SHORTLISTED
CHIDERA UDOCHUKWU-NDUKA
My father drew spirals in the margins of his notebooks. Small ones at first before larger, looser ones that swept across pages about renal function and cardiac arrest. I found the books after he died, stacked in our basement in Toronto where they had lived for fifteen years, growing mold in the damp Canadian cold.
“Why spirals, Papa?” I had asked him once, watching him doodle during my childhood in Port Harcourt.
“Because nothing moves in straight lines,” he said. “Not water, or people or time.”
He was drawing the Niger Delta without knowing it. From above, our delta is all spirals, creeks branching into smaller creeks, rivers dividing and rejoining, water that cannot decide if it is salt or fresh, so it becomes both. The Omi River where I grew up moved in loops, curving back on itself like a snake eating its tail, like time refusing to be linear. I remember standing at its edge as a child, watching how the current would push forward, then pull back, then push again, never the same water twice, but always the same motion. My father would say the river was breathing, and I believed him because what else do you call that rhythm? That in-out, that give-take, that constant conversation between what comes and what goes?
In Vodou cosmology, which I would not learn about until much later, the spirit Lasirèn also moves in spirals. She is the lwa of the sea, of mirrors, of women who refuse to be possessed by anything but water. In my father’s Igbo cosmology, Mamiwata does the same. They are not the same goddess, but they understand the same truth: that water never forgets, even when it changes form. When I first read about Lasirèn in a library in Toronto, I felt a shock of recognition that had nothing to do with appropriation and everything to do with understanding that some truths are universal because water is universal. Displacement is universal. The ocean that connects Haiti to West Africa does not care about our human categories of nation and tribe and separate gods. The ocean is one body, spiraling around the planet, holding all our drowned and all our dreams in the same salt.
This is an essay about spirals and the shape migration takes when you look at it honestly. It is about how Haitian Spiralism taught me to read my own Nigerian displacement and about how you can study a philosophy that emerged from a context completely different from yours and still find yourself reflected in its waters, still hear your own heartbeat in its drums.
The Middle Passage moved in spirals too, though we pretend it was a straight line. We draw it on maps as arrows, Africa to Americas, a clean trajectory of violence. But the ships circled. They moved with currents and trade winds, looped around islands, doubled back for more cargo. And the people stolen, the bodies thrown overboard, they spiraled down through salt water, becoming something else. Becoming diaspora and the bones that Toni Morrison says the Atlantic remembers.
My family’s migration was different; voluntary, privileged, recent. We left Nigeria in 2008 when I was fifteen. My father got a job at a Toronto hospital. We flew Air France, business class. I cannot compare this to the Middle Passage without being obscene, without erasing the fundamental violence of enslavement and pretending my father’s choice to leave was anything like being stolen. But there is something about leaving that spirals regardless of how you leave. Something about time that refuses to move forward when you are always calculating: what time is it in Lagos? Is Mama awake? Would Chioma be getting ready for church? Would the market be open? Would the rain have started?
I kept two clocks on my phone for years; Toronto time and Lagos time. I told myself that it helped me know when to call home. But really it was evidence of the spiral, proof that I was living in two temporalities at once, that linear time had failed me, that I was trapped in the eternal present of diaspora where you are always here and always there, always now and always then.
In Dezafi, Frankétienne writes about a zombie who regains consciousness and realizes he has been walking in circles. The zombie cannot escape the plantation because the bokor has drawn a salt line around it. The zombie can see beyond the line, can see freedom but his feet keep tracing the same path. Circle. Spiral. Return. I read Dezafi in translation (English from French from Kreyòl, already a spiral) in a Toronto library where I was studying for pharmacy school like my father, continuing the loop. The zombie’s realization felt like looking in a mirror. The salt line felt like the border between Nigeria and everywhere else, between who I was and who I was becoming, between the child who played in the Omi River and the adult who worked in a sterile Canadian hospital mixing compounds that had nothing to do with the herbal remedies my grandmother used to make.
You can leave home. But home keeps pulling you back in concentric circles, tighter and tighter, until you realize you never actually left. You are the salt line; the one who drew the boundary you cannot cross. This is the first lesson of the spiral: that escape is an illusion. You carry home in your body like salt in your blood, like water in your cells. You can fly to Toronto or Paris or New York but you will still dream in Igbo, still cook jollof rice the way your mother taught you, still measure distances in Lagos traffic patterns even when you are standing on Yonge Street watching snow fall like nothing you ever knew in Nigeria.
