Pilfering from Thieves
I dig my teeth into the boiled yam with grudge, chewing into it maliciously, as though it has all along been the cause of my predicament. The stench of poverty is everywhere. I throw the last piece of yam into my mouth and clean my oil-soiled hand on my tattered trousers. We save the water for slaking our thirst. Not that I cannot get water if I try but such after-meal attitude has become such a recurrent aspect of our world that we just do it mindlessly, nothing really personal. I walk to the window and swing it open to let in the cool breeze of the supra-Atlantic nighttime, but the stench of sewer and squalidness associated with ghettos and poverty oozes in and negotiates its way into my nostril. I choke under the strong smell and hiss loudly. Will I ever get used to that?
“Hey blackface” Mama’s voice floats out of the darkness. “You know you’ve gotta close dem windows. You no wan dem mosquitoes making a blood meal of your sorry ass.”
She is drunk again.
Mama is educated unlike most of the women that live around in the slum, and she likes to sprinkle her statements with spices of black American diction. She sees herself as a black American. I do not know where the mannerism came from but it is as old as me, if not older. Her problem is that she reads too much, a venture that does not put food on our table, she drinks too much too. Some days, she will sit in the front yard with women of like inclination to the bottle and savor the glory of being called a celebrity as she let into the air swear words and American vulgarities while she told the story of her life. They laugh often and in those moments, I wish for an earthquake...
I close the window, and the temperature heat forty degrees or so I imagined, coupled with a tang that rises from my siblings’ unwashed clothes and armpits. Nobody cares for them, nobody cares if they bathed or not, not even me. So I sit in a corner and bear the putrescent cross of their unwashed bodies. The night wears on and I doubt the possibility of sleeping. Intermittently, someone slaps one part of his or her body in an effort to kill the noisy parasitic mosquitoes. If each person does that in five minutes interval, I calculated silently, eleven people crammed into that five minutes will leave the room noisier than the vuuum, vuum, vuuum that the mosquitoes make. And that is what is happening.
Mama belches and the smell of alcohol breaks loose in the room. Maybe I have gotten used to this one. By the way, we were all conceived either in motels or drinking arenas, off the groins of anonymous fathers who hit and ran, such that no two of us came from the same father.
Mama’s was a complicated history. She finished the university pregnant with me; she said that I was conceived on a night of fitful partying. She often bragged when she told the story, telling the neighborhood women that she is a survivor. “I don’t even remember the rapacious dog that gave me John, but I’ll wager ten nickels he had a swell time in between these great thighs, Envy of Aphroditus” she would finish slapping both thighs. The women would then laugh and shout.
“Madam Tyson! What was that again, Aphro-wetin?”
“Ditus” mama would furnish the finish and they in turn would roar in laughter.
“Drink” mama would order and pour in another cup of cheap alcohol.
“Ok, lemme show you the evidence of this thick thigh. John!” she would go on and call out “You come here”
Then, I would rise at that moment from the slab on which I had sat all the while watching her shame herself and our family and walk sadly into the house. Our people say that while the foolery of a madman might amuse onlookers, it only breaks the heart of his kins.
“John is shy!” mama would shout
“Shy is John!” the women would chorus in response, their laughter coming after me like the ethereal smoke, typhos, while I miserably, would walk in like a Victorian ghost praying for his curses to be broken. Then mama would call another of her nine children who was “more obedent” according to mama because they did not mind her behavior. She would go on to show him off as the prized product of her great thighs. That is why she is called Madam Tyson by everyone in that area, even at her stall in the market.
So, mama finished school with a son whose father she did not know; her father disowned her and her mother who usually would have been her salvation under the circumstance had died when she was a little girl. She was thus rendered unmarriageable and coupled with the fact that she did not know anyone in the high places due to her poor background; she was also rendered unemployable. She had come to Lagos in search of greener pastures and what she found was a very harsh and inhuman environment where nothing was for nothing unless you were a thief (not that it is easy on thieves); and to survive, she took to prostitution. Naïve and inexperienced as she was, she had eight more pregnancies before she realized the tricks of the business. She was full of children, she would brag to the women. She would tell them that it was a great joke that God played on the rich and the powerful; “dey lack vecundity” were her exact words, tipsy to the tips of her head. She was full of stories too and would usually tell the story of her life till the small hours of the morning. The women on their part never tired of listening.
