AFRICA DIES EACH TIME SHE FAILS TO OWN HER STORIES by Karino Emmanuel

AFRICA DIES EACH TIME SHE FAILS TO OWN HER STORIES by Karino Emmanuel

by | Oct 27, 2019 | ISSUE, Issue - NonFiction

Africa Dies Each Time She Fails to Own Her Stories

by Karino Emmanuel

Not long ago, I was talking to a fellow writer from Nigeria, an astute lady with beautiful brains; that is if her works of art are anything to go by. Since I was the one who initiated the conversation, I had to start somewhere and with something that connects us as Africans. Although I admitted to her that there is something about being African that I haven’t quite made out that connects us from North to South, East to West, regardless of whether we have met or not, I came to know better in the course of our conversation: the arts.

We started off with books and she asked why I like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. With little or no thought, I told her, in its protagonist Okonkwo and the other characters around him and the situations that befall them, Chinua Achebe paints the real picture of Africa back in the day. And it is written in a simple language. And the thought of it being the archetypal modern African novel is inspiring especially for an emerging writer like me. When it was time to talk about film, we lacked these straight answers. We turned taciturn and chose to channel our thoughts elsewhere because there is not so much to pride ourselves in film. She seemed to sum up her thoughts about film in the title of a book – Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres by Jonathan Haynes – that she asked if I had read while I, before digressing, quickly mentioned that my thoughts on the same were being expounded in something that I was writing, a piece that would become this essay.

The arts – art, music, theatre, film, and literature – are like children responsible for putting their mother, Africa, somewhere on the global map. Except for film, the other arts have considerably made the motherland continent proud, especially literature and music. In no particular order, among others in Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, Mariama Ba, Nuruddin Farah, Aminatta Forna, Alaine Mabanckou, and Dinaw Mengestu, we have African literature rife with diversity and well-crafted stories: in Fela Kuti, Lucky Dube, Salif Keita, Brenda Fassie, Angelique Kidjo, Hugh Masekela, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Franco Luambo and Oliver Mtukudzi, to name but a few, we have had works of music that speak the language of a global audience while at the same time oozing African authenticity. And even though the works of this generation’s artists are worlds apart from most of the artists’ I have mentioned above, the voices and sounds I read and listen to now is an homage that bridges the generation gap hence telling the African story in a fresh way but one which still resonates with the global audience. These two groups of artists have done something that we haven’t borrowed whenever we write a typical African film. Film, like a troublesome rebel teenager, has refused to tap into the success of its brothers, making the same success they have achieved look like something that is not in the realms of possibility.

I am afraid that whenever we talk about the African film industry, we have to bring in the West. It is inevitable, because Hollywood, the world’s most successful film industry, is the ultimate standard. It is one which anyone who wants to partake in the eating of this cake that is the film industry, wants to break into.

For an industry whose stakeholders hold such profound devotion and respect for the arts, take these two thespians, for example, Anthony Hopkins and Bradley Cooper, ineptitude is our undoing, a chance for this industry to keep knocking on our doors and, sadly, most of the time we open these doors. Known for his Academy Award for Best Actor winning portrayal of Hannibal Lecter, the screen version of the protagonist in a series of bestselling novels by Thomas Harris, that once signed on a project, Anthony Hopkins goes over his lines in excess of two hundred times until they roll off his tongue, and; Bradley Cooper spent close to four years learning to sing and play the guitar and piano, and an additional eighteen months to train his vocals for him to sufficiently embody the character of Jackson Maine in A Star Is Born, a film he produced, co-wrote, starred in, and helmed in his directorial debut. This film was released to critical acclaim and went on to receive multiple nominations at the 91st and 76th Academy and Golden Globe Awards respectively. Giving credit where it is due, Hollywood is at its best when it tells the American story, but everything falls flat when it tries to masquerade as the spokesperson for the African story.

