Mr. Gbóyèga, my rider and gatekeeper into the communities I hope to access, doesn’t seem to mind this at all. For someone who arrived an hour and a half late at our agreed rendezvous point, and explained his lateness by saying “the time wasn’t right yet,” he appears to be in a real hurry. He doesn’t mind the mechanical choking, the potholes, and the dust particles flying into our eyes—the same canopy of dust that has already colonized the inconsequential blur of tin roofs, market kiosks, angry mongrels, and broken-down cars on our sides. In fact, his head leans forward more perilously, and the onrushing wind steals into his bùbá, making him swell. From my vantage point, his knees jutting out the sides of the speeding bike seem like ossified wings. He looks like a huge toad riding a dragonfly.
We stop at a T-junction to ask for directions. A woman approaches us from her kiosk to answer Mr. Gbóyèga’s questions about how to find “Bàbá.” An older woman lingers near, as if to ensure the younger woman is giving these men the right directions to the wild man. She stretches her hand down the road, speaking Yoruba with Mr. Gbóyèga, resting her other hand on her hip, nodding her head slightly as he interjects, seeking clarity about whether a street she refers to is in fact the same one he has in mind. Her mannerisms. The local portrait of self-assurance. Like many others, she must know him so well, or must have consulted him for her own troubles. We ride past a gaggle of screaming half-naked boys jumping into what looks to be an oversize puddle or a stagnant creek. A line of hushes is scuttling up a nearby tree, winding round its eminent bark. I whip out my Nokia phone to take a picture of the boys for my memos—unsuccessfully: the tiny screen of my phone reveals an incoherent swoosh of pixels.
I delete the picture as the rushing wind distils Mr. Gbóyèga’s voice into flapping noises, half-enunciated pidgin, and occasional droplets of spit: “Oga Bayo, we go soon reash Bàbá.” My eyes are still squeezed to twin slits to keep out the dust as we enter a clearing of well spaced-out farmlands and unpainted bungalows, through which a single asphalted road runs in the middle. A thickset, bald, middle-aged man in a white bootleg “Reebokk” T-shirt and faded jeans stands at the jagged edges of the road, a few feet from the entrance of what appears to be his home. “Bàbá nì ye,” my gatekeeper-rider tells me, slipping back into his dialectal comfort zone. I can’t blame him. The usual thing to do when a Yoruba person meets another is to speak the language—and as you might already know, dear, I am the birth child of an uneasy tryst between colonial nobility, the captive life-worlds of an indigenous people, and the shibboleth of an elite future for those who know the one-tongue well. I know enough of my own language to know Mr. Gbóyèga is saying that this man who stands before us, unassuming and quite unremarkable, is in fact the one who can answer my questions. Bàbá nì ye. This is Bàbá.
Moments later, Mr. Gbóyèga and I sit on small wooden stools just outside Bàbá’s hut. He is inside, gathering a few things I suppose are fitting for the occasion of a guest. Mr. Gbóyèga’s eyes are blood-red. I am concerned. I ask him if he is all right, and he responds with a coy smile assuring me that all is well. I can see into the wild man’s shed. It is everything I had imagined it to be—perhaps just one ontological decibel away from the fictionalized accounts of Yoruba traditional healers in local films. In those videos, the ones we had to watch because our parents had had enough of Chuck Norris and his swashbuckling American beard, the healers are folk superheroes. They strut underneath cloud-pleated skies, through forbidden forests, flanked by black mountains and the moaning accompaniment of song, drum, and yearning. Their arms are usually tattooed with unsayable secrets, their dresses ordained like Christmas trees with tiny gourds and little pouches hanging everywhere on them. The more memorable filmic depictions of these men paint them as wide-eyed, cocky, and histrionic performers of the sacred.
