These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  And when an entire platoon of rebel soldiers protesting the nonpayment of their salaries scale the fences of our mansion in Kinshasa, kidnap my entire family, and put a pistol to my father’s head—threatening to dispatch with him as they have done the French ambassador hours earlier, my father escapes again, as we all do. In the morning, our dogs, Sasha and Beethoven, are gone. The aquarium in the wall is pierced through and bled out by bullets, some of which now litter the floor and the settees. We crawl out from the toilet where we have been held hostage by successive waves of insurgent troops, tiptoe past drops of blood on the floor left by wounded soldiers, and make our way—through gutters and swamps and hidden streets lined with silent hushes—to the Nigerian Embassy on 141 Boulevard du 30 Juin. My father carries my sister on his back, wearing no shoes, and with nothing but his pajamas on. A few weeks later, the Nigerian government puts us all—except my dad and his diplomatic colleagues—on a plane home. But even though I am just nine years old, I know with an adult confidence he will come back to us. He always does.

  And come back, he does. But in a wooden box. We receive his body at the airport, three days after he feels a certain weight in his chest, decides to drive himself to the doctor, and then dies on his chair. He is forty-eight years old. The first time I see him after he returns is through the smoky window of a Volvo ambulance car, through the shattered lenses of my own world. I am flanked by my sisters and the dramatic tears and dress-tearing rituals of more than a few strangers. My mother, she has no more tears to shed. Her very soul bleeds.

  There is a convoy of buses bearing dad’s photograph on their windshields. We are preparing to undertake a long journey to his hometown in the middle belt of Nigeria to bury him. The wooden box sits still in the ambulance. Mute and ordinary, unlike the man it is pregnant with. I cannot see his face. I do not know if white hair has now sprouted on his temples, and sullies his eternal youth. I cannot know whether his mustachioed smile still haunts his full lips, whether he misses me, whether he can hear me claw away at the windshield as an uncle wraps his arms around me and carries me away. But I know my father will live forever—and this is not a love-struck son’s fantasy. He will live in the father-shaped hole carved out of my body, with nothing but the remaining sinewy threads of hammered flesh left to my claims of embodiment.

  He will haunt my dreams, my yearnings for arrival, and my visions of justice. My want of warmth. I will seek out his smile in a vast conspiracy of things … in the warp, woof, swoop, and swirl of my days; in my teenage struggles for homecomings and transcendence; in my failed relationships and how I rationalize them away; in my longing to explain the world in one breath—a grand theory of everything, and in my hopes to always be held in place. He will stand with me—a gaping hole of abiding absence, a figure of things yet to be and things that might have been—as I stand in wait for my bride to join me under the decorated tree. And he will stir when I hold you in my arms the first time you insist on breathing. He will haunt us both.

  My father is cool like that.

  That this ghastly creature of darkness is to be a receptacle for the arcana of my longings, a squirming shrine, my confession booth, unnerves me. I bring it close to my mouth—not too close. Bàbá watches. As if in response, it—the hush, that is—stirs. I cannot tell where its head or tail is, or if I should even be thinking about these things in these ways. But still it moves, as if it too wants to hear my prayer. I do not, however, know how to pray.

  Though I know why I have come here, I do not have the words to dance out the wordless gyrations of memory and pain and hope, the undecipherable grumbling of a heartache so fragile, and the feeling that all is askew and that something needs be done about that. It is an itch somewhere down my back that my fingers cannot reach. There’s so much to say. So much to feel. Feelings that are not mine, but emerge from the material grounds—the killing fields, the sites of charged yearnings and gravid voids—that make me possible.

  I sing a mournful tune of the world that now is. Let me sing and rend my clothes.

