we spoke first by phone. back then, she went by taiye tuakli-wosornu and wrote an article in which she coined the now popular term afropolitan. at the time i was online editor of brooklyn-based the african magazine and called asking her to contribute. she laughed a lot, like me, and loved to talk, so we spent over an hour on the phone discussing a range of things--africa, writing, fashion (she worked on a clothing line with her sis), and how difficult it was to do what one loved for money.

it turned out we had a lot of friends in common as is typical among african graduates of ivy league schools. and at the end of the call, i felt like i'd made a new friend or, at least, had found another kindred spirit to momentarily quell the loneliness i sometimes feel on this spinning orb. we never did work together on the magazine, but we spoke again years later when taiye worked for news anchor carlos watson. he was looking for editors and writers for a fledgling website, the stimulist, and i was interested. at the time, i was a freelance editor looking for my next gig.

when taiye and i met in person, on the pent floor of carlos's building in midtown manhattan, she was much the same person i'd met on the phone--talkative, creative, brilliant, with a sharp wit and ready smile. and she was also gorgeous. stunning. so much so that i was convinced we were destined to forever inhabit different worlds. although clearly basking in the shadow of another man's glory, she seemed so sure of herself, so purposeful. and when we parted ways with a promise to touch bases once the project moved forward, i sincerely hoped we would.

it didn't materialize in that way. though carlos started the stimulist, it ultimately folded, and i heard taiye was off doing something else creative somewhere else while i got a job at a film company, and began a two-year stint of my own professional basking. and now to see/hear of the sex lives of african girls, her debut work of fiction in the summer edition of granta, and to meet her again in an interview (see clip below), i am happy for her. sincerely. but i also get that nagging feeling in my chest that i should have reached there too, by now.

it isn't good to compare oneself with others, and i rarely do it at all, let alone in public, but i just can't help it right now. having recently finished the fidelity workshop, i feel a fire in my belly to finish something. anything. and to publish it. if only so that my words need not be relegated to my notebook or this blog forever. i have been writing for at least eight years, and in earnest for the last five. but it is only recently, within the last year, that i have begun owning my own time and mind and have been writing like mad. so i'm still not done. not done. and it can be hard, at times, to plod on and on with no end in sight.

there was something helon said that stuck in my brain, which was, 'you have to really want it.' it's the same thing one of my friends told me when i said i was leaving film school (for the second time). you have to really want it. and i do now--all of it. life, love, work, writing, film. and i'm not waiting anymore. will simply keep moving, writing, until fatigue or death claims me. --AL.



p.s. i have gotten two requests in the past three weeks to be featured on two different web sites. i said yes simply because i have lived a life of saying no, of waiting for the perfect moment to arrive. but i'm beginning to realize that there is no perfect moment; there is only now.

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One of my favorite online literary mags has a piece up by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It has been published before under different cover.

I won't comment, lest I be accused of bemoaning my literary failures again, but one of the passages really tickled me. Like the protagonist, I also sport dreadlocks and refuse to eat meat. ;)

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Excerpt from Quality Street, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
guest-edited by Claire Messud

...Perhaps Sochienne should never have been sent to school in America. But who knew a private university in Ohio would mean that Sochienne would return six years later, announcing that she was engaged to a Kenyan, refusing to eat meat, asking the baffled houseboys about fair wages, and wearing her hair in long rubbery dreadlocks. What should have alerted Mrs. Njoku, she realized now, was discovering, on her first visit to her daughter’s university, that the students wore bathroom slippers to their lectures. Oh, mummy, they are wearing sandals because of this rare blast of warm weather, Sochienne said when she pointed it out, as though giving bathroom slippers the American label of sandals would make them more respectable. There was, also, a certain alarming sloppiness to the students. Mrs. Njoku had been assured that wealthy Americans sent their children there—the outrageous tuition certainly suggested that—but here were young people in slouchy T-shirts and discolored beads around their necks. Still, she had not worried too much about her daughter then, nor did she in the following years, because she assumed that the child she raised would retain her good sense. She had wanted Sochienne to be educated in England after completing primary school and had suggested that they send her to Cheltenham Ladies College, where many of their friends sent their daughters, but her husband said Sochienne would not go abroad until university because he did not want her to turn out like those Akindele children who had spent so long in England that they referred to fellow Nigerians as “those people.” He wanted his daughter to attend secondary school in Nigeria so that she would know who she was. Most of all, he wanted her to get an American university education. America was the future. It was time for Nigerians to get over their colonial clinging. Mrs. Njoku should have resisted more. If only her husband were alive now to see what Sochienne had become; so much for knowing who she was...