This is going to be a bland essay. Not because i intend to try any of those absurdist shit that makes the mind zone out regardless of how we try to stay in focus and play pretense mindfulness. It’s because i can’t think of an inventive way to beatify the events that i intend to journal within this block of texts. There are one too many essays written with a disruptively fine craft from start to finish such that it is almost impossible to not give up on trying to stand out altogether. i might as well get this on with however way I can bear to especially considering the fact the sole purpose of this body of writing is to faithfully recount events that have gone on in my life in the past two weeks. And while it might not appear to you as such, i genuinely believe these events to be exciting, adventuresome, interesting; i believe that my life over the past two weeks has been interesting. i believe my life is interesting. This is a new hypothesis for me: (that) my life is interesting and apart from the mind-churning exercises i have been doing lately to process this possibility, this right here, this essay is another way to prove the accuracy of my hypothesis. (that) my life is interesting, i want to make this hypothesis theory, i want to make theory fact, and fact truth.
1
i cannot be bothered to remember the date of these two weeks in my life i am detailing but, by way of memory association, i do know it started at a train station. Tuscaloosa’s. The one simply called Amtrak. It is deep afternoon and i have launched myself there (this train station) like a “i am on my way” message sent via email – hurried, worried about the possibility of being late yet having an undeniable knowing that you are not going to be late or the other party is def. not going to be early.
In my case, it’s the latter. Amtrak (the train) is never early. It’s either on time or late. Still, with my kinka bagpack strapped to my shoulders and my Rum tote bag dangling somewhere around my body, i approached a man sitted on a bench in Amtrak (the train station) and frantically asked him about the train to Atlanta:
Am i late? Has it left? Why is the train station board reading “New York” not “Atlanta”?
Man, tiny, neat kinky hair curls on fleek, glowing latte colored skin, old cross-leg pose with new flair, yet with baggage close-at-hand exuding homeless person vibe, smiles at me and says a lot of things which I could only translate to mean, “Nah, you are good. The train isn’t here yet. I am going to Atlanta too. you only miss it if I miss it.”
i notice at once he likes to talk. He wants to talk. Like me, he talks a lot but only makes sense at the last sentence.
i am not in a talking mood but, out of guilt for bearing the burdened thought that he is a fine-ass homeless person, i sit next to him. i can’t tell who re-started the conversation but he, at once, started telling me things:
He lives in Alaska but is in Tuscaloosa to oversee a hostel building project that is being done on his account in his Grandma’s name. Once completed, the hostel or hostels will be given out to students at Stillman College at fair rent rates. This, he says, is his way of both honoring the legacy of his Grandma whom the land belongs to and contributing to the Tuscaloosa community.
You see, he is Tuscaloosan. His Grandma is Tuscaloosan.
“Those white people came and took this land from us. They took our culture too. And now, the only thing that is left of us is at Moundville. I hate that but this is still my home. How else can I show that except by doing something for the community.”
He might not have said this statement word for word but he said this, one way or another. And, right now, as i sit writing our conversation into words, this is how i imagine he said it. with writing, memory does not need to serve me right, only imagination does. So yes, the paraphrased quotes are justified.
In between telling me how he had left Tuscaloosa at age 14 to join the Air Force in Alaska and how he had, upon retirement, cajoled his brothers to put Grandma’s land to good use, he said,
“Tuscaloosa means Black Warrior. My Grandma was a direct ancestor of the Native Americans who lived in Tuscaloosa. She still had knowledge of the culture. I remember she used to do this dance. She knew a bit of the language. I wish I had learned. She tried to teach me but I didn’t pay enough attention to learn it.”
