BECOMING A MAN

My mother always said, 'The day I fall asleep in the backseat, that's the day you know you're a good driver.' Now, I don't know how it happened for you, but my elder brother asked me one day, 'Do you want to learn how to drive?' It was the Christmas season and, at the time, we always spent it at 'home' (interpretation: the village). So, he said if I could move Dad's Beatle round without knocking down any of his palm trees, that was all to it. I can't remember how old I was, but definitely not old enough to salivate at the prospects of gripping a steering wheel.

 

But, it came, inevitably – that testosterone-induced desire TO DRIVE. So, my other older brother got into the passenger's seat beside me and pointed things out in rapid succession – brake, clutch, accelerator. But, every time I wanted to change gears, no matter how fast the car was going, I would look down at the round knob of the gear stick, because the manufacturers had helpfully drawn a tiny schematic there to let you know which gear went where. So, my brother, not famous for his long fuse, hissed in disgust – 'You want to kill me, abi?' - and told me to let him out.

 

And I almost did (kill someone, that is). Sometimes, you just cannot get through the thick skull of a teenager. I HAD to conquer that thing. So, I grovelled for the chance to dash to Ajuwon to grind tomatoes, just so I could DRIVE. It was mostly private, empty roads there and back, so someone shrugged and said – 'Okay'. First time alone in a 504; I was so cautious a Kenyan could have gone past me. But it still happened; when I was coming uphill, the nylon bag of freshly ground tomatoes un-tied itself. I should have stopped, packed, THEN turned to try and scoop tomato slurry back into nylon bag. But I skipped the first two steps. Honestly, I looked back up only because I heard a thud. Two people (no lie) dropped off my windscreen - a woman and a small child.

 

Speed kills! But, like I told you, my heart was racing faster than that car at the moment of impact. So, the only person that ended up getting hurt that day was me, because the husband of that woman and the father of that child (thankfully for me, one and the same person) was sitting just by the accident (being at his duty post as a diligent mai-guard); he pulled me out through the car window and slapped glasses and (I swear) a few pimples off my face. But! This is not about that story. It's about how I was traumatized by the images of human bodies on my windscreen, and kept seeing them even after I shut my eyes. But my mother – still don't know where she found the nerves – put the keys in my hand again that night and said, 'Drive me home.'

 

And she (like we like to say in these parts) took it upon herself to teach me right, clutching her handbag on her knees in the backseat and screaming – 'Slow down!' – even when I wasn't actually moving. I remember snapping once (Leave me alone, mummy!) and just flooring it, and she retorting in a voice that was suddenly very, very calm – 'Go on and kill us both. At least, me, I've lived a little.' Another time, in the middle of Idumota, she leaned forward and said softly, 'Careful now. This is Lagos. If you knock anyone down here, they will burn you, me and this car right here.'

 

So it came to be, a while later, on the road to the village – me and my younger ones were in the back of an old Station Wagon when I noticed that the one-eyed driver was sleeping. So, I reached out, held the steering firmly, then whispered in his ear, 'Nna…' And when he opened his good eye, I told him (just as gently) 'Please, I beg you in the name of God, clear'. Then I took a deep breath, slid into the driver's seat, and took the wheels myself. That was how I drove us all the rest of the way - all the way from Enugu to 'home'. And when my dad heard, he turned round and gave me a quick look, then grunted and said, 'I can see you're a man now.'

 

But, to be honest, it wasn't that day, really. It was some time before; to be precise, the day I had looked over my shoulder – a bit surprised at how silent it was in the back – and found my mother, side head against the rolled up window, sleeping. THAT was the day I glanced in the rear-view mirror...and smiled to myself.

Image taken from:

 http://ireporterstv.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/how-to-drive-in-Nigeria.png

LONELINESS

Abuja can be a funny place. True story. An afternoon like any other. The phone rings. This is before mobile phones, so I run out of my room, into the sitting room, and snatch up the receiver. It's my first semester holiday, first year. I cannot remember. But I think I was 'expecting a call' (if you know what I mean).

