Bleak Joys

Things have really changed over the years. Nene. Jolade. Ara. No muse. Everything is a total confusion blocking out surreal thoughts of becoming Wole or winning the Nobel. My desire and mind constantly wavering in a see saw motion between family and that hazy forlorn dream of greatness-at least the bits and shafts of the dream left after all those years of conscious pillage by the daily pursuit of bread. The strands of flame are long dead, embers snuffed out by mundane necessities. All that is left is a guarded strain toward nothingness.

Often times, the mind plays a trick on me presenting me with false shadows of grandeur. Perhaps, I can walk on water?  At those times, I hold fast to the real and to the reality of the beginnings that came to be the end. The asphyxiating breathe. The torrid that was quenched.  The bleak and sorrowful joys that have taken hold.  The listless sameness of existence.

That was me and no longer me. The me that rose from the squalor of that bangalow squatting on that cambering street in Surulere.  The me that wade through pools and squelch through mud and grime, face buffeted by the breath of rain. That me that was free like the minstrel lark, heaving with the gift of creation.  That me that reverberated with hope and possibilities. All that me is now like a hot air balloon in a free fall from the heavens crashing towards reality and truth.

I have experienced a recurring phantasm of a test and a door.  For over a year now, I have had dreams that I am about to take a test that has (in reality) taken place more than a decade ago and that I am unprepared for the test.  In my dream, I quiver and squirm and my stomach churns, nervous at my lack of preparedness.  Like a ring that continually seeks itself, I come back to the same recurrent phantasm everyday, living the past in re-staged dramas albeit with a different plot. Different day, same act. 

I have failed in many things while dreaming.  The door is another example.  There was one time I had gone to a three-days prayer and fasting programme on a mountain in Ede.  After day-two of the programme, I dreamt of myself attempting and failing to open a door.  I have only had that dream once and my pastor tells me it is a door of opportunity/blessing and that I must pray that God gives me the grace to open it. Frankly, I actually fancied I was becoming Joseph.

May be my dreams mirror my dream. Recurring but decidedly out of reach. But I still have dreams where I fly because of Nene, Jolade and Ara!

.

Melancholy

Dreary. Drab. Dog-days are here. I have been struggling for weeks with a vast emptiness somewhere in my head? mind? heart? I just don't know really where. I feel as though I am wrongly positioned on the face of the earth, as though I am falling away into space, dislocated from all that makes sense. In truth, nothing makes sense. Not even existence. In the unusual Nigerian sense you will agree that I have a great job-six digits and all, a beautiful wife, a son, great friends and family members. But something appears to be amiss, I can only describe it as something huge like the sun suddenly vanishing and my world left dark, bitingly cold and nauseating. I guess it is my work. 6 years of training for a teetotal uninspiring profession. I have no passion. No real drive (save for the drive and hunger to shine amongst my peers - lucifer's kind of  shine I fear).

Dreary days are here again and everything has fallen into a treadmill. Wakeful hours are the most enervating.  Tiredness sets in as soon as I detach myself from the bed. It feels as if I stayed up all night and never went to bed the night before. Every morning I do a reality check consisting mainly of the pyscho-analytical tool - BILLS TO BE PAID LIKE CLOCK WORK!

Macabre

The thought of death and life increasingly grabs my being.  As I grow older, I fear death. Not because of any selfish preservative instinctual response to survival wont to be found in all creatures but because of the seed I will leave behind rudderless and lonely. It appears man is constantly and inexorably drawn to death as we contemplate life and its meanings to us.  The more we cherish life and all it brings, the reality of death and nothingness becomes increasingly frightful and less agreeable.  It is for this selfsame reason that humankind has always sought for a means of elongating its lifespan or of completely escaping eternal and timeless death.

One wonders what happens after the quietude of death. Religion has always attempted to provide an answer to sate the hunger of men for knowledge.  However, the spiritual answers we have obtained from religion hardly ever satisfies the more inquisitive and pessimist of humankind.  This is the root of all forms of  humanism and atheism.  It is a refusal to accept the divine and non-empirical explanation of the after-life.  The refusal is a natural precursor for a total refusal of even the forms of morality preached by religion (this happens in extreme cases). The refusal to accept the moral codes is simply a logical progression of the dialectics on the hereafter. The conclusion is that this world is without walls or fences, morality is relative and there can be no good or bad. Finally, there can be no hereafter.

