These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  I worry that if he moves too close to us, these devils will possess him too—even though that is very unlikely. Moreover, I will not allow him close—there are urgent matters at hand. He is writing letters to you. He is speaking about home and community and why you must now sleep. Tomorrow will dawn and the sun will bring you closer to the time when these will take to the wind and bless another body, in another time. In another place.

  For now, listen to the sound of my voice. Go to sleep. Let them do their work.

  Letter 4

  Libations at the Crossroads

  He took me by the hand and led me into the spirit world. I did not speak Yoruba and he did not speak English. Our only intercourse was the language of the trees.

  —Susanne Wenger1

  Dear Alethea,

  I’m “just black.” Your mother is “yellow, sometimes white.” And you? You are “brown”—conveniently situated somewhere in the chromatic middle, where extremes meet and forgive each other. And this you decree—again and again—carving out our humble places in your gently expanding world of colors.

  You first made this austere announcement about our skin colors one Wednesday while I toweled you dry. Mama and I looked at each other, not a word said in response, and then we fell on you tickling you—and then each other. If there’s one thing we like doing, it’s collapsing into a single pile of giggles and flapping limbs. It was yet another moment when we—your mum and I—felt ourselves in awe of the fact that our little Alethea, who only a while ago was a yelling-crying-blustering bundle of surprise, now could form a meaningful sentence about the beautiful colors this very material world bequeaths us for a while.

  And—speaking of toweling—even though your mama now frowns at the thought of me writing this to you, I thought you should know that I am the official bath-giver in our home. Apparently, I do it better than anyone else (and yes, there are many people that bathe you … your many mothers—your aunts, your mother’s cousins, your grandmother—with her long flowing hair folded into a neat bun behind her neck, and—sometimes when I have to travel alone and go away—your mum).

  Mama used to give you a bath, but I was more vigorous in my bath-giving. When I really got into it, everyone began noticing that you sparkled—so I took on the noble calling.

  No matter the circumstances or the menacing urgencies staring down at me, it falls on me to take care of you this way. To give you a bath. Bathing you is a ritual that has purposes deeper than self-care. Deeper than purpose. Greater than you and me. The world steals into our little bathroom in these precious moments, dripping through the louver windows with sunlight and curiosity and the yelling of children playing down our street, gushing through the bronze tap in an exuberant column of partnership, as you—our soon-to-be four-year-old girl—shed your skin and remake yourself. During these daily ablutions, we sing aloud, both of us—making up songs about teeth and tongues and scrubbing. And, of course, we take many liberties with the well-known nursery rhymes—like the time Little Bo Peep lost her goats, or when the bear went over Sanju.

  Sometimes you get some soap in your eyes, and then throw a titanic tantrum that slices through the humidity in the bathroom—leaving us both moody and testy. But most times we come out singing—not before you tell me you are going to scare me, and then—after I have gone to get you a towel and returned to the door to pick you into it—you jump out from behind the door with a loud “Boo!” I feign shock, trembling as best I can while you stand there studying my reaction, seeking signs that I am genuinely frightened. Convinced that your scare tactics have worked—the same one you use after every bath—you say “Surprise!” And then I pick you up in the towel as we both discuss how good a “scarer” you really are.

  When I began giving you baths, mama taught me how to mix turmeric powder, coconut oil, besan dal, and hearty helpings of patience into a small, dense emulsion, which I would then vigorously rub into your skin after scrubbing you with a soft sponge and lathery soap. I once watched an old Indian woman (whom we simply called Patti-ma) bathe you in a similar way with this same grimy mixture a few days after you were born. A grandmother and local midwife who sustained herself traveling from county to county within Tamil Nadu, helping new mothers take care of their delightful bundles of horror, Patti-ma would sit down on a tiny stool, lock her ankles together, and expertly slide you into the cradling space between her legs—where you seemed tranquil, until the washing began. Even so, her fierce care always left you with a noticeable glow about you.

