Very early in my “evolution,” the word feminism felt like another Western incursion. Another moment we could all sigh, throw our hands in the air, and bemoan the erosion of our values. “It’s those white people again coming to tell us that women are equal to men.” There was no talk of feminism in the church. The feminists were the rich artistes, the ones with rings in their noses, who probably were too rotten to have proper husbands and settle down like everybody else. As such, I learned to associate feminism with errancy, imagining women rising up early to go to work (just like their husbands), earning degrees (which wasn’t bad at all), flinging off their tight bras in street protests (which was a bit troubling), or—most abominable!—not knowing how to cook at all.
My dear mother, your Bama, who was the epitome of womanhood for me, cooked like a water spirit intent on beguiling an unwary sailor man. Even now, well into her late sixties, she can make a hearty meal out of smelly socks and an abandoned shoe strap. I suppose “it’s in her blood,” as we often say in Nigeria. Her own mother made the best fried bean cakes or àkàrà in Èbuté Métta, a neighborhood in Lagos mainland. I might be exaggerating a bit, but I did hear that her bean cakes were so well done that the busy drone workers of the inner city money hives would often arrive at her stall for breakfast in the wee hours of the morning, skipping what was served at home. She not only made delicious bean cakes, she also made ewa àgòyìn—a local variety of cooked beans with an accompanying gritty sauce, which always went well with the stoic loaves of bread we ate, fondly called Agége bread. My grandmother’s cooking sent my mother to school, and paid for an elite education that took her all the way to a prestigious nursing career in Glasgow.
So when my mum talked about food, we knew she spoke from her bones. Cooking was what she did best when she wasn’t holding a syringe. She often hissed at food shows on television—when “oyinbo” chefs would boil leaves and sticks, and then have the audacity to call the plated rubbish “food,” licking their fingers and “hmm-ing” away at nothing. It always made us laugh when mummy, while watching the shows, would exclaim to no one in particular: “But where is the pepper? Did he put salt in that fish at all? Is that one food? I’m sure it is horrible—he is just saying ‘hmm-hmm’ when there’s nothing there!”
However, nothing perhaps made her more livid than when a woman didn’t play her role. When she spoke to erring younger wives, her default position was that the man was the head of the home. Only in extreme circumstances of male idiocy did she take the side of the woman. She lived out her creed: she took care of her children with the ferocity of a mother hen guarding her chicks from street dogs. She went to work, kept the money books, prepared us for school, and had to look good doing it. She even knotted my dad’s ties for him in the morning (he didn’t know how to) before he stepped out—and, when he had to live without us in his diplomatic residence in Kinshasa, she would send knotted ties to him from Lagos by courier. Through all of this, she never questioned the gender role she was assigned and had grown up in; she never once wavered in her belief that this is what a good woman does. A good wife. She knew her place.
Then my father died and she was left alone, torn from her own flesh. Seeing her come undone might have been shocking enough were it not easily displaced by my becoming acquainted with her surprisingly fragile womanhood. All this while, she was “Mum”—fixed in place like a Kantian referent. She was the container in which my unwieldy human experiences were contained. And then … to see her torn apart.
There’s no denying that I came to know my mother for the first time when Dad passed away—outside the rose-tinted hallways of my previous normal. I saw the way she struggled to make ends meet and feed us. The way she lost her cool when things weren’t going our way, and then made up for it by scraping a few notes to take us to the local “Mr. Biggs” eatery. The way she begged my father’s rich friends for support. The way she was made to wait in their living rooms to see them, where my father’s presence would have brought them out of their proud chambers in less than “just a moment.” She had the stench of a widow and the preexisting condition of being a woman. No one wanted that. Back at home, she would fall into the torn sofa, splayed out in a posture of abandonment, staring into the vacant distance. She often called my father’s name in airy breathy sighs of longing. I remember hearing her cry again and again in the middle of the night. I would get up from the side of the bed where I slept, walk up to her side, and tell her, “Mummy, let me be your husband. Let me be your husband.” For some reason, this would comfort her, and then she would sink into reluctant, troubled sleep—her veined eyelids trembling at the cusp of oblivion. But the pain—the dreadful pain lingered, and soon after, her sobbing would lash out against the blackest of nights. And morning would feel an eternity away.