The sparks really fly when two equally powerful babalawos meet: it’s nothing like a Mexican standoff and its strategic tensions, where everyone involved is immobile and catatonic, like excitatory and inhibitory motor neurons firing at the same time, paralyzing the limb. Here, with Yoruba babalawos, or medicine men, there is mystery and movement and poetry and flair. Like a street rap battle. One wild man belches out an explosive tirade of poetic incantations, jabbing his forefinger toward the earth, stomping his unshod feet affectedly, smiling and frowning and spitting, shaking his head as if trying to expel an insect that crawled into his ear, and arguing his cause like a cosmic lawyer before a jury of half-impressed gods. The other leans in and listens; his jaw hangs open, frozen dramatically, and his eyes dart here and there—his hands delicately resting on his chest, feigning shock. He may even fall back two paces or three when the first man is done talking, spinning in a dizzy fit, doubled over in exhaustion, and then … slowly and whisperingly … he chuckles. He starts laughing, a very sinister foreboding kind of laughing, his hidden mastery becoming apparent as thunderous clouds (augmented by cheesy sound effects) gather behind them. The first medicine man is dismayed, or appears to be. He looks at the camera, at us, wondering why his spells aren’t as efficacious as he had expected them to be, and scrambles for a pouch of herbs—just as his assailant returns lyrical fire.
This wild man is nothing like the overdramatized ones I used to watch on television—the ones about whom I would ask your Nigerian grandma:1 “What are they actually saying?” to which she would reply, “I don’t know myself. Their Yoruba is the ko-ko kind.” By ko-ko, she would mean “deep” or “beyond ordinary,” playing with the tonality of the Yoruba tongue. Bàbá is genteel, soft-spoken, and—do I detect a hint of bashfulness here? Sigh. Am I disappointed a wee little bit? Maybe. Sure, his shed checks all the boxes in my head. Over its entrance, a bulbous object soaked in thick black oil and spattered with feathers of an unknown bird hangs by a red thread. Behind it, a parliament of webs, thick with age, rich with the devoured carcasses of unwitting houseflies and ants. In a dark corner of his room, I notice four cow horns, brown at the tips and striated with aging fracture marks. A clay pot and a charcoal-black cauldron, several bags of unknown substances, a single-page calendar on the cement wall, and a thin rectangular sheet of asbestos roofing tile, darkened by smoke and peculiar use, are some of the items I list. Outside, on the shed’s thatch roof, a red-headed agama lizard nods uneventfully.
“This is where I dey do my work,” Bàbá says to me, in passable one-tongue-ian, as he nestles himself into a plastic chair overlooking our occupied stools. The expected introductions begin, and Mr. Gbóyèga greets him and thanks him for granting us audience. Bàbá nods his head slowly in response. Mr. Gbóyèga then tells him that I am here to ask some questions, that I am from the university down the road, that I do not speak Yoruba at all even though my name is as Yoruba as they come. He says “yes, sah” or just “sah” at the end of almost every sentence. There is a palpable quality of eager deference to Mr. Gbóyèga’s speech and posture. It is as if he wants to squeeze himself into a disappearing speck of air. The way his palms hover around his face, as if he were a scrawny boxer pitted against a silverback gorilla. This isn’t a joke: I may have wandered into the den of a wizard, who might very well turn me into a tuber of yam, or—if I’m lucky enough—send noisome spirits to haunt my dreams. I am thinking of your mother at home and her worries that I am going in too deep, and might fall off an experiential cliff if care isn’t taken. Perhaps the veneer of bashfulness that I detect is the perfect camouflage for a sophisticated predator, and I may have just strolled past the wide-open fangs of a Cthulhu-like beast my curiosity cannot encompass. Almost imperceptibly, with infinitesimal—and intensifying—drops of wordless apprehension, my posture starts to look like Mr. Gbóyèga’s.
Bàbá turns to me and smiles, as if he heard my thoughts and wants to assure me he won’t kill me just yet. He tells me he will consult Ifá first to find out if my intentions are good or if he should discontinue the consultation. I think I know what follows, and I lean forward to see what he does.
In the “home videos”—as
they are called locally—the priest usually carries around his bag of cowrie shells, the vacated abodes of aquatic elders that simultaneously resemble the non-eroticized vagina and the eye of the gods. Venus’s vaunted birthplace. The cowrie is a symbol of overflowing fertility and life’s remarkable ability to regenerate itself.
Once used in precolonial Yoruba lands as a unit of currency when perforated and strung together by a single thread, cowries swept to the shores of West Africa from the Maldives via North Africa to the Middle Niger in the eleventh century, and later, with the arrival of European traders at the Bight of Benin in the sixteenth century. They are arguably more popular with contemporary Yoruba people as divinatory agents than as mediums of exchange or fossils of a bygone geo-politico-economic era.2
In one method of accessing the mind of the gods, Ifá priests would bring out sixteen cowries … sixteen, or eerindínlógún … from a white container, lay them in no particular order on a mat or on the bare floor, and ask the one who seeks answers to pick one. The one cowrie picked, the fellow is then encouraged to speak to the shell, to whisper to the gods her questions, her prayers, and her fondest wishes. Her reasons for coming. This is called onda aniyan, literally “the fellow wants to know the minds of the gods.”3 The one cowrie, now threaded through and layered with a new discursive web of human longing, now bathed in tears, is returned to the hands of the priest—with some money.
