Recently, I read last summer’s Brick literary journal - Issue #115.

I enjoyed a few stories in the issue, but one stood out in particular; Zenas Ubere’s “Still Lagos” - a travelogue, written in numbered sections of varying length. Each captures a moment of Ubere’s return to Lagos.

In each section Ubere conveys a comfort, though touched by wistful longing, that returning to the familiar brings. I read as a foreigner to Lagos, and even so I could feel the thickness of Ubere’s feelings. While he writes about a place he knows well, it becomes clear, slowly, that he feels like he has been made a kind of foreigner himself.

Early on in the piece, inspired by an enormous tree that, “reduces me to a pencil beside it,” Ubere recalls a quote from Emmanuel Iduma’s “A Stranger’s Pose”, “Every tree is the opposite of wandering.” I remember feeling awed by this quote and the significance of it in context. It stuck with me, setting a tone that I could not immediately describe. Ubere took a moment to reflect by the tree, remembering that quote, and tells us, “…I find that interesting. To be so rooted in a place that you own it as much as it owns you.”

Throughout the travelogue, I was reminded of my ignorance of geography, only picking up that Lagos is in Nigeria after a reference to Nollywood films! Some years ago I had seen or read something about them. Pathetically, that fact remains the only one I can claim to know about Nigeria. My foreignness receded, however minimally, but my disorientation otherwise continued, and was even worsened by the boring predictability of English colonizers when deciding on place names. Canada has a Victoria Island too.

Reading on, I felt that disorientation and foreignness completely fall away, replaced entirely by a feeling of connection. Ubere had articulated a something I have felt for years & contemplated writing about many, many times. I never quite found an articulate way to capture it, but here was Ubere, who put it in a way that made me want to write about it again.

In section #16, Ubere opens by saying,

As someone who, in childhood, moved from one city to another, I’ve never felt allegiance to any place.

This one sentence - that one word! - hit me with the gravity of a thousand suns. Finally someone who understood it well enough to put words to it. He gets it! I have also “never felt allegiance to any place.” I have never felt from any place, or stayed anywhere long enough to feel allegiance or belonging. I have had to say to new acquaintances that I am “from” South Western Ontario. I’ve lived in enough places over such a large area, that this claim is far more meaningful than naming where I was born, or any place I lived for a scant few years, home.

One thing Ubere has is a home village, and I am glad he does, despite, I admit, feeling a slight pang of envy. There he can return and feel a sense of belonging, even though he says, “My lack of fluency in our dialect puts me slightly in the position of an outsider.” Regardless, he says, he is always welcomed back with open arms and, returning to his reflection by the tree, “…left with the feeling that the village owns me, more than I own it.”