How to Wear Your Body

Eugene Yakubu

In partnership with Writivism, Arts and Africa is publishing the shortlisted winners of the The Koffi Addo Prize for Creative Nonfiction 2019. Eugene Yakubu’s ‘How to Wear Your Body’ is one of the shortlisted stories.

You are twenty-eight and will never spend weekends around the pool dressed in a swimsuit with friends again. You’ll never savour the morning breeze wafting through your window in the morning from River Kaduna and won’t smell your mother’s medicines. You used to smell the damp earth and yellow hibiscus, why do things have to change? You hate the thoughts of your mother swirling in your head and the smell of medicines lingering on your breath, it reminds you of the smell of disinfectants in hospitals. Strangely, it reminds you of your breasts.

You glanced at the enlargement photo of your beautiful mother, curled and yellowed at the edges, hanging loosely on the whitewashed wall of your apartment like a picture no one wants anymore. When you think of your mother, the memory is that of cigarette stubs rising to the brim of the sink in the bathroom. It was so full that the floor by the side of the sink was strewn with butts and ashes, a cloud of smoke in the air causing hallucinations. She’d sit for hours smoking one cigarette after another while the stench seeps through the openings in the door to get to you drooping on the old couch that smelled of dust in the parlour.

Your memories hurt.

You are livid from your mother’s passing. It isn’t cancer; you told anyone who cared to listen. The Doctor said it is stage three cancer. She lost one breast, then two, and finally her breath. She died of a heartbreak one harmattan morning in the two-room apartment you shared in Barnawa Avenue after she learned your father was getting married to the lady he had always sneaked out to see at night. A large-breasted lady, beautiful in a whole kind of way. Your mother was… well, breastless and worn. She would tell you about the man who was you father and then went away. She told you all these through rings of smoke swirling around her bony wrists, contorting her face like the whole world seemed in a horrid plan to scorn her.

When you looked at your mother you could see the traces of a once-ravishing beauty. Her face would have been symmetrical if not for the bones on her cheeks. Her head was hairless or maybe shaved, exposing flaky scales of dead skins dropping off like dust. She had splotches like scabies spreading down her armpit to the side of her breast. She called them bruises caused by her too-tight bra and the hot weather until they stayed there for weeks and became permanent. Only then, she lifted her bubba up to her bra and let you examine her body, her breasts, her armpits and even her nipples. Rashes like lesions dappled down to her spine. Your right palm was plastered with murky pus when you finished, you felt like throwing up.

‘Mom,’ you said, breath pumping in your chest. ‘Where did you get those from?’

*

It was late dry season and the heat seared the town. Your mother was thirty-eight when a side of her breast stiffened. You were sixteen, skinny and wearing a fleecy skirt with a black and white polka dot against a glossy dashiki, waiting with your mother on the sidewalk of the OPD at a Downtown Barnawa clinic. She was crouching beside you with her right on your left shoulder while patients jostled around and against you. Dr Okafor placed her on medication to heal the stiffness but instead it made her breast swell. It continued to hurt when she walked so she stayed in bed like a pillow. You got her pain relievers and sleeping pills. You gave her tamba pudding but she vomited the mushed-up half-digested particles laced with yellow and green phlegm and spittle. They had a name for whatever it is they think she had, but when the medication stiffened her breast, Dr Okafor said these things are tricky; whatever your mother had, it wasn’t what he earlier on thought. She needs a specialist, he said. She stopped the medication and watched helplessly as bruises appeared on the breast. She’d poke her fingers in there and feel whatever it was she always felt. The stiffness grew into a lump around her nipple. She told you and you wondered how pimples could grow under the skin. She stayed a week, and another, and it was still there. You really need to see a doctor, you told her.

And that was how you shuffled to and fro in the hallway of St. Gerald’s Catholic Hospital Kaduna, like an expectant father. The hospital, one of the many missionary relics struggling to survive the sea of religious extremism in northern Nigeria wasn’t just blocks of buildings with enormous pillars and gothic doors, but a home to some of the sickest patients. Patients lurching around with tubes, wires, drips loosely hanging by their sides and organs held together by the mercy of God. The asphalt knew your faint footsteps. A newsman’s voice from a TV on the white-painted wall filled the reception. Your mother was inside the consultation room tormented by the smell of medicines and the phony smiles of doctors thinking of the subtlest way to tell her that her heart was calling it a day. You stood. You sat. Then stood again. Then squatted. Then leant on the pillar in the waiting room, but you never leant with an assurance of the next minute.

