Olive Branches and Weeping Doves

Ọbáfẹ́mi Thanni

Dear Pamilerin,

I am writing to return your name to you. To leave you a word and whisper in its ears put laughter in his mouth. To leave you a kind of body to point to when you are led to ask the question what did she leave me? Because what keeps us among the living is the body we have not left behind. Because a man once became holy, became undying, when his tomb was found empty.

When they ask you if I am living, show them the absence of my body. Show them how I am living, yet gone, gone in search of all I have lost and will never hold.

 When the only figure in the distance began to blur, you screamed a name, only to find your voice disembodied into stillness. The waves of your screams did not make it past your lips, and the figure blurred even further—your pleas with it to stay remained unheard. The wave of every sound was submerged by the inconsolable sky weeping for the thirst of the earth until the gap between thirsting and quenching grew as wide as an ark and the tears overflowed. You watched each teardrop leave the sky as a light crystal, only to rinse through the air and fall as blood. You stood on a mountain that sank with each raining moment. The flood had reduced the trees that stretched towards the sky to mere shrubs, leaving only their darkened leaves visible. Another gust of wind blew and you struggled to keep your eyes open—to keep watch of the figure in the distance. You avoided looking at the exsanguinated bodies that surrounded you—their skins flowing as a single tapestry of genderless nude. You avoided the sight of excess—of bodies drowned from too much arrival and others floating from too much abandonment. The blood that fell and the blood that was shed flowed as a single shade of ruin. Arms floated away from their bodies, necks reached into the flood, searching for their decapitated crowns, the scarlet tears pulsed through the void of behearted bodies—blood brimming into the absence of a heart.

Despite the blur, you knew me. When my voice made it to your ears—saying come with me, come alive—you held your breath and began swimming through the sea of bodies. When your arms neared my shore, I stretched my hand towards you—the way an olive branch strains towards a weeping dove—before you felt fingers holding your toe, reaching for your heel and hand after hand wrapping around your ankle, pulling you away from me, pulling you beneath me. You watched the distance between us grow, from the edge of a fingertip to an arm’s length.

You knew you were screaming when the flood replaced my name. You knew you were dreaming when your pool of sweat replaced the flood.

You were both tired and relieved that Monday. You had been queueing to have your registration completed, and the line moved slowly from the early hours of morning till the sun bore its sweltering smile above you and the queue broke with sweat. Some bodies broke beyond others, shrinking the rooms you queued in with the proximity of odors and sweat. You could smell some bodies from the end of the queue, the same kind of bodies that pressed too close. Many bodies behind you, a girl called out bros, give me space now and the line murmured and shuffled. Before that, a boy ahead of you was talking about how he should not be there with you. How he should have travelled out by now, attending a university where their registrations were completed online, where his graduation did not involve the volatile arithmetic of years of study + x or fervent prayers against uncertainty. As he complained in his loud voice, you guessed his course of study. In response to him, a boy wearing a Jesu Army tee-shirt—with the bold red letters spread across his chest, and the second s missing, worn and faded from use—assured him of an appointed time, of a leader that God would himself choose, of a coming change.

You were relieved this was the last day.

After the stamp met your paper, finding you worthy of welcome because of how much you had endured, you heaved a sigh and thought of your bed, of the beans you had warmed earlier that morning and the softness of the bread you would use to hold it in a nourishing embrace, of the luxury of your two-man room. You thought of rest.

When your friend obliged you to follow him to your college, you wondered if your thoughts were gossiped. You tried to hiss past his enthusiasm, but he only smiled and repeated his urgent desire. When you told him you were tired, he stared at you, and you watched his eyes spell out the hours he had spent waiting with you, despite completing his registration days before. Your rolled eyes thanked him, then pointed the way.

Outside, the sun had clothed herself with clouds and her smile was softened. You walked in the warm afternoon under the shaded canopy of trees that lined the walkway to your college. You watched the building in the distance, at the top of a small hill and felt your calves burn, while he could have been skipping up the hill for all you knew. When you finally arrived and caught your breath, you asked what you were there for. When he responded to look around, naw, you laughed with increasing loudness, hoping that you could make his response into a joke if you laughed hard enough.

“What is funny bayi?”

“Dare, what are we doing here?” you asked calmly in the hopes of a different answer.

“We came to look around, naw. Abi?”

