Seven
I feel weak and congested, as if on the cusp of a cold, about to be served another helping of harmattan’s malaise.
A news article appears on my phone screen, about how the coronavirus could become a pandemic, a plague like the Black Death.
I cannot bear this speculative gloom.
To distract myself, I search for motherless babies homes, first only in Anambra and then I widen my search to all of Nigeria, and look at the sparse details online.
Some now call themselves orphanage homes or children’s homes.
On their Facebook pages, there are pictures of famous people posing beside bags of rice and cartons of Indomie noodles, children playing outside, children at a birthday party crowded around a tired-looking cake.
In that picture there is a little boy at the edge wearing a torn T-shirt that is down to his knees, too big for his slight frame.
I feel sorrow swell up in me, thinking of children growing up in a place called a home that is not at all a home.
A Facebook commenter asks why it costs two hundred thousand naira more to adopt a baby boy and the reply posted below reads, Due to scarcity and demand.
What am I doing, looking at this? What is this sense of internal splintering I feel? I should read messages on For Men Only instead, and write a few posts that I will spread out this week.
In the years of writing these posts, I have learned that there are so many spaces in the world where love should be but isn’t.
And that it is too easy, on the Internet, to pretend to expertise.
The lack of love makes us believe in expertise when we have no reason to, because the lack of love burrows painful holes in us which we fill with whatever we think will soothe.
I have so many subscribers who need to believe that I know what I’m talking about because there’s so much pain floating around in the world.
Some days I think I have helped people and other days I think I have not. Today, I have not.
Dear men,
I understand that you don’t like abortion, but the best way to reduce abortion is to watch where your male bodily fluids go. Keep your fluids to yourself and do not leave them in undeserving places.
Remember, I’m on your side, dear men.
Dear men,
I’m sure you were raised to be emotionally strong, tough, and when you’re overwhelmed you feel that you can’t show it because your role is to be stoic.
And so you carry all this alone and quietly.
Some men can do stoic and some men can’t.
My suggestion is if you can’t do stoic then don’t.
Lots of women out there want stoic and lots of them want men who can show when they feel overwhelmed.
Never mind all the fearmongering telling you there’s only one way to be a man.
There are many ways and there’s enough to go round.
Remember, I’m on your side, dear men.
Dear men,
I have potential sympathy for your situation, and understand what you mean when you say that women never apologize or take responsibility these days.
Silly creatures.
However, some men (not all men! not all men! not all men!) become irrationally furious when women speak and when women rise and when women shine.
Please ensure that this is not the case here, before we continue.
Remember, I’m on your side, dear men.
Dear men,
You splash around pictures of watches and jewelry and cars on Instagram and you say women are gold-diggers because all they want is money?
May I gently suggest an experiment? Post pictures of you building a bridge with your bare hands or volunteering at a soup kitchen.
And let me know what happens.
You attract what you advertise.
Remember, I’m on your side, dear men.
Dear men,
Your gamer girlfriend isn’t exaggerating.
Women who love playing video games online don’t like to play with their own voices, because once they do, men start threatening them with rape.
Good guys like you need to call this out.
If you are one of those that hear a woman’s voice and starts threatening rape, you’re just advertising what a loser you are, and the thing about being a loser is you shouldn’t advertise it.
Keep your loser genes under wraps.
Remember, I’m on your side, dear men.
Dear men,
Look, I get it.
All the stuff they told you was what a boy should do when you were a kid and suddenly they’re saying that’s not what a guy should do.
But nobody is clear about what the deal is now, even they don’t seem to know.
They say you’re sexist when you mean well.
You’re strong but now they’re saying strong is bad.
So you get angry, and because you’re angry, you drink and you beat people smaller than you.
But here’s the thing—abusing women and abusing alcohol actually just means you’re weak, not that you’re strong and angry.
Men, you ARE strong.
Anyone who says men are not strong is lying. So step up and show it. Being strong means having self-control. Talk to other men. Make them sit up.
Remember, I’m on your side, dear men.
Jide calls to say he’s only been at work for an hour and can’t wait for the work day to end.
I imagine him at his desk, computer blinking in front of him, his tie askew, his trousers not quite straightened.
