On being without paper - Eugenia Abu

Eugenia Abu

I was sure I was not going to need anything so I went in without my bag and sat. The wait was not meant to be more than five minutes, ten minutes, certainly not up to fifteen. But the wait dragged on. By the time it was thirty minutes, I was not sure what to do with myself. I had no reading material and had no writing paper. I am sure you all are wondering what this is all about.

Let me save you from the mystery. I had gone to visit a friend at a high security zone and my name had been sent to the gate. I was quite sure I was not going to wait but the wait was becoming endless and there was no newspaper in sight. For me, if the paper is two weeks old and I have not read it before, then it’s new to me. I have been known to pore over magazines that are two months old and still get value from the pages. I am well known for scouring through second hand bookshops anywhere I am in the world because believe me some of the finest and rarest books in the world are found there. There is something in a book that never goes away. As a child I carried a book everywhere I went and as an adult I am pretty much the same. But I digress.

So here I am in a security zone with no book to read and no paper to write on. As a book person and a paper person I began to feel a little uncomfortable with the fact that there was no paper. I fidgeted quite a bit because I could not understand why the side tables were clinically clean. No paper, no flowers, nothing, just plain bare tables.  The tables were cold, distant and unbearable. The wait continued and I was dying.

I have been told by my family that no one should handwrite anything before typing into the computer. It’s a waste of time and double work they say. It’s alright, I say to them. This is who I am. It actually depends on my mood. I can have it written down and still make sense of it or I can type it in. It depends on my head and I often much prefer scribbling to the cold keyboard of a computer or the touch screen of an iPad.

But now sitting amongst security men wearing dark glasses, I was not sure even an iPad would have helped in this space. So I braved it and asked for paper and biro. I had left my files in the car with my entire writing material; ditto my bag because I did not want to be subjected to a search that will disembowel my highly rated bag and its contents, most of which were personal effects.

But here I was now desperate for paper like it was some kind of addictive drug.   I craved it. I looked around to no avail. My fingers itched to write; my column, a sentence, a poem, a short, short story, anything at all. Then I braved it and asked the security men for a piece of paper and a biro. They offered me a scrounged receipt lying around. My boldness dissipated. The paper was not even going to take a full sentence. This place was the kind of place you go to and you cannot return to the entrance gate.

So I wrote a word repeatedly to stave my need to write. I wrote on the back and on the side. Desperate, I wrote over what I had written before, and then I decided to stop. And yet I waited. I thought about Madiba in jail looking for paper to write a sentence of how his day went, trying to capture history, I thought about how literary giants who went to jail struggled to find paper to put their thoughts down.

I thought about one of my favourite poets Dennis Brutus and his incredible collection, Letters to Martha. I asked myself what I would have done if I were in their shoes. I sat still and bit my lips. I am sitting in a small room with security men and no paper for thirty minutes and I am losing my mind. What about Madiba for twenty seven years? See the things we take for granted. 

I think one of the security guys was reading my mind and gave me two pages of a notepad from a bag beside him. I began to breathe. Paper, Paper at last. Thank you so much I said to him and I meant it. I sat and scribbled quickly and furiously. By the next twenty minutes, I had an article in hand. Yes I did; this one you are reading. As I pulled out from my subconscious the last few sentences for the article, my friend popped out of the door. So sorry to have kept you waiting. I did not know whether to cry or to laugh. I never want to be without paper again.

Eugenia Abu