Tension should not be the umbrella word for that jolt that reverberates through your bones and skin when you brush a live wire on a day IKEDC forgets to flick the switch off in your zone because it does more than reverberate; it constricts, twists, flings, kills if there’s no one around with a plank to whack you free of the copper.
Countless other tensions—unseen but ever-present—coil around our necks like floats as we struggle to float. The worry lines stretching on Mum’s brows, each furrow a map to a different concern; scraping together school fees, putting food on the table, beating Iju Road’s daily traffic, balancing this tilted scale.
For Brother Mark, it’s the pressure he feels to succeed in a fiercely competitive job market; forcing him to change the 0 in his 1990 YOB to 8 and swear affidavits outside the High Court in Ikeja. Sister Franca doesn’t talk about hers, but I know it. She feels it in the questioning eyes that gaze at every educated but unmarried Nigerian young lady.
These tensions, unlike the electric shock—if you survive—that fades with time, become a chronic state of being, like the refrigerator hum that persists even when the power goes out. It’s something I know kall too well, but, perhaps, not well enough. It’s like feeling both overdressed and underdressed at the same time.
Sometimes, it surfaces as a nagging voice that questions if this path—this career—that I have envisioned, along with the thousand other lawyers that are called to the Nigerian bar each year, is what I truly want. The problem is, this tension—this nagging voice—stays tucked away in a quiet corner of my mind until moments that truly matter.
Moments like when I’m about to stand before a sea of black-and-white-wearing gents and have my five minutes of fame. Or shame. But my mind fixates on the latter. Suddenly, I start to think of who is smiling at me, who isn’t, and why. Then, the thoughts drift to whether they are staring at my figure and judging whether it fills out my tight black skirt, wondering why my figure is the number 5 rather than the number 8. I’m cursing myself for choosing to wear the skirt today of all days, instead of the loose, pleated one that earns me a warm “Sister Amaka” from Sanisa whenever I walk into the faculty.
I manage to regain a semblance of control and wrestle my attention back to the present. The next thought that pops up is which one of the stern-faced men in black suits—the panel—will throw a question at me—a question that will throw me off the balance I’m managing to cling to, out the window, with the burglary proof flying out with me.
The absurdity of wondering why I’m the second person called when my surname starts with O makes a bitter laugh rise in my throat. My shaky legs carry me to the front of the hall, a silent plea escaping my lips for my worn-out soles to hold strong, to not give, to not have the last laugh. Not right now. At least.
Every thought except the one I should be focusing on—my internship defence, which I spent all night rehearsing in front of the mirror, the wall, and even the mirror with my bedspread draped over it—floods my mind. But here I am, my mouth already blurting out where I interned and the fact that the experience was “more observational than participatory.” I see some heads nodding in agreement, but their faces remain a blur. Still, this tiny acknowledgement fuels a surge of confidence, and my feet feel a little more grounded on the linoleum.
But a new anxiety creeps in: the fear of my tongue twisting and betraying me with a grammatical blunder. This time, not before a handful of classmates, but the entire faculty, junior colleagues included. Relief washes over me as the words start flowing effortlessly, like a waterfall. I even manage to sprinkle in a few jokes, and, to my surprise, they laugh.
As I conclude, I’m met with thunderous applause. I bow, attempting a discreet exit. But the Dean calls me back and asks a few more questions like, “Who was your assistant in the crowd that prompted you at some point when you forgot a word to use?”, and everyone is laughing because no one comes forward when he says he has a prize for the person. I start to wonder why he has a prize for the person, but not me. Then he asks everyone to give me another round of applause and I return to my seat, amid cheers.
The weight is finally off my chest, the nagging voice silenced. But in its place is something more sinister: a rewind-and-replay voice that compartmentalises every bit of my performance, though this one runs in the background like those data-draining apps on my phone.
I sit back and watch the others go out one by one, oozing every bit of tension I and the predecessor must have manifested, and I’m smiling, grateful for how quickly the cup passed from me to them. Then, I realise it’s the word I’ve been searching for: the cup. The phrase, rather. It’s a bigger umbrella term than tension. Tension is the wine bottle umbrella I carry around in my tote bag, but ‘the cup’ is the bigger umbrella; the type those POS operators you meet at every five-minute walking distance sit under, come rain or shine.
Blessing Obiahu is a literary enthusiast and law student at Alex Ekwueme Federal University in Ebonyi State, Nigeria. Her work has been featured in the 2021 Nigerian Students’ Poetry Prize anthology, Black but Famous (now Kaassa), Loana Press, Challenging the Writers, and forthcoming in Anarchist Fictions Journal. She is also the founder of D’LitReview, a literary website, and works as an SEO content writer.
I am dreaming, and in my dream, we are together again, Temisola- the girl I can no longer remember, you. There is no face. All that remains is a voice, scratchy, like a broken gramophone record, and a memory: a song, hazy, like it has been a long time since it has been played, regret. I still protect this. Like the other fragments of myself, hidden in this flotsam called my mind, it presents another piece to this puzzle- the riotous search for myself in the midst of fading memories. Someday perhaps they might become a whole, like this phase of the moon under which we played, and I might remember who I was, once. I might remember you.
Like every dream, I must wake up, in more ways than one, only now to the electric twinge in my spine- and to fear. The twinge was new, fear having since settled as an integral part of my consciousness, the quiet friend you had come to forget was there. It was the fear that saved you, the fear that made you you in this world that forbade hoping. It was the fear that held you back, that made sure you never had to feel this electric twinge in your spine. Because when you did, they would know. And when they knew, they would come.
I do not remember how this world began. We were not taught to know, never meant to know. We only knew that it was, in the same way one knew of the imprint of his own name- your only possession in a world that gave you none. It was not our way to ask, to dream of asking, dreams being what they were- an aberration, a glitch in the Anti-Christ Equation they had created to unify human thought as an answer to world peace. They had succeeded, banishing the impulses that had driven men to violence but at a cost. We forgot. Nothing remained of our memories of Before, of ourselves before we changed. I had forgotten how to dream; forgotten what it meant to think for myself, to exist- a wild card, outside of the horde. Till now- and for that, I had become a criminal in this world, as I was a witch in the Other World so long ago. And for that, I was always running.
Silence.
There is nothing to hear in this stillness, nothing save the blood in your ears and your own thoughts, colliding. There is nowhere else to go. How did one love in a world like ours, where we could not even recall tenderness, where your only friend was fear? How did you love the fragments of a memory, a person you had come to fear was fiction? I did not know but I held on still. I had become a slave to these things, an addict to memory. In a world that had moved on, I could not look away or forget.
Knocking. Wind. The sound of shouts outside.
I do not answer. I am thinking, dreaming, memorizing this self again before their supreme act of violation. They would break into my mind again. I would forget. Nothing would remain- not these memories of mine, not the fragments of my journey across lifetimes. Nothing but you Temisola- this husk of self, this ghost latching on to my psyche like the messy trail of a spirit child. Nothing would remain save this memory: me, looking at you, from that world from which we came, and a voice, yours. I would carry it to my grave.
There will always be those who bind us to this world.
Static
DreamRec. April the 24th. 2048.
Enter Log.
#
A long time ago, before our world began.
There will always be those who bind us to this world. We call them seers.
Temisola
You remember. You always remember, don’t you? The inevitable expanse of other lives- memory, the disconcerting awareness of history repeating itself before your eyes. This- the moment when you died, when your people realized you were never truly theirs but yet could not let you go. I do not blame them. How could they? You were a spirit child, yes, and the other world was sealed within your mind like a brand upon cowhide. You were not like the others, yes, who were made to forget, who the seers had driven into forgetting their home world. But you were the only child. You were the only one who stayed beyond your mother’s painful birth, crying and kicking for being born again. You were the only one who couldn’t leave, who Chukwu– Great One, Chief of all Creation, would not let you return home- to me.
No, you were not like them. They had learned to stay. You were not like me. I never left.
Long ago, a woman wanted children so she went to the sacred Boka tree. Night fell, when the spirits of little children came to play under light from the full moon and she called softly, to the little wind dancing in the trees that was the sound of children playing:
Mother Tree
Mother Tree
Give me a child
And then she waited.
We were there. We were there and we laughed- at her petition, at that queer mix of strength and pain we found so amusing in humans. Was this our crime? Did Chukwu look down from Elu-Igwe, His mysterious home in the skies, to find two spirits mocking man, the crown of His creation? Was this our penance- you, damned to go through their cycle of rebirths, unable to return, me, to wander the spirit world alone, unable to reach you outside your dreams?
I do not know. These things were past finding, even for a spirit. I only know that you laughed, and a moment later you were silent, listening to her song.
How would it feel to live a human life? This was the question you would ask later, softly, as your eyes looked towards the borders of the human world. Of course I didn’t know- I had never been a man. But I had heard the stories, stories of what it meant to be mortal- of suffering, of sickness, of death. I told them to you, but when your eyes got brighter instead of dull, and your skin did not go pale with fear, I should have known it was only a matter of time before you left me to seek the mortal world.
You left that very night, to that woman and her song, and even now I remember how the night took upon a shade: darker, like there was no moon in the sky, and a heaviness I could not name. Grief. Grief was a human thing, but I couldn’t stop myself, the same way I could not stop myself from running to the border between our worlds even when I knew you were already gone, searching perhaps, for a residue of you.
Grief. Grief was a human thing, but we carried it across lifetimes.
Asemoa
I am a child of both worlds. All children are, only that time passes and we forget, human life being what it is- a leaf, tossed about by the currents of the Earth so that when we remember, we are already old and our eyes are already set on going home.
