Blackass: A Novel

by A. Igoni Barrett

  Crudity is a disease that money exacerbates rather than cures. And that man was an exemplar of the condition. Leave my girlfriend alone, Tekena said. A statement that left no wriggle room. A less vulgar man, if he were still intent on wooing a woman whose animosity was so evident, would have first apologised for his forwardness, and then he might have offered one of those flattering lies or I’ve-seen-you-before lines that constitute the arsenal of impromptu courtship speech. Not our man. He was too hippopotamus-skinned. His own response was rank aggression. ‘Which kin’ girlfriend?’ he sneered at Tekena, and when she threw him a glance that told him to go and die, he said with a filthy laugh: ‘Una be lesbo?’

  Tekena, for all her playfulness on Twitter, was a Lagos pikin. She could give as good as she got. Brinkmanship, one-upmanship, fuck-that-man-up-ship – these were acquired skills in a city where even beggars cursed you out at the drop of a coin. Thus the overboard-ness of her response, which she began by hooking an arm around my waist in a suggestive manner before saying to the man: ‘And so what if we’re lesbians? How does that concern you? Abi you think sey if we want man nah you we go come meet? You, ke? With this your big belleh that can even crush a cow?’ These words were delivered in a tone of sweetened poison, and for some seconds after she spoke, the man was as stunned as I was. He recovered first, and opened his mouth to bellow, but thinking better of it, he walked away. ‘Smart move!’ Tekena called out after him.

  A woman defended me from what I used to be.

  Womanhood comes with its peculiar burdens, among them the constant reminder of a subordinate status whose dominant symptom was uninvited sexual attention from men. I hadn’t foreseen this fact of my new identity. Bus conductors whistled at me on the street; drivers pulled over to offer me rides to bars; and when I went shopping for my new wardrobe in Yaba market, the touts grabbed at my hands and laughed off my protests. All manner and ages of male called me fine girl, sweet lips, correct pawpaw, big bakassi. Landlords wanted to know if I would soon marry, if I had children, if my father or my boss would stand surety for me. A woman is not expected to live alone, to walk alone in peace, or to want to be alone.

  Pity the man who never becomes the woman he could be.

  It was early yet in my journey to the far reaches of my identity. Like those before me who had transitioned into otherness, I was finding out that appearances would always be a point of conflict. Male or female, black or white, the eye of the beholder and the fashion sense of the beholden, all of these feed into our desire to classify by sight. The woman and the man: stuck together in a species and yet divided by a gendered history going back to the womb. But in this war of the selves, I had switched sides. Despite the snake of maleness that still tethered me to the past, I was more than man, interrupted.

  I was whoever I wanted me to be.

  When Tekena and I emerged from the movie theatre, I told her I planned to be in Egbeda on Saturday (a small lie) and asked if it was OK to stop by her house for a quick visit. She gave her consent with expressions of genuine pleasure, and the next weekend, shortly before midday on the last day in June, I knocked at her gate. She came to open it and we went into the sitting room, where I spotted those two objects of my rampant curiosity: Furo’s mother and father.

  Monima Wariboko was a former civil servant who now owned a chicken farm. He was sixty-four years old and had been married for thirty-five of those years. The first time I saw him, he was slouched in an armchair that occupied prime position in front of the TV. He was a big-boned man, larger in stature than his son, and yet, sitting there, hypnotised by the TV, he seemed the smallest person I had ever seen. He was thoroughly broken. This was apparent from the slackness of his lips when he raised his head to accept my greeting, and that wheezing voice, that exhausted way of speaking, so disheartening to hear in a person who wasn’t Marlon Brando. He was unclothed except for an old wrapper of his wife’s, a colourful wax-print fabric, which he wore around his waist and knotted under the Gollum swell of his belly. He resembled a fisherman straight out of a daguerreotype, a wastrel who hadn’t netted a catch for years and yet fatted himself on the cassava from his wife’s farm, and then went to pose for the camera because he was the only one not at sea when the colonialists came calling. He annoyed me on sight.

