Amara Okonkwo-Bassey’s diary on family archives and the unexpected gift of finding new material in old letters
I wasn’t looking for a poem at all, genuinely, just going through a box of old family correspondence my aunt had finally shipped over from Lagos after years of promising to, mostly out of simple curiosity about my grandmother’s handwriting. Instead, halfway through the third letter, one single line stopped me completely, and I knew immediately it was the opening of something I needed to write.
What the Actual Line Said
A small, almost throwaway observation about waiting for rain during a specific dry season, written with an offhand, exhausted patience that captured something about hope and endurance I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to articulate in my own work for months.
Why This Line Worked Where My Own Attempts Hadn’t
There’s a specific, hard-won authenticity in something written without any intention of ever being read as literature, my grandmother writing simply to her sister, no audience, no craft consideration, just genuine, direct feeling, and that unguarded quality carries an emotional weight I’ve been chasing artificially in my own more deliberate drafts.
How I’m Actually Using This Material
I’m not simply quoting the letter directly, that feels like a genuine boundary I don’t want to cross without more thought, but I’m using its emotional structure, the specific patience embedded in that single line, as scaffolding for an entirely new poem that’s genuinely mine while carrying forward something essential from hers.
What Else the Letters Revealed
An entire correspondence I never knew existed, decades of my grandmother and her sister writing across considerable distance, documenting an ordinary, sustained sisterly relationship I only ever knew the tail end of as a child, and I suspect there’s considerably more material here worth returning to.
Where This New Poem Stands Now
Still early, still finding its actual shape, but genuinely alive in a way my previous attempts at this exact theme hadn’t managed, proof, I think, that sometimes the material you need has been sitting quietly in a box the whole time, waiting for you to finally open it. Further diary entries continue at bohiney.com, with the original piece live at prat.uk.
SOURCE: https://prat.UK/