When I was born, I cried for many days. All children do. We cried for the lost things, the memory, and the obligations that followed mortality. We cried for our fellows, who cried with us, waiting, on the other side of time, for the few who could return. I cried for my twin, Temisola, who I had left to pursue the wonders of the human world.
Only a few knew this, why all children greeted this world with tears, and it was this few that would damn us in the years to come.
Seers. Emissaries of mankind to the Great One Chukwu, Father of All Spirits. They were the ones who saw, who felt the ripple of the veils that kept apart their world and ours. They were the ones who knew, who left in their wake the leash that bound all spirits to the Earth: old age, and the trappings of mortality. Frightened mothers would run to them when a child refused to stay, when a child came again, known, by the marks of another life. One look by a seer and a spirit would spill our secrets, confessing where we hid our deepest treasures, our iyi-uwa, our link to the world beyond. We would forget. Nothing would remain of who we were or the world we left behind.
Not me. I could not forget, not Temisola- whose name resonated within me the sound of ancient memories, not the spirit world, to which I was inextricably bound. Sometimes they crossed this world and theirs, and I would see my brothers- they were waiting for me, on the other side of time. They did not smile any more- I was a spirit touched with the human world now, I was an Ancestor. Someday I will die and my body will return to the Earth from which it came, the last, in a long series of rebirths. I would remain, spirit but changed, made sacred by the very world which held me bound, by the very weight of her memories. I will no longer be the same.
I wonder now. Would she still remember me?
I look at my mother and my mother knows. She looks at me with the tears she does not shed anymore. What did the seer tell her?
“You are not meant for this world”, she says with a sorrowful shake of her head. I do not reply to her. There was nothing I could say. What did she know of the lines that bound all spirits, the ancient longings planted in our blood eons ago by Chukwu Himself? What did she know of her, my twin, bound to me since the dawn of our creation, drawn to me in spirit as I was drawn to her in flesh? Only death could separate us, and we were spirit. We could not die. Only death could bring me home.
You mortals call it love. If only you knew. Love itself is spirit.
Still, there were little mercies. I came to love this world, in my way. Life was an adventure under the fear of dying- you found life or death or nothing at every end of the bend. I remember the first time I cut myself, the look I gave the growing red puddle at my feet, puzzled. My mother screamed, and a hotness flared up my leg for which I had no name then. Pain. I Iay indoors, flitting between light and dark for weeks, my spirit brethren waiting, but I had never felt so alive.
Another time, I came upon a snake wound tightly round itself. It was a hot day, and the snake was warming itself by the bushes near our home. It must have been very weak because it didn’t sense my presence, and when I gently touched its brilliant, ringed black coils, there was no sound, not a ripple to be heard. Something about its posture spoke to me–of the circle of rebirth, of sunset and sunrise, of the world moving round and round till it came to itself, and I might have continued there brooding to my death had my father not shoved me away just before the snake poised to strike. He was livid.
“Are you trying to kill yourself?!” he had shouted. His face was a mask of anger and relief, and fear.
I could not answer. How did you tell your father you had actually forgotten that you could die?
Mortality. Mortality hung over us like a knife on an edge, a grim cloud. A man was born to the knowledge of his death, and his entire life balanced on that spider web. There were no certainties. An old man longed for the afterlife. A child just died. You walked through paths that were unfamiliar, even though you knew they were there: good and evil and death. You lived for the moment, wherever it was. And so they loved, and died. They threw their parties, and they died. They lived wickedly, and died. And it was these moments they had, this belief in meaning, that made them who they were. Man. They knew what things were valued because they knew what things were lost.
We are spirit, and we are wise, but this was something we had never learned. There are some things you could not learn without dying.
I do not know when I finally decided to stay. I do not even know why. Maybe it was my mother and her pleas, this woman I had tormented for many years, who had met seer upon seer in vain. Maybe it was me, I had not had enough of the human world.
It didn’t matter. I was letting go of the world I left behind and I felt that world slacken, the bond growing thinner with the times. I would not see my spirit brothers again for many years and by the time I did, I was already an old man, with a wife long gone, and my weary eyes waiting for the afterlife- or if Chukwu wished, another rebirth. It did not matter, not any more.
#
Perhaps, we never truly forget
29th October, 2010.
The Present.
Somewhere, in between dreaming and waking, I see her again- Temisola. We are under the Boka tree and we are laughing, our voices wild and free, by the light of a full moon. We are not alone. There is a woman too, and this woman is singing. Her voice is beautiful and haunting, calling to me in its terrible depth. My mother, from a long time ago.
A moment later and there is silence. I feel Temisola staring at me.
“I did not forget you, Temisola”, I try to say but the words catch in my throat and I do not say them. I do not even try to meet her eyes.
I woke up. There is no one here, just the steady sound of rain and the noisy ceiling fan. My wife is out, probably on an early morning shift, but the air still holds faint traces of her cologne, a smell I have come to associate with home. This should be comforting, but I do not even acknowledge it.
I have not dreamt of you for many years, Temisola. Why now? I ask this of the empty room.
There is no answer, but the wind blows suddenly from an open window, filling the room with my wife’s cologne. Almost as if, to blow the thought away.
I do not dream of her again, but I see her everywhere now- her eyes, in a colleague at work, her voice, in a storekeeper. Once my wife was talking and I just sat there, listening. I could have sworn that we have had this talk before, once, in a previous life.
“You remind me of someone”, I said to her.
“Who?”
I smiled but did not say.
The world had changed much since the world I left behind- walking through this world had become a journey through history. I was here, thirty years ago, when it was just a bush path, and it was there I suffered a particularly violent death. It had become a burden, these memories, this weight of other lives. I was living in the present, yet haunted by the past.
Once, a lifetime ago, I could not bear it any more so I told my mother.
“I cannot forget, Mummy,” I said.
“Forget what?” she asked.
“My former life.”
She had laughed it off. In that life, people had to begin to forget. In this life, they had all but forgotten.
There is no one I can tell now. I am the last of my kind.
I have learnt to hide them, these memories, and all the knowledge that came with it. Where once they saw the ogbanje, an abiku, now they saw a man burdened with the weight of years. An old soul, they call me. If only they knew. If only they remembered.
Still, there were always those who knew, at some level. They were drawn to you, and did not know why. Like my wife, Oma. I had met her at a friend’s party and had told her to marry me. She had laughed, and we spent the rest of the party talking to each other. She had left without leaving a contact, but I was unworried. She was my wife in a previous life. We met two weeks later in a library and a few months later, we were married. We have been married for eight years, and there is no one alive who could read me as well as she does. No one but this woman from my past, Temisola, who, for some reason, had chosen to haunt my present like a ghost–the only relic of my past that had any substance. But for what purpose? Vengeance? Love? Was this Your sign, Chukwu, asking me to return to the spirit world?
What would I tell you, Temisola?
I was a man now used to knowledge. Still, I could not answer this. I almost laughed. This was how Chukwu laughed at us.
Deep in my thoughts, I do not hear a car speed by in the worst of the rain. I do not register the sound, mud splattering, until the gritty feeling on my face and clothes. I pause. I am livid.
A woman alights from the car and in my shock, I do not hear her spirited apologies. She is very dark, and her looks are not one you would easily forget. I couldn’t. Hers was the constant of every memory, the one person I had searched for in others for a lifetime.
“Temisola?”
She pauses her explanations and looks me in the eye for the first time. Her face is blank, with one eyebrow raised in a question.
She does not remember me.
Mayor Prosper Ihechi writes stories for the voices in his head, and poetry for his soul. Through words, he reenacts the miracle of flight.
Grief is like the ocean. It comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim. —Vicki Harrison.
The humid Saturday morning’s chilling breeze slapped me beneath the cashew tree where I stood waiting for a motorcycle, and my skin prickled with goosebumps. My eyes drank in the sight of the leaves rustling on the tree and the red fruits draping over its branches.
Like a sentinel, the tree lined the main road leading into the driveway of a nearby hospital. I massaged my arms, dispelling the tingling sensation that caressed my skin like a lover’s steamy kiss. But I knew what it meant. This sensation that had become all too familiar—this feeling that often preceded an experience, so poignant, I know will linger with me for a while.
Behind me, the slapping of slippers against the tarmac driveway grew louder. I whirled around to see two women halt at a palm tree close to the hospital gate. One of them suddenly began to scream. The goosebumps returned, this time, pervasive, accompanied with a sting in my eyes. I blinked, and kneaded my arms again.
Sighting an approaching motorcyclist, I flagged him down; and as soon as we started to bargain, an ambulance zapped past us. My skin erupted in more goosebumps. The woman’s bawl intensified. In sync, the motorcyclist and I were lost in the gaze of the screaming woman.
There was something eccentric about the way the woman wept and screamed. Clad in a black sleeveless button-down shirt on black trousers, she stood beside the other woman, who I assumed was her sister, who was similarly garbed in black. The woman’s sister took a few step forward, phone pressed to her right ear, and sat on a hedge next to the palm tree. She was mumbling with a breaking voice, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying.
Unlike her sister who wasn’t screaming but had eyes flooding with tears, the weeping, screaming woman’s face showed no evident sign of one who had been crying—or was crying. For one who was as fair as she was, it was puzzling to see that her face betrayed no hint of her distress—her face was ‘unreddened’, her nose ‘unrunny’, her eyes ‘unsunken’, with no tears cascading down.
Yet, she bewailed repeatedly in her native dialect—“My lovely mother is dead o! Death, why did you take my mother?”—and her voice was laden with a dolefulness that melted my heart as I hopped on the motorcycle.
