These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  Bàbá tells me a few more things before packing up and escorting us to the waiting motorcycle. The way home is silent. Even the old-man-motorcycle doesn’t bleat and cough as much now. There is a calm wind blowing. Or maybe I am so preoccupied with Bàbá’s words that I cannot hear the world seemingly outside of my head. If you want to find your way, you must become lost. And then the matter of befriending hushes. I do not understand why this is important. But the echoes of your heart-rending giggles stream through my other pair of ears. And eyes. Your dimpled smile. The day you start to crawl, dragging your feet behind you like two tails. The first set of rabbit teeth that burst through your pink gums. The time you utter your first word, dada, much to the playful chagrin of your sweet mother. The sound of blaring horns bring me back to life. Mr. Gbóyèga has been speaking. I ask him what he said. I am prepared to listen.

  Letter 1

  All the Colors We Cannot See

  In My Father’s house there are many mansions.

  And if not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?1

  Baby,

  Here we are again, my dear. Right here, in the middle. In the riddling middle of things.

  I am reminded of beginnings—when you first squeezed through the curtain, like a young performer before her first audience, eager to please. You came out—a masquerade in a village square of interested passers-by—quite intent on making your voice heard. No taller than a generous roll of ghee dosa, no larger than a loaf of bread, you fit neatly on my forearm, as if it were made for you.

  On that first night, and the sleepless nights that followed, I whispered to you your secret name, your Oríkì or life-song—the one no one else (except your mum, I think … yes, definitely Lali, when she felt like it) was allowed to utter. The name Maya. For me, beyond its multicultural significance and spiritual connotations, Maya means you are vast; that the whole world, its many twinkle-twinkle-little-stars and the shadows between them, conspired in your emergence; and that—most importantly—I am indelibly marked by the small and seemingly insignificant promise I made you to find you a home. To topple regimes of knowing, petition water spirits, climb mountains, and be pierced by a thousand proboscises if only to inch closer to understanding what it would take to live peaceably in this world of dust, shadow, and burning sun. And, yes, huffing-puffing wolves.

  But where to begin on this quest? What does a home mean in this world of shifting sands and eroding foundations? What good is home if it doesn’t preserve you for a while longer than if you were without it? Hold on to these initial questions; I trust they, among others littered along the way, will later on become more meaningful to you as you read these letters.

  Beginning with an account of my brief expedition to the frontier of an Indian city, a slum, where I visited in order to understand new ways of speaking about home, I would like to tell you a story of settlements we once occupied … descriptions of the world and of home that were found wanting, leaving much to be desired. This story I tell is not done, in the past and therefore unreachable, or written in stone. It is just an iteration of the many stories I am sure you have by now heard about the world, our place in it, and what it means to be at home with it. The hushes Bàbá asked me to find are integral to the telling of this monumental story—and to my ultimate quest to find you a home.

  This story—running through these letters—is the series of assumptions about being human and about the world that is often called “modernity.” Modernity is home to us. Our flag is planted deep in this planet, this uncouth carnival of churning matter we barely understand. Not for a want of trying. We are doing our best to encounter the world and make sense of it by reducing it to utilitarian units for potential exploitation. We seek to meet the world by conquering it. We treat ourselves the same way—subjecting the “other” to the brute force of our colonial narratives (a legacy that runs in your veins).

  But then this drive to mastery has spawned many dreadful things, and the focus of (Western) critical inquiry has shifted once more: rejecting the grounds upon which our cities and empires of selves are premised, we are moving our tents. Many have left their material belongings and the camp, and headed for the sea, roaming in desolate, postmodern waters—stricken with thirst but unable to drink the inhospitably salty water. Awash in a heady place. Lost with no possibility of redemption. There’s a lot to say about these settlements, but what—for now—is important to note is that both of them, the modern and the postmodern, especially the former, are how we struggle against “nature” … how it has become imperative to discipline it, to leave its logic behind, and float above its assumedly brute prolificacy. Spirit above matter.

  So, here we are, our feet showered with gold dust and tattooed with paeans of mighty valor. Our cargo area filled with spoken secrets and many spoils from cultures plundered. And yet we are exiled from home. There is no arriving. We know no welcoming shores. We are like one abandoned ship I used to stare at when we went to the Bar Beach in Lagos. It was some meters from shore, neither tethered to safe land nor cast away in roving sea. Just hovering at the lip of a final resolution, stuck in the frustrating middle. Our days and nights are like that: filled with a certain feeling that something is missing, that there is something yet to be done, that the world could be more beautiful, more just, more inviting to leaf and limb. More like home. Perhaps a good deed here and there. Perhaps another hero who could swing his rope, anchor it to a stern, and pull us in. Perhaps another sacred book. The hypotheticals are endless.

  So where do we go from here? Where do you go, my dear? This is the question that has brought these letters before you, right here, at this threshold. This is why we are here together.

  Now, before the sun takes away her light, let us go on. It’s an uncertain road ahead, dear. But let us not back away from taking it.

