Hello Oriseje,

After so many months of dreaming about you and thinking of you in different ways, in different places, at all times, you have finally taken your first leap out of my mind onto raw, white pages on the screen of my computer. You are still not quite well-formed; but I don’t think you will ever be. You are too much of a mystery for me to think I can completely make sense of you. In the beginning, when you first came to me, I thought you were going to be the ME I will never meet. I told myself, “Oriseje, I want you to embody everything I am at the moment and everything I will never be. I want you to fail like I feel I am failing. I want you to succeed like I hope to do sometime in the future. I want you to be stuck in a place of dreams like I usually am. I want you to be supernatural in a way that I am not but to share every strand of human fallibility that I currently embody. I want you to be different but to be like every one of us – broken and hoping to piece our shattered bodies together. Oriseje, I want you to fall in love but never experience love. I want you to break hearts and have your heart broken but never really think much of it like humans always seem to do. I want you to be human and not human at the same time.”

Only later did I come to realise that you never belonged to me in the first place. I never conceived you; you did not come to me by chance; you chose me to tell your story. Yoruba mythology is filled with stories of gods, goddesses and supreme deities; of how they existed hundreds of years ago, maybe thousands; of the mighty deeds they wrought, the terrible things they created, the tempestuous relationships they had, their downfalls and uprisings, their existences. But no one speaks of you, no one remembers you; unlike other supradeities, your existence defies understanding so it should not be made known in the first place. But once, only once, you were called by your name in a three-lined portion of a story you are all too familiar with. True enough, the mention of your name might have been done in an inconsequential, irreverential way that makes you want to punish all of humanity but you cannot stop thinking to yourself; He, the one whose name you hate but whom your heart cannot say no to, He remembers you. This changed everything, right?

Now, you really want to tell your story, not just the histories of the past but the story of your new beginnings. And you have chosen me to do just this.

I might be a person of many words but words aren’t enough to carry to fullness the essence of you, the hatred in your voice, the love in your heart, the pain in the world you have come to call Home, the confusion of events that is threatening to end this world. If I want to tell this story right, I would need more than words; I would need images, sound, motion pictures; I would need to be as part of your story as you are a part of the celestial cosmos.

I am not a good storyteller and this is because I am an aggressive pessimist who sees colours but thinks of the world as a dark abyss filled with all sorts of desirable potentials that will never see daylight. But this story is not mine, you don’t belong to me; I am merely a griot under the spellbound power of your enchanting aura. So, maybe, I will tell this story with the gusto and pomp it needs. I like to think of what I will write as some sort of HopePunk, a form of storytelling in which optimism is weaponised and the infinite possibility of redemption, be it human or otherwise, becomes a mantra that defines the writer’s narrative process. So, this might be a true story of you and how you go on to fight for everything you love. But I suppose that this is also about me, about my own struggles, battles and desire for impassioned optimism because, in the long run, aren’t we all fighting for something?

Musical Accompaniment: SATURN by Sleeping at Last

Audio Two:

Well, time cannot run any faster. But your thoughts are running wild. Osanyin, counselling is supposed to offer clarity and heal the mind. But for you, it is a fog that clouds your vision and reminds you of what you have become. Of how voiceless and unheard you have suddenly been made. You always did pride yourself in voicing out and being heard. You were, after all, a teacher. True enough, you only taught English remotely to a group of Swedish students while studying Biology, with a specialisation in Genetic and Molecular Plant Science, at Uppsala University, but you have always been one to say one needs saying and make others listen to you. I helped that you write too and do a bit of translating. But in just three months, you have, against your will, become a person who dreads the sound of speech. The counsellor woman, she has been with you for three months and you have enjoyed her company; you can see how desperately she wants you to cry and babble away about your pain and grief but how can you tell the woman (Dr. Karlsson is her name right?) that you really want to say something, but you are terrified of hearing yourself speak.

The first time you spoke was when you saw your body for the first time in the mirror of the hospital ward’s bathroom. And what you saw shocked you so much that you let out a scream. But what came out of your mouth was even more shocking so much that it caused your hair to stand up on what is left of your skin. What you heard was not the sopranic silky cadence of a 25-year-old girl, it was a hoarse, cacophonic shriek of a vulture. You were stunned into silence, and nothing could undo the shock that has held you spell-bound since then. Not even the dire need to loudly mourn a dead friend. You look down with an air of indifference to mask your pain, the pain of losing your voice. You are hoping the therapy woman takes the hint and reads your words like you would if you could. She doesn’t, she won’t. So, I will read your words for you; I will voice them out in a way that conveys the pain that tears at your heart. I may not exactly say these words the way you would have said them; I may not capture everything you are trying to make known through writing but all that is important is I let you be heard through me. Mind if I play some music while I read? I don’t know about you, but songs help me reach into the depth of my emotion and salt my words with the right mood:

The pink azalea used to be here

Flourishing like a goldfish with flattering fins

yet nowhere to go.

