Meet Jaachimma, the Sponge!

This is entry 1 of Jaachịmmá Through My Lens...

Jaachịmmá Anyatọnwụ

Thursday morning was many hours ago. It was neither sunny nor cloudy yet it was both sunny and cloudy as the day wore on. Jaachịmmá was laid on his stomach. His head and right hand were the only body parts that were dangling out of bed as he peered into his phone and his thumb scrolled through.

As is his custom, before the world has had the decency to fully wake up, he already had a few browser tabs open. And as is mine, I muffled, willing my eyes to stay closed: “what are you reading this time, ‘Readwan’?”

Before you imagine some frantic, disorganised chaos of a man thrashing around on the internet, let me guide you, for there is a method to being his kind of sponge. A method you would only understand if you sat beside him and watched it happen in real time, which I have, many times, with the particular expression of a person watching something they cannot entirely explain but have long since stopped trying to.

Jaachịmmá reads something. Something in what he's reading pulls a thread. Without ceremony, another tab opens. No, he is not distracted; far from it. He has already sensed, somewhere in that vast interior of his, that these two—multiple—tabs he has open are going to meet eventually, and he would like to have both—as many of them—ready when they do. With an accuracy that should only bridge our realm with others, you can bet that they ALWAYS meet. He is always right to have opened those tabs.

And then begins the burrowing.

While reading the third, seventh, tenth Wikipedia article, somewhere in the middle of all this absorption, a word appears, or a name, a reference he is not fully certain about and further down he goes again, burrowing, opening, cross-referencing, until he comes up for air with the complete picture.

He takes it all in like he hasn't just re-enacted a figure of speech: cosplaying as a rabbit in his search, and then, almost generously, he regurgitates all of it back to me whether or not it's a subject I'm interested in. I eventually do come around, though.

I have watched him explain things to people who came in visibly indifferent and left wanting to know more. I have been that person. Scratch that—I am that person. The glint in his eyes when he returns to our world after such an intellectual voyage isn't one to miss: he's like a toddler who's finally won over his parents into his mischief, so you let him.

This is Jaachịmmá Anyatọnwụ. Your favourite bard and a real-life sponge in the most complete sense of the word.

He has only been to a handful of places in Nigeria. Neither of us have crossed the borders of this country, my brief habitation in Badagry regardless. You would not know this from the way he talks about the world, though.

He talks about Rome and their stint as rulers of the world, for example. In his description, his hand would gesture, with confident precision, towards a direction, demonstrating the advancement of their territorial victories.

Certainly, he couldn't be so sure that Egypt is in the south of the world. At least, not off the top of his head. Oh, the surprise that awaits for I check and eureka!

He talks about cities he has never set foot in—specific streets, cultural particularities, the topography, urban planning—with the ease of someone who lived there for a season and took detailed notes. When he does visit somewhere, one visit is enough.

He takes strolls, seemingly casual, and comes back having indexed every alternate route, side street, and every way in and out, while you were focused on placing one foot in front of the other. We have gone on strolls together, both of us on the same path, arms locked, and he has returned from them bearing things he noticed that I didn't see—couldn't have seen, because such situational awareness is detective-like. And I'm only one when binging on crime documentaries and movies.

He is observant in a way that can be, I say this lovingly, slightly annoying because he is not just observant of environments; patterns and people do not make it out unscathed.

You could say the most casual, unsuspecting thing in the most random conversation, and he will tell you, afterwards, what was actually going on beneath it, what the other person was not saying, and what is probably going to happen as a result. He has called things years in advance, named the friendships that would not hold, situations heading somewhere bad, people worth your energy and the ones who were not, all from details so small you would have walked past them twice without a second thought. His consistency at being right stopped being surprising somewhere around year two of knowing him and became simply a feature of who he is.

The ears are also contributory to his attentiveness. He recently corroborated his younger sister's allegations that he used to have giant ears. I say “allegations” because when I first heard this, I found it genuinely difficult to picture. The man has a thick bush of curls on his head and an unfair amount of beauty on his face; of course, the image of childhood giant ears simply did not compute for me. And then I stumbled on a throwback picture of him and there they were protruding out of the sides of his head like they'd rather be anywhere else. That's when I also drew the line between his observance and attentiveness.

Those ears were not decorative, I’d learn. They had to be that big for a reason so I deduced that he had probably used them a lot so that even though he had outgrown their big-ness, he still couldn't help himself.

Jaachịmmá can pick the faintest sound from a distance no matter the noise, including the sounds most people's brains filter out, and hear it clearly. He goes further and hears the things you say, the things you didn't say, and the things you are still privately negotiating with yourself about whether to say at all. It is remarkable and occasionally deeply inconvenient, and I mean that affectionately.

Did I mention he knows a remarkable amount of Bible history; a quality I'd attribute to his years of active and rigorous engagement in Deeper Life Bible Church’s search-the-scriptures sessions.

Jaachịmmá can trace the spread of Christianity from the beginning of time to the time of Christ, through Paul, across continents and centuries, unprompted, off the top of his head. There are theological debates on X that he watches, never once wading in, and then turns to me and tells me, based on scriptures and verifiable historical information, who is wrong, who is mixing up their history and who is making a valid point but not arguing it well enough to land. He never contributes but he knows. Behaves like an invisible, apathetic referee sometimes.

None of these expressions of his love for knowledge, I should tell you, is limited to just subjects he loves. That is the part that gets me staring at him like he fell through the sky. Interest is not a requirement for him. Passion is not a prerequisite. He encounters information and absorbs it the way breathing works just because he cannot seem to do otherwise.

Psychology, medicine, nutrition, geography, church history, AI, design theory, science, writing, history, the human body, animals—absolutely anything—all of it goes in, stays, and is available for retrieval at a moment's notice. I wonder why he only shares poetry and scriptural musings with you people seff.

However, when you ask him something, he will answer you simply and then, almost as a matter of course, tell you the history of it, how it came to be, what happened around it and what it connects to. He has the tendency to make you feel, very briefly, that knowing things is easy and then you try to do what he does and realise it is not.

He is, for what it's worth, extremely introverted. Talking to people does not come naturally. But the knowledge has to go somewhere, and so it goes into his writing, his design work, and into conversations with me, which I have come to understand is something of a privilege. One of the few things that reliably lights him up is being asked a question, any question, by anyone who actually wants to know. He will not disappoint you. He will answer and then take it further, and further still, until you have more than you asked for.

I want to be clear, because I do not mince words and I am not in the business of bearing false witness, even about the man I am in love with: when I tell you he is a person who knows something about almost everything, I am not exaggerating. I am also not saying it because he is my husband and I think highly of him, though both of those things are true. I am saying it because I have watched him be this way, repeatedly, across years, in subjects that have nothing to do with each other, and I have run out of ways to be surprised by it. Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, I look at him and I just know what I am sitting next to.

Most times, though, he will, if you ask him about most things, claim he doesn't know. That, I must inform you, is a lie. He does know. He just leads with modesty first, and the knowledge follows shortly behind it, usually with historical context and several supporting references.

The only thing Jaachịmmá genuinely does not know is gossip. You will not find him there. That particular tab is never open.

This is a layer of many things that Jaachịmmá is and I just wanted y'all to know.

See you tomorrow.