Alexandra Fuller, the British Zimbabwean author, once said that for a memoir to really succeed, the author has to engage in a brutal self-examination of everything they believe to be true.
Reading through I For Don Blow But I Too Dey Press Phone, one finds the author grappling with a host of certainties and unknowns, especially around ideas of identity, self-discovery and belonging. The author, Hymar David, riffed on these ideas in his piece featured in The Lagos Review’s curated series – “Migration and the Writer” – with his essay “Dreams, Mistakes and Memories of my Father.”
With this memoir, David creates a work of personal testimony that shines with remembered detail, and brims with an emotional intensity that is, at times, almost overwhelming. He begins the first chapter, “I For Don Blow But I No Dey Hear Word”, with this sentence: “The first time I tried a hearing aid, I realized the world was too damn loud for me” (p. 7), drawing us immediately into the realities of his disability and the extent of deprivation in his life growing up.
Looming like towering shadows in the early chapters, just as they occupied the earliest parts of his life, are David’s parents and siblings. It is with them that he first finds acceptance and the sort of love that only blood can give. His father’s shadow looms the largest, drawing comparisons to Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart, as David reflects on the rigid strain of masculinity that tries “too hard to make a man out of the boy” (p. 15). By showing a parenting style capable of both harsh discipline and patient understanding, David traces the grit, doggedness, and self-sufficiency that would come to define his adult life.
Against a familiar backdrop that most Nigerian millennials can relate to – middle-class living, teenage angst, life and love before social media, and the gradual familiarization with Nigeria’s dysfunction – David offers wisdom from lived experience with a potent mix of humour, wit, and cynicism. In “The Fire Back Then”, titled as a nod to Baldwin, he declares: “Wo, forget talk, hustle like say you dey find ransom. Your own money no fit ever hook you for throat” (p. 103). Such light-hearted street wisdom is replicated in gems strewn throughout the book, and David frequently uses this tone to register his views on everything from the state of the country to matters of the heart.
When David writes on the condition of disabled people in Nigeria, however, it is with fierce and humourless admonition. In “Be You, Even If the World Doesn’t Adjust”, he declares: “NIGERIANS DON’T KNOW HOW TO DEAL WITH DISABLED PEOPLE WHO DON’T GIVE A FUCK” (p. 52), before launching an unapologetic critique of the social conditioning that has most Nigerians expecting disabled people to be perpetually subservient, humble, and dependent. To David, this is a stain on the collective conscience he intensely interrogates, calling out the hypocrisy, subtle manipulation, and stilted expectations therein.
The memoir progressively comes off as an album of eclectic cuts. If “Signs of Our Redemption” burns bright as the bold anthem chronicling the #EndSARS saga, “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” is the wistful paean for diminished talents and dreams (“Nigeria happens to the best of us…”), while “And Always Remember Them” stands out as a poetic and elegiac tribute to the fiery season of 2020 (“It is the forgotten who are truly dead” p. 192). David’s use of “We remember them” as a refrain in that chapter creates a hypnotic, incantatory rhythm that sustains emotional accumulation.
Halfway through the memoir, one senses a gradual shift in David’s narrative voice. The tough, uncompromising tone at the beginning gives way to a gentler gaze as he meditates on grief following the loss of his father, on betrayals, on surviving Nigeria, and on finding belonging in writing, friendship, and the persistent struggle for “…the bare minimum of a dignified life” (p. 187).
By the time one arrives at the last chapter, “Farewell But Not Goodbye”, it is with the realization that self-discovery is an endless, inescapable journey because “You can never run from who you are” (p. 223), and as David contends, “There is nothing wrong with being an ordinary person who just happens to have it a little harder than most people” (p. 243).
The right to simply be himself, without the weight of undue expectations, is one he would never relinquish. Belonging, to David, should not come through exertion. One either finds that space is made for them with ease, or that they are better off moving alone, with all dignity preserved and not one bit of soul lost.
***Sima Essien is an award-winning writer based in Uyo.