Seconds crawled into minutes and there was no sign of her. You decided to go after her. Inside, you saw your mother seated without her bra. Her breast flagged beneath her raised shirt while the doctor’s fingers casually felt around her breast. You turned and headed back into the reception like you didn’t see another man touching your mother’s breasts. You grew up with the footsteps of your father in your head and his curses in your ears. You could barely place a face to the voice that snuck in at night to make your mother moan, then miserable, before disappearing into the darkness when her breast began to harden. You played with the idea of your mother looking for another father for you and it hurt. What other thing could the doctor have been doing with his hands on your mother’s fun-bags? That’s what breast is for, you’ve always believed in your adolescent naivety.

“It’s cancer,” said a voice from behind.

You didn’t hear your mother’s footsteps but you turned, still hurt by your ocean of pains.

“I tested positive to breast cancer.”

You saw her tear-furrowed face as she struggled to wipe the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. You hunkered down until you were sitting on your butt. You felt nothing, only some strain joints and the cold from the tiled floor and the panic was plain on your face like a worn billboard. Breast cancer? Whatever it meant you knew they’d be malignant to the breasts, and you so much adored yours like a golden pendant on a chain.

For the coming days, she would keep going to the hospital for mammography. Her smile would wane like a snail curling into its shell. She would come back every evening, shuffling towards you in the kitchen with a depressive yawn and hope-dashing words like lumpectomy, mastectomy, and carcinoma. Words that made you squirm that you had to wield your paring knife on the chopping board faster. She’d offer to help with the chores. You’d refuse, saying she has become so fragile. She might as well be in bed than slump on the floor. “I must live till I die,’ she’d say, facing the window and her back to you.

Fibrocystic breast disease. That was what they finally called it. She had some foreign bodies in hers, you wondered if that made her a cyborg. There were noticeable cysts in her breast as caught by the X-ray. The tumor had gotten too large for a lumpectomy. Her insides rumbled, she said. You saw the horror on her face when the doctor began to talk about incision. Should I or should I not? She asked you.

You hunched on the couch and listened as your mother weighed her options in a voice stranger than the woman sitting in front of you. She was in her chair, facing the untouched breakfast tray balanced on the stool and gripping the edge of the cushion with her neatly manicured fingers. You knew hers were little, but a woman parading an empty chest around here carries a stigma. Africa has never had the stomach for anything queer, you told her. And how would you tell your mother, your gay cousins, your dyslexic friends, your depressive self and your butch aunts that they were good enough just the way they were?

On the Monday you turned 17, your mother was about to go under the knife and you were outside loathing she’d come out without a breast. Just one, they said. You imagined what it would look like. Could the other breast breastfeed if she needed to? When you shut your eyes, you saw the blood-stained surgery gloves traveling over her sedated body; the doctors’ laboured faces streaked with nervousness; the sharp silver scalpels falling with a dull clang into the stainless steelware by the surgery bed. The Lahey Tissue Forceps was used to lift the flaps while the breast, lymph nodes and pectoral muscles were all removed by the scalpels that once seemed innocent in the stainless steelware, leaving behind a concave hollow. The doctor created a flap underneath the breast in order to sufficiently scrape out everything; from the collarbone to the fold of the breast. From the breastbone to the muscle around the armpit. The doctor inserted a drain to prevent fluid collection. For that malignant tumor, they weren’t leaving anything to chance.

Barely three hours later, they wheeled her out of the theatre into the recovery area for monitoring. You were fear-struck. For the first time you noticed how much altered she was: scarred half chest — flat and deflated. The crooked lopsidedness — the left one enormous and sagging while the right flattened. The blue hospital gown hung loosely due to her lost weight. Her hair — what was left on the skull, was greasy and sparse. She lay staring at nothing.

In the ward, you grieved. She’ll be fine, the doctor said. You scoffed. You knew enough about doctors and euphemisms.

She awoke in her new body. But the memories didn’t go. Sometimes, she would gaze on an object or even an empty space for quite a long time, only to jerk, judder and exhale deeply, like she had been sprinkled cold water after you nudge her back to life. You felt she was trying to scan her memories for what her chest once felt like. Whoever told her that breast had to be a pair and eternal told her too much.

