Self-knowing is not an endgame but a lifetime journey. Handel composed Messiah (the most renowned of his works) when he thought his life was over.
I was invited to moderate a poetry slam organized by the African Department of Vienna’s head a few years back. I was introduced as a writer, of course. After the event, a student came up to me and asked how I became a writer when I started to write and if I’d always known that I would be a writer. ‘What is writing to you?’ she concluded.
I could have gone into a long, rambling answer. But my inquisitive fan was not the only person waiting to speak to me. ‘Writing is my therapist,’ I’d answered.
‘You mean your therapy?’ She said, correcting what she assumed was a grammatical error. I shook my head and smiled. ‘No, my therapist.’ The student had looked at me with a blank expression. She didn’t understand. I did not blame her.
Sometimes, knowledge of the self is discovered in the pursuit of a hobby.
I did not discover writing. Writing discovered me. Or rather, as I like to put it, writing was given to me by my Maker to heal me. That is why it began more as a joy thing than a career. Let me explain.
Under my uncle’s roof, my love for books had soon led to my experimenting with writing. It started with poetry and quickly blossomed into prose when I realized that writing down some of the things that made me feel sad made me feel better. Soon, that became my secret joy. The minute everyone fell asleep when I wasn’t hiding under the bed to read, I scribbled away on paper pieces. I wrote about my pain, I wrote about my sadness, I wrote about my yearning to be loved, and the tears I cried alone at night. Sometimes my writings were like prayers, a wish that the next day wouldn’t be hard, that I would not be hit by my cousins, spat on by their mother or have my mother cursed by both. Sometimes my writings were more negotiations than prayers — if Aunty has to hit me, please not outside where other people will witness my humiliation. And sometimes they were petitions: for the grace to remember to do all the tasks I was assigned and do them so thoroughly, Aunty would have no cause to complain. Above all, the things I scribbled down were Cinderella-like fantasies. I wrote about my hope of being discovered by a boy who would look at me like I was the most beautiful person on earth, a boy who would then tell the whole world that I was the only one for him. Without me, his life would be meaningless. In retrospect, it was more a cry to feel validated than anything else. Those scribblings sustained my sanity. Whenever I was sad, so sad it felt like my heart would explode, I took a piece of paper and a pen and furiously wrote down my feelings. And suddenly, I would feel better, as if something heavy had been lifted off of me.
I never kept my writings or showed them to anyone. Firstly, I did not want to risk getting into trouble. To ensure they didn’t fall into Aunty’s hands, I would tear up the paper pieces and push them down the bottom of the kitchen dustbin. Secondly, I was afraid of being mocked by my cousins. If they knew I was writing stories and poems, it would have become another arsenal in their toolbox of things with which to torment and poke fun at me.
Because I looked at penning down those words as a hobby, I never took it seriously. It took the combined words of three individuals to make me see writing as something that could become a career.
After my relocation to Austria, the first happened when a lecturer at the university I was studying for my first degree threatened to disqualify my paper. We’d been asked to write a made-up story based on the historical happenings during World War I. My account was well-written; it appeared because the lecturer thought I’d copied it from somewhere. I was taken aback, not to mention upset, by the accusations of plagiarism. Rather than try to convince this professor that I wasn’t lying, I had taken a pen and paper out of my bag and asked him to point at or pick anything on his desk. I would write a complete story around that — right in front of him. That ended the accusations well and truly. Sometime later, one of my poems was considered for publication in a major journal in the U.S because of that lecturer. Soon after our ‘confrontation’, he’d began to mentor me. And ended up recommending me to a writer friend of his back in the States. By this time, I was no longer throwing away my poems, so I had a notebook full of poetry, which was how a sister of a dear friend, an international speaker, happened upon them. The lady said she began all of her speeches by reciting a poem. When her sister told her I wrote poetry, this lady had asked to see it. ‘This is very good; why are you sitting on this?’ She exclaimed when she began reading. When I still looked unconvinced, she asked for my laptop and spent the entire three days of her visits typing up my poems. ‘This is to show you that I wasn’t flattering you. Your voice is powerful. It would help if you brushed them up a bit, of course. But your poems are beautiful, so full of feelings. You should consider taking up writing as a serious venture.’
Dearest Hafsat Abiola-Costello (nee Moshood Gbadamosi Abiola), thank you very much for that day long ago in Vienna. You will never know what your single act of validation did to a young woman trying to find herself.
The third time writing was again proposed to me as a potential career was when my daughter (about 13 years old at the time) turned to me one day in frustration and said. ‘Mom, how is it you use such amazing words when you write, but you often struggle to find the right words when you speak — why not simply write?’ At this time, I’d just completed the first of my two-year MBA program with The Open University. Seeing the bemusement on her face, I did another 360-degree change right there and then (story of my life, right?) and began a creative writing course. The rest, as they say, is history.
It is never over until it is over!
And today, here I am, actually writing for a living — someone who was told daily that she was stupid and useless. The ironies of life, right?
