I didn’t slide out of my mother with a
silver spoon grasped between the gums
inside my mouth. I never tasted the
luxury of wealth, I only smelled it from
others because even the nurse that
hoisted me while I was crying, I think,
was draped in a tattered gown that
must have lost its whiteness and I
imagined my laying-face-up-mother,
in a breathless chase of happiness, wet
her ears with joyful tears snaking from
the corners of her eyes.
My father wasn’t born with a silver
spoon either, and just like him, my life
was equally fettered by poverty and
toil. It was almost like a legacy as his
father was poor too. But unlike my
father, I didn’t handle our
impoverished life with a familiar and
endearing intimacy maybe because I
just got to know what it felt like to be
poor or because I held big dreams in a
tight clasp. I had hoped to fetch my
parents out from the fathomless depth
of our suffering as though I was not
inside. But each time I ruminate on
how my father was born poor and
grew up that way without wealth
appearing his way, even in flashes like
ghosts I saw in my nightmares, fear
would hold me in a vice as if to tell
me, ‘who are you to succeed where
your father failed?’
But that wasn’t the problem. I didn’t
come from a poor family alone. I came
from a family so poor that every
wealthy family who saw life as a
fashion became evil or according to
my father, ‘the devil’s footstool,’ and
being poor was never the problem, we
wanted everything and everyone else
to be poor. My father made us believe
that the lives of the wealthy were
disaster areas. Comfort became a
fairly tale for my family; it never
existed, it never should. I remembered
vividly the troubles that wrapped
around us like a shroud and how we in
turn, wrapped ourselves like spool.
Whenever I thought of hell, home
sprouted up in the soil of my mind.
‘Riches is in the mind, not in money,’
he’d say without looking at anyone in
particular so we always assumed it
was directed to all of us; my brother,
my mother, and I as we settled our
frames on our chequered sofa in our
two room apartment.
‘When you pursue money and get it, it
enters inside your head to control you
and this will make you forget your
creator. Don’t chase money, chase
God,’ he’d continue. And from there –
where he’d mentioned God – we’d
know that the rest of our night would
be spent listening to my father’s
misconstrued Bible verses where he
either replaced John with Matthews or
called Solomon the father of David. He
would continue until we snore into the
ocean of sleep.
We left the village for Lagos state
when I was two. The two room
apartment we managed to get was in
one of the busy streets of Alaba where
empty sachets of water and
transparent nylons – both white and
black – competed for spaces inside the
ground like weeds fighting to outgrow
roses, only that I was never able to tell
which was the weed or rose. One room
belonged to my parents, we called it
Father’s room, while my brother and I
shared the other room where rats
gnawed on our fingers and toes and
mosquitoes feasted on our ears. We
never had a sitting room because the
only sofa in our house and television
were inside my father’s room.
One Friday night when I’d just told my
parents about my scholarship to study
in one of the prestigious secondary
schools in our environ, my father’s
throaty laughter burned my heart as
we sat in his room to eat the oil-
drenched rice my mother had served.
‘You see what I tell you people every
time,’ he said, almost like a question.
‘Don’t envy the rich. God does not look
like their lives.’ He shook his head as if
pitying their torments in the
afterworld. ‘You can only be successful
when you try to be like me,’ he said
looking at me, and I almost let out my
suppressed laughter after I felt the
ironic rebound of his words. He
continued, ‘Your father should be your
first teacher. You hear me?’ I nodded.
He sighed and stopped talking, holding
his breath as if recouping the oxygen
he had lost through his garrulity. We
had become so familiar with Papa’s
hackneyed prognoses that sometimes
we recited them before him in the
mouth of our minds, like when he said
Mama Abike had clothed her children
with the witchery of misfortune that
only affected those who associated
with them. That night, my brows
furrowed and the lines on my
forehead became contorted as I paused
to think back to the moments when
Abike and I ran after each other in a
joyful play, and after my father said
he’d pray for me so that the Holy
Spirit would enshroud me with
protection, the lines straightened out
again in relief. He said it again when
he saw my brother with one of her
children and we discovered he only
said it whenever we were with her
children so we kept them at arm’s
length anytime he was home.
