(cover photograph direction: Tobi Amida)
I am on the bus from Owerri where I just concluded my undergraduate studies. The driver stalls the engine at Banana Junction in Orlu, where a towering statue of a woman bearing a bunch of bananas in her palms once stood at the intersection of the roads. The monument was demolished during a road reconstruction last year, when our government decided that such relics of past administrations should be destroyed, especially if they stood on the roads as landmarks of cultural or emotional significance.
A few passengers get off the bus, and the seats are almost vacant now. The hawkers by the road grab a bunch or two from the bananas in their sheds and dash towards the bus, screaming the prices of their goods. Okada men are lined up beside them, calling to the passengers who just came off the bus. I’ll alight at Total, the final bus-stop, in less than 3km, and thereafter board an okada heading home. I look out the window as the bus makes a right turn and soon begins to cruise down the valley between Banana Junction and Nkwito Junction. Tall and short buildings border the road on both sides. My brother’s WhatsApp text appears on the roof of my screen: “Are you still coming home today? It’s late.” I am close, I reply.
The okada rider on whose motorcycle I sit doesn’t take the route that leads me home directly. I had given him the address of a school as my destination, the nearest landmark home. His motorcycle comes to a halt a few metres away from the school, just before a walk path that leads to my father’s yard. It is no shame that this compound remains unknown to cyclists. My brother’s way of avoiding the stress of having to explain the direction home to commercial cyclists was to simply ask them for a ride to the famous herbalist’s house. Myself, I’m unrepentant in using the school’s name as my landmark home to these cyclists. My reason for this borders on pettiness. Ever since the herbalist became popular with his brand of Christianity that gave him the impetus to play loud praise and worship songs on Sunday mornings, I decided that I no longer liked him. And so, I avoid honouring him by mentioning his name when describing my address.
There are five teenage girls perched on the veranda of the flat downstairs when I approach the house. They regard me as I walk in. New tenants, I guess. Maybe Nursing students. The building has seen an assortment of occupants in the past twelve years; doctors, nurses and students who came to Orlu because of the university teaching hospital. Watching some of the medical students as I grew up helped dissipate the fears I had about growing into an academically-inclined youth. I saw them make jokes, watch movies, and play PES. It was a relief learning that growing up into adulthood was not supposed to steal my most cherished fun activities. I have no idea where the medical profession has taken them now. This makes me think of movement and migration as metaphors for living, because it appears to me that stagnation is the curse of those who do not travel to places far away from their home when life demands it of them.
In 2000, my family moved to Amauzari, a rural village in Isiala Mbano, following my mother’s employment as a teacher in Town School. The first house we rented there was smaller than my grandmother’s old kitchen; its doors and ceiling were low, its windows narrow. Although the compound was near the school, it was surrounded by bushes that attracted reptiles to our room and pythons in our well.
The building that housed us before we moved to Amauzari was the same walls around which my father had grown up as a child. My brother and sister were weaned there. A year before we moved to Mbano, my mother travelled to Owerri for my birthing. I was the first child whose delivery demanded a facility outside Orlu, the first to require a surgeon. Mom gave me the name Anthony because fear had convinced her that my birth would cause her death. So when her persistent nightmare didn’t come true following a session performed by Dr Ihebereme, she named me after the saint of miracles.
We returned to Orlu in 2004, when my mother got posted to Community Primary School, Umuna, about fifteen minutes’ walk from home. I continued my Nursery Education at the Catholic school nearby, where my mother taught before her formal appointment.
*
I am ascending the stairs to the third floor of our house. The steps seem to have grown narrower with time. When I open the door to our flat, my brother appears in the balcony from the living room, shakes my hand and hails me, “Engineer Benz!,” a derivative of my name, Chibueze. I fancy the nickname because of my admiration for the inventor Carl Benz, one of the idols who inspired me to study mechanical engineering. Just maybe I could be like him. Still, I don’t feel deserving of the “engineer” title. But I smile at my brother who is excited to welcome a new graduate home.
My father is on a couch facing the TV against the wall, watching wrestling. The TV looks smaller, too. He tells me Nnoo when I greet him, and his face, which now has more wrinkles, welcomes me with a smile. I slide the curtain behind him, and push the door to my room. It gives way with a screech. The room is empty, except for the mattress on the floor by the left, a sofa by the right corner and a bag of rice beside it. The hanger is almost vacant. There used to be a television stand below it. There used to be a plastic chair, a study table, with cartons bearing books underneath. There used to be a standing fan also, and Ghana-must-go bags stuffed with our clothes. On days when we had electricity, my brother and I would watch Korean action series like City Hunter, Iris and Swallow the Sun, from dusk till dawn. We did this only because we had a TV and a DVD player in our room. The hunched television belonged to my father when we lived in the bungalow my grandmother built. When we moved in here about eleven years ago and he bought a modern Plasma television set, he allowed us to have the hunchback. My brother spared no time in inheriting the old device, and within a few weeks, we watched more movies than we had our entire lives. The only price we paid for this new freedom was turning down the volume to the barest minimum. On quiet nights, we watched the movies on mute.
