RUST

Prologue

Ibadan,

running splash of rust

and gold-flung and scattered

among seven hills like broken

china in the sun.

— JP Clark, “Ibadan”

Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha

An endless breath.

French Southern and Antarctic Lands

When back, they asked me why I stayed at the main gate while they went inside to get the weed. I said: Common sense. Just felt appropriate. They weren't satisfied. They repeated the question. I, too, repeated the answer. Common sense. Just felt appropriate. Then they said some people would have followed them inside. To this, I asked if appropriateness and, by extension, morality, was objective. They answered in the negative, offering that it was not but could be. I anticipated that.

Just a while before this, I had mentioned this concept of inverted hatred. People who hate others only hate themselves. They agreed. Then I playfully set up a challenge to anyone who could prove that humans who hate other humans do not, for being humans, hate themselves.

Shortly after this, I told them I don't consider scapegoating as well as human sacrifice moral. They in turn asked if I thought martyrdom was moral. I didn't think so.

Just a while before or after this, they asked, rhetorically, if something could be a crime when there wasn't a victim.

The light rain had stopped for a little while now. Rained breezy and soft, the night wet with its touch.

Later in the morning at their place, while prepping to leave, they asked if we got to do this again. 

Azores

Of the young man, only the white of his eyes, of his gap-toothed smile, of his undervest, are clearly seen. Himself, his hat, his outer shirt, are dark, a mere shade lighter than the darker background. This is Kerry James Marshall's A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980). This man is invisibilized. He's reduced to his skin color. Like a piece of ice in a glass of wine, his individual dissolves into the expectations of the outsider. He becomes in the public eye a shadow. He becomes a black nothingness. He becomes a stereotype. He becomes a caricature. He becomes a cartoon. He becomes a mask. He becomes a black face. He becomes the devil. He becomes a minstrel. He becomes a monster. He becomes anything but himself.

Canary Islands

Distance is measured in currency. For a kẹ̀kẹ́, a place can be as far as a hundred naira or one hundred fifty. For a Micra, it can be as far as hundred, one-fifty or two hundred. The eighteen-passenger bus measures slowly and generously. Far places could be a hundred. For a bike, places could be from a hundred to a thousand. For the new government Omituntun luxurious buses, anywhere and everywhere could be a hundred while extremely far distance is covered for two hundred.

Over the phone, I told someone Iwo Road is just a hundred naira from where I am.

The ride brand we boarded to Mọ́níyà is Bolt. Before we ordered the ride, at Paris Bakery, Ring Road, my friend and I were asked, by these people we just met, if we had the Bolt app on our phones. We didn't. Something was done, and the ride arrived. The driver didn't measure distance in currency. The driver measured currency in distance. The driver canceled the trip and stuffed the charge in the compartment glove. With a white face towel, the driver wiped some beads of sweat, said thank you to us, heard our thank you, and melted away like a holy spirit.

The city is a splash of distance.

Cuetta

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paints dark-skinned people from her head. No model. No sitter. Just handsome humans pulled out of her mind. Most or all are Black. But some have features, hair, for example, that could belong to any person of any race. Their simple outfits are “timeless.” They aren't indicative of any period of time. They're merely blocks of rich colors covering their wearers' nakedness. These folks don't wear shoes. Those stuff contain too much historicity and could easily reference a time. They are often outdoors so as to exclude furniture, which could be indicative of: class, taste, time, place, group. They aren't tied down to referential details so they could become free and autonomous. Such freedom is power. Such freedom is a power to be: whatever, whichever, whoever, whomever, whosever, however, whenever, wherever, forever. Untethered to specifics, these people inhabit a life of their own. They aren't a dash of politics. They aren't a collage of expectations. They are humans.

Madeira

On the left of me, if I'm standing on the veranda, facing Oxygen Fitness Gym, is a stretch of modern fare: Domino’s, Cold Stone, FoodCo, bitemore, TASTEASTLAS. The city isn't a city of rust. The city is a city of rust and Bolt and Àmàlà and Zen food and open places and pepper soup and heat and music and Desperados and Esse Change and litters and dirt and mud and bridges and estates and history and waste and weed and markets and schools and house parties and freshly-minted stars and impatient sellers and cursing Micras and, and, and. The city is opaque. The city is endless. The city is itself.

