Cack-Handed

by Gina Yashere

  “Hmm. Okay.” My mum grudgingly conceded, because I was right. She stared long and hard at the pictures and videos of the husband she hadn’t seen in thirty-five years. “He looks old,” she said, and that was the end of the conversation.

  I told my brothers about the books containing our dad’s family history and gave them the coral beads he’d given me for them. “Here’s the deal: he really wants to speak to you guys. The ball is in your court. Here’s his number.” As I had suspected, neither brother was interested. Dele refused to even watch the videos I’d taken or look at the pictures, as he saw it as a betrayal of Mum. Sheyi, on the other hand, watched them but confessed, “I don’t want any contact with him. As a father myself, I will never understand how he just left. I don’t give a shit how many letters he wrote—he should have got on a plane and come here. You could cut my arms and legs off—I would drag myself by my lips to see my kids. I could never respect a man who never fought hard enough to see his children.”

  In an attempt to appease my father when he had asked for my brothers’ numbers, I had given him mine. My phone started blowing up regularly from the moment I landed back on British soil. He’d call repeatedly: “My sons, I want to speak to my sons. Why are my sons not calling me?” I didn’t know what to say. I was slightly irritated that he seemed to place more importance on speaking to his male progeny, though I was not surprised, what with the patriarchy of Nigerian society, and what was I supposed to tell him, anyway? “Look, your sons want nothing to do with you.” I didn’t have the heart to do that to him, so I began avoiding his calls. Whenever I saw a Nigerian number come up on my phone, I’d cringe a little and let it ring through to voicemail. It didn’t feel good.

  A year went by, and I was at Sheyi’s house when the phone rang with a Nigerian prefix. “This is our father. Do you want to talk to him?” Sheyi’s curiosity got the better of him. “Fuck it, answer the phone.” I answered and talked to our father for a little, apologizing and making excuses for my absence. He then began to lament again, “My sons, I want to talk to my sons.”

  “One of your sons is here.” I passed the phone over to Sheyi, who proceeded to have a conversation with him. I could hear the excitement in my father’s voice, in “Oh my God, my son.”

  “Nice to hear your voice,” my brother politely responded and spoke to him for a little while, making small talk about his job, his wife, his kids. When the conversation ended and my brother hung up, I asked, “Are you going to keep in contact with him?”

  “Nope,” Sheyi replied. “My curiosity is sated. I don’t need a father now. I’m a grown man with kids of my own—it’s too late. I’ve spoken to him. It was good. I’m glad I did that, but I don’t need to do that again.”

  But my dad kept calling and calling. He’d gotten a taste of one of his sons, and he wanted more. Sheyi was no longer interested in contact, and Dele had shut down any talk of a reunion, so I went back to ignoring my father’s calls, eventually changed my number, and put him out of my mind.

  A few years later, my brother and sister in Nigeria contacted me via Facebook. “Our father is very sick and he keeps asking for you. You need to come back to Nigeria.” Your father is not my father, I thought. He never raised me. I didn’t respond to the message. I was not going back to Nigeria to stand by the bedside of a man I didn’t know. The Facebook messages kept coming, though. “Your father is sick, your father is sick, come, come, come.” I still didn’t respond.

  I said to Sheyi, “Our father’s ill in Nigeria. I have a funny feeling he’s not long for this world. So if you want—”

  But Sheyi cut me off. “No. He was never our dad.”

  I made the mistake of not telling Dele. He was so adamant about not being in contact with our father the last time we had spoken about it, I didn’t even bother to call him and let him know that he was sick. I should have told Dele and given him the choice, and I regret that.

  A few weeks later I received a message: “Our father has died.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I wrote back.

  I texted Sheyi, “Our father has died.”

  He called me back. “That’s no fucking way to tell me!”

  I then called Dele. He was furious that I hadn’t told him about our father’s illness.

  “But you didn’t want anything to do with him,” I reminded him. “You didn’t want to see any of the videos I had. You said you didn’t want to hear a word about him!”