Now, it is gone

leaving behind a dark, earthy hole

where it used to stand.

I promised myself a homage to it.

I said, “Osanyin, you will walk down

those stairs, stand in front of the pink azalea

And tell her how much you love her.

You will say, ‘the first day we locked eyes,

You brought a surety to my gaze

Like nothing I have ever felt.

You stood tall and beautiful and so confident

Of your pink blossom

That even the wind could not stand.

You know, I have dark eyes, full of gleam, gloom

And sadness and the grief my petite body

cannot contain.

But when I look at you, it is like my eyes

Become crystal clear and I can actually see.”

I told myself I was going to say all these and more

To the pink azalea.

But I didn’t.

I was too bothered with the sight of her to really ‘see’ her.

I was too worried about stammering during my confession

To even say anything.

So I said nothing and only stole quick glances at you 

Through the unflattering window glass of my room.

You were, after all, a flower.

Wouldn’t you wait for me all Spring?

I want to weep now that you are gone.

I want to reveal my shattered crimson teary urn, 

Which echoes and crackles from a place in me

I never even knew existed.

I want to say I am a broken shard of porcelain

Once stained by beauty.

But how can I even be broken

When I was never whole?

Musical Accompaniment: Spring Day by BTS (covered by 21st-century Pansori singer Song SoHee)

Audio Three:

This counsellor woman, she has got it all mixed up. True, that was you in the sketch. But you were not sleeping; you were dreaming. Dreaming dreams of all the fragments of your memory from that day. The 20^th of October 2020. The day Orunla died. The day before the day you lost several parts of you. Your dreams weren’t all that sad or too burdensome; they contained capsules of songs you had listened to that day; movies you had hoped to watch that week based on Orunla’s weird recommendations; thoughts that had crossed your mind as you took a walk in Uppsala woods during the cool breezy evening of that day. While walking, you had accidentally stepped into a puddle of water whose dark-mud surface reflected the bloody red sunset sky that graced the surface of Heaven. You had looked up that day and marveled at the beauty of the sky, of Heaven. Now, you know better:

Heaven is a lie in my mind, in my dreams

And it is only a matter of time before I lose it to sleep

It is Disney Wonderland embellished with

Vignettes of eternal backdrops from The Pillow Book

In heaven, there is no death, no darkness, there is no time

There is no fear of being too early or too late

There is no time to be late

But then, there is enough time to linger and loiter a bit

Till there is no time left to be early

Heaven is a lie in my mind, in my dreams

It is a painted sky, thick with white and nothing more

It is almost as colourless as daylight fastened into permanence

With threads of diamond crusts

I burgeon with colours

I flourish on borrowed time

So, I cannot hope for heaven;

for a glorious exit

Heaven is a lie in my mind, in my dreams

Like tomorrow drenched in the cold sweat of today’s stark realities

Because today is as it should be

Tomorrow is not looking good

Musical Accompaniment: Heaven by Troye Sivan featuring Betty Who

Audio Four:

Yes! Yes, Yes, Yes! For the first time, the counsellor woman is getting something right. She might not have even read the poem she wrote alongside the HAIR sketch. But she intuitively hit the nail on the head. Why would you, Osanyin, do damage to your hair even if you meant to take your life? Your hair, for you, was life itself; black, kinky, full and thick with oil, your hair made you feel immune to the passing of time. It made your head sit well on your neck and made you feel light on your feet. It gave your face the rounded beauty that many praised you for. You had thought, if everything else got old and died, maybe your hair will remain. But it is all gone now. Now that there is nothing left of what used to be your hair, you feel your time has come. It is over. Even your body knows this:

There was a time

When h(air) was free

When the black curls that graced the back of a woman’s

Hair

Curved slowly into her memory.

Beauty was owned at this time

By the obedience of solitude,

Blankets, sheets,

Calling the skin to comfort.

That was then.

When hope could afford to wait till tomorrow.

When it could persevere like the Apple tree dancing

To the fluted sound of the sky.

The flutist, deaf with a silent understanding of the times

Waits till there is another beginning at the end of the road

Before playing again.

That was then.

Now, I feel alone

Really alone.

My aloneness is not from a nostalgic thrust of memories

Into the guts.

It is from the drenching noiselessness,

The silence that comes with the wrecking passage of time.

A lot of time has passed

Without ever going through me.