In 2010, when the earthquake shattered Port-au-Prince, I watched from Toronto. Watched the footage loop and spiral on CNN. The spiral of disaster porn, of Western cameras that only point at Haiti when it is breaking, that reduce a nation to its traumas, that cannot see resilience or beauty or the ordinary joy of people living their lives. I was seventeen, sitting in my parents’ living room, watching Haiti become metaphor, watching it turn into a symbol, watching it disappear beneath the weight of other people’s narratives. I thought: this is what they would do to Nigeria too, if they cared enough to listen. This is what they do to all of us, reduce us to our disasters, our famines, our wars. Ignoring that Lagos is also laughter and markets bursting with colour and technological innovation and Afrobeat blasting through speakers and weddings that last for days. Forgetting that Port-au-Prince is also art and music and revolution and joy that survives everything thrown at it.
But I also watched something else spiral into focus: Haitian artists insisting on another narrative. Artists who refused the single story of collapse and instead offered polyphony, simultaneity, the past and present speaking at once. I watched Haitian-American writers on social media pushing back against the disaster narrative, sharing poems and paintings and photographs of Haiti before, Haiti during, Haiti after, Haiti always. I started reading hungrily, desperately, trying to understand this place that felt familiar even though I had never been there. Trying to understand why watching Port-au-Prince crumble felt like watching something happen to my own home, my own people, my own self.
Toni Morrison says that water has a memory. That the Atlantic Ocean remembers the Middle Passage, holds the bones of the drowned, carries their stories in its currents. If this is true and I believe it is, then every ocean is connected to every other ocean. The Atlantic that swallowed our ancestors flows into the Gulf of Mexico, into the Caribbean Sea, into the Niger Delta where I was born. Water spirals. It evaporates and rains and runs to the ocean and evaporates again. It is never lost, only transformed. This is what Lasirèn knows. This is what Mamiwata whispers to the children who sit by rivers, the ones who understand that identity is not a straight line but a spiral that loops through salt and fresh, masculine and feminine, here and there, what we are and what we are told to be.
I am one of those children. I sat by the Omi River for years, hiding from children who called me names I didn’t yet have the language to defend myself against. The river never asked me to explain myself. The river never demanded I choose. Am I Nigerian or Canadian? The river said: you are water. You are both. You are the place where salt and fresh meet and refuse to separate.
In Toronto, I learned to code-switch so smoothly I didn’t even notice I was doing it. Nigerian accent at home, Canadian flatness at work, something in between with friends who also lived between worlds. I learned to translate not just between languages but between entire worldviews, explaining to my white Canadian friends why I sent money home every month, explaining to my Nigerian family why I couldn’t just come back, why the life I’d built here mattered even if it looked like betrayal to them. Each conversation was a negotiation, each explanation a translation, each moment of switching between worlds a small death and rebirth. I was learning what it meant to be multiple, to refuse singularity, to embody the spiral in my daily life.
The Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson’s land art in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, is 1,500 feet long and coils counterclockwise into water so salty nothing can live in it. When the water is low, you can walk the spiral from shore to center. When it floods, the spiral disappears but remains, waiting beneath the surface. I visited it in 2019, drove out to the middle of nowhere to stand at the edge of pink water and walk the spiral. It took fifteen minutes to reach the center, stepping carefully on black rocks that spiraled inward, inward, always inward. And when I got there? Nothing. Just the center of a spiral, more rock, and water lapping at stone. I turned around and walked back out, and the walk out took just as long, the same spiral in reverse, or maybe not reverse, maybe just the other side of the same motion.
I think about this often. I think about structures that exist whether we can see them or not, how diaspora works like this, visible during low tide, submerged during high, but always there, shaping the landscape. Spiralism, as a literary philosophy, builds similar architecture. It refuses the Western insistence on rising action, climax, resolution. Instead, it offers recursive storytelling, fragments that circle back, narrators who contradict themselves because people contradict themselves. It understands that memory does not move in straight lines. That trauma and healing spirals. Return is not about going backward but about approaching the same point from a different angle, changed by the rotation.
