In my dreams, I have conquered hope. I am destitute, unable to participate in bearing the weight of living. The world is dark and empty. Life is devoid of meaning.
Still, occasionally, against my better judgement, hope snakes into my life. I unwittingly let it in like cold air into my lungs, and it holds my throat tighter each day until, as its embers fade, it suffocates me in culminating disappointment. Or sometimes, though a rarity, it is met with blissful release, the glory of hope fulfilled. Usually, it is disappointment, sometimes outright woe. Every thought is banal; every breath is a disaster.
Yet, I fill my life with things to mark the passing of time because what else can one do upon finding themselves awake, morning after morning?
For example, when I’m not lying down and staring at the ceiling, thinking horrible thoughts and feeling sorry for myself, I start my day in the house I share with my mother, father and four siblings. In the morning, we gather in the living room to listen to white evangelicals of my father’s choosing patter on and about for twenty minutes and then my parents pray, one after the other. My brother, Kiko, second child of my mother, would be late or absent from the mandatory morning prayer session, so my father would make sure to fashion a special prayer for us to say on behalf of our insubordinate brother.
“Dear Lord, touch the heart of this child that refuses to let your light touch him. Unharden his heart, God. My own son treats me with contempt, Lord; show him the example of Jesus.”
“Dear Lord, guide this child that refuses to obey. Do not let my children fall by the way, ransome them to your side.”
He would ask us to pray louder, as if Kiko could hear him in his sleep or as if that would call God’s attention faster to the very serious situation at hand — my brother’s zzz’s and my father’s interpretation of those zzz’s as a personal affront.
My father would call him Joseph even though he’d gathered all of us one Saturday morning, bright and early, before my mother could rouse us for prayer to inform us that he would like to be addressed as Kiko from then on. My father had looked at him in shock at the audacity; my mother had gotten up and grabbed his shirt, not one for delayed reactions. She shook him and asked frantically, “What’s wrong with Joseph? What is wrong with the name we gave you?” He ignored her and stared my father in the eye, daring him to react.
My sister, Ruth, my mother’s third child by mere minutes, looked bored. She was lying on the sofa furthest from the large burl table that separated us and essentially partitioned the room. The table was older than all the children, a reminder of the life our parents led before us.
My mother had told us more than once the story of how she had to pay pounds on pounds to have it sent from London, the only furniture she’d kept from that time in her life. A time when she was young and free, and the possibilities were endless. She’d worn her hair long and worked at a bakery designing cakes. My father did what he’s always done but without the crook in his neck and the permanent scowl on his face.
My parents had been married ten years before they had any children. They looked like different people in the albums Kiko had found stashed in the study. They were happier then; it radiated through the photos in their tiny London apartment, watching Peter Pan at the Wembley Arena, at a beach in Cornwall.
In one of the photos, they stood in front of a faded brick wall beside a lamppost. My mother held onto a said lamppost, and her head was thrown back in hysterical laughter. My father was in front of her, also holding on to the lamppost, bent forward laughing. My father’s figure leaned over her, and his free hand cradled the small of her back. His forehead rested in the crook of her neck, and you could feel his smile as well as you could see it.
They met and fell in love at university, and soon after, they were married. I don’t know why, if it was a conscious decision, they decided to have children (and five at that), but my mother made sure we knew that the trajectory of her life had been permanently altered (I thought derailed) by our collective existence. Maybe we’d robbed them of their love.
They’d moved to Nigeria shortly before my mother had Rachael, my oldest sister, and that’s about as much as we knew about who they once were. What we did know was that something about the turn they’d taken had changed them. They’d been sombre and morose all our lives, barely acknowledging us and one another, and we’d thought it normal until we sat and looked and saw them smiling, laughing and dancing, at bars, with friends. They were more in colour in that black and white spread than they’d ever been before our eyes.