  I know a certain nasty feeling of loss. It comes and goes, of course. It comes in sudden glimpses of eternal afternoons, when the world seemed straightforward and the hallway of my many small hours had furniture that stayed put in the places you left them. Neat and tidy. Now that hallway is unfamiliar, and might (yet) have always been. Death inhabits the living. Peace is a Manchurian deal. Heaven needs its hell. Even diamonds aren’t so polished as to remove the blood stains, and exorcise the ghosts, of families and communities thrown in burning heaps of casualties of modern luxury.

  I am marked by an eager fury about occluded lives and italicized worlds—about the drums of war beating in rhythm with colonial exclusions, the imperatives of progress and late liberal power, ecological devastation and big oil—the same rhythms that are the soundtrack of our waking moments. The leitmotif of the normal.

  I worry about what might become of sea turtles, water, mountains, and land—the intricate life-web of the more-than-human spun outside of story and intention, upon which we depend and by which we are enfleshed. I cannot solve the world’s problems or even know how think of them—how to think of the rivers of petrol that drown the feet of yawning toddlers in the Niger Delta, where burst pipelines snake toward giant factories that promise development and progress. Or how to think of my skin and the infirmities that come with being a young black man in a world that prefers the pedigree of brighter colors. I wish I had answers. I wish I could be accepted without having to exert myself or stretch myself in acrobatic displays of cultural mobility.

  With the loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification, air pollution, and ecosystem collapse, it seems we have come to the limits of the usefulness of technological “solutions,” and manifestos of liberation. Will I leave you a world with no enchantment? No community? No surprise? A world that isn’t constantly aghast with the many gestures, sensuous textures, and wide-eyed becomings of leaping whales, chirping swallows, scratching grasshoppers, and mingling love-stitched human bodies?

  Will I be contained in a box like my father, or—like Achebe’s Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart4—dangle from a tree, estranged from the very lands that bore me, a fugitive in my mother’s womb?

  Will your lot be an eroding island of warmth, surrounded—threatened—by pipelines, by cold cash, and by barbarous hordes of flesh-hungry beasts whose storied ties to humanity might be known if you listened to their own stories and found traces of yourself? Will you have enough money to get around? To live and breathe and dance?

  What about the misery at our fences? What about Aleppo, Standing Rock, and the Gaza Strip? Am I paranoid about all of this, or is there really a rumor that mountains might one day be replaced with piles of obsolete television sets and smart phones?

  I grieve my inability to grieve the losses that my people—the Yoruba people—suffered when ships pulled close, when schools stood tall, and steeples taller. When we learned slowly that the fullness of our lips, the color of our skins, the way we opened our mouths yàkàtà to enunciate words, and our imagined futures and notions of time were inferior and tacky, evidence of stunted development, needing the refinement of distant interference.

  Do you understand what I speak about, babe? I know I have a reputation for speaking with more words than I need to. How best to say this?

  Do you know how it feels to be possessed by agony, the one you try to repress with the unrelenting motions of the banal, but if it were left to its own devices, would scream out from your chest? You might know what I’m talking about if you know the city as your mum and I do: a sprawling edifice of anonymity and cultured indifference. A noman’s land where stars are shushed by neon-lit nights, where new buildings, new roads, and new technologies do little to quiet the hollowness one might feel if one slowed down.

  Maybe you know what it means to be without ground, to have one’s feet planted in midair, to be dispossessed of one’s own, to wander the face of the earth like a Cain—marked by a god—cursed to liv
e a Sisyphean nightmare. To tug and stretch and thrash and flail about in one’s skin, never knowing the stillness of mere nakedness. To know the burning sensation to stand up in response to a world so vast and incredible, and yet be beaten down by its suffering.

  Do you know what it means to never be enough—not in an ideological way of not living up to lofty philosophies, but in the very ordinary sense of being framed out of the picture, or constantly looking over your shoulders, or being called a thing that feels foreign to you because you do not fit a particular regime of words?

  I do not know how to meet this haunting, this feeling of alienation from community, from joy, from meaning, from my skin and from my “self”—so ably enacted by memories of his face, his brilliance, and his figure. I do not know how to appease this hole in my body, the shape of a ghostly presence, this series of cryptic questions tattooed on my palm, the meaning of which is not yet decided.