When my father died in 2018, I flew back to Port Harcourt for the funeral. The flight path was not direct. Toronto to Paris to Lagos to Port Harcourt. A spiral across the Atlantic, retracing a route my family had flown a decade before, but in reverse. Or not reverse, circular. We keep moving over the same waters, seeing them differently each time. On the plane, I read frankétienne’s Ultravocal, a novel that spirals through voices and time periods and parallel realities, that refuses to stay in one narrative lane, that insists life is too complex for linear storytelling. I read it in French, struggling with words I half-remembered from high school, feeling the spiral of language, English to French to Kreyòl to Igbo, all of them circling in my head, none of them quite sufficient for what I was trying to understand about grief and return and what it means to bury your father in soil you left behind.
At the funeral, someone said, “You have come home.” I wanted to say: I never left. I am always leaving. These are the same action. But I just nodded and accepted condolences in Igbo and English, switching between them without thinking, performing the spiral of diaspora identity for an audience that didn’t realize they were watching a performance.
There is a woman in my family, my father’s sister who left Nigeria for Haiti in the 1980s. She married a Haitian agronomist and moved to a village outside Gonaïves. We spoke about her in whispers, like she had joined a cult or died. “She went to Haiti,” people said, the way you might say, “She went to the moon.” as if Haiti was unimaginable, impossible, a place so foreign that choosing it over Nigeria was choosing madness over sanity, chaos over order. But I was always fascinated by her. By the idea that you could spiral so far from home that you landed somewhere entirely unexpected. You could be Nigerian and Haitian both. You could refuse the binary of here or there and insist on elsewhere.
After my father’s funeral, I found her address in his papers. Letters they had exchanged over the years, her handwriting spiraling across pages in a mix of English and French, Igbo words scattered like seeds. I wrote to her. I said: I need to understand how you did it. How you built a life in a place that had nothing to do with where you started. She wrote back within a week. Her letter was short: “You want to know why I stayed? Because Haiti understood something Nigeria had forgotten. That we are all water people. That the Orisha and the Lwa speak the same language. That displacement is not forgetting, it is remembering in a different key.”
She sent me books. René Philoctète. Jean-Claude Fignolé. Lilas Desquiron. I read them in Toronto, in my apartment where Lake Ontario lapped against the shore outside my window, where I could see the CN Tower spiraling into the sky. I learned that Spiralism emerged in the 1960s, during the Duvalier dictatorship, as a form of resistance. When you cannot speak directly, you speak in spirals. You hide meaning in recurrence, in the space between repetitions where change lives. You say the same thing over and over but differently each time, and in those differences, in those variations, the truth emerges like a photograph developing in a darkroom; slowly, gradually, until suddenly you can see what was there all along.
In 2023, I went to Haiti. Not to visit my aunt, she had died the year before, swept away in flooding that the news barely covered because Haiti only matters to Western media when the disaster is spectacular enough. But to see the place she had chosen, the waters she had claimed. Port-au-Prince was nothing like Port Harcourt, and yet. The heat was the same humid weight. The way people moved through streets was the same negotiation between patience and urgency. The sound of French and Kreyòl mixed like Pidgin and Igbo mix, languages layering over each other, creating new meanings in the spaces between words. The smell of the ocean, salt and fish and rot and life was exactly the same. I could have been standing on Bar Beach in Lagos. I could have been anywhere water meets land and people build lives in the margins.
I took a tap-tap to Jacmel, the coastal town where my aunt had spent her final years. The driver played konpa music that reminded me of highlife, the guitar patterns spiraling around each other in ways that felt familiar even though I’d never heard these specific songs before. In Jacmel, I walked to the beach, black sand, volcanic, strange and stood at the edge watching the water spiral in and out, in and out. A woman was singing nearby, her voice rising and falling with the waves. I didn’t know the words but I felt I recognized the melody, the call-and-response pattern that exists in every African diasporic music I’ve ever heard. Later, someone told me it was a song to Lasirèn, asking her to return what the sea had taken.
I stayed in Jacmel for three days. Each morning, I walked to the beach before sunrise and sat on the black sand, watching the sky turn from purple to pink to blue. The water was different every day, calm one morning, choppy the next, each iteration teaching me something about constancy and change. On the second day, an old woman approached me. She spoke in rapid Kreyòl that I couldn’t follow, but she gestured at the water, at my skin, at her own, and I understood. She was saying: you belong here too. The ocean connects us. The water remembers. She pressed a small blue bottle into my hand, the kind used in Vodou ceremonies, the kind my aunt must have used and walked away before I could thank her. Inside the bottle was seawater and something else, something that looked like herbs or flowers or maybe just fragments of things the ocean had claimed and was now returning. I kept it. I keep it still, on my desk in Toronto, next to a jar of water from the Omi River, two bodies of water spiraling in glass, refusing to choose between sacred and profane, between there and here.