Your mouth hung open with the weight of fatigue and annoyance. “What is the meaning of all this one, ehn? Oh! What type of stress is this one now?”

“Ah! Pele o!” he said, rubbing your back as he stifled his laughter. “Shebi, you’re already here. Oya, let’s go.”

You muttered behind him as you walked around the faculty and he pointed out the same buildings he had pointed out on several sightseeing tours. He pointed at the large lecture theater and pronounced the name of the professor it was named after in an exaggerated voice, and you could not help but laugh. When you said you hated him, he nodded and said he loved you too, before narrating the story of misappropriation behind the TET-funded building.

Later, when my class poured out of the lecture theater, your eyes rested on me with a haze of recognition. When Dare called on you to meet someone, you stood still, silent and thankful at the sight of me, as I walked past.

By the time my mother had me, she was already exhausted. Not from the pain that tore her open or caused her to scream and sweat and swear, not from her unfulfilled wish—for the pain of birth to end, for her life to leave through her yells and leave her body silent and delivered. Not the pain the doctors watched with mute disappointment as she bore its weight loudly, in protest, incorrectly. By the time my mother had me, she was exhausted by the ones before me—the trinity of hopes dashed against the swelling walls of her womb. Her arms outstretched towards hope, her months ripening with expectation only for her to watch disappointment bleed out of her, as sudden as a miracle. The one before me had a name, because it is harder to kill a thing with a name. Because my mother understood the temptation of a body to make a ghost out of a hope with no name to be remembered by, with no name to haunt the world with. She nursed her hope anew, certain her body would not fail her, again.

In the sixth month, her blood flowed in clots, like clay abandoned by its potter. She imagined her soft fingers running over a body nearing being and deeming it unworthy of breath, of birth, before crushing it into scarlet abandon. This time, she watched hope shifting in its cradle. But to see is not to hear, and to hear is not to listen. This time, she did not tend to hope, did not nestle it, did not listen to its shrill cry in the fluency of a language they once shared. This time, hope died in the resolved fabrics of neglect.

In the days after the lost scarlet, she remained in bed. The doctors came and went, whispering their condolences and chanting words like rare and gestation and recovery and sudden and possibly hostile and inhospitable until she no longer listened to them. The afternoon before she would be discharged, my father’s mother visited. She sat in a chair facing my mother, waiting for her to wake up. When my mother woke up hours later, the surprise of my grandmother’s presence was contained only by my father’s arrival. He set down a small basket of fruits by her bedside before greeting his mother. He called my mother’s name in a hushed whisper and kissed her forehead. Fully awake, my mother struggled to sit up while holding my father’s hand. Together, they watched my grandmother, waiting for her to justify her presence.

In her humorless voice that always burdened the simplest remarks with the weight of prophecy, she began: “Iyawo mi. This is the third time this is happening. And I want you to see this for what it is.” She sighed deeply. “This. This is God reaching for you. Iyawo mi, ale ma bo ‘lorun ja. We bow to God. We cannot deny him. We cannot fight him… And you see, in life, there are just some certain things that will not work. Like I told my son…”

My mother had been smiling the entire time but interrupted her when she sensed the beginning of a sermon she had heard too many times. She knew how this would unravel. How my father should not have gotten unequally yoked with a thorn in the flesh, with a godless woman. How she is being denied the heritage of the Lord because she did not submit to his flock.

“When I was a child, my favorite prayer was the Grace.” She muttered for a while, threading through the prayer to find her favored part. “I loved how it said, in my father’s version, ‘the Love of God and the sweet fellowship of the holy spirit.’”

With closed eyes she repeated the sweet fellowship, the sweet fellowship. Her opened eyes rested on the ward’s bleached ceiling and she lingered on the boxed patterns before returning her gaze to the seat before her. “The prayer says ‘love and sweet fellowship.’ I refuse a love that thinks me worthy by how much pain I can bear. I refuse a fellowship that only knows ecstasy through lack. If there is a God, let us be lovers finding each other in a garden where the seeds of fear and trembling do not sprout."

This time, my grandmother did not bring up Job. She did not have to argue with my mother’s ready reply that God knew enough not to take a chance with leaving a curse in her mouth. She did not hiss or shake her head in the slow motions of judgement, or declare hell on my mother from the book of life she always had tucked in her wrapper. This time, she fell silent and followed my mother’s eyes as they led her to the door.

