Source: Adobe Stock

(Written way back when I still wrote in British English 😂)

I must warn, this is a fairytale, a Happily-Ever-After story of very inconsequential circumstances; the story of a dowry. I do not quite plan to tell this story- I am not a teller of tales, but its keeper, only storing away memorable handfuls of events on cloudy shelves like mint sauce on white marbles. Who am I?

I am a spirit memory sprawled out on the wet shore of my own blood-sea, locked away in the tar-tomb of boundaries.

I am a cattle egret, bearing a jutting beak, squinty eyes, migrating over milestones, in the confidence of a whited fellowship, invading the beautiful blue and piercing the relative resplendence of silent hums with throaty rick-racks.

I am a canvas, a tabula rasa that snaps out of surrealism into reality, gathering clays of colour around me with the precision of a pendulum.

I am an apparition, glancing through a family album, the one heralded by a large-sized picture, the only 6 by 8 in black and white, where all family members dressed in their very bests, are smiling into the pinhole camera. I know the first face I would see in the next picture, I know the first family member that would die, leaving the paper size to shrink by minus one. I know the next baby that would be born and celebrated in oversized frocks. Yet like the keeper of tales that I am, I open the pages of the album with curiosity, moving meditatively from colourless to colourful, paying close attention to detailed nothingnesses, letting the story tell itself by itself.

1

There is the unemployed happy elfed concierge who lurks around one of those permissive hotels in Asokoro, Abuja, paying obeisance of Yes Sahs and Oga Welcome to mid-millionaire potbellied government officials in Toyota Corollas who can’t afford the grandeur of Transcorp Hilton or Sheraton, but can, without intimidation, walk the tiled terraces of one star hotels bearing slack shorts, glass cups, and t-shirts that do nothing to cover their protuberances. They are always pregnant with errands he alone can run, errands too inexplicable to send via intercom, like say,  he alone can bear their chatty grunts of self-importance, 

Hey there, what is that your name again?…Ok, Omar… you know that girl at the kiosk there, the one selling ehm…Ah yes, kunu, you are right…No, it’s not that one with the long hijab, the other one near her, her friend that wears jallabiya…Yes, that one. Call her for me; tell her it’s her Alhaji customer…

And wait, buy me cigarette, and eh…condom too, good one oo…No, No, keep the change, keep the change…

They like him. He is very courteous. No one respects their old money like he does; the whole ritual of rewarding their ‘over generosity’ fascinates them, how he raises his hands to the air, throws fists, and stamps feet on the floor, feet clothed in rubber slippers, how he salutes them with the infatuation of a sergeant.

How does an ignoramus like him know they are military retirees, forced out of service?

None of these men stuck around for too long or else, they would have come to know that their good man began to hate himself for being their lackey, reverencing their depravity, caressing their egos. He began to hate being a minion tailing every most despicable person to fill his time. And to get Banana.

Much later, he begins to hate his life.

But this will only happen after he strolls one warm evening to a nearby canteen, his favourite, to buy Tuwo Shinkafa. The lady that waits on him is new and he is immediately entranced by her busty binary, bustling beatitude, bubbling blackness. Her v-edged vocal strength reveals smatterings of ‘true’ English words, verbose combinations he could not manage to construe, so that Tuwo gets stuck in his throat when she speaks through dark coloured full lips.

He will later discover that she had not gone to any school to ‘know’ English, but had saved up the tips she got from hawking and bought all the English Queen Premier there is. Her favourite uncle, he works at Borno, buys her good books too, books that she pronominalizes with He and She, and carries about in her leather satchel, like badges on a military uniform.

By this time, she is entering in and out his one roomed cove, spreading legs on its rugged floor as if relieving her childhood dream of a playground, cooking his meals with hennaed hands and roaming her buttocks the flip-flop way like some form of rotating rotunda. He will notice all these and also notice that the pit of his manhood roils with mad enthusiasm, spurting undercurrents of naked imaginations with the intensity of a violent volcano. He tries to still his stunned stamen by pinching her sultry skin till she echoes with gleaming eyes.

She notices his struggle too, and begins to stiffen every silence with tawdry tools- Laughter, the laughter of a waddling wind caught up in the thicket of Desire; Babbles, lame stories from her favourite books. He can’t deny she is a good storyteller, spindling ancient lovetales into a tight tapestry of aesthetics that bridges time, people and places.

 If only she would stop weaving them with tidbits of their own asymmetric affair.

They are playing Ludo in the confines of his shadowy room when she becomes a griot again.

‘They tell am for you the origin of the world?’

She does not wait for an answer.