  “Yeah, well I was just doing that because of Mum,” he told me.

  The Facebook messages about our father’s funeral began coming. “Will you and your brothers be coming to Nigeria for the service?”

  “Again, I am sorry for your loss. But he was your father. I am sure he was a wonderful man, but he did not raise us, and unfortunately we never knew him. You have our deepest condolences, but we will not be coming to Nigeria for the funeral.”

  I was of course sad when he died, but more for the opportunity he’d missed to know his own children, and grandchildren, in England.

  When I told Mum that he’d passed away, she didn’t say much. Despite what had transpired between them, I never doubted that my mum’s love for my father had been real, which was why her anger at him all these years had never abated. He really broke her heart.

  “I bet they will try to get you to go back there for the funeral,” she said. “Don’t go. You will end up paying for everything.”

  And that was the end of the conversation.

  17

  A Bird That Flies off the Earth and Lands on an Anthill Is Still on the Ground

  Within my first year of comedy, I secured a regular television gig. After receiving much criticism of their lack of diversity, in 1996 the BBC decided to launch a block of programming targeted towards an “ethnic” audience, with mainly Black talent in front of as well as behind the camera. This included a drama, a talk show, a music show, and a comedy panel show, all in one homogenous lump, as obviously all Black people like the same things. This block was called The A Force. No idea why.

  The comedy panel show, called Blouse and Skirt, was based on a Jamaican exclamation in the vein of “Oh my God!” It was basically a roundtable of four comics discussing current events, but the budget was so low, we didn’t have a table. We perched on uncomfortable stools, taking questions from the audience and riffing on topical issues, all while trying to hold our stomachs in. As if to maximize failure potential, the shows were hardly promoted and relegated to stupid o’clock: the graveyard shift of the BBC programming schedule.

  Before the show went into production, I was recruited as a stand-in to see how the show would look, but somehow I did well enough to be promoted to co-anchor alongside longtime comedian and actor Curtis Walker, who had found fame as a cast member on The Real McCoy. Having been part of the first wave of Black comedy stars, he was comedic royalty, and he was none too impressed with co-anchoring a show with a cocky, big-mouthed fledgling. He hated me instantly, which, looking back, may have been justified, but nevertheless, this very much spoiled for me the excitement of this big opportunity.

  The first season of Blouse and Skirt was one of the most demoralizing and loneliest times of my life. With such a low budget for the show, there were no writers, and since I had no experience in writing topical material for a TV show, having been in the business under a year, I crowbarred my stand-up material into my answers, therefore using up all my good bits and then finding myself frantically writing more stuff for my live appearances. I felt under a lot of pressure and had no support from fellow cast members or the producers of the show, who often laughed at Curtis’s jokes during rehearsal, then were silent at mine, eroding my preshow confidence, but then the audiences would laugh at my jokes at the taping. I eventually trusted only the audience and stopped telling my jokes at rehearsal.

  The show was shot in Manchester, a city some two hundred miles from London, so after every taping, I retired to my hotel room, alone and friendless.

  Curtis a
nd I eventually bonded, well into the second season, when he realized, behind my bluster and naked ambition, I was a decent person with a great work ethic. We’re good friends now, and he confessed that he’d assumed I was somebody who would have killed her own grandmother to get ahead. We bonded on our mutual hatred of the executive producer of the show, who had disrespected us both in the most horrendous way. He had brought in two unknown comedians from the US to be on the show, assuming they were better by virtue of the fact that they were American. They weren’t.

  This executive producer also put the Americans in better hotels than the ones we were staying in, and wined and dined them at an expensive restaurant, while the two stars of his show ate KFC in their subpar hotel rooms. And if that wasn’t humiliating enough, he decided on a whim to use the entire last episode of the second season as a stand-up special for one of the Americans. So instead of enjoying another episode of satirical humor from me, Curtis, and two guest comedians, from a show we had made hugely popular in the Black community, our audience was—out of the blue—subjected to a half hour of this comedian doing Stevie Wonder impressions and warbling in front of a piano.

