Men have never really stayed long in my life my father was always on ‘business trips’ and then abandoned us fully. By the time I was 8 his sporadic visits to London stopped and the little hope my mother held onto for her marriage vanished. They were quite young when they met in their very early twenties with both studying law in Germany, Heidelberg, where they lived married and had their first child my brother. My mother fell pregnant again pretty fast after he was born which meant my brothers were very close in age and one year apart in school. In many ways they were like twins, they had the same friends, same hobbies and also taste and tried to impose that upon me! I was 8/ 7 years their junior, and started living with them full time at nine years old after moving back to London from my prIvate foster home, where I lived in with my sister, in Somerset. The fractured home was due to my father deciding he wanted to spend more time in Nigeria, leaving my mother, who had to work, two jobs to get by to raise the family. This meant there was no time to raise young children, it differed with my brothers as they were eight and seven years old meaning they could be more self sufficient, where as I was just born and my sister was just three. By the time we came together again as one family unit I was
already queer as fuck! Belting out Mariah and whispering ‘slow down Mase you’re killing me’ from Brandy’s, sitting on top of the world and being strictly told not to and wondering why! They tried time and time again to impose a certain sort of masculinity that never stuck and so I learned it was best to keep my distance from them.
I’ve never really trusted or understood men and still don’t! I was raised by women, my nanny from birth alongside my sister, my mother from 9 to 15, my teachers, my bosses & mentors were mostly women -I owe myself to women. The first woman I remember was my grandmother, there was something mystical and unknown about her, they first came to visit when I was very young and my grandfather in no other way to put it was on his way out. Blind and ill I watched as he was cared for by the women around him. It led me to question what really is strength when connected to the physical vs the emotional? Especially as a once strong man, who started an accountancy firm, who made money, who survived Nigeria’s civil war, who was so proud to connect all these things and utter about "a man making ones own way through life" to then fall victim to life’s curse and suffer ill health, only be cared for not by men but by women.
My grandparents were very Nigerian in many ways, Christians, who believed in a certain order. This was also passed on in a less rigid way to their daughter, my mother. Who I learned early on that she would never fully understand me, and honestly still doesn’t but we’ve learned to live with understanding that our misunderstandings don’t need to be understood in order to find a level of connection. When I was younger, I saw her accent and views as dated and connected to colonial views, imposed upon her not by choice but default. I watched as she adapted a kind of interpreted Englishness to get by, as a way to be more widely accepted into the often hostile and racist Britain of the 90’s. I noted that she sometimes looked on at me in horror, as I was born with the language she had to learn, manners and a sensibility that were first hand to me came secondary to her. I was this weird wild queer child in a world that was too free for her liking. She was connected in my foolish youthful mind to Nigeria, which always felt far, distant and foreign.
So when I think of my homeland, Nigeria, a question pops up. What leads me there now but a father who was absent for most of my life? Nigeria is my native home, Igbo is my tribe, my people, my language. I am Nigerian but I don’t feel it, I don’t feel fully British either but I do feel like a Londoner, Tottenham fills me with horror and pride equally, it’s complexities have shaped me and allowed me to become who I am.
Nigeria has been on my mind for a while, my thoughts have wandered there and a want has surfaced. Around 2018 I decided I wanted to go back and visit. I wanted to ask my father why he left my mother and us with nothing but each other. I still want to, to close a chapter of my life and hear from him his feelings, his thoughts yet also his fears as he was younger than I now with a full family. So I can listen, learn and hopefully forgive. I also wanted to explore the arts scene and see if I can learn and connect with how the artists see the world as reading ‘Half of a yellow sun’ and ‘Things fall apart’ soothed, horrified and educated me.
I’ve only been once when I was 8, that’s 22 years ago now, I was a spoilt little brat, that was driven around in Mercedes and had bodyguards, I saw the world outside from a car window! Yet I’m not here to paint it black and make bleak pictures about the land or add to a canon that laregely depicts the country in an often desperate light, I'm just saying what I saw from the mind of a child who had never seen or known much beyond the comforts of my English home.
Yes there was children selling ‘ice water’ in the sweltering heat, yes kids would run after the car and I’d wind down the window to gaze at them never seeing so many faces that looked so similar to my own in one place, dipping into my pocket to give them Naira, baffled by the value of the notes. Yes the police stopped and searched us but hearing our accents and knowing my father they let us pass, Yet I watched in amazement as the civilians behind us were taken out of their vehicles and searched vigorously and violently. I remember looking back as the dust rose and seeing distorted scenes play out, yes I saw a dead body of a women on the side of the road with a vulture eaten buttocks and yes these visions have stayed with me and in a sense haunted me, as even know they’re so sharp and vivid.
When I think of Nigeria, I also think of my grandmother who lived there and lived through so much. She saw her country freed from the British, she saw a new nation Biafra rise and then fall with the cost of this, 2 million of her tribesmen and women murdered, lost, raped and mutilated, she raised nine children and then sent them across the globe to study and raise families, saw her husband fade way and learned to live with the ache of loss. She moved to America, spent time in England and then decided to live out the rest of her life back where she was born, as my Grandmother died in January of this year, a link in an unbroken chain that stretched back to the beginning, to the start of wherever/ whoever I came from, broken now she’s gone.
I was due to go back to Nigeria in June to bury my grandmother, but with Corona who knows when this will happen?Yet I know it has to be soon as we have to now bury both my Grandmother and her daughter, my Aunty who also just passed away, last week in London. She was in her fifties and had underlying health issues, and so it seems that Corona claimed my family’s first victim, the first of my mother’s brothers and sisters to die in adulthood.
Now that I'm stuck in Europe, not able to leave my house, city or country, it really does have me thinking about Nigeria and who I am and what I owe to a land I don’t know, to cousins and half siblings that I’ve never met and a father I want and hope to learn more about. As the European economy and my life are both placed on hold with the virus threatening to take more people close and far from me before their time. I think of what I want to do, who I want to know and that I honestly do desire to see my homeland and know more of it and in turn more of myself. I wan to bury both my Aunt and Grandmother to say goodbye to them and a certain kind of hello to my father and to talk to people who look like me and understand the mindset more and to travel and know a land that at this time right now is unknown to me.
