66. The Secret Lives of Lagos Bars

The Flabby Half-Mast and Other Middle-Age Musings

Last night at a birthday dinner in a gastropub in North London, our dazzling Nigerian celebrant was reluctant to claim her new age. She preferred the mouthful, 29+. Bless her. Claiming 30 might be the albatross of modern times.

Trust this mischief-maker here; I found the right opportunity to advise the room that middle age now begins at age 35. It's a pity you were not there to see the dismay I drew out of their faces; these well-dressed and polite people whose sin was to leave their home on a workday Friday to honour their friend. They were to discover the bad news that we are aging. In other words, we are living. Or leaving. Put in another way, we are dying, savez?

It is easier to nuke social graces when you further announce that you are firmly in middle age. Our dear celebrant took exception with the adverb, firmly. I propositioned her bespectacled (and erudite!) partner for a different adverb. This way, working the room, softening this truth that already gathers in ungainly folds on our body parts. The conversation went straight to sleep. The need for sleep, more appropriately. Everyone in the room was pleasantly surprised at their ability to stay awake at that time of the night.

In my quiet time on the long ride back home, I asked myself what happened? What happened to that time when I wanted to stay up to hear my older cousins gist about music and travel? Why do I find sleep so integral to my wellbeing? What happened to that younger version of myself? Where is he these days? What would I say to him if I were fortunate to see him?

*

I pay my gym instructor to torture me. Between motivational speak and veiled threats, he loads routines that make my back creak in the swivel chair at noon. Between patients, I seek reprieve in an ibuprofen capsule from the Bajan receptionist’s drawer. Psychiatry does not release enough endorphins to live by; it does not rely on the prayers & ointments of mothers who insist backache is village voodoo, not poor posturing, or a consequence of sneaky middle age. Our bodies no longer listen to us. Our bodies used to be killing machines, snapping back to shape in the morning with a recoil that defies the toxins we feed them. This morning, you are one wave of nausea away from a clear head. Find the bathroom. Find the kitchen & sniff, with relish, the gourmet black coffee. But the ceiling fan wobbles from last night’s half-pint & the body flies flabby at half-mast at noon & you ask yourself: is this the middle?

*

Siri, play ‘System Fail’ by Show Dem Camp. For those who know SDC’s oeuvre, this song sits in their project, Palmwine Music 2. Released in 2018, I wrote a review of this record. I was mostly dismissive. I concluded my review with something to the effect that they should not release Palmwine Music 3. In my defence, music critics have to work fast and often make mistakes. The biggest song on that record is ‘Tropicana’. It sits at No 5 on SDC’s Spotify popular list. ‘System Fail’ does not but it is my favourite SDC song. Here is why: I listen to it every time it comes on. And in recent times, I crave it.

Sitting in my hotel room in Sharjah this January, I put the song on repeat. I knew I had to write about it. I began to write, One tragedy of our time is watching good music denied entrance into the annals of popular music. In retrospect, this statement holds no significance. What then is the role of the music critic? Why would the music critic not appropriately use their sonic aptitude and facility with language in service of good music? The problem of a receptive audience of course stands. One can argue that the system of music critics building a canon has failed. This is partly a privilege of the information age. Free access. Algorithms dictate taste on the broader spectrum, but an individual can also make his taste—like a bachelor on a Friday night in Lagos, in 2018, can decide to stay in, go out for a quiet drink at Bar Enclave or do a big night out in Lagos Island.

When I listen to Nonso Amadi sing, “I just want free booze and turkey/No one disturbing/Leave all my matter/No wahala,” I am transported to Bar Enclave, Ilupeju. In 2018, I lived in that neighbourhood. I had moved from Yaba to Oshodi, a geographical drift towards the International Airport, my Japa in small steps.

Bar Enclave was famed for its turkey barbecue, but its booze was not free, and neither was the turkey. It was an ‘enclave’ for young and vibrant bougie tweeps to meet in person. The flux of their ideas pushing from the internet to Lagos Mainland and back created a kind of FOMO back then. I was slightly disappointed when I visited Bar Enclave.

If I missed anything about living in Yaba, it was the surfeit of options. On the Commercial Avenue strip, my choices were limitless. I could order a bottle from Lynn and Bae if I wanted to stay in. If I wanted to go out for a quiet drink, I could consider the Panda Events Centre or the Apollo Hotel, if I cherished a swanky ambience. Yes, Yaba could not serve a big night. Arguably no place on the Lagos Mainland can stand up to Ikeja and Ikeja itself can not stand up to the Island.

Bar Enclave reminds me a lot of Village in Yaba. Populated chiefly by bougie Akokites who were snobbish but had great music taste, it was not my favourite place to hang out. I preferred gritty places where there were no restrictions. Notions of exclusivity bothered me, which may explain why I did not find Enclave endearing. Village may have been uppity but it had the looks to carry it. It was a genuinely tropical hideout made from solid wood and neatly tucked away close to where Commercial Avenue cedes its territory to Industrial Avenue in Sabo. Unadorned, spare and the music selection was democratic. Folks here bonded over music and shared things. Bar Enclave was too public-facing, self-conscious, and obvious for the kind of guy Nonso Amadi was singing about. Worse, it was not the kind of space where “you could lay your case and watch a space go around a waist”. There simply wasn’t space for that in Bar Enclave or Village but the latter was probably where you may hear ‘System Fail’.

Places like Bar Enclave and Village have their uses. They are safe spaces where folks can consider the soundtrack of their lives. They are away from the cranky Lagos traffic full of prehensile conductors and the cacophony of vehicular horns. They are the stop gaps for folks who break their journey home into two. They are respite houses for folks who dread home and consider home simply a place to sleep or play dead.

People run away from different kinds of things here. Toxic bosses, marriages, relatives. Sometimes it was a safe place to consider failures and personal setbacks. It is a place where the target does not matter. It is that place where you may not be bothered about the target at the back of your head. It is where you could embrace silence or voyeurism—where you could watch a space go around a waist.

I know this quite well, the act of space going around a waist. I tried to capture it once in a poem. That poem is called Tonight, published in Affection and Other Accidents. In that poem, a black woman called Lupita dances to ‘Brown Skin Girl’. Lupita has the powers to extinguish the male gaze in that poem's universe. That superpower means that she can dance undisturbed. In that poem, Lupita’s dance is therapy. She is hurt and she would heal herself with restorative dance. And there will be space for a space to go around her waist. There will be no noose of any kind hanging around like a threatening phallus. She will be herself and feel safe in the way that Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan and millions of Nigerian women (and girls) have not felt safe.

This post is against system failure, except if that system sabotages the safety of others. This post is a prayer for our systems, our bodies, that they do not fail even if they are flabby, and approach the ‘middle’ without warning.