Blackass

MORPHEUS

It didn’t matter to me if I liked Tekena, but for the sake of what I wanted, I needed her to like me. And so, when I met her on that overcast Sunday afternoon, the first thing I said was, ‘You’re pretty.’ Even as I intended to win her over with flattery, I was surprised by my reflux of pleasure, the rush of gratefulness at her acknowledgement of my appearance when she responded, ‘You’re pretty too.’ Sunlight and water to a blossoming flower, likewise our sense of well-being is both nourished by the shine of other’s eyes and the gurgle of our self-regard. Who I was as a person was more than what I looked like, but then again, how people saw me was a part of who I was.

I soon found myself liking Tekena more than her brother, whose name I didn’t mention until she and I were eating ice cream at The Palms. You see, Furo had come across as a bit of a user. I know now that he was desperate, that on the day we met he was facing a predicament and had needed whatever help he could get, but something about his request to move in with me, the ease with which he asked such a thing of a stranger, had struck the wrong chord with me. His sister could be accused of taking advantage of a private mishap to build her popularity on social media, and in person I found her as chatty as I’d expected, and maybe too trusting of strangers bearing gifts, but at no point did she strike me as manipulative. Not in person, not towards me.

Thus I liked her. She was after all a recognisable Nigerian type, not much different from me in background and social standing. We were both members of that caste of young adults who grew up in the ruins of Nigeria’s middle class. We were born into the military dictatorships of the ’80s and ’90s; we attended the cheaper private schools or the better public ones; we read the same Pacesetter novels and watched the same NTA shows; we lived in cities. Unlike the majority of Nigerians in any age bracket, we spoke English as a first (and sometimes only) language, and our inbred accents were two to three generations old. Because of our parents, who were educated and devoted and fortunate enough to hold on to their salaried positions through all those decades of martial austerity; our private dictators, who beat their children with the same whips they used on the poorer relatives they took in as house helpers; our role models, who were so convinced of ‘what was what’ that they affirmed a preference for butter over margarine even when they could only afford Blue Band for our school lunchboxes; our protectors and providers, who were neither middle class nor working class, neither wealthy enough to jet overseas on vacation nor deprived enough to cease the Christmastime pilgrimages to our family hometowns; our lifelong teachers, who instilled in us their deep-seated humiliation over the failures of Nigeria as well as their bitter nostalgia for the administrative competence of colonial rule. That was it: in Tekena’s voice and gestures, in many things about her, I saw the same contradictions that had shaped me. Shame and arrogance. Pragmatism and sentimentality. Thoughtless violence and unthinking sacrifice. Red blusher and black skin …

The thing is, on seeing Tekena my thoughts flew to my mother. She, too, wore red blusher in my childhood memories. My sentiments about my father are less conflicted: he left when I was eight. My mother stayed to be condemned to failure in raising her son. Because the success of a man, our people say, is the father’s doing. You are your father’s son — you follow in your father’s footsteps. Manhood and its machismo are attributed to the seed, which then follows that the failure to make a man is the egg’s burden. Your papa born you well, they will sing to a man in praise, but when he disappoints so-and-so’s expectations of XY manliness, it becomes Nah your mama I blame. My say is this: when you live in a worldwide bullring, bullshit is what you’ll get. If they say I cannot be my mother’s son, then it must be that I’m her daughter.

After we sat down in the food court of The Palms to eat our ice cream, I began asking Tekena about her brother. I lapped up all the details she gave of his disappearance, which it turned out weren’t much, not enough to slake my thirst. She had awoken on that Monday morning to find he had left the house for the job interview he’d only mentioned to her when he was ironing his clothes the previous night, and since neither she nor her father had thought there was anything odd about his long absence, he wasn’t missed until her mother returned from the office and asked after him. That was when Tekena went into his bedroom and found his mobile phone. And the rest, as she said, was a disaster. From Tekena’s tweets I already knew that she and her parents had no inkling of the change that had happened to Furo, hence I made no mention of my meeting with him. As I uttered suitable noises of sympathy in response to her recounting of the grief his disappearance had wrought upon the household, I couldn’t help asking myself, what if Furo had remained behind after he found himself transformed? This was the question I wanted answered, and one I would have to find out for myself.

