Author: jyeku

As of the second week of November in 2023, there was only one YouTube comment on a talk, “Brymo, Cultural Neo Traditionalism and Postcolonial Aesthetics” given by the Nigerian scholar Adeshina Afolayan. Posted on Emory Institute of African Studies’ official YouTube page, this comment illustrates the unrelenting thoughtlessness with which social media is used around the world. For some inexplicable reason, for example, around the same time as the comment to the Brymo lecture, the UK Guardian deleted a published version of Osama Bin Ladin’s “Letter to America” after some TikTokers discovered it and essentially ran with it to justify their condemnation of the US’s cosiness with Israel and the latter’s injustices in Gaza.

While anyone might overlook the normal frenzied desire for user engagements that motivates the sensational labors of online content creators, it is the mindless redemption of Bin Laden you may find most irksome. More perplexing is also the reasoning that even if it harms civilians, terrorism could become recruitable as a legitimate form of resistance to a dominant system.

If you are a teacher of popular culture like me, you might frown at any elitist dismissal of TikTok cultures as always already juvenile and prone to algorithmic manipulations. However, we might be able to agree that college professors in the United States need to be more pedagogically committed to keeping their powder dry with regard to the state of critical thinking skills among our students. Their country’s complicity in the Middle East is well documented and they certainly do not require an infamous missive posted without the proper context on TikTok to condemn its violent history.

Yet the thoughtlessness of the social media age is not something you find only among American Gen Zers and millennials; if you look well enough, you can easily spot it anywhere the fecundity of the mind surrenders impishly to the power of thumbs clacking away on the boards and screen worlds of platform capitalism. Like the online supporters of the Nigerian musician whose celebrity outweighed the facts of his dreadful misreading of a philosopher’s essay. Here is the actual story after all that digression: let us get back to it.

It so happened that Afolayan, an African philosopher who at the time was a fellow at the National Humanities Center in Durham, had been invited to give a talk at Emory, and he opted to speak about the work of Nigerian singer and songwriter Olawale Ibrahim Ashimi (stage name, Brymo). If you recall Biyi Bandele’s Netflix adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s historical drama “Death and the King’s Horseman,” you may have encountered Brymo in the role of the Praise Singer to the king’s horseman— a hedonistic chief whose duty to his community and a departed king is undermined by the failures of personal weakness.

In addition to the merits of his many works, Brymo’s commanding role as Olohun-Iyo is a tribute to the performer’s salt-like voice which, as Soyinka might agree, often belongs to the best praise singers and bards of some Nigerian royal courts. In both Afolayan’s essay and the Emory presentation, he analyzes Brymo’s Yorùbá songs to unpack how the musician’s songs exemplify the social and political value of aesthetics in postcolonial Nigeria. In the YouTube video, what one sees of the reception of the talk by those in the lecture room suggests Afolayan’s talk was very well received, a fact that speaks to his solid expertise in the intersections of philosophy and popular cultures.

As I understand what transpired later, Brymo got to know about Afolayan’s talk and rather than become flattered by Afolayan’s seemingly celebratory even if critical gesture towards his music, the matter became a social media contestation over one of the most influential theoretical formulations in French literary criticism, from the essay “The Death of the Author.”

Written by the semiotician and critic Roland Barthes in 1968, the concept gets to the core of textual interpretations, asking us to consider whether meaning-making derives from an author’s intentions or a reader’s interpretative power and affordances. For Barthes and other French thinkers working in his generation’s post-structuralist tradition, there is nothing outside of the text, no outside textual authority to dictate the parameters of meaning for readers. This was one of the theoretical anchors of an essay in which Afolayan similarly engages other ideas including Kwame Appiah’s postcolonial reading of the famous artwork Yoruba Man with a Bicycle, a sculpture that also fascinated the novelist James Baldwin at some point.

