Metamorphosis
23/05/20.
There was always grazes on our feet when we woke up. Our legs danced with the terrors of the night when were asleep and left us to cry at the scars when we woke up. There were no carpet or soft rugs on the floor to keep the ants and sands from picking their way into our mouths when we slept. We had only a radio and a bamboo chair in our one room apartment and that was where my dad slept. If he wasn’t around, my mum enjoyed comfort on the wooden heavens. My siblings and I never got a chance to give temporary comfort to our aching backs because Mother was always around. When dawn broke, we went to the river where we always swam to fetch drinking water. While we took turns in placing the plastic gallon under the stream, we enjoyed a morning rush of air and water. Whenever we were sent to the farm, we joined the other kids in playing games of stick, stones and imaginary homes till an elder who was passing by sent us off to acknowledge our parent’s errands. At night, we gathered around little fires and listened as Mother told us stories of ants that lifted mountains on their heads and dogs, whose mothers sent them food from heaven. The stories came with spices of songs that we tasted and enjoyed. These nights were quiet except for the crickets and frogs who sang into the dawn. Some nights of course were noisy with the constant cries of our stomach whenever we went to bed with empty stomach. Those were the nights when we slept with mouth open, half expecting manna from heaven to fall on our dry lips. Instead, we woke up spitting out sand and ants that strong winds had picked and thrown into our throats. We were rarely in school and when we were, it was easy for us to pick fights. The other children always found time to point at our torn dresses and our naked feet. After threats of expulsion, we found another way of exacting revenge. We bided time till dusk when the moon came out to dance in the village playing ground. After the children had danced and had their fill of the evening pleasures, we hid in the bushpath leading to their homes and listened for their footsteps. When we were sure that the shadows that approached belong to them, we jumped out, taunted them, beat them and poured sand into their wide opened mouths. It was a sign of our victory. After doing these four times to four different bullies, the insults in schools died. We weren’t beaten much when we were younger. I remember being flogged twice or three times. Once, Obehi, my sister told me to stick a piece of broom under my armpit. She said it would make Father forget that she was going to flog us. It didn’t work. When we woke up the next day, our faces were still moist and we avoided sitting down on our buttocks for a few days. We knew that we were poor but as we grew older, scales fell from our eyes and we became more sensitive to the things we lacked and the dreams we had. We couldn’t go outside at night. It became more shameful to go out with torn panties when we started growing hair between our thighs. We had no friends. My siblings and I survived on the finger of companionship that we had grown used to holding as we grew up together. The garri and displeasing soup that we ate with eyes closed began to make us throw up. Being poor made me frustrated and it became normal to see my parents suffer and lean on the crutches of life. Many times, we felt the pains they bore. In the last years that I shared with my siblings, the pungent memory that has survived the clutches of time was when we listened to the radio together in the harmattan season. The harmattan was so brutal in our village that one couldn’t smile without causing a tear in the lips. We buried ourselves under old unwashed clothes and practiced the way the newswoman in the radio spoke. We acted job interviews and plays while trying to imitate the voice. Professionals that we were, we broke into laughs frequently and controlled the atmosphere with the exaggeration that we wanted our reality to became. We had no idea.
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1976 was a time when boys pumped air of optimism into the bubbles of hard work and watched their effort disappear into dust. Even still in the era of new and promises, people wore ropes of this vision on their waist and swinged with all their might until the burden of their effort wore them down. Suddenly, the village became too tight for their success to breakthrough to them and they sought their miracle elsewhere. Perhaps the gods they prayed to were deaf or the curses that their fathers had inherited from their own fathers were clawing down their legs from moving forward. Some of us went to Lagos. We, who didn’t have the courage to put body parts into red calabash decorated with lizard eggs. We, who couldn’t walk naked under the embrace of a white tunic while holding our conscience from falling after decapitating a family or a stranger. We had heard of the city with lights that defied the gravity of darkness, the market that sang from dawn to dusk, and the land where everyone’s prayer got answered very fast. When we were younger, some of us who failed in learning the white man’s arithmetic went to Lagos to learn a trade. We laughed at them. But our laughter caused blisters on our faces when these boys came back in the bodies of men. The cars they rode caused dust to hang in the clouds hours after they had passed. Recently an uncle of mine came back from Lagos with a magazine. Pride got pregnant on my doorstep and its children bore their heavy weight on my feet. Hence I couldn’t move, but it didn’t stop me from peering through the window. People who had gone to visit formed a line to touch and see few pages of the magazine. Any unnecessary exclamation or exaggeration of emotion was replaced by a thunderous slap by the next person in line. Even the elders who visited to hear news of the Lagos city in the guise of breaking Kola could not withstand the seduction of the pretty women in the Magazine. There was a particular woman in the front of the magazine. She had long black hair and put on a golden gown and leather slippers. Mere looking at it, one could already feel the comfort of lying on leather. Even the women who gathered around almost tore off the page in Jealousy of a woman who was smaller in appearance, had no beauty, and had too much Vaseline on her face. My uncle claimed that this woman was one of his wives in Lagos and she had presented this magazine to him when he asked of a photograph. He said it was Lagos life. No one saw the lies in his truth till thirty five years later when this woman didn’t come for his first or second burial in the village.