I have heard good things about films like Hotel Rwanda, The First Grader, Sometimes in April, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela, Blood Diamond, Half of a Yellow Sun, Sarafina among many others, some of which, to some degree, I have enjoyed watching. The common thing about these films is that they are our stories. The events depicted in them happened right under our noses but somehow, someone from outside had to come and tell them for us. Sprinkling black actors like Idris Elba, Djimon Haunsou, Terrence Howard, Jennifer Hudson, Naomi Harris and Whoopi Goldberg here and there with an excuse of a joint production between Hollywood and our studios, something which ends up compromising our creative control, doesn’t make them our stories anymore.

Is any person of colour considered African? Not in my opinion. To me, Charlize Theron with her whiteness, born in Gauteng Province, South Africa, is more African than Naomi Harris with her melanin-rich skin born in London, United Kingdom. Of course, Charlize Theron has a better idea of what being African really means. Although it makes no sense, Charlize Theron is just a white African and Naomi Harris a black Briton. Regardless of their skin colour, what matters is the place where someone is born and spends their formative years. There is something to write home about being African – we all go through a kind of struggle from the moment we are born, and we traverse through the streets of life trying to triumph over it. It is this triumph over our struggles that animate us into telling our stories and therefore, to bring our stories to the silver screen and have actors who aren’t native Africans and ones who know nothing about these struggles personate our heroes, is the biggest injustice of our time.

For example, what is so hard to get to the point of casting Naomi Harris in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, one of the most important biopics in the history of Africa, when as general knowledge, the character profile of Winnie Madikizela clearly states, South ‘African’. On Half of a Yellow Sun, a film adapted from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel of the same name, Nollywood Reinvented critics: “The movie builds on amazing sets, actors, supporting actors and music, but the characters lack depth”. Like in many Hollywood films about Africa, the lack of depth is a problem that could easily get solved by letting the owner of this story tell it. You can have the looks – black – but being African is something you can’t drive into yourself with a hammer. You must live it.

It has been the same old story: We will finance this project. We will involve you. But what is the point of playing second fiddle in telling our stories? How can we tell our stories when we are shoved in the background, away from the ostentatiously beautiful frames? Passion and truth precede the need for any amount of money to produce any kind of art. To achieve aestheticism, especially in our genre films, sometimes what is needed is an attention to detail, a claustrophobic premise, a clever contained script, a minuscule budget, and a minimal crew and cast. Some independent filmmakers across the world have achieved this and we, too, can. The perfect examples of these kinds of films whose high production values belie the finitude of the things aforementioned are Buried and Primer.

Although inspired by some of the darkest moments in our history as a people and continent like the South African apartheid, the Rwandan genocide, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and atrocious governance in most African countries which over time has healed even though the scars still etched deep on the walls of our hearts are constant reminders, in a sea of sloppy productions, we have been able to make films with production values that are grounded in meticulousness if not pedantry, films that have garnered continental acclaim and won awards. At least with some of these films – ’76, October 1, 93 Days, Amin: The Rise and Fall – we owned and told our stories to our future generations, we took control of our destiny, for what good is living in a future without having any knowledge of the past?

I have always echoed acclaimed writer-filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s thoughts on sincerity and ambition in filmmaking, that: “Films are subjective – what you like, what you don’t like, but the thing for me that is absolutely unifying is the idea that every time I go to the cinema and pay my money to sit down and watch a film go up onscreen, I want to feel that the people who made that film think it’s the best movie in the world, that they poured everything into it and they really love it. Whether or not I agree with what they’ve done, I want that effort there – I want that sincerity. And when you don’t feel it, that’s the only time I feel like I’m wasting my time at the movies”.

This lack of sincerity in Hollywood films about Africa leaves Africa as a shadow of her real self, a depiction that Soek in her essay, Hollywood’s Strange Addiction to Bad African Accents, terms as: “Hollywood imagination, divorced from reality”.

We don’t tell our stories to seek validation from the West. But whatever the thing that is in our music and literature in its crude African state that the West can’t help but love, we definitely should hit that same spot with our films. Do you know what that thing is? Truth. Honesty. Sincerity. But how can they love something that in its making, we have always let them keep messing up with, allowing them to create their own kind of truth? Isn’t Genevieve Nnaji’s Lionheart, the first original film from Nigeria to be acquired by Netflix, evidence enough of what sticking to our truth can be a boundless factor of places our stories can traverse?

