This week Pádraig Ó Tuama poses the question: “What is a rock I’ve got a memory with?” in his newsletter. For whatever reason, the first place the question took me was Nigeria, specifically the northern bits of the small state I trace my origins to.
Some of my earliest memories of growing up are of being ensconced in the back seat of our old beat up Peugeot 505, travelling the 200 odd kilometres from Benin. As I recall, there was always a scramble for the door seats, as those afforded whoever got them the joys of winding the windows down and looking out into the distance as the flat, red earth which we left behind morphed into lush, green, rocky outcrops interspersed by rivers, streams and springs the closer we got to our destination.
These trips were the backdrop to an education of sorts – my father, the academic, taking the opportunity to riff on origins, our storied part in the cocoa trade, and numerous other subjects lost to the distance of memory.
This is what rocks (hills and mountains) mean to me, a harking back to the past; one that is at once personal and collective in equal measure.
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