A Prodigal Abroad

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

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As is the wont of everyone who writes – online or otherwise – there comes a time when the Why I Write question must be faced head on. I am as guilty as the next person in trying my hand at this most indulgent of navel gazing activities, previously trying my hand at answering this in the form of short prose as well as dodgy poetry . The company of those who have tried their hand at this is illustrious – George Orwell, Terry T Williams and Andrew Sullivan (albeit reinterpreted for the age of blogs). Implicit in the question is the notion that there is some value in writing, one that outweighs the time and energy expended in the act.

For me, writing is inextricably linked to long holiday assignments whilst growing up. Mum would share a paper cutting of some essay writing competition with me, and encourage me to try my hand at it. In those days before the internet came to the small town in the small state of Nigeria in which I grew up, the FM radio was the only form of distraction available, besides the five or six a side football games that went on in the various back yards in the city of red earth. To her mind, an essay writing competition was the best way to keep me occupied, and away from the kids next door she had no control over. Invariably, there would be a three month deadline to come up with 500 words on some topic, sponsored by one of the big Nigerian conglomerates – Unilever, Nestle or some other. Being of a literary bent herself – she allegedly missed a first by a fraction of a grade point whilst heavily pregnant with me – she brought her ideas of tight structured writing to my “work” in the form of brutal edits. That drive for non-flowery writing was driven in, year on year, as I went through various English composition courses over the course of my education. The first why for me therefore is one of discipline and structure.

Discovering blogs in the fall of 2008 and a particularly niche Nigerian section of it clarified the second why for me – the sense of camaraderie, community, and dare I say some burnishing of the ego that writing together can bring. Those were the days where an email address was all it took to sign up on Blogger.com, the gateway to an online commons of sorts. Google Reader, the OG feed aggregator, was a product of that time, ensuring that one could stay on top of updates from the myriads of blogs followed, as did blogrolls. These all came at a unique time for me, one in which having left full time employment I had just enough time to devote to living online. That particular community was as close to close-knit as could be, from the on-off work shenanigans of Alaye Baba and his work underlyings, through the arcane musings of Aloofa and Doug, as well as the keenly felt pain of London Buki. I owe my introduction to haiku to NDQ, and a deeper appreciation of free verse to a now lost blog. Those, and a whole slew of others (my old blog included), are now lost to link rot, perhaps the clearest indicator of how ephemeral those connections were, even at their strongest. It is no stretch of the imagination to assert that the today’s internet is much less cordial, except perhaps in those Substack/ Medium walled gardens which persist.

I like to think the third why is the most enduring of the lot for me – the ability to think aloud and interrogate a position with myself, be led down its meandering paths and arrive at a reasoned conclusion, one which often differs from the starting point.