 

Hello? But there was just quiet breathing at the other end. Then a female voice, speaking English with the faintest whiff of an Hausa accent: 'Who is this? Where have I called?' I take the receiver off my ear and look at it, put it back and say – Did you not call this number? 'Okay' replies the voice and (honestly, not one word of embellishment), 'I live in Area 1. My husband is away for a while. Can you come over?' My brother, sometimes I still wonder what would have happened to me if I had taken a taxi to Area 1 that day. Or what would have happened to me if, nine years later, I had taken the train to Newcastle. Because – if I am lying, let me grow a small pimple – it happened again.

 

Middle of the night. Trying to find warmth under my duvet. The phone (mobile this time) rings. After a few seconds listening, I politely explain that, 'this is the wrong number'. But it rings again. 'I'm really sorry to call again. But…you have such a lovely voice.' (If there is something I should have said in response, I still do not know it.) What comes naturally is - 'Eh?' - in my default accent, no forming. The one I grew up with, not the one I manage in London. But she doesn't seem to mind. It IS, after all, the night before Christmas. 'Why don't you take the train up to Newcastle? And I'll meet you at the station.'

 

Hmm. I don't know, but I strongly suspect I have no head for alcohol; that half a glass will do to me what six bottles did to Obaino that day at Uni. He left me in the room to go and 'quickly' get something from a friend, staggered back, an hour later, DRUNK. He tried to tell me what happened, in between burps and hysterical giggles; how he walked into some sort of party, and every time he tried to leave someone shoved 'one more' into his hand. He, eventually, passed out in the middle of the room. And nothing – read my lips, NOTHING – we did woke him up, till he was done sleeping.

 

So, I understand. Honestly, after a while, Loneliness will do you like six bottles of 'manya'. In that state of mind, every crooked road branching off the one you're walking down suddenly looks like the highway to heaven. Just because it's been so long since someone said something nice to you – noticed your hair, or the color of your eyes, reached across the cold aisle and offered you a hand.

 

But! Not so fast. Maybe (let me just agree with you) the midnight voice actually belonged to a beautiful woman; what if she was with a group of men, all carrying garottes in their back pockets? Some people have developed this skill to the level of dazzling proficiency, exploiting the spaces others carry around in their hearts, like that girl who orders the whole suya on the first date, chomping holes through your back pocket, or the man who colonizes your car, leaving you to hustle buses to work. Ah! The things we endure for fear of being alone.

 

But you need to see the way these things really work. True Love acts a lot like you or me, a little put off by THAT look – the one that says you NEED me, can't do without me, always thinking of me, will die without me. Honestly, the only people genuinely attracted to desperation are people looking to mop the floor with others. Just remember – not many things will convince someone else that he or she can enjoy your company as surely as this one will, watching you enjoy it yourself. And even if, at the end of the day, no one worth the trouble ever shows up, believe me, you would still have lived a complete life.

 

 

Image taken from:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/image/923882-3x2-940x627.jpg

 

Tribute to Professor Chinua Achebe

Hello,

The You Tube link below is a poetry performance done in tribute to the late Professor Chinua Achebe by Dike Chukwumerije. 

It was premiered in  Abuja on Friday, October 11, 2013 to very positive reviews.

It is a riveting and touching performance. And I would like to share it with you.

Thank you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsDJ5CUCafI

FLORENTINA

I grew up in the darkness because there was always something wrong with the transformer in our estate, on the boundary between Lagos and Ogun. This was 1992 when Sango-Ota was still a quiet backwater. And the roads in Ojuore were all sand, and crooked. But my brother had a guitar. And at night he would sit, with a lantern at his feet, stroking strings at the edge of the kerosene-scented halo.

We sang his songs. None of them ever played on the radio. But I heard them, even in my dreams. It’s been many years now and sometimes I don’t remember that I still remember. You know what I mean? Then I was lost in Rome, one day, trying to find my way on the metro, surrounded by people some of who looked at me out of the corners of their eyes. I never understand when people have souls but don’t use them to see. Because I sat in a restaurant with a friend, but the waiter would only speak to him, never to me. And when I walked into a Post Office, the lady at the counter preferred dealing with the people that looked just like her.