The syntax of the city name matters in this context. He definitely does not mean “Tuscaloosa”. The city name he is invoking in his statement is Tuskaloosa, both a man-legend and a place tag. It speaks to a legacy that has been appropriated in ways that make history ashamed. Tuskaloosa is a place tag that belongs to the Native Americans – the Choctaws and Creeks – who had been longtime inhabitants of the land before the presence of New Englanders Repackaged Britons, New Americans… But because it is a renaming, a commemoration of a historical warrior who had fought to no avail against invading Spanish conquistadors, it also belongs to the latter too. Tuskaloosa the black warrior did not fight against New Americans just the Spanish folks, so guess what, he is not a threat, he is America’s hero too.
This ambivalence of belonging allows for unchallenged possessiveness, it allows for ‘ours’ instead of ‘theirs’. It makes for the unabashed claim to the heritage of a people whose legacies have been washed away like the waste transported across the Black Warrior River. What is left of the Tuskaloosa before Tuscaloosa are the lifeless bodies of dead ancestors shabbily thrust into earth heaped into a mound, some bodies lying somewhere above six feet, tipped over the precipice of hills they once stood on to live imperfect yet wholesome human lives.
It hits me deep (my face remains square though) to hear that his grandmother retained a whiff of Tuskaloosa. More like, she wrestled with retaining a whiff…
“My mother passed on early. I lived with Grandma till I was 14. She didn’t know how to read and write. But she would ask me and my brothers to read the Bible to her. And as we read, she would finish the verses she knew. She knew a lot of verses off the top of her head. She could recite them without making any mistakes. And she couldn’t read.”
this becomes the conversational cue to pivot into broader issues. We talk about what Christianity has done to indigenous cultures and religion. i tell him his grandma’s situation is reflective of what goes on in Nigeria. Nigerian women, boomers and Gen X, are walking audio Bibles yet they are not necessarily literate. They have merely had the Bible read or preached to them enough times by pastors and relatives. Most get around to reading it in scrap-fulls, by piecing together the written words in the Bible with what lives in their heads. The Bible literally becomes their first foray into western literacy. We veer off into the prestige of the Air Force and fitness and looking snatched at 60-something. We find that there is much to say about a person of color serving in the Air Force so we stay there for a while. He talks of rigorous training, of well-paying danger-marked jobs, of not letting himself be talked down at and finding a voice amidst blatant racism. Once he says the n-word is casually thrown at him by some person within the Air Force? Without? I don’t remember. In a non-paraphrased response, he says,
“I am not a nigga. I am Nigga.“
We talk more. We hear the train is coming soon. We don’t talk about anything else other than trains. It is not until we get on the train and sit adjacent to ourselves in coach that he turns to me and says,
“by the way, my name is [ ______ ]”.
I respond back with my name before turning the other way to look through the window. At rusty trees that look alien, at wetlands that are now out of character because of the deepening spring, and at large expanses of land that look like they were once useful for something. At time passing by, drawing a distance between [ ] and me.
This becomes his cue to end the conversation with me.
For the rest of the train ride to Atlanta, he sits in close proximity to his phone on which he watches talk shows by niggas who seem to be discussing music or reviewing sports or something of sorts (i know this because he loses guard on his earphones every now and then). Me, i sit to write the paper that i am scheduled to present at the conference while contemplating with half a mind about my conversation with [ ] and fighting the urge to read a book.
Something about the conversation unsettles me. Too much that was said was so gripping, so true. But i cannot fight back the urge to believe that a two-faced impression has been imprinted on my heart altogether. It’s either i have a two-faced impression of him or he has a two-faced impression of himself.
He is Native American. He is Nigga.
He is building hostels in Tuscaloosa. He fits the image of a well-spoken, neat-looking homeless traveler.
He is chatty and conversational. He is all for silence when gesturally requested
He exudes power, confidence, and wealth on the low-key. He feels like a lonely old man with a great body and even greater sorrows.
This Nigga is two-faced and this, i think is why i find him fascinating. In fact, it has occurred to me in the process of journaling this event that if Murray was not 62 or 64 (i can’t remember which of them is the age he said he has on him), he was a bit more youngish, more 30 or 40-something, i would have been attracted to him. Not just because he has that slim, skittish sleekness that i like about the men i like, but also because of how powerful he is, could still be, but will never be.
i am fascinated by power, in the same way most people are. But my proclivity to seek and fall for power has a me-strain to it. i am fascinated by a power that makes you make everything possible for others but makes it so nothing is ever possible for you.
