BEGIN AGAIN is a series of A+ personal essays running in the first half of November 2023 where writers were asked to explore a transition, a move, grief, a breakup, repeating patterns or breaking patterns, cycles and rebirth, remaking yourself, or laying out plans for the future while standing in the ashes of something you thought was forever. And wow, how they responded. We hope you enjoy these vulnerable, sensitive, always deep but sometimes surprisingly funny works, and we’re grateful for your support that allows us to continue to publish new work from our community. These essays and paying queer and trans writers for their work are things that are made possible by A+ members like you. Queer media isn’t free to make, and we’re now and always grateful that you’re an A+ member.

-Nico

This morning there are birds singing outside my window. The fuschia-pink flowers are being pollinated. It’s not raining today. There are two seasons in Nigeria: Dry Season also known as Harmattan, and Rainy Season. I wish “Rainy Season” had a more interesting name but ever so often here, things are called just as they are. Two nights ago, I thought the roof would collapse under the weight of rain and tremors from thunder. The ceiling in the kitchen is leaking, so occasionally you’ll hear a “…thunk,” like the water considered its fall before landing. I often think about the life of water. It’s hard to avoid in Lagos, Nigeria. The flooding is worse in some areas than others. In the Oniru area, streets turn into a canal. On Third Mainland Bridge, the rain causes the cars to stand still or run too fast depending on the day.

Today, there’s no water running through the toilet system of the apartment. I look in the mirror, I feel small in big ways. There is a man-made storm on the roof. There are probably three men up there but it sounds like 50. Today is a good day to mend the roof. This flat is on the highest floor so when it pours, there’s no separation between me and the sky. When it pours it beats down the worn roof. I assume the building is an early postcolonial one, with its sentiments of colonial ethic. It’s falling apart, now, slowly but surely. The men working above are a testament to that. They pound, and bits of cement pour onto the ground. A sheet of metal cascades over the balcony, bobbing up and down like an uncertain angel before it chooses up. The sun is shining. It’s not raining today.

According to Toni Morrison, “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” If water holds memory, which one brought me back to Lagos?

I wasn’t born here, like more than half of the city’s 15,946,000, I’m a Lagos transplant.
In 2006, I am 10 years old, part of the city’s contestable population of 8,048,430. I’m fresh from Atlanta, Georgia, and while I like the way the brown school uniform sits on my body, I wish it wouldn’t frame my figure so much. I want to hide the parts of myself that stand out in contrast to the other brown-uniformed-kids, whether boy or girl. I want to be flat, unreadable, straight, narrow. I don’t want to bend or curve but don’t have control over what my body is becoming. I drop a piece of blue-lined paper (the kind with red margin lines), folded many times, into the plastic bin of the class next door. In the bathroom, I enter the last stall. The bathroom smells of Izol. It’s still early in the day so it isn’t putrid yet. I wait. The door creaks. Leather cortinas walk softly until they reach the last stall. I open the door before she knocks, and we grin victoriously before locking the door behind us. Her breath is louder than mine, or maybe my memory didn’t register anything other than that sound. We kiss. This time it’s longer. This time I feel butterflies. My memory registers this as the first time.

By 2050 Lagos (might) be underwater. The city’s infrastructure is no match for the rising sea levels (yet). (All these parentheses because I still have hope for this city, allegedly forsaken). It’s August 2023, and water has flooded the terracotta tiles on the balcony. I can see what underwater looks like, it’s pretty but I don’t want it. Does Lagos experience tsunamis? I google this, knowing the answer. No. But why? It pours so heavily, so directly that it seems like the whole city will drown in the belly of the storm. But they don’t. People walk through the waist-high aftermath of the rainstorm. Taxis grumble as they make their way out of potholes turned swimming pools.