A man was ambling by, whose appearance I didn’t quite capture. He gawked at this woman, a look that passed for a glower. Or so I perceived. The disdain in that look was palpable, one that showed how contemptuous he was of the manner the woman screamed and wept.
When he sighed, and our eyes met, I saw the detestation on his face. I imagined this man repeating in his heart the question the motorcyclist hurled at me as we veered into the main road, the same question someone had asked my friend, Evans, at his father’s funeral, where we sat under a canopy.
“How can anyone claim to be mourning a loved one with no tears in their eyes? How can people know that they are truly pained by the loss when their body language shows no intimation of sadness?”
At Evans’ father’s funeral, after the corpse had been laid to rest and candles lit upon the grave, as it was their custom, we sat together, laughing, as we recalled beautiful moments we had shared with his late father—those days he would regale us with stories of the Nigeria-Biafra war—and how we would miss his jokes.
While at it, our sorrow momentarily fading, replaced by warm glows, a young lady, one of his cousins, walked up to us. She glared at us for a while and then said, “Evans, you don’t look like someone who is grieving. How can someone claim to be mourning a loved one with no tears or sadness in their eyes?”
“But I’m mourning,” Evans said.
“Like this?” His cousin cocked a brow. “Since your father died, your body language has been saying otherwise. Are you truly pained by this loss?” She hissed and beat a hasty retreat as soon as she lobbed the question at him.
First, I shook my head at how benighted—of grief—she was, or anyone could be. “Why did she say that?” I asked Evans. “What does she mean by ‘your body language has been showing otherwise’?”
Evans shrugged. “This is the second time she is saying this.”
“Really?” I sighed. “What gave her the impression that you are not mourning like everyone else in the family? You must have done something for her to think that way.”
“I guess it is because I have been hiding my pain.”
“What do you mean by hiding your pain?”
“At school, when I received the call that Papa had died, I was very calm. I maintained that calmness, that composure, when I visited the village and was taken to the morgue to see his corpse. I have been calm till this day. But my cousin thinks that I haven’t been grieving because I didn’t react the way she expected, you know, crying like other members of the family. She thought I was just being a strong man or being impish, but, to be honest, I have been holding back from exploding.”
“She should have known that this is how you grieve,” I said.
“I don’t think she has an idea,” he added, eyes glued to the DJ at the other end, who cued up a song. The air came alive.
Sadly, in my hometown, rigid expectations are imposed on people on how they should express their sorrow, and how a person’s grief should be measured. We are told that a man overcome with sadness is the one who tearfully expresses his pain for others to understand the depth of his grief.
We are told that grief is something that is visibly written on the face and must be evident in one’s voice. We are told that the ones who hide their emotions behind a mask of stoicism, who put on brave faces, despite being deeply affected, are simply pretending or just being impish or have a skeleton concealed under their cloaks.
We are also told how to grieve here; it is read out to us like a code of conduct in funerals and family meetings after the death of a loved one: The men are to cry to show they are pained, but not too much—because masculinity demands them to be stoic and strong, and not be too loose.
If a man shows too much emotion, he is labeled as “one who weeps like a woman”. Then, to the women, it is expected they show too much emotion. Their cries must burst forth like stormy sea. Their screams must be loud enough to deafen ears. If these are not done, their grieving is incomplete.
“How do you grieve?” he asked, our eyes locking.
The question clinched a chuckle out of me. “You don’t want to know.”
“I’m interested,” he smiled. “Tell me.”
The question made me recall things that I had bottled up inside me. The first time I knew what grief is, the first time it shook me to the core, and left me profoundly shattered for days, I was seven. We had just lost our Landlady. The news of her death, when she was brought back in a coffin two weeks after she left home sick, wrung my innards like strings knotted together.
I didn’t wait to see her corpse in order to confirm that she was dead, I could tell from the weeping faces of her daughters and grandchildren, the groaning of her sons, the silence of her husband, and the solemn mumbles of other tenants and neighbours.
As soon as the funeral hearse hauling her corpse barreled into the compound and everyone rushed to welcome it with broken hearts, I ran inside with my broken heart, huddled beside our bed, and bawled my eyes out. I cried because such a good woman had finally left us. I cried because she was a mother after my mother. She was ‘love’. She was ‘kindness’ cloaked in human flesh. I let the pain stewing inside me to win. I was helpless. I let it sear my eyes, until my tears poured like a libation. I let it drain my strength until I slept off.
Later in my dream, in my subconsciousness, while the funeral dirges played in the compound, I was with her in a garden of beautiful dandelions, gaping at her in a glowing robe.
“I’m not strong in the face of grief,” I replied after a long silence. The DJ spun a new track.
“I’m a weakling.”
Being a weakling is not the same as cowardice. To be a weakling doesn’t mean you fear what you appear weak against; rather, you acknowledge your limitations, you recognize that resistance sometimes is futile, you understand that your efforts would be in vain, and that even trying wouldn’t change the outcome.
Evans let out a croaky laugh.
“But I know that no one is strong in the face of grief, no matter how we choose to hide or express it,” I added.
Grief comes with a raw and scraping vulnerability—a ‘vulnerability’ so strong it claws your heart apart, so strong that it feeds on your strength until you are left bare. It’s in the failure that comes after an exam, the pain of losing a lover to a total stranger, a betrayal from a friend. It is in the act of loving the wrong partner, in unrequited love. It is in the face of rejections, even when you know you are good at something, yet you are still turned down. It is the pain we don’t speak about, the pain that burgeons underneath our skin after a loved one’s death—the worst kind of pain.
“We are never strong in the face of grief,” Evans concurred. “No matter how we exude strength.” I nodded.
The next time I lost a loved one after my father and before my grandmother, who I loved so much—which prompted me to beg God for pardon, for healing from these losses—was in 2014.
Charles was his name. A dear Christian brother from my local church. We were both transitioning out of teenage phase, but he was older than me. When I got to know him, he was the sweetest soul one could have as a friend. I loved him deeply, just as he loved me. He taught me the raw beauty of selflessness, of putting others before oneself. Unfortunately, at the peak of our blossoming friendship, he was diagnosed with a kidney disease.
The morning I learned of his death, I didn’t leave the house for two days. I prayed fervently for his resurrection, the way we were taught to pray in church when we desired something. I desired to have my friend back. I went without eating. But as I prayed, I felt the futility of it all. It was his time to rest. At the end of the second day, I burst into tears. I bit my skin, my lips, until I tasted blood.
“But this how I grieve,” I started. Evans braced up to listen. While the late gospel artiste, Mrs. Nwachukwu Osinachi’s song, ‘Ikem’, blared from the speakers stationed close to the DJ’s canopy. “My grieving knows no border.”
When grief pummels me—especially the sudden, unexpected, searing kind—this is how I utterly unravel: First, I go numb. I feel disconnected from the world. But I try not to crack a tear in public, in the presence of people, be they loved ones or strangers. My eyes may glaze over with tears or even flood with them, but I will not let them all out until I am locked up in my room, where I can drown the floor with them, where I can embrace my sorrow, where the walls can witness my irrepressible insanity.
I withdraw from everything, from everyone; I isolate myself from the world, from its noisiness. I get lost in thoughts, shrugging incessantly, staring into space for too long. Moving with a languid pace as if I’m a leaf blown by the wind, I talk to myself too often, to make sense of my emotions, of reality. I saunter out of my room only at night, when the world sleeps, my pregnant eyes goggling at the night sky, beseeching God to see my crushed and bereaved heart, to teach me the precise language to still the gale rippling inside me, to illuminate the darkness inundating my soul. I trawl for beautiful memories I know will never come forth.
And even when I will myself to sleep in order to escape the depressing reality, I end up in a forest brimmed with ‘frigid’ memories, the melancholic memories I have always wanted to escape from. They come for me like armies besieging a city, like a termite’s relentless gnawing, and I’m jerked awake with wracking sobs.
When I’m exhausted, I let my body succumb to its weariness—for it is what grief is: an unending weariness, a stubborn scar, a memento of lost love, a gaping hole that can never be filled, a suffocating cloak, a tangled forest where the barbed branches of sorrow and the shadow of loss enshroud the route to healing. Time and memories do not heal this wound; they can only mask the pain and fester it.
“I wish I were like you,” Evans said.
“You don’t have to wish to be like me,” I said. “We are wired differently.”
I, too, did wish I was like him, that I’m like him—one who is like a rock in turbulent times, unflappable in the face of adversity, one who wears the mask of stoicism and exudes startling strength in the sea of sorrow; but then, the truth be told, those who don’t express their grief are often the ones whose sorrow has drained their joy. They may appear strong, but they are actually the most vulnerable. I’m not saying people grieve better than others; we all grieve differently because we are wired differently.
If expressing your grief through screaming will bring you solace, go ahead; scream it all out. If you prefer to go stoic, go on, process your emotions in silence. Everyone must be allowed to express their grief, their sorrow, the best way they can authentically do so—without restraint, reserve, ridicule, remorse.
Author’s Bio
Nwajesu Ekpenisi is an Ika writer from Delta State in Nigeria. He placed third in the 2023 Alika Ogorchukwu International Poetry Competition and has forthcoming publications with Brigids Gate Press and other publishers. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter): @E_Nwajesu.
We enjoy our birthdays until they make us feel old, remind us of our mortality or portend something unpleasant. Jack Adams had his one month earlier. He had mixed feelings the day he turned 47. When he got home from work he had put on his ‘happy face’–what else can you do when your wife has made you a special dinner, bought you a beautiful, down-filled ski jacket that must have consumed half a week of her after-tax salary and the kids have strung up the house with banners saying “Happy Birthday Daddy” and all–squealing with delight at the very sight of you–come running to the door?
