Chika Unigwe: The First Place that Smells of Home

The First Place that Smells of Home
Lagos was my favorite uncle’s house where I could have whatever I wanted for breakfast and so I had all my favorites: bournvita and nido and eggs and dodo. And outings to I-don’t-remember-where but I remember feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, and thinking that if I were sliced open, I’d look like the inside of a soursop.

Long after the uncle died, when I was old enough to, I’d go to Lagos to spend weeks at a time at my aunt’s or my best friend’s or my sister’s. Lagos was Muson Centre Theater where I saw Death of a Salesman and fell in love with Francis Agu who played Biffy. Was it Biffy he played? Memory is a funny thing, as slippery as soap, you can’t trust it but you can trust feelings.
I fell in love with Lagos, with all the bits of it I was allowed to inhabit.

Once, in Surulere on my way to a salon, someone stopped me and asked if I wanted to be in a commercial. For hair. I crossed myself and skipped away from him. Growing up, we were warned that things happened in Lagos.

I am in love with Lagos. It slithered itself into my soul and found a corner, beside Enugu, to make itself my home too, so that when I write, I am nostalgic about the city and have to write it out. So much of my work is set in Lagos.

Whenever I am in Nigeria, the first place that smells of home is Lagos, it seems impossible to me that I have never lived here, that I have always come as a guest.

I walk the streets of Surulere, of Ikeja , of Banana Island, of Ikoyi and my feet know that they are home. There must be a saying for a guest that is no longer a guest. Lagos has staked its claim to me and I claim it back, this Muse of mine. This wonderful, breathing, raucous, segregated city.