“I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costumed party; and I attended with my bare face” - Frank Kafka
It’s hard to pin me down. It’s hard to understand me. But if you have even a remote awareness of a concept called “minimalism” you will begin to make sense of my life. I have just had a conversation with one of the girls that blink on my radar. What I found was amusing!
It appears I am living way below the societal expectations, and in some ways, if you know me, you can almost be sure I don’t give a fuck about how the world sees me. I am chaos unto myself, but I have some little personal principles that guide my life. One of them is that I live a minimalist lifestyle. And if you know me you can tell I live a very simple lifestyle. I’m cheap to maintain. I really don’t cost much because I have known how hard it is to earn. A few days after we started living with my roommate, my roommate remarked that my life is simple. I opted for fasting and daily home workouts. I opted for fruits and an organic lifestyle. When my roommate presents drinks at dining, I hardly take them. He knew I dismissively called them accessories and that I do away with unnecessary accessories.
The simple things I buy are simple but not cheap. They’re of top quality, especially things to do with the internal system – the food, water, pharmaceuticals and where to sleep. And I worried a lot about the quality of the air I breathe. Now that I am not in Nigeria, about the air that people back home breathe. These small but important things are what defined the good and qualified life. They’re what set you apart from reduced humanity and social death, even physical death from accumulated harmful effects. I have expensive tastes for things that nurture internal human soul. But who cares about theories!
I live a very authentic life. I present to you my authentic self, especially in my WhatsApp circle. To be sure, what you read on my WhatsApp are mostly my true thoughts. They can be hidden in jokes but they are my true feelings. They’re from the bottom of my heart. One more thing to be sure about is that you hardly get a hundred percent truth from my mouth. Once, a senior friend said I should not be called “Saddiq,” a sobriquet of my name that means “the honest one”. While I was not entirely dishonest, he said, I was not also straightforward. My lies are not harmful lies and the truth they hide would not benefit anyone. “You’re a kind of ambiguous character”, he said, which makes it hard to tell when I am lying vs when I am telling the truth. I occupy this liminal space between banter, joke, logic and reason; between religiosity and secularism; seriousness and unseriousness. Even my mother struggles with this fact, including all the women I have been in relationships with. I’m fluid that defy pinning down and categorization. “Keep being fluid and unpinnable until you lose your quest”, one of the girls said.
But no one captures the descriptive energy of my personality so eloquently as my girlfriend. “I know your type”, she said years ago, “you’re honest, but you also like to pretend to tell lies”. Once, another girlfriend in Kaduna said I played too much. Another one, still on my radar, said “I know your shenanigans”. Not once, friends and potential in-laws said I played too much. This is because I am moving in ways understood only to myself.
So, this girl on my radar called and said I was not dressing well. Her remark bordered on admonition and disdain but was more of a suggestion because she offered to help me with my dressing problem. She acknowledged I was low-key, I was self-aware; she added in the same breath, “as in you’re in the US and you’re not buying designers”.
“But my library is well-stocked”, I said. If she meant I was stingy, I spend fortunes on books, books that I can borrow from the library. But I still buy them to build my library for a planned book donation initiative to Nigerian university libraries in my retirement, including in my Alma Mata where I stole books from the shelf to save them from decay. Besides, I still have shoes and caps and shirts that I bought last year which I never used. So, why waste money on things that I should not use for the whole year? In addition, here in the US, you don’t want to impress anyone. She said it’s not to impress anyone, just to feel good about yourself. I agreed. I told her if this was what she meant then I hardly bought shadda for my clothing even when I was in Nigeria. I opted for “yards”, and tissue white yards for that matter except for the dirty nature of the environment that forced me to abandon the practice. To feel good, I dress light and use perfume with celestial scent. I am also very active in the process of my tailoring, to make sure the thread used on buttons and drawstring are of the same color. For each set of outfits, I spend a deal of time on the internet trying to work out great aesthetics. My tailor complains bitterly about my narcissism. Girl erupted into laughter and said I still don’t understand.
I was not telling her these things. These were the thoughts running in my mind and I thought she was within the intellectual range. I have a natural disgust for vulgarity and lacking in social graces and taste.
I noticed a remarkable difference when I visited Nigeria last summer. People dress ostentatiously. The American foolishness started getting into my head, obviously, for I was dressing casually, appearing in jeans and a t-shirt for some outings.
Obviously, this girl sat down and had a conversation with herself about her future in my life. And she realized, as per her standard and taste, I needed to upgrade. But here in the US, like I always believe, the standard is in your bank accounts and zip code. You would be shocked to see how rich people like to appear! I have rich families from Nigeria as well, rich even by the US standard, whom I know how they live!
The 7th child of a director in a federal agency, I honestly believe there are people like her who dress ostentatiously without the will to impress. What was amusing was the lack of knowledge of the alternative dressing code, that there are people who can afford to but chose for a minimalist lifestyle. The girl, for the life of her, cannot goddam make sense of what minimalism is.
Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the mother of the future US astronauts!
Madison, WI
PS
What you read here is but fiction from the figment of my imagination. Take it seriously at your own peril!
