We begin inside a small Baptist church at dusk, on the outskirts of a Lagos neighborhood in the mid 1980’s. We are here for a rare event, the screening of a film depicting the second coming of Christ. This Baptist church is not my church. In my house, going to church is a special event—the whole family piling into the station wagon wearing special shoes and hats, sitting still for what seem like hours—reserved for a few Sundays a year. We are not Baptist, and there are certainly never any films shown at our church. We come to this new lively church on a regular weeknight at the invitation of my friend, a neighbor. I am allowed to go because it is just a short walk from home. The Baptist church is part of the grounds of the neighborhood secondary school, at which my father taught Mathematics and coached football for a few years. The walk is familiar. We pass my cousin’s apartment building, the general grocery store, cut through the quiet market-place with its stalls shuttered for the evening. I have never been to a public film screening before, never sat in the dark with strangers, silently sharing emotions. The large doors close on a crowded room, blocking out the evening breeze. A short speech by the pastor, and then the lights go out. In this dark place, we are rapt, focused on the portable hanging screen set up in front of the pulpit. What we see is a moving picture of the end of the world: radio broadcasts frantically announcing the mysterious disappearance of millions; irons left on, burning hot; eerily empty streets; abandoned cars; desolate shops; and a few very blond, very afraid stragglers screaming, running, left behind in the big American city. We emerge bewildered. Outside it is already night.

My dad sent me this wonderful picture of Lagos, his hometown, in the year of his birth. Friday, October 1, 2010 marked the 50th anniversary of Nigeria’s independence from British rule. Remember?

(from a paper, given with Barbara Adams, at the Royal Academy of British Architects, London, July 2009)
I remember the first Michael Jackson music video I ever saw; in my grandparents’ living room in Lagos, during the evening hour when state television showed the latest in American, British and Caribbean black pop music.

The glowing halo of curly black hair, the even skin, shy white smile. The fragile teen-aged body. Tuxedo jacket open, with a large, loosely-tied bowtie, sleeves pushed up to the elbows, one hand finger-snapping, one hand in pocket. White socks, black loafers.

Falling suddenly, into a marbled sky, and to me, an avid marble collector, and fan of blowing soap bubbles, this seemed like a dream—I want to be there! I want to be where he is. He splits into 3 loosely synchronized selves in this music video, each one imploring me, in stereo, not to stop til I get enough rocking, snapping, spinning, freezing.

Here, I should tell you what this is not about:

This is not a psychological account of an individual experience.

This is not an account of a social experience.

In theorizing sensual experience, social scientists tend to begin from a split between the individual and social. The individual’s body is constructed as a set of openings, orifices through which the separate senses might receive sensory and psychic input or stimuli, through which it is shaped, and through which it shapes. The individual’s sensory experience is understood to be psychologized, contained separately from that of other individuals, and from the mass. The job of the social scientist is then to construct a system of influence, what yesterday’s keynote speaker Elizabeth Edwards in her analysis of a corpus of photographic images, called collective systems, through which each individual’s experience or material might likened to others, and then explained. At the heart of this social scientific project is a certain kind of liberal, representative politics, in which the many is privileged over the one, the macro, over the micro.

My sensory experience of the image of Michael Jackson is difficult to understand if we begin with this split in scale of sensory experience, or between visual or sensory and material practices.

This story of encounter with Michael Jackson is about experience in a nonpsychological, transpersonal register. This is about friction generated in movement—mine and his and ours—in the proximity of bodies both organic and inorganic. In this story, my body is a living center of indeterminacy, in constant molecular motion, in constant motion through space. In this story, Michael’s movements on the screen are critical—smooth and economical, urgent and emergent. Each snap, jerk and soulful lean extend towards me, imploring me to match my movements to his, to make myself complimentary. His movements, meeting mine in the real space of my grandparents’ living room, show me that my body is malleable, open to new trajectories of motion through which other subjectivities may emerge. He extends his body into mine, through the color television set, offering me a new range of possibility for (e)motion. I just have to keep moving, and never stop til I get enough.

Michael’s moves are really in my heart, in my body. They have been with me since I was a child, providing a template for soulful, fluid, expressive motion through the world, and I now realize just how important that vision he created was.

The openness of his body—the combination of strength and fragility—is something I really admire, and hope one day to have: a special kind of freedom in your own skin, a joyful way of moving that cuts swathes through the trajectories of other lives, in a folding of bodies into one another. I don’t know how to go on and move towards this freedom. I often feel very trapped by life circumstances, and when I look at Michael, I wonder how did he do it? How did he find so many moments of freedom to move even within the constraints of forms and circumstances? The answers to these questions are a matter of truly living, or dying.

The city of our imaginations was London. In Lagos of the 1980′s “London” was a magic sound: its very utterance conveyed unattainable sophistication, hipness, style, escape. London stole my father for a few years of study. London bathed the in-crowd at school with the “been-to” glow. A wash of light followed even those whose cousins-fathers-sister-friend-daughters-boyfriends were rumored to have visited that fabled city.

Like many schoolchildren, I knew the London of Dickens, of the Queen; the London of black taxis and Big Ben. So when this Terence Trent D’Arby video slid into heavy rotation on state television, I was unprepared for this other, intensely romantic London, of warehouses and dive bars, of motorcycles, dandies and miscegenation. This is when London became a real place, a tangible desire of mine.

Of course, this desire maintained intensity for a brief season, and I spent my adolescence in that unlikely emerald city, Seattle, and later New York. With each new city, London’s call grew fainter. I doubt I will ever live there. But thanks to the internet, I’ll always have Terence.

A childhood friend of mine, Tade, made this beautiful slideshow of images taken on one of his visits to Lagos.

I grew up in Lagos, Nigeria during the oil boom of the 1970′s and 80′s. Fashion reflected the city’s exuberant modernism and futurism. There were great hairstyles, which all the fancy ladies wore. The city was changing and growing fast. New structures seemed to be going up everyday. The new hairstles were intended to simulate the forms of the urban structures they were named after. Like the hairstyle pictured above was called “Eko Bridge,” after the new bridges built to link the city’s islands. There were also styles like the skyscraper, the stadium, etc.

As you can probably tell, hair for Lagosians, and many other Africans, is a big deal. Look here for more about the significance of hair and the head in West Africa.

I think hair done like this could be a way of archiving the city, don’t you?