Liminal Spaces

It is midnight in 2025. On my study desk are books strewn over: Binyanvanga Wainaina’s How To Write About Africa; Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things; James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time; Richard Powers’ Overstory; Damon Galgut’s The Promise. My lamp pours its incandescent yellow over these books, over my pencil holder stuffed with different kinds of pens, over my flowery-patterned tea cup swirling vapour. I study the lamp: the inside is streaked with rust, the gooseneck stooped further with age. But the light still shines. Effulgently.

My laptop screen is blank white. My mind is a fog. Sentences swirl and dissolve into nothingness. The spirit tries to will, until it doesn’t. The silence in my study is so taut, void of those wary shuffles His tip-toeing made when trying to watch me write. Months have sprawled by, but this insanity, this liminal space, renews itself. He is still here, but He is no longer here.

In my mind’s eye, Seepersad Naipaul appears in the pages of Letters Between Father and Son, writing from Trinidad to his son at Oxford, where Vidia had gone on a government scholarship. Seepersad was a writer himself, and he read his son’s stories with the seriousness of a fellow writer. “I have no doubt whatever that you will be a great writer,” he wrote. I think of the fortune of being believed in this way. Of being given, by another person’s faith, a little more courage to persevere.

In her essay, Some Seasons I Have Known, Kemi Falodun writes: “A thing falls apart to reveal whose labour pillared it.” It is strange: this discovery of how much one has been watered by another person until the watering stops. What drought is this, what thirst is this, for a watering I shall no longer receive?

—

On one of my sporadic WhatsApp calls with O O, we pontificate about our favourite books, trawl through our arid love lives, probe faith, and laugh at life. Before we end the call, O O asks me about my novel; I respond with a long sigh; I say I’m trying hard; he says he cannot wait anyway; I ask about his; he snorts and says his parents are already asking-asking.

In that instant, seized by a wistful sadness, I think of Him.

—

My earliest memories of Him are of coloured pens and sketch pads: Him bringing home books for me, Him listening as I read aloud, Him laughing at the strange stories I made up and asking me to tell them again. There were Enid Blyton and Lewis Carroll, folklore and the stories of his boyhood re-spun for me until they became mine too.

I am six when Fellow Jesus comes to me: in this story, the child is an unheard Narcissus; one day the world is suspended in its bustle, and ends; the child finds out he is Jesus; his friends and siblings who have wronged him grovel before him—this is the end of the story.

I show Him these pages of jagged handwriting and hasty scrawlings of Boy cum Jesus, washed with gleeful pride; together we read them, pointing at sentences, at drawings. The next day, He brings me a pack of pencils, coloured pens, and a sketchpad, and says, “Keep writing and keep showing me.”

—

I am eight in Primary Four when Mrs. Evelyn says I write the best composition essays in class. Mrs. Evelyn, the Ghanaian teacher who ehs and ahs her ors. Cherch. Werk. Brathar. Sisteh. Ancle. Mathar.

On the chalkboard, she writes: Write to your father telling him how your holiday went; Write an essay that ends with All That Glitters Is Not Gold; You just moved to a new city, write a letter to your best friend telling him about what you like and what you miss.

I score 9 out of 10 in most, the missing mark almost always for uneven punctuation here and there. Mrs. Evelyn tells Him I am bad at Math but unparalleled at English; she says to watch my performance in each assessment. To do something about that math.

Mr. Obodo—the wispy-bearded Lesson Teacher who taught my sisters Quadratic Equation and prepared my brother for Tertiary Exams—resumes teaching me Math. Fraction. Algebra. Decimals. Ratio (which I call Rat Ten).

He’s progressing so slowly, Mr. Obodo tells Him, shaking his head.

He says, That’s not what he likes, but let us keep trying.

—

It’s the morning of Christmas Eve and He arrives home with a haul of second-hand books. Into The Water. Diary of A Wimpy Kid. Anne Frank. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Chronicles of Narnia.

When Ogbuefi and I were clearing some cars at the port, we found these books. Two women wanted to share them between themselves, but I told them I was taking them home for my son. They let me have them, He says to me as I inhale the must of their pages.

Later, I will read Diary of a Wimpy Kid, struck by how Jeff Kinney can make the small, absurd dramas of boyhood feel worthy of a book. It will occur to me for the first time that stories do not always have to begin with the extraordinary.

