Update:
I’m in Lagos.* God, sometimes, the devil tempts me with cursing you, I swear.
I’m renting somewhere. (Sorry to family and friends who may be reading this and have happily offered me their place.) Of course, something in the bathroom is leaking.
➿
I know there will be a brighter day, but today is a less bright day.
Turns out my printer** is really busy and so recommended that I go buy the paper, go do the printing, cutting and arrangement and come to him when it’s time for binding, since I now know how it’s done. I think he also put forth this recommendation cos my customisations look long, and I’m bringing my characteristic neurotic energy***.
I want to mud. and cry. If I were in Enugu now, the metaphor of mudding would even feel nice—soothing—because of the reddish-orange ground that I can see physically around me. But I’m in Lagos, and the floor outside is/feels ash, black and green. There is no realm of imagination or reality in which Lagos feels like a comfortable place for me to rot.
Maybe I should go back to Enugu and print with the printers there… I don’t know… I’ll still need to transport things to Lagos because I think most of my customers will be here or will be shipped to from here… I feel really really really confused. and a bit sick of me.
Besides being a writer and an artist, I’ve spent bits of the past few years paying family tax in the form of contributing to my father’s manufacturing business, the Kings Cross station to the underground network of all my childhood and adulthood traumas. Of course money has come out of it, enough to train his children in GBP schools. But it looks VERY HARD. Ruthlessly so. You must have heard that some manufacturers are using detergent to make your fufu because of the pressures of the economy. Almost everyone is cutting corners, not just the lazy, the corrupt or the irresponsible. And those are the lucky ones, the ones who Nigeria’s 2020-2024 economy hasn’t snuffed out already.
There’s a ‘Fear Nigeria’ feeling that that exposure to the state of industry/manufacturing in Nigeria**** gave me. It’s the same feeling I got when someone at the National Sound, Visual and Film Archives told me something like (don’t quote me) that they haven’t received stuff to add to the archives from public media agencies since 2000, the same feeling I got when a med school friend told me about her lecturer’s project on Noma, a disease intrinsincally linked with poverty, a disease that eats away chunks of people’s faces. In this journey of learning how books are made in Nigeria and producing for myself a physical book with the intention of selling, my ‘Fear Nigeria’ alarm bells are blaring! I’m still daring, despite. but I also think I’m afraid where I wouldn’t be if I don’t have flashbacks of people squeezing blood out of stones.
yes, yes, I know I and the book will be even badder bitches once I pass through this hurdle, but rn I need to beat the ground and ask God why? Especially cos it looks like it means spending more time in Lagos, which…
*So, yes, we finished with the redesign, Radhika and I. It was so deliciously painstaking. We revelled in the details, and we were so happy and pleased. It’s a small book, but we did it well, you know? So I’m now in Lagos to print this Studio Styles_Restful Book_Text Pages Full Book_06.pdf document. People in Restful’s Substack Chat get more frequent updates. Join with this link if you’d like that.
**My ‘printer’ is not a printer; he’s primarily a binder and packaging maker. But he takes printing jobs because that’s his network/industry. The impression I’ve been given is that no one or company in Somolu can make your book end to end. I’m not entirely sure about the ‘no’ part, but I am sure that most people are specialists in one thing and have a network of other people they can call on. So if you ‘find a guy/company’ to make a book for you, or make journals for you to sell, or do your merch… your guy will have to go to four other guys. It’s not like that video I showed you in a few letters ago with printers, cutters, binders, etc. in the same factory. Companies like Doculand in VI/Ikoyi/Ikeja have factories, because they have capital to deploy. (Even then, they still rely substantially on Somolu people.)
*** My TikTok fyp is full of clips of press tours and scenes from A Real Pain. Jesse Eisenberg is another characteristically neurotic person, and watching him gives me more encouragement to be myself more. I tried to imagine a version of him who was not openly and freely neurotic, and it hurt to even imagine all those spikes daggering inwards. I’m really enjoying watching all four characters (Jesse, Kieran and the characters they play in the movie). And learning from them fun ways of embodying what one already has. the pains, the spikes, the oddities, etc. etc. etc.
**** Everyday I think about the SAPs and Nigeria’s 1980s.
Other words:
If your work entails the exploration, preservation or reflection of our stories, cultures and ideas, you’re a culture worker in the sense that the Culture Pay Survey defines it.
The survey has hit a lull (less than 10 responses the past few days and we’re only at 190 out of our target 3000). My team and I would love it if you could fill or share this survey which asks anonymously about your current and ideal earnings. We want to put a mirror to the cankerworm eating us up as an industry and as a society—how badly we value cultural work—and provide a resource with which we can all move towards fair pay.
The survey’s data will be a powerful resource individuals, organisations and the industry at large can use in small and big ways to bargain for better standards of living for all of us.
Intangible costs don’t disappear. Someone, somewhere, is paying for it somehow.
This morning, before all that happened, I had put this down to share in today’s newslettter:
I love this newsletter- For Starters run by Daniel Giacoppelli. In today’s issue, Daniel interviews Dan Duncan, who runs a bakery and Dan shared this:
“I forget who I heard this from, but I’m definitely paying the ‘dumb tax’ right now. Everything that I expect to take one week takes two weeks. Everything that I expect to cost $1,000 costs $2,000. If it’s your first time, it’s always going to take longer. You have to start to account for that right now.”
I’m paying, I’m paying, I’m paying. I can’t wait to be able to pay tax to the government from Restful.
See you in joy next week.
- Immaculata
Enjoyed this! I love your passion and dedication