We also found old letters my father had written to my mother, deep in the throes of love. He wrote poems for her, dramatic declarations. “Arese, I cannot wait until I am fortunate enough to see your face every day in the glint of the morning sun and in the silver of the night’s moon”. I didn’t think he had it in him. Kiko thought it hilarious, and Racheal’s eyes became misty at the thought of it.
After her first child was born, my mother stopped working. She never worked again — except for the backbreaking work of caring for five children, taking care of the house and its day-to-day administration and walking on eggshells around her husband, who made it his responsibility to constantly remind her of how useless she was, how little she was doing and how fortunate she was, with and because of love, of course.
I don’t know how my siblings felt, but I certainly felt some guilt, quickly absolved by the reminder that it was, ultimately, their choice and certainly not mine.
Ruth’s chosen spot was furthest from the TV and my parents. They sat on the largest sofa in the spacious room, at the centre, facing the television. The table at their knees, sturdy and wide, ate up half the space between them and the TV, and all the sofas and armchairs were spread so far apart that no one in the room ever actually got a good view of the thing, and so, it stayed off.
We do not gather in the living room for much else besides prayer and scoldings. Everyone disappears into their corner of the world until my siblings and I occasionally darken each other’s doorsteps, looking for something, anything.
Ruth lay on the sofa, eyes closed, head hanging off the handrest, arms crossed like she would rather be anywhere else, and chose that position to physically demonstrate her lack of interest in the conversation. Chances were, he’d already informed her of his new name, and she’d probably rolled her eyes the whole day and told him at regular intervals how idiotic it was. She called him Kiko, though; my siblings and I all did. Even Rachel, firstborn child and apple of my father’s eye, called him Kiko, at least to his face. I imagine he was Joseph again in conversations with my parents.
My mother faced Ruth and yelled as she shook my brother, “You knew about this nonsense abi, talk to your brother now and remind him what his name is in case he has forgotten.”
My father stared his son down, stood up, walked out of the room and continued to call my brother Joseph. He wouldn’t respond to anything but Kiko, and as you can imagine, that became a source of constant conflict in our home.
With Kiko, there was constant conflict. Rachael never got in trouble; Ruth was usually roped in with Kiko, as his twin, best friend and confidant, and she was also smart enough to never get into any trouble of her own, to their knowledge anyway. I mostly disappeared, and Rebecca was the baby and hadn’t developed enough of a personality for there to be any friction yet.
We did not pray that morning.
“Pressure makes rocks into diamonds”, my father would say, so my siblings and I were always required to be doing something my father deemed worthy of our time. Pressure was the ideal descriptor for what my father imposed on us, Kiko, his son especially. Think of a pot of boiling water left on too long, simmering until burning steam rises out of nothing, chaos erupting.
My father had started his own construction company when he moved to Nigeria with the money he had saved working as an architect abroad. His business grew in strength and size, and he expected my brother to one day take over. He’d tell us he built the company to take care of his family, and so, in turn, his family must take care of it.
We all worked at the company when we did not have school. Rachael was exempt because she didn’t have much time to pitch in between choir practice and sewing and helping my mother and her work as an English teacher. Ruth worked as a secretary, accompanying my father to all his meetings and taking notes no one would ever look at after the fact. She’d use the time to draw, and nobody drew like Ruth. She’d paint remarkable faces in pencil and pen, using her finger to shade. Pictures of gorgeous women with piercing, knowing eyes that looked like they saw her just as well as she saw them. One time my father caught her during a meeting, and he tore her notepad; ripped the drawings in half, page after page.
Ruth came home hollow that day and for many days after that until my siblings and I pitched in to buy her a new drawing pad, a better one. We also bought her paint. Watercolour, pastel paints, pencils and pens; whatever we thought an artist needed. She continued to draw but never in my father’s presence, taking down her nonsensical notes during his meetings and drawing and painting with every unoccupied waking moment, behind him, of course.
I worked inventory for lack of anything better to do. How much protective gear is checked out each day? What is almost out of stock? Then I’d pass the information on to the storekeeper, who never stayed in the warehouse because he thought it too depressing. Instead, he’d sit at the cafeteria, talking to whoever, boring them with irrelevant tidbits.