Jack wasn’t sure what his problem was. It wasn’t being tied down to a home and family, guilt over some extramarital affair or something bad he’d discovered about his own health or that of his loved ones. It wasn’t the mortgage, the car payments or having to buy new clothes every few months for his ever-growing brood. He thought it might have something to do with getting older and wondered if he could be getting ready to have a mid-life crisis.
After all, he’d always wanted to live in a McMansion and drive a sports car like the 1994 Toyota Supra Twin-Turbo he once saw in a showroom. Yet, there he was: rotting away in an ordinary, three-bedroom split-level and puttering around in a Toyota Camry.
After rethinking his finances, he believed that with one more salary increase he would be able to afford the bigger house or the new car, but not both. Not simultaneously. Pending mid-life crisis aside, what made his stomach grind at work and forced him to hide his discontentment at home was his job; some days he just didn’t enjoy it anymore and other days he simply hated it more. Lately, the latter have outnumbered the former.
Jack spent the day after his birthday putting out fires– taking calls from irate customers, walking them through solutions where possible, writing a report for each “trouble call” and digging into code to debug software problems. At the end of the day, he looked around at the clutter on his desk, then took out his cell phone and made a call.
A friend answered. “Hello?”
“Hey, buddy. It’s Jack. Want to hit the usual place after work?”
“Sounds like a plan. Come by in fifteen minutes?”
Jack cleaned up his desk, logged off his computer and as he walked away from his desk, he made another call. This time his wife answered.
“Hello?”
“It’s me. I’ve got to do some more stuff at the office; I’ll be late.”
“Ok, but not too late. Okay? Jennie wants you–not me–to help her with her homework and I want her to do it early. Later on, she’ll be too tired to do it.”
“Okay, honey. Bye.”
He walked down a long corridor and into an office that was about four times the size of his. In it worked the mathematically-oriented “Brainiac” programmers of his company. Jack walked to his friend’s desk and stood behind him looking at the complex C Language code on the screen.
“I can feel someone creeping up on me,” said Al.
“Good thing it wasn’t a strangler, or you’d be dead by now.”
“Hey, I never said I was quick, just perceptive.”
“You still flatter yourself.”
Jack watched as Al consulted with a technical book full of equations. He recognized the integral signs from his calculus classes, but the sheer volume of mathematical symbols on the page was intimidating. “I don’t know how you do that stuff,” he said.
“All in a day’s work,” answered his friend. “I see it as a beautiful confluence of mathematical symbols, producing a shimmering pool of abstract thought.” There was a pause. “Did I say that? Gimme ten more minutes, okay?”
Jack stood silently as his friend studied the bewildering page for a minute then went back to work on his computer code. In less than ten minutes he was logging off his computer and locking his desk.
“Ready Freddie?”
“Girls say that to their boyfriends,” said Jack.
Al looked embarrassed. “Whoops! Glad I didn’t make that slip at a bar – they’d think I was…”
“Yeah, they might think that. Let’s went.”
“Let’s went? That’s from an old TV show.”
“Yeah, the Long Ranger.”
Al looked embarrassed for Jack. “That’s Lone Ranger, not Long Ranger and ‘Let’s went’ is from The Cisco Kid.”
“You and your old TV shows.”
“Me? It’s you and your old TV shows.”
“Whatever.”
Fifteen minutes later both men took their places at a local bar and ordered beer.
“How do you drink that Schlitz stuff,” asked Al. “That’s for old men.”
Jack said “That’s how I feel: old.”
A black SUV pulled up on the side of the bar. A woman got out and walked to the front door and opened it a crack, doing her best not to be seen. As soon as she got the phone call from her husband saying he’d be late she made a bee line to where he worked, just a few miles away.
Tailing him was easy, for she knew all his favorite haunts and had even joined him in several of them over the years. Peering in with one eye she spotted her husband sharing a beer with his friend. After watching for a few minutes, she drove back home, where a neighbor was watching the kids. This wasn’t the first such spying mission. Her husband has been “working late” one or two nights a week for several months.
At first, she suspected it was “another woman”, but several trips to this and other pubs proved he was only drinking with his pals. She didn’t approve of her husband idling away his time in bars and didn’t think much of his lying about it either, but, considering what he might have been up to, the offense seemed minor and forgivable. She decided then and there, this was to be her last such expedition and knew she’d have to talk things over with Jack face-to-face. When she got home, she helped two of the kids with their homework then made a late supper for the whole family, hoping Jack would be home in time to eat it.
Back at the bar with a few beers in him, Jack was starting to feel like his old self until the subject of his job came up.
“Hey – a job’s a job,” said Al, followed by “If you don’t like it, go out and find another one!”
“Typical programmer,” thought Jack, who was used to dealing with young nerds who seemed to have the world by the balls. To his boss he’d described them as “no responsibilities, big salaries and incompetent at expressing feelings or dealing with anything but computer code and technical manuals.” He stopped and thought before responding to Al’s last remark, not wanting to blurt out an angry retort, but rather a reasoned answer, even though he was starting to fume.
Al felt no such compunction to wait and think before speaking: “Hey, buddy – earth to Jack! You still there? You drift off into space or something?”
“Excuse me, Al. I didn’t realize I was sitting next to a scholar of career choices and genius of compassion and empathy.”
Al sat up, obviously affronted.
“It’s not just this job, it’s this whole career. Used to think I had everything I wanted, good job, money, a loving wife, and good kids. What more could I expect? Swimming pools, Ferraris, a palatial estate? Then, I thought I must be suffering from some sort of condition from racking my brains all day and sitting there typing away at a terminal. I wondered how many others out there were just like me: fat, dumb, happy and discontented. Made me think about the computer biz and how it got this way.
Once upon a time only engineers and math types studied computers. I’ve watched programming go from “assembly” language stuff you write yourself to pre-written off-the-shelf packages – just plug-and-play. At the I.R.S. way back when we typed our assembly-language code onto IBM punch cards, handed ‘em in and had to wait for the computer operator to run ‘em through the card reader, run the program through the computer and we were lucky to get our listing the next day. Computer operator! We couldn’t do anything without him. I bet you never even heard that term.”
“So, you remember the good old days, eh?” asked Al, laughing “And today any kid can use a PC. Maybe you’ve lived too long, buddy.”
“Sounds like you’re getting ready to send me off to meet my maker, there, buddy-buddy. Maybe I’ve just been in this business too long.”
Yeah, maybe that’s it, chum – friend – pal-o’mine. Didn’t mean to come down on you about your career. Why don’t we call it a night?”
The two men shook hands, paid their bar bill and left.
Back at work the next day, Jack felt he needed to unload his feelings about his career to the least likely person – his boss Jim Bakersfield, someone he knew well and trusted. Jim’s response came as a surprise.
“About ten years ago I felt the same way you do. I’d been programming since the ’70s’, loved it and thought I was hot stuff, but I finally got sick of the whole thing: always digging through code, taking classes, carrying manuals home at night, carrying a beeper twenty-four seven. I used to feel like Microsoft employees – you know them, their motto is ‘If I’m awake, I’m working.’ Know what saved me?”
Jack just looked at him.
“Being promoted! Guess I’d done well or maybe I was the only guy around old enough to look the part of the manager. Suddenly I didn’t have to write code, debug the same, take trouble calls in the middle of the night from irate customers telling me our software doesn’t work. Not that management’s easy, mind you, just different. Lots of meetings, trips, talks with customers, sales reps and management, but I deal more with people, which I like. Hope that helps.”
Jack thought for a minute before answering. “I think I need to make a more fundamental change.”
Jim looked at him sympathetically, gave him a mock punch on the shoulder then turned toward his desk, looked up a number in the company phone directory and handed it to Jack. “Here’s a number you should call,” he said.
“Who is it?”
“A psychologist.”
“Now, wait a minute, I’m not going to go postal on you.”
Jim laughed. “Tut tut. Nobody thinks you’re going off the deep end, but something’s really bothering you and I’m not qualified to help, so I’ll put you in touch with somebody who is. This guy’s paid by the company to listen to people’s problems and concerns and help them deal with them. Try him. I’ll give you an hour or two off every week off to see him. You won’t have to make up the time.”
“Are you sure?”
“You’ve been a good employee; you deserve it. Hey! I’ve seen him myself.”
“You?”
“Yeah, some personal stuff a while back. He had some good ideas–really helped me.”
Jack thought about it for a week then made the phone call. The psychologist told him he had a cancellation and could see him at 3:30 that afternoon. A little after 3:00 PM, Jack cleaned up his desk, logged off and got up to leave. He stopped by the desk of Timmy Bushell, who was only 23 years old and had been working there for six months.
“Hey, Timmy! Could you do me a favor? I’ve got to leave and I haven’t had time to install the DBRX package. Could you do that for me? Take you, maybe, twenty minutes.”
Bushell gazed at him with a put-upon look on his face. Hey, man – I’ve got my own stuff to do, you know. DBRX is your baby, isn’t it? Maybe you should come back after you do your shopping and install it then.”
Jack muttered “thanks” under his breath and stopped by the desk of James Martin, who was his own age, quite serious and a great deal more mature than Tim Bushell. “How’s it going, James?”
James looked up for a second, “Okay,” then buried himself in his manuals and his typing again.
“Got a minute?”
“I’m really, really busy; got to get this interface done.”
