The Panic Room of the World

Once, I watched a Nollywood film where a man sprouted the legs of a goat. His enraged lover had cast a spell, turning him into a bewildered half-animal. The name of the film escapes me now. In strange and populist ways, Nollywood represents the agony of modernity. Luxury cars lining dirt roads. Gatemen chewing tobacco with the concentration of bald-headed monks. Sirens tottering on high heels. Or, that time at a concert in Lagos, when a beggar missing half his body slid beside me on the dancefloor, straddling a skateboard. Transformations are violent. You’re allowed to be frightened of who you’re becoming. Pain can be so deeply embedded in the body that it can only escape as a bottomless howl. Things shift so dramatically, it’s hard to stay tethered to reality.

Yet another friend calls me in the throes of a manic episode, Instinctively, I’m afraid of the sinkhole of her need. Like many of the people around me, she is being swallowed whole by her circumstances. The women I know are deeply unprotected, and have mostly experienced community as a rod of silence and shame. One by one, I watch them mutate into statistics, into self-fulfilling prophecies shaped by the lack and abandonment they were born into. I’m terrified of getting too close. I’m terrified of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Friendship has to mean more than shared damage. I repeat this to myself, ashamed of how repelled I am by my counterparts, these reflections I can’t evade. Increasingly, I’m afraid my survival instincts will trump my capacity to sit with the kind of pain that’s so sickeningly familiar, it might as well be yours. (And it is yours, no matter how far or fast you run away from its clutches).

I’m writing a book that scares me. This is a personal problem. I’ve long accepted that my personality is energised by alienation, in the sense that my best thinking comes from being backed into a corner. A part of me enjoys unnerving the very readers I want to connect with, though that drive is sometimes listless and vague, aimed at an assorted patchwork of villains. (Institutional and interpersonal pressures, various forms of coercion and social control, leaders, followers, traditionalists and radicals, depending on which side of the bed I get out of). In my bones, I think this oppositional nature is a visceral rejection of likeability, an albatross hanging around the necks of women everywhere. I’ve always found the regime of false niceness and enforced sincerity intolerable. It’s not something I can theorise my way out of, considering I’ve been like this since childhood. (My school behavioral record speaks for itself). I’m fond of a good fight, and am very good at defending myself. The fear is becoming stuck in this clenched state, this wary posture that expects to be misunderstood, misrepresented, misled. Letting go means trusting in my ability to survive these external interpretations. It’s an acceptance that there’s no limit to how distorted your image can be in the eyes of others, and that there can even be a little truth to that distortion. You don’t recognise me for who I am but that fact won’t kill me. I’m not afraid of your conclusions.

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were thrown into the fire. They had no fear, no fear at all. In 1976, The Abyssinians gave riddim to this biblical story, singing of the Hebrew captives, a courageous trio who refused King Nebuchadnezzar’s golden idol. They did not bow, and were flung into the furnace seven times, over and over again. Abraham, the ultimate patriarch, was also touched by fire, rejecting the gods his people served. Quranic scripture describes an inferno cooled by the Divine, and a young man willing to be destroyed in the name of a singular truth. Fear is a threshold that once crossed, births a new self. It has both function and form, activating the limbic system and flooding the body with adrenaline and cortisol. This heightened sensitivity to danger is paradoxically euphoric, experienced as a rush. Dopamine surges, and fear leaves a thrill in its wake. I imagine this as akin to the pleasures of righteousness, the delicious feeling of being vindicated in your sacrifice.

Everybody is afraid, almost giddily so. Afraid of cracking up or going under, of losing the safety nets and creaky protections that buffer against tides of financial and social precarity. The hostilities of the world encroach, and the ranks of the vulnerable continue to expand. The circle gets bigger and bigger. Conspiracies which once frothed from the mouths of paranoid uncles are confirmed. Dossiers reveal the extent of wealth-enabled rot, as a transnational cabal of elites trade deals and children. The climate can best be described as feartropic, with all impulses directing you to smash the nearest panic button.

Paul Virilio wrote about the acceleration of daily life leading to fear becoming an environment, not just a mass emotion. Instantaneousness, simultaneity, interactivity; the “accident of the globe” as he called it, had ushered in an age of collective anxiety. Fear as synchronised helplessness, the governing mode of contemporary politics. Is it possible to opt out? To sit with what fear reveals without being led by it? Recently, I got lost near a coastal road and decided to accept a ride from a Bedouin man in a pickup truck. The TikTok algorithm insists on maintaining a constant state of feminine hyper-vigilance. It tells me to expect the worst. The man standing behind you in the coffee shop queue could be part of a human trafficking ring. Carry keys between your knuckles. Anticipate disaster. Something is out to get you, and you’d better be ready when it comes. Some fears I can live with, others I find harder to adopt. They are often justified, which makes them more dangerously capable of ruling your mind. The man dropped me off outside my door, and I thanked him for his generosity. I am afraid of a shrunken life.