“Aint shit changed” — Somebody
My mother did not need to tell me that some women in Nigeria were depressed. I saw it. I saw their backs cave in, and their lips spilling grief in the form of praise songs, under the burden of marriages lynching them with a code of silence. They nursed this silence with nurturing hands as mothers, eager eyes as young women who were once hell bent on the concept of a union. It wasn’t that every marriage in Nigeria was ruined, it was just that there were too many horrible ones rising to the surface, exposing a deep gaping wound in our society. A society so maligned with these fractures manifesting as a lack of respect and love, and an deep patriachial violence masking under the guise of culture.
Women were dying in marriages all around us, and we, society, were being quiet. In my family, we knew who's husband beat her senseless, as Nigerians liked to say. We also knew whose husband ran the streets at night with girls who were old enough to be in the state university, but young enough to truly not know any better. And when the reports went back home to waiting wives, sometimes the usual responses to quell these questions came back as -
As long as he comes back home to me, I’m the wife and the woman of this house.
So this is what was passed down. An acceptance of things being “just they way it is”. But I saw it. The depression was everywhere. In sweaty palms wringing at banks, and eyes losing light at country clubs as they downed drinks beside men whose eyes drift from the bottles in front of them to the young supple bosoms walking passed, I saw it- the great depression of the Nigerian woman.
I suppose I was probably seeing too much, and maybe it would have been better to shut my eyes and wish that it was different, or maybe it was all in my head, but it was everywhere, and very soon I started feeling it too. At a very young age, I went to bed at night seeing it and waking up with cold sweats, dreaming that this, whatever it was, would be my fate, unless I left.
“There’s a drug called Lexotan, some type of muscle relaxant. Apparently it’s been a ‘thing’ in our mothers’ generation. A lot of women in Nigeria, older women, are on it.”
Ifeoma says to me. Our eyes lock for a few minutes, letting her words cut us both. I knew she was also taking Lexotan. I had What’sApped her about it standing on the platform at Columbus Circle, my fingers numb after typing sermons on the consequences of misusing drugs. As I board a roaring A train, she replied
I’m not in America anymore, if I want to get married here I have to play by certain rules.
Before she moved back to Nigeria to eventually marry a man she barely knew, we always sat in this cafe, watching New Yorkers slip and slide on the streets in the winter time. Three years later, a 3 am phone call from her mother left my stomach turning as I played a gut-wrenching game of clue. Ifeoma took some pills, in the blue living room…and Mr. Udot found her body.”
“That was it,” she replied, facing forward. I feel my face heat up, and the cafe lights dimming all around us. We ask for the check, quickly collect our hats and purses, for some reason, rushing ourselves outside.
We don’t want to talk about how she tried to kill herself in February.
I heard about Lexotan a while back. In a time where I was too young to know or understand what it mean’t in the lives of the women around me. The older women in my life, at the time, talked about it in hushed voices with my mother, while they sipped tea on our verandah in Lagos. Stories of women taking more than one, falling asleep in traffic, dying of overdose to numb themselves from prisons masked as marriages filled my ears, and I feared for a life I had not begun to even live yet.
Prescription pills in Nigeria are easily available, so now in my 20’s, I gathered that women were probably popping these pills at an alarming rate. Today, the ghost is not so far away, women my age, in our mid-twenties are also taking Lexotan. Like a sharp knife etched in the back of our history, I was hearing again, how someone I knew was close to ending things .
Aunty Uchenna knocked on our gate the summer before my parents carted me away to America. Her eyes are a glowing purple, and there are Ghana Must Go bags behind her. When my mother opens the gate, she collapses into her arms, telling her in breathy whispers that she has nowhere to go. I hear her tell my mother that she had first gone to her parents, and her mother directed her to pack her bags, asking -
“Is it only beating?” Are you the first woman whose husband has put his hands on her? Go back home to your marriage!
Don’t ever let any man make you voiceless, do you hear me? Don’t ever let any man take your voice.
My mother said this to me all the time as a child, and I listened. I saw the women in my life, beaten down or dragged through mud for men or marriages they could have left if they did not live in a society that threatened them with shame and ostracism.
There was nothing special about me then, or even now. I was just taught differently by my own mother. I was, and I still am taught, that my voice is mine, and that the fear, that rope that dangled around my neck, while my feet lay on top of a stool that a patriarchy threatened to kick from beneath me- I could remove that rope, with my voice, and even with the pain which came from the ostracism, or fear of being a woman far removed from our society- I could still be free.