His colleague just got an American visa and is scrambling to leave Nigeria immediately because he’s afraid.
America is now banning travelers from China, and next thing you know they’ll be banning travelers from everywhere else.
I can tell this colleague’s leaving has left Jide depressed.
“I shouldn’t be here in this town, there’s nothing for me here,” he says.
“What if you try America? Try for a visa,” I say.
“America that you hated.”
“Yes, but I’m in the minority. You might not hate it.”
“It’s the UK I sometimes see myself in.
The American scene is too racist.
Nnaemeka said he doesn’t use a profile picture and doesn’t select an ethnicity on dating apps, just his interests, and he gets all these people contacting him and they get into really animated chats and they ask him for his picture and as soon as he sends it, they block him.
He said it has happened to him six times, six times, and he’s not even fat like me.
He’s always in the gym.”
I feel the irritation of having a conversation I have had many times, each time as static and unmoving as the last. Jide thinks of his hopes as thwarted even before he hopes.
“You never know,”
I say, and I try not to sound as if I am thinking that he doesn’t try and doesn’t follow through, even though I am thinking exactly that. It hurt the last time when he said, “We are not all fearless like the great ,”
although I didn’t tell him I was hurt. He did try once to leave, when he sent his CV to the graphic design agency in Lagos that was his dream job. He got a nice no. On a whim I asked him to shorten his first name and use his middle name as his last, and so he went from “Jideofor Thomas Okeke”
to “Jide Thomas”—from an obvious Igbo name to a Yoruba-sounding name. He applied again and was shocked to be offered the job.
“How can I work there knowing they don’t want Igbo people?”
“Jide, this is your dream job.”
I wanted him to go because if he moved to Lagos he would oil his wings and free himself, and he could find another job, or find that not everyone at the agency was like the person who did their hiring.
“I can’t,”
he said, and so he didn’t.
The incident with the gateman at his new flat filled me with fury, and I hoped it would finally push him to act, but it didn’t.
His old flat in Gwarinpa had no running water and the gate was too narrow for a water tanker to come through, so he always paid those Hausa water boys to bring him water in plastic containers, many trips made until his drums were filled.
Then he found the new flat, just perfect for him, airy and clean, with a borehole in the compound and enough space inside to park cars.
The gateman seemed harmless enough, until one day he knocked on Jide’s door and said, “I saw that man last weekend.
He is not your brother and he slept in your bed.”
Jide said it took a moment before the words formed in his mind as the threat they were intended to be.
He went inside and came out with some money, and after he wordlessly gave it to the gateman, the gateman said, “Oga, this is small,”
and so Jide asked for his account number and the gateman waited with his arms folded for the transfer to be done, as though for payment due to him for his honest labor.
I knew, listening to Jide, that my photograph with the president would finally come to good use.
CEO took me to a luncheon with the president and a member of the European Parliament; it was easier to see the president when he traveled abroad.
An elegant old dining room in a hotel in Brussels with tables covered in white cloth.
The president fumbled about, looking in his pockets for something he did not seem to find.
He considered the salad of mesclun and cheese and first picked up a spoon and then a fork.
At some point he put his cutlery down and, with his thin fingers, massaged his slightly swollen wrists.
“They said it’s arthritis,”
he said to the MEP seated next to him, extending his arm as if the European might give him some superior insight into the condition of his wrists.
Throughout the meal, he leaned often toward the MEP in a manner that embarrassed me, an ancient, unconscious deference.
His demeanor made me think of the men of his generation as eager boys in colonial schools with exacting English headmasters who they revered.
“Nigeria is extremely corrupt,”
the president said, and the MEP nodded quickly, trying to hide how startled he was.
The president sipped some water and left a smear of chewed food on the rim of his glass.
How was it that I came from a country ruled by this thoroughly unremarkable man? To be up close with him was to feel contempt growing like a bulb and bursting free.
Later, as we took pictures, CEO eager and excited, I smelled the president’s cologne, a scent from another time, a long-ago world.
“Tell the PR people to make sure the pictures circulate,” CEO said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
I was vaguely embarrassed by the photograph with the president.
But with Jide’s gateman, it was the perfect weapon.
I drove to Jide’s and stopped at the gate and gestured to the gateman to come.
