Splendours Unknown

27thJanuary 2025

Dear M., 

These days, in the few minutes it takes me to fall asleep, flashes of the past return to me. The timeline varies. Sometimes, the past is a few yesterdays old, or younger. At other times, days revolve into years. More often than not, the past is shared. It is ours, as the futures we dream of are.

I am listening to Rema yearn through his chorus on Runaway, and you know what sliver of the past I am recalling. Our afternoons in Bodija. Singalongs to his earnest lyrics—an earnestness I doubt he can summon now. Monthly stops at the saloon for three or so hours. Mr. Solomon cutting your hair. Mr. Joseph handling my pedicure and manicure with such tenderness, I struggle to stay awake. Mr. Solomon waving me over when your cut is done. Cuts and hair treatments that reveal a different man—like that January afternoon when you dyed your hair blonde. Your turn to struggle with sleep. A short drive to our spot for pounded yam and vegetable soup—the one cooked just long enough for the shoko leaves to retain their crisp crunch—with goat meat so tender it vanishes before you can chew it. The soft haze that follows a good meal. Another set of winding conversations over calming bottles of tiger nut milk. Long drives for the sake of it. Visits to art galleries and dessert cafés and ice cream shops. Conversation after winding conversation. Dream after ambitious dream.

Many, and not enough, months passed like that. Our schedules changed. I completed my undergraduate thesis and prepared for my final exams. You settled even more into your homely apartment. I graduated from the University—as you had a little more than a year before—and prepared for my trip to Johannesburg for a three-month fellowship. You took on more freelance roles and started preparing your applications for foreign masters’ programs. Distance started its slow yawn. My phone habits—picking it up twice or thrice a day and ignoring it otherwise—worsened in the face of writing to polish, books to read, thoughts to flesh out, sights to see, workshops to attend, submissions to make, conversations to have and masters’ applications to prepare. The yawn widened, but we managed to travel the tightrope stretching across.

Whatever tightrope we walked then, there was more ahead. When my fellowship ended, I returned home for all of three busy weeks before I had to leave for NYSC camp, then my service year and legal internship, in Abuja. And so began my most demanding year yet. A year I managed to thrive in because of you. Because, amongst other respites, I had our calls. Because when the last of my eight applications fell through, I called you. Because I shared in your joy, then sorrow, when you got admission letters but were denied a visa. Because you remind me of our dreams even as we defer them. Because with you, I always laugh—with joy, in defiance of despair, in the plain face of failure. For that, I have thanked you, but not enough. O ṣeun, ọrẹ mi.

When I think of love, especially as that will to extend myself for the nurturing of my own or another’s growth [paraphrasing M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled], thoughts of you are not far behind. Of my long and growing list of qualities I admire in you, your deep and contagious laughter is a favourite. A laughter at the foundation of our every conversation. Humour and grace distilled into a lens for engaging with the world, for loving life’s plainest face and the silt of crumbled dear things [paraphrasing Ellen Bass’ The Thing Is]. A laughter I can tell anything to.

I told you in the September of that demanding year, that my friend, roommate and senior colleague died in a car accident. I did not tell you that my calls to his wife are painfully infrequent. 

I know the value of such calls lies in making them rather than what is said. I know it is important for these calls to remind her that she, and their three children, are not alone, even as every waking moment of her new husbandless life proves otherwise. Yet, my calls remain infrequent. When they happen, our conversations are stilted—as any conversation avoiding the corpse in the room will be. The first time I ever called her was on her birthday months before. She was pleased, as her husband said she would be. I sang and teased and gave my best wishes. She laughed then. I cannot bring myself to try to make her laugh now. Her husband—my friend, the reason I called and keep calling her—is dead. A simple, cruel fact that we can spend two or so minutes avoiding in that room, but cannot enter without acknowledging. 

I did not tell you that I felt cruel in my unperturbed productivity. At work, my tasks were churned out as before. My honed mind checking box after cold box of deliverables. But then again, you know I have hardly ever stopped for anything. Weeks after his death, I injured my left knee and sprained my ankle in a bike accident. In my natural prioritisation, I landed on my arm to protect my laptop bag. I dusted myself, checked my waistcoat for tears—there were none—adjusted my tie and limped away from the scene. My phone was thankfully intact and showed me that I would arrive at the Federal High Court early, as planned. The bike rider argued with and cursed the driver whose car had sent me flying some fifteen meters away from the motorcycle. I had survived the accident. That was all that mattered. 

Eventually, I paused, as everyone does. Even when I slept for four hours every forty-eight; in those four hours, I paused. The cruelty seeped into my dreams, where I relived every car ride I ever took with my friend. In those dream rides, we never survived. Collisions, explosions, wild swerves off courses led us to death. Together. But I survived those dreams. Multiple times on some nights. Each survival relieved and crushed me. Alone.

