By Fred Itua
There is a community in Edo State called Iruekpen. It was once the kind of place that the world did not notice, where ambition grew quietly in the hearts of children who had never seen the inside of an aeroplane, never tasted the comfort of a life without want, but who somehow knew, with a certainty that defied their circumstances, that they were born for something more.
I am one of those children. James Joyce understood this feeling with an intimacy that bordered on the painful. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his semi-autobiographical masterpiece, young Stephen Dedalus moved through a world that was perpetually too small for the soul it contained.
He was hemmed in by poverty, by the suffocating expectations of family and church and nation, by a society that had already decided what a boy from his circumstances was permitted to become.
Yet Stephen did not accept the verdict. He chose, at enormous personal cost, to forge in the smithy of his soul something that his environment never offered him. He chose himself. That act of radical self-creation, of refusing to be defined by the accident of one’s birth, is not merely a literary theme. For those of us who grew up reaching for a life that our surroundings insisted was not ours to reach for, it is a lived reality.
My father was a teacher and a Scout Master, two noble professions, but nobility does not fill an empty stomach. There were no safety nets in our home, no inheritance waiting, no solid connections to open doors that poverty had firmly shut. What there was, however, was hunger. Not the hunger of an empty belly, though we knew that too, but the deeper, more consuming hunger of young people who could see a world beyond their village and were desperate enough to reach for it with bare hands.
So, we used our hands. My siblings and I worked at construction sites under a punishing sun, carried loads in the market for strangers, pushed wheelbarrows, hawked fufu, tomatoes and vegetables through dusty streets before school, after school, and sometimes instead of school. We did not do these things because we had surrendered to poverty. We did them precisely because we refused to. Every kobo earned was a small act of defiance against a fate that had already decided what we were supposed to become.
Then, life delivered its cruellest blow. My elder brother, the one whose name I would later give my own son, was taken from us in his late twenties. A young banker with his whole life assembled before him, allegedly killed by armed robbers. Grief of that magnitude does not simply pass. It sits in the chest like a stone and asks a question that has no comfortable answer: what, exactly, are we doing all of this for?
But we survived it. We carried him with us and we kept moving.
Joyce wrote of Stephen that his soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. I have read that line many times over the years, and each time it lands differently, because I know what it means to rise from something that should have buried you.
Unemployment held me in its grip for two full years after my National Youth Service, two years of silence from a world I had worked so hard to enter. Journalism was not my first choice. It was, if I am honest, my last resort. Yet, it became my life’s work, my platform and, in ways I could not have anticipated standing in those market streets with a tray of tomatoes balanced on my head, my purpose.
I tell this story not to celebrate myself, but to speak directly to every person reading this who is currently in a place that feels like the end. It is not the end. The construction site is not your destination. The hunger is not your identity. The closed door is not the final verdict on your life.
Like Stephen Dedalus standing at the edge of the sea, wings unfurling, hearing the call of a life that the world around him could neither see nor sanction, you too are permitted to fly. The permission does not come from your circumstances. It never did. It comes from the quiet, unbreakable decision you make in your most difficult hour to keep going anyway.
Poverty is inherited through surrender, not circumstance. The moment you decide that your children will not begin where you began, something shifts.
That decision, made quietly, stubbornly, in the middle of difficulty, is the most powerful inheritance you can leave.
My children will not hawk tomatoes in the rain. They will not lie awake wondering whether school fees can be found. They will stand on the foundation of everything their father refused to accept, and they will build higher than I ever imagined from those dusty Iruekpen streets.
Do not give up. The village you come from is not the limit of where you are going. Stephen Dedalus escaped the nets that nationality, language and religion flung at his soul. You can escape yours too. One day, your children will testify.
As-salamu alaykum!
