ktravula – a travelogue!

Weekend in a Little Village

There hums a fan four feet behind the chair in a closed office. Outside, the sun recedes into the end of where the eyes can reach and heat pervades the day. The bustle of traffic is as unpredictable as the flight of the geese around the neighbourhood and on the surface everything goes on as it always does, this time only with a little more gusto as commuters disperse with the wind heading somewhere, heading nowhere.

There, as usual, is a magic to the simpleness of the atmosphere, something about the order and ordinariness of the programmed chore of day in a working metropolis. In the middle of such broth of movements is a yet unknown idea bubbling around the edge. Everyone seeks it in some way or another. Some find it, and some don’t. And some don’t collide with it a few times in a day’s work. And in many other parallel worlds, there are replicas in this rote and eventuality. Only one thing stands out of the urgency of each second: the futility of it all.

There now hums more than just a whirling fan. There is music, and company, and noise – the same old rote of living.

The Text Part of Growing

The evolution from picture books to text-only materials was gradual, but memorable. There seemed to have been an unwritten disdain for picture books that manifested after each birthday, each disposed oversized pyjamas and each replaced tooth. It wasn’t self-wrought however, but acquired, either from older peers with fancier stories of intimate relations with the written word resulting in inspiring encounters, or jealousy of even fancier ones with fantastic tales of their reading prowess. Something gave, however, for sure, little by little, and the young reader emerged, ready to take on the reading world without accompanying images.

The most memorable of such recollection could be the singular, but eventually impossible task of reading the first chapter of The Tiger by the Tail during a bus ride from home to school. It didn’t matter to him in the least that he couldn’t make any sense of it yet, never having even applied himself to more than just a few words on each page he flipped. It matter though that people saw him with a book that was bigger than a storybook, had no pictures in it, and moved from page to page as if passing through the patient and critical eyes of an avid reader. “Hey, nice book. How’re you finding it?” Someone would ask sometimes during the day, and he would respond: “Oh, very nice. Chase is such an exquisite writer”, and move on before the probing went far beyond the familiar. Oh the days.

The blog, now splattered with colours and images, flesh and blood, of ordinary and extraordinary people of various places, beliefs and convictions, could only remind of such trivialties; of days when colour meant ordinariness, and a lack of sophistication needed for the rites of adulthood. Now only a smile remains, and a longing for such a not so distant past of innocence and silliness.

Welcome September, and the year of birth.

New Publication

Those interested in new Nigerian writing will do well to check out the latest issue of Sentinel Nigeria magazine. It has a poem of mine among several refreshing works of Nigerians of different age and convictions. There are also some two poems from Peter Akinlabi whom I’d interviewed for the particular issue. All comments welcome. Enjoy.

Find it here.

New Review

“I feel it’s best to look at this story critically from two angles. The first is the merits of the writing, which should of course remain paramount. In this, Tubosun does very well. He captures the dry absurdity of a potentially terrible situation, and the ending is remarkable in its pathos. I believed both the matter-of-fact and slightly sympathetic tone of the nurse, and I believed the narrator’s feelings when he hoped he did not have the illness, but suspected that, because of his life and where he lived, he might. Tubosun alternates between writing with very plain, ordinary language, such as when a conversation occurs, and larger, quite grand sentences which seek to encompass the tumultuous shifts of emotions experienced by the narrator. He is adept at both, and perhaps most importantly, knows when to use which. When the narrator talks to the nurse, the writing becomes short and sharp because the narrator himself is tense with anticipation, he must be calm, because if he is not – collapse. When he retreats within himself, his conscious is allowed to expand, and so, too, does the writing, Tubosun’s sentences uncoiling like languorous snakes willing to take their time to reach their destination.”

Culled from Damian Kelleher’s review of my story in African Roar. Read the rest here.

The Fig Tree and the Wasp

A short story by Brian Chikwava in the Granta Magazine, here.

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