It makes you paranoid, things like these. So, I too glanced out of the corners of my eyes, searching for shadow racists. Till the name of my stop flashed past – Laurentina. And I saw my brother again, in my mind’s eye, with the lamp at his feet. He wrote a song once, you see; called it – Florentina – the name of a girl another brother had fallen in love with. It is what brothers do for each other – put an arm around your shoulder and whisper, ‘Be strong’; or give you words when you lack them; find you when you need to be found. And, on that cluttered metro, I found myself again, singing lines from my brother’s old song: ‘There’s something I see in your eyes when you’re looking at me that tells me, that when I was gone you were thinking of me. And you were not complete…’

Ah! I tell you this, my friend, if you had walked over, and pulled out the empty chair at my table, you would have discovered that I glanced out of the window one day and fell in love; that I have pictures of my children on my phone and I can’t wait to talk about them; that I prefer taking the bus because I like staring and wondering where the people on the sidewalk are coming from, and where they are going to; that I have never been shopping in Italy, but I have walked for miles just to stand outside the Coliseum; that when it rains I sit on my verandah and watch it; and there’s a question you carry within you, a question you will never answer until you talk to me.

Because we are all incomplete. Not because there’s something missing. It’s just that the Universe is not an extension of our selves and no one has found its end yet. No. There is always something more; something different. Try it. When next your heart (or your conscience, or whatever it is on the inside of you that still remembers the songs that made you dream once) dips its toes in new waters, follow it. Who knows? You might just end up – perfect as you are already – a better person. For it is the one who holds it that is held back by prejudice, never the one against whom it is held. So, when I opened my eyes again on that metro, it was all I saw – people, as broken and tired as I have been many evenings on my own way home, looking back at me. And, this time, when someone caught my eye, I didn’t ask why, I just smiled, until they looked away, or (imagine that) smiled back.

Image taken from:

http://www.allpsychologycareers.com/images/racial-prejudice.jpg

QUICK LESSONS

The other day - in the middle of something else we were doing, something completely unrelated to what she ended up saying - my little girl looked up at me and said, quite cheerily too, 'One boy in school today said that my dress was ugly.' That was it. And she carried on playing.

 

As you can imagine, I stopped. And took a deep breath too. It's what growing up does to you. You see a clear plastic bag and you don't think space helmet, you think suffocation. You see the railings of a staircase and you don't think – Oh, shiny new slide – you think broken bones and hideous head wounds. You see an empty parking lot and (Heaven help us all) you think muggings, rape and child abductions, not make-shift football field or new kingdom to explore.

 

So, I thought to myself, what was so ugly about a dress everyone else was wearing; or didn't she wear her uniform to school that day? This is how it starts, isn't it? (Paranoid thoughts refusing to be calmed down.) Soon, it would be – your teeth are crooked, you have pimples, your breasts are too small, your legs are too hairy, where were you when God was sharing hips? In fact, I think you're too fat.

 

And, before you know it, she's skipping breakfast, throwing up lunch, stuffing gelatinous bags through surgical incisions on the underside of her perfect breasts, dating the ones 'they' say are 'cool', having the eighth child in a desperate search for her husband's heir. Is this how it starts?

 

I took another deep breath. Don't be silly, Dike. You KNOW how it is. Sometimes, when a small boy likes a small girl he says to her – I think you're very ugly. (Because, sometimes, when a father is proud of his son, he hisses and says – Coconut head!) But, to be totally honest with you, I've become a lot less rational since she was born.

 

So, the other day, someone said to me, 'Dike, abeg, can you teach my daughter a few moves? I think she's being bullied in school'. My brother, paranoia or not, here is a fact - you cannot legislate away playground oppression. And there are many people - on both sides of the bully/bullied divide - who will not out-grow this thing as a matter-of-course.

