The truth is we were disruption
Afopefoluwa Ojo
A dog stands in front of her house at a balcony that overlooks a narrow road crammed with houses, shops, and a church that stands on a grassy knoll. She dashes across the marble floor in short periods barking a sound so big to come from something as small as herself. Children across the road say, “Aja One, Gbera!” and she replies with the loudest bark her tiny vocal chords can emit. Children say again, “Aja two, Gbera!” She replies again, angrier now. What she’s telling them is: Move on and let me breathe.
Have you ever seen water and sun coexist? Perhaps in a photograph, a panorama of still sunset beach, a silhouette. I am water but you called me sun. This is what I was going to text Lade who texted me: “Good morning sun.” But I got outside and saw that the side mirrors of my car were no more. I blamed Landlady who woke up on a Tuesday morning and announced through her megaphone, “Dear Tenants, it’s not like you’re worthy of being called tenants but notice anyway, there would no longer be cars parked in my compound. My roads are made for walking.” Her roads were made for walking.. so I parked my car on the road outside. There also was anger burning in my heart against the state. You wake up one morning and hear that the Air Force, as a matter of error, has dropped one, two bombs on an IDP camp. Your legs become weaker and they can’t keep you so you find a place to sit and whisper to yourself, “My country is Armageddon. There is nothing left here for you.” You want to talk to your mother but she says, “Please Mire, not now. I’m not talking about this.” You wonder what things have caused skin to grow as tough as hers.
The rooftop of Wawa museum at Sabo was a delightful getaway. I’d look down and see people like mice, sparse and separated human beings who never looked up. They looked straight ahead like warriors wielding spears and there’s something invincible about seeing and not being seen. I was on that rooftop with both lover and friends and only a door separating both. It was a strange day as everything concatenated (I’d never been on that rooftop with both lover and friends.) The sun was casting shadows of us against the dark yellow walls, showing us distended versions of ourselves. My legs, bloated. Lade’s waist, pudgier. Our way was openness, Lade and I and when I kept my distance from him, I told him why.
“I don’t want my friends to see me.”
“What are you saying, Mire?”
“They’ve never seen me like this.”
“Can you even hear yourself?”
Lade threw his bag behind his back and headed for the long flight of stairs, skipping three steps with his every one step, dots of sweat forming on his forehead. He went and stood at the other side of the road awaiting a motorcycle and would casually look up at me. Every time I caught his eyes I wanted to be invisible. It’s this thing about being found out that makes you want to run and hide or grovel in gravel or whatever. I hated to see him distressed, his face contorted, his chest panting, visibly hurt. An alternate me would’ve run towards him and put an arm around his shoulder, my lips around his and then, “It’s you I choose.” But I had a mirrorless car to drive and flowery friends to impress and we altogether waltzed into the car and by the next day I was fucking someone else.
We met at a new coffee shop called NEO SOUL that recently opened down the road just beside CAFÉ NEO. Neo Soul was really small and this was what I said to Easy when he finally came to talk to me because I wouldn’t stop staring at him from across the five seats that separated us. I said to him, “I was only staring because you were in my eye view. Had a flower pot been there or even something less fascinating than a flower pot, I’d have stared the same.”
My music was loud and blaring through my headphones and he said,
“You get ten cool points for listening to Skrillex”
“It’s a$ap”
“Eleven cool points.”
I scowled.
And then laughed. We talked about Neo Soul’s coffee and he told me about how he scheduled different latte flavours for different days of the week and said if I came to his place he’d show me how to make the best Vanilla Latte.
“When should I come?”
“Now.”
We went.
His house was real cute and made of small things — Flute, bottle of groundnuts, two books, shelf, couch, small table backed up against the wall. We sat at the table and talked about possible variations of the future –
“If you hadn’t come to talk to me, would we be here?”
“If you hadn’t stared at-”
“If you hadn’t been in my eye view!”
“Sure sure, infinite possibilities”
“Actually, actually, right now, just one.
“What?”
“Me and you. Coming correct.”
“You are so corny.”
We stood bare in front of his bathroom mirror beside his bathtub, which was surrounded by glass doors looking at our reflections. He had his large hand and soft palm across my throat and I was losing breath thinking of death. He said, “Look, control is sentient” as he choked me tighter and I made him promise that he would not kill me because he might have been one of those men who brought women back into their rooms and choked the life out of them. We went ahead to have choke sex and in between I asked if he loved me and he said that it sounded like a trick question. When he asked me if I was enjoying “this” as much as he was, I told him that it was a trick question.
I left for home with his journal in my TwentySix tote bag that read “Jollof is my religion” for Easy seemed like the kind of man that would only call a woman back to say, “Hey, I’m sorry but did you by any chance see my moleskin journal the day you were here?” After sex, he’d looked right past me as though darkness and shadows were far more interesting than the woman he’d just spent hours ruffling. I wanted someone who looked at me as though I were moon and stars and did you know that the sun is also a star but that’s beside the point. That night I texted Lade saying:
i choose you.
