The Canopy

From the loom-keepers' walk you can see the whole of it, the canopy stretched over Lagos like a second sky, every thread of it a ribbon of woven solar cloth, catching the sun and turning it into the light and water and cool air that nine million people live inside. My grandmother helped weave the first sections. My mother kept them. And now the keeping is mine, which my aunties will tell you is too much weight for a girl of nineteen, and they are not wrong, they are only early. The canopy is not a machine you switch on. It is a textile, alive in the way a garment is alive, and it must be tended thread by thread, mended where the wind frays it, re-tensioned where the city grows beneath it. The loom that does the weaving is older than anyone living. We feed it pattern. It feeds the city light. That has been the arrangement, grandmother to mother to me, and it was a good arrangement right up until the morning the loom began weaving a pattern I had not given it.