He stood at my window and said Mr.
Jideofor was not in and I said I know he’s not in, you are the one I’m looking for.
I showed him the photo in my phone, of me standing next to the president, and his mouth went slack with awe.
“I have the president’s number in this phone,”
I said, tapping the phone screen for dramatic appeal.
“I have his number right here.
Jideofor is my brother.
If he has a problem with anybody, I also have a problem with that person.
If you ever try that nonsense with him again, you and your whole family will go missing.
Do you understand me?”
I hoped the gateman could not see my uncertainty in this act, this flourishing flamboyant melodrama that is Nigerian life.
He was waving both hands in the air, and saying sorry, sorry, then in keeping true to the script he sank to his knees still saying sorry, sorry, it will never happen again.
—
“I predict countries will start closing their borders,”
Jide says.
“We don’t want your prediction,” I say.
I look out of the window at my tranquil dust-lit front yard.
Paul walks across carrying a bucket of water from the tap in the back and disappears under the carport to wash the cars.
He is taking Atasi this afternoon to her parents’ place; Atasi often jokes that I share custody with her parents.
Her mother wants her to spend more of her time with me, but I wonder if Atasi might be more resilient if she had been with her parents more.
A horn sounds at the gate and Mohammed opens to let in a black SUV with dark tinted windows.
Atasi’s friend Chiso leaps out, wearing an aggressive pair of shorts, a slice of her lower bottom exposed like a dare.
She will spend some time here until Atasi is about to go to her parents’ place and Chiso will leave.
Atasi’s other life, with her parents, is like a private but not secret club, closed off to her boarding-school friends.
I go to the parlor downstairs and find them sitting side by side on a sofa, their faces bent to their phones, AirPods stuck in their ears.
Chiso pulls off one AirPod and nudges Atasi.
“She called him her boyfriend and he didn’t say anything, so I guess they’re in a relationship now.”
There’s a lurch in my chest, but I pretend I haven’t heard. Is this how relationships begin now for them, with girls scheming and then assuming? It is supposed to be better for their generation; the daughters should be better off than the mothers.
“Good morning, Aunty ,”
Chiso says when she sees me.
Atasi looks up at me and I smile and she looks back unsmiling at her screen.
I feel an inevitable distance between us that I do not want to dwell on, because to do so would be to consider that it might never be bridged.
Maybe I shouldn’t have sent her to boarding school.
But it was what her parents wanted, and I imagine them saying with pride to their relatives, “She is in private boarding school.”
Lately Atasi has been skipping more meals, asking Philippe to make her bone broth, her arms thin as a bird’s legs.
I keep watching for sadness in her and I keep finding it, a submerged sadness, its full contours unknown even to her.
She is obsessed with modeling, that sea of glimmering sadness, a profession in which joylessness is prized.
How edited the pleasures seem, with nothing sensual or real.
Every time she shows me yet another photo of models on a runway, I think of how little they must eat.
Those bony square-shouldered sylphs, clavicles jutting out like knuckles, and always morose, blandly morose, the same kind of morose for all of them, because even personality has become unfashionable.
“Get the fat from her belly and that’s an automatic tummy tuck,”
Atasi says, and Chiso replies, “And thighs too, they need to put more fat in because you know some of the fat cells die after a while.”
They are talking about the Brazilian butt surgery deaths in Lagos.
They do not question the longing for big buttocks that makes you agree to go under anesthesia in a darkish room with peeling paint.
They know irony and hyperbole and sass, but self-love is strange to them.
I think of myself at sixteen.
It was a slower-paced time and our troubles were different, of course, but we weren’t so willing to believe the worst of ourselves.
If our daughters do not know how beautiful they are, just as they are, then surely we have failed.
—
I call Chia just to call Chia, and she says, “Today is not a good day for you, I can tell.”
I say I’m worried about Atasi and I feel I have failed at giving her something she needs. It is easy to be sad; sadness is a low-hanging fruit. Hope and happiness you have to reach higher for and I didn’t teach her how.
“She doesn’t eat, she’s just bone wrapped in skin,” I say.
“Do you think she’s angry?”
Chia asks, and it sounds to me like a uniquely American question. Even her tone is American and she says “angry”
like an American, the first syllable twisted and bent.
