An Unorganized Soliloquy

In one of my writing classes in the fall of 2022, the theme was identity, I had asked my students, first year university undergraduates from science backgrounds, to write a letter to their 10 year old selves, telling them what they know now that they’re adults, most of them 18/19 years old at the time. In the assignment guideline, I said: write as though you’re now old & this is the best thing to do to save a 10 year old somewhere. While I started reading my students’ papers, something I love so much, an act of rhetoric togetherness and service, the only way I can be in the most ultimate conversation with my students, and for a pokenoser like me (sometimes), reading their honest letters made me want to write mine. But I want to write in the present and not in the past. I want to say things to myself. I want you to join me in this soliloquy, to use my soliloquy as yours or to draw something new out of my soliloquy.

I just reconnected with my English teacher in primary school on Facebook in April. She taught me in 2002. I was screaming. She’s still so young, but now with kids she didn’t have at the time. She screamed back the moment I screamed. It was exciting how these screaming was happening via chat. In 2002, she was so young and lean, Mary leagued, in skirts, always had lip gloss on, always packed her hair backwards, sometimes natural, sometimes decent braids. Loyal. Now she says I’ve turned to a big boy. Yes, I’m now bigger than 2002, the same way, from her profile pictures and a pile of mobile uploads in her album, she’s now a big woman. My being big doesn’t necessarily help me, but it worries me, in ways that there’s an expectation of me, that now that you’re big, you need to do big. It starts now, because ara ka mma na okorobia. 

The day I turned 24, I was in our house in Lagos, feeling too old and too scared, with my cousins, either just eating rice and beans or forming a circle in the parlor to gossip about life and everything that we couldn’t say on ordinary days. There would always be light, The TV would always be on, then thunder would strike and the lights would go off, it would always rain, we would always talk about something, in the middle of a hovering helicopter. Once, we had feared about how our bodies would be changing as soon as we get to 30, and how we might all be pressured to get married, make money, but now, I think we are more focused on other serious things, because age as a social identity marker either would prop you or derail you. My cousin now lives abroad, he’s 31, he laments how everyone wants to know your age in abroad, and he doesn’t like to say his age, so he says:

“How old do you think I am?”

Then the person would predict. Usually they predict him to be younger, which makes him feel better. I say this because even to remember you are a certain age in the standard of society means that you have to feel good or bad about yourself, that you have to do fast or jump, that you have to rebrand yourself over and over again. An endless cycle that you perform to keep being alive.

I’m writing this letter at the airport in Vegas, in a layover to Phoenix, with Audre Lorde’s book beside me, a book that tells me the truth every time I open any page on it. The man sitting next to me is flooded with grey hair to his shoulders. He clicks the keyboard of his MacBook as though he was sending an angry email with exclamation marks everywhere. I stare at his angry hands until my phone rang and it was my father & my mother via WhatsApp. My mother’s photo of her in a turtle neck blasting the call screen. They were waiting to go to sleep & wanted to hear how my journey was going. My father is now above 70, my mother is above 60. I have photos of them at 25; how sleek and lean they were, and now, how my father’s healthcare swallows most of his money, & my mother, always very mindful about cholesterol, slowly running the treadmill in our parlor until she saw sweat litter her neck area. And when she visited my brother in Sheffield, she was incomplete, the fact that there was no thread mill to use to keep her life longer. Back to the man next to me at the airport. The man next to me seemed like a sleek handsome man when he was 25, the type that tendered himself from hair to toe, but I can’t see the “handsome” now that I’m looking at him. I see age. I see that I will be there. Maybe full white hair. Half hair. Bald. No hair.

I’m writing this note, not to myself, but to other boys like me, who will be like me, who are already like me, who are younger than me, who are willing to see my manual as it is, as it has been, who are with me in this soliloquy.

First, now is the time to filter all that you have tried your hands on. At 5 or 6, I read my first children’s book. It was THE FLUTE by Chinua Achebe, originally published in 1977. My mother brought it from where I can’t remember and let me and my siblings read it. You know when we were like 18 and 19, we did everything, wanted to be writers, artists, intellectuals, everything that seemed fancy to be. We wrote, we sang, we drew, we made a mess. I wrote a novel at 17. The large computer in our living room never worked. My parents paid a woman in Orlu to type everything. I went to her each morning, sitting close to her as she typed out my novel from the long notebook into the computer. My only readers later became my parents and my mother’s English teacher friend, Mrs. Agwaka. No one else read it until today.