My brother, now a bachelor, has moved to a flat downstairs, and my younger brother, Obinna, with whom we shared this room whenever he was on break from boarding school, is currently studying Veterinary Medicine at a university in Umuahia. I return home more often because Owerri is much closer to Orlu than Umuahia. The tiles in the room aren’t covered with dust because mom stays here sometimes. I place my backpack down by the sofa. A picture of the Blessed Sacrament on a green background still hangs on the wall above the bed. A blue sticker I placed on the ceiling six years ago is still there. The pale green walls have grown dirtier, and the clothes on the hanger are now mom’s. Father says mom went to my maternal home. Her brother is visiting. Finally, he’s got his Visa to travel to the UK, so he’ll depart soon. “Your mother will sleep over. There’s food in the kitchen,” he says. “She cooked rice and stew.”
I walk to the kitchen through the back door, stop at the balcony to check if my grandmother is sitting on the veranda of the old house downstairs. Leaning my elbows on the baluster, I see her sitting on her once-white grey chair. “Is it Chibueze?” she asks and I affirm. I’ll go and see her later.
After eating, I feel empty and sad that home has become just a 3-bedroom apartment with spaces that were once filled. My brother, Kelechi has retired downstairs, and my father, to his room. No one is in the middle room that once belonged to my three sisters, Uchechi, Chinonso and Chidimma. Uchechi is married now, and home feels closer in Owerri sometimes because she lives there. Chinonso lives in Cameroon with her husband. Chidimma is at the University of Calabar, a place so far away she only comes home once in a year. But at least, she’s the only sister who stays here during Christmas. I miss my siblings’ company, but life would have been depressing if the six of us still lived in this same flat with our parents.
Mom returns early the next morning, and calls me “Benz” when I greet her from the balcony, as she walks toward the stairs.
My brother’s flat echoes with emptiness. Nothing is in the living room yet, except a wooden table he had brought in for ironing his work clothes. There are black curtains with silver patterns hanging from the doors and window. He says an electrician is still working on the flat, and complains about former tenants who destroyed the connection while rewiring the place. A furniture maker is still putting together upholsteries for the living room. He points to a spot on the wall, where he intends to fix the TV our uncle who is travelling will bequeath to him. He also points to the spaces the furniture will fill.
Later in the day, my brother and I ride to our maternal home on mom’s motorcycle. We’re in front of the compound now. Everything seems to have changed, except the red gate, the flower hedges that run parallel to the fence, and the hedge that divides the yard from the garden at the left. There used to stand a big pear tree by the right, and the ground was once carpeted with grass. The pears from the tree were fat and oily, and would make me feel feverish if I ate up to six in one day. During holidays here when I was a child, my morning chore was to pick fallen leaves from the pear tree in the morning, pull weeds from the grass, and dispose of them at the dump site beside an udara tree across the gully-ridden street.
The orange tree by the left offers me shade as I enter, while my brother rides into the compound to pack the motorcycle. The bungalow has been renovated; its roof elevated. The railings at the veranda are gone and the floor of the entrance high and tiled. We settle in the parlour after sharing hugs with my aunt who slept over, my grandma sitting in the cushioned armchair opposite me, my brother on the left, and my uncle with him. The brown rug is still here. Framed pictures of my mom’s siblings as infants still sit on the floor, leaning against the walls. A portrait of my grandfather still sits at the far-right corner. Grandma serves us cucumbers. One of my aunts’ pictures has been defaced by termites. The insects must have done this while Grandma was staying in London. We notice that there’s no photo of mom as an infant in the room. “Perhaps she took them,” Grandma says.
My uncle is getting dressed. He wants to return to Aba. He has always been slender, but he was much taller when I was much younger, when his joints would make snapping sounds as he walked. I used to think the cracks I heard were due to his towering height. Now, standing side by side, we could pass as peers. He wants to buy bags of drinking water for his mother before he leaves town. My brother offers to accompany him, and I rise to join them.