The age of high theory may be long gone, but Afolayan decisively relied on a reading of Brymo’s songs that imagined the symbolic death of the musician as the necessary removal of the writing body (or the performer, in this case) from the original point of enunciation. As Barthes argues, to give “a text an author is to impose a limit on that text.” But Brymo would have none of this, as he came down heavily in a Twitter (X) broadcast on his fellow Nigerian, claiming the Emory lecture “attempted negotiating my fate, and to foist on me a legacy for the price of an early demise.” In other words, Brymo incorrectly interpreted Afolayan’s theoretical reference to Barthes as an assumption of an actual death. He saw Afolayan’s Emory presentation as one of those attempts where “someone wishes me dead.” The musician probably has real enemies, especially after he went viral during Nigeria’s last elections for what many people saw as prejudicial remarks against a particular ethnic group in Nigeria.

In an industry where the fans of rival Afrobeats singers have declared him ‘dead’ in many ways, his refusal of death of any kind is understandable. But, again, this resistance to a death reference in an otherwise benign academic essay may be read as an anxiety over irrelevance in the music industry. And if there’s such an anxiety, Afolayan’s intellectual effort was a kind of symbolic resurrection that was disparaged by the ego.

As I poured over WhatsApp messages and Twitter comments mainly by Brymo and his followers, it became clear that Afolayan had been misread and his private attempts to correct an artist who cared little for literary theory would prove abortive. Even when Afolayan, as the scholar tells me, sent him messages to clarify the matter, they were met with hubristic indifference. Indeed, Brymo doubled down on his mistranslation of the essay and saw Afolayan’s attempt to explain he had not bothered about interviewing him because of the assumed Barthesian logic, this was read explained away as gaslighting.

In the world of celebrity culture, Brymo’s argument naturally wins the day, producing another nail in the coffin of whatever remains of high theory. But how do you make concepts like Barthes’s legible to a social media audience that refuses to think, or an online multitude that resurrects and rehabilitates someone like Bin Laden? Even if I say so, that question indexes troubling attitudes to knowledge in online spaces. To Brymo’s Nigerian fans, the musician, rather than the teacher, was naturally more credible, something we find in that lone comment on YouTube, as the writer unequivocally asked: “why will you assume a living man is dead because you don’t have access to him?” Another Twitter fan of Brymo’s thought the Emory lecture was “insightful [but] I feel the Prof should have contacted the artist to actually understand his art. The reference to the artist as “dead” is outrageous! In this, the outrage culture of social media dutifully manifests itself. Afolayan is lucky not to be cancelled, a fate that could have befallen him had he the influence and social capital of Brymo himself.

Like Brymo, some of these fans probably knew nothing about Barthes until their Afolayan encounter, but not even Google could redeem their ignorance. Brymo, who is expected to speak at one of the most prestigious literary festivals in Africa – the Aké Arts and Book Festival founded by writer Lola Shoneyin, ought to know better than attack a scholar who generously places his sonic art at the center of critical reflections. I may not be able to hide my love for his music, but I cannot justify the refusal to learn and think, not after your main interlocutor points you in the direction of materials to update your knowledge. In an age of information surfeit on the internet, the paradoxical surplus of closed minds has to be alarming.

At the same time, beyond the imperfections of celebrity culture and the thoughtless production of cultural content on social media, we cannot miss what the whole episode signifies for the very nature of authorship and reading practices. In the age of social media, a little learning is easily inflated, and the expertise of established voices is easily impugned especially by those who refuse to think. The production of culture in the hands of unthinking readers has to be precarious.