  That’s how I felt the first time I saw Furo’s father, but later, upon reflection, I picked out the nettles from my eyes. Yes, he was indeed a broken man, housebroken and heartbroken, and a broke ass, too, but he had stuck around. He was a father figure to his children, a weak father for sure, but a father they could see. He was good friends with his daughter, who clearly loved him dearly. He didn’t assault his wife or embarrass her with roadside sexual affairs. He didn’t remain in the civil service to do nothing and embezzle money. He established his own business through honest work and gave his best at running it, and though his best ended up ruining it, at least, on the day his coffin is lowered into the ground, someone can say in truth, ‘Here lies a good man.’

  Tekena introduced me to her parents as a new friend she had met on Twitter. After responding to my greeting, her father had turned his attention back to the TV, and so it fell to her mother to ask what Twitter was. While Tekena explained, I studied this woman. She was lying on her side on a sofa with her head resting on the armrest, and she was so petite she didn’t have to bend her legs to fit them within the sofa’s length. Going by the bellicose nature of Tekena’s tweets about her mother, I had foreseen a more imposing figure, matriarchal certainly, maybe the market woman type, with iroko trunks for limbs, a buffer of a bust, and a rock-boulder backside. Doris Esosa Wariboko née Osagiede was anything but. Perhaps because of her diminutive build, she had aged rather well. At fifty-eight, she looked in her forties. Despite having borne the load of two children, her belly showed few signs of sagging. Her bare legs were smooth-skinned, her face was devoid of wrinkles and sun patches, and she wore her hair in neat dreadlocks, the roots so black they were obviously dyed. It was her hair that decided my mind about her.

  All children of living mothers hold this truth to be self-evident: your best friend’s mother, your spouse’s mother, your mother’s mother, someone else’s mother is always the better mother. Show me the man who wants the mother he has and I’ll show you his Oedipus complex – and yet, if I were Furo, I would want my mother to be that woman sprawled on the sofa. But he also left her behind the same as he abandoned his father, his likable sister, his past entire. Meeting Furo’s mother didn’t take me closer to his story; no, rather, it made me question my questions. (Question: Would Furo’s family have accepted him for what he’d become? Answer: No white man has ever been lynched in Lagos.)

  Before Tekena led me off to Furo’s bedroom, her mother and I shared a moment over hair. I brought up the topic, and I did so because I wanted to hear her speak so I could sound her mind. It also seemed the safest subject I could raise with a woman who was grieving the loss of her child. So I told her she had good hair. She said thank you, at the same time glancing at me with those fierce eyes from which the laughter had only recently been banished. I tried again, saying excuse me Ma, but I would like to know what she used on her hair that gave it such body. That was when she noticed mine. ‘Come,’ she said and sat up. I approached her, and then, in obedience to her gesture, I knelt at her feet and placed my head in her lap. As her fingers worked through my locks, I felt a dagger thrust of compunction over the knowledge I was keeping from her. Blast the novel. No story is worth the human suffering that vivifies it. I know who your son is, I wanted to say into the sadness of her cocoa smell. I know that he’s alive and well. I know why he left. But I bit my tongue until she said, ‘You use shea butter. That’s good. I use coconut oil, but your hair’s too strong for that.’ After speaking, she retracted her hands from my hair and, clasping my chin, she lifted my face to look into it. As our gazes met, I endured the most deceptive moment of my life. I felt like sobbing with relief when she said at last, ‘Talk to your friend. Those oyibo hairs she kee
ps putting on—’ Tekena raised her voice in protest, and so her mother left the statement unfinished, but I got the point. All those nuggets I had hoped to excavate from Furo’s story, those subtexts of self-identity and self-deceit, of a continental inferiority complex, of the widening gyre of our parents’ colonial hang-ups, all of these were destroyed by a mother who showed up my fraudulence in a few quiet words.

  I found nothing in Furo’s bedroom. There was a small thrill in being the only one who knew this was the chamber where he had woken up to his new self. And for some seconds I even thought I got some insight into his personality from how clean his bedroom was, everything in its place, his clothes hung in the wardrobe, his desk arranged, his bed made, but that crumb was lost to me when I asked Tekena if anyone had cleaned the room since his disappearance. His mother, I was told, cleaned it every day in readiness for his return. Right there in that bedroom, posing beside Tekena as she snapped a selfie to post on Twitter, I realised I needed to speak to Furo.