The street downhill has grown thin, bushes encroaching from either side. We greet a few people on the walk, and I wonder where all the children have gone on a Saturday morning like this. We chat about the reason for this abnormal serenity. It is usual for young people to leave their hometowns, to respond to the needs of life in the cities and sometimes overseas. But the extent of desertion in this village is abnormal. Ever since the crisis of unknown gunmen and the atrocities of false freedom fighters began to distress Orlu, people have been relocating. The tension has pervaded the atmosphere of the town, and it’s no longer conducive for business.
There’s no water in the first two shops, so we walk down further. We buy five bags of sachet water in the third yard, and begin the walk back to the house. It seems longer since I am carrying two bags of water on my arms like one would carry a baby—a precaution to prevent the light plastic bags containing the sachets of water from tearing on the way. I collapse on a chair after putting the bags down in the parlour.
My brother and I walk my uncle to the road after he shares a brief moment with his sister and mother in the inner room. He returned to the parlour sniffling as he carried his backpack. He’s chatting with my brother as we walk through a track bordered by the walls of mom’s maiden home. I’m thinking; this is the last time I’ll see this uncle of mine until God-knows-when. At the junction, he hugs my brother and me, climbs onto an okada and rides away, into a new phase of his life.
I have learnt that, sometimes, the only difference between saying goodbye to a loved one who’s about to travel to a distant place, and learning of the loss of a friend is the hope that one day a traveller would return home. A month after my uncle travels, I will watch my friend, Darlington, board a bus going to Lagos from Owerri—the first step of his journey to Nebraska. I will be chilled by the knowledge that it will take a long time before I see him again. We’ll still have WhatsApp, but there are things we can’t do via calls: strolling or trekking to a mutual friend’s house in the evening while discussing literature or gossiping with hypotheticals, cooking vegetable soup, or eating noodles and suya from the same pot, baking cakes, listening to Amadi’s album and agreeing that he was a gifted poet and philosopher. But my consolation will be that he is leaving one of his winter jackets with me, and I will be coming to America for my graduate studies with it, according to him.
We stroll back to our maternal home, past farmlands on the left and a few houses on the right. In the parlour, my brother teases our grandma about the way she taunted us as kids, oftentimes about our hygiene. As children, we would trek here from home in Umuna on Sundays. Our shoes would be smeared with dust, our clothes reeking of old sweat by the time we arrived in Umuowa. The first thing she would do was to scold us for being dirty. It was an embarrassment we had to swallow because afterwards, she would go to the kitchen and fill a tray with rice and serve it to us with Coke or Fanta.
It begins to rain outside. I lie on the rug, place a cushion under my head and fall asleep. An hour later, after the pouring rain subsides to a drizzle, my brother and I ride home.
Back home, on Monday, we all sit at home because we are afraid to go out. I take a seat opposite my grandmother on the porch of the old house. The cement floor has grown so rough its holes threaten the balance of my chair. My grandmother begins to tell a story about how women were buried in the past. My brother comes out through the backdoor of his flat, and chats with mom who is doing laundry near the tank. The subject of their conversation prompts them to make references to Onyeomere, the main character of my short story which they’d read. My brother asks why I created such an unfortunate character. I do not know why. If he had asked about the motivation for my essay, “Vestiges,” I could have told him that I wanted to explore the history of the spaces we inhabit.
“I guess some people are just unlucky with life, like Onyeomere,” I say finally.
Mom begins to pronounce blessings on her next incarnation as she stands to pour dirty water away. My grandmother hears her, and warns that one should be very careful with such talks, suggesting that people could suffer from the vague wishes they made in their former lives. My grandmother resumes her story.
If an old married woman died in those days, her body would be carried by two or three young men to her father’s compound and buried there. But before the burial, the corpse would be taken to all the places where her daughters were married, so that the families would honour her. For a woman blessed with several in-laws, the journey could take up to a week or two. The corpse would begin to stink, but the undertakers would carry on, accepting the dry fish they were offered along the procession, and tossing the chunks into their mouths. My brother who listens to the story yells his disgust at the men’s disregard for hygiene. He spits on the ground and walks into his apartment, laughing. The burial ritual would prove difficult to perform during tribal clashes because the procession would be impeded by boundaries created by enmity, grandmother continues.
According to her story, the land my village inhabit was won many years ago from a clan my ancestors defeated in a battle. So, the vanquished had to migrate down south, far away, and began afresh, to build houses in the forest. I imagine their women clearing the forest with babies tied to their backs and the knowledge that their husbands were crushed by stronger men. I imagine their daughters cutting down tree branches to erect shacks for they no longer had brothers who could wield the machete. It is less noble to imagine myself among my ancestors who moved into the abandoned huts, and harvested crops they never planted.