The priest then picks two out of the sixteen, holds them in his fist, embroiders them with speech and incantations just like the seeker does with the one cowrie, and casts them to the ground. As the priest leans in, gazing at the configuration of little olive-white bodies before him, one of three interpretive possibilities is disclosed, depending on how the shells fall. The shell is closed if it lands revealing the swollen and smooth part, like the abdomen of a pregnant woman, and open if it shows its jagged crevice—the part symbolically linked to the female sexual organ.
If both shells are closed, then there is no hope, the divination is closed, and the reason for which the seeker has come to the priest cannot be helped. A responsible priest will relate to the seeker the outcome of his consultation. It is not his place to bend the answers to appease his “client,” or tone down the precariousness of the situation by being overly generous with platitudes. He may refer the seeker to another priest, or promise to consult the gods privately in another divination. But the silent bellies of the cowrie shells, at that moment, are votes of no confidence from the thick flow and tide of the immanent sacred. If one shell lands on the belly, and the other shell is open, then the way is clear, but not completely so. There is hesitation in the air, marauders along the highway, poison in the last morsel of sweet pounded yam, madness in the family of one’s beloved, or less-than-stellar success in a new business undertaking. If the shells, however, land open, the road is free of marauders, the feast is set for the eating, and the reason the seeker wants divinatory access to the more-than-human is blessed.
Bàbá reaches for something hidden behind the wall of his shed. I expect him to return with a container of cowries. He does, apparently. He comes back with an old paint container, the ones with plastic handles and steel lids. He places it on a third stool that had been leaning against a tropical almond tree near the shed. He starts to whistle and hum a playful tune, interspersed with murmurings I cannot make out. When he opens the container, instead of cowries, out spills disconcertingly black streams of little furry creatures. A menagerie of monsters. Hushes. The way they emerge from the old paint can reminds me of a dark demon coming out of a black hell, its thin fingers clawing for a hold of the surface. I am taken aback by the horror of it, but anchor myself in some cosmetic notion of masculinity—muffling the instinct to yelp. And the desire to look away.
It is the first time I am this close to the monsters. No one I know is so invested in them as to keep a seething horde of them locked away in a container. Some of the more insectoid hushes have made it to the ground and are stationary, beating their “wings” in place; others are snaking up Bàbá’s arms, and the rest seem quite content to maintain the fetid status quo within the container. The curious miscellany of limbs, fur, probes, scales, sizes, and behaviors belies their categorization as a homogenous group. Perhaps the one thing that unites them—apart from their pitch black pigmentation—is the jarring silence that attends everything they do. Not a sound is heard in all the beating and flapping and crawling and jawing about.
“Yes-s-s,” Bàbá says, letting the s linger longer than it should as he looks admirably at the festival of mute madness erupting all around him. Mr. Gbóyèga is nodding and smiling, wordless but obviously pleased with the proceedings. I cannot make any sense of this. What use have these creatures for Bàbá? As if to soothe my growing frustration, the wild man looks at me, and then turns to Mr. Gbóyèga. He speaks in Yoruba: “Tell him that they have approved of his quest. He is welcome here.” I understand a bit of what he has just said, but listen to Mr. Gbóyèga elaborate on and on about the glowing hospitality I am receiving, reminding me of the time I worried about accessing persons like Bàbá, and why he never doubted that I am a good person.
“Ó ti yá! Gb’eléyi! Take this one, my brother!” Bàbá moves his chair toward me, grabs my hand and shoves a hush into it in one swift and seamless move—all before I can protest my strong aversion to creepy-crawly multi-legged things. But, with my face now contorted into a scowl of disgust, I leave it there where he places it, in my wide open palm, my hand frozen in panic, held as far away from the rest of my body as possible. There it is in my palm, nesting and writhing and turning this way and that, its matte black layers of shell covering contrasting with the innumerable glossy lenses that freckle its one-two … three … seven, I count … ten, ten horns. Bàbá and Mr. Gbóyèga are laughing now, hitting their hands on their knees, and ragging at my expense. I have more than half a mind to throw the thing off, but for reasons beyond me—perhaps nothing more notable than replenishing my sense of depleted dignity—I hold on to it, hoping there is some grand indigenous gesture or something to be gained from my hard-won bravado.
