Flight, Or What It Means To Dream of Doors

A south-bound trip last year coalesced into bigger questions: about pain, its origin, the need to escape pain, and the place of art as a conduit for carrying intergenerational concerns

My friend and I visited Calabar last year, in late September. We didn’t first arrive there but spent a night in nearby Akwa Ibom. We lodged in a hotel in the neigborhood surrounding the Ibeno Beach, the longest sand beach in West Africa. Those hours were illuminating, spent in carefree embrace of those white sands we had eagerly browsed about days before as we planned the details of our trip. I was especially eager to visit Calabar because of Obongjayar, a musician whose artistry I’ve been fascinated by these past few years. Some Nights I Dream of Doors, his 2022-released debut album, was a personal exploration of Black History across continents.

In Calabar, we stayed in Atekong, the birthplace of Obongjayar who was born Steven Umoh. This wasn’t planned, but throughout our stay, I would come to see it as destined. The music of Obongjayar—his name a conflagration of Obong, which in Efik means King, and Jayar, from his erstwhile sobriquet of King Jayar—embraces his Cross River origins, and thus living there even for a few days provided an autobiographical heft to the conceptual leanings across his oeuvre. The most consequential of the places we visited was the National Museum, where we were shown around by a lovely tour guide. 

The museum was located in an accessible part of the city, possibly its center, because we saw a lot of parks around, while an institution was also nearby. Throbbing with youth, it was a colorful entry into the tourism scene that made Calabar so popular in the 2000s. Set upon sprawling land, the museum was really, blocks of several buildings which served aesthetic, administrative and communal functions, as a new block was still being constructed inside, with the aim to diversify its appeal. Inside, our tour guide walked us through several compartments, facets of the Efik culture visible but the main offering was ostensibly the legacies of the slave trade, which was vibrantly adopted in Calabar. Across the deep south of Nigeria, no other place sold as much slaves overseas as Calabar, and when I asked the tour guide why the practice was so successful there, her response confirmed what I had suspected: that slavery, in the political shape of houses, had already been embedded into Cross River culture before any white person stepped foot in the region. 

We were shown the chains, the wine bottles exchanged, the market where they sold slaves, and there, history rose to hit me in the face. It was a thrilling and defeating experience. When, upon our request, we were taken to view an underground prison where dissenting slaves were kept, I was overcome with emotion at the rugged thoughtfulness of everything. And when we were returning to our hotel, I suddenly understood the pain in Obongjayar’s music. You hear this pain in Bassey and Home, the first two projects he ever put out. They were encompassing depictions of a young man working his way through history, both personal and communal, and the language born from that exercise was often bleak, but it was also poignant and participatory, placing Obongjayar in the service of stories much older than him. 

The use of percussive instruments in those songs are especially noteworthy. The drums inspired vocalization that’s often been likened to Lagbaja, that insistent, evocative drawl that carried in its eccentric movements the local essence of a place. For Lagbaja that place was recognizably Lagos and the wider southwestern region. For Obongjayar it was Calabar, although I didn’t know that until I visited the city. ‘Sugar’, one of my favorite songs from Doors, has a riveting drum base which coaxes a stellar performance from the artist. “Who thought?” he asks in one line, “The boy from Atekong would make it this far?” The message is simple: life is all shades of bitter, but for the sake of one’s future, find your sugar. It’s an important record in an album full of important records, partly making up its motivational angle. It is especially important considering the doors Obongjayar went through in the fashioning of his destiny. It’s a door split into two, one passed by his mother who had relocated to Britain to escape her abusive husband, his father; and the other by himself, joining her years after. His music tussles with the expectations that come with that upward movement.

Art critic Carl Terver writes of the artist: “Even when he’s not being conscious, his poetry lingers; he reminds us, he makes us think, he makes us love and want to be loved, he makes us human. He is a true artist whose art is not just projection, so that when he sings about himself, he’s singing about everyone”. There’s an earthy immersion that goes on in ‘What Way Is Forward?’, advanced by avant-garde production echoing the flamboyance of an ancient masquerade. “Up like sun, down like sun, still sun,” he sings in ‘Still Sun’ and on ‘Carry Come, Carry Go,’ it’s “I get too big sometimes that I cast shadows on everyone around me”, his perspective heavy with the motions of a thinking mind and a sensual body, but his language is consistently in-tune with his message, a quality that’s also been the mark of a number of artists with African descent who were born or lived in the UK for a considerable part of their life. 

