You Came Here To Rest

To make any friend, be desperate like you’re trying to make your first friend in a jungle where they eat small animals and you are a small animal.  

Your parents shouldn’t have given you a name with so many rises and falls in its character. 

See a girl that also wears shorts and even though she gives you the stank eye, smile at her like you’re sisters. 

Think of your dad. 

A face you remember would stalk you in the shadows. Leave meeeeee, you would say, I’m going to shout. Leave meeeee, he would mock as he finally leaves. 

Chuckle back at the girl on a bike that chuckles when you miss the green light. She is laughing with you. 

// do not stand legs criss-crossed. 

// do not make eye contact. 

Envision your panic attack in the uban. 

Envision something else. 

Find solace in the boys laughing their hearts out, tears streaming from their eyes. They stop to wipe them every few seconds. When you look up from your phone and you find them looking at you

know they are looking past you, towards the doors that lead outside. 

They rush off like they do not know where they’re going. One has kohl around his eyes or those thick long lashes that wrap his lids like kohl

(Girls like you don’t like boys like him because of all the boys like him they already know)

Denounce gender. 

Look up from your phone a couple eating ice cream behind a man holding his kid in its trolley like an appendage.

Now, relax, cross your legs while you stand because it gives you more stability, more support, a bit more oomph. Standing on two legs is a full-time job - so is staying alive. 

Imagine all that then chuckle. 

At this time in your life you are still jealous of real artists; unlearn jealousy. 

// do not sweat being the sweet girl with the bladder of an ant that over smokes. 

Master your bad eye. You will need it. You red-heart everything because you like to be written about, you like to be liked. 

Count all your non-loves on your fingers. 

Start with your dad worry about death then crave it. 

When you walk past this road, there are friends smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, queer bodies embodying hypersexuality, snobbery, and a chip on their shoulders. 

claim belonging; name spaces. 

Claim borders as high as the wall that separated East Germany from the rest of the world, as high as the Benin wall almost four times its size, someone had said. It is just that you are becoming or that you have become or that you may never even become. 

Realize this is okay;

You map the origin of your non-love from the day in the living room when your father had said had he not said  he did not love you, that you were much too like your mother. You were just five. So you learned to dissolve boundaries, to never say no. 

love me love me love me you attracted men like terrorists whose only emotions they ever mastered were those of their own, centered and raging. 

Bad talking and back talking and more backstabbing. 

You work yourself into a fright because you think they would one day kill you. 

A fear that makes you jump at the sound of anything,  it has always sat in your belly, in your spine, in the droop of your shoulders, the bend of your posture. 

A four-day-old slice of lemon in your cup of water, but you keep enjoying it, keep refilling it, the sour, almost rotten taste in your water always, to wake you up. 

And that night, when you become a unicorn, a Bloody Mary for the first time. (what? Tomato paste and vodka?  It tastes like jollof rice)

So, yes, being a unicorn is about learning balance. 

Also, your taste of being loved right for the first time in your life. 

You don’t want the man to think you’re going to steal his girl and you don’t want the girl to think you’ll steal her man. So you either focus on the girl and love them both equally, forcefully. 

It’s just the way you do things With them, there is no need to possess and no fear of love. Or fear of being left. Every time they turned to ask you, and you? what was it like for you? do you recognize people where you’re from? or do they recognize you? when you see them in the streets?

yes, you say. but i’m never even sure if they’re from Lagos or somewhere in Nigeria or even another part of Africa. 

And the girl who transitioned so good no one knows what she was like before. 

Except that she’s beautifulllll and a bit anxious and tall and bendy, like a fig tree with impeccable fashion. 

She blurs the line between fiction and reality, eyebrows and lashes done a brown red you can’t tell if they grow like that or put through the stress of colorful chemicals. All three of you cycling together through cities

Enugu is a city of temporary things but also of fire and coal, that gives temporary things. Because it all comes crashing down one day when they decide to move to Barcelona.

That night, you dream of insects. The insect has a mandible so big it chases you out of dreamland to reality and then back again - a lucid dream, just a vision beneath your eyelids but more than that you toss and turn and toss and turn and toss and the first thing you do when you wake up is lift up your head and check your plants. 

The green leaves unspooling from the clay, iron, and plastic buckets, roots heavy like coconuts, some cacti buried in the soil, white sellotape where their names are inscribed - please take care of us - so you dedicate your life to their care. 

This insistent life

a blessing

a curse

When water touches their roots, the green smell of plants drinking pervades the air. 

The palm grows towards the ceiling and you envision that one day it will touch the ceiling. 

You think of Ifemelu saying, I saw the Ceiling when I was with other men, and Obinze finding it more threatening than restful: so you were with other men — a man with a whole wife and kid at home. It did not happen in this order but your mind does this and you allow it expanding and contracting time and events and all that fall between When anyone asks you, you say you moved to Enugu for the architecture, for the landscape there's a fierce type of fire here, you say, a kind of protection and safety. 