The following day, at home, my mother would lock my father out of their room. My father would sob into the arms of sleep as he listened to my mother's weeping; making for himself a bed at the feet of her refusal to be consoled.

In the middle of the night, my mother unlocked her refusal and my father was stirred awake. She stormed past him, into every room of the house and my barely awake father trailed behind her. When she ran out of rooms to question, she turned to ask my father where are they?

“Who?”

“What do you mean, who? Can’t you hear them crying?”

“Darling, no one is crying.”

“Listen. Listen. They are crying. And their cribs. Their cribs are empty. Why are their cribs empty? Why aren’t their clothes warm?”

My father replied in their private language. His hands wrapped around her. Holding her. His touch saying come here. His chin hugging her head saying let me show you where everything is.

By the time my mother had me, she had run out of tenderness. When water broke where her body had known blood, she knew the cost of joy better than to smile.

My father says I was born holding my brother’s toe—as if in a privacy as tender as a shared womb, I was saying, come with me, come alive. Gloved fingers flicked against my skin, but I only began to cry when they pried my brother from my grasp. I had become my mother’s daughter. I had known loss.

My mother did not hold me as I wailed. She did not hold me after I was washed of blood, because even then, she knew, it was always a matter of time before taking followed the giving. Because like the others, I will be lusted after by Death.  

At the same time the following Monday, you came looking for me, alone. You waited by the stalls where women sold petty things, sipping zobo from a Pepsi bottle. When my class was over you rushed what was left of your drink and came over to me. After your hello, you fumbled through your remembrance of me. You walked closely beside me yet backwards through memory. We stopped at the foot of the hill and watched others disperse after you apologized. I’m sorry. I just feel like I’ve always known you. I nodded and said nothing as you turned away from me and began walking into the late afternoon. Suddenly, I heard footsteps bringing you back to me. I turned to find you running and whispering breathlessly with excitement animating your face. I remember. I remember. You stopped in front of me. We attended the same secondary school. I laughed and told you I found that interesting, but I still did not know you. You said it was understandable as I was a year ahead of you. I asked how you knew me, and you told me of a rumor.

“I think we all knew you.”

  “You heard of me. That is not the same thing.”

 “You’re right. But is it true?”

 “What is?”

 “The reason you transferred to our school?”

 “What did you hear?”

 We began walking. You told me what you had heard, and my truth was a thin thread in the fabric you spun. When we had walked through your fabric, I pointed in the direction of the quarters where I lived, and you offered to walk me to a food joint along the path. You said you could tell by my amusement not much of it was true and you’d like to hear my truth. I laughed and reached for your fabric. It was true that I had declared my reason for transferring to my classmates on the first day. It was true I had been called to the front of the class as the new girl and awkwardness was expected. It was true that I did not meet that expectation. But you would come to know that my given reason of a biology teacher whose ignorance was harmful to my sexual and mental well-being was not the full story. Yet, a rumor was born when the word sex came out of a girl’s mouth and shame did not follow.

You were patient in the silence that followed, breaking its hold over us only to explain the longer route we were taking to the food joint. The sun was resting from her watch and she took her flames from the sky, drawing a curtain of soft darkness over her absence. You watched the evening fall before your eyes rested on me. The shorter route is uncomfortable, you said. And I understood as you returned into silence.

We walked the longer paths behind the male hostels, through faculties, open crossroads, and the university’s staff school, to arrive at the food joint because you did not want to see me stumble. Because a shorter route meant the unbridled hunger of boys for a sight. Meant a fragile earth. Meant the ogling of walking a tightrope as a call for attention. Meant eyes that leeched to the skin. Meant the call to prayer for prey at the edge of corridors. Meant the earnest waiting for a fall over the earth they had made treacherous with words the height of hurdles and the depth of shallow pits.

You still had food in your mouth when I reached through the silence, asking if you were still listening. The seriousness of your nod waned with the strand of noodle that fell from the edge of your lower lip, and we glanced at each other before breaking into laughter, into the exile of silence.