So, in 1976, we planted a new dream of life in Lagos and watched it blossom in our reality. We had no idea how painful it would cost to reap the sacrifice of our harvest. Not all of us had the financial motivation for this migration. One of us, Osahon, stole his father’s pension and ran to Lagos to marry a Yoruba girl. His father was angrier at his choice of bride than the actual theft that Osahon had used to get the bribe. On his deathbed, Osahon Father cursed Osahon to be a butterfly till the day of his death, hopping from one bad situation to another. Osahon suffered in his youth and it was said that he was a very sad and angry man. They found him dangling on a rope that he had tied to his ceiling fan nineteen years later.
And so in 1978, people left buried plantation and unsearched dreams to pursue Lagos, the city where manna fell from the sky. Our minds were pregnant with curiosity and anxiety and it made us walk faster. Some of us had list of dreams we wanted to achieve before going back to the village to take a bride. Indeed we wanted to dance with white women. We wanted to work under Chinese and Lebanese men so that we could participate in discussions on how foreign men behaved and how weird it sounded to us when they spoke English. We were virgins in experience and we were quickly looking for tales to conceal our green horns. Of course, some of us who had stayed behind had preached patience. Some said we shouldn’t be quick to forget the white men who had destroyed our empire in 1897. Of course we knew about 1897 and some of us could still point to the houses that suffered burns in the invasion. Our history teachers went a whole term crying about the tragedy of the travesty that occurred in our land, the sacrilege of the white man’s tenacity and our mortuary that was still filled with our dead gods. Of course we knew all that but the world was changing and we must change along with it. One’s feet must learn the dance of the world to survive. Change is needed. Change is necessary. Change is important. Isn’t that the whole point of metamorphosis?.
Lagos was surrounded by water. My eyes turned misty when I tried to search the origin of the fog from the water. We found out that the city had a mainland and an island. Some of us still think that this disparity is marginalized based on material strength. We sought for cheapest homes and we had no choice but to move to the ghettos of the Mainland. Imagine the distraught on our faces when we saw homes with broken roofs packed so tight to each other till it was difficult to breathe. They were ugly brown puddles of mud, dirt and urine in front of the homes and one couldn’t enter without holding the nose tight together to prevent the smell that erupted. If you inhaled the stench for more than five seconds, you nose would fall down and cease to become a part of your body. Four of us crammed our body parts into one room. The barns in our homes were four times the rooms but we refused to be discouraged. It wasn’t the fear of failure that strengthened our defiance, it was shame. There is no better poison to reputation than shame. All we could afford was a mat and a standing fan. We searched for office jobs with our SSCE certificate. At first the ‘We will get back to you’ was a sign of promise and goodwill. Soon, it turned into a song that we had gotten tired of listening to. Except for the tribalism that haunted our job opportunities, we found out that our village schools failed to do a subject in our WASSCE examination. It was the subject of connections. It was why we were never successful in answering the last question of every interview. ‘Who do you know?’.
After days of dieting only on an evening meal of garri soaked with dirty well water and almost two months of unemployment, we were running out of money and optimism. Some days, we rarely talked to one another. It was as if we all secretly blamed each other for our own actions. Of course, we had no courage to give voices to our thoughts. In those days, we had the time to walk around Lagos and we discovered the ugly truths to the city. Of course, we were impressed with the cars that trailed the roads and the jewels that people hung on their necks. But we saw that the wealth only got to a part of the city and not all part. The wealth revolved around a certain table so carefully that a drop did not fall down from the table of the rich to the puddles of the poor people. We suffered whenever rain fell. We had to swim to our destinations. Sometimes, we woke up as early as four so that we could walk naked in the puddle and dress up after we had gotten to the safer end of the road. In the island, streets were decorated with green neatly cut grass and tall trees with spaces between them. The roads were smooth and rain only made the granite shine. The houses in the island were tall, had huge gates and decorated with the varieties of colors that I didn’t know existed. There were no dumps piled at the sides of the road because of the expensive prices of Hausa waste collectors. There were a lot of men in Mushin who made choices in violence and whenever they was a tussle, we suffered the aftertaste of the earthquake. Sometimes, the gunshots were so loud that the bullet hit us in our dreams.