  Do you remember what you and I learned in those nightly moments when I—with some exhaustion from repeating it so many times—told you your second-favorite bedtime story, of the three little pigs, with your tiny legs playfully thrashing in the air, and with Mary the red-haired rag doll clutched close to your chest? Yes? We agreed that a lesson to learn was that when you build a house made of straw or sticks the big bad wolf is sure to huff and puff and blow it away. The moral of the story seemed to be that what one needs is a house of bricks. And if one could afford it, steel comes quite recommended. And why not go even further? High walls, barbed wire, a moat, and closed-circuit television cameras thrown in for good measure—one cannot be too safe where wolves could willy-nilly blow one’s abode away and eat you up!

  Early in my own life, in my teenage quest for final settlements and homecomings, I hoped I could afford the luxury of a house made of bricks—a safe place, warm and friendly, where I belonged and was free from the wintry desolation of a material world I had come to despise. I was a young kid a few licks away from the terrible, terrible loss of a father and best friend—and I hated the world for my predicament. Something had to be wrong with this carnivalesque riot of things. Death was so unnatural. So wrong. Consequently, I dreamed of a home that would take me away from the pains of being enfleshed—away from this body of death, this deadening mangle of dust and grime. Away from the inanity of a world that, were it left to its devices, would rapidly descend into some kind of protozoan immobility.

  I longed for a pristine beginning, a clean start. A time before corrupted time. A time of innocence. Do you understand? I write about pure beginnings, corrupted middles, and redeeming endings. Home evoked a notion of future reconciliation and of bravely slugging through the tangle of the ordinary in order to arrive intact at the unspoiled gates of the real. For me, life was an arrow—the entire world and its history a single shot fired from a benevolent archer. To live was to come awake mid-flight, never fully at home in the fugacious sceneries of our days. Home wasn’t this annoying unsure spin of hellos and goodbyes, of dying fathers and interrupted joys. Home was the glowing red bull’s-eye in the faithful distance. The e
nd of the archer. The permanent. The point of the plot.

  I wish I had this to give you now: you know, this bull’s-eye I write about—for, whatever I might come to say about it, I must admit, there is more than a small measure of comfort and relief to be gained from thinking about home in this way. H. P. Lovecraft, what with his preoccupations with terrifying primal beings and monstrous entities, knew a thing or two about the comfort I speak of:

  The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.2

  This “safety” of the shore, this fear of voyaging too far and falling off the deep end of all things, of staying put, of maintaining originality and the seal of the pure, is a powerful thing indeed. The world is too complex, too tedious to be apprehended in one gaze—perhaps reason enough for Markus Gabriel to insist that the world does not exist and that “an overview of the whole is impossible.”3 Hence one can at the very least sympathize with the psychic need for an End, which guarantees that the Middle, the vast continent where we all must number our days and count our blessings-curses, will one day be blown away like a house of straw and sticks, giving way to a new heaven where many might arrive.

  I wish I could offer you this story of arrival, a tale of a city in the horizons with which you could warm your weary bones made hard and brittle by cold, long pilgrimages. A map to teach you how to go, why to go, when to go, and what to look for when the place you seek stretches unforgivingly in the taunting distance. Firm ground. An origin myth—a story of when things were just fine and innocent. A portrait of paradise lost. A resolute forefinger trained in the firm direction of home.

  But I can’t. I will try to explain why in the course of these letters: the problem with safe shores is that they are never too safe from the ocean they pretend to protect us from. Indeed, the anxious work of keeping the ocean to its watery confinements, and of hoping it does not arrive too heavily on the shore, is futile. Not because rising tsunamis might someday tear apart our little islands, but because the ocean never reaches the shore. There is no simple arrival here; that’s an inadequate portrayal of what is happening. Instead, the ocean enacts the shore (the stranger without is already within). It happens the other way around too—in one single move. The shore performs the ocean—a co-constitutive mutuality that makes doubtful the prospects of xenophobic havens, where the pure are inside and the Gentiles are out. The inside and the outside are not easily divided. By acting as cleaning agent for ocean debris, the shore characterizes the ocean; and by the mereness of its material complexity, the ocean creates shorelines. The heavens we seek are secreted by our own longings and performative quests for a final, static home. We want to get “there”—whether “there” is a beautiful techno-utopic world, or a more just arrangement that works for the many and not just the few. But there is no “there”; there is only a yearning, an aching, a struggle for “there”—and in the struggle, we change.

  But let me not get ahead of myself.

  There’s a lot I’d like to tell you, and these letters are the only way I know how to.

  Let me also say this, dear—just before the night comes and you no longer have any light to see my heart beating between these lines: I have written you these letters—though at times it might seem like these words are exercises in meeting my own self. And the resulting effect might be passages that feel too dense, too thick for your easy reading. I am not so sure, however, that this is without merit. In meeting myself, in working through the knotty issues that becloud my mind, I make myself more available to the nuances of our relationship. I become your father over and over again—in new unexplored ways. But most importantly, these letters urge you to slow down. If there are words you don’t understand, check them up. Contemplate the knots and the entangling turns of phrase. The slowly eaten morsel rewards the patient mouth with juices that the rapid eater may never know.