My father was an autocrat who made
us sit on thorns and smile
comfortably. He brought us up to fear
him. The thing was we always accosted
him with trepidation; slumped
shoulders, face buried downwards and
hands crossed at our buttocks before
we spoke as if he was an invisible god.
We grew up that way, my mother was
no exception.
‘Papa, I’d love to further my
education. I want to be a computer
scientist,’ Michael said after dinner, as
though picking off on an old
discussion.
Papa’s brows raised and for a
moment, I thought they’d roll to the
back of his head. We just finished
eating in his room and normally, we
were supposed to wait till it digested
then Papa would lead us to an evening
prayer before we could go to bed. No
one was supposed to speak, it was
forbidden.
‘You see how the devil is controlling
this boy, eh?’ Papa said, his forefinger
was in Michael’s direction.
‘But Papa, I finished my secondary
school three years ago. I want to
further.’
‘The devil is a liar, a big liar. He must
leave you this night. Why didn’t he
come in the morning or afternoon? It
shows he’s a coward,’ Papa said,
searching for his Bible as he continued
talking about the devil.
Every time my father spoke about the
devil, and because of the way he
talked about him, I always imagined a
stout man dressed in black suit with
an equally black broad brim clamped
beneath his arm, either seating on the
weak chequered sofa in his room or
standing behind our red-rose designed
curtain, looking at everyone
insidiously with a cigarette perched
lightly between two of his fingers,
taking a drag and blowing the smoke
out through his nostrils to my father’s
face because he was the one always
calling him. He blamed the devil for
everything, even his own mistakes.
That night, we spent almost an hour
praying for my brother for something
that wasn’t particularly sinful. My
father could have just said he didn’t
have the money to send him to the
University instead of casting and
binding demons that never existed
inside my brother. And that was when
things started to fall apart in our
house, our lives.
Michael stopped greeting our father
and for four months, he didn’t care
until one rainy night in March. He
came back that night looking worn out,
drenched and his black eyes had sunk
under the precipice of their brows.
That night, I didn’t see the man who’d
never been tortured by doubts, I
instead saw a man weighed down by
his own decisions.
‘Welcome, Sir,’ I said, unsure of how
the words came out.
‘Emma, how are you?’
‘Fine, Sir.’
‘And you. We’ve become mates in this
house, isn’t it?’ he said, staring at
Michael who lay on our mat, face up,
his head propped up on his two palms.
Michael kept quiet as if he didn’t hear
someone say something to him and my
eyes dilated with fear of what would
happen. My mother was cooking in the
general kitchen at that time.
‘Are you deaf?’
‘What do you want me to say or do?’
Michael said, still lying in the same
position.
And in one swift move, my father
removed his belt but Michael made a
feint and evaded his first attempt to
flog him and in the process, dragged
the belt from his grip. As if a bucket of
flaming coals had just being poured on
my father’s bare back, he scattered his
strength on Michael in fits of angry
blows that met him at fine precisions.
His gait, as he escaped from my father,
was laced with uncertainty like the
unsure steps of a walking baby. My
brows furrowed perplexedly and I
fought many words before I finally let
out the ones I thought was right,
respectful.
‘Are you okay, Papa?’ I asked. The
words tasted bad after they slipped out
of my mouth and I feared the stench
would annoy Papa.
‘What?’ he said, his face rough with a
baffled stare.
‘Errmm.. I mean, is everything fine?’
He walked out. Michael never came
home that night. We didn’t even see
him again that year.