Ugliness and beauty, they are everywhere around us, inherent in the fabric that binds us all to the human condition. If you looked hard enough, you might find them locked endlessly in dialectical tensions in the best of us. And in the best of our ideas and inventions. Like social media, at once a connective technology and a dopamine-generating machine that assimilates its reward mechanism to the concealment of its profit capture from users that also yield themselves and their stories to both simulacrum and truth. Like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, undermined by its racist descriptions and stereotypic imagery, despite a most elegant modernist language organized in the service of its arguably anti-colonial resistance. Like beautiful Berlin, a former enclave of Nazi horror that is now home to not only one of the greenest places on the planet but also a diversity of voices and faces that constitute an internationalism inflected by the city’s subterranean racism, If American cities were not equally lovely spaces that concurrently witness the gains of individual freedoms and the morbid illogic of incidents like gun violence, I would wager that Berlin’s ambiguities are peculiar, but they are not! What I have seen of Berlin, starting from the summer of 2023, is this Janus-faced reality that shapes the collective human experience.

Consider an incident at an Edeka store in East Berlin; some would imagine Edeka as a fancy organic food store that caters mostly to seniors and relatively rich folks. As far as I was concerned, it was your regular Walmart with a bit of a glowing edge. In any case, when I lived in the city of Bochum, somewhere around the Rhine River, Edeka was the closest store to me, and is, therefore, the one store I would look out for in any German city. So when I found myself in Prenzlauer Berg that summer, the normal thing again was to look around for Edeka’s yellow-crested blue branding. Despite a REWE store beside me, I would walk past and go all the way to Schönhauser Allee which was some miles away from where I lived around the road to Pankow, about 10 mins drive what remains of the famed Berlin Wall. I had gone to this particular Edeka store a couple of times before this day which I now recollect with some mild irritation.

It probably helps to recall how the day itself started. For some odd reason, I had left the house that morning, thinking about the neo-Marxist French philosopher, Louis Althusser. I cannot recall if my mind was actually preparing me for Lauri Kubuitsile’s talk that afternoon at Humboltd University, but the phrase racial interpellation kept dancing around in my mind. Prescient perhaps, but for anyone wondering what Althusser meant by interpellation, he was mainly interested in processes of subject formation and subjectivity. He described interpellation as a form of hailing in social interactions that reinforce ideological systems; how we come to accept views and values that subject us to the workings of a repressive system. Of course, this is a very simplistic way of putting it, but to be interpellated racially, for example, is to be hailed in a manner in which your race is made the essentializing attribute of your identity.

As I walked towards the train station, I kept thinking about what this might mean in the immediacy of my encounters in the city: in the smiles and the kind of frozen stares strangers might get in East Berlin, but probably not in the West. Engrossed in my mobile adventure in high theory in heterotopic Berlin, I challenged myself to a game, wondering how I would translate Althusser for my daughter should the need ever arise. And then some light from the domains of popular aphorism appeared to shine on me: “Nobody makes you inferior without your consent.” Often attributed to a former occupant of the American White House. No, not any president; a First Lady, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt to be specific. And I reckon that her take on the place of personal responsibility and agency in the circumstances of life’s many turns and bends may have appealed to Althusser. The key word is consent. You are already a racially interpellated subject if you give your consent to the inferior values and racist attitudes a repressive ideological system assigns to you.

When I got to Humboldt University and, after she had read from sections of her historical novel, The Scattering, Kubuitsile saw to it that my thoughts remained on the subject of race. During one of the Q&As that interposed her readings, someone asked her, a white American who became a citizen of Botswana in the late 1980s, if it was in her place to write about the German genocide of the Hereros in Namibia, partly the subject of her brilliant novel. Not the exact phrasing of the question, but something like that. Let’s just say her response to this and other questions — like the politics of appropriation, the Caine Prize and poverty porn in contemporary African fiction, and even the orthographic politics of capitalizing Black but not White, would get her cancelled were she to have ventured them on Twitter. But I especially loved her answers, especially the insistence that we urgently need to eschew the now-dominant perspective that only people of a certain group are best positioned to write about them.