Still, justice for my suffering mother and relief from a world that manhandled her did not take the form of an experimental feminism until you were born. With your appearing, a cycle was completed: her only son gave her a granddaughter. In your first days, you even looked like her. Everyone but a few believed you were her in some way. In a manner of mysterious returnings and cleaved lives. And for the first months of your life, she took care of you when your mother and I were teaching in our university classrooms. She taught us how to give you a bath, and how to put you gently on the shoulder and tap your back until you burped. She knew best how to sing you to sleep, shaking her upper body while singing a lullaby with the name she had given you: Joyinolá—a Yoruba name that means “I will yet eat the honey of my tomorrow.” In this regard, you are my mother’s prophecy, her stake in a more promising future. Her faith that the grievous hand dealt her with my father’s untimely death would not slip by unaccounted for. In a familiar case of jumping generations, of the living haunting the living, her longing became your name. And your many names became my quest to find a place in the world for the womb that birthed me as a father and the womb that birthed me as a son.
As a young graduate assistant, however, my growing experiments with truth reinforced the very fundamentals I found deeply problematic: the same exclusivity that banished nonbelievers to an eternity of burning with sulfur and brimstone was the very framework that deified the male figure, rendering my mother a rogue planet in a fixed orbit of named or counted planets. I couldn’t come to terms with a faith that was blind to the complexities of culture and context, treating belief as if it were a factory grade limit or quality assessment score, instead of the fragile, provisional, local performance of the sacred and of earthly questions. I couldn’t relate with the judgmental gaze that looked upon the oppressed as victims of their own faulty mind-sets, instead of real conditions outside their control.
I remember writing in an essay a pastor had asked me to write that my footprints leading to church had dried up, long covered over by passing dust. The pews stabilized my participation in the exclusion of the other, my mother, beautiful cultures around the world that had their own keen senses of the sacred and ways of thinking through their finiteness. I had already torn away the front page in one of my many journals whereupon I had imprinted what (in my nerdish headiness) I had called my “life motto”: “Magna est veritas et praevalebit,” Latin for “Truth is great and will prevail.” The idea of Conquering Truth stampeding the world on a noble steed might have made my colleagues salivate, but it made me shudder with irritation.
So, one innocent night, before I even met your mother, I lingered by the fence, the same one I had joyfully planted to stave off the uprising of the wilds, to cordon off the evil beyond. My mother’s groans of sorrow echoed in the tempting distance, entwined with a feeling that other natures were indeed possible beyond the steely imperialism of Truth. I took one deep breath, and slipped through into rebellious frontiers lit seductively by a pagan moon, in search of the liberatory errancy rumored by the bodies of the paraphrased.
And you have more than one goodly heritage of fence-hopping debauchery in your collective story. Let me take you to another scene—one
which you might recall:
Every Wednesday, over a hundred people gather into a six-hundred-square-foot apartment squeezed among other homes in the dense suburban neighborhood of Egmore, singing with each other. The music is rich, sewn into an exquisite tapestry of sonorous voices, shifting feet, and palms vibrating over the percussive surfaces of the South Asian tabla. Everyone sits on the floor, on clean mats, their feet tucked neatly underneath saris and salwars or jeans.
There is no dancing, as would be the case if this were a religious gathering in Lagos, but there is a gentle spirited swaying to the guttural dum-dum sounds that accompany the clapping and the heaven-bound whispering. They are singing about God and blessings and devotion. If you come in late, you’d have to tiptoe between glaring eyes and folded bodies to find yourself an unoccupied spot to sit. Every space is taken with children and elders, listening with rapt attention, laughing or singing when song breaks out.