You don’t feel scared here. In the mornings, you’re cycling through the estate, your camera around your neck, making pictures of buildings old and forgotten. Dropping them on your instagram with captions like the old shack of Enugu

You enjoy this work, it’s anthropological, and yet art. You are starting to feel more like an artist.

Your mother had warned you not to move back but you insisted you came here to hear yourself. 

After your father died, and you missed everything, especially the hugs, you needed the bodies of your families pressed into yours, you all sharing grief like that, watching his body descend, watching people pour heaps of sand into his grave, you watched it on a glitching Zoom, tears streaming down your eyes. 

You begged your cousin to send you a recording of your father in his coffin. At first, you didn’t want to see but then all you really wanted to do was see. 

His face engorged and emblackened. His lips almost five times its size. Shades across his eyes so even through the blurry camera of the phone, you couldn’t see him.

And so to deal with grief you enter into a fugue state. That feels like defining things. 

@see_eye3 posts about those old architectural ikoyi houses, pre-colonial buildings, their post-colonial identities morphing into something airless and strange and downright ugly

you’re keen to write him but you do not know what to say, maybe you would say: but have you seen Enugu? No like really seen 

Remember when you passed through Awka to get to Enugu? Remember that long bridge that went from one side of the road to the next? 

Remember the men who sold Indomie, egg, and all sediments underneath the bridge - you should make something about the auteurship of Nigerian indomie makers. 

Remember how you ate it with so much glee. The bridge lined with what you describe to a friend as “so kitschy. Igbo kitsch,” you had said. ‍

and that time you stopped at the resort got naked and dived in the water, amidst staring eyes before you went back, a baptism of sorts, the weight of water pulling your hair down over your eyes, normalise beauty, you had screamed

You had wanted to hear everything about your father. 

You found it easier speaking to your family on your father's side than that of your mother's side. It was still hard to speak to both, but after a few calls from your paternal uncles, you returned the calls. Your father's younger sister, Aunty Nkem, had told you so much about him. 

a young “your father” sitting at the bus stop in Enugu, distributing everything he had to his name, then getting mad, way too mad, when he had nothing left. 

Aunty Nkem had said his kindness made their mother worry about him, how she instigated the whole house to look after a son whose kindness got the best of him. 

“He became the last child,” she says with a wistfulness that reminds you that she was actually the last child.

But they saw his kindness and this was important to you. And so they saw him.

Fugue means you stop feeling things. Fill your head with images and words and work and the residues of “capitalism”, that man must toil to eat. 

If not that, then what? 

The violence of dealing with your true emotions; them rising up from nowhere so that even when you manage to learn to numb your mind the thing goes and rests in your body and your body reacts violently. 

A panic attack so violent erupting from god-knows-where and you stop breathing and you’re sure you have died, and you’re sure you will die. 

Your mother had told you not to move back.

An educated woman who believes in God but also believes in witches and wizards. To go back to the village for her was like to go back in time. 

To go back to a history where people still worshipped through divinations and not Jesus’ ears pricked up through stripes of his blood. It was to go back to uncivilization where women mixed potions and stole your husband jealous neighbors who dug your backyard and hid things that could steal your destiny back in the day, before Christ, the air was thick with evil, she says. 

You willed yourself to believe those things because they were as potent a spirituality as anything else but you also willed yourself to believe that no weapon fashioned against you prospered and you called it balance. 

One of your favorite songs in the world is Yinka Bernie singing “balance” in that fully devoted and yet noncommittal way in which he sang things.

i balance ..

 Like him demanding you could either meet him where he was because it was beautiful enough to stand with him there or you could quite easily, quite simply, sod off. 

ye ye ye ye ..

For someone given to extremes, the spaces between pockets of his voice humming, the deep throat singing was nice to be. 

Haha remember how your mum had called you on the phone> 

Your mum - cool enough to be one of those mums that reads your tweets but not cool enough to hold herself back from protesting it. 

Your tweet about setting up a shrine for your ancestors, not like you had even tweeted it - just shared a post you’d read out of curiosity 

Her face bobbing through the phone screen:

I WARN YOU, DO NOT DABBLE IN THOSE THINGS. YOU THINK YOU’RE CALLING YOUR ANCESTORS BUT WHAT YOU'RE OPENING THE DOOR TO ARE UNFAMILIAR SPIRITS, she says in Igbo

ogini? you say searching for words 

oGInI, she mocks. Even the Igbo you can’t speak, said they’re finding ancestors. 

When she sees your face at the verge of tears, your lips twisting thinking about how you miss your dad because he offered you freedom of self or taught you that it was one of those things one took by force 

“Omalicha,” she says smiling. She doesn’t want you to cry. 

You look for an excuse to get off the phone. 