‘People dem talk about am in many ways, but as I see am so, everything na about moving,

Like the Yanmiri, dem Yoruba people say na their Olodumare send one small deity, Oduduwa and him friends dem, to one place wey dey call Ife. Na water full that side oo, but with magick from hen, everywhere become land. Oduduwa then born many chudren, savin of dem, wey move to everywhere the Yoruba people dey stay now, even Benin.’

She pauses only to catch her breath,

‘As for the Igbo people, you know that book wey I dey read yesterday, Him tell me say na their God too, send one person from heaven, Eri, who move small small from one far country till he get to Anambra. He marry two woman and they give birth to chudren too. But him also tell me say na for far away Israel for Bible dem come. I go believe this one pass because the Ibo people dey get skin wey yellow like Mammy Water. Our own forefather, Bayajidda too, move from Baghdad because he dey fight with him papa about horse wey get gold for head. Na for the back of this horse he take escape to Kanem, where the Emir give am him daughter to marry…’

Much of what she says is lost in between watching her lips melt against each other as she talks and roping her long hijab around his fingers. But when she starts asking question, gritting her teeth in complaint, he sits up and listens.

‘What of the woman wey born the chudren, nobody talk about them. How much dowry this men pay to buy their woman, dey no talk am; if the woman like their husband or like as them dey move about, dey no talk am. Na because of this, our men no get respect for their woman, abi?

He mutters a yes and communicates his impatience alongside it. Like a woman with a hole in the heart, who wants to get rid of the pain at any cost, she blurts out, ‘my papa wan marry me to one of his Imam Friends wey dey for Kano because him friend get plenty dollars to give my papa as Dowry for my head. When I enter eighteen, I go go that side to be the Imam wife. Number four. As you know, today na my seventeen birthday.’

This is when he begins to hate his life.

2

Omar shrugged off the question again with a stone stare, wondering why the IOM Man in blue t-shirt would not let him just air in benevolent breath. The man, unrelenting, moved closer to the edge of the hospital bed, smiling the well-practiced clownish smile that he had been trained to showcase.

‘Look, there’s no way we can help you get home, if you refuse to tell us anything’

He touched Omar’s hands lovingly. Like a father would, a son. This became his mistake. Omar yanked off his hand and turned to the other side, the wall, hurting his bad leg in the process. He blinked incessantly; trying to force back the memories conjured in his mind’s eyes. 

He could remember everything alright, but did he have to babble like an exorcised witch?

Yet without meaning to, he looked too deep at the shadows on the wall till he began to form faces, pull unseen puppetry strings and give voices to silhouettes. These silhouettes chose to reenact the conversation he had with the dreadlocked guest at the hotel who flaunted unkempt beards with style and chewed gum in a way that excited attention. Omar did not know what to make of this man, suspect of taking unwarranted interest in him, except that he talked like a rapper and seemed to know a lot,

RAPPER: Hello there, been seeing you around alot, you got notin better to do?

OMAR: No work

RAPPER: Then look for one. Anytin better than slaving for people who cint say thanks. You married?

OMAR: No. No money for dowry.

RAPPER: Oh I see, you one of those men whose gal’s dad will only sell her to the highest bidder. In this rotten economy, everybody is trying to suck money from anybody.  You know, even the cheapest prostitutes at Garki have increased pay. Them ugly gals wantin big money. Back in the States, tins are much easier. No one wanting dowry and money easy to come by.

OMAR: You go abroad before?

RAPPER:  Yea, I gat my businesses there. Cin help you get there if you want. There, you will find all the money you need to marry your woman and get outta this helluva sorry condition.

OMAR: Visa wahala too much

RAPPER:  There are pleny ways to get to Amewiker without visa. Just a few bucks and that’s all. It won’t be a floating spaceship with air con, but it sure will be a jolly ride down them breezy road.

OMAR: Dollar in Amerika?

RAPPER: Yea. Pleny, pleny a’ them in Amewiker.