I think making a mess is the work itself. All the mess I made in secondary school, all the writing, all the reading, have kept me until this day and have carried me into adult life. I was looking at a poem I wrote when I was 17. I also came across a poem that won me the ABC Transport Poetry Prize in 2013. I died in laughter. I sent them to my friend so we could laugh together. When she saw them, she said they were too beautiful and that I wouldn’t want to see what hers looked like. Like an unnecessary puzzle. But now, just start filtering everything you ever put your hands on, until you find one or two that you can stick to, this one or two that you can have a command on, that even if someone wakes you up at 3am- you would speak so well about it, as though you are the scientist who left something in the refrigerator in the lab. You can’t forget what you left. Because your existence as a scientist temporarily depends on it.

Be angry if you can, but do not let your anger transition into bitterness. You can be angry sometimes, but bitterness is what you will run away from. Anger helps in many ways, to overcome and to reject the situations and people that are not for you. Of course you can be as angry as you want to be. Homosexuality in the world today is anger itself. But a bitter homosexual? No. I think that might end you. I’m not saying that homosexuality shouldn’t equal bitterness, but my point is that homosexuality alone, in the circumference of this heterosexual world, is already enough to bring you down.

While in university, lecturers asked me to leave their class because I asked them a question they couldn’t answer and I was serially misunderstood as being arrogant. I had a hard time situating myself in the midst of the terrible lecturers I had. Some failed me and asked me to repeat. Even when I repeated, they failed me again. Some asked me for money to give me a C. I didn’t bring the money, they offered me an E or an F. I questioned myself. I questioned them. I questioned the university. I fought with myself. I wanted to spit at those lecturers; for being bad, for forcing girls to sleep with them, for lying, and painful that no one could speak. My best lecturer then moved to the US. It was obvious that he couldn’t stand the rot. So, that season of my life was for battling. Battling with the people in whose hands I should find support. When you find the avenue to battle, please battle, whether something changes or not, you have just done your part. You might not battle that sort of battle ever in your life. To do the battle is to live life.

Fall in love. But don’t really fall too much. The first time I fell in love, in university, a long distance situationship that I didn’t expect that it would later be love- because the difference in us was too tall. I was just flowing. I was just waiting for the verb of the love to happen, like an accident. I had loved this person, and this person had loved me back, but I was waiting for it to be heterosexually pronounced, which never happened. It was stupid of me to think heterosexually most times, but it is also gracious of me to acknowledge that my existence, my childhood was circled around heterosexuality. It swallowed me that I had to fight it out. Back to love, I think falling in love as straight people is different from how other people fall. Men would remain the most difficult people to date on earth, even me. So, when love happens, it is right to use your inside eyes, to not fall too much too early, to fall in an equilibrium, in an equal measure of things. I think it’s hard to know when people really love you wholeheartedly. Love that has no head and no tail is like you are nailing yourself every day. Blood will come out.

Can we now talk sex? Can I talk sex? I’m not asking for a permission to, because no one has authority over sex. I’m not sure I want to talk sex in this essay. My not wanting to is not because I’m running away from appreciating body pleasure and the biology of the body in adrenaline chaos or that I’m not ready to be in my most vulnerable moment of remembering. My not wanting to is rather because to talk sex is to remind myself of fantasy, to wallow in a fantasy that presents itself as theory that doesn’t necessarily become reality. I would prefer to avoid this coitus theory at this time. It would be most appropriate and most respectful to specially dedicate an essay to sacramentalize my views about sex and the body and freely bare all these holes that I’ve ever concealed.

My artist mother (who I will write a multimodal essay for later) says: Igapụ agapụ, ịchapụ achapụ. This literarily means- when you go out, you lighten up and lighten up. My mother is a textile designer, an art teacher, an ardent motorcyclist, a potter, a graphics designer, who also owns a large palm plantation in our hometown. Her life is a bunch of many things. I remember the first time she took me and my brothers to a birthday party in 2001, at her friend’s mansion on the hills in Orlu. Her friend was a Chemistry teacher at the same school they taught. My mother says her brain works like a machine, but when we went to her house, all I saw was a woman dishing Jollof rice and cubes of meat and chicken and turkey up and down. She kept going around to everyone, one by one, like a reverend father giving holy communion, do you need more? Can you finish this one? She would then turn to me and turn to my mother and say in Igbo: Mrs. Adioha, this your son doesn’t eat at all? He’s afraid of our rice? It’s foreign rice o.