Perhaps this was on my mind that Thursday afternoon when I called you and begged you not to die. It is a strange promise to make, but you did. We spoke of other things as I walked from Wuse Zone 2 to Wuse Market to board an along back to work, where I would draft and review written addresses and motions until midnight. A passenger squeezed herself next to three men in the along’s backseat. I had to go; before the highway to Katampe extension chopped our conversation to windy bits. Before goodbye, you asked me to make you the same strange promise. And so I did. And so I do. I promise I will not die on you.

* * *

Another quality I admire in you is how different, yet at par, your loves are. From the beginning of our friendship, I knew it existed outside the prevalent love hierarchy. Within the prevalent imagination of that hierarchy, friendships occupy a lowly rung—some rungs below filial and many more below romantic. In that hierarchy, romance reigns supreme. Every dream and aspiration pales in pitiful comparison to that of an exclusive romantic partner—plus the promise of marriage some years down the line, two or so children and an idyllic ever after. In the absence of that hierarchy, our friendship, your many other friendships, family ties and romantic relationship all interact as circles in a Venn diagram. You remain at the centre, interacting with these intersecting spheres of love in the different capacities required of you. 

As I did with Maami and my sister a month to the time, we started to countdown the days until I returned home. I worked with a peculiar fervour in those final days, leaving nothing, from stones to files to correspondences, unturned. On the flight home, I read Emmanuel Iduma’s A Stranger’s Pose with a reclaimed relish. For the first time in that demanding year, my time with language was not furtive. I belonged entirely to those sentences. On the day humans began to codify the signs and their meanings … without the help of the diviners, they began … to trace the openings to the unknown … had interjected themselves between reality and dream. … One turns to the other in utter uncertainty and enquires: Tell me, am I alive?  I turned to literature. I was alive—without a legal thought on my mind.

The first place we went together, other than Maami’s party where we danced with startling abandon, was the Lekan Salami Stadium for a match between Shooting Stars and Kano Pillars. My enjoyment of football has always been vicarious. As a boy, I listened to my father speak of Stamford Bridge—like it was his home in a past, but clearly recalled, life—and swear by Didier Drogba—a striker so skilled that others would be blessed to have a strand of his straightened hair laced into their boots. His passion and my filial tie to him meant I sided with the Blues against any and every other colour. In me, he had a ready, laughing audience when he traded jabs with his avuncular friends. I agreed with him that Sir Alex was a cheat, the Gunners were only good at shooting themselves in the foot, Mourinho was special and the Premier League was the best in the world. 

When my brother developed his fine, technical and individual appreciation of the game, began his support of Manchester United and kept Sir Alex’s honour pristine, my position shifted to the fence. From this blissful middle, I watched season after season of fond yet fierce rivalry, clever, thin-veiled insults, defeated silences and triumphant yells. I leave this middle only when Christiano Ronaldo is concerned. On this, we all agree. There is no player my father and brother, you and I, find more astonishing.

Before you, I had met no other Liverpool fan. Even in the Gerrad era. I was drawn to this peculiarity. Beyond that, there are few people I know who watch and love the game like you do. Who speak the language of those iPads and sketches and play simulations and statistics I used to find so unnecessary in a game where victory and defeat are reduced to numbers on either side of a dash. The Shooting Stars game was perfect, then, to watch you in your element and experience professional football in a stadium while we anticipate live World Cup finals, shared moments in Anfield and Champions League matches in storied cities.

In quiet moments of the game, you caught me up on things. I fed fistfuls of popcorn into my mouth as I listened. You recounted the warped fears you felt during the complications of your girlfriend’s appendix surgery. I knew a more concise version of this fear. The one I had listened to during a midnight break, before resuming my desk to put final touches on documents due by dawn. In the full version, your tears and anxieties are unabridged. I listen to the worst-case scenarios you imagined and your prayers against the dark workings of your mind. 

After an impressive, but intercepted counter-attack by the away team, you told me of the transfer from her alma mater’s teaching hospital to UCH. Tears lined your eyes. There were calls to make and strings to pull. As you imagined, the standard at UCH made the difference. She regained consciousness in a matter of hours and you slept properly for the first time in weeks, with the narcotic relief of averted death. Your tears retreated, unshed. I imagined you silently reliving the nights when all you could do was watch the slow drip of intravenous fluids coursing their way into her unconscious, weight-shedding body. My left palm rubbed circles between your shoulders. Pele. The tense blades under your shirt relaxed. You nodded and leaned forward in your seat. 

