Tales of many aches
i.
They are asking you what your story is; their voices are like echoes, subjecting you to an inquisition about your past life. A life encrusted with all the shadows of the dark cloud, the dimness of thick nights. They are asking about a life abounding with haunting memories that are so difficult to reminisce about. Many a moonlight has wandered down the sky like meteor showers, many a brilliant star has died, and many a spirit has dined with their ancestors since your last time down that path, but you still feel the ache deep inside you each time you close your eyes to recollect the events of that sullen existence. It is an existence you want to forget—the memories of stones, rods, and blood.
"Why are you here, young as you are? What is your story? Tell us." They are pressing on and on, hinting at their impatience with the uneven changes in their inflections.
But how do you tell them all the tales of the stench of evil, of abomination, and of abnormality? How do you look them in the eyes and betray the familial love with which they adore you? How do you defile this holy sanctuary—in which you all have made deep bonds, formed fatuous jokes and choked on your throaty laughs—with the pungency of a single story? After their faces have frowned at you, your conscience will prick you to a second death. This you know for a fact from many firsthand experiences.
They are asking again and again. Again and again, they are whining about their grievances. They are grumbling and growling at you. Again and again. Tell us! Tell us!
Fine. You will indulge them. You will tell them. All of it. Not sparing even a sole line in your tales. You will wear down their ears with the steam of heat. Of course, squinting eyes may pierce through yours in disbelief. Wrinkled noses may slope upward in disgust. And wagging tongues may rain curses. But you will still tell it regardless. You will weave your story into a string of truths to preserve the truth for those to come. Those who would bear a lot of yours - a pale, coarse shade of grey and black.
So, when it's night and darkness has befallen the surface of the sky, when the sound of the earth is still silence, you will summon them all and tell it all. Unto the deep of the deep, you will dig down and relive these memories that haunt the fulcrum of your soul. If you die again, you die the last.
ii.
You can't tell this story without starting from its inception, from the time of a birth marked by present joy and latter sorrow, a bittersweet birth. It happened when the spirits of the night had risen from their rest, when the caskets that were laid had got cracks and the restless dead roamed the earth. Your mother, after countless pushes supported by deafening shrieks, forced you down the passage of her womb, out of her tight vagina, into a dim darkness you didn't consent to. You were her first, and the world was dark, but you brightened their world, all of them: your father, your mother, your Aunty Chioma, and your Nne nke ukwuu. They held you in their hands, looked at you with the glitter of pearls and smiled till their faces threatened to split apart. They adored you, loved you, and cherished you—while they could. Often, they would toss you in the air and catch you in a warm embrace, giggling as you giggled and singing as you cried. Often, they would eulogize you with all the offerings on their lips. Olu gbajie girls. Nwa nwoke mara mma. Oyiri nna ya, they would say. Your Nne nke ukwuu would sing to you one of her favorite songs.
Muna bekee, ekwela dotti metu gi
dotti metu gi, i were ncha sa-apu ya
onye mara mma ga-alu gi
onye ocha ga-alu gi
lolo ga-alu gi.
Then, you didn't know what she sang about, but you enjoyed the enthusiasm with which she sang what she sang. Years passed, and five came. Five, the age of knowing. Five, the age of feeling.
You were five when Uncle Chima knocked on the door that afternoon. You and the table and your colour books were eating the beans your mother served you in your small, brown plate. You loved sharing, so you shared your food with everything close to you when you ate. Your mother called it waste, but your hands were too tiny to avoid those wastes so you let them be. When you heard the knock, soft and fuzzy, you stood up at once and ran to the door with all the force your legs could muster, your half-finished meal falling out of the plate and spreading over the dining table.
"Munachi, be careful," your mother's voice ejected from the kitchen, making no difference to your reckless moves.
You stood on tiptoes and twisted the doorknob to the left to open the door—a chore you voluntarily took upon yourself, one you would fight anyone for if denied the right to carry out.
You looked up at him—a big, tall man standing at the door.
"Obu onye?," your Nne nke ukwuu asked from the sitting room.
"Nne, it's a biiig man." You stretched the word big, and the man laughed.
"Big gi kwa," your Nne nke ukwuu said.
You would later know that he was your mother's youngest brother. He came from Owerri where he had just finished his NYSC programme and was in search of a job. He will be staying in your home for the meantime and will be running errands at your father's workplace to keep body and soul together as he looks for better opportunities. At first, you did not like him because of how he smelled whenever he returned home from work—heat, sweat, and dust. But you began liking him when he started buying you Cheese Ball, Speedy Biscuit, Digestive Biscuit, Ribinna, and sometimes Capri-sonne. And because you did not know how to accept kindness without feeling indebted, you would take one of your father's bottles of perfume that he no longer used and put it in Uncle Chima's work bag. You were still five and very mischievous. Very, very mischievous, your father would say, and Nne nke ukwuu would in your defense quote something about an apple not falling far from its tree, and everyone would laugh. Uncle Chima understood this gesture of yours and took your silent advice. He began smelling nice whenever he went to and returned from work.
One day, he hugged you at the door when you welcomed him home. It was this hug, warm and full, that changed everything and made your heart bubble so hard behind the wall of your chest. Though, prior to that day, you had begun to feel something subtle when with him, the hug pronounced the feelings and punctuated them with all the exclamation marks in English Language. Seven, and you knew you shouldn't feel what you felt for him. It was something your subconscious had come to know from watching all the cartoons on Silver Bird, OnTV and Galaxy where such things only happened between the female lead character and the male lead character. But there you were, male as you were, reveling in the warmth of Uncle Chima's hug.
iii.
