Issue 8: How Should We Document Our Reality?
In this letter, I ask questions about documenting our reality. What stories are we telling? What stories should we be telling?
‘Sad inverts the old person's head, what won't it do to a little boy?’
I should really write ‘Hey, I’m not writing to you this week’ when I can’t write. It’s irresponsible not to communicate, so here’s me apologising — no excuses needed. What says sorry more than a cute cat gif?
This past week, I read a book called Black Sunday, written by Tola Abraham Rotimi. The debut novel chronicles the coming-of-age of four siblings who were abandoned by their parents and left in the care of their grandmother after a series of financial misfortunes.
Starting in the late 90s, in a bid to navigate life and discover the world on their terms, they drift apart. By the mid 2000s, they're all so deeply troubled and flawed in one way. The driving emotion in the book is sadness. There’s little joy and excitement. The siblings move from trauma to trauma, from grief to grief. At some point, I ask myself, why are there so many sad stories? Is this a consequence of being Nigerian? Or is it universal?
It’s independence day today in Nigeria and I’m asking this same question: are Nigerian stories themed around sadness, grief and poverty more a reflection and documentation of our society and collective existence than mere fiction (or pandering to so and so gaze)? Are there more realities than these stories filled with 419, yahoo-yahoo, and poverty? Are we perhaps not even telling the stories of the systemic rot in the country enough? Is the predominant reality one in which we are all abused and killed by SARS, haunted by a President who uses policies and realities in other countries with better structures and systems to justify his own flawed thought processes and actions.
I randomly think about coming-of-age American movies where the focus is on trivial high school battles; think Mean Girls, Clueless, etc. Where’s our variation of that? This is not an intention to police anyone’s storytelling choices. If anything, it’s asking for more coming-of-age stories from the Nigerian perspective. We need more.
What makes the book rich for me is the author’s narrative switch in each chapter. She gives us the chance to experience the world through each sibling. The downside of this is that they all do not get the ending they deserve and a lot of times, the entire narrative doesn’t feel cohesive. The thing that I don’t like is it’s attempt to pack different social issues into it. That felt overwhelming and a bit tacked on.
Still, I’ll I recommend it. There’s honesty in the way it paints the stories of lower-middle class Nigeria, and the way it reimagines and documents Lagos of the early 2000s. We need to be documenting more.
Speaking of documenting, at various stages of my life, I’ve had different degrees of passion for documenting. I remember that as a teenager, I kept several journals (which I still have) where I basically recapped my day and spoke about how my life was shit — teenage drama. Recently, documenting has revolved around work: ensuring that every process is clearly outlined, that new projects are defined, that these are saved in files members of teams have access to. One big reason is transparency across board.
In my personal life, I document for memory sake (70-year-old brain and all), vanity and then posterity; I tend to take pictures and videos of everything, scribble notes in different places and these days (or years), tweet addictively about my life. Even when I’m sad. Which is why I understood (or saw nothing wrong) when Chrissy Teigen posted a picture of herself in grief. Summary of those thoughts here:
If I tie this back to my questions on the stories we tell, I think that there’s room for all kinds of stories and narratives, as long as they’re not harmful or detrimental to any group of people.
Not much else to say. This month, expect a deep dive into Girlfriends, my current sitcom obsession, an interview with Ignis Brothers on their new album, The Cost of Our Lives and some notes on what I learned from being the managing editor of Zikoko mag this past year — of which I’m no longer the managing editor, just an FYI. Let’s just say an entirely new and different journey just started and I’m super excited about it. More on this… eventually.
Have a lovely weekend.