An easy chance was missed and you joined the chorus of curses and boos. Questions were shouted at the erring player in Yoruba. Where was his head? Was he aiming to kill a bird with that stupid shot? Was he hungry? Did his mother drop him on his head as a child? Did he wish, desperately, to be unfortunate? You said the player—who had also missed a one-on-one in the first two minutes of the game—was due for a substitution. The coaching section of the spectators agreed with you and deliberated on who should take his place. 

I ran out of popcorn. You leaned back into a quiet moment. I listened. For the first time in years, you were at home for an extended time. Your mother, especially, was delighted. What used to be three December days at the most, was, at the time, a few weeks and counting. Like any forgotten skill, you relearned how to receive the specific pampering that comes with being at home. Your meals did not come with bills, thoughts of what the next one would be, what needed refrigerating, what the power supply had been like in the past week and what that meant for the quantity of food you could cook at once, or which ingredients you needed to buy and which ones you had enough of. There were no electrical units to budget for and no gas cylinders to refill. You learned to lean into this care again. In your mother’s house, you worked less and spent more time speaking with her and your siblings—especially your last-born brother, whose education and upkeep have largely been your responsibility. You laid out the financial implications of this responsibility—the private university education you want him to have and the millions you are preparing to offer in exchange for a fixed graduation date, one immune from the strikes and institutional neglects that snailed our progress.  

You leaned into the game. I leaned into our past.

When we were much younger and had just met as undergraduates, it was easier to think of our friendship as the organic product of unmotivated respect [as Toni Morrison defines love in Paradise]. And because I respect[ed] you, the hard work and creativity friendship requires came easily to me [paraphrasing Toni Morrison’s Love]. It was easy to take our friendship seriously—as you once put it. We would later learn that within a love hierarchy, that seriousness is the reserve of romance. In its absence, seriousness and the will to extend ourselves flowed to all spheres of our loves.

Despite an abundance of lessons, the years have only made us more serious. As we grew older, we learnt that we were offending some notion of how much of one’s supposedly finite love should be squandered on friends when there is a distant stranger that literature, media and lore demand we wait and yearn for. Only when this stranger arrives should we reveal ourselves, pour on them the full overwhelm of our pent-up passions and place them at the pinnacle of this hierarchy. It is a rather absurd notion, of course, but society is never lacking in absurd notions. 

One of our lessons came from your friend, who warned you to be careful around me. It was practical advice. She did not want you to be in what you think is a friendship, with someone who clearly wants more from you. Her advice annoyed you and you let her know in a way that silenced the subject for years. When she brought it up again, sometime last year, as a joke, you did not reward it with as much as a chuckle. I laughed both times you told me, finding it all rather amusing.

On the face of it, the issue with her advice was her misreading of me as queer. You were annoyed by this because the hypocrisy of it sickened you. You did not expect your friend—who talked often about the dangers of toxic masculinity and the datedness of men performing a lack of tenderness and vulnerability in the name of strength—to also be the one who adjudged a man to be queer for trying to treat his friend with a fraction of that tenderness. It was an interesting double standard to apply and a good reason to have been upset. To that extent, I agreed with you, even as I laughed.

Beyond the face of it, there was another issue, one rooted in a prevalent human need to label people and the lack of imagination with which we often do. My misreading as queer did not start or end with her. It happens a handful of times every year and I find it quite interesting each time. Think of it as meeting people who keep sorting you into the wrong ethnic group. The question of interest then becomes, why do they think I am Ijaw, for instance? And why are the Ijaw-like attributes they observe in me incompatible with their conceptions of a Yoruba man? This is an imperfect comparison, of course, and the stakes of these questions are much lower. Yet, the same fault line runs through both misreadings. The trouble with sorting people is that it hates the private [to paraphrase Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion]. Categories like Ijaw and Queer and Heterosexual thrive on a broadness that contrasts human nuances. Although those categories have their utilities, once you take a closer look, the line between them often starts to blur. 

On the days I ask after a misreading, people have told me they drew their conclusion from my: taste in music, fashion choices, near-anal fastidiousness, jewellery, emotional bandwidth, unabashed declarations of admiration and or love for my male friends, the number and ease of my friendships with women, appreciation of art, appreciation of fashion, the way I speak over the phone as if to charm or woo, the poems I have dedicated to you—perhaps the beginning / of our friendship, like that of a dream, cannot be recalled—and an aggregation of what my friend S. calls my metrosexual tastes. All nuances that show up as I move through the world, simply living.