She’d poke her fingers underneath her shirt where the breast once lay, then like a sudden realization pulled out depressingly. You never valued your breast. They were like mere enhancements until you lose them. When has it become law that you have to appear with both breasts as a woman in this sexist world? You’ve always taken it for granted, your breasts. Looking at your mother resurrected in a strange body gave you the chill.

She did nothing. Not as much as a finger. Mourning her old body, you thought she was trying to weave her mind into a new one. You closely observed her face was the colour of dried leaves, her skin of overripe avocado.

At night, you would hear her loiter in her room, barely coming out. You wished you had the power to grow her a new breast. Womanhood was more than carrying an inflated chest, you tried to tell her but she avoided your gaze and disappeared into her bedroom.

You got her a mastectomy bra pumped with a pair of silicone cutlet from Amazon, but you found it abandoned beneath her bed with her dusty shoes. You stumbled on Audre Lorde’s post-mastectomy statement and you wished your mother could read and live it: Amputation is a physical and psychic reality that must be integrated into a new sense of self. The absence of my breast is a recurrent sadness, but certainly not one that dominates my life. Powerful Lorde, you thought. And your mother…

But you forgot too soon you were in Africa, where gender roles circumscribed bodies were policed into orthodoxy and binaries. You’d rather your mother had abandoned her preoperative body in the basement and wore the body that fate gifted her even though androgyny and cross-dressing around here, like all non-normative identities, were always guilty until proven innocent? We as a people needed more love and acceptance, so why not her? You pondered.

You watched a post-mastectomy video on YouTube on how elite women pumped up their chest; some as enhancements, others as implants until the skin extended into bumps that resembled breasts. But your mother was too poor to afford temporary fillers and breast implants. She would have to carry her half flat-chest without pride, like the flag of a defeated country. Would she wear it well? you wondered.

*

She had a fresh tumor. You saw this coming. What medical magic would the bespectacled Doctor had performed on the breast tissues found above the collarbone and down the abdomen? Meanwhile, your mother wouldn’t go for a double mastectomy under duress, but would rather live through the distress and strain of having to subject her remaining breast to surveillance for tell-tale signs.

So you were in a yellow taxi, seated beside her at the back and heading to the same hospital that had etched pain unto your heart. A silence unusual and depressing settled in the car. The air was hot and dry like the evening before. Your mother’s face was streaked with beads of sweats. It was the harmattan season and remains of the rainy season still lingered: dry husks of corn and guinea corn stood in the farms. Pains wouldn’t let your mother be bothered. She writhed on the seat and gritted her teeth as the car barged into potholes and speed bumps. ‘I want to go home. I feel like throwing up,’ she slurred, the pain returning quicker and more intense each time. You began to wind down the car window, urging the driver to hurry up.

The cancer spread to the second breast and the mastectomy wasn’t quick enough to expunge it, was the news that greeted you at the hospital. A bilateral prophylactic mastectomy only seemed reasonable. If not, she had months, barely a year to live. How do working class single mothers afford two mastectomies when each cost huge amount of money? It was sad but you remembered the look on your mother’s face when she sold all of her jewelries in order to raise the eight hundred and eighty two thousand naira the hospital asked for before they would put her under the knife. That day you had the feeling that you were losing something, that you were mourning a death that had been foretold. After then, she said she has had enough of the odorous chemoprevention pills and of going under toe-curling and skin-wrinkling radiation light.

She was your only family.

You tried to write and the pen felt different. You heard stifled moans and sobs escaping from your mother’s bedroom. The wind hummed and the corrugated metal sheets creaked and hawed as if it might split out of its rivets and fly away. Fireflies wiggled around the lantern on your reading table. You watched them flail their little feather around the yellow light. The thoughts of your mother perishing with pain, only held together by the mercy of painkillers and generosity of aspirin, acetaminophen, MsContin, Fentanyl and a stock of medication you couldn’t waggle your tongue around kept pounding in your head.

*

Something about your mother winding up reminded you of Grandma who died decades ago, and had complications that showed symptoms of cancer too. It ate her slowly. Though she died with two of her breasts; they were battered and itchy. She would die proud, she always said. She came from a long line of Southern Kaduna ancestral tribe that worshipped the body as sacred and whole, she said. Unlike you children of the internet with fake breasts, hair, nails and fake smiles.

*

You follow the words, they fall into memories you cannot escape from.