Not that holding a belief outside the established religious dogmas is terrible in itself, events in history has taught us that humankind can only peacefully exist in a society with known precepts and rules. Religious precepts have been the most effective leash on the ferocious instinct of humankind for self, spiritual and material preservation to the detriment of all other creatures including fellow men.  It is this religious precepts that are being constantly attacked by waves after waves of rationalisation and demystification.  By the time the modern man is finished, God will indeed be dead as once proclaimed by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Growing Up (Second Installment)

No. 42. I have always known that number. It is permanently etched somewhere in my mind like the pockmarks I have always had on my anthill coloured skin from childhood. My skin is burnt black now, I remember one of my distant aunts hardly recognising me. No. 42. That is where I grew up. Growing up started at No. 42. Like being literally tied to my mothers apron string, nursery and primary education was brought to me just a few meters across the street from No. 42. And off to Victoria Children School and Quarnic school. After all I was born Adeyemi Kazeem Adeleke. I remember...what is that her name?...yes, Seun Agugua. I always thought she was pretty but I have never gotten over the fact that she always helped me cross the road even when we were age-mates. The memory is a bit hazy but that fact sort of sticks out. I still remember peeing in my knickers while seated in class. I was always afraid to let the teacher know that I wanted to urinate. My first surgeon out of my seat was to read the numbers 1,2,3,4,5...19 to the class. I do not seem to remember clearly how it went. Peeing was not my only problem though, I also had a serious case of sweaty-palms. Once I placed my hands on my exercise books, the white pages turns brown from my sweaty-palms. Teachers after teachers made me wash my clammy hands in a bowl of water which always sat on a wooden carrier at one corner of the classroom. Especially, Aunty Rita, the demagogue from my Primary 1 class. I did not fancy her much.  I do not find that a particularly gay part of my childhood memory. But it is way better than the mistaken identity that occurred in primary 4. That memory I have almost interred in my subconscious with varying degrees of success. It simply bobbed up from no where now as I write this piece and I wonder why... I was barely two feet from the earth. Nusery 2. And it was Nike Adeyeri and the fondlings under the desk. She was my first prank-mate. I remember sneaking a peek at Nike's armpit thinking it was her private part. I equated it to her vagina (which, I must say, I never saw). Now in hindsight, I think I have always been in love with the feminine form. My parents had this picture album; at a very tender age, I was enthralled, not by the pictures in the album, but by the album's cover picture of a half-naked white lady laying down by a beach side under the loving glare of the sun. Strangely, I felt aroused by the picture even then. It was never a wonder that I lost my virginity before my fourteenth birthday. I had access to pronographic movies before I reached the tender age of 10. Before my eighteenth birthday, I had gone through over more than half a dozen girls. By my eighteenth birthday, I felt as though I had seen it all and done that (as the saying goes) and it was time to retire. I recall break-time in primary school. It always came with the toll of the bell by the bell-prefect and Iya Olounje bringing our plates of food in a huge aluminium tray. Lunch was always served by 12 noon. The menu was always limited to beans, rice, yam porridge or puff puff...Then Wonder Year and Kevin and Winnie brought me fumbling closer to adolescence in my mind.  I had almost forgotten the importance of the Wonder Years until I saw part of the show on YouTube.

Grown Up (First Installment)

There is something utterly drab about growing up. It brings with it a forbidding reality that all but destroys the surrealism of childhood and teenage air-headedness. It replaces dreams with conformism, a constant effort to fit into societal expectation. Herein lays the cot-death of many a dream, talents and possibilities. I fear that I may have already begun the macabre dance towards the sepulchre of my possibilities. I have never being a lover of reality; it represents the darkest place for me. As a young man I could exist in my thought for hours unbroken, uninhibited by reality. I created my own reality, my own terra firma, my own being. Thinking about this has driven me to one incontestable conclusion: these days are the dog-days; the hours of glory may have already passed by.