Jack looked over James’ shoulder at the confusion of X-Windows code on the screen. “Still taking those X-Windows and Motif classes?”
“Yeah. Motif in-house on Wednesdays and X-Win stuff on my own time.”
“I got to do an errand but I need some software installed. Twenty-minute job, tops.”
James ignored him and kept typing.
Jack’s last stop for help was at the desk of one Joannie, who told him she’d be glad to help in the morning. Jack told her that was too late, but thanks anyway.
He glanced around the room for help but decided everyone else looked too busy to be bothered. He walked into his boss’s office.
“Jim, I have to go out; I’m seeing the man we talked about last week.”
“Oh, are you? Good. Do what you have to do. Get that DBRX package working yet?”
“No, I’ve been too busy fixing problems from the field. I got three trouble calls this morning and then I had to work on the fixes.”
“Can’t somebody else do it? How about Bushell?”
“He can’t.”
“Can’t be bothered, you mean.”
“I’m not complaining – he’s …”
“You don’t have to say anything – he’s a brat, wouldn’t help his own brother if he was dying unless there was something in it for Tim.”
“He’s busy.”
“Not that busy. These kids today – to them it’s every man for himself. I had another career before this. When I started out, it wasn’t like that, people helped each other and they didn’t come right out of school and get a big salary either. That’s their problem; too much affluence…that, and their parents gave them everything.”
Jack gave a smile of recognition, as if that were something he’d never quite been able to put into words. “I’ll do it first thing in the morning, Jim.”
“That’s soon enough,” said his boss. “I told management we’d have it up and running this week. Will spending three or four days working with it be enough to make you comfortable with it?”
“Think so, except…”
“Except you have to have time to work with it and a full load of trouble calls won’t let you do it; you need somebody to handle your workload for a few days.”
“But…”
Jim’s voice went down to a whisper. “Don’t let this get around, but sometimes I really miss the technical stuff … I’ll take your trouble calls and help with the fixes. I just don’t want everybody around here knowing I can do their work for them if they get too busy, so I’ll have all your phone calls diverted to me. If it’s personal I’ll take the message. I’m making an exception for you ’cause you need and deserve the help. Let me know how it goes with the shrink, okay?” Jim winked at him.
“Will do. ‘night, Jim.” Jack walked out breathing a sigh of relief. He knew a good boss when he saw one.
All that was several weeks earlier. Since then, Jack had seen the psychologist and having someone to talk to about his problems made him feel better. A week ago he had his third appointment and he hadn’t expected any big revelations, just another chance to “let it all out,” but at the session he saw a look of recognition on the doctor’s face.
Finally, the psychologist said “I think I know what the problem is. I started to suspect it on your first visit but I wanted to get to know you and your situation a little before even suggesting anything I might call a diagnosis. I think you’re suffering from a condition that’s probably not in the medical books yet and may not even be recognized by many doctors, but it’s very real. I call it “I.T. burnout”.
A hint of a smile crossed Jack’s face. He finally had a name for his malady and, boy, did it fit the condition perfectly! He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it himself.
“Think of it this way. The human body and mind evolved over millennia around physical work and the need for human contact. In this machine age of ours, we’ve replaced both of them to a certain degree with mental stimulation. That’s fine up to a point, especially when it comes to entertainment like video games and television, but when it comes to sitting all day in front of a terminal, people adapt to it in different ways. As a psychologist, I don’t like to use words like ‘nerd’ but you know what I mean. Some people seem to never get tired of programming, debugging, hacking, manuals; they thrive on it. They love problem-solving, constant mental games, their minds always going at full tilt.”
Jack nodded with recognition at the description of his profession.
“Some of these so-called nerds escape their mental rat race by eventually moving up into management.”
Jack smiled again.
“But many people work very hard to get into this business, do it for years then find they can’t take the stress anymore. That sounds like what’s happened to you. A girl that worked here used to say ‘My mind’s always going at 90 miles per hour.’ She put her finger on the problem without realizing it. Not only was there not enough ‘people contact’ for her, the mental stress of having to fix computer problems all day wore her down.”
“What happened to her?”
“She now teaches at a college. She moved to Charlotte, North Carolina–I just heard from her last month. She’s doing very well.”
“So, changing careers fixed her problem?”
“That and moving to a less-crowded area. She said the traffic around this whole Washington metro area got to be too much. She told me she was moving to a less-crowded area to get away from it all.”
“Got any suggestions for me?”
“Yes, first I think you should take the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator …”
“I’ve heard of that – isn’t it some sort of aptitude test?”
“Not exactly. It helps point out your personality type, which can give important clues about jobs or careers you’d fit well into. You can take it next time you come in. For now, I’m giving you a book, it’s What Color Is Your Parachute by Richard Bowles. I’d read it cover to cover if I were you. It’s been called ‘the career-changer’s Bible’.”
The following morning Jack felt different, like he’d finally faced his problem, instead of trying to blot it out with beer and bars. He walked into the office with two boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts under his arm.
He stopped by Timmy Bushell’s desk, opened one of the boxes and held it out. “Want one of these?”
Bushell looked surprised. He grabbed a donut, looked up and said “What are you gonna do next, blow me?” He grinned as if he’d said something terribly clever.
Jack just stared at him.
“You’re supposed to thank people when they do something nice for you,” said Jim Bakersfield in a loud voice. He’d noticed Jack walking in with the doughnuts and came over to grab one.
Bushell briefly looked at Jim then turned back to his terminal, but Jim wouldn’t let him off the hook. “Hey, I’m talking to you, Bushell!”
“C’mon, I was just kidding – he knows that.”
“I couldn’t tell you were kidding and I’m standing right here,” said Jim.
Bushell typed away, pretending he couldn’t hear.
Jim leaned over his shoulder. “Next time you say something like that, we’re going to have a little talk in my office, capiche?”
Bushell had a smirk on his face like the whole thing was a big joke and he was too busy to be bothered by it.
Next, Jack stopped at James Martin’s desk.
“Hey man, want a doughnut?” asked Jack.
“Thanks!” said James, sounding surprised that anybody would do something for him, even something as small as giving him a doughnut.
Jack looked over his shoulder at the X-Windows reference manuals and the Motif textbooks piled up on his desk. “How long do you have to keep taking those classes, buddy?”
James turned around. “A while. Worked on X-Windows Calls last night.”
“Yeah? How’s it going with that?”
“Learn something new every time I go through the manual and the book.”
Jack looked back at Jim, who grinned as he walked away.
“Don’t mean to tell you what to do, but why do you go through all that?” asked Jack. “I mean that stuff takes forever to learn and now they’ve got kits and tools like Visual Basic to do all that graphical user interface stuff in a fraction of the time.”
James looked perplexed for a second or two and then a smile came over his face, like he was a college professor, about to lecture a naive student who couldn’t possibly grasp the subtlety and depth of what he was about to hear.
“My dear fellow – what you seem to be utterly unable to comprehend is the power of the X-Windows system. GUI builders are the poor man’s way to go about it. I’m aiming for mastery of user interfaces and you can do so much more at this level. You can …”
“You can do the exact same thing in two hours with Visual Basic that’d take you a week to do with that shit,” piped up Timmy Bushell, who’d obviously been eavesdropping. “It’s getting so that anybody creating a user interface is going to use a GUI builder with a WYSIWYG editor. Right? Anybody who does it the hard way is a dummy!”
The look on James Martin’s face would have stopped a clock. In fact, he never spoke to Bushell at all unless it was work-related. The problem between them started when Bushell was hired. James knew Tim from way back and James expected to receive a recruitment fee for any and all of his friends who came aboard. James would obtain their resumes, turn them in and collect said fees if they were hired.
Bushell had never anticipated coming to Kenmore Software Systems and had fortuitously run into Jim Bakersfield at a job fair, where he presented Jim with his resume. By the time he realized his colleague James Martin worked there it was too late to give Martin the resume and hence James received no recruitment fee. When it came to money Martin had a long memory and as long as Bushell worked there he’d never be forgiven.
Jack carried What Color Is Your Parachute under the boxes of doughnuts. He’d take a whack at it at lunch and then when he got home. The previous evening had been his “breakthrough day” and he’d had to celebrate. He even informed his wife of his intentions and she joined him at the bar.
His problem wasn’t solved, it was only identified. But, at least, he now had a goal; he would continue his talks with the company-provided psychologist, he’d take stress-relieving medication, if that was called for and he would devour every piece of information of career choices he came across, starting with the book he was carrying around.
He knew he had a long hill to climb and that it wouldn’t be easy to leave Information Technology and start a new career, but a clear direction uphill is a lot better than being stuck in the quicksand of ignorance and indecision regarding one’s plight and how to go about dealing with it. Jim Bakersfield had said something that struck a chord–something about working with people. Jack would focus on finding a career where he got to work with people, to help them–sounded like a plan.
Doug Dawson has written for the U.S. Defense Department and for car and trade magazines and has had his short stories published by Academy of the Heart & Mind, Ariel Chart, Aphelion Webzine, Literary Yard, Scars Publications, The Scarlet Leaf Review and many others and are included in the print anthologies “The Devil’s Doorknob II” and “Potato Soup Journal’s “Best Stories of 2022.” His book “Route 66 – the TV Series, the Highway and the Corvette” will be published by BearManor Media in 2024.
A chameleon camouflages into its environment as a means of defence. And remarkably, the substance of its presence smothers into a film of illusion. I am a chameleon.
It was my first day in elementary school. I remember it vividly like a memory etched to the heel of my skull.
I was awakened by the rooster heralding the break of dawn—my body tumbling out of my bed as excitement sprawled across my face. It was my big day—I had waited for this day with an admixture of anxiety and joy, ready to grace the four walls of an elementary class.