You were nine when you learnt the words for what you felt for your captain, Olumide —affection, some movie characters called it; infatuation, as some book characters said—only that those words were quite difficult for you to understand. They confused your puerile brain and you mixed them up, but thanks to your father's big Oxford dictionary that lay on the shelf in the master's bedroom, and thanks also to Aunty Chioma, who differentiated them for you, you were able to tell what one was from the other. But whether affection or infatuation, you knew it was the same feeling you had felt for Uncle Chima. Olumide reminded you very well of him—a much younger version, though.
You knew you would never again cry the way you did on the day Uncle Chima got married to his Ghanaian wife. That pouring of streaming salty water down your cheeks had to be the last of its kind, because what again would incite it? What would pierce deeper into your bones than the extremity of pain that plunged at your heart that day? What would be so severe as to teach you at such an early age that this kind of affection was to be buried in the depths of your midriff? It was not to be known, seen, or acknowledged.
So, with Olumide, you applied all the wisdom in the world. You would not look him in the eyes for more than a second because they burnt yours like wildfire. You would not stand close to him because your body would voluntarily gravitate towards him against your will. Even though he was the only boy who spoke to you in your class and did not call you names formed out of your eccentric nature, even though he would always ask if you had done your homework before demanding to have everyone's book for submission, even though, unlike the other boys, he would allow you on his team when playing ice and water, you still avoided him like a pest. You ran far from him because boys were not supposed to feel this way for other boys and because your heart had known the pain that comes from a silent, one-sided attraction like this.
Olumide was soft, sweet, and kind, not like the other Yoruba boys who made fun of the Igbo boys and their native names. He was the same age as you but acted older. A friend to everyone; sometimes distant, sometimes close, but still a friend in a way. A peacemaker. A happy soul.
To all the humans like Olumide who do not see effeminate boys like me as prey, as an object of ridicule, and as a piece of clothing to dust off one's weaknesses,
To all the humans who embrace us in our fullness, who do not impose on us the pressure to perform, to impress, but to be and breathe,
To all the humans who do not take their being kind to us a favour that needs to be reciprocated,
You are the real heroes, the human gods on earth.
Peace be unto you and every ground you walk on.
May the earth serve you well.
You wrote in your journal, with hands trembling from emotions. It was your twelfth birthday, but you were not celebrating; you were not smiling and saying a warm thank you to happy birthday wishes. Instead, you were in your room, drowned in tears and hurt, crying out your eyes over yet another year to endure all the unfair treatments from the other boys and girls, from teachers and neighbours.
iv.
The crescent moon had appeared and the crickets were crying from the cold soil after the first August rain. The night was as cold as ice, sending crisp winds through the cracked walls and broken windows. The smell of an omen drifted around your room in a breeze, and you could feel your skin freeze in terror on your bones and your breath grow heavy around your nostrils. You no longer felt safe anymore and the world was whirling around your head. Your vision blurred and your mind was thick with haze.
School has always been a trauma. A deep, muddy pit where you sank in. But school that day was more than just trauma and a pit. It had tasted like the intermixture of acid and otapiapia, bleach and petrol, and all the other things your mother kept out of your reach when you were younger. In other words, school that day was a slow, gradual, and painful demise.
You were on the assembly line when Mr. Tunde, your mathematics teacher, called you a fag.
"Hey, that boy over there." His voice thundered. Everyone turned, including you.
"I'm talking to you, the boy, like the letter i." His index finger pointed toward you.
"No, not you, Ahmed. I mean the fag. The boy behind you," he yelled, and over a thousand kids burst out laughing, their gleeful eyes resting on you.
Fag! That became your name ever since. The fag boy!
When you submitted your books for marking, someone would paste on the name section a piece of paper with The fag boy boldly scrawled on it, covering your well written Munachi Daniel Obialisi.
Often, when you went to the toilet, some gangs of boys accosted you—different gangs on different days—squeezing and squeezing your penis beneath your trousers, wanting to make sure you indeed had the organ that made one a man, and if you indeed had it, why were you behaving like a girl? Why did your fingers flap back and forth like a flag when you spoke? Are you homo?
Na homo e be na. You no see as e dey talk. You no see as e dey cross leg wen e dey waka, they would all say. What they didn't know was that every day when you returned home from school, you would stand in front of the mirror in your room and rehearse walking with a new gait, a lopsided kind, one that made you look like those beggars on the Expressway hopping on a single leg. You had bought local gins from a kiosk down the road one time and had once attempted to smoke a cigarette to thicken your voice. But, since you were you and were not acting, since you did not choose the texture of your voice yourself and did not deliberately cross your legs against each other when you walked, nothing changed! Not a single bit of you was altered by all those efforts you made to be different from what you already were.
So, when they said those shits they said and did those things they did to you, you would want to scream at them and tell them to leave you the hell alone for goodness sake. But your voice would betray you; your voice would hide behind your oesophagus, taking shelter while your flesh suffered from blows and slaps. Your voice would run so far away from the present that, even after those experiences, it would still not be able to speak up. You would still not be able to relate to others the pain you felt in your chest because, you see, your voice was guilty too. Guilty, because it betrayed you when you needed it the most. Hence, silence became your comfort. Your new found peace.
In those nights, you choked on your cry. You soaked your pillows with the tears of your eyes and soiled your white singlets with the mucus running down your nose. After hours of crying, you would begin to hiccup on your silent sobs, your lips quivering uncontrollably, and your body shaking to the wave of fear. And your head would say: End it all. Make it stop. There's a knife in your mother's kitchen.
You were thirteen.
v.
