Art is My World, Not an Escape
Why I wrote Face Me I Face You as it is…
I have always been an artistic person for as long as I can remember. I grew up in well-decorated houses with artworks hung on the walls, mini figurines on tables, live-size paintings and sculptures in our compound. From my maternal side, it is the language. It is difficult to not be enchanted by the mouthy and musical Yoruba that my Ijebu grandmother (Alhaja) spoke when she gave us gist about family, neighbors, friends, and the enemies the lord could love. My mother’s timely and periodic sarcasm, in combination with this inheritance from Alhaja could not have been better. Any African child knows better than to put something on their mother’s head when, for example, you ask them where to put a dirty dish, and they say, “Put it on my head.” So, if you’re wondering where my sharp sarcasm, the always-present characters and stadium of audience inside my head came from, there you go… I find delight from the inescapable reminder that art is present everywhere and an even more beautiful world when interacted with.
There is a Yoruba saying, “Eni to ba monu ro, a mope da,” whoever knows how to think will know how to be grateful. In hindsight, despite how tangled my creative journey has been, I see how God orchestrated it perfectly. Senior Secondary School 1 (SSS1), aka Grade 10, was my first exposure and attempt at writing poetry and picking up a poetry collection to read (willingly). After years of pressure from watching Ife, my older sister read books of punishable sizes with ease and side-eyeing books that littered my father’s bedside, I finally picked up a book by Jeri Angel Knox titled I Must Share that My Brother May Live. Of course, my only motivation to attempt reading that book was its flimsy size, the smallest of all the options I could find while digging through the dusty bookshelf in the living room. I was motivated to finish reading the book because of its engaging simplicity and quite frankly, reading books makes one look like a “serious child.”
In SS2 (Grade 11), I took a Fine Arts class, and the most humbling description of that experience is giving a toddler with poor motor skills a xylophone. Desperate to find a means to express myself, I tried my hands at everything I was offered, from using yarn to design a banner size of the school’s logo to painting, doodling, pencil drawing, tie and dye, crocheting, and more. Mr. Yemi Olawale, our fine arts teacher, was kind enough to hand me a spare key to the fine arts lab, and I would often go there to escape everyone and everything.
Simultaneously, I enjoyed our literature classes taught by Mr. CJ Njoku (in blessed memory), whom I referred to as Caliban Jack (an inside joke from reading the 1954 book, Lord of the Flies by William Golding). To date, I still don’t know what that book is about, but I remember clearly hating the experience of reading it and feeling unequipped to envision the author’s British imagination. Mr. CJ encouraged my poetry, and we would spend endless office hours exchanging poems and mercilessly criticizing each other’s work. He never hesitated to bring things down to my level while learning the complicated aspects of literature. It was no surprise that after getting lost in books bit by bit, I was offered the Library Prefect position in SS3, my final year of high school.
As a quiet rebel, my first order of business in lovingly terrorizing the school authorities was to redesign the school library. During my tenure, I requested that the withering wooden and plywood bookshelves be changed to something that could last longer. I also ensured that new and entertaining books replaced a few old ones students no longer enjoyed. I may not have been the smartest kid academically but seeing the outcome of the library by the time of my graduation was a chip on my shoulder. Especially as an art student fulfilling this dream, you couldn’t tell me anything about my poor grades in the sciences; biology could kiss my behind for all I cared.
The worst chaos of my creative journey, like for many developing African writers, was when it was time to choose what to study at the University level upon relocating to the United States. After almost 8-months of interrogation from well-meaning family members and adults, I finally settled to study Psychology instead of the Creative Writing I really wanted. My plan, like Chimamanda Adichie’s (when she studied medicine), was to eventually become a psychiatrist and use my patient’s stories as material for my vengeful dreams of becoming a best-selling author just to stick my childish tongue at the doubting Thomases of my life. I stubbornly was going to become a writer regardless of what anyone advised, even if it were a broke and jobless one.