  Patti came every Wednesday, always delighted to help out for a few rupees. She couldn’t speak any one-tongue, but she let me know (with your mum interpreting her Tamil) that the mixture was to help make you fair. “What’s wrong with black?” I’d ask, possessed by an old sensitive spirit. It often took your mum a few moments to assure me that Patti didn’t intend to transform you into a Caucasian; she just wanted you healthy and bright-looking.

  But there were spirits that churned and curdled whenever the intense scrubbing began. Old wounds. I often felt that the hint of darkness that pigmented your skin in certain areas was seen as a stain on your beauty, and that the daily regimen of applying turmeric and dal was intended to chase out my claims to fatherhood. In my defense, there were other prevailing cross-cultural circumstances that made me feel this way, but I wouldn’t want to write about that now.

  No matter how vigorously she scrubbed you, however, your complexion always blossomed somewhere between beige and a desert-sand brown hue. Right now, at three going on four, with a mouth that spills wise things, with a generous heart that beats out rhythms for those around you, and with little feet that tiptoe across the floor—as if at any moment you’d sprout wings like Lilith and fly, you are a rainbow-colored bodhisattva, at whose feet I long to sit. You are not pitch black like your father or the off-white ambiguity of your mum. You are not one color; “brown” doesn’t quite cut it. You are neither midnight nor bright sunny noon. Just the rambunctious ground that steadily observes the antics of the skies above.

  However, I often wonder if that would spare you—for this town, with all its joys and colors, seems to bask in the fleeting hospitality of bright sunny noons, leaving out those like me with an affinity to midnight.

  When I started to visit Tamil Nadu in the months before mama and I got married, I noticed a fondness for whiteness and a cultural apparatus that ascribed beauty to persons who were on the lighter side of things. This giant hidden hand, rarely visible, produced billboards advertising “Fair & Lovely Skin Lightening Cream,” and selected the distressed damsel for their local movies. The girl to be rescued, the one who sang her undying love to the swashbuckling hero, swinging her hips on a hill, teasing him from behind a tired tree, or pouting at the camera, was always, almost without exception, light-skinned or (if not fair enough) heavily plastered with makeup to look lighter than she really was. Beauty didn’t come in shades of black, and I wondered why.

  I would walk down a street, or linger at a bus stand as people looked outside their windows, or literally came within a few inches of me to stare at me like I was some fascinating variation of a familiar beast.

  Of course, I didn’t like any of it, but—to be fair—I didn’t feel like I was at the receiving end of some kind of racism down here in the South of India. Your mum helped me understand that their ways of performing curiosity were merely strange to me, and that they meant no harm. Up north, however, in the more populated cities of India, it is a different story for Africans that have migrated there. There are reports of Africans being abused, beaten up by violent mobs, denied basic services, or called names to their faces for not having straight long hair.

  Recently, a Kenyan woman was dragged from her cab and beaten by locals in Greater Noida; African men (mostly Nigerian men seeking business opportunities) who have moved into urban areas in South Delhi are frequently assaulted, followed into dark alleys, and beaten with sticks until they die. A wrong gesture could land one into lots of trouble.2

&
nbsp; Being a frequent traveler, I have often met immigration officers at Indian airports who, upon realizing a black man is next in line to present his passport, put on a disheartening scowl, while I do my best to smile from ear to ear, echoing a loud “Good morning” or “Good evening” in exchange for a muttered icy acknowledgment. They would flip through my passport, and then their eyes would almost jump out of their sockets when they see that I have an Overseas Citizen of India card, which means I am—for all intents and purposes—Indian. A female officer once sized me up many times, unable to comprehend how I was in possession of such a document. She asked what I did, if I was married to an Indian. By the time I answered that I was a professor of clinical psychology, author and speaker, and that—yes, I was in fact married to an Indian—she had darted off to show her colleagues in neighboring booths the wonder of an OCI card tucked neatly in a Nigerian passport—the horror of it.