It must be why when i eventually embrace the allure of reading a book, all i am in the feels for is something that has the same vibe as Francine Rivers’ A Voice in the Wind. It’s an old book, first published in 1993 and followed by two other books that make up the Mark of the Lion trilogy. The novel leans heavily towards the heteronormative forbidden love trope – man falls in love with woman who is way below his league and so within grasp but who is yet out of his reach. The woman loves him back but she will not reach for him. In fact, she doesn’t want him reaching out of his way for her. She is content throwing whatever she feels into the wind just so she can have a peaceful life. He is powerful. She is inaccessible by reason of the same power.
This typical forbidden love story is complicated by worldbuilding and narrative peculiarities. The settings are 70 A.D. Jerusalem and Rome. The man is Marcus Valerian, the son of Decimus Valerian, a wealthy Ephesian merchant, and aristocrat who has all of Rome under his feet including its emperors but cannot get the one thing he wants – Roman citizenship. Roman citizenship or not, Marcus is a dreamboat, and, even in his most philandering, nonchalant, breezy state of existence, he is business smart, endearing, and lovable. One never to be caught unfresh. Especially to his sister Julia who, at the beginning of the novel at least, is a doe-eyed innocent beaut that is enamored by her brother’s charm and sway over his seemingly larger-than-life contemporaries.
The woman is Hadassah who loses her whole family during the besiegement of Jerusalem by General Titus in the first Jewish-Roman war. She is captured, maltreated, and bound to die at the arena. But, by the stroke of luck, she is saved ( Luck, in this context, being Enoch, the trusted Hebrew head servant of Decimus, a secret Judaist). Hadassah is swooped into the household to serve the innocent teenage Julia who detests her at first because of her bald head, frail body, and ugliness (Julia wanted more oriental slaves like the ones owned by her friends). But, in time, Julia comes to adore Hadassah because of her soothing singing voice, her genuine loyalty, and her show of sincere love.
Marcus shares the same sentiments about Hadassah as Julia does but he agrees that the Jewish girl might be the right servant for his sister because of his own observations about how dangerous and treacherous beautiful maids often are to their mistresses. His dismissive first impression of Hadassah lingered longer than Julia’s but when it finally shifted and he really began to notice her, he cannot unsee her. She becomes everything. To quote Lord Anthony Bridgerton, she becomes “the bane of [his] existence, and the object of all [his] desires”.
He is in love and she is in love too. First, with Jesus, then with Julia, then, mhmm, somewhat with him too. As he comes to find out, her ride or die is definitely not him, it’s Jesus all the way. She isn’t, as he initially thinks, a secret Judaist like Enoch, she is a Christian. The kind of Christian that emperor Nero would burn as a torch during a night out at one of his gardens.
Oh yes, A Voice in the Wind is very much a Biblical historical fiction. One in which the biggest obstacle to a love story becomes the unyielding faith and feelings a slave girl has for the Lord Jesus. This novel breathes into life what I think many fail to realize about the character of Jesus – he is, to many people – family members, friends, partners, a love rival, the strongest and most powerful there ever has been.
Marcus, with his resplendent charming halo, is not able to talk Hadassah out of staying on the good side of Rome by playing the Judaist card or staying by his side to avoid the scrutinous eyes of Romans who seek out Christian prey. Hadassah chooses instead to stay in the frontline, going to banned churches any chance she gets, praying openly in the gardens in ways that make one wonder if she is sexting an unseen lover, and upholding her God-given mission to be Julia’s conscience, a Jiminy Cricket to the once-naive mistress who becomes utterly depraved and deranged after a series of misfortunes which started with her forced marriage to an older man in Decimus’ friend group.