My father taught us to be reticent, and
if by mistake our discreet reticence
was ripped into sheds like when I told
Abike of how I had won a scholarship
in a very big school, something that
my father forced me abandon because
of my large mouth, you’d be sure to
sleep on your stomach for days. The
day Papa found out through Mama
Abike’s ‘Papa Michael, good morning. I
hear wetin them give your pikin o, e
go reach us.’ After my father snorted
into our room, he laid me on our
creaky bed; my trousers pulled out
completely and as Michael held my
hands with my eyes shut tight, his firm
grip on me crushed the bones guarding
my heart. I started with shouting, then
it melted into moans which became
weak breaths, and even at that I could
still hear the swishes of cane in
between my mother’s pleas and wails
that paled into insignificance. In my
home, my father was our Lord. From
that day, I became drowned in the
deep reticence of my father’s sea and
sometimes, to avoid too many
questions from people either about my
father’s whereabouts or about my
mother’s health, I would feign
tiredness and flutter my eyes in a
manner that seemed like drowsiness
was trapped behind my eyelids and
run inside the house. After my mother,
I was the next who feared my father
the most.
The night my father shivered my
ambition into pickable fragments, I
had just turned seventeen, three years
after Michael left. When I told him I
wanted to be a medical doctor, he
chiseled its lofty ends into rough
shards. As usual, my mother came by
to raise my dreams from their
sepulchers with her honey-yoked
words.
My mother talked slowly like one
unsure of what to say but I felt her
fear was on whether the moist words
on her tongue would roll out to hurt
someone or not. She’d become used to
finding happiness in other people’s
laughter that she most times forgot
about her own needs. And whenever
you listened to my mother talk, there
was no way your eyes wouldn’t
moisten with an eager hopefulness. In
our house, the wind of Papa’s doctrine
blew us like chaffs and sometimes
while we shrugged, we always smiled
as if blithe with the bliss of a morning
sun; our teeth exposed so that the
furtive air of his dominance hovered
over the house.
‘Nnam, God’s plan for you will not fail.
Just believe, inugo?’ she said, as she
rested my head on her chest. Her
presence became a prop for my dying
heart.
‘But Mama, I want to be a doctor,’ I
said, before breaking in a stupendous
roar of tears.
It wasn’t just her sympathy I wanted,
I’d told Mama that Papa’s conception
of my dreams was tainted and that
before his belief of everything
civilization had brought is bad sink
into the quicksand of his ignorance,
someone better orient him or better
still, re-orient him. I’d always carried
that dream in the eyes of my mind
wherever I went.
That night, I was empty of thoughts
but even my discreet silences in the
days that followed didn’t shield me
from the claw-sharp arrows of Mama’s
glare or the moisturized stares of my
father that encompassed me like a
caught thief and I smelled of poverty
for the first time, my gait tilting like
someone utterly detached from life.
My father’s life comes at you fast.
Before then, when the thoughts of
becoming a successful surgeon – a
word I saw from an old newspaper at
fifteen – sprang up inside me, I was
usually enveloped by a certain
assurance of freedom or an
overwhelming excitement of its
promise; a very shiny future and so no
other thing mattered, not even my
father’s refusal. But after my mother’s
talk, all I waited for was God’s plan for
me and my brother’s return. I missed
my brother so much, especially the
way he pronounced my name with an
endearing sweetness that made me
swim in a stream of fantasy where I
saw a world that consisted of just two
of us, living in a wide happily-ever-
after.
It was bizarre how after my secondary
school, in a Government-owned school
my father pushed me to attend, I
didn’t make a single friend. Unlike
Michael, who had them in abundance,
I was very bad at keeping friends. I
couldn’t even sustain even a simple
discussion. Sometimes, I liked to think
it was because Michael was five years
my senior so it didn’t matter then. It
was now, without Michael, that life
began to show me how much time
could matter. We usually visited some
of his friends at a big primary school
field in the evenings. Most of the time,
we left the places in stitches in spite of
ourselves, our eyes teary from laughter
and our faces glowing with haste and
happiness. It was such wonderful
moments we looked towards sharing;
moments that left us feather-light as if
we guzzled the healing spirits of the
evening, and this goaded us to dream
more, big and braced us for the
exquisite burden of our tumultuous
life. There, our conversations were
with colorless fluency as if we already
knew what the other person had in
mind while listening greedily to our
jokes. We were usually thrown into
oblivion so that detecting the hollow
ring of our fundamental flaws became
a labor. There was a guy I took
interest in, particularly. His name was
Kachi, one of the best football players
amongst the boys and easily the oldest.