Fourteen came. Fifteen came. And your smothering room was gradually becoming a tomb. Nocturnal birds had begun flocking on your windowsill, their chirps summoning you to the realm of the afterlife:
The purple hibiscus has scorched to grass
The crops are now weeds
The blue sky is a faint grey
And half the yellow sun has faded away
The other half is a pale beige
What is left of you in this place?
Come, let's travel into the night
to the other side of the world
Come, you friendless soul, lonely as a deserted unicorn
Come unto eternal bliss and rest in the bosom of the spirits.
You would sense them sing in short, sharp notes every night. But suddenly, your mother's Psalm 91 vs 16 would ring in your head: With a long life, I will satisfy you and show you my salvation.
Salvation. You craved salvation. You needed that saving grace to grab you out of it all—your thick world and the fume that gyrated around it.
And so you would kneel beside your bed, close your eyes, and clasp your hands. Then the words would flow. They would pour and pour as you begged Him to save you, change you, correct you, and make you normal—like the other boys.
But the more you prayed, the more you questioned. Didn't the Holy Book say that He made us in His own image and likeness? Didn't it say that we are His Blessed children from the lineage of Father Abraham? Or was He like this, too?
Confusion hit you from the many questions gnawing at your mind. No, you must pray! You must break your spirit, rip off your garment, wear sack clothes, and cover yourself in ashes like the Israelites did for many years before He took pity on them and saved them from King Pharaoh.
But how many years are left before He saves you? Two, three, four—you couldn't tell, but you could pray. You were fifteen and prayer was your modus operandi, 'Lord, change me' your mantra. So you kept praying until your tongue soured from wailing the same words over and over. Change me. Change me. Please, change me.
vi.
It was three days after your eighteenth birthday. Your mother was in the sitting room applying methylated balm on your Nne nke ukwuu's back, the pressure from her hands causing your Nne nke ukwuu to moan.
"E wo. Nne jiri ya nwayoo. O na-egbu mgbu." Take it easy. It's painful.
"Ndo. Ka m mee ya ka o la ngwa ngwa," your mother consoled her.
The TV screen was showing a blonde woman wearing a red lipstick too deep for her skin tone, her accent rolling the r's in her words around her tongue, her name—Karen Raine, CNN Reporter—written in bold letters at the bottom of the screen.
Your father's attention was focused on what she was saying, his buttocks partly resting on the edge of the one-seater sofa. Occasionally, he would jolt and roar his objection to something she'd said that didn't align with his opinion.
"Joe Biden is of no good to the United States. That man is abominable to the highest order," he yelled at her again.
"Why do you think so, dad?" You asked him.
"His view of the world contradicts the standard norms of nature. America doesn't need such a confused personality as her president."
"How so?" You pressed on.
He hesitated, contemplating the gravity of what he was about to say, then uttered.
"Funny how the man thinks it's okay for people of the same sex to have carnal knowledge of one another and get married if they so wish." His voice conveyed the bitterness surging in him.
Your mother shook her head and snapped her fingers. "Tufiakwa. Aru."
"But what crime do they commit in so doing?" You asked. "It's not like they are hurting anyone, or how does what they do affect society at large?" Your tiny voice rang around the sitting room and hung in the air.
Everyone averted their gaze from the screen and rested them heavily on you, their eyes terrified by mild suspicion.
"Doesn't that sound like Sodom and Gomorrah to you? How quickly have you forgotten your Bible stories?" Aunty Chioma, who was once engrossed with her phone, fumed at you."
"I think, for Sodom and Gomorrah, the case was different," you countered. "Theirs was making amorous advances at the angels—divine entities—which was an utter disregard for God. And I also think that, if it were women who had done that, God would as well not spare them." A sharp gut swelled in you, distorting your voice into a sound you couldn't recognize as yours.
"What have you been reading, young man?" Aunty Chioma flared up. "Didn't we agree on decent young adult novels and Ben Carson's Memoirs only? Where is all this bullshit coming from?" She fired at you, her eyes glistening with anger. "See, I don't know what you have in mind, but let me tell you, homosexuality is evil, and Nigeria does not and will never condone it."
"That's okay, achalugo." Your mother interfered, resting a hand on her shoulder. "Nna, don't mind your aunty." Her other hand reached out to you. "She doesn't know that you're only practicing your barrister skills as a future lawyer. Come here, my honourable judge." She squeezed you in her arms, her jaw resting on your head.
Your father cleared his throat as he recovered from the apprehension that had held him still.
"Munachi, have you prayed your rosary today?" He asked.
"No, dad. I will before I go to bed."
"Good. Ask God to forgive you for supporting evil."
You withered away. Gradually.
vii.
It was on the yellow app where you met Chijioke. Bare chest flecked with tiny hairs. Deep, dark eyes submerged in warmth. Full brown lips stretched wide in a smile. You tapped on his profile. 24. Sapiosexual. Recluse. And then slid into his DM.
Hey beefcake. You typed, deleted, typed again, and contemplated before clicking on the send icon.
A few minutes passed. A notification popped up. It was from him. You whiled away some minutes before viewing his text.
Okay, this has got to be the best intro I've gotten on this app in the past two days😊. His text read.
You blushed.
What's the worst you've got? Tell me. You sent, and regretted you did.
So a dude just started off with, 'can you fuck me?' Imagine that. His reply came in.
You sighed, relieved that it didn't go the wrong way.
Hell no! That's so crude. You typed and added an emoji that looked closest to 'unbelievable'.
I just viewed your profile. It's interesting. And you are damn beautyful. He texted.
Beautyful. You glanced at the mirror and smiled hard.
