Reaching back to twelve year old me, pulling signification from three years ago, sifting a once-felt feeling through the sieve of memory. My body is mourning this distance by fragmenting. Sometimes I walk in the street and hear my name in a crowd, the name only my father calls me by. But now here, many land and sea miles from home, I hear soundscapes.
They didn’t haunt me when I moved from Ketu to Ikorodu, another residential location in Lagos. When I wake, I wonder why these sounds come to me. Blared from megaphones, uttered in Yoruba. A sound tied to the landscape dwelled in childhood. In my sleep, I hear the low thrum of the mosque’s call for evening prayers. It is indescribable too, that airy feeling you wake with in the first few months in a new land. It is different from travelling somewhere for a vacation, or any other sort of temporary encounter with a foreign land. To start, planting a question to dive deeper into the implication of movement: to move from here, what happens there? After? It is easy to underestimate the schism-a product of migrating from a familiar geography to a new one-since it isn’t a change marked visible on the body. To look back means to not take for granted such a shift.
Fragmentation here is framed through a psychogeographical lens speaking to how the brain and heart is connected to geography. Too lucid to deny, once at home, I realize I was wrong. I bend with my hands on my kneecaps to heave out a heavy breath. The cold ejects me forcefully from this induced trance. I am at once here and there, in New York and Nigeria. A particular memory dilates: a rainy day, legs astride the back seat, body bobbing up and down due to the slippery bumpy road of Ondo street, heading back to my residence in Ebute Metta. Caught in a split, in a street in New York and transported back to the city of Lagos, to days of riding Okadas. Overwhelming wistful waves invade my body I realize I am reliving a moment from the past. Right after the light indicates “walk,” my legs cease to move. Somewhere in Brooklyn, I am waiting for the lights to cross over. No, I say, it doesn’t feel like I left Lagos yet. asks, Have you started feeling homesick yet? I consider the question for a truthful response. Leg-shuttling toward 23rd Street Station for the F train, I’m preoccupied with thoughts from an evening class. The body is always active in the process of staying alive. Fragmentation as a continuous state of being might affect the stability of identity and rootedness, generating a loose feeling of homelessness and ennui.Īfter six months of living in New York, I take a sustained glance, a look back: A wholly bodily state with nodes connecting in and across tangible and intangible things, time and geographies. Fragmentation is a condition of being two or more.