  My mother often wonders why we decided to move to India. “There are other places you could go. You both finished summa cum laude—you could get well-paying jobs here in the UK,” she would say again and again when she calls. It’s probably true. But that is not the life we want to live, not the deep lesson we hope to bequeath you. Moreover, I love India—its wild geographic splendor, its unctuous sensitivities to the texture and ecstasy of bodies that lurk behind a studied (and perhaps colonial) prudeness … as if any second the thin veil of decorum would burst and release a delayed orgasm. How else could one explain the gasping abundance of culinary delights, of endless colors, of sacralized objects—from knickknacks to huge ornate statues baptized in milk and touched with powders and mixtures? And how could one reconcile this culture of excess with its seemingly pervasive shyness, this inclination to fold into oneself, to tuck in the shirt, and put on an administrative uniform of homogeneity?

  When your mother and I made the choice to come back to India and live here in its coastal south, we did so not merely because both of you were born here, and not merely because we have strong communal support here, but largely because we believed the life we want—small, intense, and intimate—could be provided here. Yes, I do find myself falling to worry when I read Indian dailies about arrested Nigerians, or watch a Tamil movie about an overpowered deified policeman, whose villain is a Nigerian drug smuggler that he refers to with a snarl as an “African monkey.” I hate to think that we moved to a beautiful and sacred country so attuned to the sensuous materiality of the ordinary, with people whose blue and wondrous gods are fashioned in the figures of animals, and who know how to boil a bucket of milk into a soft cube of edible ecstasy—only to find a politics of complexion and a fascination with white people.

  So I sometimes walk about stiffly when your mother sends me down the road to the local store. I would put on an affected Americanized accent, or say I was from South Africa when people ask me what part of the world I was from. It’s true. I hardly feel at home in my own skin—which seems like a necessary prerequisite to fashioning new settlements and new ontologies of home. If your own skin repels you, then where might you live?

  Now I tell you all this because it seems that the world has favorites—and one’s skin color has a lot to say about whether you are well off or not seen at all. Whether you are shown a seat at the table, or shown the door. Bàbá’s quest has taken me on journeys across the Möbius strip of my days to find a way to pray for you, as a ritual to bless the world you will live in. And though I haven’t found all the hushes yet, I know well enough to say that I want you to be seen, to be embraced with the many colors your skin takes on. I wish for a world that loves you the way I do, that knows something the world I now live in doesn’t know.

  I began to think about this world you will grow in—wondering whether your brown skin and frizzy hair might find room in a world thickly textured by fair and white skins. Who would hold you when I am gone? Who would see you, in your diffractive splendor, and love you just the way Lali and I do? Is there a place for those that fall between the binary, mired in the morass of the middle? Or were you cursed from the moment you leaked through the matrix, drawing in air that was reserved for the proper born ones?

  In Nigeria, where I grew up and where your mother’s father was born, in the cities, the air is thick with a forgetfulness and a busyness. With a preference for white ontologies. Everyone rushes about with a “skeptical pout,” fulfilling the prophecies of a forlorn myth, the sides of their faces nailed tight to the phones in their hands, singing the lyrics of a song that has no rhythm or sway.

  We speak development and progress and GDP. We endorse their standards of excellence. We tell ourselves that the white man knows the way forward, and we curse and spit at ourselves because we do not add up to the cherished figure of the foreigner. Because our airports don’t have functioning carousels or operating air conditioning units. Because blackness often feels like an unfortunate deviation from the default of whiteness. And we shake our heads when the television screen lights up with images of yet another building or engineering feat in the legendary West. There’s even a song for those moments when we feel there’s something wrong with us and everything right with “them”: “Come and see American wonder! Come and see American wonder!”

  It is said by those among us who seem to know better about our own nobility that we have lost our own stories, our own histories, our own senses of fortitude and worth. They say, in effect, that we have potholes in our roads, not because we are laughably inadequate to the task of tarring our highways, but because something in the soil resists the finality of the industrial order, and potholes might very well be the orifices through which other potential political imaginaries breathe.