Omar doles out “Just a few bucks”- his savings, earnings from the sales of his meager properties and money borrowed from well to do friends to the rapper, so that in the wake of several days, he is shoved, alongside his small world of a bag, into the metallic embrace of a tiring truck membrane. On the truck, there is the graffiti of a wounded snake with a man standing over it, smiling, raising celestial hands in a triumphant gait. A giant inscription in red, edges close to it:

THE GOD OF PEACE SHALL BRUISE SATAN UNDER YOUR FEET

As he crawls deeper into an abyss of angst, he finds a discussion going on amongst excited faces, he waves off their chattering and shuts his eyes with antipathy, just as he shuts out many other things- slimy sweats and eely skins; a galloping truck and a griming pilot; the smoky silencer that has death hovering in its dark chimney clouds and the clang-clang of metals, a result of loose nuts and unknotted bolts; houseflies hazing the sun and crickets chirping away at the moon; the communal camaraderie of sandwiched women and the shrill shrieks of children hating the sour fruits too many times, screaming for a quick halt because they want to wee and poo. The sorry stories of men fly around like the birds above them, stories of love gone sore, bosses that must know they don’t hold the key to prosperity…

For him, all these blend and blur into a deep unseeing stare. His non-seeing eyes feels already the smooth surface of a good forever- whiffs of winter exuding through his mouth, fine dark hands tugged in black overcoats and haloed necks holding tightly to a red muffler curling loosely around it.

Perhaps due to the rigour of the journey, sparse water, stale staples. He now begins, not just to see, but also to pick conversations with non-seeing eyes. With a demented kind of excitement, they are talking about the graffiti. Someone is trying to make a sermon out of it, preaching Romans 16:20 with the vehemence of a confused missionary. He is shushed and called “hypocrite” (they all are going to be called illegal immigrants if they succeed). Another spins the graffiti into a story he heard from somewhere. 

He is a good griot. Like her. He talks of Bayajidda too. ‘That man must be Bayajidda,’ he says. ‘This Bayajidda is the beginning of all Hausas, a snake-slayer who kills a malign snake in a public well to marry the Queen of Daura, Magajiya and possess her slave maid, Bagwariya, from whose loins the main pillars of the Hausa dynasty emerged.’

‘Before this,’ the griot adds, gathering attentive ears as he rolls rich Hausa words into kneaded balls, ‘Bayajidda had married Magira given to him by the Mai of Kanem, with whom he fathered a son, Biram. He leaves her, however, because of troubles with the father and flees. On horseback. She is not important.’

The silence that follows confirms the close-ended seal that comes with legends of any kind.

Did he ever go back to her? A voice questions, the words carried round by the wind.

The griot guffaws, ‘who is he that finds a goldmine and goes back to tell the story to people?’

Everyone laughs.

The man with non-seeing eyes remembers his own storyteller. The one he is doing this for. She must be living her life the usual way just like they had planned. He is the one to go far away, scour greener grounds for one year, and come back to pay the dowry to her father. 

He had gone to this father to beg like a mourning widow for the hand of his daughter. But like a poet with dementia, this father kept repeating some retarded line, ‘When she is ripe, Imam Shekau will come with plenty dollars and take her ‘home’.’

This line was bad enough, without considering the overfed belly of the poet. The poet however ended his verse on a seemingly reconcilable note ‘Can you give me the kind plenty dollars Imam Shekau will give me?’ He answered his own question by laughing, holding his calabash-belly with two hands to steady himself.

This, Omar knew, was the father’s way of rejecting his proposal. It was typical for rejection to come by means of setting an almost impossible standard for the suitor. Omar remembered how he had laughed at Ahmed, his cobbler-friend, whose supposed Father- in-law had asked to see his Dongoyaro before a marriage could take place. The irked Ahmed couldn’t but assume this in-law was very gay, so he asked the man if he wanted a piece of the action. Of course, this went down well with nobody and apart from the myriads of insults rained upon him; his shocked fiancée was willed to some man whose money spoke more volume than his virility. Ahmed had accepted this outcome with a shrug but Omar knew he couldn’t.

He did not know how to not be with her.

He really didn’t know why: couldn’t say it was for Love’s sake or that Cupid had struck him hard because Cupid and Love were very elusive concepts to him. He did not even know that roses and butterflies and presents wrapped in fancies were signs of good love. All he knew was there was a burning warmth in him that stayed only when she stayed, a little something in her eyes he wanted to keep alive, a nudging connection between them that made letting her go a no option.

Besides, who will she tell her stories to? Who will listen to them without thinking her a lewd mad woman?

So, he tells her about the rapper. She tries to dissuade him, tries to make him see the sheer inanity of the mere thought, but he is too angry at everybody- his indifferent farmer-parent that birthed him merely to ensure free labour at the farm, his Epicurean self that cared only for his next meal, greedy fathers that want the whole world as dowry so they can grow fatter, marry more wives and birth more children to be sold. He is too angry at everybody to see anything or even care. All he asks from her is her blessing and a vow of fidelity. 

She nods. 

Silence rubs into their black skins, making it glow voluptuously. They are left bare to be looked upon by the naked socket of Desire.