I honestly don’t think anyone I am writing this long essay to will, by means of my profuse statements about A Voice in the Wind, be moved to read it so I have no hesitation about detailing the end. Julia learns of Marcus’ love for Hadassah and she is furious not only because she is disappointed that her high and mighty brother, the one she elevates to the level of godship is swooning for a maid, but also because love, for her, has not come cheap. Apart from Marcus’ overprotective brotherly love and the platonic, mistress-maid love she gets from Hadassah, no one has loved her wholesomely. When they love her, she does not love them back (as is the case with her first husband) and the ones she loves, she has had to buy her way into their hearts, sometimes paying a much more heavy price than the rewards she gets. It is because of these that she rejects Marcus’ plea to free Hadassah or sell her to him. For years, Julia plays a deaf-mute to this plea and taunts Marcus for losing his fun, his power over a woman until one day when, in her broken and dying state, her sexual partner Primus who is tired of Hadassah’s moralistic, self-righteous tootings, says:
“Give him what he wants, Julia. Give him your little Jewess.”
To this, Julia responds:
“Hadassah… Sweet, pure, little Hadassah… I don’t know if I can’t part with her. [But] very well. Just promise me you’ll send her back to me when you tire of her.”
Macho conquering Marcus goes to Hadassah to share the good news. Except to her, it’s not good news he brings, it’s merely a dilemma. After his hug-filled, body-caressing proposal, she drops the bomb:
“I can’t marry you Marcus… I can’t marry you because you don’t believe in the Lord.”
“Why must we always come back to this god of yours,” he asks
“Because he is God, Marcus. He is God!”
Despite everything that still manages to unfold after. This, for me, is where the story truly ends: “Marcus, let her go.” First by walking away, and then, by saying to his mother but mostly to himself:
“One god! One god above all else! So be it. Her god can have her. May he take pleasure in her faithfulness!”
And this god does. Julia who overhears the knee-bending way her brother proposes to Hadassah becomes angry at her for throwing her brother’s pride in his face. No, she begins to loathe Hadassah. And, in her blind rage, she stages a party in which she outs Hadassah as a Christian. Without delay, Hadassah is taken to the arena. On the day she is meant to be fed to the lions alongside other Christians, Julia invites the unsuspecting Marcus to watch the spectacle. He notices only one second too late that the person he is grumpily watching getting mauled to near death is Hadassah. He screams like a mad man, looks at his beautiful sister only to see the devil in her eyes, and it is then that he realizes that, for real, that the one rival god he is contending with does not take defeat, but he does not accept concessions either. You don’t concede to him, you don’t decide what he can have or not have. Rather than have you relinquish your hold over someone or something like you are doing him a favor, he would rather burn it all.
This bible verse, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy on and compassion on whom I will have compassion on” says it all.
Although i read this story as a teenager, it has stayed with me, not only as an evocative narrative but as an anecdote for the religion of Christianity (which I, by means of upbringing, embrace as my primary belief system) and what it does to human relationships. I am sure Rivers wanted readers (most of whom will be Christians like me) to be ‘exhorted’ by the steadfastness of Hadassah who, in the face of freedom and love, refuses to be “unequally yoked to an unbeliever”. But, even as a teen, all i felt was what love could do, be it love for a human being or an unseen god. and i learned ardently that to love God, to truly love a god is to play humans (no matter how powerful), the whole world in fact as second fiddle. And in time, A Voice in the Wind helped me understand why i found it easier to love God back then when i wasn’t too interested in humans and why if find it so difficult to truly love a god now when i am interested in are humans.