You can imagine how I felt when I got to Edeka later that day and the ideas of race and racism that had built a nest in my mind escaped into the real world to haunt me. It began at the baking aisle. Google Translate had given an incorrect word for flour that had left me exasperated. Kemi wanted to bake her first sets of Puff Puff in Berlin that evening and I had been saddled with the noble task of finding everything she needed. After admitting that Google was not going to save me in this case, I asked a store attendant for help. She was patient in guiding me to the right items — yeast, sugar, etc., but my not being able to speak Deutsch hindered much communication on our part. Hardly had I got all I needed and trudged wearily to check out when a more insidious monster showed up.

For some odd reason, the cashier, a bright-eyed and agile senior demanded I produce my ID card to prove my Capital One credit card was in fact mine. Again, language stood in our way, as I first thought she wanted me to perform the usual rite of signage that, I came to discover later, some European merchants still ask of buyers. I asked for a pen to sign the receipt and move along but she insisted I had to produce my passport. I think it was the mention of my passport that made it apparent that she did not trust my ownership of my credit card. I was contemplating producing it when it suddenly became crystal clear that I was the only one in a long queue of buyers being asked to prove my card was mine. I confess: Althusser did not race back to my mind at the moment, but I also found myself refusing to prove that I owned a card I had used without any qualms in the same store a couple of days earlier. I knew what was being done. She seemed to have concluded I was too poor or too immigrant-looking to own the card. Not when most people paid for their goods with cash.

As she insisted, so did I. It was a moment of ugliness that affected me in no small way, but as is often the case with ambiguities, there was also a place for beauty and grace in the space, for another Berliner — furiously shouting expletives at the woman from the back of the line — would not keep quiet in the face of what she thought was racial profiling. I agreed with her; even if that cashier did not understand a word of my English or chose not to, the woman who spoke up in my support made sure she got my interlocutor to get the gist of her prejudice. Not that it changed things, though. Finally, when neither of us would budge, I decided my little act of resistance did not need to become a spectacle. Right then, it was time to unbag all the goods and return them to the conveyor belt. I simply walked away to another store, not minding I had already paid for the items. The goal was to shun the victimization of another person’s ignorance while removing myself from the locale of their racial nervousness. What was most irking, though, was the feeling that the labor to produce Puff Puff might yield nothing.

As I walked away, alone but unashamed and unbowed, two teenagers ran to me, with a deviant sense of solidarity and broken English on their heels. It was as if they wanted, if they could, to press charges on my behalf, telling me what the woman had done was not good and that I should consider talking to the police. Listening to them made my teary eyes a bit moister than they needed to be and offering a Danke at that moment would have been nice. From them and the woman who spoke up at Edeka, I realized that people, bad people, may break us, but people, good people, also make us and cover our weaknesses with their garments of care and love. People don’t have to speak the same language or be in the same age group or from the same country to be ethical. In Berlin that day, the contraries, and ambivalences of human experiences were visible to the naked eye.

What happened in Berlin reminded me of a similar occurrence some years earlier in Kansas. This time around, we are in the American mid-west, and a poet is about to deconstruct an epiphanic moment of racial self-realization. The Nigerian poet Rasaq Malik and I were out one sunny afternoon as summer reached its climax in 2019, the week before Jayhawkers returned to the University of Kansas (KU) campus. No, it was not that part of the Free State where you might expect two Black men to offer a smile of atonement to signal their lack of threat to anyone they encountered. You may be familiar with that ritual of safety among Black men who have been taught to perform their lack of aggression by centuries of racial violence and an unabating fate of police power and carceral discipline. It was in Lawrence, the birthplace of the famous African American poet Langston Hugues, a typical American college town on top of Mount of Oread.