I spent my days in the store, grateful for the solitude in the airless, stuffy warehouse. The whirring of the small standing fan in my makeshift “office” (a windowless closet that stored the inventory documents) served as a background hum against my thoughts. I’d sit for hours on end, reconstructing memories as they appeared in my head, frame by frame, picture by picture—a disjointed mess. Glamorous dysfunction. Soon, there’s no telling what’s real and what’s fake, what’s remembered and what’s made up.
My childhood memories are in my brother’s voice. He’d taken to me and would call me his baby for most of my childhood and occasionally now to tease me. I remember when I, at maybe 8 or 9 years old, broke a vase in my father’s room. He’d sent me to fetch something, and like a child, I’d blundered the task so badly that I smashed a vase and cut my hands. After Rachael tended my wounds, my father punished me, “go and ride okada there”, and after an hour of the task, I was shaking, sweating, and praying for death.
Kiko had come to take my place, unceremoniously nudging me out of the way. When my father came and saw him, he was angry. How dare he subvert his instructions?
My father had him in that position all day and into the night. Then, finally, my mother released him, and we could hear my father’s displeasure at that through the walls. Later, my mother came and sat with my brother and me while we cried and consoled one another, Ruth in tow. She sympathised with us, wiped our tears, and petted our backs.
That never happened again. She usually left us to our fate, watching and tutting as though powerless from the sidelines and avoiding our eyes when we looked at her accusingly for forsaking us.
When I wasn’t too busy remembering things, I made up stories in my head and watched slideshows behind my eyelids. I took images from actual memories, places and things I’d seen (albeit limited) and fabricated entirely new ones with some help from books, music, movies, and things. There were three-dimensional characters with intricate lives and feelings so big that sometimes they moved me physically. I’d laugh, I’d cry. Their lives were more fulfilling than mine, more flexible, pliable. It wasn’t life at all.
I wasn’t always alone in that cupboard office. Kiko and Ruth would come by, and sometimes, we’d sit in silence. Other times we’d talk.
Kiko had been my father’s right-hand man at the construction company since he was 10, in primary six, and had the misfortune of childish curiosity. He’d asked to see where my father worked and had shown some vague interest in it, and his fate was sealed.
He’d studied architecture at the church university and was so viscerally opposed to the whole thing that he almost got kicked out twice, but for the grace of my father’s regular, heavy donations to the establishment.
Now, his day-to-day was sitting in on internal meetings, nodding, and making a serious face. Sometimes my father would ask him a question, and he’d refuse to answer or answer wrongly, and everyone in the room would sit back and awkwardly watch them go at it. Kiko could be better; he just refused to, in defiance.
One day, Kiko and Ruth came for lunch, and as we ate, Ruth asked Kiko why he wouldn’t just leave. But we knew why. We were nothing without our father because we didn’t know how to be anything but his children.
Earlier that day, Kiko and my father had a particularly nasty row. My father had informed him that he would be accompanying him on a business trip, and Kiko had said he’d rather die than spend that much time in his company. My father, enraged, had called him a worthless son, a stupid boy. Kiko had shrugged offhandedly, and that only made my father angrier. He’d sent us out of the house, asking my sister and me to go ahead of them to the office, and Kiko had shown up a few hours later with a black eye.
Kiko rebelled because it was something to do — to test my father to see if he felt the same way — if he wouldn’t leave us simply because we were his children, even when we disappointed and fought him. I often wondered how my parents would react if any of us girls ever asserted our individuality like our brother did. I imagined the reaction would be worse. My mother regularly told us we were different in a way that felt like an anchor tied to my heel. I had to do and be certain things just because I was a woman. And I could not do and be certain things for the same reason.
