First, there was Ànyasi; the darkness; an endless void of nothingness. And then there was Àghará; Chaos; atoms spontaneously bursting into being; an existence with no progenitor. And then there was Ndú; life; the single cell; one corpuscle multiplying. The mother.
And then there was Us.
– Children of the Netherplaces
If Nnedi tells this story, she will paint you into a god; she will line your skin with gold and lace your words with sonorous beauty. Your hair will morph from its original, mundane afro into a crown of obsidian cloud. Your eyes, naturally wide and flattering, will transform into alluring orbs of fiery intelligence. She will call your name–Obiajulu–with the same reverence with which she says ‘Jesus’ during nightly vigils. The air around you will be colored by an aura of beauty and brilliance and your smile will rival the iridescence of a thousand suns. You will become, at least until she is done with her tale, a celestial thing.
But in the place where she sees a deity; a child spun from gold and kissed by God, we see a deserter, a vagabond, a cruel sibling.
We will tell the story in this manner:
i.
In the beginning, we were one and we were many–multitudes of the same entity, an amalgamation of selves, facets of the single self. A unity.
We were the scent of rain-kissed earth, the feel of a warm October breeze, the sensation of butter melting into oil, the sugary-milky taste of anjigilidi sweets, the scent of mud and jasmines in Ukpo, the rage of whirlwinds in Kano. We were all and we were more and we were complete.
In the aether, we remained content; satisfied in the nothingness and the void and the all encompassing stillness of existing in inexistence. In the belly of Ànyasi, we thrived.
And you, Óbianyi, were our heart and our kindness and you were restless. You were as brash as you were intuitive, as reckless as you were sensitive–because nothing is ever as sensitive as a kind heart. You were an extension of Us, a facet of our divinity. You were of Us and you were Us and you were restless. And in this–your brazen restlessness–you began to edge towards the gates.
We were content in the aether but you began to peek beyond the void. It happened in small spurts, your biding curiosities. One time you stretched a tentative finger over the gates and felt the electric tingle of aliveness. It thrilled you as much as it startled you and so you retracted your hand and ran into the safety of Us. We comforted you with songs, with stories of endless, blissful nothingness. We prayed for you to sate your thirst. But the thrill beckoned you once more and the next time you edged towards the gates, you plunged your entire wrist into the warmth of mortality. And then your arm leading up to your elbow. Past your elbow. Your left leg. Your arm and your leg. The entirety of your lower half.
Every time after you experienced this shocking bliss, you returned to Us and we prayed anew–with increasing fervency–for your restlessness to still, for your curiosities to wane. But it did not. And one day, you, Óbianyi–our heart, our kindness–walked beyond the gates.
This time, you did not return.
You reformed Us with your leaving. It was a cruel thing, this metamorphosis for which we had no interest nor any control over. It was a strange thing too; like a chrysalis unfurling to reveal a butterfly that had never known of the world outside its cocoon.
Because you were our heart, our kindness, you brought the world to Us and we were briefly blinded by the sight, by the sensation of seeing and knowing that we were now only capable of seeing through you. Through your eyes, the world unfurled anew and we became unwilling witnesses to it.
In our first sight, you were cloaked in the flesh of a mortal foetus in a room that was cramped and dark and slick with wetness. But you had always been of the void, of the space and the nothingness, and so the solidity of existence startled you. You kicked, desperate to free yourself from the cramped room. Your carrier–the one who would later call herself your mother–lurched forward and leaked amniotic fluid down her thighs.
“The baby is coming!” she screamed and we heard her words as muffled shouts from a faraway place. We were stilled by this sensation of hearing and knowing that we were now newly capable of hearing. But you, utterly alone in mortality and smothered in claustrophobia, were startled by the sound and you kicked again.
Your carrier had only just begun to leave for the hospital down in Okigwe when, at the doorway, you slid smoothly out of her.
We bristled with rage and grief and the many unnamed emotions for which human language could not encompass, because you had–through your birth–chosen mortality over Us. In the doorway between Us and them, we waited for you to choose and you chose them. Your betrayal startled Us–because we had never known a thing like it, a selfishness so profound, it washed Us away.
She christened you Obiajulu; meaning a calmed heart, a heart at rest. And we laughed at the irony.