The lack of imagination is two-fold. First, there is the failure to imagine that a heterosexual man, secure in his masculinity, could possess or exhibit those nuances. My interest in this failure is limited. The other failure has to do with love—the failure to imagine, across the genders, sexes and sexualities, that two people can be sincerely and unreservedly affectionate towards each other without any romantic aspirations or undertones. Because romance reigns supreme in the prevalent imagination, our finest acts of love—revealed in the elements bell hooks identifies as trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge and responsibility—are misread as the reserves of romance. But we know, from experience and hooks, that there is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. Yet, within the limited romantic imagination, it becomes difficult to conceive of unmotivated respect or friendships like ours where a love ethic is practised. Within this limited imagination, everyone loses. Whether they are both male, female, queer, or heterosexual; or one is male, female, or queer and the other is female, male or heterosexual; any two humans would be subject to this lack of imagination once the love between them transcends what is otherwise reserved for romantic love. I find that failure greater and more interesting.

As with every act of normative resistance, it is tempting to think and act inversely. The prevalent imagination—what Elizabeth Brake calls Amatonormativity—devalues friendships and other caring relationships with its assumption that a central, exclusive, amorous relationship is a universally shared goal for humans, and that such a relationship is normative and should be aimed at in preference to other relationship types. The ready inverse would be to devalue romantic relationships—and the [monogamous] marriages they often aspire towards—and ensure that friendships reign supreme. It is this trap I sense Mariama Bâ sliding into in So Long A Letter, when she goes beyond saying friendship has splendours that love knows not to saying that Aissatou has often proved […] the superiority of friendship over love.

I admire the kind of friend you are to me, and I love you for it. But my love has no craving for supremacy. The supremacy of a form of love over others limits those who love to the rungs of hierarchy. hooks warns that committed [romantic] relationships are far more likely to become co-dependent when we cut off all our ties with friends to give these bonds we consider primary our exclusive attention. Morrison’s Song of Solomon offers a similar warning through Hagar, who had no self left, no fears, no wants, no intelligence that was her own outside her failed romantic relationship. Friendships and filial ties are not immune to the corruption of supremacy. The corruption lies in the supremacy itself and its isolating claim to exclusivity, which cannot be divorced from conceptions of power and hierarchies. While hierarchies and their will to power have their utilities, they are incompatible with love [paraphrasing hooks and Carl Jung]. Every form of love, at its best, has splendours that the others know nothing about. Your mother knows splendours of your love that I cannot conceive, as does your girlfriend and brother and other friends, and vice versa. But this is a valid claim to difference, not supremacy. These differences form the non-intersecting spheres of one’s love circles, not rungs on a ladder leading nowhere.

I say all this to emphasise my gratitude for our friendship and the place you have given it. A recent conversation we had about marriage and childbearing deepened this gratitude. Marriage has been coming up more and more in our conversations. A sign of the season we are in. Our friends and peers are getting married like there is some undisclosed deadline. Some have had their first child. Others are engaged. Timelines are being set. Non-negotiables are being identified and the partners who cannot reach a compromise have parted ways. Our mothers & aunties have started their nudging whispers. Whispers that are louder and more insistent for our female friends. New romantic relationships are basking in the warm light of their honeymoon phases. It is all interesting to witness. 

In our conversation, you mentioned the non-negotiables your girlfriend satisfies and how palpable this makes the future you are planning for yourselves. A silent while later, I imagined aloud a married, then fatherly version of you. The first, you welcomed with a smile. For the second, you burst out laughing, begging me not to tempt the fates and put you in trouble. So, naturally, I added even more flesh to our mental images of you as a father—parenting style, communication style, preferred extra-curricular activities for the children, love modelling via relationship with their mother, preferred family environment, approach to Yoruba socialisation and other cultural osmoses. I loved how this imagined version of you kept making space for me, despite the many things calling for your imagined attention. Whether you were a graduate student, groom, dreamer, husband, father, lover, son and/or brother, you were always my friend. 

When we had envisioned and laughed fondly at this heartwarming version of you, you started to flesh out my portrait as an uncle with the same mischief I extended to you. You assigned me so many school runs and summer vacation visits, that I had to remind you I decided to be childfree for a reason and these were your hypothetical children. Your laughing head tilted back into the headrest. I was breathless with laughter and struggled to keep my eyes on the highway we drove on. My mind skipped back to the different timelines our friends are adopting in their relationships, and I added that my choice with childbearing means I have a bit more time. My hypothetical partner’s biological clock is, after all, out of the question. With leftover laughter widening your mouth, you repeated what you had impressed on me, weeks ago at the Shooting Stars game. You are right, there is no rush. But, if you want a relationship at some point, you need practice. That’s what dating is for. Your only relationship ended five years ago. It’s been a while. You have the tools, but you need practice. 

I nodded, then chuckled, wondering where all the time went. Perhaps I spent it learning how to be solitary. Perhaps I have gotten too good at it. Perhaps. Regardless, I promised you I would think about it. I hope you can tell that I have been. Whatever I decide, you will bear witness to. One of these days, a new circle just might grow next to yours. 

See you on Friday.

Yours,

Ọbáfẹ́mi