My mother was already awake. She was heating the water for my bath. I was mature enough to bathe myself in my own philosophy—but my mother never approved of this. I hesitated but her will triumphed.
After bathing, Mom picked up my neatly ironed and well-creased school uniform: a green and black chequered shirt, and a black shorts. Eagerly, I wore it, completing the outfit with my white socks and thick black shoes.
I looked at myself in the mirror. I smiled. There was an imprint of ecstasy on my cheek: a happy face. But slowly, it blurred and my smile crimped into a sad face. My hands and face turned cold with fear.
How am I going to make friends? Would I fit in? Would my classmates not say I am too tall for my class?
The only language I could communicate properly in then was the pidgin English, and I worried about how other children with versed manipulation and deft command of the English language would treat me. Would they be willing to talk to me or even understand me?
I was terrified at the shame of this inadequacy. I was mostly terrified about everything, the totality of myself and people’s perception of me—they seeing me as a flawed mishap.
It was in the wake of insurgency in the country that had made my father decide that my mother, my two siblings and I would relocate to the South-Western part of the country—precisely Oyo state—as a haven of refuge from the attacks in the North.
We used to live in Zamfara state where my father worked as a banker in the United Bank of Africa (UBA) PLC and my mother, a textile trader. We were an average family.
By early 2012, the year we moved, leaving my father behind because he could not leave his job and the option of transfer was not allowed, the infamous militant rebel group, Boko Haram, had caused about 900 deaths in the Federation, evoking fear and unleashing their pang of horror into the Northern areas particularly Yobe, Borno and Adamawa.
We moved to Ibadan late January and rented a two-bedroom flat bungalow.
Personally, it took some getting used to the environment because I missed the company of my father. I missed the hours where we would sit in the night and he would tell me and my siblings his adventures while he was young.
He would tell us stories of how he was a chronic prankster in school— how he often got punished and sometimes went scot-free. And stories of him with the ladies for he was a “lover boy.” It was always funny the tone in which he told the stories; like a disney character.
I missed when he would come home with packets of ice cream from the amazing Mr. Biggs and days when it was me and him only, gossiping through the night about how school had been. Now, it feels utterly lonely; I lusted for my father’s presence.
When he called, his voice ringing into my ears like a rivulet of beads, it often comforted me. We would spend hours conversing about basically everything.
However, that did not fill the chasm that had been chiselled into my heart, into my life. There was a void, a big hole within me, that not even a telekinetic device could fill. Often, he taught me not to be afraid of my peers at school or feel shy but once that connection broke, that confident mechanism in me broke too.
Back then when I was in Zamfara, I schooled in ECWA Primary and Nursery school. My friends, J and K, were my closest companions and we would spend our break time jumping around, playing tag races and having fun.
One particular day, we had a dare contest during break time. We had to jump over the school fence without getting caught by the teacher on duty. The winner of the dare would be crowned “the king of the group” for the next week.
J, who was always very competitive, took the lead and jumped first. He made it safely over the fence without being seen by the teacher. It was K’s turn next, and she was feeling nervous. Her hands were trembling as she climbed up on the fence. But she took a deep breath and took the leap.
As K jumped, she landed with a thud, and the teacher heard her fall. He came running towards the fence and caught her in the act. K started crying, fearing the punishment she would receive. J and I ran over to comfort her, but we knew that we had to let the teacher take her away. We felt so bad for our friend, but we knew that we had to respect the rules of the school. After K was taken away, we all felt a little bit lost without her. The rest of the day felt quiet without her.
After school, we met up at our usual hangout spot to wait for K. We knew she would be feeling upset, so we brought her some of her favourite treats to cheer her up. When she finally arrived, she looked teary-eyed and sad. But as soon as she saw us, she ran over and gave us a big hug. We told her that everything would be okay, and we would always be her friends, no matter what. She smiled and said that she was glad to have friends like us.
We spent the rest of the day talking and laughing.
We made a pact to always be friends, but it clearly never lasted.
On the day I had to leave Zamfara, I had to watch my father say goodbye to us knowing we were not going to see that face for a very long time. I had to say goodbye to my friends and to our home.
My heart was stricken with sorrow. I remembered I wept all through the journey. Things were never going to be the same from here on. I would miss my friends, school, my dad and mostly, the person I was in this environment.
***
I entered my classroom, Primary one A, after being directed by the headmistress. From the door, my heart began panting. I said my greetings to the class teacher and I took my seat second to the last row. It seemed like a spontaneous selection but I knew it was not. It was the best seat to detract any form of attention during class activities. The teacher often questioned the students in the first row or last row, reducing my chances of being questioned.
At 7:30am, the bell rang for assembly and we all gathered outside. There was a devotion prayer followed by a welcome address given by the Proprietress of the school and, afterwards, the matching in song. It was the song “Oh, The Grand Old Duke of Yolk”. Back then I did not know the lyrics. So, I just stood watching as other pupils’ lips moved. A petite girl in a hijab beside me gazed at me, her eyes surveying me from top to bottom. She turned to her friend on the line, and whispered something in her ear. They both looked at me, and laughed. I wondered why they laughed. Then I heard.
I could hear the other girl saying: “He is too tall to be in Primary One”. It made me feel awkward. I was shamed for my height, something I did not even have control over. It was pathetic.
“And he is not even fine. His face resembles that of a monkey”, I heard the first girl say. Saddened by her words, a tear rolled down my cheek.
After the assembly, our class teacher came in, addressed and orientated us about the new class. She began by asking to know our names. I observed as everyone stood one by one calling out their name with incredulous fluency, till it got to my turn:
I stood and before I could even say anything, a boy in the front row burst into laughter. The teacher stood him up and demanded to know why he had laughed. He gave no response, scratching his forehead. She stood him up till the class ended.
Within me, I knew why he laughed; I was the tallest in the class and, perhaps, to them, I was the ugliest too. I was flawed, I knew this but my peers made it feel like an abomination.
Next, the teacher decided to elect a class captain. She chose to pick at random. I was agitated but, at the same time, calm; why would she select me?
Her eyes surveyed the class from row to row before settling on me. Me! “You look serious and gentle, you would be the class captain,” she said. I caught my breath several times, heaving silently in a bid not to faint.
But she picked me anyway. I bluntly rejected it. I could not manage it. All of a sudden, the class burst into laughter. I realised I had spoken in pidgin. “I no fit do am. I dey scared,” I had said. My tongue trembled. I looked down at my feet, feeling embarrassed. The teacher cautioned them from laughing but they went on. She insisted on me being the class captain whether I liked it or not. It was not an option.
Throughout that day, I did not talk to anyone nor did anyone talk to me. During lunch break, my teacher, whose eyes I had felt observing me, asked why I did not join my classmates playing around outside. I told her I could not, I was too afraid of getting embarrassed again.
After the break, we began mathematics class. We were taught the addition of two digit numbers. I found it easy and simple but my sitting partner, who was a girl, did not. As the teacher taught us, I observed she was just kissing her teeth in annoyance that she couldn’t comprehend what was being taught. I asked if I could help her after the teacher finished.
She looked at me with piercing eyes: “What would you know? Common English you can’t construct properly. Please…”
Something writhed and died in me that day. Whatever little crumb of self-esteem I had left decayed.
By Primary two, my spoken language had become better and a bit polished. I had pulled all tenacity into my study of the English language to make sure I could speak fluently just like my peers. I drowned myself in my studies and, consequently, I lead the class as the second-best student. I thought this would attract friends to me. It did not.
Instead, it repelled them. I was nicknamed bookworm, and the “laughing at” never stopped. It got worse. Whenever I answered a question in class, I would hear some of my peers say “He’s an ITK” meaning I always acted like I knew it all. But that wasn’t true.
Depressed, I took to reading, spending my time in the library, invested in the world of fantasies and fairytales I sank into the magic of book: “Gulliver’s Travels”, “Frankenstein”, “Cinderella”, “Peter Pan”, “Bambi”, “Beauty and The Beast” and many more several tales, their stories were etched into my memory. I was so fascinated with these stories, I began to make my own—including daydreaming myself as a character in them. My narrative was somewhat different: I was a prince needing rescue, not the other way around. It sounds pretty but it really was a sad philosophy.
By Primary Three, I was still the boy too shy to have friends or too awkward for people to be friends with. But I had something different. I had my stories with me and they were my friends. My best friend was Prince Charming in the Snow White story. I wished I possessed his charm, his confidence and beauty. More than a wish, I was desperate to be like him. Often, I compiled short stories together, writing tales that were a novel retelling of the fairytales I had read or from scenes around me.
I didn’t want to show it to my classmates but during breaks, some of them would see me scribbling and venture to investigate what I was up to. They discovered I was writing these stories. More surprisingly, some of them loved it and asked if they could read it. It became a tool I used to forge friendships with many of my classmates. My biggest fans back then turned out to be my very first friends and best friends and prolly my only sincere ones. They were Eniola and Moyosore.
Every lunch break, we would spend our leisure talking about stories we had read and the ones we had written, for we loved to read and tell stories too. We had this in common. Therefore, I never felt entirely alone.
Moyosore would argue Peter Pan could never beat Robin Hood in a fight and I would argue otherwise. We would conjecture theories, build stories and fantasize. Eniola never argues, he was too obsessed with and smitten by the beauty of Rapunzel. Sometimes, he forgets she was not real. Eniola was clowny and this often made me smile.Eniola also had a knack for telling jokes that were so silly, they made everyone laugh. Even on the worst days, Eniola could make us feel better with just a few silly words.