Sometimes I open both bottles and pour a little of each into my palm. The water from Haiti is clearer, colder; it tastes like the Atlantic, like salt and distance. The water from Nigeria is darker, warmer, it carries the smell of mangroves and diesel, of home as it actually is, not as I remember it. I mix them together in my hand and watch them become one thing, indistinguishable, impossible to separate back into their origins. This is the practice of the spiral. This is what it means to refuse the binary, to insist on both, to become the delta in your own body.
My mother calls sometimes and asks when I’m coming back. Not to visit but back permanently. Giving up this Toronto life and returning to the proper order of things. I used to get angry at these questions, used to feel the old guilt and defensiveness rising in my throat. But now I understand she’s asking the wrong question. There is no back. There is only the spiral, the continuous return that is also a departure, the going home that is also a leaving, the arrival that is also a preparation for the next journey.
I write this essay in pieces, in the spaces between work shifts and family obligations, in the early morning before the city wakes up, in the late night when Lake Ontario is invisible but I can hear it breathing against the shore. I write it in English because that’s the language I think in now, even though the thoughts themselves are shaped by Igbo grammar, by the way my grandmother taught me to see the world and the river that raised me to understand fluidity as a form of strength. I write it for my aunt who drowned in Haiti, for my father who drew spirals without knowing why, for every kid sitting by a river somewhere learning that water doesn’t judge, that the delta is a sacred space, that you can be salt and fresh at the same time.
I write it because Spiralism taught me that fragmentation is not failure. You don’t have to make sense in a straight line. You can circle back, contradict yourself, return to the same themes from different angles, and still be telling the truth. That the spiral is not a symbol of being lost, it’s a map of how we actually move through the world, how we actually live our lives, how we actually become ourselves.
But Spiralism also taught me something about community, about collective survival. The philosophy didn’t emerge from one person sitting alone with their thoughts. It came from Frankétienne, René Philoctète, and Jean-Claude Fignolé talking to each other, arguing, building on each other’s ideas, creating something together that none of them could have created alone. The spiral is not just individual, it’s communal. We spiral around each other, our trajectories intersecting and diverging and intersecting again, creating patterns larger than any single person’s journey.
I see this in the black community in Toronto. We are all spiraling, some of us coming out, some of us going back in for safety, some of us somewhere in between. We are Nigerian and Jamaican and Somali and Ghanaian; we are first generation and second generation and somewhere lost between generations. We gather in someone’s apartment and cook jollof rice three different ways and argue about which country makes it best, and in that argument is love, is recognition, is the understanding that we are all trying to hold onto home while building new homes, that we are all the delta, all the place where waters meet.
One of my friends, Amara, is Haitian-Canadian. She came to Toronto the same year I did, fleeing a different kind of danger and carrying a different kind of grief. We met in 2015, both of us feeling out of place in the sea of whiteness and looking for our people. We became each other’s people. She taught me Kreyòl phrases. I taught her how to tie a wrapper. We made a tradition of meeting every January 12th, the anniversary of the earthquake, to pour libations to the water gods; Lasirèn and Mamiwata, who we decided were sisters separated by the Middle Passage, still calling to each other across the ocean.
This is what the spiral looks like in practice. Not grand philosophy but small rituals or sweeping statements about diaspora but specific friendships, particular meals, actual water poured into actual earth. The spiral is in how Amara and I text each other in three languages, how we spiral between grief and joy and hold space for each other’s contradictions. The spiral is in how Nigerian friends and I gather monthly to read poetry and talk about home, how we are all trying to figure out what it means to be both, to refuse the binary, to live in the constant motion of becoming.
Last year, we created a ritual of our own. Once a month, we meet at someone’s apartment, the location spirals through our community, rotating so everyone hosts eventually and we bring water. Not tap water, but water from home, if we’ve been back recently. Water from Lake Ontario if we haven’t. Water we’ve blessed or prayed over or simply carried with intention. We pour it all into a large bowl and take turns washing our hands in it, speaking our names, all our names, the ones we’ve chosen and the ones we’ve inherited, the ones that fit and the ones we are growing into.
