Calabar is an old stripper the fans called mama ekaette, from a club along Marian. She had slender dark legs that led to a bum, settled neatly on hips swimming into a six inch waist. No-one understood the job description like Calabar because she truly was an exotic piece. She did her lines of cocaine and danced along to music she barely heard over millions of screams. She was a perfect smile settled on teeth done every two weeks and a medium Botox.

“have you been to Calabar?”

“It honestly is paradise”

“The city is so clean”

Calabar welcomed all with open arms, she didn’t care much for who you were - describe yourself however this wicked earth desired, because if you couldn’t pay for the shows at Transcorp you could always stare at the lights at eleven- eleven. Calabar put on her show all year round but in December the quality of the coke went up and she was a goddess on the polls. She adorned herself with lights that hung lowly from her generous cleavage. She would keep the streets alive for hours as rumored spirits breathe life to the environment.

Oh, whether from the north or the east, if you heard of Calabar then you simply must see her perform. She housed her foreigner in waterside resorts and patted them on the back, cautious to ensure every bit of her left them breathless. Like any good old Jolene, they sang songs for her, and she danced to them with as must graced as excepted from Calabar.

Calabar was an era, but time did it’s ekombi and when the new people concluded that the club couldn’t run as a money laundering scheme, they shut it down.

Now she sold low quality vodka and cheap beer in a roadside parlor. She was the sort of seller that never fell short of “gist’’, spitting in rapid efik of times too distant to be relevant. Her tongue was now a mosaic of tiring “remember whens” and her shops was filled with photo of a paradise so far gone and so poorly managed.

Calabar had no concerns for anyone, she knobbed to the thank-yous as much as the insults. She still had no urgency for work but no platform to dance. The quality of the cocaine had gone down five folds but Calabar wasn’t fond of sobriety. She ran things at her own pace, she greeted her customers on the days she cared too and shrugged off gleeful “goods mornings” on others. People came for the beer but there was a certain aesthetic Calabar had that would always be pleasing

“Oh, I remember when my hips still had life, when my waist would swing side to side, with fluorescent beads dancing over them’’ Calabar would say.

Oh, when Calabar had life - what an era.

Calabar was a simple song composed by silence, simpler to death but not quite. There was no beauty in death, but there were still pretty things here. Calabar was like a village with coal tar roads and streetlights. They was beauty in this silence - go to that empty place and find solace in your echos.

There was a certain peace in the way the streets emptied out by 11pm or the trees lining the estates at state housing. They were no places to go, but there was a fulfilling jest the people generated with their age group gathering, run by three-thousand-naira gin and life threating drinking games. You would listen to the waves of the river running from Marina to Tinapa and find yourself moving along to it’s chaotic rhythm.

Calabar is a slow place, she didn’t care for your urgency or search for a greater thing. She offered what she had, two hours late in the morning. She was unbothered by big talk of mediocrity because she had already settled for what she was. Calabar was a green aesthetic of open field, corkwood trees and wide river.

Here lies the body of Calabar, once the embodiment of a faux paradise. We gather in memory of a twelve-hour street carnival, now a vacant three days in December.