ktravula – a travelogue!

Edwardsville by Heart

The picture that I had intended for this post remains in my head. It is a sheath of red and green Christmas flowers bound in a perfect circle and hanging by the side of the wooden bridge over the Tower lake at the entrance of Cougar Village. It has been there since winter began as a sign for the season. I don’t know who put it there but it always makes a good sight every time I drive by, and I have always been too preoccupied with driving to be able to take a perfect picture of it. And so, it remains in my head.

One more disadvantage of being able to drive is the laziness it induces. All my favourite haunts on campus once familiar to regular treading of my bicycle tyres have now become distant acquaintances. But for that battery run-out on the car a few weeks ago that forced me to walk home at night in the cold, I probably won’t even have recognized what the bike paths look like. It’s sad, I know. It is also fattening. Goodness knows how large I’m going to become by the end of this school year. We have not even mentioned the cost of gas made higher often, no less, by Nigerian agitators in the Niger Delta. It has warmed up for a while in the last few days and a bike ride is looking very likely now, if only I can muster the patience to walk again to campus in order to pick up my bike where I’d left it a few weeks ago.

But this post is not about the bike, the car or the Christmas sheath. It is the treasures of the little city. Not much a delight as it was last year through a stranger’s eyes, it is growing into an even more familiar friend. From new wineries being discovered in the most obscure corners to making friends in wine shops downtown with the hopes of getting my picture artworks displayed on their walls. If what this is is the subliminal instinct working towards replicating an already picturesque childhood, this will be more interesting than expected. All we need now is a dog. I already have many stories to tell.

Roads Around The Child (Non-Fiction)

Our house lay at a junction of roads. The first one stretched from an unknown place beyond the mango trees and a public water well in front of the Oguns’ house. Ahead, it reaches out into the dry dusty parts of the village, past the albino barber’s house and farther down into places where now I can’t immediately conjure beyond the sight of leaves, dry wood and old men playing draught on wooden benches outside their unpainted houses. The other road goes past the Bello’s house to the church, then branches towards the main road where tar begins and heads into the town. When put side by side as they both inevitably lay approaching the wide spot in front of the house where we all usually play in the evening around the grown men of the area, they form a dusty wide line of an attempted “v” which ends at the Baale’s house. From there, they part, each again taking up a lonely path to my right into as far as the eyes can see.

A mental stepping now out of the big compound of my house into those streets, I stand now, facing the Baale’s house, turning my back to the dusty “v” of the coming road. On to the left, the road veers by the small thrush in front of the house where Lanko Lanko lives, then a little further down it reaches an electric transformer. After that, to the left, is my school, fenced around with a white concrete wall and spiked metal bars. Further down is nothing but gullies and leaves, and a beaten path to where moin moin is sold along with its corn paste companion, into the labyrinths of huts and a maze of households of mud and concrete of old women with intriguing dress patterns and ribald tongues. They knew me and knew that I ran away from them whenever I could, except when I had things to buy. And one of them called me “my husband”. Further down in the centre of the village woods where dirt competed with house animals and putrid smells from collective waste is a large agbalumo tree. It came along with it a myth that it housed spirits that tormented wandering children…

Back to my junction, on to the right are the better, sanctioned spaces of play: the opening towards Mama Lawyer’s clinic, just three houses away. Before that is the kolanut seller, then the farmer and professor’s awesome cottage where I saw a chess board for the first time and wondered why it didn’t look like the draughts boards I’d seen my brother play at home. In there are their three boy children one of whom was around my age, older by about a year or two. Then an orchard of sweet smelling flowers, a corn mill, trees of mango and cashew, and livestock. The cottage opened itself always up as a paradise of treasures, menu, and learning.

Mama Lawyer’s clinic, for then and now remains as old as memory. I never saw her husband who was the real lawyer. She has travelled to many countries, we were told, and she had come home to retire, operating the clinic as a way to stay active. Even then, tufts of grey hair already dotted her beautiful hair that kept her demeanour always so disarming. The smile, the warm hug of a mother of all little children, and the music in her voice when she asks “Young man, what have we got today? Aren’t we looking good.” It always made the enduring phobia of needles immediately disappear, if only for the second. So when I get the “fever” as all ailments are called to a six year old, Momma dresses me up in a thick sweater and the right pair of trousers, and we walk hand in hand towards Mama Lawyer’s house, stirring the dust paths of the village’s open roads into the evening sky.