In the middle of the room, a large woman in her late fifties sits on a lone chair set against the wall. She cuts an imposing matriarchal figure, like a mother oak tree in the center of the forest whose branches fan the length and breadth of the forest. Her face is stern, her brow sweaty, and her long woven hair falls behind her, snaking along the top of the chair then falling by its side. She is wearing a colorful but unassuming dress. There is no nail polish on her fingernails, no pottu on her forehead. She is animated, making a joke in Tamil that I do not understand, then seguing into the “word of God.” She is the convener of this homey place of worship, a respected elder whose counsel is sought by the weeping wives of drunkards, by women who worry that their sons are wayward, by couples who must learn that love is not enough of an excuse to get married in India.
Her nightly speeches are often fulsomely peppered with words like “perfect,” “holy,” and “prayer,” but you’d be mistaken if you thought this was merely some Christian gathering. This is a place open to all, even those who don’t subscribe to doctrine. There is food and drink; everyone offers to help feed everyone else. The format of the fellowship actually allows for more conversation and less sermonizing, inviting play and games and troubling inquiries about the nature of faith today. The fellowship has become a home, open to all, discriminating to none. And at the reluctant center of it sits Syreena Dike, your grandmother, your Bama, whose life is a remarkable testament to the surprising generosity of errancy.
In 1983, the year after her Parsi father died, Syreena stood tall in her household, where seven other siblings were born to her father and mother. She was in her twenties, beautiful, and hardworking—with an eye for business and a dream to travel abroad. Her own mother, born of an English woman in Tanzania and raised into a stern Catholic who frowned on movies, rejected modern medicine, and required her children to say “Praise the Lord” as a greeting, founded a home fellowship—foreshadowing Syreena’s own foray into community-building in the years to come.
The most prominent guests to those meetings were black students from Nigeria come into the country to pursue greener academic pastures. Nigerians had notorious reputations among many South Indians, some sustained by fantastical accounts about the body proportions of African men, and some steeped in the real. Some said these Nigerians impregnated their women and stole away to their own countries, leaving “half-and-half” children to their dejected mothers. Syreena would later work to connect some of those children, now grown and seeking, with their fathers in Nigeria—many times successfully. But for now, she—like everyone else—was wary of the black Nigerian students that populated her mother’s fellowship, oftentimes out of necessity to fill their stomachs with the free food the fellowship offered.
One Nigerian student from the Hindustan Institute of Engineering Technology in Chennai stood out, lingering in the corner of Syreena’s eyes. He was tall, princely, immaculately dressed, and with a halo of thick hair on his head. He was also a brazen fool, a joker of the highest sort, for he approached Syreena one day and declared, “I want to marry you. You will be my wife.”
It wasn’t just the manner in which he did it, or the fact that such inter-racial relations would have been cursed with bloodied teeth by her family and the network of families she was connected to, it was that Syreena didn’t have the time for such nonsense. She was the fourth-born of eight children, the one in the middle with something to prove—the one with the boyish habits and a distaste for weakness. Her older brothers had left the house, and she had quickly risen into breadwinner status, taking care of the others, earning the little she could to help the others go to school. Her best friend was a young businessman; she couldn’t stand the company of women or bear to hear the things they talked about. There was no time for love. This crazy black man would have to learn to keep away from her.
But Uzoma, of the Dike stock, whose people in Igboland were known for their determination and skill with medicine, whose mother was a midwife, and who was the first of his people to travel abroad to be educated, was not built to back down. He kept coming. In fact, the more elaborate story is that Uzoma, your grandfather you never met, was actually “fronting” for a fellow Nigerian friend and fellowship-goer who had entreated his support in winning the heart of the fair Indian girl who moved like a blur during sermons—the one they both observed with slit-eyed fondness while everyone else squeezed their eyes shut in devotion. Uzoma, like the alpha male he was, came for the kill instead. His friend fell to the wayside. Syreena was to be his wife, and he knew it. And nothing—not nature or truth or an army of machete-wielding Indians—was going to stand in his way.