Thank you. I love the word Beautyful. I'm Munachi BTW.
Pardon me. I should be the one taking the lead. I'm Chijioke. He replied.
You are forgiven.
You sat up on your bed and bit half your lower lip, a smile brightening your face.
So what's Munachi like on a good day? His text came in almost immediately.
You could feel your lungs taking breath again and your heart beating to the rhythm of life. You felt alive, like the risen Christ, and your fingers began drumming rapidly on the keyboard. Your face bloomed with delight, and your cheeks puffed with a smile that refused to end. Conversations swirled and swirled until the clock ticked 2 a.m. Three hours and forty minutes, you reckoned.
Weeks later, you were in his arms, your head pressed against the hard wall of his chest, his hands wrapped around you in a hug. The masculine smell of him filled you up with all the pleasures of desire—the yearning for more of him.
Chijioke touched you in all the ways you wanted to be touched. The way his hands exalted your body made you start loving the many flaws your body bore. His hands were magical, causing healing for your most painful aches. His lips on yours were like fire and water at the same time, burning and cooling. His voice, calling out your name in a gasp, was the mildest and fiercest thing you'd ever known. How it would come out like a fluff, yet shake the core of your heart down to your midriff, leaving you trembling against him with emotions surging from within. His tongue on your ears, neck and nipples had a way of making you pull his head closer and scream his name. He made you alive in many different ways, and you loved him more than you had thought you'd love the man who made you feel this way.
For Chijioke, the anchor of this body.
For Chijioke, the comfort to this ache.
For Chijioke, the flame that ignites this soul to life.
For Chijioke, my heart beats.
You entered in your journal the night when his body and yours knotted in a covenant of togetherness forever, when he told you he wanted so badly to do the rest of his life with you, to make memories and tell stories with you, to cry all the cries to come and laugh all the croaky laughs over trifling jokes with you and you and only you. It was the night when you made promises of perpetuity to each other in the dark of his room. The night of a new beginning.
viii.
You want to end your story here because a sticky clump is hanging somewhere in your throat and obstructing the passage of air in your lungs. You are struggling to tell them that this is the farthest you can go and that your soul cannot help it. But they are saying to you, "Your story is safe with us." Their hands are clutching your shoulders and their eyes are holding yours in a firm gaze. One of them, Orunshewa, the fairest in the group, picks up the wooden censer and tosses it around you. The incense wafts into your nostrils, soothing your soul to a height of rest.
"Munachi, the beautiful one. The one with eyes that sparkle like the stars at night. The one with a voice like honey and a smile the radiance of the morning star, tell your story. Tell it with the wisdom and bravery of an old soul. Fear not, for the eldest spirit of the night, Nwanyi agbara, would preserve you and your truth," they are chanting and clapping in unison, their voices a cacophonous sound of strength.
"Twenty came. The age of dying," you gasp, and silence engulfs the atmosphere. The sound of chirping, antsy animals penetrates the air.
ix.
The day you died, the world felt like every other day. The sky was at its brightest, a blanket of brilliant blue. The sun had smiled cheerfully and was resigning from the day's work, entrusting the evening to the moon. Chijioke had called to say he would be taking you to the newly-opened bar at Okigwe Avenue and that you should dress up in those red shorts that revealed your hairy thighs, the ones he told you looked good on you.
This was something he did very often, calling you and telling you to dress up for a hangout. You argued about him being a prodigal with his spending and how the intimacy of his room was just perfect, but Chijioke had always insisted on showing the world a different way love could exist. He'd always wanted to scream in the air about this thing you both shared. So you conceded.
In the bar, beer was pouring freely and the music was deafening. Ladies swayed their waists to the rhythms of languorous tunes, their silhouettes shimmering under the artificial lights. Guys ground their groins against buttocks, their intrusive hands gripping hips and smacking boobs. The whole place was full of activity.
In the dark corner of your table, Chijioke had stealthily leaned forward and planted a kiss on your cheek when everything suddenly flashed in a haze. At first, curses and ridicules hurled at you both, then slaps and blows on your faces, then stones and rods to your bones, then blood spurting out of the crown of your heads, then your voices begged to be spared, promising that you were not GAYbriels as they claimed; you were only brothers. Such heights of denial of self!
But they didn't listen to your many pleas. They savored your tears and relished your anguish. A second crucifixion must happen; the dying for the sins of the others—a million evil boys like you taking refuge in the closet. One at a time, they too, shall be wasted. But for now, this was your turn. You and Chijioke.
x.
You stood up. Surprisingly, you felt nothing. There were no pains in your bones. There was no ache in your head. No blood. You were grateful for the grace to live again and a chance to love him again, Chijioke.
You saw your mother, your father, your Aunty Chioma, and your Nne nke ukwuu crying. They tossed themselves on the floor, summoning their beloved to life.
You ran to them, telling them not to cry and that it was all okay now. But they wouldn't stop. They kept crying even more as you solaced them. Then it clocked; they couldn't hear you.
On your mother's lap was your identical lookalike, cold and torpid, drenched in a pool of red. And right next to her lay the same dark, brawny body that once tangled with yours and taught you how to live and love. To breathe in a world of infernos. You knew it was all over when you touched his lifeless body. You knew It was finished. Perhaps this was a much better way to end it all—sharing a death with your lover.
BIO:
Princewill Ibe writes from Lagos, Nigeria. His works rebelliously employ themes of queerness, feminism, sexism, patriarchy, racism, ableism, and religious extremism. When he is not writing, he is fantasizing about a world void of mundanity—just books, music, art—or perhaps musing upon the future with uncertainty.