(Photos taken in Jos, Plateau and Obi, Nassarawa. July 2010)

The Text Part of Growing

The evolution from picture books to text-only materials was gradual, but memorable. There seemed to have been an unwritten disdain for picture books that manifested after each birthday, each disposed oversized pyjamas and each replaced tooth. It wasn’t self-wrought however, but acquired, either from older peers with fancier stories of intimate relations with the written word resulting in inspiring encounters, or jealousy of even fancier ones with fantastic tales of their reading prowess. Something gave, however, for sure, little by little, and the young reader emerged, ready to take on the reading world without accompanying images.

The most memorable of such recollection could be the singular, but eventually impossible task of reading the first chapter of The Tiger by the Tail during a bus ride from home to school. It didn’t matter to him in the least that he couldn’t make any sense of it yet, never having even applied himself to more than just a few words on each page he flipped. It matter though that people saw him with a book that was bigger than a storybook, had no pictures in it, and moved from page to page as if passing through the patient and critical eyes of an avid reader. “Hey, nice book. How’re you finding it?” Someone would ask sometimes during the day, and he would respond: “Oh, very nice. Chase is such an exquisite writer”, and move on before the probing went far beyond the familiar. Oh the days.

The blog, now splattered with colours and images, flesh and blood, of ordinary and extraordinary people of various places, beliefs and convictions, could only remind of such trivialties; of days when colour meant ordinariness, and a lack of sophistication needed for the rites of adulthood. Now only a smile remains, and a longing for such a not so distant past of innocence and silliness.

Welcome September, and the year of birth.

A Short History of My Face

I looked in the mirror this evening and found out that I am good-looking. This doesn’t happen often. I am either in too crappy a mood to appreciate what the mirror reflects to me, or the mirror isn’t clear enough, because of mist or some imaginary dent, to give me anything substantial. Let’s just say that we had just never agreed in a long while. Today, everything changed. Heck, I even noticed a growth on my chin that haven’t always been that impressive. Is it because of the winter? A few months ago, in Nigeria, I could almost count every one of these wiry strands. Now, that has become an impossibility. In any case, sometime this evening, I found myself in front of my bathroom mirror and I noticed a few old and new things about my now good-looking winter-adapting still boyishly hirsute face.

One of the most prominent was a lone vertical mark on the right side of my face. It used to be a scar and it has been there since I was seven, or eight–I no longer remember–but I remember the incident that brought it up there. How could I forget it? It’s a long personal story, but it can be summarized in the following words: an otherwise crazy curious experiment in traditional science.

Earlier in one lone week out of the now many blurry ones in my childhood memory, my father had unknowingly satisfied too much of my recurring curiosity by telling me how he got the tribal marks on his own face. He was born in the early forties when it was still acceptable and admirable for parents from his side of Yorùbáland to scarify the faces of their children as markers of culture, tribe, social standing or just plain beauty. Well, beauty as decided by the eyes of the beholder! I had looked at his face that evening, perhaps even touched his hirsute cheeks too, and found the three pairs of horizontal marks there quite fascinating. How in the world, I wondered, could those scars made by a probing knife of the professional traditional scarifier remain on the face of his victim for that length of time? I had not the slightest idea, and I asked him.

In those days, he said, the men who made the marks had a secret black paste/potion which they applied to the wound on the baby’s face while it was still fresh, to make the wound heal, and to make the marks truly stand out when it eventually healed. It was the effect of the dark paste/potion, he said, that ensured that the wounds never returned to the same nice state as the other parts of the bearer’s face. Thus explained the deep permanent marks on the faces of the very many grown people of his generation that I had met until then.

For days after I discovered this secret, I remained in utmost sleepless fascination, not just about the level of pain it must cause the newborn who must endure the ordeal, the cruelty of the adults who must hold them down at just a few months old to get them scarified for the rest of their lives in the hands of a trusted man with a knife, nor about the resentment the children must feel when they grow up and decide that they never liked those marks on their faces in the first place, but about the possibilities of putting to test the newly gained knowledge I had obtained. I believed my father, but I wanted to see it for myself how this worked. I expressed my thoughts aloud and he responded in a very mischievous and to me quite unsettling jest, asking whether I would prefer for him to call the local scarifier immediately to come and mark my face “for beauty” even though I was already past the required age. I shouted NO, and quickly fled.

