perishing along with my daughter, nothing will. I waited, for Godot, patiently, looking forward to receiving a response from at least one of the five publishers who had acknowledged receipt of the manuscripts.

              Days turned into months, months into years, years into defeatism, defeatism broke its pod and I grew yet again into a shining seed of hope. Lenrie Peters, at that moment, walked stealthily into my mind: hope is not a grain of sand. Though I had waited for a lifetime, I couldn’t resist the temptation my hunger brought. I had returned home late in the night to the feeble fists of my daughter. She lay awake in her innocent frenzy at that time of the day. Her eyes glistened with tears as she cried, unable to keep her fingers away from her little but beautiful mouth. Tremor: incapability is a form of dying. I swore to have my phone sold by morning. I had called a friend to call a friend who needed a phone. One met me at my place and we agreed that I can have my phone back as soon as I returned the money in exchange for the phone. He took everything I had: photographs and memories, poems, short stories, essays and all the things I have written in years. Momentarily, I regretted I didn’t place my daughter above my dreams, and that ordinate desire to be called a poet and author.

               Time passed, with thoughts of losing my dreams, I brazenly took up a job at a new building to lay bricks as a helper. I got paid after weeks of grueling labor. I ran excitedly to take back my phone. I met him in a bar drinking Vodka in a transparent glass cup. Without being unnecessarily hesitant, too bold for what has befallen me, some misfortune he will never know even after death, he told the story of how, on their way to attend a funeral party, the phone slipped off the long and well painted fingers of his girlfriend and fell into the river Forcados. Instantly, I grew roots deep under the chair where I sat, fixated, listening to how he had buried my dreams alive. I had no thought of saving my passwords, or memorizing them. I had said to myself, again and again, that I cannot afford to lose a phone, at least, not in this life. When I finally got home, I sat on the same spot where the idea, like Isaac Newton’s apple from a thousand years, fell on me. Where gravity became its opposite. Not everything that goes around, comes around. It was just me and my stubborn stoicism which mellowed into a giggle and a whisper that came in the form of a mock-courage: Nigerian poet; where are you headed, if not self-destruct?  My phone was gone, so was my dream.  Some humbling, quite revealing months later, using a friend’s phone, I received the most agonizing message from one of the notable publishers. Dear Tares, he wrote, Congratulations. After careful consideration of your work by the editorial team, we have decided to accept your manuscript for publication. Attached is the quotation. Please do revert. All the best. I opened the quotation hurriedly and read it in the way my heart kept skipping its beats. Right there where I sat by the mattress, I knew I will never be a poet. I needed about a million naira to be an author, and half a million to transport myself from one bookstore to another, becoming guest in several literary events to be able to feed my daughter with the sales of a book.  I received yet another in a few days, which posed the question: do you do prose, Nigerians are hungry and dying, we don’t read poetry. At the back of my heart, Stevie Smith wouldn’t stop screaming his lines at me: I was much too far out all my life and not waving but drowning.

               Although the African Poetry Book Fund has stepped in to fill what has been missing, its tendency to move away from its center, pulsate strongly. Every poet's dream here in Nigeria, particularly, arcs into the American dream, and I, too, am guilty of it, loud in Ocean Vuong's lines: Tell me it was for the hunger and nothing else. For hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep. I, too, sooner than later, will leave with my poetry when it tells me to leave the country which cannot keep it.

Tares Oburumu is a poet, essayist, editor and playwright. He’s the winner of the Sillerman first book prize for African poets, 2022. His works have appeared in Connotation Press, Dawn Review, Icefloes International journal, Woven Tales Press, Juke, Agonist, Bluepepper, Loch Raven Review, and others.