As a child you did not know how to sit still in your own skin. Your mother was worried by this and your father was gently amused. They did not understand that mortal existence was a new thing for you, a temporary thing. And because it was impermanent, you wished to savor it. This desire was heightened even more by Our songs which assailed you at night. In the comfort of your dreams, we sang for you to return, for you to choose Us, to make Us whole again. We sang and sang and your heart was lulled by our melody and began to rest. But always, you wrenched your consciousness away from our symphonies and willed your heart to beat again. Every night you fought to remain in existence. And we were wounded by your resistance, by the starkness of your wickedness. You were aware of our grief and our contrition, aware of our emptiness, and yet you remained.
Sometimes, when our sadness took on the quality of rage, we accessed what little influence we had over the human world and strove to take you by force.
When you were four and we heard–through your ears–your mother say that she would take you for baptism and give you a proper Christian name, we took hold of a mosquito and inflicted you with a malaria so severe, your mother feared–and we rejoiced–that you would die. Because we knew even then that naming you in a foreign tongue would sever you from Us, cause you to become independent of our unity. But you did not die and we sulked in our failure.
When you were nine, we enchanted a butterfly to draw your attention away. We danced around your head and perched teasingly on your nose and whenever you sought to catch us, we danced out of your reach. In that way, we teased and danced you away into the roadside where a speeding lorry, whose driver’s legs we had temporarily paralyzed to stop him from reaching the brakes, barreled towards you. We were sure of our plan, confident that you would surely die. But your mother—a quirk we had not predicted in our plan—leaped across the road and pulled you to safety. Later, when everyone applauded her for her heroism, we watched her smile and heard her say, “When it comes to a child, there is nothing a parent cannot do,” and we seethed.
When you were fourteen, we realized how very foolish we had been. How shortsighted we were. Death would never take you of her own accord. You were an offspring of Ndú, a descendant of the mother, and death would never strip Ndú’s child of her very own essence. Not unless that child asked for it. And so, in that age of blossoming puberty, we sat in the corners of your head, mimicked the sound of your own voice, and painted the world in bleakness.
ii.
If Nnedi tells this story, she will tell it in this manner:
“Don’t you think Ajulu is becoming somehow these days?” She is careful not to register any alarm in her voice, and yet when her husband’s eyes meet her own from across the room where he is settled before the television in nothing but a boxer brief and an ashy white singlet, she knows that her worry has managed to seep through.
“’Somehow’ how?” he asks, his face carefully arranged into a neutral, impassive mask.
She shrugs.
“He’s just very quiet these days. Always sitting in his room. He doesn’t even watch TV anymore.” Her worry takes on the quality of urgency as she speaks. Her performative calmness seeps away and, in its stead, agitation takes hold of her.
When her husband waves away her concerns with a casually nonchalant, “You worry too much,” she knows, despite his stoicism, that he is just as worried as she is.
The day after, she calls for Obiajulu to help her in the kitchen. She expects for him to grumble, to stomp his feet and whine and delay until she shouts at him to hurry up. It is the nature of things: she calls, he complains and then he acquiesces. And so she is momentarily stunned by the presence of the beautiful child in the doorway of her kitchen. He has not argued or dallied and so she does not know what to do with the instinctive complaint that is lodged in her throat. Something has shifted in their routine and she does not know how to accommodate herself around this new and alien existence.
“Ahn Ahn, since when did you begin to respond after just one call?” There is something suggestively jocular about her tone and yet her eyes plead for him to return to usual, for this broken thing around them to mend itself.
He smiles as a response and says nothing else.
She passes a small mortar filled with yellow peppers for him to pound and he sets to the task wordlessly. She watches him pound: her fourteen-year-old son whom she had always thought, very impartially of course, to be almost too beautiful. With his skin a fine dark chocolate; his irises a glossy brown umber; his figure like a girl’s; lithe and carefully slender–she always thought her son possessed and was possessed by a graceless kind of beauty. A breakable kind of preciousness. And she fears that he has begun to break.
“So what is happening in your life these days? It’s almost as though I don’t even know my son anymore. You just keep to yourself these days.”
When his silence greets her words, she does not know if what she feels is hurt or fear or disappointment or an amalgamation of all these independent emotions into one broth of sheer helplessness. She does not know what to do in that moment. So lost is she in the severity of the bleakness that has marred her son’s life–and by extension, her own life–that she almost does not notice him say, “Nothing much. I like somebody sha.”
“Really? Who is she?” Her excitement is as new as it is large and cleansing; it slowly absolves her of the malaise that has begun to cling onto her.
She sees something flicker past his face. It is too quick for her to get a discernible identity and yet she is sure that it carries the color of uncertainty and fear.
“Just forget,” he says and continues to pound the pepper in the mortar, silent and retreating into himself.