  Both Americans got on a plane the next day, never to be seen on our shores again.

  I resolved that I’d rather go back to engineering with a bunch of Nazis before I worked with that producer ever again.

  The third season of the show had a new, better production team, a different producer, and a slightly better budget. We got writers, clothing, and actual chairs—no more uncomfortable stools. Unfortunately, the BBC were unchanged in their lack of support for the show—it felt like they were just filling a quota for Black content, as our show was again aired on the graveyard shift, and to add salt to the wound, aired twice a week, as if to get the season over and done with as quickly as possible and get back to regular white TV. To add acid to the salt in the wound, our show was also on at different times every week, so our audience had no idea when to catch it. This was before DVRs. All we had were VCRs, which didn’t have the capability to track random showtimes set by TV executives who didn’t give a fuck. On the positive side, this show made me even more “Black famous.”

  My fast rise on the Black circuit continued to rustle a lot of feathers. A lot of the older Black male comics were affronted by it and gossiped about me. This scared me because I was just starting to find my sexuality and wasn’t ready to come out to myself yet, let alone to others, and I was trying to keep it quiet. Rumors spread about me, and whenever a new female comic came on the scene, the male comics attempted to turn us against each other. I wasn’t sure why they did this. Was it a way of keeping their boys club intact and the women in their place, using divide-and-conquer tactics? Maybe. Or maybe they were just a bunch of schoolboys who’d never grown up and hated being outdone by girls.

  Early in my career, before I discovered what they were doing, I momentarily fell for their tricks and allowed myself to be manipulated into a confrontation with another female comic. Helen was mixed race—half English, half Nigerian. Tall, slim, attractive, and, by day, a trainee lawyer, she had arrived on the scene initially as the girlfriend of the pretty boy of the comedy circuit, Richard Blackwood, and all the other male comics were falling over themselves trying to get her attention. It was pathetic.

  The other male comics spent months whispering in her ear about how she could topple me from my perceived throne, and how I was extremely competitive with other women, which was not true—I was competitive with everyone. They dropped nuggets of disparaging things I had supposedly said about her, even though I hadn’t even met her yet. They then came to me with similar stories about Helen’s disdain towards me. By the time we met during our first show together, there was no love lost between us. We were extremely frosty towards each other, each of us believing the other’s behavior confirmed what we had been told by the men. At one point, as we sat backstage, I was talking to one of the other comedians, complaining about a promoter who had not paid me a fair rate for a show I’d done. Suddenly I heard Helen’s voice: “If it wasn’t enough money, you shouldn’t have done the show.” I was inwardly furious. She had been talking shit about me, someone she didn’t even know, and now she had the balls to interrupt my conversation, which had nothing to do with her. Who the hell did she think she was? I decided to keep my distance from that moment on, because I knew my temper, and I didn’t need the extra headache.

  One day a couple of months later, a male comedian, Kwaku—a comedian of Caribbean descent who used a Ghanaian stage name—approached me: “I hear you’re gay.”

  “Really? Who told you that?” I was in a relationship with a woman at the time, but like I said, I was not ready to come out.

  “Helen.”

  I made the mistake of articulating my Who the fuck does she think she is? thoughts out loud, and I heard later he ran back to tell her like a high school gossip. Now, deep in my subconscious, I knew Helen was not the one who had started this rumor about me, as I’d already heard that the male comics had been gossiping about my sexuality way before she had come on the scene. But the combination of my terror of being outed and the memory of our first meeting made me more furious that she was participating.

  A few weeks later, I was booked to do a big show with about five other comedians in Battersea Town Hall, in South London, a large venue, home to many live comedy shows and theater productions. Helen had not been booked to appear but was hanging out in the dressing room. I had a great show and hurried back to the dressing room to make notes, grade my performance, go through my list of bullet points, highlighting the most successful routines. I found her sitting in my chair. Her feet up on the green-room counter, her shoes just inches from my open notebook, as if she were challenging me. “Yeah, bitch, what you gonna do?” Felicity Ethnic, who is a British comedian known for her Jamaican characters, was in the room, along with a few other comics.

