The Day Ends Like Any Day by Timothy Ogene

Author:Timothy Ogene
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Holland House
Published: 2017-06-15T08:42:29+00:00

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To write a memoir is to paint the past. Each drop of memory is a brush stroke, the paint making intended and unintended patterns on canvas; the result a presumed replica of the past.

Those were my assumptions when I started working on this book. I also assumed that memory would always be there to scoop from. It would always be available, abundant, and waiting to be laid on my canvas. And the final piece must, to be worth the effort, form an aesthetically coherent whole, a text that one can explore. I am thinking of texts like Hemmingway’s A Moveable Feast here, where scenes evoke and historicize streets and faces, making them touchable, making them leap from the page and assume presence. Now you are at Place Contrescape; and there, on the page—no, at a corner—is the Café des Amateurs, and you are a breath away from ’the drunkards of the quarter’ who congregate there, whose collective stench is that ‘of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness’. You are moving through the book and can feel your feet moving about the city, beholding it as though through a gallery, each street and café carefully accounted for on canvas.

Edward Burra. His Paris paintings. His Harlem paintings. You look at his works and do not see the images but the places they immortalize, the moods therein, the moments captured as they were, not exact reality but approximations that ring familiar bells, that draw you in… That, I believe, is what good writing should also do. Burra’s own life is what good writing should read like: elusive but looming somewhere on the horizon, rejecting conventions yet aware of their existence, gathering and documenting the dark side of society, alive but always dying, in the moment yet retrospective and forward looking.

Confident that I would fetch words to reconstruct my childhood, to historicize the faces and places that have shaped my worldview, I slammed a deadline on myself. The goal was to celebrate a first draft in December. A first draft! How lovely. The idea of holding that draft, a thick collection of loose leafs containing my young life, made me giddy and conjured images of renowned writers hunched over a bunch of papers—Wole Soyinka over the manuscript of Aké, Amos Tutuola over a draft of The Palm-Wine Drinkard—grinning and drinking to the fruit of their labour.

I imagined Georges Perec, a cigarette in hand, admiring loose leafs containing the first draft of W, or the Memory of Childhood. Smiling, he randomly picks a leaf and reads aloud, ‘From this point on, there are memories—fleeting, persistent, trivial, burdensome—but there is nothing that binds them together.’ He picks up a pen, cancels a line down the page and returns it to the pile.

The first draft! How did Italo Calvino react to the first draft of Invisible City? Well, they all do the same thing: push back on their chairs, stare intently at the resting pile, and then randomly snatch and read out a page. ‘When a man rides a long time through wild regions’, Calvino reads, ‘he feels the desire for a city.

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