I do not recall what gave us away as potential shoplifters but our animated discussions about poetry and the Nigerian homeland must have blinded us to the realities of an assailing shop attendant. But you will hardly blame both of us for getting carried away by discussions of Nigerian poetry and its recent extroverted march into the heart of other locations in middle America, what one might call a certain Iowaization of Nigerian literature. But the contentious politics of the homeland, a usual staple in diasporic discourses, played some role in this other attempt to become racially interpellated. If you asked me, though, it probably came down to Rasaq’s choice of outfit that day. For some reason, the Iseyin-born writer who had arrived at KU as a Fulbright fellow in Yorùbá language had donned an òfì, the top of the handwoven loomed fabric, aṣọ òkè. You need to understand the symbolism of the aṣọ òkè to appreciate what a foremost Yorùbá poetry performer had intended it to accomplish as part of his sartorial politics in the Midwest. In its heydays, the Aṣọ òkè was a dress of royalty and was often found among the elite class. It was the kind of clothes you would wear if you had a special occasion involving the celebration of life’s major feats. In more contemporary times, it has become a symbol of Yorùbá pride, a way of signalling your appreciation and veneration of culture. Rasaq’s new role at the KU involved teaching both language and culture, so I am guessing he had put on this regalia to mark his enthusiastic anticipation of a classroom filled with American undergraduates eager to learn Yorùbá.

The moment we entered the shop, some woman took notice of us it seemed, and began to follow us about. From aisle to aisle and to the ends of the earth, she was determined to stop us from carting away every one-Dollar item, for it was a dollar store. I had lived in Saskatoon and saw this several times when some white guy would follow a First Nations youth around. So, as soon as I saw this woman in a third aisle, pretending to dust off a perfectly clean shelf, I pointed Rasaq, who had been completely oblivious to what was happening, in her direction and assured him she would join us in the next aisle. Of course, she did, surveilling our every step and waiting to pounce should the anxieties she had become a reality. Again, here were two individuals being profiled in a college town that is often regarded as the most progressive county in Kansas.

From Germany to the US and to elsewhere, you will find good people and bad people, ugliness and beauty, and a constant tension between both. Rasaq and I may have laughed about our experience that day, but we also went away knowing the struggle never to surrender to racial interpellations is always ongoing. Whether it is a dollar store in Kansas or the Edeka in Berlin — where I later got an apology and an assurance from the store manager that he will be retraining some of his employees — the ugliness of a few and the beauty of many others remain very much intimately entangled. The challenge for all of us is to abjure single stories of the cities we visit.

Absence

That story about wayward canticles from love-books

came from a tongue dripping honey and tales of exits.

A day lingers into eternity when you are not here.

You ask yourself why the heart still longs for the muse

it daily beholds like a bee, her honeycombs.

You wonder why absence sickens like an unwanted

friend visiting in the heat of an ungodly hour, a moment

that dithers and forbids unravelling its next passages.

You wonder. So when I said, “to love you is to bear you

in my bosom even when you are not here,” a feeling growls

inside of me and stretches into a sky where​,​ not holding you,

I’m stuck to smiles shared a flurry of seconds ago,

memories threaded by affections into a bouquet

freshly plucked from gardens that sprout longings,

the roses and magnolias of thrusted passions.

To be away from you is to become a fountain

void of waters, springs that rain down as nothingness.

A day lingers into eternity when you are not here.

But the past does not exist independently of the present…The Past—or, more accurately, pastness—is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing The Past

It helps to consider the ancestors sometimes. To look into their gaze from below and enter their minds and from there contemplate their grief. What were their dying moments like and what was the last thought that lingered most in their minds before they crossed the threshold of death?

For my grandfather, it was probably the Sahara, with its arid hotness and the sand dunes that slowly bury weary bones in their loins and swallow pilgrims questing for life elsewhere. Grandpa’s greatest longing before passing was for a son that never returned home, even if his daughter, through whom I was direct kin, did stay back, she and her other siblings, nursing him in his last days.

Against grandpa’s greatest wishes, his eldest daughter never did get around to fulfilling her old man’s desires. She had other plans that later culminated in her decades-long business in the heart of the beauty industry on Lagos Island. If you needed some Brazilian hair weaves at a Balogun shop, she was probably your surest option. Mum is the most natural salesperson you would find, but grandpa wanted so badly to see his children, those who left and those who stayed, have some formal, educational training. From her, it became clear to grandpa he had to turn his attention to the next generation, mine.

