Burnside on Burnside

This is how I learned.  And how I began to navigate.  In walking I asked myself: what is this place to me?  Am I anything at all to it?

‘When she didn’t give birth, we realised the lamb had died.  She wasted away but then unexpectedly got fat and lived on.  Inside her, the lamb was calcified and wrapped in fat.  That’s how she’s survived.

I was so happy to see rain in the desert, something I longed for, prayed for, wished for with all my might when we ran out of water.  Back then, there was not one cloud in the sky.  The cloud was also saying sorry.  Twenty years too late, but I know it was apologizing.

So we pressed on.  Her pace was fast.

Thirst, hunger, none of it mattered, until we ran out of water.  But even then, I don’t know how to explain it, but I knew I wasn’t going to die.  I guess this is what I now call hope.

On a wall of his home in Hamburg, he had arranged a collage of photos, some taken in Kabul, others in Germany.  Many of thee, I noticed, were images of roads and bridges.  Of train stations and airports.  He had arranged them like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, with white spaces in between.

‘I’m glad we found nothing as kids.  That way, I can still believe.’

We turn off a highway leading out of Lagos to Kent.  I do not recall Ketu being this sedate.  Then I recognise two signs: an Anglican cathedral, and once we are past a junction, at the entrance to a street, a fast-food joint I’d known.  Built in our first or second in the neighbourhood, Mr. Bigg’s was shiny and unapproachable to teenagers like me whose parents swore off food cooked outside the home or who considered weekly treats of meat pie and Scotch eggs wasteful.  Now only the frame of its hoarding remains, as well as broken windows and a dark, empty inferior.  Hah, I think, then feel a small jolt at my keenness to return here with no clear sense of who or what I hoped to be reunited with.  I wonder if I might obscure the past by approaching it slantwise.

We slept at the Gadsden that night, a haunted hotel on the American side of Douglas.  The next day we woke up at dawn because you said we would be able to see the lights I saw in 1999.  I did.  We did.  Check.  There were also fields on either side of the highway.  Check.  These two things were the confirmation that I, that you, I don’t know who, needed.  It felt right.  It finally felt like my memories, my flashbacks, were based in reality and not my imagination.

Yakoruda means literally the Great Ore; the mountains to the south had been mined since antiquity.  In the 1950s geologists found intact tools inside the sealed tunnels and, astonishingly, woven baskets and wooden ladders from before the Roman colonisation, preserved thanks to the lack of oxygen

Postcards make graffiti more transmissible, not through reproduction, through postcards themselves are almost always made in multiples. They also transition graffiti from ‘I was here’ to ‘I wish you were here’, uniting writer and reader in a speculative first-person plural: a ‘We were here’ that could have been but never was.  An unusual lack of grammatical specificity in English allows us to also read these sentences in a way that emphasizes the inextricability  of person and place, just as image and text are two sides of the same postcard.  ‘I am here’ can be read just like ‘I am clumsy’ or ‘I am competitive’, while the past tense of ‘I was here’ emphasizes the fleetingness of the descriptor ‘I was young’.

I was filled with a very American kind of naivety then, one flowing from a mythology in which the individual is powerful enough to change long-standing structures through sheer force of will, in which any single one of us is capable of introducing humanity into entirely inhumane systems before we, instead,  are left misshapen by them, barely recognizable even to our former selves

I sit watching the Malabar pied hornbill bring figs to his mate.  The female has walled herself up in a nest hole in the tree opposite, cemented herself in with a fruit paste, so no snake can eat her eggs.  There’s a rush of air when the make lands with his huge wingbeats.  I watch as he regurgitates his meal and pipes it though the great curved bill with its black-and-yellow casque down into the tip of hers through the slit of her cell.  He arrives every hour and each time he feeds her I feel stronger.

On this ‘ stone dam’ that used to be an elevated paved street, I found a different river: of people who are not entirely wanted, a ‘wave’ that the city would rather keep out, would rather not see, despite being in plain sight.

At a taxi stand, five white German women wait next to their cars, smoking and drinking coffee; it’s so cold you can see their breath.

I smell on him the urine of ancient kings.

about the dreams you dreamed, that wasted away, then dissolved.