Source: From the Rebel Issue (October 2019)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

KARINO C. EMMANUEL who for some reason he doesn’t know, chose to write his poetry under the name KC Manuel, is an emerging Kenyan writer and poet, and student at Kibabii University whose works have appeared on The Kalahari Review, Kreative Diadem, Praxis Magazine Online, and Ghana Writes Journal. His piece, ‘The Rough Ride Home’, was shortlisted for the Igby Prize for Nonfiction. He’s currently working on his first novel. He believes that there’s timeless magic between the tip of a pen and the face of a paper, and that’s why early drafts of all his works are written longhand.

THE LOVERS by Logan February

THE LOVERS by Logan February

by | Oct 27, 2019 | ISSUE, Issue - Poetry

THE LOVERS

by Logan February

from Garlands

 

We were naked and I was crying. In the sensual

world, I did a woman’s work—felt

a primordial hysteria.

The room, humid

 

and humming, full of my spirited

panting. The sheets I spoiled with a dirty heart.

I hid my face behind history to watch him,

apple of my teary eye.

 

We had torn my veil in hunger, it lay strewed

across the tiles, a glimmer illusion laced with perfume

to invoke an ancient chasm.

Why, what an awful mess

 

I was at that primal depth. There was so much

sweat because the power was out again. And when

I told him I was sorry,

he asked: what for?

Source: From the Rebel Issue (October 2019)

THE LOVERS

by Logan February | POEMS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LOGAN FEBRUARY is a non-binary Nigerian poet. He and his work have been featured recently in The Rumpus, Dazed, The Guardian Life, Lambda Literary, Washington Square Review, Africa In Dialogue, and more. He is the author of In The Nude (Ouida Poetry, 2019) and three poetry chapbooks. You can find him at loganfebruary.com

THE GOSPEL OF REBELS by Othuke Umukoro

THE GOSPEL OF REBELS by Othuke Umukoro

by | Oct 27, 2019 | ISSUE, Issue - Poetry

THE GOSPEL OF REBELS

by Othuke Umukoro

& in the evening when he had dispersed

the multitude, he went into the synagogue

& spoke to his disciples & the pharisees

a parable concerning the kingdom of rebels,

which by extension is the

kingdom of heaven

 

behold, sixteen men, he began quietly,

black with pristine pride & holding hands,

like thousands after them, chose

the shark-mouth of the atlantic

instead of life in sweltering

sugarcane plantations

 

& his disciples reasoned among

themselves for many days about

the meaning of this parable,

wondering that perhaps in

his death

 

a man sails home, free

Source: From the Rebel Issue (October 2019)

THE GOSPEL OF REBELS

by Othuke Umukoro | POEMS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

OTHUKE UMUKORO is a poet & playwright. His demons have appeared, or are forthcoming in the Sunlight Press, AfricanWriter, Eunoia Review, Brittle Paper & elsewhere. His debut play, Mortuary Encounters is available here. When bored, he watches Everybody Hates Chris. He is on twitter @othukeumukoro19

THE OTHER DWELLER by Frances Ogamba

THE OTHER DWELLER by Frances Ogamba

by | Oct 27, 2019 | ISSUE, Issue - Fiction

THE OTHER DWELLER

by Frances Ogamba

Lana is dead.

But she has etched rooms in our present, in the intricacies that braid our realities. She breathed her last underneath a duvet, curled up and cold beneath a covering, a seeming enclosure, perhaps this was why she went on finding crannies to get stuck and burying herself in them. At first, our rooms hummed a song that was as rhythmic as the claxons of vehicles from the gridlock in the morning hours. The songs were repeated at night, monotonous; they rapped at the windows of the three-room bungalow and clambered in and encircled the bedposts and the reading tables and pushed really close enough to fan our nostrils.

There are four of us. We share the same mother, but different paternity. One of us is dark-skinned. One of us is small of stature and has two navels. One of us squints when staring at remote things. One of us is me.

