Language Is the First Casualty of Exile

I once sketched the outline of a poem at the Heathrow arrivals bay. I was waiting for a friend and his partner, who were relocating to London from Lagos for good. Expectedly, I called the poem ‘Arrivals’, chronicling my own arrival in London on 18 September, 2019. Back then, Uncle instructed me to ride the elevator to the topmost floor to departures, where he was in his Toyota Prius, the standard vehicle for Uber taxis, especially in South London. My uncle was ready to throttle away as soon as I dumped my luggage into the boot. There was something furtive, sneaky, subversive even about paying the five-pound drop-off tax instead of the premium tariff I would spend holding my car in the assigned basement car park while waiting for my friends at the arrivals bay. I would drive them from Hounslow southwards to Forest Hill that wintry evening. This was the equivalent of driving from Lagos to Ibadan but with better roads. I must confess that ‘Arrivals’ could have been a better poem, perhaps because I hesitated to fill it with all of my life’s anxieties and rich biographical details at the time. Instead, I opted for a snapshot of an immutable memory.