READING MYSELF BACK TO PURPOSE BY FODIO AHMED

What do you do when you keep sabotaging yourself, even while standing in the middle of your own achievements? I asked myself that question, and for a moment I had no answer. Then I realized I was asking the wrong thing. I didn’t need to punish myself—I needed to sit down, study the pattern, and adjust the routine. That’s when it hit me: I had wandered into the wrong lane, drifting away from the very purpose that brought me here in the first place—books, literature, the quiet but relentless work of words. I come from the bloodline of literature. Poetry runs in my veins. I inherited it from my ancestor, the Fulani poet and scholar Usman Dan Fodio. And a poet does not sink into the river of history. We are meant to be the current that carries memory forward. I have an ancestral responsibility to pass down messages in paragraphs and verses. So no, I cannot sink.

That’s what Rashidat Olamidayo Ajakaye reminds me of in her poem This Book as an Aquatic Stone. She refuses to let the book drown in the river of transparent time. Instead, she turns it into a stone—weighty, enduring, refusing to be washed away. Her work digs into the rusting strings of society’s screeching sores, pulling at the places we try to ignore. Reading her again and again, I find myself loving the discomfort, because it forces consciousness.

From her poems, I draw three lessons that pulled me back to myself. 1st, return to your lane. When you abandon your original purpose, life begins to feel like self-sabotage. For #1PEN, that lane is literature. For you, it might be something else—but the lesson is the same: misalignment feels like failure. 2nd, be the stone, not the leaf. The world’s currents will try to carry you away—distraction, noise, approval, cynicism. A stone resists. It holds its ground and shapes the water around it. That’s what writing, reading, and remembering do for us. 3rd, read to remember why you exist. I will read. I have to read. I must read. Not just for pleasure, but to understand my purpose, to drive it, to sustain it. Reading feeds the hunger for history, consciousness, cultural values, beauty, and the public plights we too often look away from. 

As Rashidat writes again in her poem, Immortality Isn’t Competent Enough, “He who garnishes fun with facts, reading out to the societal hunger for history, consciousness, cultural values, beauty, and humanitarian crafts…” Oh, jewel of literature and artistry! You are conscious of the spreading universe, stretching like a global umbrella over all of us.

So here I am, back on the path. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s mine. And if I stray again, I know where to return—to the book, to the verse, to the responsibility I inherited.

Both poems—Immortality Isn’t Competent Enough and The Book as an Aquatic Stone—are responsible for the clarity I found today Thursday, May 14th, 2026 and the thirst they stirred in me for meaning within words, sentences, verses, and pages. They were both authored by Rashidat Olamidayo Ajakaye in Lagos, Nigeria, in April 2023. I read both poems in the poetry anthology Adulation, a tribute dedicated to the literary legacy of Professor Wole Soyinka. The collection was brought together by Cameroonian and Nigerian writers, edited by Nkwetatang Sampson Nguekie, Interim President of the Cameroonian & Nigerian Writers League, with a foreword by Dr. Wale Okediran.

There’s something fitting about that context. Soyinka’s legacy is one of words that refuse to be domesticated—words that interrogate power, memory, and the human condition. To have Rashidat’s poems sit within that lineage feels like a passing of the torch. Poetry, after all, has never been just ornament. It is the way we carve permanence into time, the way we argue with mortality using nothing but ink and breath. That’s why these poems stayed with me. Immortality Isn’t Competent Enough seems to say that even the idea of lasting forever is inadequate if the life lived within that time has no weight, no truth. And The Book as an Aquatic Stone turns the written word into something stubborn and unyielding—refusing to be swept away by the currents of forgetting. Together, they remind us that meaning is not found passively. It is searched for, fought for, and built line by line, page by page.  

In a world that moves too fast to remember, poetry insists that we pause long enough to ask: what is worth remembering?

© Fodio Ahmed. 1Pen, Chief Reader, MpapeReads.

- Nigeria