  And in other places, the veil that shrouds our painful loss is just as thin as the space between the red earth and asphalt layers. If you press closely, you might hear the interrupted strokes of tunes that might have been sung. You might hear hooves and equestrian stirrings, ghostly laughter and merrymaking, and the prosodic invocations of the kalengo drum attending every step of a legendary king.

  You might hear stories spoken by moonlight of when Portuguese ships pulled close, in 1485, docking at the shores of a mighty kingdom and the mighty people of Old Benin. The tragedy of those arrivals not yet foreseen, and the magnificence of the courts—now filled with Manila hemp, clothes, and the guns the Europeans brought with them—blinding them, they opened their gates to the British travelers who came afterward. Our chiefs sold ivory, gold, oil, and slaves to the coastal settlers, whose explorers and mapmakers then ventured inland, proposing to save us from our original sins and teach us how to read and write.

  Those coastal enlightenment settlers, transacting by the waters, remaking our children, unearthing our dead ones and closing up the pagan places, never did leave—even when they made a great show of leaving and bequeathed us with a new word, independence. The white cloth had already been soiled; the cowries had already been cast to the ground. And there, in the divining of their smooth bodies, were the stories of dispossession and curious inflections of the familiar.

  I speak of loss and dislocations. Of futures interrupted. Of dances halted by the crack of gunfire splitting the night into a strange duality. Of strange poisons buried in the land so that the ground no longer recognized the once intimate footfalls of my fathers and mothers in their comings and goings.

  Achebe’s Okonkwo hung himself on a tree because he no longer knew the ground he had always made love to, the womb that had given him sturdy yams and kept him aloft when he threw “Amalinze the Cat,” the wrestler that he beat at the opening of the book Things Fall Apart. This violence, this pain of being estranged from one’s ground, of losing a sense of gravity, also haunted “The Man” in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, a meditation on postcolonialism in Africa. Armah writes of the nameless man: “Outrage alternated with a sweaty fear he had never before felt. Something, it seemed to him, was being drained from him, leaving the body feeling like a very dry sponge, very light, completely at the m
ercy of sly toying gusts of wind.”3

  He might have been speaking of Okonkwo. He might have been speaking of those among my fathers that pressed their ears close to the earth to hear its vibrations and could no longer hear them. He might have been speaking of Bàbá, who lives away from a proud modern highway—the poisoned black stuff that scorches the ground so that cars and their newly minted owners can drive faster to hell.

  He might have written of the Osu people of eastern Nigeria.

  Your grandfather—your mother’s father and my other-father—was a proud Igbo man. He came from a respected line of Igbo men. His father was a chief and his mother a midwife. I have already written a little about him, and would write more if I knew him … if I had the honor of prostrating before him for his daughter’s hand in marriage.

  He was Nwadiala—which in the Igbo language means “sons of the soil,” a designation for the freeborn that only makes sense in the context of what it excludes, those born of the weird, the Osu.

  One can either be born of the soil, to the Nwadiala, or to the “accursed” Osu people. The Osu are considered untouchable, unclean and abominably alien to their communities. The Nwadiala neither marry them nor do business with their children. In fact, if a member of the Nwadiala wants to get married, the family of the intending one conducts thorough investigations to make sure that their own does not get entangled with an outcast. On the off chance a headstrong cross-caste couple insist on love and get married, certain measures are taken to quickly end the marriage or, in some aching instances, end the couple:

  A human rights group outlined the atrocities meted out against the Osu in Igboland. They include: “parents administering poison to their children, disinheritance, ostracism, organized attack, heaping harvest offering separately in churches, denial [of] membership in social clubs, violent disruption of marriage ceremonies, denial of chieftaincy titles, deprivation of property, and expulsion of wives, etc.”4