At the party, my mother made us dance to Fally Ipupa and Brenda Fassie, the same music that played in the Mazda she drove us with, she made me meet my first best friend, Chimamkpa, a boy that I later went to the same primary school with, good friends we were, but always competing in everything, competing in who had more books and who knew Math, until his parents started feeling uncomfortable and took him away from our school. I say this because going out has saved me. You won’t find anything staying inside. You will go out and show yourself. If you’re an introvert like my cousin who later married another introvert, you might really miss the world in one way or the other. So, go out, meet the people you have never met before, online or physical, and please, leave your phone in your pocket or the bag you carried with you, and speak to the human beings around you. Recently, I now value physical connections more, I think about the five senses even when I meet people online. I’m never speaking to them if those five senses are not going to be present, if there are no possibilities of meeting those five senses. It’s a waste of time and space.

One day you will be tired. Even tired of arguing to prove your existence on earth. And fighting. Not even when you are old. Even now. I get tired of certain topics. I like to say that I can’t really engage on social media, but inside me, I want to, but my body says no. Too tired. I once made a tweet where many people who do not know me almost spat at me, some asked questions, some found that opportunity to be like me, angry, and then I was telling one of my friends in our FaceTime that I wish they would send me an email and so we can have a conversation and maybe understand myself. Not saying email would be the easiest, but it allows me to give myself time and use my computer keyboard to respond with my body and soul, in peace, because to respond to strangers via social technology does nothing than to run in circles. To give yourself away, your voice away, your mind, to a stranger- is to enter into an endless cycle of distrust & non-reality.

If you’re an effeminate man in any way, straight people won’t like you. But I’m not saying their likeness will bring food to the table. I’m not saying their likeness will ever be meaningful in this life. In the order of things, their likeness is largely inconsequential. Just that because of this space that is the society, the people, the system, will twist you. I remember the days when I walked a certain way or performed masculinity to pass a group of strange boys, or to feel belonged in this heterosexual system of things. To say it was a phase is to deny myself of the process of my life. It wasn’t a phase, it was just the design that accompanied my personality. It will be normal for many people. It is normal, as far as this society still exists in its version of unequal capitalism. So, walk the walk, perform where you need to. What performance does is to prepare us, to open our eyes to the injustice that is foundationally buried in the space we float and sail on and therefore empowers us to fight it. To fight both sexism and homophobia and all its ingredients.

As you get older, as you become like me, in 27 & 28 & now that I write this, you will lose friends and family you grew up with, people that were part of your childhood, that canopied you, because this life you have chosen to be rebellious about doesn’t please them, this you that goes and comes, that is warm, doesn’t please everyone, won’t please everyone. Because you are now another new, and this new will have to stay for a long time. You will also loose ordinary friends you meet on your journey. Those who will break you, and those who you will break, everyone, all of us, gathering our pieces of life. Until we heal. In life or in the end. Please prepare to choose yourself when the going rumples. Nothing is permanent.

My soliloquy is ending now. With my cousin, Chidi, 35, pharmacist, whose father is my uncle, Nicholas, the one who I reincarnated from. Chidi died while I was in primary 2. Just after he married a tall fair woman from Abia state. Good union. What people liked. Pharmacist and lawyer. Many things happened in primary 2. Chidi was so ill that my mother and my father cried the day he returned home, leaner than usual. The white kaftan he made in Jos had swallowed him. The same white kaftan I watched my father iron on his king size bed, preparing them for Chidi to wear for lying in state. I stood there, by the wall, until he finished ironing them and folded them into a transparent nylon file. My father’s sweat became a mirror of tears. Chidi’s body became a memory. His mother died 15 years after. My aunt whose mental health failed her, died in 2016. My other aunt was running and screaming until she peed on her wrapper. It always happens to her. Any death in the family would kill her bladder. She’s late now. I watched my father cry, my father’s name is Nnodịmelụwa, always watching pain and living it away. I end this soliloquy with Chidi because he was the one I watched, the one I wanted to carry me, the one whose age was too numbered, the one whose blood looked like mine, the one who made my father’s eyes sore and red, who brought my family pain in many ways, the one whose white kaftan hung in my head till tomorrow, the one who didn’t let me see the rest of him in the way that I had dreamed, the one whose demise changed me, the one who showed me how fickle our lives are, whose grief I grief on every November 2nd.

The moment to live is this moment.