Often, we hear scurrying, sprightly and brief, it disappears the way it comes. Something unlatches our doors and blasts in a gust of wind. The clothes in our wardrobes quiver as though shrinking away from our touch, as if a pair of hands squeezes them first before we can.

Lana was our maid. She laid the table and brewed our tea. She bustled in the kitchen and made soup treats that heated up our taste buds. She loved peppers, that one, our Lana. When we finished the dining, Lana swung in and picked the plates. She made the beds just as we were about to crumble into them. She was swift, as she is now, living in our walls, whispering, surviving in airless passages.

We got Lana into our employ after our mother went to bed and swallowed her last breath. While we mourned, we needed help with the laundry, and cooking. We made a post in the town paper and a plump, light-skinned woman knocked at our door a day later – Lana. She owned neither a man nor a child, so every of her moments was forsworn for our convenience.

Our walls breathe recurrently, rising and falling like a heart. Someone dusts the floor before we ever reach the broom. Somehow, our plates get cleaned and put away. Something walks right into our rooms each time we unlock our doors, inhabiting the rooms before we march in. We scare at first, and then it feels so convenient that we relax into this comfort of being cleaned after. We tell no one, or how do you tell about a hand that depresses the button on the water closet just as you stand from the toilet seat, pushing your effluent into a sea of wastes? How do you explain the clean floors when you haven’t lifted a mop in months?

“We should visit a seer and know what all of this means,” the dark-skinned one says.

“In some stories, this whole thing stops the moment we go to find out anything,” the one who squints when staring at remote things says.

“It is beginning to get uncomfortable,” the one who is small of stature and has two navels says.

None of us visits a seer.           

The worrying dies off.  When we tell one of our friends, she says that we needn’t bother because these things happen a lot around here. We don’t say who we think it is. All we know is the woody fragrance that was Lana’s pastime, and how it is still sprinkled in the air of every room.

                                                      *

We cannot recall how long Lana has been dead, or the time spanning her service years between living in her physical body and in our walls. One day, she, while channeling her soul and her fury into keeping our rooms clean, spills water on the floor in error and one of us slips on it. Then there is some tongue lashing as we scold the empty air. This would have cut across as ideal if Lana still moved about in her blue uniform and flat shoes, her large eyes twinkling in embarrassment, except that now she is a feeling, a presence. There are more chidings thrown to the wind for someone’s dirty footwear, for the unpolished walls, for the bathroom curtain left hanging downwards for too long. You’d think when you heard the reprimands that Lana is still with her body, seated on her favourite stool in the laundry room.

Something appears to reverse in time right after this thrift. We return home to enmeshed clothes spilled all over the house, trailing across the floors like droplets of some liquid. The beds seem to rid themselves of the duvets, every surface shudders as our breathing hits the walls. We hear Lana when the plates clink and litter the kitchen floor when our boots go unlaced, and when the electric light bulbs dim and irradiate the rooms instantaneously. When this hurricane of activities passes, there is a steam of defenseless ease spread in all the rooms.

We seek the seers. The first seer says that the house we love, which perches on the cleft of a highland, overlooking a small neighbourhood with more houses than people, is haunted by the dead.

Does the dead not go home to the dead?

“No. There’s no other home for the dead except amongst the living. They loiter and bury themselves in their favourite things, rooms, and people,” the seer says.

Why is Lana happening to us?

“She worked for you and died in your house. There’s no other place for her to go.”

She seems hostile now.

“You took her services for granted.”

How do we undo it?

“Give her some time. Spirits are often surly and may delay granting absolution.”

The second seer asks us to break eggs at the doorways and make the egg yolk splash on the sills. He assures us that the mischiefs of the dead will go away after the ritual.

Nothing changes and we do not leave. The walls have on them the green paint which we love, and the sands of the yard graze our heels with a time-long familiarity. What we do is immerse ourselves into our present, find a pattern in the heartbeats of the walls, and make wisecracks about the clothes that walk away from the hangers after a force pulls and loops and knots them around things. We stop cleaning and arranging the house too, and align our lifestyle to the activities of the other dweller, our Lana.