  Right.

  Where were we? Middles. Origins. Arriving. Maps.

  Maps are comforting, for reasons I have just highlighted. I spent my mid- to late teenage years tracing paths and seeking maps to lead me to fixed existential settlements—mostly to the exclusion of a functioning social life (I had often nursed fears that your early passion for writing and scrawling almost-alphabets on every surface you could find meant you would also live a very solitary, internal life—like mine—which is full of haunting ghosts and often unbearably lonely). As you grew to know, my life was irreparably changed when dad passed. It was difficult watching my mum become a shadow of her once full self. Oftentimes she would bow her head in soft, jerking sobs of sadness, doing her best to assure us—as she hastily (and futilely) wiped the tears away from her tired, ringed eyes—that everything was going to be fine. I was young, just coming away from fifteen, but I was old enough to know she had no clue what the next day might bring. In the place where there once was the soft golden glow of assurance crept shadows of foreboding, like distant rainclouds dispelling the naive blue of a sunny sky. We were a little tugboat of a family—and we had lost our sails and compass, adrift in the oblivious vastness of the sea.

  Cast about so rudely, without land in view or the promise of being saved, I desperately needed some sort of stability. I needed this mad dance of the elements to cease their obstinacy. There had to be a place, a truth, behind this nihilistic spin of things. For my sake, I had to find it, this endorsement of a master seated in the midst of a disagreeable audience.

  I didn’t go anywhere “fun,” and always had a book about me—a sticky habit that would later annoy your mum when we met, and sometimes made her erupt in passionate pleas to me to come out of my “shell.” She used to say, “I married a mind with a body attached,” which—her sarcasm notwithstanding—would have coincided seamlessly with the Christian view of the primacy of mind that we were both raised with.

  Growing up, soon after your grandpa passed, and after I graduated from secondary school, I would wander about my neighborhood—actually from our home to my mother’s shop down the street, where we sold delicious chicken barbeque under a canopy I often set up by myself—with a Walkman firmly attached to my jeans pocket. A single black cord—a life vein, to me—would snake up toward my ears from the clunky plastic thing, streaming urgent dispatches from the frontiers I sought, the final settlement where only the deserving arrived. The place I wanted so much to believe now held my father in transfigured wait.

  With my Walkman, I held open a breach in the deadness of the sky; I had his final instructions not only for how to live a good life in the hostility of the time being, but how to eventually find him—how to right the wrong that was done to us, done to the very fabric of the world, when he closed his eyes on that deathly surface, a man in his prime.

  I lived in a bubble, pored over the Bible, and kept multiple journals. My inoculated distance from the familiar, my cultivated indifference to the material middle, had the effect of making me feel I belonged to a better commonwealth, a vaster conspiracy of nobler selves who knew the hidden codes behind the swirl and indiscipline of the everyday. The stable behind the apparent.

  Of course, it wasn’t my father’s actual voice that I heard when I pressed “play” on my Walkman over and over again—blocking out the unadorned sounds of the prosaic in my quest for the sacred. It was the voices of others who knew the way to where his soul floated, waiting for me. And to hear them was the closest thing to pacifying his ghost. What I heard every day—as I drifted in the liminal space between being a teenager and becoming a man—was soothing medicine for my existential exile. My firm ground i
n lieu of the firmest. Sanctuary. It was the rushing of a waterfall splintering into a million haloed paeans to a beautiful world; it was the song of a company of holy people. And when they sang, I felt giddy with electric pulses shooting out of my head: the foretaste of rapture. Their voices made my insides tingle, made me want to squeeze myself into the warmest cradle the universe could contrive, and giggle with endless excitement.

  You see, I was raised in the Christian south of Nigeria, at a time when there was a church on almost every street in Lagos, at every turn—each a funny adjective different from the previous in their titling. I doubt much has changed even now. Every day of worship, you could hear the shrill voices of pastors urging their flock to pray “in the spirit.” To dance away their sorrows and troubles. There was drumming and preset electronic piano tunes accompanying even shriller voices in song. The biggest, richest pastors in the world were Nigerian; they knew their stuff. They wore fine suits and drove finer cars. They stood behind proud lecterns and told everyone that God wanted them to live the best life they could—and that, like them, we all could find the secrets behind a victorious earthly existence.

  The thought that these men hadn’t a clue about God or the home I sought never did completely untangle itself from me. But I knew no other way, no other bolder map or hope for restoration. So when I wasn’t at church, I had my Walkman. I would listen only to “Christian music” (some of which I played repeatedly and eventually labeled “The Soundtrack of My Life”) and, even more frequently, to my father’s prized collection of audio cassette recordings of an old American preacher called Finis Jennings Dake—who in 1963 published an annotated reference Bible with an intriguing spin on the familiar Christian creation story. These were the same recordings I woke up to on most days we went to church when we lived in Kinshasa, filtered through one of those very expensive sound systems only a few of my father’s peers were privileged to have.