There and then I decided I would ask Tekena if I could pay her a visit her at home. Before I could find an opening to put the question, something happened. This was some time later, after we’d left the food court and gone upstairs to catch a movie. We were waiting in line to buy our tickets at the box office when a man walked up to us. I had seen him coming, and I suspected he was trouble, though I’d thought his trouble was my companion’s to rebuff. I was wrong. It was me his potbelly was jiggling towards. He had an enormous one, which he carried with as much pride as the tablet-sized smartphone clutched in his left hand. He looked to me like some local government chairman, one of those gruff-voiced goons who had moved on from extorting bus conductors and now made their money in ballot-box bullying. I was already irritated by the way he smirked at me, and I was tense on account of how close he was standing, but when he said, ‘I like your hair o,’ raising his hand at the same time to stroke my locks, the violence of my shudder shocked me as well. I sensed Tekena’s look of vicarious horror before she struck his hand away and said in a furious tone, ‘Leave my girlfriend alone!’

Crudity is a disease that money exacerbates rather than cures. And that man was an exemplar of the condition. Leave my girlfriend alone, Tekena said. A statement that left no wriggle room. A less vulgar man, if he were still intent on wooing a woman whose animosity was so evident, would have first apologised for his forwardness, and then he might have offered one of those flattering lies or I’ve-seen-you-before lines that constitute the arsenal of impromptu courtship speech. Not our man. He was too hippopotamus-skinned. His own response was rank aggression. ‘Which kin’ girlfriend?’ he sneered at Tekena, and when she threw him a glance that told him to go and die, he said with a filthy laugh: ‘Una be lesbo?’

Tekena, for all her playfulness on Twitter, was a Lagos pikin. She could give as good as she got. Brinkmanship, one-upmanship, fuck-that-man-up-ship — these were acquired skills in a city where even beggars cursed you out at the drop of a coin. Thus the overboard-ness of her response, which she began by hooking an arm around my waist in a suggestive manner before saying to the man: ‘And so what if we’re lesbians? How does that concern you? Abi you think sey if we want man nah you we go come meet? You, ke? With this your big belleh that can even crush a cow?’ These words were delivered in a tone of sweetened poison, and for some seconds after she spoke, the man was as stunned as I was. He recovered first, and opened his mouth to bellow, but thinking better of it, he walked away. ‘Smart move!’ Tekena called out after him.

A woman defended me from what I used to be.

Womanhood comes with its peculiar burdens, among them the constant reminder of a subordinate status whose dominant symptom was uninvited sexual attention from men. I hadn’t foreseen this fact of my new identity. Bus conductors whistled at me on the street; drivers pulled over to offer me rides to bars; and when I went shopping for my new wardrobe in Yaba market, the touts grabbed at my hands and laughed off my protests. All manner and ages of male called me fine girl, sweet lips, correct pawpaw, big bakassi. Landlords wanted to know if I would soon marry, if I had children, if my father or my boss would stand surety for me. A woman is not expected to live alone, to walk alone in peace, or to want to be alone.

Pity the man who never becomes the woman he could be.

It was early yet in my journey to the far reaches of my identity. Like those before me who had transitioned into otherness, I was finding out that appearances would always be a point of conflict. Male or female, black or white, the eye of the beholder and the fashion sense of the beholden, all of these feed into our desire to classify by sight. The woman and the man: stuck together in a species and yet divided by a gendered history going back to the womb. But in this war of the selves, I had switched sides. Despite the snake of maleness that still tethered me to the past, I was more than man, interrupted.

I was whoever I wanted me to be.

When Tekena and I emerged from the movie theatre, I told her I planned to be in Egbeda on Saturday (a small lie) and asked if it was OK to stop by her house for a quick visit. She gave her consent with expressions of genuine pleasure, and the next weekend, shortly before midday on the last day in June, I knocked at her gate. She came to open it and we went into the sitting room, where I spotted those two objects of my rampant curiosity: Furo’s mother and father.

Monima Wariboko was a former civil servant who now owned a chicken farm. He was sixty-four years old and had been married for thirty-five of those years. The first time I saw him, he was slouched in an armchair that occupied prime position in front of the TV. He was a big-boned man, larger in stature than his son, and yet, sitting there, hypnotised by the TV, he seemed the smallest person I had ever seen. He was thoroughly broken. This was apparent from the slackness of his lips when he raised his head to accept my greeting, and that wheezing voice, that exhausted way of speaking, so disheartening to hear in a person who wasn’t Marlon Brando. He was unclothed except for an old wrapper of his wife’s, a colourful wax-print fabric, which he wore around his waist and knotted under the Gollum swell of his belly. He resembled a fisherman straight out of a daguerreotype, a wastrel who hadn’t netted a catch for years and yet fatted himself on the cassava from his wife’s farm, and then went to pose for the camera because he was the only one not at sea when the colonialists came calling. He annoyed me on sight.

