FUNKE ADETUTU
The evening of last Sunday was one that I can never forget in a hurry. I must admit that I wasn’t exactly sure of my feelings. They were just as uncertain as I was. I honestly did not know what to make of what was ahead.
That evening, MUSON was my destination. Even though I was sure the event had started two hours earlier, nevertheless, I still trudged on. I recall someone had told me some days earlier that I just had to be there. As of then, the invitation had yet to be delivered to me. I didn’t even know that I made it to the finalist list.
“You didn’t tell me you were nominated for the Future Awards,” Phillip, our editor, queried me.
“I thought I told you I made it to the semi-final stage. I didn’t know what became of the nomination since then,” I answered. And sincerely, I did not really follow events up there again to know what became of the list after I got the first alert on Facebook. I was expecting to get a notification like the first, but it never came until my conversation with Phillip. It was only then that I got curious and logged on to the Future Awards web page. I didn’t really give much thought to it, even when I discovered I actually made the final list. And then, the invite came Thursday evening. “A Nigerian passport,” as the organisers, tagged it.
So that beautiful evening, I arrived MUSON shortly after the event began. The hall was already filled to capacity. There were no seats in the main arena; at least, that was what I would call it, since other late-comers like myself barely managed to get seats there. I was my usual quiet and composed self when I finally sat down; maybe I didn’t know the gravity or is it importance of what was taking place that night. My confidence remained unshaken. I was just the Funke who never worries about anything. This feeling remained until Dare Art-Alade, one of the night’s compere, announced that the first set of awards were about to be given. Instantly, my stomach tightened. My heart raced. I could not explain the fear that gripped my mind. The tension within was high. In that state, the following lines of William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads came to my mind, “poetry is a continuous overflow of powerful feeling recollected in tranquillity….” But that evening the overflow of feeling that I experienced was not caused by poetry but fear. The fear that I might lose or win, you’d ask? That I wasn’t sure of, I must confess. You know there are times when one could be overcome by the fear of joy, even when the outcome of the situation is positive.
It was just a kind of feeling that quickly responded to the appeal that the award night had begun in earnest. It was essentially a feeling, but one which did not depend largely on intelligence (in the light of Wordsworth’s words), strengthened and made sensitive and responsive by what I heard from the podium. It was impossible to give specific directions for the cultivation of the feeling for failure or success, even when I had not known the outcome. Little wonder why people never stopped asking what was on my mind that evening. Even when my brother called to congratulate me, the first question he asked was: “How did you feel when your name was called?”
When Tara Fela-Durotoye announced me as the Future Awards Journalist of the Year, I was overwhelmed by the fear of joy. The fact that I won was a mixture of joy and fear such that when I stood on the podium to give a short speech, my voice shook. And Kemi Ajumobi, my colleague here at Business Day, who was in the audience that evening, would never cease to laugh at me for that. On my inside, my confidence was sure but my voice just refused to steady itself. This, I still can’t explain. Could it be because I was conscious of the fact that the other nominees were seated right there in the audience and they could as well have been making that speech and going home with the trophy? Maybe. However, my voice steadied all the same such that Joshua Awesome, a friend, asked when he saw me in the office on Monday, “Your speech last night sounded like a prepared one?” Truth is, it wasn’t so much a prepared one, but one that was a mixture of fear and joy. And that, precisely, was simply the feeling I had on my mind. How about that!
The evening of last Sunday was one that I can never forget in a hurry. I must admit that I wasn’t exactly sure of my feelings. They were just as uncertain as I was. I honestly did not know what to make of what was ahead.
That evening, MUSON was my destination. Even though I was sure the event had started two hours earlier, nevertheless, I still trudged on. I recall someone had told me some days earlier that I just had to be there. As of then, the invitation had yet to be delivered to me. I didn’t even know that I made it to the finalist list.
“You didn’t tell me you were nominated for the Future Awards,” Phillip, our editor, queried me.
“I thought I told you I made it to the semi-final stage. I didn’t know what became of the nomination since then,” I answered. And sincerely, I did not really follow events up there again to know what became of the list after I got the first alert on Facebook. I was expecting to get a notification like the first, but it never came until my conversation with Phillip. It was only then that I got curious and logged on to the Future Awards web page. I didn’t really give much thought to it, even when I discovered I actually made the final list. And then, the invite came Thursday evening. “A Nigerian passport,” as the organisers, tagged it.
So that beautiful evening, I arrived MUSON shortly after the event began. The hall was already filled to capacity. There were no seats in the main arena; at least, that was what I would call it, since other late-comers like myself barely managed to get seats there. I was my usual quiet and composed self when I finally sat down; maybe I didn’t know the gravity or is it importance of what was taking place that night. My confidence remained unshaken. I was just the Funke who never worries about anything. This feeling remained until Dare Art-Alade, one of the night’s compere, announced that the first set of awards were about to be given. Instantly, my stomach tightened. My heart raced. I could not explain the fear that gripped my mind. The tension within was high. In that state, the following lines of William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads came to my mind, “poetry is a continuous overflow of powerful feeling recollected in tranquillity….” But that evening the overflow of feeling that I experienced was not caused by poetry but fear. The fear that I might lose or win, you’d ask? That I wasn’t sure of, I must confess. You know there are times when one could be overcome by the fear of joy, even when the outcome of the situation is positive.
It was just a kind of feeling that quickly responded to the appeal that the award night had begun in earnest. It was essentially a feeling, but one which did not depend largely on intelligence (in the light of Wordsworth’s words), strengthened and made sensitive and responsive by what I heard from the podium. It was impossible to give specific directions for the cultivation of the feeling for failure or success, even when I had not known the outcome. Little wonder why people never stopped asking what was on my mind that evening. Even when my brother called to congratulate me, the first question he asked was: “How did you feel when your name was called?”
When Tara Fela-Durotoye announced me as the Future Awards Journalist of the Year, I was overwhelmed by the fear of joy. The fact that I won was a mixture of joy and fear such that when I stood on the podium to give a short speech, my voice shook. And Kemi Ajumobi, my colleague here at Business Day, who was in the audience that evening, would never cease to laugh at me for that. On my inside, my confidence was sure but my voice just refused to steady itself. This, I still can’t explain. Could it be because I was conscious of the fact that the other nominees were seated right there in the audience and they could as well have been making that speech and going home with the trophy? Maybe. However, my voice steadied all the same such that Joshua Awesome, a friend, asked when he saw me in the office on Monday, “Your speech last night sounded like a prepared one?” Truth is, it wasn’t so much a prepared one, but one that was a mixture of fear and joy. And that, precisely, was simply the feeling I had on my mind. How about that!