They are asking you what your story is; their voices are like echoes, subjecting you to an inquisition about your past life. A life encrusted with all the shadows of the dark cloud, the dimness of thick nights. They are asking about a life abounding with haunting memories that are so difficult to reminisce about. Many a moonlight has wandered down the sky like meteor showers, many a brilliant star has died, and many a spirit has dined with their ancestors since your last time down that path, but you still feel the ache deep inside you each time you close your eyes to recollect the events of that sullen existence. It is an existence you want to forget—the memories of stones, rods, and blood.
"Why are you here, young as you are? What is your story? Tell us." They are pressing on and on, hinting at their impatience with the uneven changes in their inflections.
But how do you tell them all the tales of the stench of evil, of abomination, and of abnormality? How do you look them in the eyes and betray the familial love with which they adore you? How do you defile this holy sanctuary—in which you all have made deep bonds, formed fatuous jokes and choked on your throaty laughs—with the pungency of a single story? After their faces have frowned at you, your conscience will prick you to a second death. This you know for a fact from many firsthand experiences.
They are asking again and again. Again and again, they are whining about their grievances. They are grumbling and growling at you. Again and again. Tell us! Tell us!
Fine. You will indulge them. You will tell them. All of it. Not sparing even a sole line in your tales. You will wear down their ears with the steam of heat. Of course, squinting eyes may pierce through yours in disbelief. Wrinkled noses may slope upward in disgust. And wagging tongues may rain curses. But you will still tell it regardless. You will weave your story into a string of truths to preserve the truth for those to come. Those who would bear a lot of yours - a pale, coarse shade of grey and black.
So, when it's night and darkness has befallen the surface of the sky, when the sound of the earth is still silence, you will summon them all and tell it all. Unto the deep of the deep, you will dig down and relive these memories that haunt the fulcrum of your soul. If you die again, you die the last.
ii.
You can't tell this story without starting from its inception, from the time of a birth marked by present joy and latter sorrow, a bittersweet birth. It happened when the spirits of the night had risen from their rest, when the caskets that were laid had got cracks and the restless dead roamed the earth. Your mother, after countless pushes supported by deafening shrieks, forced you down the passage of her womb, out of her tight vagina, into a dim darkness you didn't consent to. You were her first, and the world was dark, but you brightened their world, all of them: your father, your mother, your Aunty Chioma, and your Nne nke ukwuu. They held you in their hands, looked at you with the glitter of pearls and smiled till their faces threatened to split apart. They adored you, loved you, and cherished you—while they could. Often, they would toss you in the air and catch you in a warm embrace, giggling as you giggled and singing as you cried. Often, they would eulogize you with all the offerings on their lips. Olu gbajie girls. Nwa nwoke mara mma. Oyiri nna ya, they would say. Your Nne nke ukwuu would sing to you one of her favorite songs.
Muna bekee, ekwela dotti metu gi
dotti metu gi, i were ncha sa-apu ya
onye mara mma ga-alu gi
onye ocha ga-alu gi
lolo ga-alu gi.
Then, you didn't know what she sang about, but you enjoyed the enthusiasm with which she sang what she sang. Years passed, and five came. Five, the age of knowing. Five, the age of feeling.
You were five when Uncle Chima knocked on the door that afternoon. You and the table and your colour books were eating the beans your mother served you in your small, brown plate. You loved sharing, so you shared your food with everything close to you when you ate. Your mother called it waste, but your hands were too tiny to avoid those wastes so you let them be. When you heard the knock, soft and fuzzy, you stood up at once and ran to the door with all the force your legs could muster, your half-finished meal falling out of the plate and spreading over the dining table.
"Munachi, be careful," your mother's voice ejected from the kitchen, making no difference to your reckless moves.
You stood on tiptoes and twisted the doorknob to the left to open the door—a chore you voluntarily took upon yourself, one you would fight anyone for if denied the right to carry out.
You looked up at him—a big, tall man standing at the door.
"Obu onye?," your Nne nke ukwuu asked from the sitting room.
"Nne, it's a biiig man." You stretched the word big, and the man laughed.
"Big gi kwa," your Nne nke ukwuu said.
You would later know that he was your mother's youngest brother. He came from Owerri where he had just finished his NYSC programme and was in search of a job. He will be staying in your home for the meantime and will be running errands at your father's workplace to keep body and soul together as he looks for better opportunities. At first, you did not like him because of how he smelled whenever he returned home from work—heat, sweat, and dust. But you began liking him when he started buying you Cheese Ball, Speedy Biscuit, Digestive Biscuit, Ribinna, and sometimes Capri-sonne. And because you did not know how to accept kindness without feeling indebted, you would take one of your father's bottles of perfume that he no longer used and put it in Uncle Chima's work bag. You were still five and very mischievous. Very, very mischievous, your father would say, and Nne nke ukwuu would in your defense quote something about an apple not falling far from its tree, and everyone would laugh. Uncle Chima understood this gesture of yours and took your silent advice. He began smelling nice whenever he went to and returned from work.
One day, he hugged you at the door when you welcomed him home. It was this hug, warm and full, that changed everything and made your heart bubble so hard behind the wall of your chest. Though, prior to that day, you had begun to feel something subtle when with him, the hug pronounced the feelings and punctuated them with all the exclamation marks in English Language. Seven, and you knew you shouldn't feel what you felt for him. It was something your subconscious had come to know from watching all the cartoons on Silver Bird, OnTV and Galaxy where such things only happened between the female lead character and the male lead character. But there you were, male as you were, reveling in the warmth of Uncle Chima's hug.
iii.