Thinking of my desire to re-read A Voice in the Wind in the train makes me realize something about [ ]’s Grandma is analogous to Hadassah’s. Tuskaloosa is her Marcus. No matter how precious its culture and origins are to her, it plays second fiddle to her love of the Bible, her love of the one true God. The same rings true for Nigerian Christians, especially women, who, at the expense of giving pleasure to themselves, receiving sexual pleasure, or embracing the love of a well-meaning human entity, would rather seek validation and sometimes reproof at the hands of an unseen yet all-seeing god.
i used to be critical of this for a long time, i used to fight it until i realized as I neared 25 that I have become a Hadassah. There is no fighting it now. There is just a knowing. It’s why i turn my eyes away from [ ], why i refuse to believe despite obvious signs that he, with all his righteous anger about the lost heritage of Tuskaloosa and the part he is playing in defending its left-over identity, is, in fact, making a smooth, habit-driven pass at me. Because regardless of his powerful allure, who is he next to the all-powerful one true god who can give and can take, who owns me and every other person on earth, who tickles us in the right places when he so pleases!
But Hadassah with all her abstinence and preachy morals about being faithful to the one true god does her moments with Marcus. Those times when her eyes call for a kiss and he obliges; when she wants him far but thanks the holy stars that he is near; the moments that he nudges her on to feel him, watch him feel her and she yields with an air of righteous indignation at her carnal self (if i didn’t hate the way “melt” has been bastardized in romantic contexts, i would have been a more perfect word to use in this context).
And it is this depiction of stolen pleasures, of wanting and not having, of starting but getting nowhere close to middle, of receiving in just-enough measures to sate the body temporarily that gets me more. In fact, although i had, at that age, read a lot of harlequin romance novels, each one nastier than the last. But it was not until i got into A Voice in the Wind that i started feeling sensations gather at the lower abdomen region of my stomach when characters kiss, touch skins, wrench out of their arms, and work their way to themselves again.
With the lovebirds in other novels, i felt a wave of teenage curiosity and thoughts in my imagination piqued; with A Voice in the Wind, i felt things, very basic and cliche yet powerful to still make my skin tingle when i bring to memory particular scenes in the novel. Reading that novel was my first hint at the now-clearer realization that i am (in this time of life) more sensual than sexual. i am moved not by the act itself but by the near-acts, the primal force of attraction, the wants and have-nots.
The irony of having to catch feels first from a Christian novel. Maybe it’s not ironical, merely appropriate for a church girl. At the core of every love story, biblical or not, is desire, pleasure, and what Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith aptly phrase as “tangling in awkward shapes”.
When you think of the love between Marcus and Hadassah, think of Bridgerton – except the form has a much-delayed happy ending. Marcus is to Hadassah what Rege-Jean Page (Simon Basset) is to Phoebe Dynevor (Daphne Bridgerton). The amorous yet chivalrous gentleman leading the uncannily pure yet strong-headed damsel into a discovery of sexual pleasure.
In fact, Marcus literally uses Simon Basset’s classic words, “I burn for you” once in his longwinded confessions of sexual thirst to Hadassah (was this a thing that horny men said from the Roman age to the Regency era?). Well, so even with all the biblical fluff, A Voice in the Wind is Bridgerton gold.
I wish Shonda Rhimes would jump on this one. She has a thing for evocatively detailing the angst and tensions that come with wants and have-nots. It’s like what she did with Scandal which i just rewatched within the space of my interesting, eventful two weeks. There is a president – Fitzgerald Grant the III, big, charismatic man-child, handsome with a well-practiced walk that intimidates, reassures, swoons hearts, leader of the free world, powerful. And there is a girl – Olivia Pope, black, beautiful, brazen, genius, complicated, otherworldly, in love with him. There is Vermont – the want. And for all of seven seasons, they both try to reach for this want, to have it. But it never happens. And it’s not because of the testy rivalry of an unseen, all-seeing god. This time, the god is in close proximity and even more threatening. Olivia Pope is Olivia Pope’s god. Olivia Pope is Olivia Pope’s one true god.
But yeah, my love for unlove and nearloves, it is why i like BLs i have come to realize; with Boy Love novels, mangas, movies, dramas, webtoons, animes and/or animations, my imagination isn’t doing any work, i am not thinking up what is happening because there is a limit to what i can think up so i let myself respond to the subtle romantic gestures or overt eroticism based on my basic instincts to feel and desire.
