“Hi! My name is Sarah Parker.” She
says and you smile at her.
“I’m Ese Osemwenke.” You reply,
trying hard to stop yourself from asking her if her middle name is Jessica.
She is
pretty, with shoulder length hair the colour of corn silk and eyes that are
very blue you can tell their colour from across the room. You try not to feel
too self-conscious about the pimples you noticed on your chin this morning but
your hand trails to your face all the same. You reckon that just like you,
she’ll be speaking at the United Nation’s CEDAW Session; she has that confident
and assured air around her that you recognize so well because it’s like looking
in a mirror.
“Your name is beautiful.” She says
to you in the deep sultry voice you find hard to believe belongs to someone
with such dainty features. You would have expected her voice to be wispy and bird-like.
“Ese.”
She tries it out on her tongue. “It’s beautiful, just like you are.” She says
and you feel your mental shutters coming down with a loud clanging sound that
threatens to burst your eardrums. You fight the burning urge to clamp your
hands over your ears, to shut out the clanging, to shut out her beautiful
contralto.
You’ve heard
those words a million times too many and you know just how quickly they can
turn ugly as soon as people see what’s beneath the carefully painted façade.
You have learned the hard way how fickle and fleeting acceptance and respect
usually are. You know that no matter how forward thinking the world thinks it
is, biases still run deep in the DNA of the human race.
No one likes the messy stories.
No one is
comfortable with wounds or scars or the not-perfect lives. So your smile
widens, showing your straight, white teeth with the tiny gap between your
incisors. Yes, you smile and even offer inane comments here and there, but you
push all thoughts of the sexual abuse, first from the house girl, then from
uncle Ighenegbai, into that place you have sworn will never see the light of
day.
You imagine
how the easy rapport she has built with you in so little time will disappear if
she knew. You know how she will flounder, try not to show how uncomfortable she
is with being uncomfortable with your damagedness,
how she will try not to make too much of it and then wonder if she’s making
too little of it. You know that whether she judges you or feels sorry for what
you’ve been through, it will distance her from you because you’re the broken
toy.
She is
saying now that she has seen a bit of the world and you hope she doesn’t ask if
you’re from Africa and what the country
is like apart from all the starving children and the safaris.
“I have been to Cape Town. Your
accent doesn’t sound South African.” She says and you’re impressed.
“I’m Nigerian.” You say but you don’t
tell her that your life had been far from the pictures of emaciated children
the media is filled with. You don’t say that you were born with a silver spoon
shoved down your throat and that you had been expected to live a stereotype
because of it. You don’t talk about how no one took you seriously, especially
because you were a girl-child and that you were told to enjoy daddy’s money until a rich suitor came along. You don’t tell
her that you defied daddy and got that job anyway, or that when you refused to
sleep with the boss, he fired you and told everyone you were just a spoilt brat
who was clueless on the job. You don’t tell her that growing up, you were not
expected to have a mind of your own and most people either labelled you spoilt
for taking advantage of daddy’s fortunes or spoilt
for not.
“I have done a fair share of
travelling too.” You tell her.
“Great! Whereabouts have you been?”
she asks, her eyes lighting up with excitement.
“I lived in Scotland for a few
years.” You say, but you leave out the part of fleeing two weeks before the
wedding your authoritarian father had planned for you. Of course you don’t
mention the fact that your father had chosen your suitor without consulting
you, or that your would-be groom had been almost twice your age.
“I visited Edinburgh, spent a few
days there.” She says. “What was it like living in Scotland?” she asks and you
tell her about the beautiful landscapes, the enchanting way the brogue rolls
and sloshes off the tongues of the natives and the amazing landmarks. What you
say nothing about is how difficult it was to fit in and how you were the one
with the weird accent. You say nothing about the veiled racist remarks or the
time ‘Niggar Whore’ was spray painted on your car. You don’t tell her of the
lecturer who refused to answer your question because you said ‘Eh-din-borg’
instead of ‘Eh-din-bu-rah’ and how the entire class had dissolved in laughter.
“I returned to Nigeria after eight
years.” You say.
“Wow, you must have missed home
during that time.” She replies.
Yes you did,
every single day of those eight years, but you had been trying to find yourself
and you hadn’t been sure how best to do that, and the days had just continued
to roll into each other. You don’t tell her that despite missing home, you
hadn’t been able to return because your father had cut you off and had
forbidden you to come back. You can’t tell her how much you regret not
reconciling with him before he died and how at the funeral, you had still been
the outcast.
“After that, I lived in Brisbane for
a few years.” You continue.
You don’t
mention how finally going back home had only made things worse. You don’t say
anything about how the people you had left back home either envied you for
having flown the coop or resented you for leaving. You don’t bring up the
people who consider you selfish and self-serving or those who call you
unpatriotic, the ones whose eyes scream traitor.
“Then work took me to Perth and then
Auckland for a couple of years.”
“Did you return home to Nigeria
often?” she asks.
You give a
non-committal shrug and say yes, a few times over the years. You don’t say
anything about how you never felt like you belonged there anymore and how home felt even stranger than all the
places you’ve been to. You gloss over the fact that you started to experience a
new kind of discrimination, one even worse than what you suffered at the hands
of foreigners. You don’t tell her how you’ve become the outsider everywhere you
go, how you’re not even sure of where home
is anymore.
No one wants to see brokenness.
You share
with her instead, your adventures and all the glamorous places you’ve seen. You
both bond over your shared cities, two strangers who are clicking on the
surface. Two strangers who will likely become friends without getting to the
messiness beneath. You know this very well because you have learned to play
this game like a pro and have perfected the fine art of creating charades. It
is the only way you know to survive; you paint on your face, wear your
picture-perfect masquerade like an armour and plough on through life.
You see her
eyes flick to your hands which are in your laps and you self-consciously pull
your sleeve over the scar on your left wrist before you can stop yourself. The
scar is old and belongs in another lifetime but you know from bitter experience
that people will always define you by it. You’re not interested in anyone’s
pity or judgement. You look up at her defiantly and what you see in her eyes
surprises you.
She leans
over and lays a hand on your arm.
“I’m a survivor too.” She says with
so much tenderness and you are surprised even further when you burst into
tears.
Maybe, just maybe, you don’t always have to
be the strong one.
*This story was originally published in the 2016 edition of the Ake Review.