There is monotony to daily events that bores.  There is an acute detachment to the essential workings of my persuasion. A disquiet that perturbs.  To me, beauty and living attain life-like contours the moment I read Dickens, Hardy, Joyce or Wole and the Holy Writ.  I think it was my Grandpa, Baba Ibadan, that herded me towards the lodestone of the earthly pursuit of Thermis.  He would always berate me for being too inquisitive saying "ma lawyer mi".  The encounters sowed the seed of an inclination and eventuality in my soul. Then there were the demons that pestered and chirped mockingly that I could never make it in the art. The spirit of Doubt that left nothing but a Changeling in my place for my parents to nuture.

a love letter to creative urge

I have left off this act for a long time. I feel like a child just learning to speak. Infancy after adulthood is a rude shock. An unnatural situation. I dicovered the frustration involved in googoogaggling and the exhiliration of a first step as I strove to regain adulthood. I do not know how I have lived without her loving embrace for so long-is it the abiding block that made it easier to bear? or was I just enchanted by the fever of daily human pursuits that I deserted the love of my life?

The stacatto utterances of the key-pad is like music to my ears. It calls her from the hidden crevices where she lays basking in the warmth of a rosy world, somewhere deep within the recess of my heart and mind, which hung over her still body like a benign moon. Even though I still trade with words everyday, I cannot find the words to woo back my lover. But, like the spartans, I wont despair or relent even to the death of the monotony of my steady pay-check and a draggy work schedule that snuffs the life out of all the muses.

The love of my life, my books, my seed, words like brick and mortar. I long after those days when i wrote copiously and was sated by the idea of creating a world to which I can invite my readers from far and wide.

MM2

There are so many sides to life, hope and despondency; the mirthful and the melancholic; the bookish and the klutzy; the highbrow and the lowbrow. It is as though life by its own workings strive to achieve a balance. I saw a portion of this existential pathos at the local wing of the Lagos airport some days ago.

The airport was new, all shiny and modern; more like a futuristic anachrone in the midst of obsolete landmarks. Unlike so many things in Nigeria, the air-conditioner actually worked. The airport was dotted with restaurants and retail shops. The tantalizing smell of food hung in air like an abiding torture on rumbling bellies and hearts. There was a loud air of opulence in the ambience that shut out every lowly person by its sheer existence.

Strangely, in defiance of this, a mangy looking man, wearing a threadbare suit and a well-worn shoe strolled into the departure lounge. He could not have been taller than five feet.  He had poverty trailing him like a body odour. He was carrying a guitar covered with stickers to hide the numerous holes and crevices on it. He glanced right and left to see if the security men were onto him already. They were not. He walked towards the general eating quadrangle.

The seats were scantily occupied. It was not a busy day at the airport. The guitar man was visibly disappointed but nonetheless he started strumming the guitar strings. His voice was mellifluous as he sang La Bamba.

I tapped my feet and hummed along. After all, there was not much difference between the musician and I, we were both koboless.

He had picked a family of two kids and their friends to entertain. On their table, was food, popcorn, and soda drinks. The father of the family and his male friend were dressed in expensive looking suits and spoke in a refined manner. The women reflected their husbands status in their attires. This was a comfortable company of individuals by all standards. The children danced to the sound of the guitar man and mouthed some gibberish in unison.

But the men and women ignored him as though he was not there, as if he was invisible. Not even a kobo was going to come from them; not from all that opulence; not from all the fine suits and expensive attires, refined mannerisms and clipped English. The story of the world was playing out again, I thought, arcing out in its pure icy darkness; a tale of self-preservative humanity; a sorry story.

I pondered at what makes man so supercilious and self-centred? The horrendous nature that feeds the rich’s desire to align to and be spliced with their own kind. Life is full of such infernal proprieties and high-flown decorum associated with societal expectancy that every inch of existence seems affected. I wonder how much time one can waste on this cosmetic sham-show in the short time we have to spend here on earth? The most pitiful of humans are those living a life of constant pretence in a laughable bid to conform. People who live in shackles.  Society is like a fathomless abyss, an all consuming cesspit, never to be sated. The wise knows this, keeps this truth close to heart always and intentionally starves Society.