*A classic example; I wish I have never watched it just so I can go back and watch it.*
It’s why i never could get myself to stick with Game of Thrones. The characters, they enter into their bodies too easily, body in GoT is commodity, not a container of condiments. It’s why I sit through long episodes of Chinese historical or speculative fantasy drama series where the lovers never have sex on-screen but serve high doses of sexual tension that cut through the screen, leaving you drunk on wild emotions yet offering no possibility of climax.
Oh, the punishment. Oh, the pleasure!
The most recent i have watched is The Story of Yanxi Palace, released in 2018, 70 episodes, great storytelling. In Yanxi Palace, Wei Yingluo, a palace maid works her way to the top using her political savviness and her mind resolve to avenge the death of her sister who was raped and forced to commit suicide. Wei Yingluo is a political genius; if she were on House of Cards, she would have put Frank Underwood and his wife to shame.
She is Woman though, woman of the Qing dynasty; so rather than take on the show herself, she uses the people in her life to get things done. Most end up being mere puppets; two become love interests – love interest the first is General Fuca Fuheng who adores Yingluo to a fault but gives up on marrying her after a series of challenge; love interest the second is the Qianlong emperor himself Aisin Giaro Hongli who, by the brute of his far-reaching power, earns her nearlove, marries her, but is always kept on edge over her true feelings for him. Yingluo never lets him have all of her; she kept other gods and played him as second fiddle. Only one becomes a soulmate – Empress Fuca Rongyin – the first wife of the emperor and the sister of Fuca Fuheng. Rongyin, upon her death, commemoratively becomes Yingluo’s one true god; she becomes the reason why Yingluo can say no to any other crisscrossing pleasures.
Everyone must serve one god. Only by serving one true god can you withstand the wish-washiness of the ever-swaying world. Only by serving this god can you find strength within yourself to put other humans in their place. This is the 49th law of power.
It’s how i am able to see all the truth in [ ]’s testament but still reckon with his Janus-faced identity and embrace for him the bundle of contradictions that he is.
It’s how Hadassah is able to take charge of her passionate relationship with Marcus and change the dynamic of their romance from being a master-loves-servant situation to being a boy-meets-girl encounter. No, Hadassah doesn’t die. In the second installment of the trilogy – Echo in the Darkness, it is revealed that her life is saved by a Roman doctor who, while sneaking away about-to-die bodies from the arena to use as cadavers, takes pity on a faintly breathing Hadassah and treats her wounds. Her face and shoulders forever bear the deep scars from the arena lions but she moves through the world like a free woman, and re-meets a now-broken, a one-true-god-believing Marcus under a new identity Rapha. Their love story begins anew. This time, he is boy, doe-eyed, lifeless, unsure of every next step, contrite, wanting love; she is girl, healer, mature, independent, less preachy, more mindful of human kindness, open-minded, having love to give.
It’s how [ ]’s Grandma managed to hold two realities to the mirror and defend them both – Her Tuskaloosan identity which lives through her dance and her memories or imaginations; her Christian upbringing and indoctrination in western ideologies which is represented by the Bible but is equally valid and quintessential to the core of her life and living.
Serving one true god does not mean you are powerless. It’s just how power works. Power is Janus. To have and keep it, you have to open the door to a god who inhabits you completely and shields you from making spineless commitments to world wants. This god could be you as is the case with Ms. Pope or an unseen, all-seeing god as it obtains with Hadassah, Grandma, i.
After seven hours of train ride, i say goodbye to [ ]. i am tempted to ask for his number, to spur a discussion about hearing more of his story but i don’t. i know i will find new stories and i want to make enough mental space to hold them.
i am right
the very next morning, i meet someone, a Peter Pan to my Wendy wishes, a happy-go-lucky who will be a perfect Cadence in an alternative telling of E. Lockhart’s We Were Liars.
I will call her Cadence…