You were nine when you learnt the words for what you felt for your captain, Olumide —affection, some movie characters called it; infatuation, as some book characters said—only that those words were quite difficult for you to understand. They confused your puerile brain and you mixed them up, but thanks to your father's big Oxford dictionary that lay on the shelf in the master's bedroom, and thanks also to Aunty Chioma, who differentiated them for you, you were able to tell what one was from the other. But whether affection or infatuation, you knew it was the same feeling you had felt for Uncle Chima. Olumide reminded you very well of him—a much younger version, though.
You knew you would never again cry the way you did on the day Uncle Chima got married to his Ghanaian wife. That pouring of streaming salty water down your cheeks had to be the last of its kind, because what again would incite it? What would pierce deeper into your bones than the extremity of pain that plunged at your heart that day? What would be so severe as to teach you at such an early age that this kind of affection was to be buried in the depths of your midriff? It was not to be known, seen, or acknowledged.
So, with Olumide, you applied all the wisdom in the world. You would not look him in the eyes for more than a second because they burnt yours like wildfire. You would not stand close to him because your body would voluntarily gravitate towards him against your will. Even though he was the only boy who spoke to you in your class and did not call you names formed out of your eccentric nature, even though he would always ask if you had done your homework before demanding to have everyone's book for submission, even though, unlike the other boys, he would allow you on his team when playing ice and water, you still avoided him like a pest. You ran far from him because boys were not supposed to feel this way for other boys and because your heart had known the pain that comes from a silent, one-sided attraction like this.
Olumide was soft, sweet, and kind, not like the other Yoruba boys who made fun of the Igbo boys and their native names. He was the same age as you but acted older. A friend to everyone; sometimes distant, sometimes close, but still a friend in a way. A peacemaker. A happy soul.
To all the humans like Olumide who do not see effeminate boys like me as prey, as an object of ridicule, and as a piece of clothing to dust off one's weaknesses,
To all the humans who embrace us in our fullness, who do not impose on us the pressure to perform, to impress, but to be and breathe,
To all the humans who do not take their being kind to us a favour that needs to be reciprocated,
You are the real heroes, the human gods on earth.
Peace be unto you and every ground you walk on.
May the earth serve you well.
You wrote in your journal, with hands trembling from emotions. It was your twelfth birthday, but you were not celebrating; you were not smiling and saying a warm thank you to happy birthday wishes. Instead, you were in your room, drowned in tears and hurt, crying out your eyes over yet another year to endure all the unfair treatments from the other boys and girls, from teachers and neighbours.
iv.
The crescent moon had appeared and the crickets were crying from the cold soil after the first August rain. The night was as cold as ice, sending crisp winds through the cracked walls and broken windows. The smell of an omen drifted around your room in a breeze, and you could feel your skin freeze in terror on your bones and your breath grow heavy around your nostrils. You no longer felt safe anymore and the world was whirling around your head. Your vision blurred and your mind was thick with haze.
School has always been a trauma. A deep, muddy pit where you sank in. But school that day was more than just trauma and a pit. It had tasted like the intermixture of acid and otapiapia, bleach and petrol, and all the other things your mother kept out of your reach when you were younger. In other words, school that day was a slow, gradual, and painful demise.
You were on the assembly line when Mr. Tunde, your mathematics teacher, called you a fag.
"Hey, that boy over there." His voice thundered. Everyone turned, including you.
"I'm talking to you, the boy, like the letter i." His index finger pointed toward you.
"No, not you, Ahmed. I mean the fag. The boy behind you," he yelled, and over a thousand kids burst out laughing, their gleeful eyes resting on you.
Fag! That became your name ever since. The fag boy!
When you submitted your books for marking, someone would paste on the name section a piece of paper with The fag boy boldly scrawled on it, covering your well written Munachi Daniel Obialisi.
Often, when you went to the toilet, some gangs of boys accosted you—different gangs on different days—squeezing and squeezing your penis beneath your trousers, wanting to make sure you indeed had the organ that made one a man, and if you indeed had it, why were you behaving like a girl? Why did your fingers flap back and forth like a flag when you spoke? Are you homo?
Na homo e be na. You no see as e dey talk. You no see as e dey cross leg wen e dey waka, they would all say. What they didn't know was that every day when you returned home from school, you would stand in front of the mirror in your room and rehearse walking with a new gait, a lopsided kind, one that made you look like those beggars on the Expressway hopping on a single leg. You had bought local gins from a kiosk down the road one time and had once attempted to smoke a cigarette to thicken your voice. But, since you were you and were not acting, since you did not choose the texture of your voice yourself and did not deliberately cross your legs against each other when you walked, nothing changed! Not a single bit of you was altered by all those efforts you made to be different from what you already were.
So, when they said those shits they said and did those things they did to you, you would want to scream at them and tell them to leave you the hell alone for goodness sake. But your voice would betray you; your voice would hide behind your oesophagus, taking shelter while your flesh suffered from blows and slaps. Your voice would run so far away from the present that, even after those experiences, it would still not be able to speak up. You would still not be able to relate to others the pain you felt in your chest because, you see, your voice was guilty too. Guilty, because it betrayed you when you needed it the most. Hence, silence became your comfort. Your new found peace.
In those nights, you choked on your cry. You soaked your pillows with the tears of your eyes and soiled your white singlets with the mucus running down your nose. After hours of crying, you would begin to hiccup on your silent sobs, your lips quivering uncontrollably, and your body shaking to the wave of fear. And your head would say: End it all. Make it stop. There's a knife in your mother's kitchen.
You were thirteen.
v.