  I do not know how to find home. And yet I am possessed by this longing, this embroidered absence that hisses within; I smell the evasive whiff of the Otherwise. A promise of reconciliation.

  I am worried that I won’t be there for you. That I won’t last for long. That I won’t be a good father. Won’t rise tall enough. In fact, what can I give you, dear—that is not already haunted? That is not tainted and troubled with two shadows, instead of one? How can I hold you?

  The fluorescent tube flickers on, engorged with white humming light. Restless, electric humming light. Not the kind that soothes. It is the cold, clinical kind that keeps one on one’s feet, that says “don’t get too comfortable—keep moving.” The chairs in the passageway are plastic and morose. There’s nothing warm or homey about it. I think it’s ironic that hospitals could be the least hospitable places. I can see down the lonely hallway, the perfect squares of milky tiles that cover its walls, the studious whirring of the mellow mocha fans above, the picture of an eminent looking Indian woman hanging near the reception, her forehead emblazoned with a pottu, her portrait garlanded with delicate arches of jasmine flowers. They say that during her time, she helped thousands of women carry their own children.

  This is why we are here. This is why I walk five or more steps in one direction, and five or more steps in the opposite direction. Not that I am counting. I couldn’t care less about numbers at this point, or being manly, or behaving appropriately. Yes, I am whispering “be a man” through my teeth, my taut lips lubricated by salty tears in free fall. I can hear her muffled cries of pain through the door. Oh, god. It must hurt. It must hurt so bad. Are they doing everything right? Is this how it’s done? What if … she’ll be fine. She will be fine! I wish I were in the room. Why doesn’t India allow husbands to stay in the same room with their wives giving birth? How would daddy behave now? Be a man. I’m a man. I’m a man. I can’t breathe.

  Lali’s piercing yowl and stomach-curdling gasps of anguish reprimand me. Syreena briefly exits the hallway and retires to the hospital room we’ve been allocated. I know she cannot bear to hear her first daughter in so much discomfort. The minute hand on the clock on the wall moves backward. Or seems to. Is it broken? It’s taking so long. I turn and face the door, hiding my tears from the uniformed sisters walking down the hallway. The door. Those maddening cries. She is a ghost, and her unfurling plagues me. I say a soft prayer to whomever. Then to the familiar god I was taught to think of as supreme. Then I pray to your mother’s very femininity—to the cosmic circle of women who are invoked when a body stretches itself to make room for another body. Anyone’s help is needed.

  Please, don’t take her away from me.

  An eternity later, Lali’s crying grows faint. And then an alto voice sprints through the air, mellow, delicate, quivering, but resolute and textured—like an aged flute. The tears flow even more freely now, and I stand still, my face contorted into a puddle of relief and—ah-h-h … there’s no need to put it to language! I stand there, looking at the frosted glass, through the shattered lenses of my own world. There are others! Where are they? I make to go bring the others that are with us, but they are already there. Syreena is still in the room, however. When I see her, she has no expression on her face. She asks if all is well, and I smile, exhausted. No, she has no expression on her face—none that is apparent to one who doesn’t know how to look. None that can be felt by those who don’t know what it means to suddenly, as it were, become a grandmother.

  Dr. Vivek walks out through the door. His brow is wet and lined with threads of hair. He tells me, “So, congratulations, it is a girl,” but says it with that Indian lilt so that it sounds as if he is asking me if it is so. I respond, “Yes, I know. Thank you, doctor.” Through the door, I catch a glimpse of a nurse holding a clean white bundle in her arms as she walks swiftly to an adjoining room. There is no wah-wah filling the room, just—and this is amusing—something syllabic and frantic that everyone hears as “ee-lai,” a phonetic match with the Tamil word for “no.” “Your wife asks for you. Everything went very well. Don’t worry,” Dr. Vivek continues, and walks away. I run into the room. Lali is there, your mother, filleted into chunks of collapse and whispered acknowledgment. And yet she looks like an angel. I smile. She manages a smile, asks me to bring a few items in the box she had—as usual—made ready before we came to the hospital. She turns on her side, and closes her eyes. I lift her hand to my lips, and kiss it, and bless her. The music of your syllabic protests never dies out.