I was listening to yoga and practicing podcasts when I felt hunger pangs course through my body. Soon, I walked down the road to buy bread and akara. I’d make a sandwich of them with ham and down it with the creamiest coffee. As my coffee brewed, the podcast sauntered on about young people becoming more interested in politics, in policies, in politicking and that reminded me of something I’d seen in Easy’s journal. I walked down the road and imagined the owner of the voice from the podcast, short, stout and black with thick lips that hung loose while idle. I saw Lucky Lou who I’d seen many times before on Ibukun Street. He’d tried to get my phone number for the longest time and I always told him, “A cat ate my phone”
“Please..” he’d say. Then I’d say “Sorry, I flushed it down the toilet along with an underdeveloped foetus.”
This time when he said, “Consider me, please.” I gave him Grandma Girl’s number and he dialed it. Grandma Girl encouraged him to not give up the chase. She asked to speak to me and said, “You must come visit me sometime. Also, give the sweet boy a chance.” As though I hadn’t just told her the week before about a Lade who made butterflies burp beneath my tummy skin. But she’d forgotten, once again, as she always had, and for this reason, I’d made a secret diary of her, one that constantly erased itself. I asked Lucky Lou about the thing that he was always high on that gave him really slender cat-like eyes and he said, rat’s tail. He said, you roast it with aboniki balm, grind it and sniff it and you’ll be swimming in something like paradise all day.
“All fucking day?” I asked.
“All day”, he said, “I’m not one to swear.”
I laughed really hard and said, “Okay. Well, fuck you then.”
It was during this conversation that his friends began to come around. And somehow we talked about the government. I said in a small whisper that I blamed them for everything. When a short guy whose name was Martins asked what everything was, I said, “My mirrors.”
Chikama said, “Splendid to know that taking your mirrors did you some good. I mean, see you out here talking to us.”
Chikama was wearing a red weave and had painted her lips a red that deeply contrasted with her dark skin yet which had a certain appeal. Like something that said, look I do just what I want. I asked her what she meant and she said, “I took your mirrors.” I lounged at her and the other guys held me back before I could grab her. I said, “I hope it fed you shit.” And she said, “Calm down. It didn’t feed me that much.” I straightened out my dungarees and saw the road. The road was mud brown and it undulated across itself like a bow making music with strings. Two separate entities, one sound. I discovered then that we were gathered in a porthole and I talked about how the porthole we were standing in was a metaphor for the ditch the government had dug us. I talked about my burning anger towards a landlady who wakes up on a Tuesday morning and declares that her roads are made for walking or for a street girl who steals your side mirrors. I paused and scowled at Chikama who dusted nothing off her shoulders as though she were untouchable and I thought to myself, who does that? I said that I hated being sour like my mother. That I wished I were more like grandma girl who was “sweet like son of man.” Chikama clucked her tongue and said, “Son of man wasn’t that sweet. You don’t remember him losing his mind at the temple? Declaring himself the only son of God. Pure narcissist if you ask me.” I told her that Grandma Girl was sweeter than son of man and also that I’d pray for her soul. Chikama talked about how she’d had to feed tens of mouths by herself by doing odd jobs. Martins asked her, “Which odd jobs?” and she said it was none of his business. Lucky Lou said with much sadness that he hated his addiction to rat’s tail. That he would do so much more with his life if he weren’t consistently high. He said he blamed his father for everything and when I said, “What’s everything? That so vague.” He said, “Na condition wey dey make crayfish bend” I told him his answer didn’t correlate with my question.
My mother came to me while I was lying on my bed reading about a girl who was both so intense and evasive all at once so that she confused people out of their minds. I decided that if I were going to be anyone else other than Grandma Girl, and myself I’d be her. My mother stuck her eyes between the space between the wooden frame of my bunk bed and the bed itself and stared at me for seconds. I stared back: two identical pairs of eyes staring back at each other with something like love, a moment worth noting. I said slowly.. “What?”
“You’ve been quiet for a while”, she said, “I’m sure you’re up to something.”
“Something like what?”
“I don’t know. You’re so full of naughtiness. I can’t ever tell.”
I laughed and said, “Well, brace yourself.”
“I should brace myself abi?”
“Yes.”
There was a bottle of Hennessey which stood upright on my bed. It had been emptied of booze and filled with nuts. Mum told me how everything had become too expensive now. That the bottle of groundnuts was sold six hundred naira. “It used to be four hundred naira”, she said.
I yawned and closed my eyes and said, “People are going to starve to death.” By the time I opened my eyes, she was no longer there. I stretched to see if she’d fallen asleep on the lower bunk but she’d just disappeared.
We began to receive nasty letters in our mailboxes. Sometimes, the tyres of our cars were punctured and out of air and all the vulcanizers around refused to fix it or even to speak to us. But things were happening, we’d wake up in the morning and hear through our radios and televisions and see on the Internets that leaders were resigning and when they were asked why they’d say ridiculously vague things like, “My time was up.”