“Angry?”
I repeat, even though I understand.
“About you. Being her benefactor, her family’s benefactor.”
In the midst of my worry a sapling of annoyance has sprung, as it often does when something happens to push America back in my face.
This is the reason girls like her are sad.
America tells them this kind of nonsense.
Be angry with the person helping you and your family, be angry with the person who pays your school fees and your parents’ rent.
“Chia, I don’t have energy for this Americanism now.”
“Okay, it’s an Americanism, but do you think she’s angry?”
I feel deflated and exhausted. “She probably is,” I say.
—
Atasi was not an easy child to love.
I knew from that first day when fate pushed her to the point in the road that I was driving toward.
I wasn’t driving fast so much as I was driving distracted.
It was in the beginning, when we were so new to Abuja, and Abuja so foreign to us.
Jide was sunk in the front seat reading up on pap smears online.
We were on a road whose name I did not yet know, a wide scarred stretch of road, with people darting between cars and a medley of every imaginable shop, vegetables and secondhand clothes, car tires and bread.
I was going to the clinic to repeat my smear test.
The doctor had called and said my result was irregular, and it could mean nothing but she wanted to be sure.
I was in my first Abuja home, a tiny self-contained flat in Wuse, and I held the phone pressed close and silent as she spoke, thinking: She didn’t finish the sentence, which was that my result could be nothing or it could be cancer.
At my first checkup, she had seen my surname and asked if my father was the great professor and afterwards took her time attending to me, pressing down on my belly more firmly than I liked.
She told me to be careful in Abuja, that everyone was on tramadol or Benylin with codeine.
“Everybody in this city is on something. The poorest of the poor are sniffing pit latrines to get high,”
she said, and I wondered why she thought I needed that warning, or if it was something she told anyone new to the city.
It could be nothing or it could be cancer and so I was distracted as I drove.
My very first car, the hatchback with bad shock pads, bought so shortly after I started working that of course there was whispering about a man buying it for me.
Usually I drove with care, wary of those unwise Abuja intersections where nobody gave way, everyone tearing in at the same time.
Usually I was alert to people standing by the sides of the road, especially on roads like this where the press of people was so close to the cars.
Jide said something before I hit the little girl.
I didn’t hear what he said but I heard the panic in his tone, and it was his tone that unconsciously moved my foot to the brake.
The little girl, a swish of movement, a red scarf on her head. Jide shouted, “Jesus! Jesus!”
I stopped and was already flying out of the car and Jide was trying to pull me back, to keep me in the car. The little girl lay on her side. She was still and unmoving like a doll made of wood. There were voices, people, horns, and dust.
—
Life can change because of what could have happened.
The little girl did not die.
She stared at me with an expressionless round face and I feared something had happened in her brain.
Then she stared down at the blood from her thigh that had stained her dress a darkish shade of red.
Her mother was sitting under a small umbrella selling sun-faded packets of biscuits and sweets and didn’t realize her daughter was hurt until somebody shouted for her.
As I drove frantically to the hospital, her mother sat in the back crying, saying, “I tell her don’t play near the road, don’t play near the road.”
She made to hold the child but the child pushed her away. The child sat by herself, unheld and uncomforted. She was so young. I thought: Why was she allowed anywhere near the road?
Her name was Atasi.
She spoke Hausa but they were Gbagyi, the indigenous people of Abuja, the owners of the land which the government took and went off to build a capital.
Her father was a cleaner in a ministry and her mother called him on her cell phone, speaking urgently in their language, and repeating the hospital’s name.
I had never been in a hospital children’s ward and the dank sadness of this one startled me.
Children on narrow beds crying or blank from medication, children in pain, and tired mothers stretched out on mats next to their beds.
A greasy enamel plate was next to one of the women lying on a mat.
The nurses lounged about as if nothing was urgent.
Atasi was put on a bed without a bedsheet.
I scanned the nurses and decided on one with thinly penciled eyebrows, and I called her aside.
I slipped her some money and asked where the closest ATM was, and in this way I bought Atasi an advocate.
The teenage boy next to Atasi had a broken leg, which was not yet in a cast.
The nurse told me, “Do you know this boy’s mother brings food here and then she sits on his bed and eats all the food herself.”