Then we cook. Everyone brings something from home, some recipe passed down or half-remembered or improvised from memory and longing. The kitchen becomes a kind of polyphony, multiple languages layering over each other, multiple smells spiraling together. Someone makes pounded yam the way their grandmother taught them. Someone else makes accra, Haitian fritters that taste like home even though none of us were born in Port-au-Prince. Someone brings Nigerian chin chin and someone else brings Jamaican sweet bread and we eat it all together, washing it down with hibiscus tea and ginger beer and sometimes, when someone’s had a particularly hard week, rum.
After we eat, we tell stories. We do not do the sanitized versions we tell at work or to white friends who want to know about Africa but not really know. We tell the complicated stories, the ones that spiral. Stories about fathers who loved us but didn’t understand us. Mothers who understood but couldn’t always protect us. Cities we left because we had to, cities we yearn for even though going back would mean death or exile or slow suffocation.
We tell stories about water, rivers, oceans and the Atlantic that connects us all. We talk about Mamiwata and Lasirèn and Yemoja and all the water goddesses who remember when the world was more fluid.
These gatherings have become sacred to me in a way I never expected. They are my church, my mosque, my temple. They are where I practice the spiral, where I learn to live in the constant return. In these rooms, with these people, I don’t have to choose between Nigerian and Canadian, between past and present, between who I was and who I’m becoming. I can be the delta and I can hold it all.
Amara says that in Vodou, water is the medium through which the lwa enter the physical world. They mount people, possess them, and the person becomes a vessel for the divine. I think about this often. How diaspora is a kind of possession, a haunting we carry in our bodies. I think about how every time I cook my grandmother’s soup or speak Igbo or pour libations, I am being mounted by history and by all the people who came before me and made it possible for me to exist here, now, alive and free in ways they could never have imagined.
But I am also mounting them. Taking their stories into my body and transforming them, making them new, making them mine. This is the reciprocity of the spiral. This is what it means to be both inheritor and innovator, both tradition and revolution. I carry my ancestors with me, but I also carry the future, all the Nigerian kids who will come after me, who will Google “Nigerian” and find my writing, who will know they are not alone, that the spiral has been here before them and will be here after them.
I thought about my father’s ashes, scattered in the Omi River and my aunt’s body, taken by flood waters, returned to the ocean that connects all of us. I remember all the African bodies the Atlantic holds and how water connects us even as it separates us. Spiralism is not just a Haitian philosophy but a diasporic one, a philosophy born from displacement and making beauty from fragmentation. We who are scattered, we who spiral through time and space and language, we who cannot go back but cannot move forward, we who exist in the eternal return, we understand what frankétienne meant when he said the spiral is the essential form of existence. We are living proof of it. We are the spiral made flesh.
I am writing this essay in my Toronto apartment. Outside, Lake Ontario is frozen, a vast white sheet that looks nothing like water but is water nonetheless, just transformed. Snow spirals down from a gray sky. In six months, the ice will melt and the water will move again, flowing east toward the Atlantic, eventually reaching the Caribbean, eventually touching the shores of Haiti and Nigeria both. My father was right. Nothing moves in straight lines. Not water, time, people, stories, grief, healing, or homecoming. Spiralism taught me to stop trying to force linearity onto my life and stop apologizing for not having a clear trajectory from there to here, from then to now. It taught me to understand that I can be Nigerian and Canadian, my father’s daughter and my own person, all at once, without contradiction.
The spiral teaches me something new every day. It teaches me that I can miss Nigeria while loving Toronto. I can grieve my father while celebrating the life he gave me. I can study Haitian philosophy while remaining rooted in my own displacement. The spiral says: you don’t have to choose. You can be the delta where contradictions meet and flow together, where opposites refuse to oppose, where multiplicity is not confusion but clarity.
The spiral does not choose between center and circumference. It is always both, always moving outward while circling back, always approaching the same point from a new angle. This is what migration is. This is how we survive, not by going forward or backward, but by spiraling, by returning transformed, by letting the salt water and fresh water meet in our bodies and refusing to choose which one we are. We are the delta. We are the spiral. The spiral, as frankétienne says, is the essential form of existence.
Note: An earlier version of this essay was published on the platform Liminal Lit
