I had been there before. Or better said, I had seen it before, but on what occasion I do not remember. Had I been on one of my walks through the staff quarters when I glimpsed its blackened hulk, or was it that day I was scouting for a location to photograph someone with whom I now seldom speak? I am separated from those days by distance, temporal and physical. Time and experience do not mix, their every encounter being a lesson on the obnubilation of the latter by the former, with experience becoming a curio ensconced behind frosted glass, its finely detailed vertices steadily declining into misted abstraction. Opaqueness is further aggravated by fixation; appraised from a certain distance and with a sort of attention, the segment of a lived life takes on dream-like amorphousness and plasticity. It becomes volatile, mind-bogglingly transposable, and its important plot points shift like police thumbtacks tracking a murderer’s scurry across a map, a trail of holes shadowing his flight from city to city, hideout to hideout, traversing an oneiric landscape.

2.

The details of one’s life, plot points that they are, are proven lessons in locomotion; elements electrified by one’s scampering from place to place, love to love, swimming in this lake and then swimming in that other lake, following this diet and then sticking to that diet. To live a life is to be a fugitive; those who know this negotiate every corner, every turn, with a glance over the shoulder. Unlike is the case with some fugitives—say a murderer with a good lawyer, for example—a life is a charge no one escapes. Tragedy, whether orchestrated or instituted by chance, is no trapdoor through which one exits the stage play of one's life—it is an interlude, an intermission the purpose of which is the recalibration of one’s understanding, ultimately situating one at a different relation to things. It is as much a changing of the light as it is a conferment of new eyes, and thus a new-sprung mode of seeing. In the instance this intermission, by way of death, forces one’s removal from events, the recalibration of understanding zaps like a neutron star beyond the curtains and into the audience. Somewhere on the obituary page, inching towards the band of survivors huddled beneath the roof of a paragraph is Understanding, dazzling and reconstituted, ever slightly tilting narrative arcs of which they, the survivors, are protagonists (we are all protagonists). In this way, every story is a lesson in locomotion.

3.

Of the house, one could safely assume the occupant was a lecturer or someone else who worked in some capacity for the university. Perhaps a professor or a senior lecturer, but certainly not a gardener or a security officer. The ruins, charred but still legible on the blackened page of destruction, bore markers of middle-class privilege—the remains of a tricycle, the scraps of what was once expensive hollandaise cloth, a carbonised bedroom trolley. Perhaps more intriguing than the cause of the tragedy was the absence of any visible attempts to remove the artefacts of its occurrence, the post-cataclysmic scene preserved for anyone who went out of their way to have a look. One could safely say there were children in that house (if the tricycle was anything to go by) and could only wonder if they got out safely, if no one was hurt. Was it an electrical malfunction? A kitchen accident? Arson? The question of cause stayed with me as I surveyed the scene, gingerly stepping over wood, metal, clothes—all marked by flames.

4.

Of the photographs I took that day, one in particular dogs my mind. My subject is outside the house, and I’m within. He is by the window, looking stoically at the camera, his hands gripping the rusted burglar-proofing. On my side of the wall, inside, is his jacket—checked red lining and black exterior—hanging from what was once a curtain holder. The window frame is a huge rectangle of charcoal.

This photograph is one I’ve come to believe encapsulates my experience with that house. An outsider looking in, I am armed with nothing but artefacts, imagination, and my idiosyncrasies of interpretation. Forced into a point of view by what I know, I fill up the gaps in my understanding with assumptions and extrapolations derived from experience and existing knowledge. The unknown is filled with what resembles it most of what is known. One digs familiar ground to fill up an unfamiliar hole, egged on by the knowledge that what one stands on is earth, and what should be inside there is also earth. The whole thing could have been an art installation—the blown-out light switches, the mangled metal, the smithereens of glass—but, of course, it was not.

5.

While tragedy is a spectacle, mesmerism or pathos isn’t enough to qualify misfortune or its artefacts as art. Art is art because of intention. Perhaps if the house were part of the set in a screen adaptation of Medea, then we would be able to call it art. Jilted by the husband for whom she betrayed her father and her homeland, a scorned and enraged Medea sets fire to her home with her children within. Rather than conjure flames with sorcery, she chooses the human, laborious way of stacking the house with tinder and striking a match again and again, insistent even as the wind antagonises her efforts, persisting until her destruction finally blossoms behind a cupped palm. Cut.

