‘You’re too clean to be a writer,’ she said to me, half smiling, half cross-examining me with bespectacled eyes that were half Asian but deeply penetrating, like I was a troubling equation with some fine and important scent. A moment of unresponsiveness passed between us and she replaced her words and eyes with a soft tuck and sizing my frame from toe to my dreadlocks which sat unevenly on my head like a bad art project by an overtly playful adolescent, she unhinged her glasses to drive home her interest. Her wantedness oozed and was felt but I needed to arrive artistically to her longing or so.

Pablo once shared at our weekly meeting that a poet’s response should be necessarily cool, enough to be remembered. If you were unwanted by any chance, for whatever reasons- lack of money, some cool sneakers, bad breath or whatever- your words and wit should be like Olumo Rock, permanent, for what’s a writer whose comeback can’t be studied as an independent piece of art. Pablo kicked himself out of the university when he confronted a lecturer who asked him to patronise African literature and read Eze Goes to School. It was the height of all things broken to mankind, to tell Pablo that Eze Goes to School literature is worthy of his time and mental engagement. Pablo thrust a middle finger in the lecturer’s face and spoke a long line of unprintable cuss words that he repeated when the university security arrested him for verbal assault.

‘You speak so fluently to spew half-cooked sarcasm, ma’am’ I responded.
Perhaps I had made Pablo a proud mentor with my comeback, for this lady paused coldly, like she was taking my words apart in a laboratory, fragment by fragment, and with the aid of a magnifying glass, re-seeing them to understand where my words were coming from – a place of toughness or outright jerk-dom. I could feel her withdrawnness but as nanoseconds grew into seconds, I saw that her pause was not necessarily of resignation but may be a retreat to review if she was slutty or that I was just putting up a fence.

It was an unclassified kind of cold calm that ran between us at the shop and taking my mind off the scene, I heard cackles on rooftops few meters away. I could count and distinguish the many footfalls that increased in the hallway as a class ended and students trooped out, like prisoners, so hunger for their freedom any further delay could endear Amnesty International for breach of human rights.

‘Do you work here?’

Her words, like a phoenix, rose and took centre stage, shattering an ensuing silence and took me by the neck back to reality, of a cobwebbed shop that sold soda and cheap biscuits, where students lined up to make photocopies of textbooks they couldn’t afford.
‘I go to school here,’ I responded, partly interested in the next line of words she would speak and in my own relevance created from the backdrop of Pablo’s instruction. When she eventually did speak her choice of words was different from the mixture of drained confidence, uninformed-ness, silliness and uncreative use of words that was an everyday project in the department. It was commonplace to meet a facially endearing damsel whose skin was velvet and whose eyes held all things glorious but whose words were empty, draining and lacking of life, a thing which drove a poet closer to death than a pack of poison.

‘I seem to be asking the wrong questions, I think.’
‘I don’t know what a wrong question is but you could just say hi and we could go by that and maybe there would be no wrong’ I said.
‘From the event of the past few seconds, I think saying hi may be wrong too.’
‘Do you give up so quickly?’
‘Do I? I guess I do. Life should be easy. We should go with the wind when we can’t help it,’ she said.
‘Are you going with the wind now?’ I asked.
‘Maybe.’
‘A strong wind?’ I asked.
‘Nothing violent or pretentious,’ she said.
‘You like it calm and real?’ I asked.
‘I like it robustly gentle.’
‘I think I like you already’ I declared and we shook hands, allowing what softness became take pre-eminence over what many years of mixing cement for construction workers, to pay my fees, did to my palm.
‘Do you go to school here, monsieur?’
‘Yes, I do. I attend the School of Life.’
‘What faculty is that?’
‘I truly do not know,’ I said.
‘It is not real, right?’
‘Doesn’t it sound real?’ I quipped.
‘Well, it does but you are joking, right?’
‘Life is an endless circle and I am a student of it.’
‘Do you pay fees?’ She asked.
‘With my sweat, yes.’
‘Ah. Lovely,’ she proclaimed.

Koko was not new to me. I and the rest of the poets had seen her a week earlier. Like other poets in the department noted, she came when we were already fed up with the system, awaiting some newness. Her appearance was something that could not be hidden. She was stocky. She was always with a big bag-pack which held some novels and anthologies of short fictions. She wore huge glasses and a smile that was a poem and we saw her every day for her first week but none of us could say hi to her.
The teachings at the department were monotonous. The voices of the teachers did not change. The theories were as old as time and held dust. The materials we read were classic and could be enjoyable if read by a truly fine orator but these guys mumbled everything. And it was tiring. The allusions were far from our time. The metaphor could break padlocks from its age. We wanted to read more new voices, some hippy American poets, some Nigerians poets who were expressing issues around mental health challenges but we were seen as rebels. We were anti academia, according to the system that never responded to us.

I was the first to walk up to Koko and though she seemed nice, I wanted to feel wanted and I wanted to hear her talk some more. For the answers I had for her questions, I delayed them to allow more words. And she had a special way of saying sorry without words that had sorry in them.
‘Soda?’ She asked.
‘I am okay.’
‘Are you angry with me?’ she asked.

ANGER
In July of the year I first started university, I lost my mobile phone. It housed all the photos of the university campus I had taken. The plan was to exhibit the photos at the end of my study year. And when I lost the phone, I knew that a new and well structured dream that had a part of me was lost forever. The other new part that replaced the mobile phone was visible anger. Little things triggered it. And the receivers did not have boundaries. Everyone received it. The teachers who mispronounced words and placed a wrong stress on such simple word like present had me raise a hand in class to correct them. And in return, the class stared at me and my wondrous and ignorant mind. And subsequently, my results developed sickness. No matter what I wrote, I had pronounced Ds. And one day, at the prompt of a poet in the department, I bought a bottle of wine to the most aggrieved lecturer, the one I had told that her teaching of English poetry with the local language was both annoying and very disrespectful to the university system. She smiled when she saw me at her office entrance and received the wine and looked over her shoulder. When she saw a wall that looked perfect, she threw the bottle of wine at it and when it broke, she cheered sarcastically and walked away.

‘Why did you choose to study in this university?’ I asked her.
‘Who said I came to study here?’
‘You did not come to study like us?’
‘Us? Who are the us?’
‘Us, the poets. You don’t see us but we see you.’
‘Oh, no. I am not a poet. I am not one of you. I am not sure I would ever make it to being a poet. But I am a graduate assistant. I applied here and was sent a letter. I am here to assist the African fiction class. And do not have that look of shock on your face. I am 25.’

TWENTY-FIVE
I was 25, five years ago. It was the year that made me eight years since I first came into the university as an undergraduate student from Lagos. And here was a young woman who had just clocked 25 being offered a teaching job. She could barely reach the middle of a class board with her hands but she was becoming a teacher. She looked smart but when did looking smart become all there was needed to get a teaching job? Oh, I am sure I will do better if given the opportunity – to unteach the rusty syllabus that made no sense. Maybe she is related to someone. But whatever! Why does she say she is not like us, like we embody otherness and less sophistication? Why does she feel that there is anything special in teaching fiction, in carrying aged anthologies in a bag pack? Why does she even think she cannot become a poet, like it is a disease or something?
I walked away that day from Koko and though a part of me listened carefully and wished she would call me back, she did not. And when she came to the shop, she did not say hi or look at me interestedly. Maybe it was what it was, a poet would be hated to be loved or she was making her notes about if I would make a great partner? Whatever!

Bura-Bari Nwilo is a post graduate student of Literature at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He lives in Port Harcourt and Nsukka, in Enugu State. His writings have appeared in print and online.