I am caught in many in-betweens;

In the middle of a quarter life crisis

The middle of summer, all alone…

The middle of depression,

with the first half of me, facing the sun,

The other caught in the thicket of a 

Blood red moon.

But time hardly notices any of these,

It cuts through all my middles

Like snow flames melting before

Touching the ground.

I am pressed for time.

I want to know what happens

On the other end of my middles.

What happens when summer tires itself out

When depression is exhausted.

When I really begin to live in the future.

I am pressed for time.

I desperately want to know

What happens on the eve of

Going back home to the future.

Yet, I wish time would stop altogether.

Musical Accompaniment: Lovely by Billie Eilish featuring Khalid

Audio Five:

Progress? At what? Osanyin, this is what is going through your mind as you listen to the counsellor’s last words. Why do people always think that smiley faces somehow translate to the cultivation of happiness or an attempt to hide the sadness in one’s eyes. For you, a smile could mean much more; it could be a way of expressing a feeling that is neither this or that. It could be a way of expressing contentment with one’s feeling of listlessness or loneliness. A smile could mean to be at peace with a state of mind – happiness, sadness, grief, pain, melancholy or whatever else it may be. Like the night blooming cereus which beams brighter than sunshine only when it is shrouded in darkness:

I am lonely.

There is a dark in my heart 

That sunshine feeds on.

It intoxicates me, the feeling

Of being chewed upon and ravished by the Sun.

I feel everything the Sun feels as it crushes on my bones:

The love that spreads from its sun-beamed eyes,

The cackling of memories that echoes from its limbed rays,

The fragrance from touching bodies with the sky,

The holding of hands with the air,

The Kisses on the lips of daylight

that causes cherry blossoms to flourish in summertime.

I feel it too;

How the Sun is bloated with happiness

from watching the tidal waves of love

hit its own bank.

In one sweep, I become the memories that the Sun holds dear

But I, the snack on which the Sun feasts,

cannot live out these memories for myself:

There is a dark in my heart

It is what the Sun feeds on

As sunshine grows, the dark grows too.

I feel love in the tresses of my hair

On my face

My thighs

My skin pores

But it fades away like a daguerreotype

That lost to time those moments meant to be

Forever immortalised.

Time is what I dread too.

One day, I will grow into a bard of

wrinkles lyricising about the black swan

Fluttering to the surrealness of a lucid dream,

A lucid dream

that once was real.

There will be no one to love me then;

No one to wait for when I wake up

There will be no sunshine to feed my dark with.

With time, love will mean nothing more to me

Than 16 candles gifted to mean girls

Who break a sweat at the mere thought of Kpop idols

And break hearts while dirty dancing to Thank U, Next.

But my heart has never been broken

Not even once

So there is nothing to fill up the empty

Staring me in the face.

I am lonely;

as lonely as heaven

burnt on a pyre of ashes

By the rays of a Sun with a

gluttonous appetite

For a raging, dark hell.

Musical Accompaniment: She is in the Rain by The Rose (a K-band)

ILARI

                                                                 For MARYAM

Five times, death has torn at the

Protective layers of your nine lives,

distilling the leopard’s snore

from his sleep.

And

These five times,

My chest heaves to know this

My breath ceases thinking about it.

So i go, the way of the sow

Dirty, Naked

Where crickets’ chirps become sonorous stanzas

And the night’s woes, the Grecian chorus.

These five times, for my sake

Death has stayed his hands

swayed its lanky frame to the 

beat of apology.

Because of who i am:

Ilari.

I, who am known to look away

from the deep lines on a Zebra’s skin,

Now sees and  chants about

the ripple in the brook at my backyard.

I, who never counts the meats

In my pot of soup, has begun to place

my ear against the wall and

recount old women’s fables.

Even a parrot knows when to shun words

A towncrier can live without the sound of the gong

For me, I blab like a witch, confessing to save her last life.

But my penis, it makes no noise

bears no complaint

no longer itches for the soothing touch of Omobunmi.

I have become less of a man.

Because of who i am:

Ilari.

Yet,

Fajuyi must go.

He must tread the path that leads to the vultures rapacious den.

I must bring his head to be bequeathed to the blood thirsty craze of the godless axe.

Because of who i am: 

Ilari.

Ah! Mercy, my king.

Ina tin parun

Omi atutu lara,

Mercy.

Ilari i may be

The shapeless head of a cock

I may bear

But my heart can not bear

to show the road to the scorpion’s grave.

I know, i know

The snare of the butcher

has already been set.

But again, think

Think again, my lord

Because

For the Ilari you have made me,

I can only kill for you.

                                                 But make me your friend,

                                                                       And I will die for you.