He had a culture of incentivizing us whenever we visited, offering cash and books to take back home. His library of UK-styled Arithmetic and English readers was no longer fashionable but that could hardly stop him. It didn’t matter to him. A much-changed curriculum was not a match for his gift of books. Becoming at home with them and reading as many as we could find was all he wanted. He would constantly press the importance of knowing books.

Among the Yorùbá, a true philosophy of education appears to begin with becoming one with the world of letters. To know books, mọ ìwé, is to be at home with literacy as in a sensual experience that erupts as intimate knowledge. It is as if being able to read and truly becoming knowledgeable is to become one in mind and spirit with the books you read; to know books becomes that necessary intercourse with printed texts that congeals the most special kinship with them. The book itself—ìwé—is, as a Nigerian scholar later told me, a sign of belonging to a privileged class. Naturally then, in grandpa’s world, to know books was the surest way to becoming known and famous⁠—if you wanted that; to become a person of worth, you had to mọ ìwé.

The thing is, grandpa’s love for books derives from a cosmopolitan ethic that is traceable to his travels. Among other destinations, he had gone to Mecca and became what people in southwest Nigeria would call an Alhaji. Growing up and hearing this appellation, I had thought that was his name and I would fondly refer to him by that. But he was a man of faith who was devoted to the teachings of the Prophet.

Beyond that, he was a man who could read people, for his temperament was of a peaceful and tranquil disposition, the type that suffered long the ill-treatment of others. I sometimes thought his ethics and attitude to life were shaped by his Yorùbá upbringing in Lagos.

There was something beautiful about his gentleness and the constant ambience of grace he exuded. Well, most of the time, with the occasional times being when he would threaten to get the stick whenever I threw the kind of tantrums peculiar to my pre-teen age. His eyes were tender and soft. So were his words, although forcefully when necessary.

As I became more discerning of my environment, I came to appreciate the elasticities of a certain Yorùbá religious pragmatism in the man, so much that when I ran away from stick-wielding and mean tutors at my Quranic school to become a Christian, he never withheld his affections. The popular narrative about religious conversion and the hostility that sometimes attend that in places like Nigeria was something I heard about but hardly experienced from those closest to me.

But I could tell he was deeply hurt. Yet it was a battle he did not mind losing as long as being in school and having good grades were still in place. To him, and as I guessed later it was with most in his generation, a legacy of educated lineage was something to be proud of. To aspire to even if you have to lose some battles.

But he had other battles, beyond the domestic skirmishes of children who wanted to ká owó, rather than ká ìwé, children whose major preference was the lure of capital, rather than books. As someone who had real estate property in abundance, he fought hard to keep some of the houses he had built on lands hotly contested by other more powerful families and landowners in Lagos. Having few connections in the Lagos state hierarchies, unlike some of his competitors meant he lost many of these investments.

His greatest battle, that of every Nigerian parent of his era, was the forces that thwarted the legacy of education he sought for his children. There was one, in particular; let’s call him Hassan, who had so much promise but had his light deemed by an erratic mind that was constantly high on drugs. In a sphere where such things were hardly regulated, Hassan became undone by a gradual overdose of weed and cannabis.

But he too wanted a better life. So long before to japa entered the Nigerian cultural lexicon, long before images of floating bodies by the shores of Europe became a regular pastime of news networks and social media, he had been convinced a journey to the West through the Sahara would offer him a new lease of life.

Billy was supposed to arrange this. He was a friend of Hassan’s who lived in the same neighbourhood in the Surulere area. He had assured grandpa a journey through Libya was the surest path. Acting as some kind of travel agent with familiarity from his own travels abroad, he had promised to help Hassan as long as grandpa was ready to splash out the money.

Being the man he was, Grandpa did and so began Billy’s endless request for money. He needed to so badly help his friend surmount every hurdle he would claim. To help Hassan, who had become sober and focused on a clean start, achieve his dreams was the goal, Billy claimed.