 

So, I stood her in front of me, barely eleven years old, and said – 'Listen, if someone rushes at you in school to push you like this…' And I shoved her gently, so she understood EXACTLY what I meant.  'I want you to move your hands like this…' She giggled. Like this? Asked it shyly. 'Yes.' I nodded 'Just like that.' And we kept at it, till she was laughing out loud, parrying my hands, and throwing me to the floor.

 

Because, even though they both provoke similar behavioural patterns, there is a world of difference between Fear and Love. And it's one thing to do something because you care how someone feels, and quite another to do it because you care what they think. So, I stopped (it is the Divine right of parents, after all, to over-react) and told my little girl what to say.

 

But you can never really tell with children. That's why you make them repeat sentences. It annoyed her a little, seeing as she was in the middle of something she ACTUALLY cared about - combing out the tangled hair of her doll. But I threatened a smack, so she giggled and said, 'I like my dress.' Looked me straight in the eye,  'And what is your own business sef?' That was it. And we carried on playing. 

Image taken from:

http://www.medepage.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/selfconfidence.png

A TALE OF BROKEN HEARTS

When I was in Primary school, it wasn't 'cool' to admit you 'liked' a girl. So, you can imagine how I felt when my sister tricked me into a confession. She had asked me who I 'liked' in my class and I had, of course, emphatically denied that such a thing was even possible. How can?

 

So, she said – If I tell you who I 'like' in my class, will you tell me who you 'like' in your class? Hmm. Well, if it was going to be like that – Okay. And she said – I like so-and-so. Wow. I couldn't even believe she said that! Fine then, I twisted my lips (a deal was a deal) and went on to say it for the first time in this life - I like so-and-so.

 

Well, as this article is not really about how devious the female specie of the human race can be, I'm not going to tell you how my sister cackled long into the night. Of course, her own 'so-and-so' was completely fictitious. I tried to bluff my way out, claiming my own 'so-and-so' was also a lie, but like Kenny Rogers so eloquently sang - love (or in this case a baby crush) is 'something everybody else can see'.

 

It just shows. And, because it SHOWS, you can't pretend it doesn't hurt (well you could try to) when you get NAILED; like if she (Lord, have mercy) refuses to sit with you in class. What did you ever do to deserve this pain shooting up and down your chest? But you MUST recover before break time, before the other boys find out and slap you with that odious label - 'woman wrapper'. God forbid.

 

Then, one day, it becomes something you're proud of – with your pimples and developing pectoral muscles. So, you're even less believable when you try to pretend that she no longer returning your calls is 'nothing'. My brother, if you've ever laid down on a single mattress in a dark room, or sat on some wooden bench outside your house, listening to, or softly singing under your breath, Boyz II Men's 'End of the Road', over and over again, then you KNOW that a broken heart is anything BUT 'nothing'.

 

It hurts like hell. I can't even describe it. Okay, let me try. When you're in primary school, it's like falling off your bike and skidding a few meters along the road on your knees. When you're in secondary school, it's like when a senior bends you forward and slaps you in the middle of your back, in THAT place you can't quite reach with your itching fingers, no matter how deeply you arc. When you're in University, it's like failing a course in your final year, or accidentally rubbing your eyes just after cutting tatashe, or being stung in the crotch by a severely pissed off soldier ant, still stubbornly embedded somewhere down there. You know what? I can't describe it.

 

But it's what you risk every time you admit that you love someone. In the real world, things can get really ugly; sometimes, people walk away, I swear to you, the exact second you need them the most. But it's a bit like saying you won't take another breath, just because when you pulled in the previous one you sucked in a fly and almost choked to death.  No. You cough it up and breathe again. Because, I tell you this, through all the things that happen between when the sun goes down and when it comes up again, I have reached this conclusion - it's better to have seen a dream die than never to have dreamed at all.

Image taken from:

http://www.thenakedconvos.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Black-man-Crying.jpg

GUYS ALOUD

Don't worry. I'm not about to do a 'Femi Fani-Kayode'. But I remember the first time I heard the word, 'conji'. I was freshly arrived at University - sitting out in the evening, with a friend, on the wall separating our hostel block from the next. He kept fidgeting. After a while, he said it was 'conji' that was 'worrying him'. It sounded like an ailment. So, wary of contagion, I shifted away slightly and said 'sorry'. It took a few seconds - because he carried on speaking – before I realized what he was on about.