In 2001, I’m 6 years old, and for the first time, I learn disappointment. It’s my birthday, a pool party at a local community playground. My cousin is visiting and I’m jealous because he has formed a bond with a girl who I later learn that I have a crush on. It’s alright because it’s my pool party and I can sulk if I want to. It’s okay because I’m a child and we’re easily distracted by cake, by the grass that clings to the fabric of our clothes, by the Lagos heat, by mosquitos, by water. But there is no water in the pool because my father didn’t tell management to fill it. According to my mother, this was his one responsibility. I’m 6 years old. My swimsuit clings to my skin under the heat, under the pink dress that I perform girlhood in.

It’s 2015, and I’m 20 years old, and the same sunken feeling — the one I got when I was 6 years old and looking at the dry blue tiles occupied by grass and plastic bags at my pool party — is present. I’m at the beach in Toronto and the water doesn’t carry the same bravado that the ocean I’d seen in Lagos did. Woodbine Beach is soft and graceful where the waters of Tarkwa Bay were rough and playful. Regardless, I am thankful for an expanse of water. Besides, Lagos was so long ago, 10 years ago, maybe this memory was filtered by nostalgia (false). I’m on a date with a woman visiting from Europe, my first date with a woman. The water is calm and I try and fail to match its steady rhythm as I listen to her talk about her queer adventures, as I hide that this is my first queer experience as an adult. We walk into the water, she kisses me. We lose each other’s numbers and she sifts in and out of memory.

Dry season is coming / is here/ is in that in-between of neither here nor there. They are fixing roads that formed rivers due to potholes and overflowing gutters. It’s better to get the roads done during dry season because the rain won’t get in the way. But it rained last night and the electricity went out and didn’t come back until the next time I woke up without sweat. In a few weeks, it will be a year since I moved to Lagos. In a letter to a friend, I write about the love I don’t have for Lagos (like how every driver believes they’re a NASCAR racer or how vegetarianism is reduced to a myth here) and how I find myself explaining all this so I don’t seem like a fool with a bad lover. Lagos is a good lover too; with sweet words, delivered promises of adventure, a solid gaze.

In 2021, I’m 26 years old in a 3-star airport hotel room in Lagos, with a woman I met online. I later learn that I love her, like a discovery. We do our chart readings and it makes sense to me that on that first night, it flowed like water without blockage. Like it remembered. We’re made of the same water, she has the same Cancer moon and Pisces Venus.

In 1999, I am 4, and there is a cousin-nanny-aunt bathing me with those plastic buckets that merge into and out of many colours, with waves that go from purple to orange to blue. When she brushes my teeth, she squeezes my jaw tight in her calloused palm. Through clenched teeth, she mutters words that I can only remember now as a knot in my stomach and faint pain on my gums. In the bathtub, I submerge my head inside, eyes wide open. You like water too much. Here, under the water, her voice is distant, faraway. Later, the softer cousin-aunt-nanny tells me about a river in her village that is benevolent to its people but swallows outsiders with indifference.

In September of 2023, I’m in Osogbo, Osun State, a sleepy city miles and miles away from Lagos, which is always awake. Already, I start to yearn for the familiarity of Lagos’s buoyant energy, faces that I know, cafes that are bars and bars that are clubs, and the Atlantic Ocean. I end up at a shrine for a water goddess. The tour guide is amused at my unsettledness. Its roots are in my Christian upbringing and in the synchronicities that keep bringing me to water. My friends are documenting the sacred environment with cameras, as I take in the expanse of tall trees and silence. I make eye contact with a man by the river. He approaches me and tells me he’s a priest of the goddess and asks for my name and number. I give my name but decline to give him the number. In the night, I dream of water and dancing worshippers.

