THE HOUSE CALLED JOY

by Chizoma Emeka Joshua

At one point you had taken the symptoms to Google. Google was better than doctors. Less intrusive. It did not ask if your family had a history of mental illness or whether you had been under a lot of stress lately (Both useless questions because doctors were always embarrassed to ask the former, and the latter was just plain silly, I mean, what banker is not under a lot of stress daily?)

But Google provided no solution. Perhaps the problem had been with how you typed the question. In the search area you had written:

1: is sadness a person?
2: what condition is it that makes one feel like oceans are threatening to spill through her mouth whenever she is alone? 

For a long time after Google had spewed articles about ocean animals that left you the more confused you had sat staring at your laptop screen, wondering if perhaps Google was not as smart as people gave it credit for.

With time, you teach yourself to manage the storm. At nights when you feel most vulnerable, when the minions carry out their onslaught and there isn’t the armour of work to keep you safe, you whisper affirmations to yourself. You are a Christian so it is easy for you to pick from the armload of cheesy statements that fill the Bible. Your favorite is from Ecclesiastes 9: 4 – a living dog is better than a dead lion. You like how you think yourself as the dog, you don’t know who the dead lion is. You would chant the verse like a prayer, wield it like a sword, till you emerge on the other side, victorious.

Other times what you mutter is the twenty-third psalm. You repeat the words over and over again, hugging your knees, your back against the wall. You repeat it till you actually find yourself beside still waters and smell the freshness of the rivers on your skin.

But there are nights this storm would refuse to be caged. It will hit against your barriers with such intensity that your affirmations would be ill-prepared to stop it. Nights when you lie awake in the spare bedroom because you got into one of your frequent fights with your neighbor who had then hurled her insult of choice: barren woman, and you needed a safe place to hide from your shame. Or the nights when your husband had used his fist to communicate his rage at your childlessness or any other of his many problems that he thinks you are the cause of. Those nights, you do not give affirmations, because words would not do. You rather reach into the recesses of your mind to that sunny place where you store happy memories. You flip through the pages: your graduation from primary school, that time you had an A in government, the time that boy in the choir smiled at you, you skip all these pages and rest on a particular one.

In it you are sixteen: too young to be carrying dead dreams around but not too old to receive seed from a man, nourish it and present him a flower.

You are lying on a hospital bed. You are tired.  There is a hand in yours. Smooth, little hands. Baby hands. They are the reason that even though you feel sharp pains in between your legs from where you had just pushed out another human, you are content, proud of yourself. On your lips is the taste of joy, and it takes like nothing you’ve ever had before. It is foreign in the way a lot of things are foreign to you. You would nibble at it. Careful not to gobble it up, so there’d be some for next time.

It is this joy that you visit. The feeling you felt in that moment. It is a safe harbor where physical pains cannot break through. Where raging storms cannot reach across to place their hands on your heart. Where you feel most worthy of things you do not deserve. In that house called joy, you are everything, and everything is you.

Those nights, you are also careful not to go beyond this point. Because past it, there is another picture of you. In that one, you are two years away from sixteen. Your parents are standing behind you, a scowl on their faces. The camera clicks shut as you are handing your baby to a man who in return hands you an envelope within which you would find, over the course of 8 years, a university degree, a job at a bank and a flat where you lie on cold nights with an aching heart  and a resentful husband to keep you company.

ANEESAH

by Sobur Olalekan

I stole things that cannot be returned. Her name was Aneesah. I was nine, she was four. Then, ten and she was five. Then I was eleven and she was standing with me, her mum and my parents at the departure longue of an airport, holding her mum’s hand – my aunt – while she laughed and said to me “Baba Aneesah. Aneesah doesn’t want to leave you. Thanks for being a good cousin to her. I hope we can always visit Nigeria. We’ll miss you.”  

The therapist watched me as I sobbed into my hands and choked on my words. She waited patiently through the silences that came between my words, silences cold and hollow, dense with a special kind of guilt, of shame. Silence, icy cold and heavy against my chest, in my lungs, on my tongue. Silence like a cloud filled with rain that never fell. Sometimes, the psychiatrist asked a question or two, carefully, and I had to ask myself in my own words, to feel the trembling of my voice as I scavenged tiny moments from my memories to find answers.

When I learnt that what I was doing was wrong? When did this guilt start?  Had I seen her in a dream before I had my daughter? I didn’t know it was wrong, or didn’t have time or a reason to think about it until the guilt started, until I saw her again ten years after she left. I saw her on Facebook, and by the time I saw the third picture, I couldn’t look any further. In the following days, the shame washed over me like some warm sticky liquid – it still does. Some days, I can feel the guilt rising from me, like steam, and forming a cloud around me. A cloud I can never find my way through. This is the first time I would see her in a dream.

I saw Aneesah for three days after I saw the therapist. And in those three days, after I had woken up and finished sobbing silently into the pillow, I remembered the therapist’s words and planned my escape. I would write a book. I didn’t know about what, or how I would, but it would be for children. For children who would not have known what abuse was until they had their daughters, until they had their guilt, had their own dreams like mine. Then I would call Aneesah. I would tell her I needed to talk. I would still my body for whatever came after then.

On the eighth day, I held my daughter and brought her to my chest, sobbed silently into her shawl and gave her my cousin’s name. I called her Aneesah, and repeated my final words to the psychiatrist: I do not want to forget.