One of my most memorable courses while studying Psychology at Bronx Community College that affirmed my delusion was Abnormal Psychology (yes, all the puns of my life are intended). This course was taught by a much-disliked professor named Rafael Mendez. He was not many students’ cup of tea because of his unconventional and unserious teaching methods. I didn’t care; I was just happy to learn one more thing that could be useful in negotiating stories out of the patients in my future psych ward and the noisy characters inside my head. While I left that class with a half-empty head, it was from Rafael’s course that I picked up one of the most impacting and surprisingly entertaining poetry collections I’ve ever read – Knots by R.D Liang. From Knots, I began to see the practical importance of art to life and mental health. This professor, Rafael Mendez, is also known for his 4Ps of psychology and therapy: performance, play, pretend, and philosophizing. I recall in one of our class sessions, the task for the whole period was to act a mental illness while the audience guessed what it was. Of course, I did Kleptomania because your girl wasn’t about to let one class make her lose a perfect GPA.
As I read through the final version of my book Face Me I Face You, I realized in hindsight, what art had done for me in the past 10 -12 years. Art eased the burden of my consciousness about everything else. It is a privilege to have the power of specific imagination and a more immense blessing to hand it to someone else to experience through the right choices of words. Reading Knots by R.D Liang allowed me to see that poetry and whatever is demanded of its delivery didn’t need to be difficult to be profound, have thoughtful meaning, or make an impact. If anything, art is essential to help people perform, play, pretend, and philosophize amidst a choiceless existence and the chaos of our world.
Face Me I Face You, while on the surface, permits you to interact with the accurate panel of judges, fellow co-debaters, and timekeeper inside my head, has been a teachable journey to my artistry. The manuscript, which was first collated about 4 years ago, has transformed in so many ways; half its size has been lost to intensive revisions guided by my awesome thesis advisors at American University (David Keplinger and Kyle Dargan), and over 13 characters have been fired from their imaginary roles with the help of my Saturday co-conspirators (readers) on Instagram, who identified the strongest personalities with their engaging comments. The book’s title has changed at different stages, from “Halima’s Diary” when I started to embrace my unserious personality to “Love for Breakfast” when one boy broke my heart to “Face to Face” while facing grad school shege and finally “Face Me I Face You.”
It’s very conventional for people to say, “Art is their escape,” but that’s not true for me. Art is my world and reality (in the doom of a capitalist society). Art is my world; from the music of Alhaja’s Ijebu accent to my mother’s daring sarcasm, the live sculptures (of an elephant, peacock, and woman carrying a basket on her head) in our compound, to paintings, poetry, and everything else. Art is the world, not an alternative, exception, option, or exclusion. Everything in creation and our daily existence is art if one is curious and attentive enough. For many artists like me, “being realistic” has been a perfect excuse for so long to escape the scary responsibility of our calling and playful imagination, especially when there is no guarantee of success. But as the world is, I have learned that there is really no guarantee of anything, even when you play your life safely. There are so many forgettable achievements I have had in the real world that wouldn’t compare to the memorable joy of my worst failure as an artist.
Reading the final version and oddly enjoying Face Me I Face You as I hope my readers would, I know the laughter these characters, stories, and poems have brought me. In my world, Face Me I Face You, your only responsibility as a reader is to observe and be entertained. I also dare my readers to welcome a little delusion and to throw away all their belief about what we’ve been told of art (as a second born to the “real” world), poetry (as this impossible genre understand, enjoy, or even sell), and creative writing (as an “unfruitful” position in our world). Poetry, to me, as I have offered you in Face Me I Face You, is not far-fetched from anything we are already familiar with.
As I let this book off to the world in good faith, I imagine God, the master artist, has a good sense of humor by creating me as I am with a constant chaos of characters and voices inside my head and very graciously gifting my non-confrontational introvert self the vision to write a book titled Face Me I Face You.
