Teach Tuesday should have been just that. A Tuesday session at the RED headquarters, where we sit around a guest teacher, usually a veteran in some media related field, and drink from their wealth of knowledge on a given topic. This week though, it happened on a Wednesday and it was anything but business as usual. It was worth the wait. And a lot more than we could have bargained for. With just the right anecdote-real message ratio that every interaction should have. One can go on…

In she came, looking the part of every woman that she embodies – the ace broadcaster, the culture lover, the style icon, the creative and the self-assured power-house who can withstand a hike up Mount Kilimanjaro for a cause she holds dear. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind about what we were in for so that when she switched the game on us by pulling out a notepad- “I am here to learn” she said- we instinctively clasped our feeling bras.

It was certainly a good call because we were about to examine the subject of “Finding one’s soul and then, voice” starting with an interactive exercise. She asked that each of us describe what happened every time we had ever being in a situation where we were at conflict with our souls. “Lethargy, migraine, wanting to hide away, confusion, loss of confidence.” Different feelings that probably had never before been examined by the bodies that felt them.

 

So what does “F.I.”, one of the many characters that dwell inside Funmi Iyanda, feel?

When she is confronted with a situation that doesn’t sit right with her soul, something drops in her stomach. The sinking. Then the drop, almost audible. She links it to the colloquial “gut feeling.”

So why is it important to isolate this feeling? Not just the events that happen afterwards, immediately or over time. This is where you start to appreciate the beauty of the conversation, if you were not already. The feeling that you get when your soul is not connected to a given situation is the body’s response to what it knows already -before you, its owner- is a situation that is not good for you.

What we do as adults is rationalise situations despite what our basest gut feelings are. We condition our bodies to accept what we think is proper to do in every circumstance even when we know from within, what the needful is.

What we do not realise is that the body is counting scores and after a while of ignoring what it demands, it will turn against us.

She describes a protracted illness that kept her away from the public sphere for a while because she had failed to respond as required to ‘Aduke’.

Aduke is another character, the one with the instincts that never fail. Aduke speaks the voice of Funmi Iyanda’s soul. She is the one that challenges ‘F.I.’ in private conversations she has with herself. This is not crazy. It is how you find your sense of self. The self that determines your voice.

So your soul is undeniable. It is distinct and except you choose to ignore its manifestation through the signs it leaves your body with, you cannot ever deny your soul. It is there. Never going to shake.

But how do you communicate your soul so that it carries and is heard in your voice?

“Madeleine Albright was the first female Secretary of State in the United States”, she begins an anecdote. Madeleine had been appointed secretary of State during President Clinton’s administration on the firm recommendation of Hillary, then, the first lady. “I had a chat with her (Madeleine),” she continues, and she told me how she would attend United Nations meetings and allow herself to be silent because she didn’t want to sound stupid”. And because Madeleine had allowed herself to repress the urge to speak (aided of course by the system that glorifies the sound of the man’s voice over the woman’s), it became natural to her, for a while.

“Until one day she realised that many of the men who spoke at those meetings were not smarter, they were just less afraid to sound stupid and many who may have sounded stupid at some point suddenly started to sound a lot less stupid.” What happened was that the men had spoken up so often that they got better, correcting their errors along the way. You must exercise your voice till you lose the fear of sounding stupid

It may sound silly, that story, but anyone who has ever had to hold their tongue in a bid to constantly appear intelligent will understand.

It is the point of making the conscious decision to let your voice come through that is instructive here. She (Funmi Iyanda) started her career as a journalist; being told that she could not handle politics; that she’d be better suited talking about women. She said “no”. It’s not that women weren’t interesting enough, she wasn’t going to “because there is no one way to be woman”.

But she has talked about women, no? She has talked about women, fought for women’s rights and continues to. Not just about women’s rights but everything that one’s voice can carry after it’s found. However, our voice is best when it is in harmony with our self examined self, one that constantly checks our intent to contain our ego. That is wisdom and it’s where the trick lies. We must not keep reinforcing the patriarchal order of hierarchy of voices and then drowning everyone else’s. The goal of finding one’s voice just for the business “because we are not in the business of scoring and keeping points or scores is somewhat wasteful, unwise and conflict begetting.

Amazing how conversations evolve because we had moved from soul to voice; to women and patriarchy and wisdom without realising it. So when Dami contributed his bit about sometimes feeling disconnected with everything as a result of neglecting his relationship with God for days, our conversation moved on to religion.

So what does Funmi Iyanda think about religion?

Born into a Christian family, she grew up going to church but the also knew other religious practices including Islam, as was common in many Yoruba communities. Her parents had no problems with mixing with the Muslims and learning the Quran even though was Christian and she went to church.

She stopped going to her church because they she wouldn’t accept that her God will punish her best friend, Yewande, for not practicing a different form of Christianity. Any God that will punish Yewande for that wasn’t the God she’d like to serve. She also did not like the way women had little or no voice in almost all modern religions.

So she believes in intelligent creation, a God idea but not a mono theist vengeful entity. She feels religion can be beneficial if it provides an individual a personal tool for connecting to the creation entity as long as it is not predicted for or enforced upon others.  So whilst she might not go to church , it is not that she doesn’t like churches, on the contrary, she rather enjoys sitting on “the cold floor of old empty churches to meditate”. She just finds many churches here a little distracting.

She also doesn’t think there is one way to go about it. Connecting with that deepest part of ourselves, “our Godself”, regularly is extremely important. Examination of self, she calls it.

It is extremely important to regularly reconnect with one’s Godself. In any way that works for each individual. She also thinks that religion in our part of the world discourages having questions. And it is not just with religion. We stifle questioning everywhere and it has hindered our growth in all aspects.

We moved on to society…

Every society that has developed has done so only by expanding beyond its current state and you do not expand by not questioning the norm. Progress only happens by expansion and it is only by questioning the status quo that thought leaders in Nigeria and change agents will start the wheel of development in the country. About this, she states, “nothing blooms by turning into itself”; in nature and in all things, there is an expansion, a blossoming then a necessary dying only to blossom, it’s the circle of life, ideas, and society. The chemistry of existence. To blossom as a nation we must turn the soil of our existence regularly, water it and nourish it and allow space for expansive thought and ideas to grow freely.

It was the perfect way to end this type of conversation. A challenge to go on and keep finding things out.

To the undiscerning, it might appear we simply had a disjointed discussion but far from it. This was a conversation about finding and navigating individuality in an interconnected world. How to shape oneself into a thinking person, in tune within and without; knowing the value of voice enough to lend every time that it matters. And because Funmi Iyanda was our anchor, we ALL got the chance to be heard, to learn and, by the end of just two hours, we were all the wiser for it!