 

'It's been three months', he said, looking genuinely distressed. 'Honestly, as I am sitting here, I can't concentrate.' Then he looked at me and said, 'How do you do it?' Not a problem at the time, seeing as I was barely 17, and hadn't actually done anything yet. And I wasn't alone either; take this other friend - let's just call him Lukman - who returned to his room once and found it mysteriously locked from inside. And when he went round the window to look, my brother, what he saw made him gasp out: 'My God! They're doing it!' I haven't stopped teasing him about it. And about the fact that they didn't stop, even after he'd shut his eyes and asked the Lord to arrest every offending cell in their bodies.

 

That's how difficult it is, apparently, to hold it in once you've let it out. You start calibrating Time around the instances of its occurrence (hence, the invention of a term like, 'conji'). I tried, once, to dissuade a roommate. No. It wasn't out of concern for his lecherous soul. I was just tired and about to go to bed. Then I heard whisperings at the door. 'Where you dey go? Dike dey inside o. He's sleeping.' A long thoughtful silence. Then the reply: 'Okay. No problem now, we go dey quiet. I no go disturb am.' WHAT? I sat up in bed. This guy was not serious. Quickly – it was the only dissuasion strategy that came to me in the seconds it took him to turn the door handle – I dragged my desk over, grabbed the biggest Bible available, opened to the middle, and bent my head over it. For where? He entered the room with the girl in tow, didn't even say a word to me, pulled a mattress to one corner and disappeared beneath the blanket.

 

It made me think, 'Jehovah, what will I not see in this world?' Yes. But then I also chalked it down to youthful exuberance, and all the heady feelings that come with encountering FREEDOM for the first time in one's life. Surely, it is something people out-grow? Well, not exactly. You outgrow puberty. You out-grow curiosity – one way or the other, whether by listening to people, walking into situations, reading books, watching stuff, wandering down a few (or maybe not so few) paths yourself.  These things WILL happen. What you don't out-grow are consequences. And! THE dilemma. Yes. THE dilemma. Forget those drawings in Biology; not every part of you is actually linked to your thinking brain. And, once you turn this thing on, sooner or later, it will want someone your heart, or your soul, or your spirit, or just plain common sense, doesn't. That, my friend, is THE dilemma.

 

So – for the sake of giving him one – let's call my friend, Bobby. 'Okay, Bobby, I'm ready for that question now, ask me again.' And Bobby scratches the back of his head, shifts around a bit, looks at me and says, 'Men! I haven't had sex in three months. How do you deal with it?' Well, Bobby, it HAS been seventeen years (God forbid! I meant since that conversation). But the thing is, unlike a conscience, erections don't actually always point you straight. They don't care if you're in school, or still trying to find your feet in life. They don't care if, midway through kissing this person you met an hour ago, you reach into your back pocket and can't find the condom you put there. They don't care if you have enough children already, either with the person they are leering at now or with someone else, someone waiting at home, watching the clock and worrying. They DON'T care. Even if you're breaking hearts and risking reputation, they DON'T care…

 

What can I say? It's just the way we're wired. Learn it early – no secret formulas – how to take deep breaths and cold showers. Because, compared to what you will find down some of these roads, the miserable state of 'conji' is pure heaven.

Image taken from:

http://www.google.com.ng/imgres?imgurl=http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8103/8474797259_7f7b76cfa6_z.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.flickr.com/photos/91199447@N03/8474797259/&h=612&w=612&sz=119&tbnid=1OUSL8YyOMg5MM:&tbnh=86&tbnw=86&zoom=1&usg=__N9uWvjVLKi9ERAm6_Ct3HzVdHCU=&docid=IzaFT8yYBGFvgM&sa=X&ei=TtMyUvK-Ouq00wXpl4HoCg&ved=0CE4Q9QEwCQ&dur=453