By Dike Chukwumerije
Continuing on this London theme, you see? I have many, many pictures from my sojourn there. But you see this picture? Yes. It is one of my favourite ones. I was by the Thames, you see? It was summer, wearing my favourite short knicker in the world, newly married, with my new wife behind the camera, AND ice cream on top? Choi. What else is one looking for in this life? Honestly, I felt a joy – a thrill, an exhilaration, an enjoyment – in the moment that was very, very primitive. It is instinctive, you know? When an experience hits you in your medulla oblangata, it brings out the inner child. No filters. No airs. No forming. That is why in the picture it looks as if it what is in my mouth is ukwuoru (aka, corn – roasted or boiled) and not, in fact, ice cream. Yes. It is because I was captured as I truly am (no ‘innit’, no ‘mate’), just a Nigerian – very, very comfortable in his own skin – in London.
Like the day in Enugu, driving back to Agbani as Law students – and my colleague still teases me about it till today – how I broke off in the middle of a deep conversation on, ehm, Criminal Procedure, to swerve violently to the side of the road and screech to a halt, only so I would not miss the opportunity of buying okpa. Yes. She said that that was the day she knew – from the way I exclaimed ‘Choi! Lekwa okpa!’ – that I was truly Igbo. No matter. The members of my cast and crew say the same today. That when we are travelling by road, I will not stop to piss, or take picture, or stretch leg. No. Never. How? What for? That the only time you will ever hear me shout ‘Driver, stop!’ is when somebody is standing by the road with boiled groundnut. Yes o! They swear that eating that thing with a bottle of cold water is my pre-performance juju.
It is not. Only that the feeling it evokes – like the memories of sitting down on the fence outside Boys Hostel to watch men play 5-a-side as the sun sets behind the hills of Gwags – is difficult to explain. You have to have grown up with these things, with Patty Obasi on repeat on long drives, with bread and egg at midnight at the table of mai shayi. Yes. You have to have grown up with these things, with the palpable excitement dodo causes wafting over a school fence after classes, with the sun and the sweat, and the games we played at the approach of African thunder storms. True! You have to have grown up with these things to really understand how hearing a certain song, or sighting a certain snack, or feeling the sun strike your face in a certain way on a certain day – no matter where you are – can immediately scatter your jerry. And have you manifesting. Show you up for who you really are. That beneath all that ‘watta gwan, blood?’, ‘yo men, yo men’, that you have to use to perambulate abroad – you are still one of us. Na be so? Ever ready to answer the question ‘How body?’ as only a Nigerian would. Na so.
Yes, if you get me, then come Saturday 26th March, 2022, fall out. Because this show na for we, we. True! Shakespeare will not understand this poetry, but Okoro-Feeling-Funky will. Na so!
The Made In Nigeria Poetry Show
Date: Sat. 26 Mar 2022
Venue: Banquet Hall, Owerri Hotel Plaza
Time: 4pm
Tickets: N2k regular, N1k students/youth corpers with ID/anyone with a PVC
First 70 students/youth corpers with ID enter free! Courtesy of individual donors.