She has no stories to choke this silence; she is too dry and parched to even remember any. Thus, as if pleading penance before offence, she waits till after Maghrib before slowly peeling off fabrics- orange peels falling off spirally from the cutter’s grip, who is carefully trying to stay uncut. He can’t bear the extravagance of their well-meaning shenanigan; he leaps on her- a weather-beaten kangaroo stealing from its own pouch.

There is nothing superfluous about their love-making, just kisses, scratching, catty cries, and the melting of butter skins into oily passion where their essence becomes mingled. The need to make the most of every nearness while it lasts makes entering more painful, but quicker and the tiny wisp of blood that escapes through parted thighs is not even given any consideration. With the nearness unobstructed, he retells every ancient story she had ever told him, making sure to recount it his own way. 

He becomes Ali Baba claiming Marjenah for himself, rubbing himself into her, sapping her wisdom, and collecting her moans into oil jars.

He is Sinbad the sailor, loving ‘the slave girl, like the Shining Moon’, escaping with her into a crescent moon, on chariots of ecstasy, failing to preserve Harun-Al-Rashid’s gift.

She is Scheherazade, he, Shahryar, so that after 1000 nights of listening, he is telling her a tale, for the first time, using his groins.

She is Penelope-she is going to wait.

He is Bayajidda- he is going to come back for her. On horseback. He is going to meet her a virgin, his’, for the second time.

He is….aroused from sleep. There is a jerk; unsteady growing gallops finding resonance in the moonlit midnight. Before long, the pitter-patter of chatty raindrops tears the heavens, raindrops prating loudly about bold showers who subdued earthy deserts. Reality blinks and with his seeing eyes, he spots silent sirens stalking their stallion wheels with solemn screams at their strolling truck to stop. The truck picks pace and feigns faulty ears, strutting like a bedeviled bull. 

The siren car, like a mad matador, blares its horn and follows.

Amidst the deafening downpours and raving race, a woman with a son tied to her back, tries in vain to prevent the shivers running through her dripping wet clothes and clattering teeth from unsteadying her feet.

Another jerk and she is sent high from the cleavage of the truck unto the wet hardness of the unexplored road, leaving the boy’s brain splattered and the woman convulsing in a fit of forced epilepsy.

Everyone screams, but Omar screams most, even ordering the driver to stop. The stocky driver steps on the accelerator with a shrug and speeds on, losing the siren car in the process. He looks somewhat baffled at their awe, wondering how long it would take these fellas to realise they were koel birds fighting, even killing for a rightful place in a stranger’s nest.

3

The IOM Man in blue t-shirt, he does not agree.

It was through the deluded muffles of Omar, through his endless gabbling to no one in particular, that he came to know that Omar had only known of America and the European glamour, he did not know of recuperating post-Gaddafi Libya or the proliferated militia men who spotted illegal migrants at one glance and coerced them into doing miscellaneous tasks in farms and shops, for no pay, working them till their backs cried pain and their lips quaked with want of food. He did not know how much pain five years of slaving and wishing could bring or how escaping could be so difficult that a bullet had to rest in the thigh’s bosom till the roadside is made a graveyard. He did not know of good policemen with owls’ eyes. Or of the International Organisation for Migration and its helpmates, that amongst other things, made sure to make light the regrets of many forlorn migrants and take out bullets from suffering legs till the only scar left is a trotting limp and a twitching once-in-a-while pain. He did not know of detention centers, his expressions of fear mirrored in the eyes of many others or the promise of home.

The IOM Man, he made sure to not just let him know of these things but to make him see that he, Mr. Omar Umaru, had, like many others, gone through these vicissitudes, experiences which have left his face creased with unrippled wells of hardness. 

He is reminding him of the promise of home, telling him how close it is, he is going to be ridden into home on a plane, when Omar says he only wanted to prove his woman’s father wrong. 

This is what the IOM Man does not agree with. He perceives an overtone of wanting to enact the American dream, wanting fame, power, prosperity, fulfillment. But he does not voice his disagreement, he only nods, pretending understanding, knitting his brows in an I-know-how-you-feel way, for, from years of mingling with these hoping-against-hope people, who either got intercepted at sea, or were found lapping the river of misery, he, the IOM Man that is, has discovered one truth: the gap between living a story and telling it is very wide, too wide to find the perfect spot to place a balance. Somewhere between watching the ceiling and walls, the IOM Man mumbles to himself,

‘Really, they should make more sentimental Dicos where migration would mean more than just moving from place to place, where the blood and agony of searching for home would be well represented.’

He looks down to find a sleeping Omar. He is relieved, he can go home now. 