  “You’re sitting in my spot, and that’s my notebook.”

  Helen proceeded to get up. Very. Slowly. At that point I decided this was as good a time as any to get to the bottom of what was going on. “While you’re here . . . we might as well talk about the fact that you’ve been talking about me behind my back.” I invited her to follow me to the bathroom, as I didn’t want anyone to be privy to this conversation. “Why are you talking shit about me?” I asked once we arrived. “I don’t even know you like that, and I don’t know what it is you have against me, but you need to stop this shit.” Helen, who was taller than me, by a pretty margin, obviously felt threatened by my aggressive stance and squared up to me. At some point her hands came too close to my face and I just lost my temper. I grabbed her and began punching. Felicity Ethnic, on hearing the kerfuffle, ran into the bathroom, wrapped her arms around me, and dragged me out as I screamed like a banshee. A crowd of gawking comedians gathered.

  News of the fight spread around the circuit like wildfire. Even though I was ashamed that, again, I had been unable to control my temper and had resorted to violence, I felt no need to apologize to Helen, as I still felt that she had brought this on herself by bad-mouthing me.

  Weeks went by. I refused to talk about the incident, to not further stoke the flames of gossip, which I knew the male comics were devouring like famished dogs. Comedians around the circuit kept asking, “What happened?” I replied, “None of your damn business.”

  I was still working on Blouse and Skirt at the time, and a few months later, Helen’s name came up as a possible guest comic. The whole room went silent. They all slowly turned to look at me. The producer asked, “So, Gina, do you have a problem with us booking Helen?” Even back then, in my early twenties, I knew how to run my business. After learning to maintain a stoic exterior, I was not about to let these people know my personal feelings or let my feelings get in the way of work. And I was certainly not going to use this small amount of power for petty revenge.

  I also wasn’t going to be the one to stop another woman getting work, especially because by that point I�
��d had time to think about what had happened, and I’d come the realization that the comedian Kwaku, who’d told me what Helen had supposedly said about me, had been partaking in some classic high school shit stirring, and that the male comics had caused all of this. I told the producers that I had absolutely no problem working with Helen.

  Later, while we were all sequestered in the Manchester hotel to shoot the episode, I contacted her to apologize and get to the bottom of how this thing had started. “Listen, you know, we’re about to be on TV together. I want us all to do well, and we need to talk about what happened. Here’s my hotel room number. If you want, walk down the hall, come to my room, we’ll sit down, break bread, and clear the air.”

  She agreed. She came to my room, and I told her the reason why I had been so bristly on our first meeting. We both agreed that we had been fed toxic information about each other and manipulated. She also explained to me how she had gotten into comedy. Helen was highly educated—a lawyer, for crying out loud. She had started dating Richard, who was the hottest male comic of the time. One day he heard her doing her father’s Nigerian accent in jest, and he encouraged her to get into comedy. He told her that there was a Nigerian girl (me) who had the whole circuit on lock with her African jokes. “You could do that.” As if the accent was all there was to what I was doing. As if I needed to be taken down a peg or two. Egged on by her boyfriend, and eager to try out new experiences, she decided to try her hand at this comedy thing, although it had never been a passion for her. She actually was a pretty good comic, and we could have coexisted quite happily from the start had the men not played us against each other.

  We decided that when she came on the show, we’d put on a united front. We ended the show standing together, united, our fists in the air, reminiscent of the Black Power movement, but this time we were in solidarity with each other as women. We wanted the male comics to see us and know that they couldn’t mess with us anymore. There weren’t many shows for Black comics, and we needed solidarity, not the crabs-in-the-barrel mentality—a mentality that has worked too long in dividing our communities throughout the world. Well, I wasn’t having it.