Writing through the night

You are charged with writing around 1000 words a week, on a topic of your choice. You prefer to focus on arts and culture, as that is your specialty, and there are any number of things to write about: books, films, long walks in an American park where you find a rare four-leaf clover, which […]

You are charged with writing around 1000 words a week, on a topic of your choice. You prefer to focus on arts and culture, as that is your specialty, and there are any number of things to write about: books, films, long walks in an American park where you find a rare four-leaf clover, which your Irish ancestors thought was a sign of good luck—and which, you admit, as educated as you are, you think too. You are done with a PhD that took years too long to complete, and you are happy, but you feel, sometimes, that you shouldn’t be, with everything that is happening back in Nigeria. You sit on the banks of an American lake and read the Psalms and feel peaceful. You are in America now, where the things people get upset about and write long ranting articles about are often, in the big scheme of things, not that big of a deal. There are many injustices in America, to be sure, plenty of issues we need to deal with, but you are afraid that if you wrote about them for a Nigerian audience, people would roll their eyes—Americans are so self-absorbed. They talk as if they are the only people on earth.
In Nigeria the bodies pile up. Bombs. Militant strikes. Women and children kidnapped and held. Churches attacked. Mosques attacked. You have heard the word genocide used. You have heard the word ethnic cleansing used. The people of Chibok appeal to the UN to intervene. In Imo State, there are discussions of issuing ID cards to “northern indigenes.” You think of the ID cards issued to Jews before the Holocaust. Of the passes issued in apartheid South Africa, where most people were not allowed to travel outside of what the government termed their “Homeland.” Of how Rwandan ID cards, which specified ethnicity, led to genocide. These are things one should learn from history. But how do you learn history, when history has been removed from the school curriculum, when schools around the country are underfunded, and in the northeast closed down all together, where you might get killed or kidnapped for trying to learn? You fear for the country—every part of it. 2015 elections loom. Politicians play politics with bodies. The last matches of the world cup are on, and your friends on Twitter cheer for Brazil, which seems to be taking quite the thrashing from Germany. Every once in a while someone posts #BringBackOurGirls.
The day before your deadline, you spend the day gorging on social media, reading articles about Nigeria so that you will be relevant. You pick up a hard-backed academic book of philosophy on the problem of evil, and you put it back down. You think about how when you were twelve and you first read of the German Holocaust, you swore you would never be silent in the face of evil. Now, you face your own cowardice. You want to write about what is happening in the northeast, you want to say hard true things, but you are afraid of what will happen if you choose the wrong words.
You click on an article listing the 10 worst things to say to a friend who is suffering. Your mind freezes up. You go back to a draft of a book review you wrote over the weekend of Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies. But what you have written does not say the things you want to say. There are parallels to be drawn between the 16th century England in the world of the novel and Nigeria today, the vain and calculating royal court so separate from the concerns of royal people that is so like contemporary politics, of people, then as now, at risk of death for holding the “wrong” religious beliefs. But you have not written these parallels. What you wrote over the weekend is a plot summary. It is not relevant. All the connections you want to make remain locked in your head. You go to YouTube and watch several hours of the TV show The Tudors that someone has chopped up and edited back together to tell the individual stories of each character: the passionate Anne Boleyn for whom King Henry VIII overthrew the church to marry, the stern princess Mary neglected by her father, whose only comfort is the Catholic church he has abandoned. The story of each queen awaits. You could stay up all night following each thread. The TV series is relevant to the novels you are trying to write about, and indeed you think that you could write an article about how many different plot-lines can come from a single moment in history, but you need time to develop that idea. You know that tonight you are really just wasting time.
It is late. Half-packed boxes are piled up in your tiny flat, as the end of your lease approaches. You lie down on your two-seater couch that is too short to stretch out on. You are afraid that if you move to your bed you will sleep too long. You wake. You add words to the screen. Your space bar sticks so that your words all run together. You doze. You wake again at 2am and brush your teeth and lie down again still in your clothes. The lights stay on all night. You know that if you were in Nigeria, you would not have the privilege of doing this—if the power went off, your battery would run out and your screen would go dark, instead of sitting there all night long infernally blinking at you. This has become a dreaded routine—at least one night a week on the couch that is too short, your feet dangling over the arms, the light in your eyes, a fitful sleep as your brain asks you, oh what to write, what to write.
At 5am, you take a shower. You cannot write about 16th-century Tudors this week—not when people are displaced and dying—not when all you have is plot summary. Words fill your mind, but they are not the right ones. You lie down, you sit up. You wake your computer and start to type.

Word creep across the screen.
You think of Psalm 6, where the poet writes “I am worn out from groaning; all night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears.” You decide to add the Psalm that you read this weekend on the banks of the lake, because maybe despite your own wordlessness, this ancient poem will comfort someone, as it did you. Perhaps this is the best way to end:
Psalm 46

God is our refuge and strength,
An ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
And the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
Though its waters roar and foam
And the mountains quake with their surging.

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
The holy place where the Most High dwells.
God is within her, she will not fall;
God will help her at break of day.
Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall;
He lifts his voice, the earth melts.

The Lord Almighty is with us;
The God of Jacob is our fortress.
Come and see the works of the Lord,
The desolations he has brought on the earth.
He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth;
He breaks the bow and shatters the spear,
He burns the shields with fire.
‘Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.’

The Lord Almighty is with us;
The God of Jacob is our fortress.”
—
Alhamdu lillah