6.

Action. Catastrophe is always happening, and by this, I do not mean that our world is a cesspool of disasters, perpetual and simultaneous and vicious in their occurring, though this is true. A tragedy, once underway, cannot be interrupted. What we call interruption is merely mutation. People often speak of tragedy as a thing which starts and ends, as if it were a cassette tape unspooling, determinedly racing to the final note of its music. They forget (or refuse to acknowledge) that after its occurrence, disaster is disintegrated into digestible chunks and strategically fed to one in a manner and with such frequency that its erstwhile enormity cannot be forgotten. You eat loss once, and your palate is forever tainted; everything you swallow thereafter is marked with the aftertaste of misfortune. The very impossibility of returning to a before ensures an ever-running sequence of afters. A friend told me of how, at the age of six, an adult, a man she knew well, got electrocuted before her eyes. He had asked her if she wanted him to get her anything, and she said she wanted a coconut, after which he tried to pluck one for her as she watched. He had with him a metal rod for that purpose, which, as he tried to knock the fruit down from the tree, got caught in an overhead high-tension electrical wire. As his skin melted—she told me they could not get him out of his shoes after—so did the incident sear itself into her mind. She could not eat with metal spoons for the longest time. A tragedy, once underway, cannot be interrupted; it is the interruption.

7.

In Peter Weir’s 1998 psychological drama, The Truman Show, our protagonist, Truman, is an unsuspecting insurance salesman whose speckless life in the hyper-picturesque town of Seahaven is a reality television show filmed with about five thousand cameras and broadcast to millions globally. His wife, Meryl, is a paid actor, as are his mother and his best friend, Marlon, with whom he cracks a beer now and then; Spencer, his affable elderly neighbour is also one, as is Spencer’s friendly dalmatian, Pluto; his beautiful island town of Seahaven is, in reality, a gigantic soundstage built into a colossal dome. His weather is controlled through knobs and sliders, and every product he uses is a surreptitious advert. In essence, Truman’s world is a simulation, a constructed reality within which he is guided by routines of which he is oblivious. To keep him from ever attempting to leave his water-surrounded habitat, the show’s executive producer and creator, Christof, orchestrates a boating accident in which Truman’s father “dies,” leaving him with extreme thalassophobia that follows him into adulthood. Christof understood well not only tragedy’s power of recalibration but also the fact of its perpetuity. It would only be half-true to say that once a tragedy happens, it cannot un-happen. What is wholly true is the crux of its perpetuity: if it happened, then it never ended. And if it never ended, then it cannot un-happen. Unable to forget the night of his father’s drowning, Truman’s fear of water keeps him on his island, and when he decides to leave for Fiji by air, well-timed inconveniences stop him.

8.

Standing in the cold July air, surrounded by the detritus of an inferno, each charred item pulsating with a story I would never know—as do the affected lives with memories of the disaster—I realised then that the fire was what ended; the burning, however, did not. ♦

This photo essay was first published in Culture Africa curated by Frank Njugi, and was translated into German and French by Hans Hofe and Lorna Likiza, respectively.

Onyekachi: If love is not mellow, what then is it? Agitated? Calloused? What did you mean by that?

Manny: What did I mean by that? Personally, I’ve come a very long way from the person who said that, and although some things I used to think then have changed, that particular one has not, and the days have further reinforced what I said. Love cannot be mellow, guy. Love can never be mellow; It’ll never be short of that initial high. Humans, I don’t know how to describe human beings, but for just a lack of a better word—or fuck that, I’ll use that word, God.

God, and then there’s humans. God is like this pure absoluteness and humans are like these gremlins aspiring to that point. And whatever we express—God has already expressed it, or will express it, or is expressing it, in the most unselfish, unbiased, indifferent way. And this is what it is—humans see something they love and they get overwhelmed; they write poetry, they make art, they do stuff. Stuff that keeps them on top, that keeps them stretching themselves further and further, to see what they can do for their love, to see how much they can go for their love. We do that with nobility and we also do it with carelessness; we have wars, we have conquests, we have all these things. But God does it in the purest way, and the more I try to understand this universe, the more I see how—I’ve been getting it from mathematics lately, trying to just understand what it is, and I really want to know it, I’m going to study it.

Onyekachi: You’ve been getting from Mathematics the indices of love? How so?