He took a gift to Syreena, just before she set out one morning for Andhra Pradesh to accompany her younger sister to an exam. As he gave it to her, he told her that all the words within were the words from his own heart. And then he left. Syreena opened the gift. It was a Walkman music player. Inside it, a Ginger Williams cassette. Syreena listened to the tape. When she returned from Andhra Pradesh, her hustling slowed down a bit during fellowship. Her feet were heavier, her pace more measured. For she also had learned to look through slit eyes at the tall princely fool she had already fallen in love with.
But her family would resist, fiercely. To respect those who linger at the time of this writing, I will not tell you the terrible things that were done to your grandmother to punish her for her mutiny. Let it suffice to know that the wounds we often inflict on others have roots that connect oppressor and oppressed in a loop of shared unrequited yearning. Such is the ubiquity of trauma and the promise of leaning in farther than we are used to, if only to acknowledge that we are all collectively smitten—and that even evil has a story.
Uzoma was driven away from the fellowship and Syreena was forbidden to have any kind of relationship with him. But Uzoma, of the Dike stock, called his mother back home and told her he was getting married.
So, one innocent day, Syreena finished all her chores like she had done in the past, and then told her family she was leaving. She had been lingering by the fence, the same one she had planted to stave off the uprising of the wilds, to cordon off the evil beyond. Her lover’s desire had echoed in the tempting distance, entwined with a feeling that other natures were indeed possible beyond the steely imperialism of Truth. With the aid of a certain “Brother Kumar,” Syreena stole away to find her lover, the one she had once considered abominable. They would hide at Brother Kumar’s place for a while after getting married at the Registry. A year later, they would hold the fruit of their shared sin, a cherub no less, the first daughter born to a proud Igbo man … Ijeoma, meaning “safe journey,” which is what we often say when someone is taking leave for somewhere very far. A scandal of departures. Your own mother, “Lali.”
I write these letters to you from a world where being a woman is an enduring scandal—never fully spoken, never fully heard, only eavesdropped on. The human male, in contrast, bathes in astral light, monumental and fixed—a chastising example to all other bodies. Most of our modern cities are built to honor the idea of the male—with tower
ing spires and skyscrapers bursting out of the ground in a phallic opera that convenes our lives around this exclusive sentiment, this singular worship of modernity’s patriarchal premises.
My initial endorsement of feminism took the form of an attraction to the “feminine,” and I was happy your mother shared my preference for “girly stuff.” When I met your mother (a story I owe you!), we knew we wanted a girl—two girls, in fact. It was an odd thing to wish for in both our cultures. When she eventually got pregnant, we were excited about finding out if our fondest hopes and prayers for a girl had come to pass. At the time of your conception, we were both working as lecturers in a Nigerian university. One day we drove out to have an ultrasound scan performed. I remember the technician in the later stages of his operation wiping the bluish gel off your mother’s belly and then turning to me, saying underneath his breath: “Well, it’s likely this is a girl.” If you were in the room (well … you were, in a sense, but … well, you understand), you wouldn’t have needed to ask him to speak a bit louder to hear the implied “I’m sorry” between the lines. It was the way he said it: in some needlessly reassuring and cautious way instead of as a celebratory declaration, as we would have preferred. Not surprisingly, he was visibly startled when I punched the air with a defiant “yeah!” while your mother-to-come—in her usual conservative way—simply smiled.
That same cultural hesitation for daughters prevailed in your mother’s land, where you were eventually born. Here in India, the silent war against girls was so disturbing that in 2014 the government had to institute a law banning prenatal sex determination and other medical practices they feared might be deployed as sex-selection technologies. When pregnant mothers found out they were to have daughters, they would either seek to terminate their pregnancies or even kill their born children. An official of the Indian government, the present minister for Women and Child Development, Maneka Gandhi, reports that two thousand girls are killed in the womb every day. “Some are born and have pillows on their faces choking them,” she noted on television.1 Contrast this with the widespread understanding here that boys bring luck and prestige—a culture-specific issue that has recently become very real to your mother and me as we are now both expecting your longed-for sibling, and as people around us—well-intentioned friends and neighbors, mind you—pray fervently that we have the preferred gender.
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences Page 13
