The first book
The Path to God went up on Amazon today under the name Jay. A devotional, first, before any of the others. This is why.
It is on Amazon. The Path to God, seven steps, a hundred and sixty-four pages, paperback, by Jay Nwaorisa. I pressed the button at the internet café by the market at eleven this morning and it appeared, with a price in dollars, in a shop that reaches every country on earth, and I sat and looked at it for the price of an hour of café.
People will ask why this one first. Why a gay man from Owerri with three manuscripts full of police stations and clinics and doors puts up, before any of them, a plain Christian devotional under a nickname.
Because it is true. Because the faith is the thing that kept me alive on the floor at E.'s uncle's and under the stain and on the bench with the malaria poster, and I wanted it on the record first, on its own, before anyone could say the other books were written by a man who had turned against God. I have not. I wrote this one the way I pray: plainly, in order, for whoever is tired.
Jay, because it is what my friends call me, and because I wanted to see what it was like to have my name on something in this city and still be able to walk to the market. The other books will have the whole name. They are coming. In a country where a book is only a book.