Manny: Mathematics has sort of shown me the undergarment of the universe, just a little speck, the inner chambers, the inner room of it. And there’s nothing else that will drive a person to the great length that is mathematics, if not love. It [love] makes you mad, it makes you feral, it makes you insane. So, human beings are moving around exercising just a sliver of God’s power, just a sliver of it. And because of our ego, because of how we have detached ourselves from the world for the sake of ourselves, we contaminate things; it’s like the number 1 removing itself from the number pile without understanding that it is in every other number, too.

O: Oh wow, that’s something to think about, the ubiquity of the number 1 as a mirror of God’s omnipresence, yes? How, then, does love come into that equation?

M: God is love, guy. When you go through that selfish carnal path of detaching yourself from the world for your own ends, it makes you lose sight of what you are—and once that happens you are reduced to a puddle. But then again, love is not something with an end, it is limitless in what it will offer. It’s just like how Prime numbers are infinite, that’s how love is; it’s a quality, it’s a substance that will continue to express itself as long as this universe and the awareness of it exists. It’s a tremendously beautiful life, for real. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful.

O: I imagine its heart-breaking beauty is one of those things to which there is no end or reason.

M: Because, why? Why? Why? What is the reason, why would you go through all this stress! Even if it’s to defeat your enemy, you love the idea of defeating your enemy…I don’t know, I don’t know, this world na movie, it makes your heart throb, it makes your heart break…

Imagine when you read a poem by another human being and it makes your heart break. I will not say I have read the poem of God but I have sort of glanced at the poem of God and it made my heart shatter. Bro, I don’t know what to call this life, I don’t know what to call this life at all. But the only way to live it is to love, and love will keep you on that high. Love will never be mellow. All these things we think, imposing our opinions on the world, saying this is what I want from love, saying this is what I want in a relationship, imposing our selfishness on it. But then you see someone you love and apart from them nothing else matters, and there’s so much you can do for them, so much you will do for them, and you will see it as nothing, because it is love.

God did not rest on the seventh day, God continued to work because God is love. God loves us, guy. There’s no rest, there’s no let-me-stretch-my-back-until-the-person-I-love-calls-me. No, you are eager to spring up from wherever you and just move. It’s incredible.

O: It almost seems like love is the death of convention, that place where walls fall flat, where resolutions are dissolved and new ones are moulded and agreed upon.

M: It [love] is where rules go to die. You were talking once about the grace we give people we love, and I have been trying to think about how much that grace can stretch, and that day, Omah Lay’s Purple Song was playing over and over again and I knew I had to write something down. In the song, he is basically saying even say if you catch me dey moan…like, whatever he does, don’t let him go. And also telling the girl that whatever she does, he will not let her go because only [your] water fit cool my soul. Ah, it’s beautiful. And the song just answers the question—the extent of that grace you show is limitless. If there is a limit to your love, then you have not loved has God has loved. God has loved with everything. The extent of the universe, the depth of it, that is the depth of God’s love.

O: As human beings, how then do we deal—our carnality having made sure that God-level magnanimity is unwieldy to us—with instances of a loved one breaking conventions the pre-existence of which are the bulwark of a relationship. And I think these conventions are elements present in every relationship—

M: Yeah, you are right.

O: So, how does one then deal with such instances in which these conventions are selfishly obliterated. Say, for example, by a lover who has cheated or engaged in some other form of dishonesty?

M: It depends on you, really. It depends on what you want to allow, what you want to do. Yes, when we are in the presence of love, we are inclined to offer grace. But then, we are human beings. The limit of this grace is a place where people tend to get to, especially when the other person keeps driving them to the wall. So, is this person a serial cheat? Is this person one who disregards the grace given to them and does not give grace to the other person, which is consideration? It depends on the person, ultimately, where they feel they stand in the other person’s life. In Purple Song, from the lyrics, the two of them stand in equal measure, they stand on equal ground, saying: if this happens, don’t let me go; if this happens, I won’t let you go. So, they already have an agreed-upon contract that they are working with and abiding by. So, it really depends on that person.

O: Well, kudos to God for his unending magnanimity then?