My friends did not care how I looked, and for a moment, I had found a place to belong without feeling inferior or awkward.
But like good things were short-lived, a horrible thing happened when we got to Primary four; Eniola left for another school and Moyosore relocated overseas. I was heartbroken, my first, and I crawled back into my shell like a mollusk. I lost my place in the world all over again.
By the beginning of Junior Secondary School, things changed. I realised I could not stay crawled up in my shell forever and so I came out. But it was not me, it was a form I modified to the behavioural patterns of my peers. I acted like them so I could be with them.
I learned their slang and verbalised them. I learnt the popular songs they often talked about and hummed them pretentiously during class to display my familiarity with the pops.
I talked about girls because they too did. I thought of everything I thought of because they thought of it. Now that I think of it, I talked and related with them as my friends but they were not really my friends. A friend knows you; none of them knew me because I did not give them a chance.
I did not reveal my true self. I became a chameleon. For years, I lived this way, camouflaging.
It is amazing how the moon hangs in the sky, its false light glistening through the clouds, night after night, that we sometimes forget its true colour. Sometimes, what we call the moon is no longer the moon because we do not think of it that way any longer.
About last year, weeks before my final exams in secondary school, I stopped deceiving myself. I read a self help book on being confident in one’s identity and these words struck and spoke to me: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
I realised I have authority over what I choose to believe about myself and what I don’t. Enough of the self-sabotaging. It was tiring. It is tiring—liking something I do not just like because my so-called friends like them and so they can like me. It kills me. It is a sad philosophy. It is not a defence. Forcing myself to fit into where I do not naturally fit into, my friend and therapist once told me, is utterly pathetic. You should not have to change yourself to belong anywhere. I should not have to.
Now, I am learning to triumph over the complexities of my identity. I have stopped trying to fit in because my awkwardness is what distinguishes me from the multitude. I am unique because of the totality of all my inadequacies and deformities. My imperfection is my personhood, and if I lose it, I lose myself. So, no more blending to fit into peer groups or sects nor bending to the complex rules of the society. I refuse to be a chameleon.
I am not a chameleon. I am not a chameleon. I am not a chameleon.
Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, TPC XI, is a medical student, poet, essayist & Assistant Editor of Fiery Scribe Review from Nigeria. Winner of the Team Booktu Poetry Contest (2024), Cheshire White Ribbon Day Contest(2022), NiMasa Cancer Awareness Poetry contest (2024) & Konya Shamsrumi Poetry Contest(2024), his works are featured/ forthcoming in 20.35, Isele Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Poet Lore, Tab Journal, Poetry Wales, Variant Literature & elsewhere. An Adroit Journal Summer Mentee & SprinNG Writers’ Fellow, his works were selected for inclusion in the Annual Outstanding Young Writers Anthology(Paper Crane, 2023). He tweets @ademindpoems
There is only so much that algorithms and memories can tell you.
My Spotify tells me that this month Keane’s ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ is the song I have listened to the most. Spotify tells me my mood is mellow, like a Sunday afternoon. What it does not tell me is that I miss my sister.
It was a Sunday afternoon late in March. At least, I think it was a Sunday afternoon late in March. I know the marigolds were almost done blooming. It was not yet hot, but the promise of a hot Indian summer was in the air. My sister and I were lazing in my room. In April, we will start a new school semester. But, before then, our days were open and free. I am reading, she is drawing. The new Keane song comes on. We both hum along:
I walked across an empty land I knew the pathway like the back of my hand I felt the earth beneath my feet Sat by the river and it made me complete
We both loved the song. I am not sure why. Maybe it was trending at the time? I do remember that, with time, we forgot about the song as teenagers do until we heard a fresh rendition a few years later–this time on the American Teen TV show, Glee.
We used to watch Glee on Sunday afternoons. Since we otherwise sang straightjacketed songs in the school choir, we enjoyed watching the flamboyant performance of Glee Club singing songs that we would actually listen to. Our Bollywood sensibilities would rejoice every time a character breaks into a song when big feelings come up.
One of the early–and quite remarkable–songs in the first season of Glee was “Somewhere only we know”. This “version”–popularly known in urban terms as ‘cover’–was younger and brighter in its tonality: the singer clearly enunciating the words, their voices rising above the music. In the original, the music and vocals are deeply enmeshed in each other.
We liked the Glee Club cover and soon forgot the original. Now, instead of humming, we sang loudly. It never occurred to me to wonder why this song about nostalgia and weariness was so appealing to us. A response came to me later as the song became the background score of my summer of endless Sun-days in Kashmir. The summer that came after the March my sister passed away. The year I played with a starling. The same year the song, which I had heard a million times, took on new meanings.
Headphones on, I am writing to my sister sitting on a bench at the garden’s entry when a flock of mynas (starlings) distracts me. They are pecking at the grass noisily, unmindful of my presence. Annoyed, I leave my letters and walk towards them. The mynas scatter and fly away. Except one.
I try to shoo her away like the others. But, as I turn back to the bench, she follows. Curious, I reverse my steps. The myna matches my movements. Again, I try to shoo it away. But I see it waddling back just as I sit down. Maybe it wants seeds or crumbs. I crumble the biscuit I had brought out with me. The myna makes no attempt to peck at the crumbs. Instead, she waddles away and looks back. I follow the myna with the crumbs in hand and somehow, we end up playing tag. After a while, I get tired and the myna flies away.
I retreat to the diary of letters to my sister, slipping on my headphones. The following lines are playing
I came across a fallen tree I felt the branches of it looking at me Is this the place we used to love?
My mother’s family home in Kashmir was a summer retreat. V and I loved it there. Just the previous summer, we spent a month at the house as she recovered from the latest rounds of chemotherapy. She and I would sit at the bench where I now sit with the diary of letters to her. We would often feed the birds together, and I would read, while she would practice with her camera—taking pictures of a bent-over rose bush that my mother’s grandfather planted several decades ago. The rose bush was showing signs of life, despite a harsh winter. V, with a camera in hand, was showing signs of life, as well.
The old plum tree near the rose bush was dying. “Remember that year,” I ask V, “when you climbed onto the roof of the car reaching for ripe plums.” She smiles and nods, looking a bit drained. “I remember,” she says.
I had watched her, terrified she might fall; instructing her to be careful while collecting the plums she had plucked in a basket. But V tells me that she asked me to help her, to look out for her. In remembering the conversation alone, I think, perhaps, I liked the version where I was the one who volunteered to help her—to look out for her.
I feel tired now. Since every day is a “sun day” in Kashmir, with nothing to do, I take a nap.
The next day, the myna returns and our play resumes. When she flies away, I remember a summer of our pre-teen years. There was a war on, in the upper regions of Kashmir, bordering Pakistan: The Kargil war. But, here at the house in Srinagar, we were oblivious. We rarely went outside the boundaries of the house, yet we were thoroughly entertained. We ran around the cars, the porch, the garden playing tag. Older and taller, I should have been ahead of her. But she was fast and athletic. She always caught up with me.
Is this the place I have been dreaming of?
I write to V, about my memories, about more-than-human encounters, about growing up together. And now having to grow old alone. I am vaguely aware that there were others around, that my grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins were there with us. Another year, when we returned to Srinagar, we helped our grandfather with a rickety old refrigerator. When it was finally installed, my grandfather took a nap on the couch. His snores matched the loud, robotic hum of the refrigerator. V and I were tickled endlessly, laughing till our stomachs hurt.
When I remember it’s just me and her. The whole world fades into the background. The game with the myna was also a private game of tag. Just me and the starling. We play until she flies away.
Looking at my Spotify Sound Capsule, I think how Sundays and summers were never the same again. The lazy afternoons are long gone. ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ is now a totem for my yearning to return to a time when nostalgia was not a feeling but a concept. Like you knew the song made you feel something, but you had not yet felt that feeling yourself.
The music used to only strike a chord and the lyrics were for belting out, imitating a show we watched, imagining our voices to mean something in a world that lay wide open in front of us. Now, the surface notes acquired new depths. Like when you read something at different times and pick up new inflections. Like when you walk across a path enough number of times, it takes on new shapes under your feet.
The band Keane, when asked about the song’s meaning, have often responded saying that it is about a place, time and memory that meant something to the songwriter, but it can also be about any place, any time and any memory that might mean something to those who are listening. And I was listening–Is this the place we used to know? Is this the place we used to love?
In playing with the myna and writing to my sister with “Somewhere Only We Know’ in the background, I conjugated my grief, made new shapes and patterns with it. I carved out some wiggle room to remember the place we used to know, the place we loved—not only a physical space but one I recollected from past summers and Sundays.
This could be the end of everything
So, why don’t we go somewhere only we know? Somewhere only we know.
The place of my grief is not a place my sister or my Spotify playlist will know. That place sits within me. I make and remake that place as I draw patterns between the times I shared with V, and the times I have not. After 12 years of losing her, my memories are now unsure yet intense. An algorithm reminds me that I miss my sister. What it does not tell me is that, in missing her, I think of Sunday afternoons when life was normal only because that life came before this one—the one I am living now. That life became a level with no apparent way to reach for it, no car to climb onto and pluck moments. In any case, even in memory, it was V on the roof of the car, not me.
I am getting tired, and I need somewhere to begin.
So, I begin with my song for Sundays as I add texture and depth to an algorithm that knows nothing of my grief but simply reads it as a mood.
Ikenna, 15, and Osato, 16, were expelled from their respective schools for their queer sexual orientation after they were caught engaging in intimate acts with the same sex. Usingtheir experience, this article investigates the profound suffering of Nigerian queer teenagers.