The neighbours call us ‘weird’ and point us out to their children as the adults to never go close to. The whole thing is as disconcerting as it is normal.

There is always a rip in the air, we hear the slit loud and sharp. There is always a buzz, like an undertone, the severe intake of breath never quite escapes our hearing. There isn’t complete silence in our heads. How can there be when our pots clank against one another, and our toilets are filled with flush sounds as if a whole sea is out and crimped in our rooms, lashing out at us?

Source: From the Rebel Issue (October 2019)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FRANCES OGAMBA explores varying themes in her writing. Her short story appears in the 2019 New Weather for MEDIA anthology. Her nonfiction piece, The Valley of Memories, won the 2019 Koffi Addo Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She also won a joint first place for the 2019 Syncity Ng Anniversary Anthology. She is on the 2019 shortlist of the Writivism Short Story Prize, and the 2019 longlists of OWT short story prize and the K&L Prize for African Literature. Her stories appear on Enkare Review, Munyori Literary Journal, and Arts and Africa. Few of her stories are interspersed in Afridiaspora and the 2016 and 2018 Writivism prize anthologies, Dwartonline and YNaija websites. She is a workshop alumnus of Writivism 2016, Ake fiction 2016, Winter Tangerine 2016, and YELF 2018. She works as a content developer from Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

BEYOND THE SILVER LINING by Efe-Khaese Desmond

BEYOND THE SILVER LINING by Efe-Khaese Desmond

by | Oct 27, 2019 | ISSUE, Issue - Fiction

BEYOND THE SILVER LINING

by Efe-Khaese Desmond

Alero sat amidst the animated blackness. The only source of light sprung from the tranquil screen of a computer device, which stood on the wooden table, observed by a tall suntanned stool.

Her palm scrolled through her unmade hair, drawing irregular searching patterns. It found the source of the itching and massaged with the strength of her annualry. This sent a stimulating feeling through Alero’s mass of sordid flesh. She wrestled her finger between the kneading that soothes the itching and that, which turns the tingling into a suppurating sore. She fought the urge and let her hands lay static between the fabrics of her trousered thighs.

The screen brightness of the laptop dimmed a pale white.

Alero knew this to be a forewarning of the system’s screen saver – a slideshow of pre-stored photos. Pictures, which will dissolve into memories. Memories. Hurt. She was crawling reflexively to the device to shut down its proposed blitz on her passions when an image of a young smiling boy appeared on the display.

His peculiarities were a set of teeth that threatened to pop out of its enamel as he clasped a basketball between his hands; a sweatshirt, the number 19 scribbled on it, and a pair of black tracksuit pants. One would have precisely deduced the base of his delight but for the bespectacled Alero who stood behind him gripping the handlebars of his motorised wheelchair. She was wearing a complete lawyer’s outfit – a dark robe that contained a white long-sleeved shirt, topped by a funny looking cap. It was the day her child had wagered that if his team wins the Paralympian games, she would don her legal costume to celebrate his victory.

Alero gave off a burst of maniacal laughter. Her voice rippled across the thin striped walls of the small room. The echoes, in turn, ricocheted to her, moulded with teary whimpering.

It has been two years since she allowed the metonym of her wig and gown to sail with the winds of fate in order to write her book. A thing she picked up after reading an article on the therapeutic effect of transcribing one’s feelings into words. In effect, hers were worthy of a book. Although she had been downing the therapy, the healing has refused to make an early rapport. It was like walking a tight rope – you know what is on the other side, but what befogs the mind is the downside – the apprehension of tumbling down. The years have been poured into a cause built on a chasm of uncertainty and loss, which wove through the lives of her family like the fabrics of spider knots.

Two years, yet, she still struggled to find the right grains to shape a model of her curse. The curse that takes the form of virtual motions and shadowy insignias, continually plaguing her to transcribe her early intimacy with dead bodies.

Alero punched a button on the laptop. The screen came alive with excitement.

