Under A Halo of Shame
For people like her, silence is as much therapy as talking is for others.
Content Warning: Self-harm, suicide.
Last semester’s results were out and she failed a course whose instructor she refused to sleep with. The man she loved was growing distant. The loneliness was tearing at her intestines. She missed her brothers. Majorly, she was having recurring nightmares of all the dirt in her childhood she was trying to forget. She was hurting.
First, she started to drive her fist into the wall forcefully yet casually; laying in bed and looking the other way, as though she were merely drawing patterns. The resulting pain was refreshing. It had a way of shifting her brain’s focus from her heart and into the pain in her knuckles. But with time, it became insufficient, as is the nature of all improvisations, and it was then she turned squarely to God, pleading and then begging that He be sufficient for her.
She knew from experience that God’s helping hand was not always swift so she sought another way; one that had been on her mind for months, one she had always shooed away but which, in an intense wave of pain and displacement yesterday, Google confirmed as a proven even if temporary and terribly unhealthy route.
This morning, she went to get the razor blade. The shopkeeper said they had run out of it. The superstitious part of her tried to suggest perhaps it was God’s attempt to deter her? And though she knew God intimately and with conviction, she told that part, hush.
With time, her arms will become a board of various cuts. But right now, she does not know this.
And so, the first time Nana realizes that fatalism is a real thing, whose head always rears into the mind to announce its impending occurrence, she is sitting on the floor in her bathroom under a halo of shame, rays of the brilliant sun straying in through the window, her phone ringing in her room, unattended, her right palm slit so deep the flesh inside it a little visible, giving way to a slow gushing of blood and pain; and the razorblade in her left hand.
She feels the continuous stinging in her bleeding palm and screams, but she also feels the immediate alleviation of the other hurt, the one in her heart that had been going on for days. There is a sudden clearness of path, a weight lifted, and an unclogging. It feels like magic.
This pain in her slit palm will leave residues that can be summoned whenever the other hurt comes in during the next few days that lie ahead. At such times, she will crumple her palm to squeeze pain out of the injury. With time, her arms will become a board of various cuts. But right now, she does not know this. She only knows that this physical pain is a welcome substitute and she will be doing this again.
When the blood has stopped considerably, she pours warm water over the palm, stands up slowly and returns to her room, a heavy sense of what she has just done hugging her. She takes her phone and begins to text the man she loves. She types with her left hand slowly, but when she has completed a sentence, she erases it all and drops her phone. I’ll tell him someday. When it is all over, when this phase has passed. But she knows this is not a phase and so it will not pass; this is more like an initiation. You are a fraud. You hide the terrible things you do from him, so he doesn’t see you in all your nakedness. A fraud, that’s what you are. She picks her phone again to text him. Again, she drops it.
Nana has not always been like this. But she also cannot tell when it all began. Sometimes, when the darkness gave her a break, she went back to herself. She played volleyball and table tennis with her brothers if she was home and not away at school. She attended journalist events. She sometimes played snooker at night if her older brother agreed to go with her to the game center.
She made her hair in all the fancy styles and had a tongue-in-cheek answer ready for anyone who asked why bother when you’re just going to cover it up with that scarf? She enjoyed spinning theories out of things other people thought were dumb. She wore a durag and made the peace sign whenever her brothers called her a gangster.
She spoke to at least one of her brothers at least once a day, if she was away at school. She loved how when they said her name, it sounded like an endearment.
“Oh my God, Nana, have you been on the internet today? They are dragging you!”
“Me? Who? Why?”
“I mean, they are dragging broke girls and you’re one of them, so…”
She liked that Yusuf enjoyed teasing her like that. Because then, she has to retaliate with something meaner, and that’s how she knows she’s in form.
In the beginning of the beginning, Nana is sitting across a psychotherapist who urges her to talk to him with neither fear nor pride, with no inhibitions. She starts talking but her eyes stray to his hands on the table and she imagines them touching her inappropriately. A version of her nightmares begins to replay in her mind as she sits there.