I told you about my former school. Its bright buildings, its brilliant colors, its beautiful fields and elderly trees. I told you of Sherri, my closest friend who walked those fields with me and made sure I never ran out of choki-choki or any sweet thing. How that morning her body had surprised her and she ran to class with my sweater tied around her waist to find a solution in my bag. How she was returned to the assembly ground by an overzealous newly-appointed prefect who pursed his lips and pointed to the assembly before she could explain her necessary absence. How she felt the surprise spread. How she could not sit and we stood away from the rest of the assembly. How that morning was also for the inspection of seniors. How boys hid in their pencil trousers and contraband shoes from the gaze of teachers. How girls pulled their gowns into reluctant friendships with their knees and kept their lip glosses and too-beautiful earrings in the darkest parts of their backpacks. How the biology teacher—who had once said, with the conviction of scientific fact, that masturbation caused retardation—asked Sherri to take off the sweater around her waist, and met her attempt to explain with a raised voice. The eyes of the assembly rested on them. When the sweater came off, silence fell at the sight of the surprise. Many looked away, others gasped, others stared, but no one moved. As he could not bear the weight of being wrong, he broke the silence with a slap to her face. He began yelling, asking if her mother had taught her nothing at all. If she did not know how to keep herself. Asking why she wanted everyone to know what was happening to her. Why she had no shame.

I told you how I was paralyzed by anger and began running after her too late. How she ran out of school, past security, with the other side of my sweater, spotted with surprise, trailing behind her. How, when I could not catch up to her but was caught by the school security instead, I returned to the assembly to scream, as I could not find the words for the other teachers who stood silently by. How my offence of breaking decorum was of more consequence to the school authority. How I found a way to reach my mother. How I was reported to her when she arrived. How she remained silent until she had spoken with me. How blood shot through her eyes after I told her. How she stormed from our conversation into the administrative building. How she obliterated decorum. How we began to worry when we called Sherri and her mother and received no response. How we drove out of school, to Sherri's house, with eyes trailing behind us. How we arrived, unprepared, into the jaws of tragedy.

At Sherri’s house, she was seated between her mother’s thighs in her underwear, her wrists glowing with raw flesh. We were still standing in shock when her mother pressed a button on a screen and Sherri’s voice poured into the living room, anguish-tinged and declaring with finality, her love, and her answer to the question of continuing. When silence returned to the living room, we broke into a collective stream of tears and her mother with an eerie smile, cradled her head between her thighs. She oiled her scalp, running an ilarun—with Sherri's name carved into it—through her hair. We wept as we watched her weave Sherri’s hair in thick cornrows. When she weaved the final cornrow, her fingers ran over each strand of hair in slow caresses with eyes closed, reading each cornrow like years woven in Braille. She kissed each cornrow and opened her eyes after the fourteenth kiss. When she looked up at us—her face marked with a vestige of tears—my mother moved over to her side and held her hand. Their eyes met, and my mother led her sight to her daughter's glowing wrists. Her eyes returned from the glow to meet the question in my mother's eyes.

She looked away from my mother and sighed, then suddenly begged us in a cracked whisper to make her a promise: Promise me you won’t say she took her own life. I know she has left me, and I have become naked again. But you know her. She caressed Sherri’s last cornrow. You knew her. You knew my baby would never hurt anyone. Would never hurt. Herself. She bent to kiss Sherri’s forehead. My baby… My baby was only trying to get rid of all that blood. Even if it left her with nothing. Because she had not learnt that you can only bleed what you own. Promise me. Promise me if they ask. You will say she went to the river to wash herself, and drowned.

We nodded solemnly and she thanked us. When she asked us to excuse her, my mother stood up slowly. I’ll make the calls and arrangements, were my mother’s last words as we left her in the living room singing soft songs to her daughter.

I told you how I lost track of how long I was silent for. How my first words were at her funeral. How I had thought of her mother and whispered to mine, grief is a different tongue and she replied I understood her every word.         

When silence returned, you were weeping softly. Your hand outstretched for mine. Your other hand falling from your chest as you no longer held yourself. Do you remember how we walked to my quarters under the crescent that hung in the sky like a hungry mouth? How we stayed up watching it feast on the night until there was no darkness left and the sky-bowl shone with daylight?

By the soft glow of a lantern, I lay in my mother’s lap. We watched the flame dance to the tickles of breeze seeping into its glass world. She spoke into my hair of a love song. One from her girlhood. One I had stumbled into when I left my music player on shuffle and she came out of her room dancing to. One she left on loop for a month.