“Set your ears atop the lifeless form of a cadaver”, Alero recited, “Feel the soft sounds of life sip slowly from form, and watch with a most satisfying feeling…”

These were the opening lines of a new chapter. The words sound almost macabre, she mused. On the other hand, her mind had mutated into that form. The fear of the loss of her son had somewhat warped her psyche from the breasts of typical thoughts.

It began when Alero was newly possessed with the aporia of leaving the legal practice, and she had told her husband atop the tenderness of bedroom pillows. He had set out the next morning and returned with a near facile speech on how her decision would disintegrate the income of the family, especially with the condition of their son, who was selectively needy. Alero had tried but she knew her husband could not understand the recurring nightmare she had been having. She only fed him her distant gaze and the arch of her back as she walked away. 

Alero had nodded, perspired and went to her laptop to draft a resignation letter to her law firm. She addressed it to the human resource office and since then had not gone to work. Not when she received interrogatory emails, not even when these mails transmogrified into teeming knocks at her door or when they downsized into tiny bytes of text messages nor plethora of missed calls.

She found comfort in the darkness, and voice, on her computer’s keyboard. It helped when she typed those words but when she read them back to herself and they brought back images to her head, she would abstain for days and release these shrouded words out of its cocoon, in slant watery anecdotes – her eyes becoming the pen, and tears, the lines.

It was during this phase that her husband wheeled their son out of the home. By way of an overdue jeremiad, he sent a message about how her newfound hobby has become inimical to the well-being of their son. He did not say further on this but went on to give a notice about how he will file for custody if she does not change. Those were how the words came across even though he had used something as nocent as “…if amendments are not made”. Alero knew this to be a penance for defying him but she did not care. Her love was for her son. He was being exhibited between a conflict founded on self-importance. But Alero had not responded.

Her phone chimed. 2:25 pm

A reminder. It was time to visit her esoteric therapist, Kaycee, who was being inhabited at the state’s prison facility.

*

Fortunately, the drive took more time than she predicted. This gave her a chance to think about the origin of her ‘sessions’ with Kaycee.

He had been one of her clients with a case of murder and a possible death sentence in proximity. In truth, Kaycee had not committed the killing but had only been a negligent pharmacist who misplaced drugs in the right bottle. This caused the death of the young boy.

Kaycee had doused all the humility he could muster as he told her the emotional turmoil his life had been spinning in since the loss of his children to the overseas. They neither contacted him nor were they considering it. Alero had empathised with him and fought to upturn an impending verdict of murder to manslaughter. Nevertheless, she could not save his license nor the next 16 years of his life. Although, he was grateful that she had preserved it.

He was an old man, in his mid-50s, and the visits started as a friendly call to check on his wellbeing in prison. Still, when her troubles were born, the table was transformed into a therapy session where she simply talked, and he paid attention. To him, it was an escape from the angular life of prison, for her, it was a conversation with a person who would listen because he had to, despite any perceived sentiment he might harbour.

Alero soon arrived at the prison. Turning the 2004 Toyota Camry through the old prison gates, she viewed the chief warden handing out instructions to the subordinates. The chief warden must have seen her car drive into the compound because just as she stepped on the doorframe, the warden saluted. She smiled. He thinks I am still a lawyer.

“Madam”, the man called out in his accentuated tongue, “Welcome o. How is the family?”

Her stomach did a tumble

“They are in God’s hands”, Alero managed to reply

“Hmmm… okay”, the warden beamed “Eh you are here to see our doctor àbí?”

They called Kaycee ‘doctor’. He had told her a remarkable experience. When he was doing his baptism – the part of telling them about what he did to warrant imprisonment – they could not phantom who a ‘pharmacist’ is. He had had to explain it in the light of a ‘doctor’ description. The latter appeared to have stuck better and stuck well as a nickname.

“Yes, I am”

“Okay. Kingsley”, he called to a younger officer “Go tell doctor sey him get visitor”. The designee hurried off to do his senior’s bidding “Madam”, he turned to Alero “Oya put your bag for that locker make this boy carry you go where you go siddon”

A few minutes after, she was in the faintly lightened waiting room. It had a flinching fluorescent bulb with half of its illumination in the darkness.

