The Yellow Ruler

Preface

It is a dream, a privilege even, to read about the place you grew up in. Especially if it’s where you’ve lived a significant portion of your life. After all, we are drawn to mirrors just as much as we are to words that mirror our society and all its intricate contradictions. This explains, to a degree, the allure and longevity of newspapers despite their often grim headlines. Newspapers report our stories. But since the news sticks to facts, fiction holds its own appeal, for which there is no cheap alternative. Although there’s no substitute for living in a place—nothing compares to firsthand experience—reading about the mall you went shopping earlier in the morning has its own thrill; coming across a paragraph about a restaurant you barely noticed while you counted your woes in the cab you boarded to uni is magical. An otherwise nondescript street with no lore, now recast as a crime scene of a gruesome murder, takes on a new meaning and glitters with blood. You start to see the place differently, it clings to your memory like lichen to a branch. Hence, the more fiction is written about a place, the more real it becomes. Consequently—as the articles, essays, and books double—the place begins to loom larger in the public’s imagination.

In this way, writers are the first point of tourist attraction.

The alchemy of buildings, streets, and people to words is critical to understanding or appreciating a place. Those who can’t read about their city—due to an unprecedented decrease in documentation caused by a scarcity of masterful writers, or a complete devaluation of the literary process due to national neglect—are robbed with jazz. There’s a lingering sense of having lost something with no clue as to what it is. Nothing, however, can undermine the magnitude of this loss, for the book is a window to the city and its inhabitants, a shortcut to access culture and trace the historical lines of division.

In turn, every city has its writers except Calabar, whose writers, the few exceptional ones who at least manage to centre the city in their writings, have a few short stories and critical, immersive essays but no books. If they have been published in print, it is in anthologies alongside other writers writing about other states.

The number of contemporary fiction books set in Calabar is at most a dozen and, at worst, less, which—even though it’s from the top of my head—is a staggering statistic about a city with over 600,000 inhabitants. 

The other writers—those who dabble in prose for fun or as a hobby—do not even bother to edit their works (essays, short stories, blog posts) properly. They are nonchalant about their grammar and punctuation, which might seem like a small thing to fault, except I’ve read fanfics written by writers in other states and countries that don’t suffer from this problem, and their stories were impeccable. 

They also tell stories that risk nothing; stories with stakes so low even the deaths bore to death, stories where the characters are either too pristine or unnaturally scandalous. Either that or their words point to nothing. They present paragraphs that only engage their experiences or their environment with no apparent depth or mastery. 

It’s a sad, sad, sad thing.

I have read beautiful books with beautiful prose about heart-wrenching stories centred in Lagos, Abuja, Port-Harcourt, Jos, Kano, etc., but not Calabar, The People’s Paradise, which is, to my knowledge, in no shortage of incredulous stories.

The writers who no longer live here but grew up within the state have no excuse either. The Lost Generation, a group of writers and art enthusiasts from the 1920s—including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway and Gertrude Stein—wrote about America while exploring the rivieras in France.

I strongly believe that living in a place and reading about it are two separate experiences that ought to coincide; one informs the other and vice versa. Arguably, too, the best way to experience a city is through its writers. Their bias, perceptions, frustrations, enthralling confessions, pedantic musings, lengthy descriptions & witty aphorisms; their jabs at the stereotypes, their take on the cuisine, and their chosen lesson in history and culture are important attempts at immortalising the city by capturing its mood and distilling its essence into literature.

To render in words the city as it refracts through their minds, surrendering the by-products to progeny, too, is such an irrevocable offering to literature as a whole, and the people whose lives inspired the text. And I believe it is pertinent to judge a city by its writers, because, while stories happen daily, writers tell stories. The stories they choose to tell speak to their character, morals, worldview, sense of wonder, and attention to detail.

This thought process drove me to write this collection. In earnest, when I began writing The Yellow Ruler, I didn’t know I’d end up with a book. I’d just completed writing a novel-in-stories, which exhausted me, for the sole fact that I pushed myself to the limit of beautiful, compelling language whilst trying to avoid the obvious pitfall of purple prose, whilst also managing to tell a literary, plot-driven story.

After completing the manuscript, I felt I’d achieved my goal and uncovered some inadequacy in my skill in handling some cardinal aspects of storytelling, which I would have to improve moving forward. As a solution, I challenged myself to write some short stories focused on different story elements that gave me trouble.

In No. 74 Mekenge Layout, the second story in the collection, I experimented with POV—I wrote it like I was shooting a movie with dynamic camera directions, leaping from one character to the other, something any good editor will frown upon; Blue Heaven Crimson Moon, Cyan’s a Sin & The Yellow Ruler, as is evident in their titles, are littered with colours as recurring descriptive motifs and literary symbols.

Each story has its obvious and hidden focus. Some are joined by similar attempts—most stories in the collection have bookends, which makes them, in a way, cyclical. 

Nearly all the stories are bound by death.

Yet, through all the excesses I experimented with, one remains constant. The syrup that cuts across all the waffle grids is that all the stories are set in Calabar and feature landmarks and musings recognisable to the locals.

When I chose writing as a career, I hesitated to write about Calabar—no one I knew did it, and there weren’t any books to act as mirages to drive my decision forward. In the middle of my dilemma, I made a startling but bleak discovery: You can write a terrible story centred in New York. What matters more is your skill as a writer, not necessarily where or what you write about.

In that sense, The Yellow Ruler is a diorama framing this known but obscure city, capturing a moment that might become future history. It is literary proof that things happen here, terrific and terrible things, things worth writing about.