My father did not often hit his children, except his son, and Kiko would take it in our place whenever it came to that. On one of our nightly conversations where we sought comfort in one another, he’d told Ruth and me that there are worse things than physical violence. The suffocating feeling of hopeless resignation that sits firmly on your chest, the needles that poke your skin, the waves of anxiety that wash over you, rendering you unable to breathe freely and function, are those not worse?
We spent a considerable amount of time at church too. It was a whole day affair on Sundays, punctuated by lunch at Savant, an upscale French restaurant near my father’s pentecostal church. He was an elder at the Lord’s Dominion Charismatic Revival Ministries, and on Sundays, he took his position very seriously. He also clearly enjoyed being an “elder”. Their noses were so high up that they could probably smell God, and they acted like it too. If someone had a problem and took it to the church, the elders, my father included, would sit among themselves and decide their fate.
When Mercy got pregnant, they instructed her parents to keep her at home. She had sinned a shameful sin, so she must be kept hidden. When Pa Ranti was caught fondling a child right there in the church, they gathered around him, placed their hands on his head and prayed for him to win his battles next time, for him to triumph in the face of temptation. Their devotion convinced them of the rightness of their purpose; they fuelled their own fires.
After we ate, as my father dazzled us with his Sunday smile, we’d go back to church for the evening service. We’d be silent at lunch, and we’d be silent in the car, and then when we got home, my father’s scowl would return, and the lines etched into his forehead would deepen.
Beyond our work at his company, our father was generally disinterested in our lives. He reserved his interest for doting on his Ada and terrorising his only son. The leftover sisters mostly faded away. Kiko envied us; he wished he could exist outside my father’s radius; he wanted to disappear.
Of all my siblings, forgotten or otherwise, I disappear best. Rebecca strives to be noticed, and that’s understandable. When we were her age, we too believed that if we tried hard enough, we would make our father happy and that if we made him happy, we would be happy too. Rachael remains stuck in that cycle, and I sometimes wonder how she would be if she had a personality outside of pleasing our parents. She had started smiling at Mr Paul at church even though her instinctive reaction had been repulsion when my mother had told her he was interested in her. Finally, after some coaxing and cajoling, she was convinced it was a great idea. Maybe she’ll marry him. Or someone else, and soon. My mother was itching for her to be married, and though my father would hate to lose his baby, he thought marriage was a good idea too.
Ruth disappears just fine, maybe as well as me. She paints, she’s Kiko’s permanent plus one, she listens to girl in red and kisses her best friend in corners around the house during visits.
Me, I fade away before their collective eyes.
I come in two parts. One is the half of me that is flesh, meat and bone, only half subject to my whims and control. And then there’s the other half, the half that does the thinking and feeling, and that, ultimately, is above me. Consciousness and unease are fraternal twins, so I was always on edge even before I started to dull my senses and wallow in woe, on purpose, or maybe in resignation.
When Kiko and my father would clash, I’d think to myself; this is it. This is the moment it’ll all really fall apart. When Kiko was suspended from the university in his first year for smoking marijuana, my body vibrated, and my stomach turned. I thought my father would kill him. At least on that occasion, there was a tangible reason to worry — a spot to point at and say, “here, this is where it’s paining me”.
A ghoul was waiting for me on every corner, so I had to be on high alert at all times. Was I truly functioning if my heart did not beat so violently that it threatened to tear out of my chest at the sound of my name out of my father’s mouth? If I could not anticipate every possible misfortune that could befall me and those I loved, had I not failed? If I could not make a window into a door and a plan for every eventuality of life, then was I even worthy of being alive?
The fundamental problem was that I thought there was some merit and virtue to living. That I had to earn it; endure my discomfort to accommodate its will. That I had to have hope because is a hopeless person even worthy of life?
On a day so hot it would inspire even nuns to curse, as I sat in my cupboard office melting, the fan temporarily out of order, I suddenly had enough. Every day was just a journey into the next, and into the next, and into the next, all activities meaningless and trivial. What will my life be ten years from now? Who will I be? Will it even matter?