—

It’s prefectship election season. N and I are running for the Deputy Head Boy position. Before my manifesto interview, I rehearse and study hard for probable questions: current affairs, school history, leadership techniques. I memorize quotes from Henry David Thoreau. On the D-day, in the presence of stern-faced teachers and senior staff, I begin my speech, responding to questions flung at me, dissecting each one carefully.

Weeks later, when prefects are announced, I am not the Deputy Head Boy. N is. My stomach clutches; I can scarcely breathe. The sound of clapping and cheering seems to me like scraping fingers on a chalkboard. Like dragging wooden desks on terrazos.

Later, the history teacher says, Oh, you’re really smart but they think you’re so soft for the role.

When I return home crying that evening, He holds me to his chest saying Ndo, Ndo. Don’t mind them. When I am done crying but still gloomy, He says, You can make this a story like your other stories. Write about it.

—

In 2018 He comes home from work with a lamp. A shiny black lamp that blazes yellow.

No more rechargeable lanterns; use this instead for your night reading and writing, He tells me.

—

2019. Adichie is my new fixation. The new recommendation from Ms. Oge, my literature teacher in senior school. Adichie’s sentences are predominantly long, winding, crisp. Her stories are saying something I recognize but cannot name. Months before, He and I were walking past bookshops, looking for Purple Hibiscus, until we found a smiling man who had the last copy.

I watch her interviews from time to time. In one, she speaks about the danger of a single story, about the violence of allowing one account of a people to harden into the account of who they are. I am in love with that eloquent Nigerian contralto with which she speaks. I try to speak like her. At night, I conjure interviews in my head. On some nights He catches me talking to myself, he sniggers. He says don’t worry you’ll be like her. Even better. Even bigger.

In the following weeks, each trip to the bookshop with Him will introduce me to Achebe, Nwapa, Soyinka, Cole, Wainaina, Ekwensi, Emecheta, Okri, and so on. My own people. Slowly, my sensibilities will begin to resemble theirs, as Blyton and Carroll quietly take their leave.

—

It’s early 2020, and the pandemic has shut us off from the rest of the world. I am reading and writing. More than ever. He stores packs of Lipton and mint gums in my study.

For night reading and writing. From time to time He tiptoes into my study, watching me, saying well done.

In the mornings I wake up in my room, swaddled in my blanket.

You fell asleep while writing, so I carried you to the room and covered you, He says.

—

Each publication comes with a cheer: Nwakịbeya, no one can do it like you. This is great work. What does punctilious mean. Ị na-asụ nnukwu Bekee!

When I win a prize, He shares my work with all his friends; He says, Oh I’m proud, so proud. My son is a writer.

—

It is mid-2023, and I am working on a short story about Biafra. One evening, I ask Him, Can you tell me what happened in Ibadan before your father took you guys to Enugu when the war began?

Ah, I have a meeting tomorrow. I won’t be home, He says.

The next morning, He is seated on the raven three-seater settee. I’m staying back because of you. Sit down. Let me tell you the story.

—

Christmas in 2023. He is supine on the hospital bed. Nearly lifeless. Before the doctor says it, I know that the stroke has permanently altered him, that things are taking new shapes, bending into new forms. He will now live in the orbit of his senses, largely oblivious to the external world.

—

It is 2025, and my days are blackened with episodes. Here is a picture: a little boy in the dark, looking for his father, weeping.

I yearn for the Vast, Immense Yesterday. This ground I walk on is now unsteady, filled with stumbling blocks. Memorying is my only solace, but I fail sometimes.

As I watch the bent gooseneck of the lamp in my study, somewhere in my head, He is saying, Keep writing and keep showing me. And I think to myself: but I must try to write, in this new life, without Him holding my hand.

The lamp still shines. I begin a sentence.

Chinonso Nzeh is Igbo first, then a creative writer and photojournalist. His work explores the intricacies of the human condition and has appeared or is forthcoming in Evergreen Review, Isele Magazine, Agbowó, The Shallow Tales Review, Ibadan Arts, Marókó Journal of African Poetry, Bounce Net, Witsprout Anthology, Sevhage Anthology, and elsewhere. He is a prose reader at Beaver Magazine and an editorial assistant at Black Boy Review. In 2023, his essay The Slipping Away won the Isele Prize for Nonfiction. In 2024, he was a runner-up for the Sevhage Prize for Nonfiction. He is a law undergraduate at the University of Lagos.