Now you are twenty-eight years old, TV presenter and obsessed with your curves and straight hairs. One morning, a stranger stand before you in front of the mirror for your routine makeup session and your mother’s words on her deathbed rattle you like a windstorm. You should get to know your body like a map. You realize how vulnerable you are, betrayed by your own body. You abandon the earth-coloured mascara on your face and stare curiously at your breasts. You don’t even know your body yet, what boulevard would you be plying? What’s this strange weight adding up on your chest like boulders?

It is 2 P.M, Saturday in April, 2018, and you decide to visit the hospital instead of the swimming pool. The decision to go for diagnosis couldn’t have been more unnerving. Eventually you do and you wish you didn’t.

The Doctor runs his fingers up your torso as you lay there like a statue. Paranoid. He is so close you could breathe him, the taste of chalky medicines, heavy and soapy. Do you feel anything? He asks. You say you feel like disappearing. When did your body turn this public — for everyone’s touch like a parking lot? The rest of your life will stretch out like an echoing void before you. You inherited a malignant mutation in the BRCA1 gene. Your doctor estimates that you have a 64 percent risk of breast cancer. He feels a palpable stiffness, what you’ve always managed to not feel. Is this going to be the beginning of the end too? Not knowing your fate creates tremendous anxiety: can you live without the breasts you so much cherish more than your butt? What of when you’ll need them to breastfeed? You must decide whether to pretend that you’ve never been in the consultation room and go back to baking cake at home and wearing toothpaste smiles on TV, waiting in bed like grandma or be a constant patient journeying to the hospital for chemotherapy like your mother. Of all the dead, it is your mother who comes to you bare — such a fighter she was. But unlike hers, you are going breastless — both sliced off, you are leaving nothing to chance.

You are still deciding if you will, and can afford implants.

You decide to preemptively cut them out. A radical mastectomy is better than carrying two bulbous organs that would be cauterized to checkmate these strange cells at the end. A total mastectomy provides the greatest risk-reduction rate and you opt for it. Breasts appear from nowhere when you are growing. All of a sudden they become massive that people see them before they even see you, then it finally sags and returns to wherever it came from. This sounds relatable. You decide you will cultivate it once more with silicon or refillables and cover them with tattoos.

The confirmation of your next action terrifies you.

Days crawl into months without you noticing. You strut out of the hospital gate one Saturday morning and you’re the cynosure of all eyes. You walk down Hospital Road, down the boulevard flanked by grocery stores and salons where you are sure of meeting faces that know you from TV. If only they knew how much you fought and defeated your breasts, windowpanes wouldn’t have been sliding furtively and heads poking out of cars. Jaws wouldn’t be dropping and eyebrows arching, staring at you like an alien straight out of a time machine. But you don’t feel different, you only feel reincarnated into another body, portable one, free of anxiety and pain even with your chest breastputated. Amazing what doses of amobarbital and testosterone can do. You wear a blue pajama, a bit too large for your hips. Your large feet fit well in your flip flops. Your crew cut trimmed a bit too low. Your shoulders are broader in your red wrap top, your palm heavier. You wouldn’t have remembered the absence of your chest if you hadn’t leaped across a gutter at Yakowa Avenue and not feel your breasts tremble and bounce on your chest. You have the faintest recollection what it once feels like to carry a breast. Your scar tissue is a perpetual reminder, but it will fade eventually. This weight on your shoulder is lighter than you thought until you stand in front of the mirror. Bare and vulnerable. You broke down in tears, the shock of your body unfastening the last pieces of your strength. You feel like a cyborg wearing a laboratory body, but you are not the strangest thing in Kaduna wearing a fuck-you face on a Saturday. Someone should have already told you: if you don’t have a good enough body, go work out one. Just make sure you don’t feel as odd as an alien strutting down the street. Smile. Embrace yourself. At the end, you realized we are a bunch of spirits wearing imperfect bodies.

About the author: Eugene Yakubu is a storyteller and cultural critic who lives and writes from Nigeria. He loves coffee and books and the twilight glow of the African sky. He spends his time staring at the world from his window, living in his soul and wondering where the sun goes to at night, as should all right thinking people do. He is best known for writing stories that will guarantee him a time in jail, essays and non-fiction on non-normative identities, fluid gender roles and human rights. He is running a graduate research on Queer Studies and LGBTI narratives in African literature at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. His nonfiction This Hell of a Body has been shortlisted for the Gerald Kraak Award 2019. If he isn’t writing a review, he is probably dreaming of sitting on the same table with Toni Morrison and Obama and eating cake.