She knows better than to pry, knows to leave him to himself in moments like this, and so she has to fight the desire to ask him more, the instinct to prise him out of his cocoon.
Years later, she will remember this memory and she will think of it as the precise moment when she lost her son.
iii.
But if you, Óbianyi, tell this story, you might tell it like this:
“If you loved me half as much as I love you…”
There is something about this moment, the sharp clarity of it, the settling reality of it, that causes me to feel as though my eyes have only just opened after a year of endless sleep. I look to the voice that speaks and it is Korede, the love of my life, the love of my many lives to come.
My essence hovers meters away from my body which is static and silent and unblinking. My body stares at Korede with such relentless blankness that even I, the incorporeal possessor of this flesh, feel a chill spread over my being. Gateways open all around me; the knife in the kitchen gleaming a sultry silver, the bottle of aspirin on the dresser, the sharp blade of the fan whirring overhead, the thick long meter of rope that is hidden beneath my clothes in the wardrobe. They sing and they call for me to choose them, to surrender myself into bliss. To return home.
I ponder very briefly–because allowing myself to ponder for too long might trigger a nostalgia for the abyss where my siblings wait for me–about which of them might be the easiest to acquiesce to. And as soon as I think it, I am stung by a sharp sense of guilt, because before me stands a man who has loved me relentlessly, who has loved me despite and regardless of myself and I have just thought of a way to leave him forever. The thought, mere as it is, is a betrayal.
I possess my lips to speak. “Finish the words, Korede. If I loved you half as much as you loved me then what?” I do not intend for my tone to come off as biting, for my words to leave my lips charged with barbed edges. They cut him, my words, I see him flinch and I loathe myself for it.
“If you loved me half as much as I loved you then you would not leave.” He sighs after he speaks, it is a small imperceptible thing but it is stained by relief. He looks nearly unburdened in that moment, as though a weight has finally fallen away from his shoulders.
“You are being selfish, Korede. It’s a freaking MFA scholarship. What am I supposed to do? Throw away my career because you’re afraid of long distance? You’re being selfish.”
“Am I? Or are you just trying to run away again, Obiajulu?” Something shifts in the air around us, something shatters, and I know that we will never fully recover from this. Carefully, I shift my essence back into my body, look at him through my own eyes and try to hold onto the unfurling threads of what I have newly become in the presence of his words.
“What are you talking about?” I ask the question carefully, tentatively. And although I know the answer to that question, I fear that his words might cause them to manifest, to become tangible and permanent.
“You are always running away, Ajulu. Running from your family, you don’t even visit your parents anymore. You pretend not to notice whenever your mother calls. And you can say it’s because you’re gay and they’re conservative all you want, but we both know that it runs far deeper than that. You run away from friends, you don’t even attend any social hangouts. You even run away from yourself. Sometimes I sit with you and I know that you are not here with me. Do you know how lonely that makes me feel? And now…” His voice breaks. “…Now you want to run away from me too and I don’t fucking know why. I don’t know why you can’t just stay here. Why do you always have to leave?”
Behind him, beyond the tears that he tries and fails to hold back, beyond his quivering shoulders and the sobs that bleed from his throat, I see a gateway open from the rogue wire on the switch in the wall. Beyond the gate, I see Us, my siblings of the netherworld. The family I first deserted. They see me see them. And they turn their eyes away from me.
He collects himself enough to speak once more. “You are always running, Ajulu. But what are you running from?”
I am flattened by the question, by the entire boundlessness of it. What am I running from? What am I running towards?
“If you decide to leave this time, I will not chase you.”
And like a breeze, he saunters away and leaves me utterly alone. I am alone with myself, present in my body, and yet I am lost. The beige walls of our apartment’s living room; the soft fur rug beneath my feet; the plush sofa on which I am seated; all these things are as familiar to me as the scars on my wrist, and yet I am so hopelessly lost in that moment.
I pick up my phone and call my mother. She answers on the third ring.
“Hello, Ajulu? O gi di’ife a? Is it really you?” Her voice is marred by a grand, unperformed surprise, as though she cannot believe that I have called her of my own volition. In the distance, I hear my father’s frail voice ask, “Is that Obiajulu?”
Then I dissolve into tears.
Chidera Solomon Anikpe is a young, queer, Nigerian storyteller and student. He is currently in his third year of studying Literatures in English at the University of Jos, Plateau state, Nigeria. He can be reached via Twitter at @Dera_writes or via email at chideraanikpe(at)gmail(dot)com.
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