Fourteen came. Fifteen came. And your smothering room was gradually becoming a tomb. Nocturnal birds had begun flocking on your windowsill, their chirps summoning you to the realm of the afterlife:
The purple hibiscus has scorched to grass
The crops are now weeds
The blue sky is a faint grey
And half the yellow sun has faded away
The other half is a pale beige
What is left of you in this place?
Come, let's travel into the night
to the other side of the world
Come, you friendless soul, lonely as a deserted unicorn
Come unto eternal bliss and rest in the bosom of the spirits.
You would sense them sing in short, sharp notes every night. But suddenly, your mother's Psalm 91 vs 16 would ring in your head: With a long life, I will satisfy you and show you my salvation.
Salvation. You craved salvation. You needed that saving grace to grab you out of it all—your thick world and the fume that gyrated around it.
And so you would kneel beside your bed, close your eyes, and clasp your hands. Then the words would flow. They would pour and pour as you begged Him to save you, change you, correct you, and make you normal—like the other boys.
But the more you prayed, the more you questioned. Didn't the Holy Book say that He made us in His own image and likeness? Didn't it say that we are His Blessed children from the lineage of Father Abraham? Or was He like this, too?
Confusion hit you from the many questions gnawing at your mind. No, you must pray! You must break your spirit, rip off your garment, wear sack clothes, and cover yourself in ashes like the Israelites did for many years before He took pity on them and saved them from King Pharaoh.
But how many years are left before He saves you? Two, three, four—you couldn't tell, but you could pray. You were fifteen and prayer was your modus operandi, 'Lord, change me' your mantra. So you kept praying until your tongue soured from wailing the same words over and over. Change me. Change me. Please, change me.
vi.
It was three days after your eighteenth birthday. Your mother was in the sitting room applying methylated balm on your Nne nke ukwuu's back, the pressure from her hands causing your Nne nke ukwuu to moan.
"E wo. Nne jiri ya nwayoo. O na-egbu mgbu." Take it easy. It's painful.
"Ndo. Ka m mee ya ka o la ngwa ngwa," your mother consoled her.
The TV screen was showing a blonde woman wearing a red lipstick too deep for her skin tone, her accent rolling the r's in her words around her tongue, her name—Karen Raine, CNN Reporter—written in bold letters at the bottom of the screen.
Your father's attention was focused on what she was saying, his buttocks partly resting on the edge of the one-seater sofa. Occasionally, he would jolt and roar his objection to something she'd said that didn't align with his opinion.
"Joe Biden is of no good to the United States. That man is abominable to the highest order," he yelled at her again.
"Why do you think so, dad?" You asked him.
"His view of the world contradicts the standard norms of nature. America doesn't need such a confused personality as her president."
"How so?" You pressed on.
He hesitated, contemplating the gravity of what he was about to say, then uttered.
"Funny how the man thinks it's okay for people of the same sex to have carnal knowledge of one another and get married if they so wish." His voice conveyed the bitterness surging in him.
Your mother shook her head and snapped her fingers. "Tufiakwa. Aru."
"But what crime do they commit in so doing?" You asked. "It's not like they are hurting anyone, or how does what they do affect society at large?" Your tiny voice rang around the sitting room and hung in the air.
Everyone averted their gaze from the screen and rested them heavily on you, their eyes terrified by mild suspicion.
"Doesn't that sound like Sodom and Gomorrah to you? How quickly have you forgotten your Bible stories?" Aunty Chioma, who was once engrossed with her phone, fumed at you."
"I think, for Sodom and Gomorrah, the case was different," you countered. "Theirs was making amorous advances at the angels—divine entities—which was an utter disregard for God. And I also think that, if it were women who had done that, God would as well not spare them." A sharp gut swelled in you, distorting your voice into a sound you couldn't recognize as yours.
"What have you been reading, young man?" Aunty Chioma flared up. "Didn't we agree on decent young adult novels and Ben Carson's Memoirs only? Where is all this bullshit coming from?" She fired at you, her eyes glistening with anger. "See, I don't know what you have in mind, but let me tell you, homosexuality is evil, and Nigeria does not and will never condone it."
"That's okay, achalugo." Your mother interfered, resting a hand on her shoulder. "Nna, don't mind your aunty." Her other hand reached out to you. "She doesn't know that you're only practicing your barrister skills as a future lawyer. Come here, my honourable judge." She squeezed you in her arms, her jaw resting on your head.
Your father cleared his throat as he recovered from the apprehension that had held him still.
"Munachi, have you prayed your rosary today?" He asked.
"No, dad. I will before I go to bed."
"Good. Ask God to forgive you for supporting evil."
You withered away. Gradually.
vii.
It was on the yellow app where you met Chijioke. Bare chest flecked with tiny hairs. Deep, dark eyes submerged in warmth. Full brown lips stretched wide in a smile. You tapped on his profile. 24. Sapiosexual. Recluse. And then slid into his DM.
Hey beefcake. You typed, deleted, typed again, and contemplated before clicking on the send icon.
A few minutes passed. A notification popped up. It was from him. You whiled away some minutes before viewing his text.
Okay, this has got to be the best intro I've gotten on this app in the past two days😊. His text read.
You blushed.
What's the worst you've got? Tell me. You sent, and regretted you did.
So a dude just started off with, 'can you fuck me?' Imagine that. His reply came in.
You sighed, relieved that it didn't go the wrong way.
Hell no! That's so crude. You typed and added an emoji that looked closest to 'unbelievable'.
I just viewed your profile. It's interesting. And you are damn beautyful. He texted.
Beautyful. You glanced at the mirror and smiled hard.
