About me - Abiola Daniel
This is probably the hardest story I’ve ever written.
As of the time I’m writing this, I have no audience and no fan base, which is just as well because this story will probably become something I look back on fondly in the not-too-distant future. Hi there. I’m Abiola Daniel, but I’d much prefer it if you call me Danny. If you’re fond of me and/or my writing which you inevitably will be, you can call me Dinero.
You probably noticed I added a curiosity hook in the previous paragraph, and your brain is likely telling you “who is this guy even, and why’s he so sure I’ll be fond of him?” Well, I’ll answer the first part now and my writing will answer the second for me. So, the big question…
“Who am I?”
As most “about me” stories typically go, (believe me, before writing this I read a lot of ‘em), the answer is I… I don’t exactly know? (God why is it so hard to answer this, it sounds like such a simple question!). I don’t know who I am yet. But I can tell you about myself a bit….
“What am I?”
Now this is wayy easier to answer. I’m a black, Christian conservative, African (not African- American) male. I’m also a graduate with a B.Sc in mass communication. I’m a fresh enough graduate for the last sentence to deserve its own paragraph. While writing this particular story, I feel like I live in a reality drastically different in my own eyes than everyone else’s. It started from my childhood. I had one of the best childhoods an upper middle class father could give his children. As I found out later on in life, it is uncommon to find someone who had this good a childhood. High standard education, exotic food, bicycles and computer games, and the best of all, more books than I could read. I believe books were my third parent. They shaped so much of my personality, ideology and beliefs in a way that I’m only realizing now as I write this chapter.
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Life came to me in stages of realizations. I realized that reading as a form of entertainment was laughable in most places, that speaking English the correct way drew mockery at best and hostility at worst, and that being extraordinary meant being abnormal, because everything normal is ordinary.
I realized a lot of things shortly after my dad died of cancer in 2013. I realized how much he had shielded me from a lot of the realities of life. I realized the food he provided was actually exotic. I had always considered them regular. Hot dogs and sardines and strawberry jam and peanut butter were not everyday items in most households. I realized that being computer literate at about the age of 7 was rare, as I began to increasingly encounter people my mother’s age who couldn’t type a sentence if their lives depended on it. Of all the adults who could use a computer, I still could navigate one better than they could. It turns out computers were not commonplace among adults. Or the general populace for that matter. Quite shockingly, I realize how exceptionally educated I was amongst my peers, and even amongst the adult population. I thought knowing the capitals of every African country was common. People considered me smart for knowing how to spell “synecdoche”. Or for being able to watch Western movies without the subtitles on.
So much of my late childhood, teenage years and early adulthood was filled with shocking realizations of how my perceptions of reality were so radically different from actual reality that somewhere along the line, I found myself staring at the stars through my bedroom window one cool night and wondering: What is true in the reality I live in?
This sharp conflict between what I thought was true and what I found out to be true shaped me in a very powerful way. It made me develop an insatiable thirst for, not knowledge, but truth. And when it began to occur to me that the truth (not “my” truth) was so much less widespread than misinformation and propaganda in my country, continent and the world at large, I was heartbroken. You might not understand the depth of the sorrow I feel until I tell you that I was born in northern Nigeria, and my mother and father had to flee for their lives holding me and my two brothers and a few scanty possessions because the predominantly muslim north believed that the Christians had slighted their god and were staging a religious riot.
If I tell you the full story, it’ll sound funny. But I bet it wasn’t funny when my parents were evading gunmen and machete-wielding extremists bearing three infants. I wasn’t old enough to remember anything of course, but I was told the story when I came of age. It is not a story I liked hearing. I was born in conflict birthed by untruths.
Are you enjoying my about me story so far? I know it sounds like the synopsis of a thriller novel. At least that’s how it sounds to me. I’m tempted to explain what everything I’ve said so far says about me, but I’m thinking you’ve already pieced that together. There are not enough words to finish telling the story. The story is still happening as a matter of fact. Maybe later I’ll write a sequel and tell you more of the story that’s still in progress. For now, it’s 12:42 AM and I’m very sleepy.
Abiola Daniel