Prior to the release of Doors, Obongjayar collaborated with the rapper Little Simz on ‘Point And Kill’, a groovy cut from her own album ‘Sometimes I Might Be Introverted’. While the collaboration occupies a playful, interlude-esque role in the spirited autobiographical probings of Simz, it’s a sterling showcase of both artists’ skillset: the vocal manipulations of Obongjayar smoothly matched by the host’s incisive lyricism. SIMBI, the album’s acronym, is also one of the names of the artist, a nod towards its consistently personal gaze. Little Simz tilted towards an identity base, the kind her influence Kendrick Lamar mastered on his third studio album ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’. Indeed, she shouts out the Compton stylist on a song, but her application is drawn with both lightness and heft from Victorian England. The songs are graciously spaced with opera-esque interludes; it’s an album that takes its role seriously as a sonic document of the idiosyncrasies that shaped it. 

As she unpacks the weight of her experiences and their influence on her person and artistry, she uses language and tone that resists singularity, cooing in one song while rattling off her jaws in another. Born Simbiatu Abisola Abiola Ajikawo in the United Kingdom, her Nigerianess has been present from the start and on SIMBI, that embrace of her person peels even into the communal records ‘Woman’ and ‘I See You’, both coincidentally featuring Cleo Sol, a talented UK-born singer with parents of Jamaican, Serbian and Spanish descent. She dances through the former, a sweet-licked flow delivering odes to African women. Consider the opening quartet: “Naija women, got the melanin drippin’/L-O-N-D-O-N, city girl livin’/In the back, lookin’ like fire, chili pepper/Yoruba girl tougher than imperial leather”. Later she shouts out “Miss Sierra Leone looking like a gem”; “Miss Tanzania [who’s a] do or die” and “Miss Ethiopia can play so jazzy then sit you down and school you on Selassie”. 

There is something distance does to memory. If one is a focused artist, the absence of physicality forces one to think, to pull from memory the images of where they’re coming from while parsing them through the manifestations of their present location. Each shout-out was lovable, because even though Little Simz was not in those countries, had likely never met those women, the validity of their person cannot be put aside because her tributes never claimed to know them beyond the surface level. When 2Face sang for his African Queen, there was no need to single out a particular name or country; it was an understandable metaphor. That is how the diaspora sharpens the African narrative, by possessing this clarity enshrined by time and space. 

You hear something of that clarity in Dave, one of the most revelatory lyricists UK Hip-Hop has ever seen. His albums Psychodrama and We’re All Alone In This Together are full of searing portraits of people and events. His debut was trained inwards, utilizing the professional acuity of a therapist as an entry into formative relationships, peculiarly with his family members and lovers. Through this encompassing gaze we get to know Dave’s elder brother is in jail, that his mother went through the toughest of times, and that he carried the expectation of growing faster than his agemates. And so the associative trauma emerges in his later actions, but he also reveals them in larger stories like ‘Leslie’, an eight-minute opus exposing the destructive tendencies of men with those shortcomings on the women around them. That he does the showing doesn’t exclude him from the conversation of how men cross seas and become hardened and hurt the women they should love. 

We’re All Alone draws more striking images in their evocation of what happens in the world around Dave. The rapper born David Orobosa Omoregie carries his experiences across the Atlantic, even though he’s a first generation Brit; it doesn’t weaken his observation. His origin of Benin City in Nigeria is often referenced; in the ‘We’re All Alone’ opener he raps in the first verse, “I’m a young Black belligerent, child of an immigrant” and later advances the image through specificity. “We’re from Nigeria, Benin City/ Sin City, don’t know what it’s like? Take a trip for yourself/ Poverty’s killin’ us, the government’s killin’ us/ If they ain’t killin’ us, then we killin’ ourselves”. An advancement from the sprawling ‘Black’, he zooms in on himself before taking in the society, showing his ability to switch perspectives with the razor sharpness of his delivery. On ‘Three Rivers’, he takes a hard look at the impact of British policy on migration, with three different eras—the Windrush Generation in the 1980s, the Eastern European wars of the nineties, and the contemporary manifestations of war in the Middle East—forming the basis of his analysis. He ends the verse three with these lines: 

Death from a sky littered with stars 

You run away from your kids so you can give them a chance 

But your asylum has got you in a different war 

Because the British wanna know what you livin’ here for 

We rely on migration more than ever before 

They’re key workers, but they couldn’t even get in the door 

When you’re at Heaven’s gate, what are you telling the Lord?

You wouldn’t even let a kid into some steadier shores 

That’s a life they may never afford 

Surely you would wanna give your people chances that were better than yours?

No? 

“I’m like a journalist,” Obongjayar once said in an interview with W Magazine. “I tell you what I see, I report what I see around me”. In The Standard, Little Simz’s response to a question about her ego reveals interest in the lives of others, which is nothing if not the willingness of the journalist to imbibe new stories, to sometimes see past themselves. “Honestly, respectfully, I think I’m very talented. I know I am. But I also wanted to pose the question: why is legacy important? I want to be a legend, but sometimes I don’t know why. There are all these people on the ground doing real work: the teachers, the healers, the preachers: So why do we admire people in the public eye so much?” 

We should dream of doors; I think that’s what Little Simz was saying.