Her fate almost caught up with me. I finished my university education five years ago as a political scientist but you will not believe it, seeing the way mama treats me like a child and the way the country treats me like a louse. And why would she not? I have been eating off her food bowl, “mama thank ma” as we called it, till last six months when I was employed to drive a taxi cab for one stingy Mr. Adekunle, whose rickety Peugeot 504 (who drives such cars these days?) never ever wins the traffic wars that often were waged on the streets of Lagos…
But I have eaten mama’s boiled yam since I was a child, so why this sudden disgust tonight? Why do I suddenly recognize the poverty that lies all around me? Why does it suddenly begin to matter? I have slept in this room with my smelly siblings ever since I was a child, so why is it a big deal now? I had been so poor in my university days that as my classmates walked out of the university gate full of high hopes, I walked out full of hazy hopes. I did not have a girlfriend because of obvious reasons. Who wants to date rubbish? Or to put it in its right perspective, who wants to date poverty? For that is the more suitable description of my estate. I had been bitter when I finished school, because school often provided the safe haven where I found solace. While others looked slim at school and fat at home, I was a complete reversal of that social arrangement, because I was as robust as I could be in school and as thin as I could be at home. I never took my vacations till about four days to resumption when I would breeze in to see mama and my siblings and then breeze out again. Within the four days mama would show me off as much as possible, a clear testimony that she was indeed a survivor, and would challenge any of them to contend it. “I’m single handedly raising this chap in de university, one of the best, UNILAG. Come John gimme a hug.” I would go then and give her a hug and try to walk away quickly but she will hold me tightly on the hand and begin to sing a line from Michael Jackson’s Billy Jeane.
“Mama always told me, be careful whatcha do, be careful watcha do, cos the lies become the truth.”
The women having rehearsed the songs for many night and for such occasions as this, would chorus,
“Billy Jeane is not my lover…” The horrendous manifestation of this song off their alcoholic throats is better left to be imagined. Then I would wring my hands free of her iron grip and she would intone “John is shy.” And they would reply, “shy is John.”
Then in the small hours of the morning, mama would stagger in and I would bow down my head and cry and hope to finish and raise up my family. But since I graduated, the biggest amount of money I ever got at a go was the nineteen thousand and eight hundred naira, which was the corp. member’s minimum wage.
Inside however, I have never accepted my state as a poor man. I would not touch the girls of the ghetto with a ten-foot pole, though they cluster around me as the one eyed king in the land of the blind. I just need to give one of them the belly and the liability of marriage would see me rolling down down the social ladder. I had my eyes on flashy girls with flashy cars, who in turn had their eyes on flashy guys with flashy houses. It was a social cache 22...
As I sit and analyze for the first time the whole situation of my home, from the constant hunger to the chronic grubbiness, to the intractable alcoholism of my mother, I grasp a deeper understanding of it all, they all come to light even though there is no light in the room since one liter of kerosene has risen to one hundred and thirty naira. I understand them because I now regard the problem from another degree of consciousness. No problem is ever solved from the same degree of consciousness that created it. I used to regard them from the point of view of a poor man. Tonight I am regarding them from the point of view of a rich man. Something happened which nobody in the poverty stricken house knows about.
Yesterday, a meeting was held by one of the prestigious political parties in Nigeria. Since the elections began to draw near, there had been lots of lies, mudslinging, bribery, corruption and all other social vices associated with the hustle for power. But politics was not really the business of a poor man, especially in this country. Though I read political science, the reality is that the leader before, to me, is no different from the one promising celestial institution on earth if he happens to be elected. The result on me is political apathy and subdued resignation. I see and observe everything from the point of view of someone who is jobless and unemployed. If they cannot help me, if they cannot give me a job, then they cannot help this hapless nation. They are all thieves…
Someone breaks the air. The little room suffers. I do not know who suffers more, the room or its inhabitants. I smile in spite of myself as I remember a line from the Stations of the Cross, it sounds like, “all of you passing by, observe and see if there is any suffering greater than the one laid upon me…” the poor house would be saying exactly that. The windows “adorned” with broken louvers would be complaining to the rusted zinc, whereupon the zinc would crack in disbelief and call the attention of the broken sewage system to imagine that the window is complaining when it was the most catered for. On and on, they would rant and rave till the whole environment broke into a voiceless argument between these unattended elements. And maybe to get its point home the sewage would let out such putrid smell of decomposition as would impede any one of them from uttering one more word. Perhaps every time the environment smells, an argument has broken out a few moments before among these inorganic articles with the insurrection quelled soon enough at the instance of the smell. What we need is a government that caters for the ghetto, but we do not see it coming; not any time soon...