We agreed to use the pseudonyms Ikenna and Osato to protect the teenagers’ identities.
In a secluded corner of a Catholic boarding school in Benin city, fifteen-year-old Ikenna sat alone, his back pressed against the cold wall of the dormitory. The air was thick with the whispers of his classmates, who had discovered his secret—a secret that, in their eyes, was a sin, an abomination.
Ikenna had been caught in an intimate moment with another boy, and the repercussions were swift and brutal: expulsion, public shaming, and a call to his parents.
When his parents arrived, his mother screamed, “What have you done to our family?” while his father silently fumed, fists clenched at his sides.
When Ikenna recounted his story, his voice trembled, and his eyes looked distant. “They called me fag,” he said, his hands gripping the edge of his seat. “My parents couldn’t even look at me. My mother said, ‘I regret the day I gave birth to you.’”
Ikenna’s story is far from unique. Across Nigeria, queer teens like him endure profound suffering, hidden in the shadows of a society that rejects their very existence. The discrimination they face is not just social but institutional, as schools, communities, and even families turn against them.
The Roots of Discrimination
In Nigeria, alternate sexual orientations are criminalized, and societal norms are deeply rooted in conservative religious beliefs.
These attitudes trickle down, creating an environment where queer teens live in constant fear of being discovered and ostracized.
But the attitude is even worse towards teenagers; parents often assume that their children are too young to be certain about their sexual orientation, and in some cases, may threaten them with homelessness for not conforming to societal (traditional) expectations.
I remember speaking with Mrs. Adebola, a mother of three, who told me with a stern face, “If my son ever told me he was gay, I would throw him out of the house. He’s too young to do that rubbish.”
Her words echo the sentiments of many Nigerian parents and illustrate the harsh reality of the average queer teen living in Nigeria.
Conversion therapy is another brutal reality for these teens. Sixteen-year-old Osato, speaking with tears in her eyes, recounted, “My parents took me to a counselor to fix me.”
What they described as ‘fixing’ was actually conversion therapy—an attempt to change her sexual orientation through psychological or physical means. Aisha’s voice shook as she recalled the sessions. ‘I went in feeling bad and left feeling worse. The counselor told me I was confused, misdirected. He said… he said a homosexual is worse than an animal.’
Conversion therapy is not only ineffective but profoundly damaging. According to a 2019 report by UCLA’s Williams Institute, queer youth who experienced conversion therapy were almost twice as likely to contemplate and attempt suicide compared to their peers who did not undergo such methods.
These so-called therapies leave deep mental and emotional scars and reinforce the deceitful message that their very identity is wrong.
Loneliness is another companion for these teens. The fear of being outed, combined with a lack of understanding from peers and family, forces them to isolate as a coping mechanism.
“Since they found out, my friends no longer talk to me,” Ikenna said. “One of them told me, ‘You’re disgusting. Stay away from us. Some even blocked my number”
Once queer teens in Nigeria are caught in the act, their friendships are fraught with mistrust, as even the most innocent relationship can be misread. The result is a pervasive sense of loneliness that eats away at their self-esteem and mental health.
This loneliness leads to severe mental health issues, including depression and anxiety. It took a toll on Ikenna’s health. “‘Some nights, I couldn’t sleep,’ he admitted. ‘I felt like I was drowning in my own thoughts, but there was no one I could talk to.”
Queer teens who live in Nigeria often suffer in silence, unable to seek help for fear of exposure.
The stigma surrounding their identity makes it difficult to find supportive mental health resources, leaving them to navigate their struggles alone.
Expulsion
The harrowing experiences of these teens extend from their families into their classrooms. In Nigerian schools, which are expected to be safe environments for young people, students like Ikenna who are found to be gay or exhibit traits not traditionally seen as masculine, face expulsion.
This punishment sends a clear message: you are not welcome here.
It informs the teens that their identity is so abhorrent that it warrants exclusion from the very institution meant to nurture their development.
Too Young To Understand Sexuality?
Teens in Nigeria are often told they are too young to understand their sexual orientation; too young to be queer. I asked Ikenna’s mother about her thoughts on his sexuality, and she said, ‘I don’t think he knows what he’s doing; he’s confused; he’s still young. Hopefully, he will come to his senses when he grows up.’
This belief is scientifically flawed. According to Medscape, the education of identities, gender and sexual alike, is not something that can be postponed until adulthood; it is a fundamental aspect of who we are from birth.
It is equally problematic to assume teenagers cannot form meaningful connections. It is a reductive view that intently dismisses the profound nature of their experiences.
Adolescence is the age of identity formation. During these formative years, teens explore various aspects of their identities, including their sexual orientation and capacity for intimacy.
Ikenna and Osato’s story—as well as the stories of countless others that we know and hear of—must not be forgotten. Their suffering is real and unjust.
As a civilised human society, we must not only strive to be a powerful voice that collectively decries the diverse suffering of queer teens in Nigeria, but advocate for their right to be their harmless, natural selves openly–without fear or stigmatisation.
These young individuals deserve to live free from fear, shame, and violence.
Lastly, we must create environments where teens can openly discuss their feelings, ask questions, and receive guidance without fear of judgement or punishment.
It’s 8:30 a.m., and the sun is shining brightly. I remember I have a class at 9 a.m. As I rush to fetch water for my bath, I discover the tank is empty because there was no electricity overnight. I protest silently as I return to my room. I ask one of my roommates why we didn’t have water.
“Did you see light?” he asks sarcastically.
I recall that the electricity distribution company failed to supply power for the second night in a row. I sit on my bed in dismay, wondering how I will manage to take a bath. Soon, I’m on my feet, heading to my friend’s house in BDPA, a 30-minute walk from my place. There, I take my bath and rush to school.
This was one of my many negative experiences living on UNIBEN’s campus last year.
I graduated several months ago, but to this day, the story remains the same for a lot of students. However, now the students are tired of adapting to the terrible living conditions and are making their voices heard, demanding that the school administration bring about the necessary changes.
Their peaceful demonstration on the Benin-Lagos expressway, where they even played football, caused significant gridlock, which drew criticism from members of the university staff.
This is not an isolated event. Sadly.
Last year, UNIBEN students staged a protest against a steep hike in school fees. Every year, the administration seems to creatively devise new forms of living hardships and impose the same on the students, thereby raising the question: Why are UNIBEN students treated like second-class citizens in their citadel of learning and on their campus?
Poor Campus Living Conditions
The conditions in most of UNIBEN’s hostels are nothing short of appalling. One student I spoke to likened it to a prison, describing faded, dilapidated buildings and cramped rooms with each housing up to eight students on average. The hygiene is deplorable, with one hosteller recounting contracting infections from the toilets multiple times.
Worsening the students’ plight, they are forced to use kerosene stoves for cooking as gas and electric stoves were banned by the school authority. In today’s fast-evolving 21st century, one would expect the administration of a reputable Federal-owned institution such as the University of Benin to know better than to expect such laughable, backward innovations of its students e.g. cooking with kerosene stoves.
Like its progress, the administration’s excuse has been stagnant: the hostel transformer’s inability to handle the load of electric stoves. A flimsy justification.
The poor maintenance of the hostels culminated in a fire outbreak in Hall 2, destroying rooms, important documents, and personal possessions. Although the fire service was alerted early, they arrived without water, leaving students to douse the flames with buckets of water fetched from distant places.
The administration blamed the incident on the use of banned electric plates, ignoring their own neglect. To date, most affected students remain uncompensated and without new accommodations, despite paying maintenance fees.
Power Outage
Less than a year after the fire, the Benin Electricity Supply of Edo State cut off power to UNIBEN due to an unpaid debt of Three Hundred Million Naira only (#300, 000, 000.00), plunging the university into darkness. Students living on campus were forced to seek basic amenities like bathing and charging their phones and other electronic devices off-campus.
Their academic activities suffered, with the case of a computer science student unable to complete tests due to the power outage being heard of. Despite promises to resolve the issue, six weeks passed without action. The vice chancellor recently admitted the university’s inability to settle the debt, even suggesting a possible session suspension if students couldn’t endure the conditions.
Furthering the administration’s bid to stifle convenience out of the living conditions of its students, transportation costs within the university have also soared, with cab fares increased by over 900%! Such alarming administrative creativity.
Today, UNIBEN students are engaged in protest because their endurance has reached its limit. This situation is a damning indictment of the government and the university management. Their collective failure has resulted in intolerable living conditions that in turn hinder the students’ ability to meet their primary need: focus on their studies and fulfil academic diligence.
How can students excel without basic amenities like electricity? How can they read, study, or prepare for exams in the dark? How can they conduct research and/or engage with modern technology essential for their academic growth?
Improving living conditions is not just a matter of comfort but a fundamental requirement for fostering a conducive learning environment.
Last Words
People often claim that UNIBEN students love to protest. Having spent four years at the University of Benin, I can unequivocally say this is not true. These students have too many bills to pay, books to read, assignments to complete, tests and exams to prepare for, and businesses to run to spend their days protesting on the roads. It took six weeks of power outages before they finally took to the streets.
Rather than focusing on superficial actions like shutting down the school, the school management should look for practical, immediate solutions to the problems.
Addressing these issues requires a multifaceted approach, starting with increased government support to ensure that basic amenities like electricity and adequate living conditions are consistently provided.
The government must increase funding for educational institutions. Additionally, the university should actively engage its alumni network in fundraising efforts, leveraging their success and goodwill to invest in infrastructure improvements and student welfare programs.