Firstborns raised in Nigerian homes have an albatross hanging from their necks. You can call it a sense of responsibility. In a sense, it is spirited selflessness or performative generosity—the kind that is rewarded early in life to shape you into a surrogate parent. You are chastised when you approach life as a sole individual.
If your parents are successful in their programming, you are thoroughly indoctrinated into the big brother/sister persona by the time you are a teenager. This, of course, has its merits. But then, there are downsides, too. One is an effusive ego that obliterates boundaries, searching for people to save. Call it a saviour complex, an affliction that I still suffer from.
It is at the core of my humanity to support others, often at my detriment. I went through my 20s, undiagnosed. I went about unknowingly soliciting for people to support. My home was a youth camp filled with strays, mostly troubled writers or aspiring creatives, the kind with enormous potential and little discipline.
They make for good company. They make stimulating dialogue that often creeps into the night, powered by alcohol, smoke, and good music. If the night is a shroud for making bad choices, there have been many nights when I stared into Lagos skies from a ramshackle beer parlour and made choices that have haunted me to this day.
In retrospect, I was naive. My naivete was that the love of literature meant the love for humanity, that loving literature instils one with good values, and that being curious about culture was all it took. If you wrote competently, I was swooning, begging to buy beers. I sometimes forget how much influence I wielded at the time. There were no barriers around me. I did not realise I was an easy target, made vulnerable by my preoccupation with literature.
Perhaps it was my background outside the arts. As a doctor obsessed with writing, perhaps I was subconsciously grateful that I had been let in the door. Maybe I could not believe my luck and became too effusive, in the way firstborns are after they have been rewarded for a cause.
I admit I was a bit lost. I desperately wanted to write, and I had been handed this medical degree, which felt like an impediment to a literary career. Sometimes, I read the poems in Clinical Blues, and I am pleasantly surprised that I was sure I would not practice medicine fifteen years ago. Back to that gratitude that I felt for the communion in literary communities and spaces, it was not a lack of merit as a writer, it was because I desperately wanted to belong.
I soon found myself in bad company. I was desperately searching for mentorship and found myself in the company of older writers whose values and worldviews differ from mine. At the time, their view was alluring. They were cool, worldly men with a sense of style and a deft turn of phrase. They had book deals and fine day jobs. They spent their night in airy bars, listening to live music and blowing smoke into the night. They drew beautiful women, too. That hedonist lifestyle was so storied in the writing that I enjoyed. I felt like a character in a book. Think Amusa Sango in Ekwensi’s People of the City.
I wish I could tell you that I received some kind of mentorship, that my writing improved, that I learned how to spin a sinuous sentence or master the elegant turn of phrase, and that the company I kept made me become a better writer. I will say I am a ‘better’ writer despite that company.
I vowed not to become a bad mentor, but that is another story.