*
On a Sunday evening, two months later, I arrive in Owerri from Orlu. Because I no longer have an apartment in Owerri, I have been frequenting the Owerri-Orlu road. My former lodging—an old building by the road, near the university back gate—is mostly occupied by students. I moved out last month after I spent a few nights at a friend’s flat. Although I had noticed that my room and the building in general had faults that wouldn’t stop growing, staying away for a few nights made me realise the enormity of the discomfort I had been enduring. At my friend’s, I slept more and my will to work returned. There, it occurred to me that my former room had been my doom. Its walls were damp, and insects crawled on them at night. My roommates were relentless mosquitoes, and whenever there was no electricity to power the fan, they would feast on me, buzzing in my ears through the night.
A few days later, I climb aboard a bus to Lagos. I had expected the bus to set off by 9pm, but by past 10pm, it still hadn’t moved. The young man by my right seems nice. He provides answers to my questions about our journey. A middle-aged man on the other side of the aisle has his gaze set on his phone, reading page after page of blog posts on Phoenix. He is dark-skinned and has tribal marks on his cheeks. A woman two rows behind him dishes out jollof rice from a small yellow bucket for her three or four children. Mosquitoes attack my feet. The young man beside me says I’ll stop feeling them once the bus begins moving and air starts flowing. It is almost 11pm when the tyres start rolling, away from Control, through a road I’ve not used before, towards Lagos, a place I’ve only heard of. I am going to visit a friend I’ve not met before—an editor who first texted me on Facebook about a year ago to tell me he liked my review of a poetry book, that he had been following my writing.
For fear that my parents would think of my trip to Lagos as foolhardy, I do not tell them. I only tell my brother. I ignore my friends who discourage me from using the night bus. But now, gazing out the window and seeing this vast darkness, I feel foolish and afraid. In the dimly lit bus, I begin to write a poem about the similarity of death with travelling to the unknown at night. I remember the narrator in Dostoevsky’s The Dream of a Ridiculous Person. The darkness in the bus is similar to the narrator’s experience during his space trip with an unknown being. I’m praying to God, and telling myself that I will be safe in Lagos before daybreak.
But we are not even close to Ijebu when daylight returns, and I see nothing but trees on both sides of the road. It is drizzling outside the bus, and most of the passengers are asleep when my brother’s call rouses me from slumber. He wants to know if I’ve reached Lagos yet. My seatmate is sleeping. When he wakes, I want to ask him if he’s sure that the vehicle is not heading to one of those places where they butcher people and harvest their organs. But the passengers, who seem like regular commuters, are quiet in their seats—an indication that we are truly on the road to Lagos.
The bus stops at Berger, and I alight after thanking my kind seatmate who I’ll probably never meet again. I was supposed to call my host’s driver before I reached Berger. It is drizzling so I walk into a shed. After calling the driver, I walk to a pharmacy store where I think he’ll easily find me. He arrives in front of the store shortly. In the car, I apologise that things did not go as we planned. When we arrive at a duplex, my friend, Mr T, opens the door, smiling, and I notice how tall he is as he hugs me, takes my bag and hangs it on his shoulder. He tells me of his earlier worry. He is making breakfast, he says, as we enter his living room. The walls are decorated with framed paintings, drawings and other artworks. There’s a bookshelf stocked with books at the far edge of the sitting room. He asks me to sit at the round dining table. Around 4:30 in the evening, Mr T and I are getting ready for an event at Terra Kulture in Victoria Island. It is a private screening of a film which doesn’t start until 6pm, but because he wants to show me around the city, the Bolt will take a longer route to the venue. We’re on the Third Mainland Bridge. By the left, the lagoon—the largest body of water I’ve ever seen—stretches into the horizon. By the right, the University of Lagos stands with pride. Mr T points at neighbourhoods and high-rise buildings, telling me their names.
*
On a Wednesday morning two months later, I’m on a bus leaving Lagos, heading home. My intended two-week holiday in Lagos stretched into the foretaste of a writer’s residency, all thanks to Mr T’s hospitality. Although coming into the city terrified me, what calmed me was the thought that entering an unknown territory is a sacrifice that success demands of us. And now, as I depart from this big city where I experienced steady electricity, for a town where I will miss important deadlines due to lack of electricity, I feel like I’m crawling into a cave. It’s a long road to Orlu, and before my bus reaches Ijebu, I realise that the territories I am reluctant to explore are not geographical locations but emotional and social.