M: Think about what could drive you to make a world with such constancy, and these constants are the foundation of everything—from flowers to song to colour to all perceived as beautiful, to poetry. Everything has a pattern, everything has a substance, everything has a direction, everything resonates with the truth, and this truth can be measured. None of it is arbitrary or by chance—it was thought about, it was planned, it was expressed as a matter of a love and we are here to experience it. That’s madness [laughs now], that’s madness and that is the kind of madness akin to love, that is the only madness allowed in the arena of love, really. It’s unfettered, it’s unrestrained, it’s a waterfall bursting eternally with living water. Omah Lay makes you remember that the people you love, love will not transform them. They’ll still have all their demons, their suffering will not change, it’ll remain the way it is. But yet, love is this thing you offer them, despite all that. The greatest punishment God can give us is not going to be hell—though we deserve it—it’ll be more love. That is the only thing that will bring us to our knees.

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This conversation has been edited for clarity. All photographs by Onyekachi Iloh.

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It was the year of our Basic Education Certificate Examination and we had completed the syllabus early. Did we complete the syllabus early or did the exam come around very late or was it both? While I may not be able to say categorically that we finished early, I recall that the exam came late. So late that the joy of being in a certificate class—the elation that came from the knowledge of wearing long-sleeved shirts and skirts instead of pinafores the next session—devolved into unease and unuttered panic. We went through the past questions multiple times, revised what we did since JSS1 and then revised those revisions, hoping that any day now would bring news of the exam being three weeks away. The fateful correspondence that would drive us into a last-minute frenzy of studying never came, and class work continued at its usual pace, after which it slowed down into languid call-and-chorus sessions; this was before our teachers got tired and began to spend their class periods telling us stories of their past lives or blaming the state government for not conducting the exam as at when due. Time soon proved the unsustainability of this model and the teachers stopped coming to class altogether.

We made noise in our unmanned classroom, played games to pass the time (our unease having morphed noiselessly into casual nonchalance. What exam?) and were frequently punished. It was not unlikely that you would peek out at our classroom block and see the whole class kneeling outside in the sun, chattering even under the sweltering heat. Everyone thought we were the worst, the big bad. Someone, say the Vice Principal, would say “This is the worst set ever in the history of this school” and someone else, say our Basic Science teacher who also doubled as the hostel matron, would affirm: “So recalcitrant! Their strong-head is too much” The principal called us goats. We took to the school field and frolicked till the bell went for closing. We were happy goats. In that memorable year, I made a lot of paper planes and watched them sail above a sea of green before nosediving into the Bahama grass. It was also the year of crushes, hidden letters, and secret awakenings for many.

The government eventually woke up and the long-awaited exam finally came, its coming so late that our last paper coincided with the prize-giving/valedictory service day. As we wrote I think it was Civic Education, we stamped our feet in unison to the Olamide song blaring from the school hall some metres away. Our invigilator, an irritable English Language teacher who had a habit of stroking his lips with his thumb and index finger, was almost driven to insanity. As he walked to one end of the class to berate a child for disturbing the exam, the child whose side he just left would pick it up and the child beside that other child would do the same until you had an entire row marching, humming, and listing the functions of the legislature into the booklets before them. He dashed from pillar to post smacking erring necks (he loved doing this) and barking “Keep kwayet, go on your knees, keep kwayet.”

It must have been funny because there were loud giggles here and there, but I don’t think it made sense to us. It was the last day of the school year, our last day of Junior Secondary School, and he was not a teacher we particularly liked. He was a raincloud, dark and ominous, rumbling menacingly over our parade. We ended the exam and attended what was left of the valedictory service. I got a prize; for being the best in Basic Science, I think. During the long vacation, I would discover that I was also the best student in Christian Religious Studies but either by some deft miscarriage of merit or through plain oversight, the prize was awarded to another student. The principal informed our class teacher—who also happened to be the irritable English teacher—and contacted the student’s parents who had the prize reconveyed back to the school, after which it was given to me. This is easily the least impressive memory wrought by that radiant year.