She trembles visibly, her heart begins to beat painfully fast, her skin bursts into a chorus of goosebumps and she feels that odd, tasteless feeling scraping the back of her throat and working up to her mouth. The psychotherapist watches her closely and can tell what is happening. She knows because his eyes have a film of understanding and an unspoken oh dear. It feels like he has just seen her naked. She wants to bolt out the door. She even looks at the door.
When the moment has passed, and a silence that suggests he’s waiting for her to speak begins to stretch, she begins to talk. She explains all that happens with her skin and heart when these imaginations and contacts begin. She makes no mention of the experience he’s waiting for her to recount.
He regards her with kindness and asks,
“Do you want to talk about it? It is necessary.”
First, she looks at him as though expecting him to laugh, or say the question was a joke. She shakes her head firmly. What she neglects to say is that for people like her, silence is as much therapy as talking is for others. Through silence, she can somehow trick her mind into segregating moments, deciding which to give the power to visit and which to not by refusing to clothe them in words.
..she knew a year before she started to tear her skin that she would do it. It had always been there somewhere in her mind; not the intention, but the foreboding.
Through it, she can regard certain things as experiences that happened to a faraway acquaintance whose face she can no longer even remember. It is in silence that she has been able to stay alive and semi-sane for this long. In talking, she will bestow reality on it and give it a permanent power. This, she cannot afford.
They have more sessions. She goes because her father drops her off religiously and the psychotherapist does not press. She suspects it is because he thinks she will speak when she is ready. After weeks have passed and she does not mention it, he begins to probe. And so she begins to avoid him. After all, she has her pills. When her parents ask, she cooks up a story about how they have decided the sessions can stop now that the pills are helping. She knows they will be in touch with the doctor still and hopes he doesn’t blow it up.
But here she is, no longer at the beginning of the beginning, in the middle of it, but still back in this terrible place of darkness and displacement and helplessness and suffocation. And when she is there, she begins to think a lot about fatalism. For example, she knew a year before she started to tear her skin that she would do it. It had always been there somewhere in her mind; not the intention, but the foreboding.
Two years before she started talking to her now lover, she knew simply by hearing his name that they would one day belong to each other, no matter how briefly. A year ago, she knew how she was going to die. Everything was predestined. She had no power over it.
The second and perhaps final time she understands the full import of the word, fatalism, she is in her final year in school and has moved from her rented place into the school hostel. The morning she is to write the last of her final exams, she dresses in a black slender skirt that reaches her ankles, an Ankara print top, a matching headgear tied stylishly round her head, a light black veil draped over it and then wrapped around her neck to cover it.
She grins in the mirror and feels like a stunning opening line. But when she attempts to open the door, it does not give way. Instead, she hears the clanging of the padlock against the door from the outside. Perplexed, she tries to draw it open again. This is when she realizes that her roommate has locked her in. Because of the fight they had early this morning? She begins to panic.
She bangs for a long time but nothing happens. She picks up her phone to call her classmate whose room is on the ground floor but there is no SIM card in her phone. Her roommate removed it? Nana cannot believe this. She bangs and clangs the door repeatedly, screaming, hoping to draw the attention of neighbors. There is no such luck. She continues to stand there for a long time. An extra year in the university is staring her in the face. She keeps staring at the door, dazed. Moments after, she looks at her wristwatch, the time is 8:45.
Her exam is for 8:00 am.
She walks slowly, deliberately to the balcony. She stands for a while. In that moment of standing, the air begins to smell of god and she knows he’s the wind brushing against the bare of her skin. She looks down to the ground so far from her. She is on the fourth floor. It is when she begins to gather her skirt to her knees that the word, fatalism, comes to mind.
Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu is a poet and essayist from Nigeria whose work has appeared on Popula, Ake Review, The Republic, After the Pause journal, Jalada Africa and elsewhere. She’s a 2018 fellow of Ebedi Writers Residency.