Kaycee soon came to join her. He was a well-built man for his age. Alero had no fear that he will not survive his term in prison. The oil that wheeled her visits was processed because of his perceived loneliness. He was looking untidy and sad. Alero wanted to hug him. She had tried, one time, but was rebuffed by Kaycee who said he did not want word to travel that he is weak. Alero could not connect the ley lines so she had let it be.

“How have you been?” Kaycee inquired, his eyes searching the answer on Alero’s face

Silence

“Jul?” he pressed on, the lines on his face already toning with strings of concern

“Eh? I’m coping”, her voice came out in a whisper.

Kaycee looked over his shoulders. The guards were not visible

“Why you dey whisper? Police no dey here na”, he jested

“Sorry”, this time it came out loudly “I have barely said a word to anyone for the past four days. I guess I am still finding my voice”

Kaycee let out a sharp sigh. He felt guilty about mocking her predicament

“You still dey write that book bá”, it was not a question

“Hmm”, Alero said, with a static nod

“So how far, you don finish?”

Alero did not reply

“Hello, I am the one in prison here”, Kaycee bellowed sharply

“What do you want me to say?” She retorted with a strain in her voice

“I asked you a question”

“I am not done, okay”, She said begrudgingly

“Why”

“You know why”

Kaycee took his hands from the table to lean on the rickety chair. Then he folded his arms across his chest to observe the woman in front of him.

“What are you writing about? At least, that I don’t know”

Alero paused then. This was the first time he was asking her about the subject matter of her troubles. Despite the repetitive visits, Kaycee had not earned the badge of her friendship – the insignia that allowed him into her nightmares. She looked away as if to retreat from the question, but she knew he would not allow her. The silence was not an answer either.

“It’s personal”

“‘Personal’ as in it happened to…” his finger, pointing at her, complementing the sentence “or personal as in you don’t want to talk about it?”

Blank stare

“Yes”

“Yes, what?”

“All of the above”

“So what are you doing here?”

“I don’t know what to do”

“About?”

“Finishing the book. I want to finish it. I really do, but I just can’t find the right stones to mount the building”, Alero muttered rapidly

Another blank stare

“Kaycee, time is ticking”

“I know”, he replied “and that is why I have six words for you…no seven”, he babbled, then he moved on to count his fingers

“Who cares, just tell me”, Alero demanded

“Get your hair out of this mess”

“What mess?” Alero probed, puzzled

“This mess”, his hands motioned to signify all of her.

“Me?”

“Yes, you”, Kaycee motioned again, “you sit down in your darkroom, and you reminisce about the blackness around you. You think about your husband and the impending loss of your son. You reek of regret about your decision to leave the legal profession. Forgetting that time walks on lighting feet and the sooner you move on the better for you not to be trampled. No one leaves a profession like Law in Nigeria, except they are pursuing a higher calling. Get your hair out of this mess and think forward, Alero”, Kaycee concluded breathlessly.

Alero marvelled at Kaycee. This was the first time he had ever scolded her for the tides of her life. Other times, he had just sat there and listened. She had been content with that or she thought she was. This newfound trait in Kaycee was shrouding. Intimidating.

“Okay. I will put that in mind”, that was all that came out, as the guard banged the door to indicate that their 5-minute tête-à-tête was over

“You had better. Come here”, he outstretched his hands as the guard knocked on the iron door.

“But I thought you said you don’t want the guards to think you weak”, Alero uttered slyly as she moved to the imprisoned man.

“Who said the hug is for me?”

*

This time Alero was in squalor. She could feel it; something was with her beyond what the eyes could comprehend. The hue of the room was a still nothingness merged with a vantage observer, or observers, stowed away, invincible. She knew there were spectators of this darkness.

“Who is there?” Alero asked the threatening gloominess

Her voice did not come back to her, although it felt like it was let out in a barren room. It was as if a huge hollow jar had been opened to swallow her echoes – as if something was denying her even the companionship of her own presence.