One leader called Shehu said in his thick Hausa accent, “I woke up and found a tic in my tac” and when he was pressured to explain what that meant, he swore it meant nothing. Shehu said he just needed to resign to his beach house with his numerous wives and children. From thereon, everything began to spin inexplicably out of control. “We didn’t plan for this”, is what we kept saying to each other. My head was buzzing and I was afraid for the life of my mother. When I told Lade all the things that I’d been up to. He said, “This country is not worth losing anything over. You need to stop asap.”
It began when we’d sit together and draft long letters and post it to the houses of the some of the government officials blackmailing them about the things we’d found out about them. If you don’t quit in two days, word is going to get out. And they’d scurry like fools. It was Lucky Lou who did all the digging and whenever I asked him how, he’d always go into a timid tirade rambling on about how it didn’t matter. I later found out through a long letter he wrote to me that his father was a politician like the ones we’d blackmailed and that he’d blackmailed his own father to divulge information about the rest of them. He’d written that his father had married six women in total, and each of them died every time his father needed to progress his political career — his mother had been the first. He’d attached photographs of the shrine his father built in the house where they lived, with vivid images of the decaying body parts of his dead wives. Images that would keep me turning and tossing for many nights after. The next time I saw Lucky Lou, I asked him if his father knew that we knew what we knew and he said “Of course! None of us are safe.”
I shivered.
When Sunday came, I wore a fancy hat, fancy socks and shoes and went to my old church. I sat and watched a woman who’d brought me up and mentored me from a young age stay at the altar and cry about the son she’d almost lost as she held him in his arms. His head was irregular and convoluted. I watched her decide that God’s will was final and that God’s will was that he would live. I thought to myself, everyone with their palaver. Her first palaver was that her mother had left when they were little. I remember being at her wedding and looking at the empty seat that belonged to her mother, wondering what a motherless life must be like. Everyone was worshipping with their tongues but I could only worship with words, so I sat down and was scribbling things. It was good to once again be amongst people who really believed in the things that they believed in. I wrote about the way a woman in the choir sang, how she pressed the microphone to her mouth, shut her eyes and then disfigured her mouth as though she were experiencing a stroke. I imagined a million ants crawling all over her face. The woman called Aunty Bukky, who had held her son so close to herself and cried to herself, was so elated to see me and decided to follow me home. She said she wanted to see my mother and when I told her that my mother wasn’t around, she still insisted on coming. I thought about divinity, about how my spirit knew that I craved the distraction and made way for it. I drove her in my mirrorless car back home and she kept trying to get a sense of what I’d been up to but every time she asked, I said “Nothing much” because I concluded that she had problems of her own and I didn’t need her to worry about me. She’d asked her husband to take their boy home so that we could have alone time and I was grateful.
When we got home, she insisted on making both of us coffee while I sat down in the sitting room, switching television channels. I told her that I wanted my coffee really creamy and when she came back to sit at the parlour with me, I put a hand on hers and said, “I’m really sorry about your son, Bobo.” She sighed and said, “Thank you.”
“Tell me how God healed him.” I said
And she went on and on about God’s sovereign power.
“God’s sovereign power through the hospital? It must have cost a lot of money, Aunt Bukky.”
She sighed and said, “It did. Even more than.”
“So how did you raise it?”
“Government Contract.” she said.
“How so?”
Aunt Bukky began to fidget and tell me about how they sent her a letter that said, “Your son is dying. Reach out for help.”
“They left a number for me to call. When I reached out, they told me that they needed to take someone out. I did it for my son.”
“Did what?” I asked.
And this story would write itself. I sat in my seat stunned, my eyes large as they are when something is unbelievable. I looked at the coffee in my hand and my hand began to shake as Aunt Bukky grabbed her purse and headed for the stairs. I dipped my fingers in my throat and gagged, falling to the floor and salivating. I began this story with my dog for a reason.
More than once, I’d made the mistake to give my dog, Kiki, large pieces of ponmo. Meat that hung in her small oesophagus and made her choke and cough and spew drool as though she were dying. I’d sit by her, massaging her throat ever so tenderly until she was soothed. And now I lay like her in my bathroom, spewing drool and dying and she lay by my side, barking. I felt just like Kiki, small and helpless. I saw myself with white fur and sharp canines. I saw my mother and Lade, and thought about how love was nothing bigger than the people in themselves. I saw Easy waver only for like a second and even in death, I thought about sensation I’d felt while with him. My eyes were closing in on themselves and I was willing that they should remain opened. Everything else that happened happened outside of my consciousness: Lade running in and lifting me up, carrying me outside of the house onto the street. All the people on my street staring and Kiki running after us, barking wildly at the strange onlookers, telling them, once again: move on and let us breathe. There is nothing left here for you to see.
About the author: Afopefoluwa Ojo is a writer who lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria. Her work has been published in the journals Overland, Experimental Literature Africa vs Latin America Vol. 1, Intense Art Magazine, and others. She is co-founder of Arts and Africa, and runs a book club called the Barely Literate.
