snake.
When I was born, there was impermanence.
It had existed before I crossed the threshold of my mother’s cervix. Before I had let the air fill my lungs as I cried. Before I was rejected by the man that was my father as he pleaded to see his wife. As I grew, I became aware of it. It was heavy, ever-present. It filled the air we breathed with anxiety and robbed us of peace, of safety.
My feet did not know stable floor, my hands did not know strong shoulders, my memories had no filling. There was an absence I could only sense when I was with others. Why did we have no visitors? Why did mother not go out? Why had I never called out the word ‘cousin’? Why was father not home? What was a childhood friend? What was a family dinner? Why was my world small and ever-changing? Colours moving faster than motion pictures on rewind. Why didn’t I have roots?
My mother was in love with a snake.
The snake had waited for her every day at the same place, at the same time. It would rush into the road by the street with the transformer as its landmark to greet her. At first, she did not see the snake. She’d sauntered by, sparing nothing but a nod. The snake knew he’d have to do more than that to get her attention. “Gbaza queen,” they’d called her.
The snake took the form of a man and waited for her. This time, she saw him. He had been too filled with excitement, so he had said nothing. The snake was there the next day and the next. It took him 8 days to speak to her. He complimented her and spat out his feelings in amusing haste, like it had been a knot around his neck.
Mother had told me she met my father by the side of the road. He had snatched her bag on her way home from work. She’d continued walking, relinquishing her bag to the madman. Whenever I heard this story, I’d swallow the lump in my throat. The lump was so thick and painful, but I swallowed it regardless.
Why did she bring the mad man home?
My father danced like there were ants on his feet, raising them at weird intervals; never in rhythm with the music. He lived his life the same way he danced — to a rhythm that made no sense at all. He spent days away from home and nights buried in the demands of work. He never spared a phone call, not even when his dear wife was sick, not even when she was pregnant, and especially not when she miscarried.
When I was 6, I had worn my George wrappers and a lace blouse to school, my siblings in hand. A teacher had stopped me to ask why I was in inappropriate clothes. I bit back that I wasn’t. I donned the attire of my mother, the one whose milk made my bones, whose ofe onugbu had quenched my hunger and flesh made my flesh. I was as much hers as I was his, if not more. I had always said it, I was both. To say I was not would be to erase my mother. People wanted me to belong to my father, but my father didn’t belong to me. I was unsure he wanted me — us. How could I know of him, be his, when he wasn’t ours?
Mother swore the snake had never hurt her.
One day, mother told me about how father had tried to hit her with a belt because she’d been out all day braiding her hair without his knowledge. Her eyes beamed as she spoke of flinging a stool at him in retaliation. It’d missed him by a string line. She spoke of how he begged her days on end for forgiveness with gifts of sweet suya and even sweeter words of apology. I swallowed the lump and sighed. Why did she choose to marry a madman?
He was a snake. Snakes were cunning and evil. On the days when the weather was bright and warm, he’d appear human. He would smile and fill our pockets with tasty treats. On some even brighter days, he’d play and share stories of his time as a child as we peeled boiled eggs. On the stormy days, his wickedness knew no bounds, his anger cracked through like thunder on a rainy night. The gloomy days were not as plenty as the bright.
But mother loved her snake. She twisted herself to his liking, writhing on the floor at his mercy, ridding herself of the humanness of self that he despised. She broke her back carrying his ego and twisted her tongue till his language was second nature. Mother also knew I hated her snake. She knew I made my siblings hate him too. She knew we stared at him while he slept, our little hands dying to snuff out the air from his lungs. Like a snake, he never settled in one place. He had no place to call home, shifting from space to space, place to place, no care for us and how the impermanence affected us. Mother was alone, just how he’d wanted — the both of them alone.
How could she love a snake?
He had bitten her and left her for dead. Almost swallowed her, wrapped his slithering self around her, trying to snuff life out of her.
“That’s the way they are, my dear. That’s how snakes love,” she had said one day, cradling the snake on her thighs as they bled from its bite.
So when mother found out I was the culprit and wasn’t enraged, I was bemused. We never spoke of the night when I had led the snake out of our house. He’d chased after me furiously. His slit for eyes promised horror if he caught me. I had led him to the busy road and let him get crushed. I watched in delight at being free of the snake. Mother would be free too, and she was. We were no longer snake people. We could put roots into the soil and rest.
Maybe I had freed us of the impermanence.
