July, in the sun
Thirteen short videos filmed outside a house in Owerri in a white T-shirt. I wanted a record of me happy, made on purpose, before I left.
Today a friend filmed me. Thirteen clips, five seconds each, on a phone, outside a house on the Nekede side of town with a black car behind me and the sun straight overhead. White T-shirt. Smiling, laughing, waving, arms crossed, hands open, pointing, a shrug, a greeting. No sound. I asked for no sound. I wanted the face, not the voice.
I did it on purpose and I want the purpose written down. When a man like me goes, the pictures that survive are chosen by other people, and other people choose the one by the mango tree from 2018 with me looking at the camera too hard. I wanted something I chose. A man in the sun in his own city, happy, on the record, dated, for whoever needs it later: a boy on a church floor at one in the morning, a mother in a kitchen, me in England in the dark at four in the afternoon.
It took twenty minutes. I laughed for real in at least four of them because my friend kept saying ridiculous things behind the phone. In the last one I am doing the thing with my hands that Mama does when she is telling the war story, and I did not know I did that until I watched it back.
Thirteen clips. Ten weeks to October. Biafra Rising has two hundred pages and Mama's name on the cover. It was a good day in Owerri. I am putting that down as a fact.