  I am a father. I am your father.

  It is Wednesday, the 10th day of July.

  I find words to say. Or maybe the words find me. I whisper them to the hush, and hand it back to Bàbá. He receives it gently, with both his hands. He now holds more than a hush. He holds the precious cargo of my prayers. He holds the very stuff of my fatherhood. He holds space-time. The space between us, you and me, is at stake. Everything turns on this.

  I don’t become your father the first time I hear you rip the air with your song, or when I later carry you close to my chest, shaky and afraid that I might do something silly and drop you. I tend to think it is the moment we bring you to your grandmother’s home, the house your maternal grandfather—a Nigerian like me—bought for his Indian wife. I steal away from the festivity of laughter—often punctuated by shh!-lower-your-voice-she’s-still-sleeping persuasions—and find a private spot. There, where no one else can hear, I say a short prayer to you. I make a promise to give you a home, to work for your future, to love you with my darkness, to be the ground upon which you stand to greet a whole new world. I promise to be your father.

  This is why I am here, and why I sit with this wild man: because the only way I can meet that promise is to seek out the ghosts that haunt my fatherhood-in-the-making: the ones that linger at the edges of our collective imaginations of human agency, in the crevices of our protracted enactments of socio-politico-economic reality, in the blind spots of our scientific pronouncements about the nature of nature. How can I know what is at stake in such a promise unless I grope at and feel the strange shapes in the vast ecosystem of elided histories and stories that is our world? How can I make you a home unless I set out to encounter the universe halfway?

  I take this seriously. This project to give you a “home” by striving to know the world in wholly new ways.

  Bàbá places the hush in front of him on the floor. I realize he has now slipped from his chair and is sitting upright on the bare ground, his outstretched legs boundarying a small V-shaped space where the hush remains. He tells me my prayers have been heard, and then he falls silent. In the periphery of my vision, Mr. Gbóyèga shifts in his chair. He seems a lot more comfortable now, but his posture now conveys keen interest. Bàbá says something at length in Yoruba, holding his hand in the air, dropping it behind him as if pointing to something forgotten or lost or on the way. Mr. Gbóyèga stirs to life: “Bàbá is saying that we have chased away all the spirits into the forest. Him say if we want to do well for this world, we must to look for them. If we want to find our way, we must first com
e away from the road and become lost.”

  Bàbá is nodding his head all this while, watching Mr. Gbóyèga translate his words. As soon as this is done, he turns to me and continues speaking, Mr. Gbóyèga mediating: “My fathers who taught me this work—when they want to bless the people that come to them—they use ten cowries. The number ten is important for blessings to us.” He pauses to take a breath, raises one knee and uses his hands to hold that leg in its folded position. “You must go and look for ten of these ones,” he points at the hush in front of him, “if you want your prayers to be answered.” He goes on to tell me that I am to go on many journeys to find answers to my questions, and that wherever I go, I must go to the edges … the edges in the middle … and that there are hushes—ten in total—that I must not only acquaint myself with, embrace and acknowledge, but pray to as well. He tells me I must learn how to create the right conditions for them to show up. I must learn to listen. “Only then will you find the answer to your prayer.” I am told they will come in twos, or threes, or fours, or alone—no matter how I find them, I will somehow know which of them are the right ones to use for my ritual. What I am to do when I encounter the “right” hushes will feel improvised to me, but I do not need to worry—just because it feels useless doesn’t mean it isn’t important. Also, this might take years to complete and it could take a day. Who knows? I can begin anytime I want. It doesn’t really matter when. Life will guide me.