And so Hassan left Lagos, but Billy never left grandpa’s purse. The endless demand for money was like an unwanted note in a beautiful sequence of a Jazz routine. As Grandpa obliged every time, Hassan was always said to want more. The thought of a son who was stranded in some far, unknown country was unbearable. The more Billy asked for money, the more grandpa gave him, yet only Billy could talk directly with Hassan since they had both travelled out of the country.

When the whispers began, grandpa knew something sinister had taken place, but he could not be sure. Hassan had gone for a long while, and although Billy had stopped requesting money, nobody knew where my uncle really was.

Billy, back in Lagos one rare summer, assured the family all was fine with Hassan where he was, but this country was a riddle only Billy could solve. He assured grandpa and everyone connected to him that Hassan merely needed more time to settle where he had found a new home. That, as a matter of fact, he might actually need more money! A desperately longing father was growing suspicious.

But grandpa never heard from Hassan again. Certainly not before his wife, my grandma who sold pap and fufu at a popular crossroad passed away, not knowing the fate of her son. Billy had made promises Hassan would call as soon as he settled down in Europe. But the phone never rang. In 2014, grandpa joined his wife in the ranks of the ancestors, never knowing what had become of his investments in a son’s quest for meaningfulness far away from home.

Before his final exit, he had called me one day after my arrival in Saskatoon for doctoral training. It was one of those regular Prairie days. The weather was raining ice outside and the temperature was a familiar narrative of frigidness. Winter came early that year and poring was the first snow that would later melt in May. I was about to head to a store on 8th street to get my winter tires when my phone rang. It was grandpa.
He wanted to know if I had seen Hassan. If I had found a way to connect with him since I left Nigeria. Had I spoken with him? It was as if he needed to confirm Hassan’s years of silence were not rumours of an eternal absence in the body. I had crossed to the West and could easily get in touch with my uncle, he reasoned.

“Have you spoken with him?” The voice on the other end of my Samsung A8 gave me shivers. It was the most distraught voice I ever heard. The quivering voice of a father whose son never returned. His fears and regrets, translated by radio waves across the Atlantic.

I told him I would get on the internet and see if I could find some leads online, any traces of a son for a father who wanted closure. As an elder, he did not have to remind me that ‘‘Ọmọ-o mí kú’’ yá ju ‘‘Ọmọo mí nù’’ lọ. To lose a child to death was more tolerable than simply losing a child. The wisdom of the elders: ọmọ mìí kú is deemed a better loss because it brings closure to the mourning process; whereas, in ọmọ mìí nù, the mourning is an endless season of frigid snow without heat. Nothing ends and melancholy forever threatens. But aren’t both losses a path to troubled sighs, a reminder that hope is always haunted by loss? The hope that what you have lost will take a concrete shape before you someday condemns you to a tragic longing that makes closure elusive. But how do you close something that refuses to be closed?

My grandfather did not wait for me to return his call. He too, like his wife before him, bid the earth a final goodbye, leaving behind a grief he could not fully express; a mourning I can only take up in the wake of an inscrutable loss.

Never knowing the fate of his son, whether swallowed by Sahara’s sands or buried under Sicily’s depths, he died with scars of hope unfulfilled, drowning in a sea of sorrow, with his heart frozen by a trauma that became food for the next generation. They remain with mom today even when she doesn’t talk about Hassan. There is something haunting about her silence, like a horror story on the pages of a tragic book.

As I close this meditation and think of Hassan’s past life that is really not past, I have come to know a book that I can only describe as activating an upsetting experience of reading, not for its poetic and beautiful language, but for the tragedies it unfurls: Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake in which she explores the precarity of Black lives, and mortality in the many afterlives of slavery as evocative of “the past that is not past” and which “reappears, always, to rupture the present.” Like the undying question Hassan’s passage through Libya left in its wake: are you still alive?