“Why?”
“To teach him a lesson. He broke his leg when he went to steal cement at a building site.”
“So what does he eat?”
“Our hospital food,”
she said. “Even us, we don’t eat it.”
I saw the boy’s mother later in the day, and when she said her son’s name, Olisa, I spoke Igbo to her. “Oh, my sister, good evening,”
she said. She sat down and began to eat a piece of agidi which she had unrolled from its wrapping of leaves. She said only, “Olisa, did the doctor come?”
to her son and then nothing else. She looked at me and at Atasi and at Atasi’s mother, who was sitting at the top end of the bed near Atasi’s head.
“People like you don’t come to this kind of hospital,”
she said to me in Igbo.
“We had an accident. This was the nearest one.”
“I saw your husband talking to the nurse,” she said.
“He’s my friend,” I said.
She gave me a sidelong glance. “Your mates are marrying and you are still doing ‘friend.’?”
She amused me. I asked if she thought her son wasn’t hungry, and she said he didn’t need food; what he needed was a big slap to reset him. She had spent so much on transport to come here, she said, after a day of running up and down, trying to get the papers she needed so that the task-force people wouldn’t demolish her shop again.
“What of Papa Olisa?” I asked.
“Oh, that jobless one ran back to the village a long time ago because he could not cope. I am the person raising the children.”
She suddenly looked at me, eyes narrowed with a measure of calculation.
Where did I work? Could I help with the problem of her renewing the papers for her provisions shop? Just then, Jide came to say we could leave now that Atasi was stable, and had I called the woman at my clinic? I hadn’t.
I told Jide I wanted to stay. I looked at Atasi, thinking: What if this child had died?
Atasi stared and said nothing, a brooding lonesome child.
When I tried to hug her, she shrank back, her face still expressionless.
Later, Jide said he tried to keep me in the car because he heard that crowds in the rough parts of Abuja would gather and beat the driver after an accident, so the best thing was to drive to the nearest police station.
I don’t know where he heard this tale, but we were so new to Abuja and Abuja so foreign to us.
—
With Atasi gone the house is shrilly quiet.
I know newspapers lie but I am astounded to read about Kadiatou’s life in details invented from pure air.
She was part of a hotel workers prostitution ring, a brothel madam, trafficked as a child, also traffics children, she planned to steal his phone, she stole his phone, she was paid by the French government, she sent him a message asking for ten million dollars, and above all else it was a setup.
She’s working with his political enemies and was paid to set him up.
Chia texts to ask for another unnecessary group call to put our heads together.
“Her lawyer wants her to do a television interview, to tell her own side of the story. He thinks it’s the only way to counter the press stories,”
Chia says.
“Before the trial? Isn’t that unusual?” I ask.
“She has nothing to lose,”
Zikora says.
“I talked to Junius and his view is that an interview will let people see her as a human being and maybe force the media to cover the case more fairly.
Right now almost all the coverage makes it look like it’s The People vs. Kadiatou, instead of The People vs. this Very Important Frenchman.”
“Apparently, so are the prosecutors,”
Chia says. “You know Kadi is not talking much. But she said something yesterday about the prosecutors. She said, ‘They are questioning me as if I am the one that did something bad.’?”
“Zikora, will it be in English?” I ask.
“What?”
“Will the interview be in English?”
“I would imagine so,”
Zikora says, with the pained patience of having to deal with a stupid question.
“Can’t she have a Pular interpreter?” I ask.
“Kadi speaks English,”
Zikora says.
“It will be easy to disbelieve her if she’s not speaking the language she knows best,” I say.
“Kadi speaks English,”
Zikora repeats.
I don’t know if it’s merely to disagree with me or if she has that American trait of lying about people who are not privileged in life.
Kadiatou’s English is not very good and pretending that it is won’t be of use to her.
In the recovery weeks I spent with Chia, after America had battered me, Kadiatou’s Africanness felt like a balm, the way she hunched over her plate when she ate, the way she said, “Miss , I’m going,”
and still stood there, in that radiant pause of mutuality that said I have given you the courtesy and you have acknowledged it.
“When will the interview be?” I ask.
“They’re still talking to the networks,”
Zikora says.