  FRANK WHYTE

  ‘For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.’

  —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

  The soreness in Furo’s buttocks was a minor irritation when he opened his eyes on Monday morning. A bigger worry was his new job, all the unknowns that could go wrong on his first day. But as much as he dreaded this new adventure, he was also excited by it. Yawning widely to clear his head of sleep, he sat upright in bed and threw open the doors of his mind to the sounds scrabbling beyond the darkness of the bedroom. He could hear Syreeta knocking about in the kitchen; she was becoming flatteringly domestic. And she had offered, last night, as they lay in bed, before she turned to him with her ‘fuck me’ sigh, to drive him to the office this morning. It was she again, sounding just like his mother, who had suggested that they set off early to avoid the Monday traffic. Furo was surer than ever of how she felt about him, but still, just to be safe, now that the two weeks were up, he would ask if he could stay on longer at her apartment. Later today, he thought, when he returned from work, he would ask then. At this, his first decision of the day, he climbed out of bed.

  After a rushed breakfast of toast and boiled sausages, Furo and Syreeta left the house at five thirty. The sky was deep purple; the moon was still out; dew dripped from the leaves of the looming trees in whose branches roosters roosted. As they tramped past the silent houses, the crunch of sand beneath their shoes sounded like ghouls in conversation. The estate streets were deserted except for clusters of sheep bedded on the tarred road leading to the gate. Syreeta had to zigzag the Honda around the motionless shapes, and when the headlights stilled against the closed gate, the guard, swaddled in blankets and rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands, shuffled from the shadows and shone his torchlight into the car before crossing to unlock the gate. Syreeta sped through with a scream of rubber.

  The roads were clear through Victoria Island, across Third Mainland Bridge, and down the endless stretch of Ikorodu Road, but, as the sky brightened under the sun’s approach, they drove into heavy traffic at Maryland Roundabout. At first sight of the congestion Syreeta cursed, and as the Honda slowed, Furo stared out the window at the stagnated cars and thought about the last time he had passed this way. On foot, homeless and broke, and headed for The Palms. He owed Syreeta much more than he could tell her. ‘Sorry about the traffic,’ he now said to her. ‘Hopefully you won’t have to drive me tomorrow. I should be getting my car today.’

  She took a moment to respond. ‘I still think that salary is too small.’

  The previous night, after lovemaking, they had had a conversation about Furo’s job. Syreeta felt that his status, his oyibo-ness, had been taken advantage of. She argued that he was worth way more than eighty thousand and a company car, and when he sighed with indifference, she told him that the first job she’d got out of university had paid two hundred and fifty thousand. She was also given a car, the Honda. At this offered scrap from the mystery of her life, a history she had guarded thus far with utter silence, Furo’s interest sat up and woofed. She had to be, and if he had thought about it, he would doubtless have concluded that she was, but it had never occurred to him that Syreeta was a graduate. After he blurted out his surprise, she laughed before saying how could he think she wasn’t, and then she told him that she had a degree in accounting from Unilag, and that she had done her youth service at the National Assembly in Abuja, where she was retained afterwards, though she gave up that position when her benefactor lost his senatorial seat in the last elections. She capped her testimony by repeating that Furo could do better, to which he responded with some heat: ‘Our situations are different. You’re a woman.’ A kept woman, he meant, and Syreeta caught his meaning in his tone. She shot back: ‘And you’re a white man. You don’t have to fuck anyone for favours.’ Then she turned her back and ignored him until he fell asleep.

  But now she was smiling as Furo replied with caution: ‘Maybe the salary is small, but it’s all I have.’

  ‘Until something better comes along,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Furo.

  ‘That’s the spirit. Something better will come, very soon, you’ll see.’

  When the Honda pulled up at the gate of Haba!, Furo said his goodbyes to Syreeta, then clambered down from the car. He felt like a cosseted child on the first-ever day of school, a feeling of abandonment and peril that grew stronger as Syreeta drove off with a cheery wave. It felt too easy to call her back, to climb back into the coolness of the car and be driven home to finish his sleep, and then watch TV, eat her cooking, do anything but worry about work, money, responsibility. It felt too easy to give up what he had wanted for so long – a money-paying, office-going, real-life job. Not easy enough, he told himself, and striding to the closed gate, he nodded at the maiguard who emerged from the gatehouse at his knock, then said in answer to the old man’s polite question, ‘I work here.’