To get to Tarkwa Bay Beach, you take a 15-minute boat ride from a marina across the water, then pass some menacing military men on the coast before you reach the shores of the beach. Unlike most of the other public beaches in the city, it hasn’t been privatised enough to be demarcated by class divides. Last June, on the ride back to a partner’s flat, two police officers stop our Uber, waving a dim flashlight to illuminate our bodies as they separated faster than the speed of light. You have to be fast so you don’t get caught being too tender at the wrong place at the wrong time. He makes us step out of the car and searches our tote bags, fiddles with a 500 naira note and places it in his top pocket, asks why she’s carrying a taser and if she knows it is a weapon. Does she know that it is dangerous and harmful to men in particular? I tell him about the assault rates against women in the city. He doesn’t care, and he says he’ll take us down to the station. We can’t afford to go to the station because we might pay in emptied bank accounts or scars inside and outside our bodies or— The driver pleads, sheds enough dignity, and the officers let us go. “With these police officers you have to be like water” the Uber driver advises us. It’s harder to see potholes when they’re covered in water, so we jolt forward and back. Her street is flooded, the car struggles to pass through. If the government fixed the roads, this wouldn’t be a hassle. If the government fixed the disjointed drainage system, it would be less of a hassle. If the government did many things, there would be fewer hassles, fewer extorting policemen. Why am I here?

A saxophone leads a band of instruments: trumpets, drums, cymbals. They rise and rise until the tides settle on the Afrobeat jazz, and then on the 4:28 mark, Fela’s caustic voice informs us of all the ways we use water: to bathe, to cook, to grow, even in death.

If you fight am, unless you wan die water, you no get enemy

It is 1974 in Lagos and in his popular jam “Water No Get Enemy,” Fela Kuti advises listeners to do as water does because water is vital to existence, just as the people are vital to the country. The song reflects Fela’s own resistance. He was arrested over 100 times by the government for his open criticism and his activism against corruption.

How is being queer in Lagos?

The same as everywhere else except that it’s illegal?

At a pool party during the first week I move back to Lagos, I navigate one end to another underwater:
“Machi, I thought you said you didn’t know how to swim?”
“I don’t.”
“You’re lying.”
“Apparently, I know how to swim now.”

I started my life from scratch in Lagos, but as a former third culture kid. I spent my whole life starting from scratch. Scratch is plenty to build with when you know how. But the scratches in Lagos are filled up with water and I’ve had to learn how to swim. I still haven’t told you why I’m here. There were many ways I almost drowned in Toronto, and when I resurfaced, once again alive, I thought about living and what it looked like.

Why did you move to Lagos?

I like the way the heat forces the fruit to burst open.

Outside my three-story flat is a tree that bears a fruit whose name I don’t know. On some days, the fruit falls loose from the branches and lands firmly on asphalt. On some days, the sun forces the skin to rip apart and the insides of the fruit to pour out. Bloodshot ixoras, a moth knocked down by the sun, burst nameless fruit with violet flesh, a driver dousing a black jeep with water; it’s no longer the rainy season. They’ve fixed the roof and I’ve spent 11 months in Lagos “un-hiding” — uncovering versions of myself inside other versions of myself. At the core is water.

Today I am 28. It is 2023. I live in Lagos, Nigeria. It is my home, and there is love here. A few months ago, I hosted a sapphic speed dating event. I think we all just wanted to see each other, and it was enough to know that we are here. I go on a shitty date and laugh about it at home.

Today I am 28. It is 2023. In Nigeria, it is illegal to do the things I did freely at the beaches in Toronto; watch my queer friends kiss under the eyes of a cloudy sun, hold hands with a woman on a rain-less night intoxicated by wine and wishfulness. I lie to a taxi driver, tell him that I have a fiancé. I show him a picture, a man. My cousin doesn’t know how often his image has saved me from lecherous men. Here, fiction can be a raft in a sea…There is a new president in power. He is more nonchalant than the last which is dangerous in a place with potholes the size of a crater on Mars. They raided another queer gathering — they called it a wedding…(redacted redacted redacted) there are things I cannot say because they are under water.

Take what you will as fiction.

It’s 2050. I’m 55 years old. A Moses Sumney song is playing.

Childlike curiosity about my fate
Is the only thing
That makes me stay
It keeps me alive
It keeps me alive
It keeps me alive
It keeps me breathin’ right

The city is supposed to be under water, now. This is a Choose Your Own Adventure game, now.

Am I still in Lagos? No.
I hope I’m happy here.

Am I still in Lagos? Yes.
Then maybe I want to be present as the city sinks? Is it a form of self-harm or self-preservation? Either way, this allegedly-forsaken city keeps me alive.

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