A memory:

everyone sitting in the living room by the light of candles, telling stories about their days, their teachers, mum cackling because everything is so amusing, and as it gets closer to 8pm, we start to hope they bring light so that we can watch Super Story on NTA. At 8:05, power trips on, cries of “UP NEPA” from the streets. You rush and blow off the candles. “It’s a super story....” 

yes yes yes, it’s the little things that make you happy.

Your father's house:

 it reminds you of many things. If you are anything less than tidy you believe it’s because your father was everything less than put-together. 

Chukwudi talks of your father with fondness. Now it seems like everyone does except your mother and her family, friends. You don’t want to take sides but now that he’s gone you’re realising that if you had to take sides 

you should have split yourself into two. 

Your father's house is painted olive green, has pictures of Wole Soyinka, Barack Obama, Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Junior aligned in small frames.

You know for sure he bought it in one of those long traffic jams that lead from Lagos to Akure, where he worked sometimes. 

3 big bedrooms with big beds, air conditioners and fridges, the bedrooms so well done you know he built it toying with the idea that one day you and all the friends you brought home to live with you from school, that became sisters - would be living with him here in Enugu.

Now, after all these years, you move back

that was all he had wanted. 

You meet a man in your father's house who’s willing to tell you about your father. 

Like Aunty Nkem, you learn that you do not have to prod too much 

The last time you spoke to Aunty Nkem she had told you how your father fought with her husband. 

Would block the door to stop her from going outside to him. 

He had come as their friend, and then started toasting their sister. 

but we know all your girlfriends now? he had told him. 

This one is for marriage oh, Aunty Nkem’s husband had replied. 

And Aunty Nkem ended up being the first one to marry. 

Last time you talked to your mother you had seethed: 

nobody tells us things.

Even how you met Daddy, till today we don’t know the full story. 

But this guy loved your daddy, worshipped him. You could tell from how he spoke of him that men wanted to be him, saw something good in him. 

You remember your dad talking in passing about a driver who had taken his shoes and his perfumes and his watches and for a moment, you wonder if this is him. Your daddy had said this happily like he enjoyed being stolen from. 

So yes he told you everything in bits.

“Kedu?” he would say whenever he saw you. 

“You come carry your father's face sha. Na your father's face be this now? Kai” and you would laugh. 

If not that, then what? 

You want to make a film with a quiet river, stills and birds, something like a procession calling for your father. 

Sometimes you think about going back to Lagos where you would drive the nice Honda your father bought you in your second year of University, cute, desperate boys in your passenger seat. 

Now, you’re wearing a blue shirt and pencil skirt, weave done straight down to the beginning of the curve of your bum. Shoes a steep stiletto. A pencil skirt. A shiny leather bag your mum had bought in Idumota you’re walking into an insurance office, into a place where men talk with their teeth because it is the only way they can hear themselves

You don’t want to have to go back. 

But the possibility is that you would have to, once you run low on savings. 

You imagine your mum saying, “Ehn, Adaora, biko nu, but what about your job?” 

You stepping back into your home in Lagos, her rushing to hug you then showering you with praise. You would postpone this reality for as long as you can; push it far into the recesses of your mind. 

If not that, then what? 

So maybe you set up an altar for your ancestors, but you do it in secret, candlelights, warmth, you even leave food out as he was a man that loved food, mirrors so that he can marvel at himself, 

And that night when he visits, the first thing you want to do is scream and run. 

Because you are lying on one side of your bed and when you wake up open your eyes

you see him across you. Lying down too. How he had laid in your mother's house. He lived most of his life in that reclined position. 

Lying down, curved, towards you. You stay because he’s restful, you stay because all he’s come to do is wish you rest. He is also resting. Or no, you stay because you miss him. And he’s just there, both formless and full of essence; the essence is brushing your braids down, kind of copping you but just being, you keep looking at him, closing your eyes to take in the darkness of the room and perhaps opening your eyes again to check that he is there or that he’s not there he stays until you fall asleep fully. 

he stays the whole night. 

If not that, then what? 

Maybe you wait for him to keep coming and when he doesn’t come anymore, you let yourself realize he had been this way his whole life there and not there. 

You felt his presence in your blood but when you looked around he wasn’t there and that is why you chose your mother and defended her every time 

You’re hellbent on not ending up like your mother, who married a man who beat her and then left her to chase small girls so you download the app where sugar daddies abound. 

You will get a father and a lover all wrapped in one neither ever did it for you anyway 

Yet you crave that presence and that support, it makes sense that they should be one person. 

looking for a sugardaddy to spoil me silly

You choose one of your godliest photos. Your friend Kemi had seen and said: this babe, you know you’re not from here sha? You’re such an Orisha. 

A Jackson Donald, after checking your profile 16 times writes to you and says, i don't really want much from you, all I want from you  is to get know you more better, show me sweet love and be my best accompany, and I need a lot of attention and Compassion If you can do this, I promise  to treat you like a Queen, and I can assure you will never regret this arrangement 

You reply and say: when can we meet?

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