adasofunjo

[adasofunjo]

5. Possessor

The English word “Lover” is ultimately useless. It is too vague, inaffective, carries no weight, a sore wound on the tongue. In choosing such a word, the Yorùbás—understanding that it was a matter of life and death—approached the topic with more trepidity. They understood that there was no Love without contest. That there would be wars—against yourself, against other people, against the one you claimed to love. That you would have to defeat distance, time, age, restlessness. That there was no love without light and darkness, hope and despair, faith and fear, chains and freedom. That only an image emerging peerless after these fires deserved such an appellation.

And what word would do such an image justice? Certainly, nothing as useless as “Lover."

Consider instead the Yorùbá word for "Lover"—Olólùfẹ́: "the possessor of one's supreme love”. I want you to know that you are, after my battle is done, the only flame that endures.

[adasofunjo]

4. Traveling While in Love

I carried all my books with me. First went in Okigbo’s Labyrinths, because he was the genesis. Next, beside it, I placed, with all the care in the world, Owuor’s Dust—the woman wrote a timeless Kenya, empathy oozing from every word. And of course, Berger’s Here is Where We Meet—that torchbearer of a man without whom there is no light.

Book after book.

Adichie’s Half of A Yellow Sun. I searched in vain for all my Lispector books and found just two. Then, Taban Lo Liyong. Arthur Nortje. T’chicaya U Tamsi. Poems of Black Africa. Where did I leave Tade’s The Sahara Testament?

Book after book.

Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map A Way to Zion. Nazim Hikmet. Soyinka’s Idanre and Other Poems. Soyinka’s Samarkand and Other Markets I have Known. Mia Couto and Kafka. Love in the Time of Cholera. Cole, Gide, Mabanckou. Addresses in a Highland Chapel. Roy, Ekwensi, Bessie Head. Salter. Salter again. Ondatjee, Emecheta. Aribisala and Thoreau. Glissant whose boat was open.

Book after book.

I arrived at the airport holding Muller’s The Passport. The flight attendant, after she had eyed my bag, said that it weighed more than I’d paid for. But all I could think about was you at the other end of the ocean, weighing more than I deserve.

[adasofunjo]

3. El Gato Negro

I remember.

A small day on the Spanish countryside, a bus ride at the edge of the cliffs. You hated the turns, the towns—Coín, Ojén, Monda—cheap and littered with dog shit, sunlight filtering behind the mountains. The mornings were hot, the days gliding always ahead of us.

Surely I remember—

The hurrying radio and its flamenco, the walk between the broken houses before the townsquare, the locked gate of the perverse old man before the hills, the fights, the dance we never had, the fans twirling through the night, the lovebites—oh yes, the lovebites, the cats atop the closed bar, the shape of your lips when you say El Gato Negro: love is when you call me a name that only you know.

[adasofunjo]

2. Dennis Brutus Had A Lamp

Dennis Brutus had a lamp of love. One night he came to a crossroad. Confused, he lifted his lamp and saw, on his lover's face, the path that he should take. Come with me darling, lovemaking is mapmaking.

[adasofunjo]

1. Devotion

I can recount devotion from the footsteps of dancers. Arápáregángan. Arẹ́sẹ̀jábàtà. Adáraníjó. Look how many words it takes to translate their inimitable steps—these worthy dancers. However, what does not need translation is what it means when, suddenly, in the middle of the night, you awake with fingers groping to check if I am still beside you.