In time, the lucky among us got house help jobs. At first the thought of it made our mouths bitter and we vomited bile for days after the idea had been introduced to us by a friendly Igbo neighbor. He was working as a driver to a foreigner whose friend had recently arrived in Lagos and was looking for people to help him around the house. The pay was promising. Among us, the idea was firmly rejected by Erhonse. His father was a chief and had slaves. Living the life of a slave in Lagos when he could live like a royal in the village cut his pride deep. After a week, he packed his luggage and went back home. Eighteen years later, Erhonse had built three houses in Benin and sponsored his eight children’s education in London. Some of us got our wishes. I was the chef while the others were driver and security man. We worked under a Lebanese man. It was a very hard year. Many times, the Lebanese man who was younger threw harsh words at older SSCE holders like us. We didn’t know if it was because of the money he had or perhaps it was race. Perhaps we were having our fair share of Lagos experience mixed with racial discrimination. We consoled our bruised pride by saying that one day in the comfort of our duplex on the island; we would remind ourselves of these experiences as part of our success stories. None of us managed to own an uncompleted building talk less of a duplex. We worked. We suffered. We lost our brown skin complexion to the harsh sun. even when we heard that our ignorant mate who had chosen stay behind in the village had started buying homes, we stayed on, trudging through the tunnel of the metamorphosis hoping that one more step would bring us to the light at the end of the tunnel. In 1980, we decided to pay a visit to our folks in the village for Christmas. And so in June, we started saving a huge chunk of our salary. This meant surviving on the remains of our Lebanese master and our garri meal daily. When we took our annual leave in December, we bought fine expensive laces in Yaba market, foreign and Lagos magazines, cakes and sweets. It was very difficult spending the night without tearing our teeth into the cake that we had bought. The next day, we rented a car for two weeks and drove to the village enjoying high life sounds from the radio. After a week without our bleaching creams, our dark lines emerged in full form. Our chameleon appearance was in accordance with the lies we had rode in to the village. We had shared cakes among the cousins we didn’t recognize, slipped thin wards of cash into the hands of Old relatives who had more flesh on their skin than ours and placed the magazine in our sitting rooms and enjoyed the swarm of bees that gathered to lick the honey.
Truth is like smoke. It cannot be hidden for long. We were not ignorant of this fact when we went to the village. We just didn’t think that our two weeks would become a month. In truth, it had been a long time since we saw freedom and we wanted to suck the gourd till our tongues turned dry. It became more difficult to convince people that we were the children of Israel that had not murmured in the face of setbacks and made it to the promise land. Our fathers started whispering about the dates of our return. Our mothers were hinting at the possibilities of grandchildren. Before the masquerade of our fat fallacy turned to deprived truths, we ran back to the bondage waiting for us in Lagos.
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As we grew older in bondage, we emerged from the metamorphosis of our actions in chains and regret. Soon, time dissipated these emotions and we sought happiness in other places. We soon realized that time was not doing us a favor as we delayed the marriage proposals that our mothers kept whispering whenever we visited during Christmas. In Lagos, people fell in love before they got engaged. Our love journey began with music. In the 90’s, we fell hard for the brass voice of Fela and the highlife of Victor Uwaifo. Falling in love with music was much easier than falling in love with women. People in Lagos allowed their women go to school. With education, these women became more aware of certain concerns and their relationships came with questions. We had not mastered the art of digging for answers to evaluate ourselves in relationships. All we knew was the handiwork of society conspiracy that our own fathers had practiced. In our world, the women were not trained up to standard six. They were only allowed the basic arithmetic. They were trained to pound yams, and fetch water. They are told that a woman who can effectively perform home chores will keep a lasting marriage. In Lagos, the society conspiracy failed. Or perhaps, it wasn’t Lagos. Perhaps it is the emblem of the new generations. They come with questions that we would fail to answer. Once, a lady asked me what I wanted in a woman, I said ‘I want someone to take care of my children, wash my cloth, and cook my food even if I have little or no money. A woman that never complains and knows her place among Men’. She threw an invisible spit at me and said ‘if you want a slave. Go and meet your useless mother.’
And so we fell hard on the questions of love and marriage that life threw at us. We did not account for the future when we sent slim blanket of pounds back to our mothers to ship the women that they had picked for us. We looked for cheap accommodation in Mushin and Ajegunle. We married these victims of society conspiracies into our one room apartment and more painfully, when they got pregnant, we anchored the new generation into the poverty of our actions. Indeed, a failed metamorphosis.