She read in her study with the love song playing at the volume of a whisper. She pressed her body to my father’s as the love song spun them in slow evening circles. She whistled after its tune. She fell asleep to the gentle coaxing of its saxophone. She spoke into my hair of the longing the love song caused, how it was not the softness of the voice she longed for, not the syrup of the saxophone, not the days it returned her to; but how she longed for the way the love songs played. How the CD or vinyl record demanded care, how a skip or scratch was possible after hundreds of plays, how there could be proof of listening. How they shined with care, shined with an effort to remove one’s own touch. How each listen, each loop, was an effort towards tenderness, how tenderness is how whole you remain after the world storms through you.

As an infant, I did not know of my mother’s inexhaustible tenderness. Whenever she tells me of the darkness I was born into, she points skywards at her glowing tenderness—waxing or waning, clouded or lushly nude, but never absent. We laughed as she told me of her conviction that I had hated her as an infant. She was certain it was only my father’s touch I would keep knowing because he was the only one whose touch kept me, whose arms had held me for most of my first months. She was certain in her fear that if her body came too close to mine, I would be reduced to a broken mold. She was certain my life depended on her distance from it.

The first morning she held me by her choosing, I cried in response to the strangeness of her warmth, only to fall quiet after she out-cried me. She nestled me cautiously, watching me with tear-filled disbelief as I suckled. She told me, in those early years, what she most looked forward to was bathing me. Your baths were the only times I was certain of your presence. In the small pools she made for me, I was as palpable as the lather on my body, as palpable as every emptied bowl washing away her doubts. Each bath was my wet wish for you to endure, for water to wash over you and not through.

My mother bequeathed me my greatest heirloom—blood. Her blood pulses in the tongue she gave me, where it is understood that to resemble is to bite out of another’s innards. It is my mother’s flesh that I eat. It is her blood that flows through me. It is my mother I am in communion with.

From the wealth of my heirloom, I take tenderness to mold my brother. I break the clay of my father's laughter to sculpt his smile. I cup my hands under the flow of my father's kindness and take handful after handful to the workroom of my dreams. These faithful handfuls are how I know him. I know his hands soften my feet when I stumble. His scent lingers on the fabrics I clothe us with. His touch runs across my cheek when he shares my skin. His voice rises when my father's singing falls. His sight beholds us in the mirror on days when he migrates beyond the edge of my dreams.

By morning, your eyes were circled with a longing for sleep. You thought of saying goodbye before your eyes glowed with a remembrance. What is your name? you wondered; and I swallowed the thought that you knew my name as I knew the laughter in yours. When you gave me your name, I left you with half of mine. Eyinju.

Before you waved goodbye and I shut the door behind you, you repeated half my name, praying unknowingly for the part to be made whole. And what is this answered prayer but a weight you cannot bear? A name you do not understand rewriting the lines of your palms? A fate misread from new lines? A newness causing your own palms to betray you?

For thirteen days I had no name. Whenever I called for my father in the shrill language I knew, he cooed over me with omo mi, omo mi. Affirming again and again that I was his child. I know now that to name a child is no light thing. I know now that to be barren is to be nameless, and a mother who names her child renames herself.

In the first seven days, my mother silently christened my brother, giving him a name only she knows and my hands will never hold. On the fourteenth day, there was a ceremony and family members and friends in attendance wore different faces; of shock, of delight, of surprise, of indifference, of hunger, of joy. My mother stared at them all and pronounced the name she had kissed me with.

Before our compound was filled in attendance, before the alase arrived and began their cooking, before glimpses of the sun caused roosters to stir awake—my mother had kissed me with a new name, as my father held me towards her under the quiet of midnight.

Because there is nothing new under the sun, we waited in the moon-filled dark to be shown everything unseen. As the different faces in attendance watched, my mother raised me in the early afternoon light and the stunned sun hid behind clouds at the sight of my name.

My name, Eyinjuorun, meaning apple of the heaven’s eye, meaning the heavens hold both the sun and the moon, and the shutting of an eye is the opening of another, meaning I long for earthshine and eclipse, meaning I would touch my brother at the cost of darkness, meaning my skin holds Taiye and Kehinde, and I am always shifting between either and both, meaning I tasted the world and my brother refused to come after me, meaning I am always reaching for him, always reaching for myself.

Forgive me, I did not mean to leave you emptyhearted. When you said you loved me, I only heard my brother returning.

Ọbáfẹ́mi Thanni is a genre-bending writer whose poetry was the third-place winner of the Nigerian Newsdirect Poetry Prize 2020. He is a reader at The Masters Review and is currently making attempts at beauty while applying for a citizenship in Lucille.