When my mother found out that our neighbor’s daughter and I were getting into each other, like padlock and key, she sent me to the village. I was to live with my grandmother so that I might be tamed. When I returned to the city, Chidiebere was disgusting. Her body that I considered slender was now too lean. Her laughter that I thought was rhythmic, too loud and fake. It worked. My mother’s strategy had waned me. I was thirteen.
The first thing I observed during my stay at the village was how everyone cared for their fowls. Because it was an extended family compound and the domestic animals cross-bred, all the fowls looked alike. It was easy to lose yours, or acquire someone else’s own. Everyone had a symbol with which theirs was known. My grandma had six hens, five roosters and eight eggs. She tied pieces of an old, red fabric on the wings of all her birds, and reserved part of the fabric for when her chicks would hatch. Her co-wives had their own symbols. One dipped hers into bowls of uhie to colour their feathers red. Another tied blue fabric on the legs of hers. Yet, some evenings before supper, before the chickens roost, there would be arguments over the ownership of some birds.
Worse than having someone wanting to claim your bird, was having it disappear, the hens especially. They leave sometimes in search of food and never return. When that happened, they had either been eaten by beasts, ran over by cars, or their wings had grown too strong and they had taken to wilding, and preferred to nest on trees that dared the sky. To avoid the later, grandma plucked the feathers of her birds every forth night. This exactly was the reason my mother sent me to the village. My feathers needed to be plucked.
She didn’t stop there. I was also not allowed to have any relationship with anybody. Her aim was to raise me a pious child. My father, in his bid to emphasize how feeble my wings must remain, told me to seat back one morning after devotion. When we were left alone, he said, “This is a Christian home and you must not bring shame upon it. If you ever bring shame to this home or come back to this house pregnant, I’ll poison you and the baby.”
Those words took flesh and moved around with me like a dog and its tail. They reminded constantly that my life was not mine, and I must not ‘dare’ or it would be taken from me. My first response was to kill the most abominable part of me: that craving that could only be quenched by other girls.
Many years have passed, and I have only identified as a queer ally. Pretense, sometimes, is survival technique. I am bi and androgynous, but I have embraced my feminine side and the world is at peace with me. Or it pretends to be. Barely two years after I got a job, at an end of the year party organized by the school, a colleague had, of all questions, during a truth or dare game, asked if I was straight. I lied. I told them I was a ruler. Afterwards, I spent more time making up. I also wore longer heels. I had to girl-up. I wondered which part of my body snitched on me. Worse than putting up an act is realizing that in spite of the mask you wear, the world still sees you. Another incident that stands out was a conversation at my work place that turned into an argument. Lilian, a colleague, had stumbled on a viral post on Facebook, of a father who killed his daughter because she came out to her family. Everyone, all of a sudden became interested in the conversation, in the way privileged people are interested in having the lives of others examined. They said she deserved to die. Another said killing was bad, but homosexuality was worse. The walls of my ears cringed. I couldn’t stop myself from ambushing the conversation. I spoke in favor of queer people and when it seemed I was buying the attention of many, Lilian interrupted, “It seems you’re one of them.”
I said I wasn’t.
“You are. That’s the only reason you’re supporting evil in this manner.”
They agreed with what she said. It occurred to me how easily these people with whom I had labored and shared moments would condemn me to die, if they knew me truly. I remembered my father and I let them win. That night, I dreamt that I was walking down the aisle to be joined with a woman. The sun was out. Birds too were chirping, till my father arrived unannounced and passed a sword through me. It was as if he punctured a container of red oil and let it flow on my wedding gown. No. It was the sun he punctured, and it bled till everywhere became crystal dark. Worse than realizing that the world sees through your mask, is realizing that the world sees you, but pretends to see your mask.
When I say my father’s words took flesh and they hunt me daily, what I mean to say is, people wane me. How easily I would have lost my job over an argument. That won’t be the first, or last. Once, a student in my class called another homo. I pretended not to hear. They began to fight. A tooth. A mouth full of blood. I couldn’t ignore them anymore. When I stopped them from fighting, I told them to desist from calling people homo. Because it isn’t a curse word and homosexual people are normal people. Less than 20 minutes after that, I was summoned by the principal and suspended for promoting perversion. It is easy to lose everything when you stand against the world. This is what my father’s words— the people I encounter everyday remind me of. They cut my wings. They make sure that the dead thing in me remains dead. That I stand with the world, and they don’t care how I do this. But the problem with cutting wings is that the feathers grow back, and with each trim, it comes back thicker and stronger.
In 2019, I asked a girl out. While I didn’t know what to do if she said yes, I knew it was a risk that I was willing to take. I knew I definitely wanted to kiss her. She refused my proposal and I was disappointed in a good way. I believe the saying, “what is dead may never die.” During my stay in the village, those eggs that bore grandma’s chicks hatched and began to grow, I became attached to one. Not out of admiration, but pity. A kite had descended one evening and ascended with this chick clutched in its legs. We yelled, the hen threw tantrum, and the kite kept ascending. Somehow, the chick escaped the claws of the kite and fell like a fruit. We thought it dead, until it jerked. I picked it up and we began nursing it. Its left wing with which it fell was broken. It was also bleeding from the eye. Grandma oiled its wounds and placed it close to the lamp. We feared that it would die but it didn’t. It was stunted but not dead. I put it in a separate cage and placed it in the kitchen. I fed it daily and begged it not to die. Its wounds healed completely; we let it roam the compound. When it was time to cut the wings of her mates, grandma let it go. It could only play with its feathers but not fly. One evening, I observed it was missing. I went into a frantic search and saw it perched atop a mango tree. I too, am beginning to play with my wings.
Last year, I met my girlfriend online and we began to date. It is also an age-gap relationship. It began like friendship, but I soon realized that I can’t imagine my existence without her. After one year of pent up emotion, she came to visit me from America. We waited to get home before we could hug properly, or kiss. When my neighbors asked, I told them she was my aunt. Later, I would lock myself in the bathroom and cry. Some people asked if she was my mother and others assumed she was anything except my lover. We agreed with whatever they said. That was the only way we could be at peace with the world. We talk about getting married, but we can’t share that with the world. To get an affidavit of my willingness to marry, I had to travel to a Northern state where no one would recognize that both our names are feminine. When you stand backing the world, you stand with caution. When we made love, we tried not to make any noise. We try so hard not to upset our neighbors, not to draw attention to ourselves. Pretense, is a survival technique. I am still trying to be at peace with the world. I am refusing to run wild. My father’s words still lurk behind me like a shadow, but at the same time, I feel my feathers thicken. I play with my wings. I, too am beginning to grow wings.
This story is published with the permission of the writer and editor, and is one of the award winning stories from the forthcoming anthology, Wedged Between Man and God: a Collection of Queer West African Women’s Story.