It was in the likeness of her writing room, yet, a structural flaw betrayed it.

Alero stretched her hand into the thickening air and groped for a wall or anything solid. Her hand caught on the stiffness as she clawed away, ripping at it like posters on a street wall. She kept tearing at it in search of a wall, a door, or anything concrete she could hold onto. When this failed, Alero tried to retrace her steps back to where she once stood. Just as she reclined backward, she hit something hard. The wall where she had woken up. An arduous malaise filled her temple. Had she advanced only a step?

Alero closed her eyes briefly and when she opened them, she made out the highlight of a door few paces from where she stood. It was either the darkness had cajoled up the door or the shape of her eyes has become allied with its rich contours.

She advanced, this time keeping track of how many paces she was away from where the door was mounted. Thankfully, she was moving closer to it. A few steps passed and she was dispersing her fingers across the doorframe, searching for the lever. Just as she was about to move it into opening, her ears became fixed on a quiet call behind her, which almost immediately became a fusion of different stages of wailing. While one cried out her name in a fit of benign erudition, a gentle one, with a tinge of motherly composition, seized the first syllable of her name, dipped it in the crevice of her throat, and let out the last syllable in a rocketing pitch. Another, a gruff voice wailed like that of a big man. A timid one, like that of a child, called out too. They were all calling out her name.

A sweetening sensation enveloped her as she stood there absorbing the effect of the grotesque spectacle. It carried the smell of resin and another familiar odour. This one tumbled into her nostrils and surged her memories into a forgotten time. The smell usually held strong around the figures of dead bodies. This awakened a feeling in her, a feeling of dread that these voices were warning her; inviting her, calling out for her not to go through the door. The voices became faint as her hand pushed the handle down to open it. She could not will it to do otherwise. Then she noticed that her body was not the one performing the action. Either someone was prodding the door from the other side of the door had an animated likeness.

As the door slid open, the sensation heightened and rolled into a whirlpool of dread. The stench of cadavers grew with a rocketing geometry alongside the detail of the room.

Alero saw an array of stretchers by the end of the wall, seated as if hypnotized. She would have attempted to move back but for the young girl who was walking towards one of the tables. The girl wore a pale nightgown and her black hair has been twisted into a cornrow with multi-coloured beads sticking out from its ends. Alero recognised this girl, even though her back was turned to her. It was someone she once knew. It was the young Alero spreading over two decades.

And she knew what the girl was about to do.

She called out to her, to stop her, but her words became strangled in her throat. Then it began to fall back into the pit of her chest.

Alero choked.

A tightening in her chest was preventing her from alerting the young girl. From averting her young eyes from what is underneath the covering. She still struggled to call out. But the girl’s hand was already on the head of the stretcher, lifting the covering of a bulging pile. The girl raised it and she saw it – a disfigured skeleton of what might have been a man rested on the head of the stretcher. This bone slowly took the form of flesh, filling up the indenture on the macabre form. Flesh became a whole face and the whole face appeared to be her mother, lying still atop the stretcher. The face then began to decay in tiny pieces, slow motion of horror.

A scream erupted from the nether, the observer, then Alero woke up on the floor of a small room. Her laptop laid stock-still a few feet from her head, undamaged. She picked it up and wiped the base with an opened palm. The pulsating light from the laptop stole a sigh of relief from her lips. Her hands quivered, not from fright, but eagerness. As she touched the keyboard in the darkness of the room, the voices in her head became her light.

Source: From the Rebel Issue (October 2019)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

EFE-KHAESE RINSE DESMOND is an award-winning writer whose stories mirror the issues he feels are not given enough recognition. This makes his works transverse from a virtual paedophilia to the enigmatic mind of a child stammerer. His hobbies are seasonal alongside his interests. Nevertheless, he is passionate about animal and societal welfare and the value of true feminism. Desmond was the Winner of the April edition, Brigitte Poirson Poetry Contest 2019. He was first runner-up at the African Poetry Contest 2017 and was recently shortlisted for the Chronicles Short Story Prize 2018. 

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