That’s how I felt the first time I saw Furo’s father, but later, upon reflection, I picked out the nettles from my eyes. Yes, he was indeed a broken man, housebroken and heartbroken, and a broke ass, too, but he had stuck around. He was a father figure to his children, a weak father for sure, but a father they could see. He was good friends with his daughter, who clearly loved him dearly. He didn’t assault his wife or embarrass her with roadside sexual affairs. He didn’t remain in the civil service to do nothing and embezzle money. He established his own business through honest work and gave his best at running it, and though his best ended up ruining it, at least, on the day his coffin is lowered into the ground, someone can say in truth, ‘Here lies a good man.’

Tekena introduced me to her parents as a new friend she had met on Twitter. After responding to my greeting, her father had turned his attention back to the TV, and so it fell to her mother to ask what Twitter was. While Tekena explained, I studied this woman. She was lying on her side on a sofa with her head resting on the armrest, and she was so petite she didn’t have to bend her legs to fit them within the sofa’s length. Going by the bellicose nature of Tekena’s tweets about her mother, I had foreseen a more imposing figure, matriarchal certainly, maybe the market woman type, with iroko trunks for limbs, a buffer of a bust, and a rock-boulder backside. Doris Esosa Wariboko née Osagiede was anything but. Perhaps because of her diminutive build, she had aged rather well. At fifty-eight, she looked in her forties. Despite having borne the load of two children, her belly showed few signs of sagging. Her bare legs were smooth-skinned, her face was devoid of wrinkles and sun patches, and she wore her hair in neat dreadlocks, the roots so black they were obviously dyed. It was her hair that decided my mind about her.

All children of living mothers hold this truth to be self-evident: your best friend’s mother, your spouse’s mother, your mother’s mother, someone else’s mother is always the better mother. Show me the man who wants the mother he has and I’ll show you his Oedipus complex — and yet, if I were Furo, I would want my mother to be that woman sprawled on the sofa. But he also left her behind the same as he abandoned his father, his likable sister, his past entire. Meeting Furo’s mother didn’t take me closer to his story; no, rather, it made me question my questions. (Question: Would Furo’s family have accepted him for what he’d become? Answer: No white man has ever been lynched in Lagos.)

Before Tekena led me off to Furo’s bedroom, her mother and I shared a moment over hair. I brought up the topic, and I did so because I wanted to hear her speak so I could sound her mind. It also seemed the safest subject I could raise with a woman who was grieving the loss of her child. So I told her she had good hair. She said thank you, at the same time glancing at me with those fierce eyes from which the laughter had only recently been banished. I tried again, saying excuse me Ma, but I would like to know what she used on her hair that gave it such body. That was when she noticed mine. ‘Come,’ she said and sat up. I approached her, and then, in obedience to her gesture, I knelt at her feet and placed my head in her lap. As her fingers worked through my locks, I felt a dagger thrust of compunction over the knowledge I was keeping from her. Blast the novel. No story is worth the human suffering that vivifies it. I know who your son is, I wanted to say into the sadness of her cocoa smell. I know that he’s alive and well. I know why he left. But I bit my tongue until she said, ‘You use shea butter. That’s good. I use coconut oil, but your hair’s too strong for that.’ After speaking, she retracted her hands from my hair and, clasping my chin, she lifted my face to look into it. As our gazes met, I endured the most deceptive moment of my life. I felt like sobbing with relief when she said at last, ‘Talk to your friend. Those oyibo hairs she keeps putting on—’ Tekena raised her voice in protest, and so her mother left the statement unfinished, but I got the point. All those nuggets I had hoped to excavate from Furo’s story, those subtexts of self-identity and self-deceit, of a continental inferiority complex, of the widening gyre of our parents’ colonial hang-ups, all of these were destroyed by a mother who showed up my fraudulence in a few quiet words.

I found nothing in Furo’s bedroom. There was a small thrill in being the only one who knew this was the chamber where he had woken up to his new self. And for some seconds I even thought I got some insight into his personality from how clean his bedroom was, everything in its place, his clothes hung in the wardrobe, his desk arranged, his bed made, but that crumb was lost to me when I asked Tekena if anyone had cleaned the room since his disappearance. His mother, I was told, cleaned it every day in readiness for his return. Right there in that bedroom, posing beside Tekena as she snapped a selfie to post on Twitter, I realised I needed to speak to Furo.