A closer look and he would have known Omar wasn’t sleeping but dreaming. Dreaming of Food. Fireflies. Freedom. Fatima.

4

Fatima dreams too. Of Omar, of his grand coming back with more than enough dollars to pay off her old man. He is going to buy them a house in Central District, Abuja, right near the US Embassy, and then they will get married in an elaborate Hausa fashion. She dreams of how to love their son, Ibrahim, more, the semen that had erupted from the crevice of her portal into a shriveling, dry fleshed bundle, one that emits spasms of Spartan cough and can only boast of a beriberi frame and bulgy eyes that has butter coloured yellow where white should have been.

 The other day, she had taken him to the Primary Health Centre because he could hardly breathe and his joints were as stiff as log. Only his eyes moved with the alacrity of a failing bulb. She had been transferred to General Hospital where bags of blood, like sachets of pure water, were passed into him; they also sucked his own blood with their needles. Much later, a female doctor in white hijab tempered by white overalls called her by the name she had written, Fatima Umaru.

Just three words and the doctor gave her too much to think about,

He is SS.

Fatima couldn’t help but smile, painfully. This Oyinbo language never ceases to amaze her, how well they manage to abbreviate everything, even matters of life and death, how neatly her boy’s wrecking pain and the fierce fluttering between her own breasts are compacted into just three words. 

She dreams of other things too; of hating her father and family, whom she holds responsible for Ibrahim’s ripping joint pains and deathly eyes. Hadn’t her father cursed her while he flung her things out of his house, for bringing shame to the family, more like, for making him lose favour with Imam Shekau, his greatest benefactor? Hadn’t the entire family asked maggots to feast on her vagina, because, she, a Hausa Muslim girl, from a decent family, had spread her legs open for a headless fish to swim into her waters and plant a headless seed in it? Even Imam Shekau had done better, only using her as a lesson at his own mosque, warning all young girls to desist from fornication if they hope to get to Jannah, pointing out she was lucky not to have been subjected to a Sharia discipline.

She dreams of rewarding her kind uncle, who is accommodating them in his shack at Mainok, Borno, with fat chunks of dollars.

She dreams of colourful hijabs and her once present ebony skin.

It is 2014, a long time from 2011, when he left. But she is still dreaming. Waiting. She is not deterred. One day, he will come back and she will weave her dreams into stories, for him. In the meantime, she writes her dream on a worn out paper and calls it poetry:

Al of dem past are storys.

Storys of bad naits and good monins,

But des storys, like many lorys,

Have move on. I don’t worry,

Becoz I wil hav dem niw storys.

5

As bad as he wants to, Omar does not cry, not even when he is handed a walking stick that would be his support for life, not when hygiene kits and other burdens are presented as parting gifts by the IOM. Not when the plane pillows on the air like a loaf of bread floating on water, not when the plane touches the runway of Murtala Airport and they are ushered like kindergartens going on a tour. Not even when embraces are dished out like Christmas cards and his own kinsman is embroidering him with a pathetic hug. It is when his questions about Fatima and her whereabouts are met with a quizzical look, this is when he cries.

 Like a baby denied breast milk, he unleashes a fountain of tears, sending streams of mucus down his leaking nostrils, grooming choking gasps that shut the gateway to his heart till he feels his emaciated mass wishing 2016, wishing forever goodbye, wanting Death.

Meanwhile, somewhere amidst dense forests stretching into eternity, there is a boy coursing the untarred dust in the back of a hiccupping truck, clogged next to many other black parched skins staring into the souls of their future with hollowed-out eyes. His butter brown eyes dance dreamily, following the rhythm of a flock of cattle egrets hovering in the sky, migrating towards the South.

 He is mumbling, telling them something; something about how he can’t get out of his head, the horrid scene of watching his mother sprawling in the desert sea of her own blood, responding conveniently to the outburst of riotous gunshots that graced a small Mainok market, where she sold Tuwo to motorcyclists, on a sunny 2014 day. He mentions something about the rasping pain gathering at his chest, his cramped legs, and how he doesn’t have a good feeling about being taken to yet another camp, full of white tents and expansive rowdiness, a place where his name, Ibrahim, or Biram, as he was fondly called by his mother, will be forgotten, where he will be simply known as an IDP. He notices one of these birds with distinctive grey plumes and it is this one he chooses to be the courier to deliver his SOS to the only one person who can save him from dying of hunger and many horribles, to his Bayajidda, his father, who is on one of the many other sides where the sky is bluer and the grass, greener.

6

…I am this cattle egret…this story that tells itself by itself…