Well, the day before yesterday, that is two days ago, my rickety Peugeot had spoilt as usual and did not just attract a loss to me since it means I needed to take care of the repair, and that certainly will take a large chunk off my niggardly remuneration because Mr. Adekunle had sounded it to me properly upon giving me the contract of driving his car that I must work hard if I am to gain anything from the bargain. Five years at home doing nothing! What options did I have? So, I always did the repair from my own wage, and fuelled the car from there too. But you would not expect me to explain the complicated intricacies of being a poor man, and how man must survive, and how it ate away some basic human virtues like honesty. But that is a story for another day. The story for today is that I survive despite the inhuman working conditions. No more, no less. And mama is solidly behind me. And mama is a professor in that kind of thing.
So on that day the car stranded me, I pushed it with the help of some boys to the nearest house with a parking space. The next day, being yesterday, I went there to know if I could repair the vehicle with my amateur experience as a mechanic only to realize that I had parked in front of the party secretariat. Well, I needed to do something fast and get my car off their property before they did to it what the rich often did with the poor. I walked to where my car was parked and went over to the booth to retrieve some tools for the repair.
I almost fell backwards when I opened the booth. I rubbed my hands over my face to be sure I was sure of what I saw. And lo, it was real. I pinched myself and certified it was no dream. Then I touched it to satisfy my sensuality. I glanced around surreptitiously and satisfied that no one had his attention on me and then, I closed the booth. I entered the jalopy taxi and tried the ignition one more time and surprisingly “like play, like play” the car started. God is good!
I drove the car away from the place to my house; all the while I was whistling a tune that said something about how the birds never had barns yet God feeds them and how the flowers neither weave nor knit yet are clothed to Solomon’s envy. When I parked the car at home, I locked the booth for the first time since I started driving the car and walked back to the secretariat.
A furious argument was going on when I got to the secretariat. The man raising the ruckus was an oily oily politician with a bald head and bulging eyes, his mustache went up-down, up-down as he pouted, pointing threateningly at the boys before him. He had beads of sweat scattered this way and that all over his chubby forehead.
I gathered from the people gathered around the secretariat that the members of the party had been packing “ghana must go” bags full of money into the cars parked in the building. It happened that one of the cars at the extreme was empty and the man was threatening hail and brimstone if he was not cleared as regards what happened to his own share of the so called “the national cake.”
The proliterate gathered there were full of mute celebration at what happened to the man and praised the unknown hero who did the unthinkable, under the safety of the calloused fingers of their thin palms cupped over their mouths. Enervated by this general tone of acceptability regarding my silent adventure, I deftly left the surroundings and went home as the only one who knew what really happened to the national cake. My hypothesis is that my car had been parked there when they came and parked theirs too. So, it happened that the thugs asked to go and fill up the cars started with mine and had gone up to get more of the money bags when I came and drove off in my car. Now, one car was short of moneybags and they could not reconcile it. I had not even counted the money. There were four “Ghana must go” bags inside the car full of cool, crispy Nigerian currency…
I listen to mama snore and I smile. I am not angry anymore at the squalor. In fact, I now revel in the odor oozing from my siblings and surroundings; it is the last time I shall relish such artifacts of poverty. I observe it all from another level of consciousness.
“Mama, wake up” I say, after contemplating all that have happened from every possible angle, shaking her. She has been sleeping for about four hours.
“Jo-Hn” she replies sleepily and sits up. I hold my torch to her face to get her fully awake.
“You don’t go ahead flashing dem light into my eye, you scum!”
I smile as I realize for the first time how beautiful mama is. She also has too much experience, I must admit. Besides, she has stooped to conquer for us all, sending us to school despite her lean income. For the first time, the glaring irreplaceability of my mama becomes apparent.
“You didn wake me up to be staring ah me like one of dem whore customers huh?”
“Mama, you don dare talk to me like dah.” I returned.
“You sure wager I can talk to you any way I vucking choose”
“O.K mama, you win.”
“O.K? What did you wake me up for?”
“I have a story for you, mama; a beautiful story.”
“In this freaking middle o’ the night! Wonders shall not neber end! Ma baby with a story? Right baby shoot!” she always speaks in a way that makes you visualize exclamation marks at the end of every one of her numerous sentences. She is such a special woman.
“Right mama. But first, come with me.” I say cool-headedly, suppressing the excitement that is welling up within me. “I’ve got something to show to you.”