Bàbá and the gatekeeper decide their making jest is quite enough, and the wild man looks up to me and says, “Whatever you came here for, tell it,” pointing at the hush that still rests barely mobile in my phantom hand.
I know why I have come here. I know what haunts.
A gentle, wistful wind blows through the almond tree near us, making trembling incoherent music with the green leaves on its mysterious way to wherever. A familiar ghost.
My father, your grandfather, is tall. His full head of hair rises more than six feet above the ground. He is handsome, with sideburns that have a precise way of telling you that he is a man’s man—and that he knows what it’s all about.
There isn’t a strand of white hair that tarnishes his eternal youth. Perhaps that is because my mother always dyes it, sometimes twice a month, and always on Wednesday. We put a chair in the bathroom, and my sisters get clean white towels, all the while bristling with excitement. My mother, her own hair attachments folded into a homey chignon, wears the transparent nylon gloves that had come with the hair dye, takes a neat comb she had soaked in a bowl of hot water, dips it gently into the chemical mixture, and applies the stuff on his hair—always beginning from the front and then proceeding to the back. We all watch, Bimbo, Tito, Wendy is too small to know what is happening, and me, all four of us, our faces transfigured by the soft golden glow of the bathroom light, as the comb’s teeth runs through the forest, ploughing the wild, leaving wavy subservient locks of hair in its resolute wake. It’s appropriate, this golden hue in the bathroom. After all, he calls us “the golden family.”
My father, his eyes are closed, his head tossed back and forth in the firm direction of Mum’s busy hand. Suddenly he wiggles his nose, sending us cackling with glee—the kind of laughter an underling would give to patronize his boss’s attempt at a joke, or the kind that happens because love does indeed make thing
s lighter. Mum just sighs, shaking her head as she treats his triangle sideburns with the black stuff, careful not to let any of it fall anywhere on his face that there isn’t hair, and then combing from front to back again. He likes it when his hair at the back extends a few inches away from the neckline, just like those high-heeled, bell-bottomed Afro crooners on his many vintage vinyl record covers. My father is cool like that.
When Mum is done, he kneels by the bathtub, and holds his head over its rim, as mum runs the water—not too hot, now, darling—and rinses away his age in a black whirl of youth. He towel-dries his head. He is reborn. From the Lazarus Pit like Ra’s al Ghul in the Batman comics stuffed under my bed. When he steps out, when we all do, he lets us touch his hair and climb his back. He tickles us until we are at the edge of peeing on ourselves. Outside a moon massages the troubled shadows of the city of Kinshasa—the tensions that daylight, like a Band-Aid, cannot tolerate or appease.
My father will live forever because of nights like this. He will never grow old and leave us alone. Because he can’t. He just can’t. In the morning, he will be dressed in his immaculately pressed suit, holding a giant glass mug filled with milk, speaking gritty jaw-breaking French into his walkie-talkie, just before he kisses my head and swaggers into the embassy car that will drive him a few miles to work. It’s the way the world spins: to finish the remaining morsels of pounded yam and okra soup he has left for me in his bowl; to watch him bounce into our home with a big bucket of ice cream; to know that inner gravity, that horrifying feeling of falling into a dark place, when he and mummy get into an argument—or when I can taste the acrid tensions in the air, and know (along with my sisters) that they are about to have a fight because dad has taken one too many Guinness Extra Stouts.
Yes, my father will live forever—and this is not merely a love-struck son’s fantasy. He has met death before, but he always comes back. A young civil servant freshly returned with his family to Lagos, Nigeria, from his first deployment in Bonn, Germany, my father is driving home one day in his buttercream Volvo sedan. He reaches an intersection, and makes a turn to his right. A trailer driver approaching the intersection steps on his brakes and realizes to his horror that they aren’t working. The trailer slams into the Volvo right in front of him, sending glass and metal and gasps spinning in a thousand directions. Young men drag the man out of the car, and rush him to the hospital. The policeman that stands at our door reassures my screaming mother that he is well. They don’t say it till months after, but everyone who sees pictures of the totaled Volvo knows he shouldn’t have survived the accident. But he does. My father is cool like that.
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences Page 2