  Following their start-up meeting, which lasted about an hour, Ayo Abu Arinze showed Furo around the office, and during the tour he delivered a running commentary on the internal workings of the three-year-old company, its mission and vision, rules and regulations, the anecdotal history. ‘Work starts at eight and ends at five, but the office is locked up around ten, so you can stay until then if you want … what we sell, in a nutshell, is self-education … lunch hour is between noon and one … I was a senior manager in the telecoms industry before I resigned my job to start this company … every word in a Haba! proposal must be spelled correctly, no text message spellings, that is a rule … Nigerians must start reading serious books, whether for work or for pleasure, that’s my vision … the red button on the dispenser is actually cold water and the blue is hot,’ Arinze said as he led Furo into office after office and presented him to the staff as Frank Whyte, the new head of marketing.

  Sales, Accounts, Human Resources, Information Technology, and Marketing: the five departments of Haba! The sales department comprised two staff members, one of whom had been employed on the same day as Furo. The senior sales manager and department head was a bejewelled, hijab-wearing, boubou-clad woman called Zainab. She beamed a fatigued smile at Furo, and when, to the clatter of gold bangles, she raised a hand and patted her belly, he saw she was with child. The new salesperson was a plump, stylish woman whose name was Iquo, and after Furo was introduced, she spoke in a confident tone of voice, her words directed at Arinze: ‘I remember Mr Whyte from the interview day. I also want to thank you, sir, for granting me the opportunity to work for this great company. I promise to give my best, sir.’ She sounded easy to boss around. This intuition of Furo’s was strengthened when she stood up from her desk and rushed towards the door as he and Arinze turned to leave, but Arinze waved her back and said, with a cool glance at her eager face, ‘I can get the door myself. One more thing, please don’t call me “sir”.’ The next-door office was the IT department, and it held one person, Tetsola. He was a wide-shouldered and long-limbed man who sat hunched over a white-tiled le
dge in the dim cubbyhole that was crammed with dismembered computers and discarded compact discs and tangled rubber cables. His office, which shared a wall with the lavatory, had been converted from a bathroom, and perhaps for this reason, because of the mouldering smell that seeped from the peeling walls, he remained silent when Furo was introduced. He dipped his head at Furo’s hello, and then shuffled his feet in their outsized sneakers as Arinze described his duties and praised his work to Furo, but he refused to say a word. After emerging from the IT office, as they made their way downstairs, Arinze told Furo that he himself handled the company accounts, hence his office doubled as the accounts department, while the HR department was staffed by two people, Obata and Tosin. Obata was the head of department, but it was Tosin who managed the support staff of two drivers and one gatekeeper. She also served as his personal assistant.

  ‘Meet the amazing Ms Amao,’ Arinze said as they reached the reception desk. ‘Tosin has been with me from the very beginning … she and I opened this office together as the only staff. You could say she’s the face and voice of Haba! Anything you need to know about the business, about how we started, or where to get ink for the printer, or how to requisition books from the store, Tosin’s the person to ask.’ And to Tosin he said, ‘This is—’

  ‘I know, Furo Wariboko,’ Tosin interjected.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Arinze said with a low chuckle, and then nibbled his lower lip. Finally he spoke. ‘From now on he will be known only as Frank Whyte.’

  During their meeting in Arinze’s office, Arinze had expressed astonishment at Furo’s decision to change his name. In response to his cautious questions, Furo explained that Frank was his Christian name and Whyte was his furo ere, his family name, the English version of his family’s compound name. Many Kalabari families still retained this legacy of the slave-trading days when the chieftains answered one name in the clan and another to the white customer, the European sailors, who had no interest in learning their names and thus, partly in mockery and partly from necessity, addressed them by English nicknames. Hence it became that Fyneface was Karibo, Yellowe was Iyalla, Black-Duke was Oweredaba, Bobmanuel was Ekine, Georgewill was Otagi, Harry was Idoniboye-Obu, and, according to Furo, Whyte was Wariboko.