But the fascination remained.

So one day while in my primary school, which was not too far from the house, something led to another in class and I had a really rough fight with one of my classmates over something that could as well have been as trivial as speaking “vernacular” in the classroom or reporting same to the teacher. I suddenly saw his hand in a flash towards my cheek. It was all he could grab so he scratched me as hard as he could, and I felt a deep searing pain. A few seconds later, I touched my face and saw a vertical stripe of blood on my hands. Then a few drops began to trickle onto my shirt. It was painful and I let the boy go. But it was also a brief moment of epiphany.

Instead of continuing with the fight which I could by now have won if only for the moral upper hand of rage, I bailed, and everyone stared at me, wondering what was happening. I ran homewards as fast as I could towards the storeroom where mother kept the charcoal fired up to put in the oven she used to make cakes and bread, with blood still dripping from my face. What I did in those fleeting moments of pain and panic was grind the few charcoal chalks into soluble powder, and apply it to my bleeding face.

Thinking about it now, I almost can’t believe the extent of my little daredevilry and stupidity, because if my grandmother had caught me there, she would definitely have panicked, and I would definitely have received some serious spanking. Now satisfied with the experiment, I grimaced in pain but smiled in satisfaction, and waited. The line had been drawn, no pun intended, and the traditional science had been put to test. My father could either be proven wrong and the scar would disappear eventually, or he could be right and I could now have a tribal mark of my own making.

Looking at that lone vertical stripe on the right side of my face today, I could only smile. It used to be a really prominent one. Now it’s just an almost indistinguishable scar, but it’s there alright, visible at the right angle to the source of light.

While applying for the Fulbright programme early last year, I wrote an account of this experience in my application to illustrate one of my first personal intimations with some of Yorùbá cultural practices, and only just hoped for some laughter when the board eventually got to read it. It was to my surprise on the big day of the interview when the board begged that the light be switched on in the room so that they could properly see the scar on my face. The anecdote had apparently made a memorable impression. I was giggling and grinning like an eight-year-old child as I let them bend and angle my face to get a better look. And while one of them huddled close almost hand-tracing the line on my face, I myself wondered why and how I could have been such an enfant terrible willing to put his own self on the line for such a curious experiment.

My face now bears one lone mark that wasn’t there since birth. But unlike that of many Yoruba people now wishing that they could erase theirs, or at least that they had got a choice in the matter in the beginning as they really should have, mine is worn with a certain pride.

Maybe I was really that terrible as a child, now atoning for those sins through the huge torment of the writing gene. The stripe on my face may be a fine reference point to some precocious point in my interesting history, but the real truth is that secretly, I really really just wanted to prove my father wrong.

Image Credits: http://www.vub.ac.be/BIBLIO/nieuwenhuysen/african-art/images/sothebys2008yoruba.JPG

It’s Global Warming, Stupid!

I’ve found out that it’s not so cold here after all. Don’t get me wrong, three degrees cold is cold indeed, but coming out of my apartment this morning, I found out that I have indeed been in this kind of cold weather before, and it was neither in Europe nor in the Arctic, but in Nigeria. In Ibadan, to be clear.

You see, I’ve been having these repressed memories of my childhood brought back. And no, they don’t include memories of a sibling or step-father or any form of touching in the wrong places. I do vividly remember now that while I was younger, it used to be very cold at some times of the year that we always had to wear thick clothing in order to go out. There were times when it rained ice, and it was too cold even to venture out to dance in the rain. As I smell this post-rain atmosphere in Edwardsville, I realize that I’ve indeed been here before, in this cold, in this temperature. I have not seen snow before, and there is no doubt that I will get to see some this year, but what is clear to me beyond reasonable doubt is that I have experienced up to three degrees cold before. In Nigeria, so many years ago. So what happened? Why is it that today at home, everyone sweats profusely and curses the fact that the heat has become so generally unbearable? Yes, you got it. It’s the global warming!

The really memorable thing about this startling discovery is that I did not notice it while I was in Nigeria. There, everything always seemed perfectly normal, even though once in a while, we’d hear someone remark “Oh, it was never always this hot. I wonder what is happening!” And now, I have a perfect explanation for the reason why everyone in my family looked fairer in complexion in all of their baby pictures.

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