Eneh Akpan Writes: Nissan Urvan

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Amassing Graffiti

An old model Toyota Liteace gives the heads up through a yellow painted “Back to School” label. A VW Vanette rejoins with an offbeat “Mummy’s Pet.” Yet, a beat up Nissan Urvan serves up a terse comeback with an in-your-face “Back to Sender” sticker. There are a string of buses with the “God” graffiti on them, mostly stuff like “God First,” “God is Great,” “God Pass Them,” “No King as God,” “God’s Time is the Best,” “No Be God?” “God is Good,” “Man No Be God” (pidgin version of “Man ain’t God”) “God Dey” (pidgin version of “There’s a God”), I watch, a trifle amused as a kept up VW Caravelle marked with the label “H₂O” negotiates a turn, early on I spotted an old model Toyota HiAce tagged “Big Fish.” I visualize these drivers hanging out on the same team—some inane variety of a mobile EPA where the story ends with the tuned up “H₂O” gobbling up the tacky “Big Fish.” But life doesn’t work that way and folks gotta maintain up in the game if family’s going to have food on the table. Probably, why the owner emblazoned the rear window of this bus I’m riding (which is a copy of “Big Fish”) with two words; a no fuss phrase which carries in it all the authority Lagos drivers need to “Carry Go” as one useful pointer hacked in chicken scratches says, it is uncomplicated yet delivers its import like a decree when it states “No Story.”

“Have a problem with my driving? Call 08099999999,” reads the inscription on the company truck speeding past my morning ride. Such CTAs (call to action) are commonplace, these days. You will find a hundred variations of it painted on transports especially, on the back of school buses. A friend once boarded public transport which showed off similar message on its body. He committed the number to memory before climbing on the bus and decided to humor the driver (or whoever had drafted up the phrase) so he called him up. And guess who picked up? It wasn’t the driver but it was just as well. Someone who was probably home or about her business several miles from the scene of incident answered the phone. And said, “Hello. My husband is over speeding again, isn’t he?”

Large red letters of “Remember six feet” marks the bus leading this one. The rear window of another (a yellow old model Volkswagen Transporter) preaches “One Love” in daring, bold letters. Several other buses wheeze past flaunting some ambiguous graffito, many in local dialect and I’d rather not go there. I wouldn’t want to spend the whole day acting interpreter unnecessarily extending the length of this post. You see, Lagos drivers are a little religious on an entire level. A Volkswagen Vanette riding along beside my bus boasts, “I Love this God!” As we drew near the other auto I am offered a close up of the guy behind the wheel. I struggle to imagine this fellow as a bible holder and can’t turn off the image of a thug lord in a suit, wielding a bible like a magician pulling rabbits from a hat.

The sticker of the American eagle dappled with the red and blue stars and stripes has by unanimous consent, become the secret transit code of Nigeria’s highways. You hardly fetch a commercial bus not wearing the gummed label like some Restricted Area access sticker. Besides, there are other writings I can’t quite place in a category like the ones above. “Holly Mary” (could be same as Holy Mary, who knows?); “Psalm 140 v. 1” (Get your bibles, folks); “Empty” (Now why would anybody scrawl this on public transport?); “Superstar” (I feel this guy); “Backward Never” (Amen to that, bro); “It pains you, why?” (I got this one off the cowl of a Volkswagen Beetle). And so on and so forth like that. Long before I started collecting bus graffiti, I ran into a certain brilliant one-liner. It was drawn on the rear of one of those huge Marcopolo passenger vehicles. It seemed to have found me just when I could use a breathing spell and here’s what it said, “No Competition in Destiny.” It never slips my mind how that one-liner rearranged my entire mindset.

Talking about graffiti calls up an early childhood memory about a story I overheard my father talk over with a relative who bunked with us. He told a tale of a battered public transport which, threw bystanders into a fit of hee-haws when it passed by. In time, the driver designed a method to the madness. It was in a sense, his way of saying you can laugh all you want but wait until you see what I got written up on the rear window. See who’s laughing then. On the rear window makeshift glass, a spread of polyethylene held fast with adhesive tape, he had scratched two words in Ibibio, my native dialect. These words: “Asak Uka” which by interpretation means, “Yo Laughing at Yo Mama!”

Keep your pens bleeding!

Akpan

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Anarchy on Wheels

Photo credit: Thecityfix.com

Lagos bus drivers (besides being speed daemons) have a hang for maneuvering their buses with one-half of the tires rolling on asphalt while the other half bumps along suspended on the shoulder (God knows why), which is often than not a mud-rid depression. I guess you could call it a variant of talent just as people have a talent for walking into doors. Trucking with these road hogs sometimes, leaves me in strange circumstances–getting stranded is just one chapter in that book.

“Hey, driver! Take it easy, will ya?” Somebody yells from behind me as the driver navigates the Nissan Urvan through a nasty ditch.

“What the hell does it look like I’m doing?” The driver turns around and the look on his face says he doesn’t know from Adam what the guy is talking about. “I’m trying to get you jerks to work as quickly as I possibly can and you dare run off your mouth at me?” He cusses a little to buttress his point.

“Just take it easy,” another passenger, a lady with a child in her laps, says.

“We want to get to work in one piece,” adds yet another passenger.

And that makes the driver really press the pedal to the metal. “If you want, I can drop you off right here.” Yet, he doesn’t ease up so they can get off. No one takes up his offer either.

And the tango between driver and passenger that has by some method become tradition in Lagos, Nigeria begins.

If the makers of the 007 films could tour the roads of Lagos, aboard public transport for a day, they would learn vital lessons from the real-life car chases Lagos commuters survive on a daily basis. The anarchy we have somehow, learned to live with. The bottleneck drama we have dubbed James Bond driving. There are other ways to live with knowledge.

Mornings arrive with a sour-sweet taste in my mouth. On one palate is the pleasure I derive as I write this in this vehicle (I’m doing this on my way to work), on the other–maybe, the hard palate–is the situation I described above. Every now and then, I feel my teeth rattle as the driver who finds it impossible to stay on his side of the road, dive-bombs a bump or a pothole. I pause my writing at this time and look up, tensed. When the coast clears (some come later than others), I continue to write.

The road to hell is paved not with adverbs or works in progress but with hunks of junks called Nissan Urvans. Especially, the fleet operated by Lagos commercial drivers. Nevertheless, as I stated earlier, there are other ways to live with knowledge. Sometimes, life gets in the way and ruffles up my affairs like my rides to work do. I continue to seek ways to put my talent to use.

The one thing, which abides always, always, always is that I continue to write. In some amusing way, I find opportunity poking out of life’s stack of slack like rabbits bending blades of giant grass to take in the scenery. And like the roads that get me to work, this place becomes more and more familiar to me even when my writing is 99% bilge and 1% slog. I continue to write because like my early morning bus rides, I can see my destination looming over the horizon like the big arc of a rising orange moon.

“Owa o!” I tell the driver as the bus bumps and bounces towards my stop. He doesn’t seem to hear me. I yell “Owa o!” a second time.

“Ibo lowa!” he says as if he’s totally ignorant of the Bus Stop. I tell him where I’m dropping off and the bus sputters and coughs and finally comes to a halt several meters beyond my stop.

I leap out of the vehicle and hurry to take my next ride–the last hell ride–that would finally get me to work. It appears to me I’m almost eager for the jittery ride through torture and all that’s life threatening. That I almost crave for it.

But I know better. It’s the chance to reach into the richness of my imagination that I long for; the beauty of finding creativity on these anarchy on wheels that calls out to me–seeks to possess all I have and am.

Yes, I know better. And it makes me unafraid.

Akpan