He had this face that glinted with joy
every time and sometimes I wondered
if he ever got angry. We would roar
with delight anytime he rolled and
drifted the pupil of his eyes sideways
and then push it up slowly as though
magically until all that remained of his
eyes was whiteness. He was full of
majestic tenderness and it was some of
the things he did, like this, that made
us dream of a big bright future with
starry eyes after of course, it must
have sank our torturous doubts with
laughter that sometimes wormed our
foreheads with menacing veins and
made our eyes glow with inspired
rays. We found everything about
happiness there. But that was some
years ago, the heyday of our
relationship where everything seemed
unending.
One night as I left our room that had
become so wide with Michael’s
absence, there was restlessness in my
spirit, an intense travail to my mind,
and there was an utter depression to
my soul. I sat on the ground outside
our compound just close to a
neighbor’s window, music blared from
all corners and I could hear traders
shouting at the top of their voices for
things they sold. I began to look back
to the years when Michael and I were
inspired by the immortal flame of our
early days together and how my father
extinguished it with air from the snap
of his fingers as though the flame
feared him, I still felt the stab of
disappointment at my father’s words,
his ‘you’re not going to be a man by
being a doctor, stay here and work.’
Although he didn’t bark as usual that
night he said them, his voice was soft
and calm with authority. The room
became small, the walls pulled
themselves towards each other, and
oxygen suddenly fell short, terribly
insufficient as everyone waited for
who would speak next. The breathless
night of suspense ended intolerably
tragic with everyone going to sleep, I’d
thought someone would stand up for
my desolating dream, maybe my
brother would run in and stand up for
me, my dream. A vast silence crept
into the room. That was how we lived;
if it wasn’t one trouble where we
ended the night in a tragic silence, it
would be those noisy nights we
allowed our father’s dreams for us and
teachings overshadow our reasoning.
The sky became empty like the eyeballs
of someone dead. Thunder grumbled,
and the clouds began to push each
other as if they were trying to pave
way to the rain that fell in serious
torrent. The raindrops sounded like
pebbles as they hit our window panes
and the next morning, the dirt that
covered our street after the heavy rain
was in wild luxuriance like vegetation,
and it gave the dirty water a crisp
sparkle as curtains of opaque rain still
drizzled.
That morning I met Kachi, who gave
me a clue of where I could find my
brother. I waited for my mother to
return from her Thursday prayers and
immediately I told her when she came
back that night, she dropped her Bible
inside the house, tightened her scarf
and we set off to look for him. The
abnormally large moon seemed still, as
though looking at us, inside a sky that
had gone black. That night, we padded,
in nervous trots, a labyrinth of
obscure roads that led into streets
we’d never been to before; passing the
suya joints with their spicy swirling
smokes unfurling nostalgia in me. We
swan the whole area looking for my
brother, and that was when I realized
everyone could resemble one person
because as though we searched for him
in the faces of everybody we saw, they
looked like him. We didn’t find him in
any of the streets Kachi had told me –
Imam, Mosafejo, Alafia, Awoyemi. Still
we didn’t give up; the both of us
trawled the dark like owls. That night,
my mother was painted with a fresh
sorrow.
Things began to come back together
when my father, too, started to look
for Michael. Everything became
normal, although our activities
rumbled on like cars after a gridlock
and aside good mornings we rarely
spoke to each other. He would pray
earnestly, fast for days and he even
invited local prophets. As usual, hopes
were given that we’d see Michael
again, that he would return. My father
became sober. One month, as the
prophet prophesied, passed but
Michael didn’t return. The year drifted
away slowly, two years trickled by and
Michael still never returned.
THE END