Thank you. I love the word Beautyful. I'm Munachi BTW.
Pardon me. I should be the one taking the lead. I'm Chijioke. He replied.
You are forgiven.
You sat up on your bed and bit half your lower lip, a smile brightening your face.
So what's Munachi like on a good day? His text came in almost immediately.
You could feel your lungs taking breath again and your heart beating to the rhythm of life. You felt alive, like the risen Christ, and your fingers began drumming rapidly on the keyboard. Your face bloomed with delight, and your cheeks puffed with a smile that refused to end. Conversations swirled and swirled until the clock ticked 2 a.m. Three hours and forty minutes, you reckoned.
Weeks later, you were in his arms, your head pressed against the hard wall of his chest, his hands wrapped around you in a hug. The masculine smell of him filled you up with all the pleasures of desire—the yearning for more of him.
Chijioke touched you in all the ways you wanted to be touched. The way his hands exalted your body made you start loving the many flaws your body bore. His hands were magical, causing healing for your most painful aches. His lips on yours were like fire and water at the same time, burning and cooling. His voice, calling out your name in a gasp, was the mildest and fiercest thing you'd ever known. How it would come out like a fluff, yet shake the core of your heart down to your midriff, leaving you trembling against him with emotions surging from within. His tongue on your ears, neck and nipples had a way of making you pull his head closer and scream his name. He made you alive in many different ways, and you loved him more than you had thought you'd love the man who made you feel this way.
For Chijioke, the anchor of this body.
For Chijioke, the comfort to this ache.
For Chijioke, the flame that ignites this soul to life.
For Chijioke, my heart beats.
You entered in your journal the night when his body and yours knotted in a covenant of togetherness forever, when he told you he wanted so badly to do the rest of his life with you, to make memories and tell stories with you, to cry all the cries to come and laugh all the croaky laughs over trifling jokes with you and you and only you. It was the night when you made promises of perpetuity to each other in the dark of his room. The night of a new beginning.
viii.
You want to end your story here because a sticky clump is hanging somewhere in your throat and obstructing the passage of air in your lungs. You are struggling to tell them that this is the farthest you can go and that your soul cannot help it. But they are saying to you, "Your story is safe with us." Their hands are clutching your shoulders and their eyes are holding yours in a firm gaze. One of them, Orunshewa, the fairest in the group, picks up the wooden censer and tosses it around you. The incense wafts into your nostrils, soothing your soul to a height of rest.
"Munachi, the beautiful one. The one with eyes that sparkle like the stars at night. The one with a voice like honey and a smile the radiance of the morning star, tell your story. Tell it with the wisdom and bravery of an old soul. Fear not, for the eldest spirit of the night, Nwanyi agbara, would preserve you and your truth," they are chanting and clapping in unison, their voices a cacophonous sound of strength.
"Twenty came. The age of dying," you gasp, and silence engulfs the atmosphere. The sound of chirping, antsy animals penetrates the air.
ix.
The day you died, the world felt like every other day. The sky was at its brightest, a blanket of brilliant blue. The sun had smiled cheerfully and was resigning from the day's work, entrusting the evening to the moon. Chijioke had called to say he would be taking you to the newly-opened bar at Okigwe Avenue and that you should dress up in those red shorts that revealed your hairy thighs, the ones he told you looked good on you.
This was something he did very often, calling you and telling you to dress up for a hangout. You argued about him being a prodigal with his spending and how the intimacy of his room was just perfect, but Chijioke had always insisted on showing the world a different way love could exist. He'd always wanted to scream in the air about this thing you both shared. So you conceded.
In the bar, beer was pouring freely and the music was deafening. Ladies swayed their waists to the rhythms of languorous tunes, their silhouettes shimmering under the artificial lights. Guys ground their groins against buttocks, their intrusive hands gripping hips and smacking boobs. The whole place was full of activity.
In the dark corner of your table, Chijioke had stealthily leaned forward and planted a kiss on your cheek when everything suddenly flashed in a haze. At first, curses and ridicules hurled at you both, then slaps and blows on your faces, then stones and rods to your bones, then blood spurting out of the crown of your heads, then your voices begged to be spared, promising that you were not GAYbriels as they claimed; you were only brothers. Such heights of denial of self!
But they didn't listen to your many pleas. They savored your tears and relished your anguish. A second crucifixion must happen; the dying for the sins of the others—a million evil boys like you taking refuge in the closet. One at a time, they too, shall be wasted. But for now, this was your turn. You and Chijioke.
x.
You stood up. Surprisingly, you felt nothing. There were no pains in your bones. There was no ache in your head. No blood. You were grateful for the grace to live again and a chance to love him again, Chijioke.
You saw your mother, your father, your Aunty Chioma, and your Nne nke ukwuu crying. They tossed themselves on the floor, summoning their beloved to life.
You ran to them, telling them not to cry and that it was all okay now. But they wouldn't stop. They kept crying even more as you solaced them. Then it clocked; they couldn't hear you.
On your mother's lap was your identical lookalike, cold and torpid, drenched in a pool of red. And right next to her lay the same dark, brawny body that once tangled with yours and taught you how to live and love. To breathe in a world of infernos. You knew it was all over when you touched his lifeless body. You knew It was finished. Perhaps this was a much better way to end it all—sharing a death with your lover.
BIO:
Princewill Ibe writes from Lagos, Nigeria. His works rebelliously employ themes of queerness, feminism, sexism, patriarchy, racism, ableism, and religious extremism. When he is not writing, he is fantasizing about a world void of mundanity—just books, music, art—or perhaps musing upon the future with uncertainty.