Mayotte

The city wears you over its face like a balaclava. All faces become yours. I see you everywhere: the model on the Elle & Elle signpost, the person in the front seat of a moving car before Oxygen Fitness Gym, the free spirit at ...CONTINUUM... Arts Festival. I won't be able to contain my shame when I meet you. 

Melilla

In Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant maintains all what make us us cannot be fully grasped. For him definitions and translations often overlook the aspects of self that are difficult to understand. Insistent defining, translating, is simplifying, reducing, othering. Different persons, people, culture, should be allowed to remain different, difficult, complex. Different but not othered. Different but part of our whole. Trying to simplify them is trying to dissolve them into stereotypes. Trying to translate them is trying to reduce them. In their wholeness they are complex. In the complexity they are whole. Glissant thus calls for the right to opacity for every person, every people. Any person, any people, does not, do not, have to be transparent. They could remain opaque. They have the right to be opaque. They shouldn't be reduced to labels. “We clamour for the right to opacity for everyone.”

Pelagie Islands

At Spices, University of Ibadan, this person wanted to know why this city. Why not Ifẹ̀, where I schooled, and have stayed for a decade? I told them the city could contain me. Clearly, I wasn't talking about the size of the city, the biggest by land mass in the country and fourth, by the same, on the continent. Then I told them that, if Obafemi Awolowo University is taken out of Ifẹ̀, the city becomes an empty sack. They said I shouldn't let the indigenes hear me. We both laughed. Our laughter poured into laughter and chatter, dissolving into the smoke-filled evening. We were many around our two tables, and the music from the speaker was a bit loud. Then I said I didn't mean it like that. After all Ilé-Ifẹ̀ is the cradle of the Yorùbá. But I didn't tell them that. I didn't tell them, too, that, for me, a life off that campus is off. But this city is a hologram of space. I can float without bounds.

Plaza de soberanía

Fluidity.

When I finished school in July, I went home. When I left home, I came here. When I left, I wasn't going back. I am here, finding life.

Standing on the veranda in the evening, the part of the city before me becomes a grey of pointed yellow and white lights, more yellow, less white. They all are like newly-minted stars hanging freely in a dusk of breeze.

Gaza is burning. So is Sudan. So is IG. Stories and reels so real.

Somewhere in the universe, in the museum of lovely things, life rearranges itself into flying little things, covering the night sky, floating into the future, like paper planes. 

I lost my fear and confidence at once.

Sharing a cig and talking at New Culture Studio: How old am I? Borrowing a lighter, same place, different time: How old am I? At Spices: How old am I? On IG voice call: Where do I stay? At Orí Òkè, Mọ́kọ́lá: What do I do? At the house party, but didn't wait for a reply: Who I be? At Staff Club: Are you a UI student? All these are boring. I want someone to ask me who I am and wait for a response.

I am full of shame.

The child of the founder of The Waste Museum said the founder says it is not a waste until we call it a waste.

Sometimes I need to be freed from my freedom.

I, me, my, mine, myself.

Many days after we first met they told me they asked me who I was, and I answered. I can't recall.

Reunion

Marshall, Yiadom-Boakye, Glissant: I can't unsee a link. The smiling artist as the shadow of his former self is people insisting on translating someone else. With their labels and tags and fantasies, they strip the artist of his selfhood, reducing him to a shadow, a black nothingness. The Black figures who people Yiadom-Boakye’s canvasses insist on being who they are: humans. The painter has refused to bracket them within: a politics, a time, a class, a place, a taste, a group. They simply exist. This freedom affords them the power to: be, being, being-ing. They retain their right to being opaque.

Socotra Archipelago

That night I spent at theirs, they had said, as we walked out of UI, that you don't have to come out to anybody if you don't want to. Who are you closeted to? Are you closeted to yourself? Nobody but you have to know about you. When they said this about being closeted, I thought about Glissant's opacity. But I didn't mention it. The right to remain closeted is the right to privacy. Later when we mentioned the similarity between this right to privacy and the right to opacity on IG, they mentioned the person who told them the former.

Epilogue

it’s not size but surge that tells us

when we’re in touch with something real

— Mary Oliver, “Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard"

‍