What was certain was that new, more serious and pressing worries would replace the old. Burdens would grow, and life would swat me around insolently like a cat.
My siblings and I had matching bracelets of identical trauma in varying degrees. Rachel was a people pleaser, Kiko was angry and resentful, depression and anxiety were the nooses around my neck, and Ruth was passive and had resolved to be rid of my father as soon as possible. I worried for Rebecca and wondered what shade of trauma she would inherit and if it was as inevitable for her as it had been for us.
Usually, I would keep my thoughts to myself and take them to bed for nightly musing, but that day, I told Kiko and Ruth how I felt and asked if they felt the same way. “What do you think about hope? Does it calm you down, or does it wind you up? Does it make the days bearable, or does it drag your heart around, incapacitating you?”
Ruth had hope and lots of it. She’d been saving, and she and her best friend would get an apartment together at the end of the year. Of course, my parents would be livid, but the way she saw it, life is short, and she’d already spent too much of it being “inauthentic”, as she put it. She had found a way to make money off her art, so she would. I was happy for her. I was ready to fight for her however I could. I was willing to share in her hope.
Kiko was less optimistic, and like me, he found the responsibility of bearing and anticipating the future too much, the uncertainty of tomorrow, even if today somehow turns out okay. I think that to Kiko, hope was not something to pay attention to or dwell on. It was just something that was there sometimes, and when it wasn’t, hopelessness was worse company. So, he took hope where he saw it and let it go when it seemed too much to hold on to.
My mother walked in on me wailing once. Sincerely, it was not that serious. Crying is normal, wailing even. Pulling the hair out of my scalp and scratching myself till I bled, all normal. She’d asked me what was wrong, and I could not answer. What was there to say? She’d called my father to see his child, and they’d dragged me to church for counselling.
I could sense their worry, so I reneged on my usual tight-lipped stance and tried to explain how I felt, the colour of my problem. A sorry mistake. My mother had told me I was ungrateful. What did I mean by I was sad and tired of life? Did they not feed me and buy me clothes? Did they not pay my school fees?
Sometimes, love and concern do not translate. Sometimes, love and concern are selfish. My father was angry that members of the church had seen weakness in his family through me. What will people think and say? What is depression in God’s house? They wanted me to be happy not so that it would add fullness to my life but so that the dark spot would be gone, and they could return to patting themselves on the back for being such splendid parents and pillars of society. And so, in my own love and concern, I gave them that.
I pretended then and every day after that. I wore a mask of fake smiles and feigned interest in whatever they wanted me to be interested in. It was easier that way.
Now, I endure, finding a new reason to get through each day, but I fear that one day, that will no longer be enough. Some days there is no reason. Sometimes weeks and months on end. When those dry spells last too long, the light fades from my eyes and then, what even is hope? Who has time for that? Living is simply finding things to fill your days and while away time. Not very sustainable if you ask me.
Sure, time flies. But you know what people don’t talk about? How it crawls. How if you’re still enough, you can feel the passing of every second, minute and hour. The day creeps along, and night evades your grasp. How wait is perpetual and endless. And what exactly are we waiting for even? What is big enough to give purpose to our daily struggle?
At night, before I fall into anxious sleep, I wonder where my siblings will be in ten, twenty, or thirty years when our parents are but a collection of memories tugging at our hearts, real or imagined. I wonder if we will still have each other to talk about this time we share and the weight we will inherit from it.
I, unfortunately, cannot be completely rid of hope, no matter how hard I try. The intensity of hope matches the intensity of the ensuing disappointment. Even if hope is fulfilled, misery lurks around the corner to snatch it out of your hands. So, what does one do?
Until I have simply had enough, I will close my eyes and orchestrate elaborate dreams and visions to distract myself from the sorry state of my reality. I will share hope where I find it, bear it where it is my own, and shed it like old skin when it suffocates.
I think this was the story that rekindled my love for reading. Thank you so much this was a beautiful read
Missed this power!