After the valedictory service, as was the practice, we met with our class teacher for our report cards and the food pack each person was entitled to. Sealed in the envelope alongside our exam scripts and the actual report card was the yearbook. The second thing anyone did once they saw a copy of the yearbook was to make fun of their classmates’ pictures (or just express excitement). See Taofeek’s head. Raucous laughter. He looks like bushmeat. See this one’s hat. Like fisherman. The first thing was to look for one’s own picture, assess it, appraise it, and decide if it came out as expected. I don’t think I ever really cared how my picture appeared until Senior class; I was usually more concerned with my submitted article or poem, if it was published and if it appeared how I intended it to. Once, I was crestfallen because an article I wrote propositioning indigenous Nigerian languages as the new means of instruction in schools was pared down from maybe eight hundred words to two paltry paragraphs, boxed away in a third of the page. I even cited a study in which one Professor Babatunde Fafunwa taught some Ile Ife primary school students in Yoruba and recorded performance that trumped that of their English-instructed counterparts; I copied that from somewhere. I did not encounter that name again until university where there was a Babatunde Fafunwa Building in the Faculty of Education, forcing me into cringey recollection every time I saw it. Another time, this was in JSS2, a poem I had written extolling the school, in which I said it was full of knowledge as an egg is full of meat—having gleaned that from a chapter on similes in one of the countless English textbooks lying around the house—was published saying the school was full of knowledge ‘as an egg is full of protein.’ I was livid and beside myself with rage, able to do nothing.

Amongst numerous other things a few of which are unending expenses, an ever-ready posse of bastards to break your heart, and a body trudging towards degeneration faster than you can keep up, one magnificent gift of adulthood is the undisputed agency, that unquestioned and unquestionable ability to choose. As a child, you have no agency, things are done to and decided for you; you could fall asleep at a birthday party and wake up in your underwear, at home. But thank heavens, things are a little different now. Want to stay up all night watching TV? No one can stop you. Want to go outside and start eating dirt? By all means; the universe won’t as much as give you a pop-up asking “Are you sure you want to continue with this action?” Don’t you think that’s beautiful? You are reading this because I think it is.

“As an egg is full of meat” becoming “as an egg is full of protein” without my permission exemplifies childhood inertia, the inability to decide and the ineligibility to be consulted. While it can be for good reason—childhood being characterised by folly and staggering naïveté—that children are not able to choose for themselves, a lot of people are unable to outgrow this stage of life and seize the agency granted them by adulthood. They police their dreams, stem their dreaming, mutilate their authenticity, and erode their individuality in accordance with dictates set down for them by people for whom those dictates were also set down.

In the nefarious pyramid scheme that is society’s murder of genuine self-expression, the Self, ringing vibrant and true, is deftly annihilated in favour of the Other’s clangorous crusade of falsehood and performance.

It was not uncommon for people to disapprove of how they appeared in the yearbook. Their tie was askew, their eyes were half-closed, the picture made them too dark, their smile was awkward, anything.

Once, a graduating senior had listed “girls” in his yearbook profile as one of his likes alongside “reading” and some other things. Upon resuming the following session, we talked about it for hours on end, simultaneously shocked and nonplussed. They all liked girls, we knew, but this was fascinating, worthy to be spoken of because of its transgressive honesty and unsuppressible candour. Shoutout to Senior Fawaz.

It was not uncommon for people to disapprove of how they appeared in the yearbook. Their tie was askew, their eyes were half-closed, the picture made them too dark, their smile was awkward, anything. This is no surprise since no one was asked: is this picture okay? Would you like us to publish this the way it is? And when that is, what you have is dissatisfied people who are resentful of how they have been depicted or presented. But then who really thinks of children as people? As a photographer, as every photographer worth his salt does, I know the importance of pausing intermittently, to bridge the distance between my subject and me by showing them what has been taken thus far, the continuity of the shoot dependent on their approval or otherwise.

Partly in line with this basic ethos and mostly as an insistence on agency—or the reclamation of it—is why I have begun this newsletter, this Substack, to present people as they would love to be presented, to use their words as they deem fit, be it for the illumination of things about which they are passionate or to pedestal the mundane they encounter in their passing through the world, their world. This was intended to be a short introductory piece to the newsletter but I think it became, along the line, a way for me to understand this project and ground me firmly in what I have come to regard as the thesis of it.

The newsletter will feature photographs of people, as taken by me, and their words, as said by them. Here is how it is going to work and a thing or two you need to know. I hope to collaboratively build (with you) a thing beautiful, truthful, and embodying unstifled self-expression in the lush field of these electronic pages.

Speaking of pages, as I flipped through those of that yearbook looking at our prepubescent faces, which, despite frozen in different forms of expression, belied underlying attempts at seriousness, I remembered everyone, versions of them that exist only in memory, phantoms from a simpler time now aided by their manifestation as paper objects, remnants of what one could call a luminous year.

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