By the time I eased back into reality, a security man had spotted the guitar-man and all I could see was his rear as he dashed down a stairway to freedom...

memories

Memories...reveries...I guess I am an escapist. Can't blame me. Everyone wants to live in that lovely fireside, either of the mind or beautiful old memories that gets better like old wine. It is like living in the past, yet being attuned to the present ever so acutely than before. It is as though the present would always exist in the shadows of the past, guided by it, prodded by it when necessary, and out-rightly overpowered by it. For me, the past is alife, heaving and totally breath-taking; the present is a work in progress ...almost drab, it only becomes magical, as if touched by Potter's wand, as soon as it passes. The future is an intrigue I try to make less intriguing by a fusion of the past and the present. WISH ME LUCK!

THE PASSIONS OF ANITA

The first book

The moment the sound of screeching tyres could be heard as the car outside surged forward, he smacked her across the face with so much force that it threw her off the three-legged wooden stool, where she was permanently consigned as it behoved her status in the household. She was never to sit on the soft sofas. As she looked up at her assailant from the floor where she lay sprawled out from the sudden jolt, the expression on her face was that of calm sufferance; the inexpressible pain of a cornered prey knowing that, as sure as the sun rising in the east, the inevitable was about to happen. She did not even try to defend herself.

“Get up you tramp!” he shouted, standing over her, full of anger, or the sense of it, that seemed so righteous as though he were justly provoked.

“Leave her T” said another character that seemed the exact spit of the first attacker. “I will get her up in a minute” he sent a bone cracking kick into her rib and spat on her.

She gave a deep groan, too coarse for a female’s voice but nonetheless produced by her voice-box, and slowly struggled to her feet. She could not stand straight. She buckled at the waistline as pangs of pain invaded her body. Her ribs hurt as if they were all broken; her cheek smarted from the terrible smack and her body shook with a guttural hackling cough and before her eyes the room was swirling out of control. But her anguish was just in its teething stage.

The first attacker grabbed her and carelessly shoved her onto a reclining sofa as one would shoddily throw an unfeeling object.

“Bitch!” he cursed amongst an avalanche of other incoherent invectives.

This was it again. The circle pursued each day by her miserable life was arcing out once again in its pure darkness. In her nightmares, there were always these two men, no one taller than the other was, no one more fair faced than the other was; and none viler than the other was. They wore the same clothes, the cadence of their voices were indistinguishable; the one was like the clone of the other. Two competitors for Satan’s throne of evil, it seemed.  It would have been better that these two were not born on the same day, to the same parent. That it was exactly so was a catastrophe. Like a lamb at the slaughter table, she laid where she was shoved, unmoved by nothing else but pain, which she endeavoured not to betray.

In a singularly deft movement of their hands, the two tormentors let their trousers fall to the floor.

“Spread-eagle!” the first attacker bawled, as he went for his pants.

The second attacker was faster. He threw his pants away and jumped on her.

“Hey K” the first attacker said in mild indignation. “Stop cheating, I thought we had agreed that I would go first”

Their prey looked on. Unfeeling. Thoughtless.

K paused, withdrew his hands from pushing her gown up over her midriff and answered.

“You are too slow. I can not hold it any longer” his eyes were pleading, his manner was of that laughable demeaning trait found in the male gender when prevented from having sex.

“But we agreed” the first attacker iterated.

The victim simply laid there as supine as though it were all done with her consent.

“Please”

“No!” the first attacker said vehemently.

“Well, since I got there before you and since I had promised you earlier, I say we cast lots” the one straddling over her offered.

“Let’s”

So it was done in her honor as it was done, once upon a time, in the honor of a particular Messiah hanging on a death-tree on a now-revered once-dark-patch of a holy land. They cast lots with a one Naira coin. The first attacker won; and the second attacker, vacated his erstwhile position with an utterly maddening libido and an utterly indignant chagrin
.

The first penetration was delivered with all the energy that he could muster, so was the second and the third until it reached the tenth and it slackened. He took his pleasure deep within her: a stone, dead to the natural sentience of her own body. The second attacker climbed on in his wake, with an enormous libido that grew and grew till bursting point while he waited his turn.  He unleashed it all on her with selfish abandon. After that, they sodomized her and did many freaky tricks with her body. This terrible act of violation went on for over one deathless hour.

The abiding iniquity present in the heart of men can not be better reflected as it was by these two. To state that there was a shadow of devilry in every work of their wicked hands would amount to an euphemism, these two were ingrained devils. There was one remarkable thing, all these assaults was borne, by the victim, with an aplomb that would insinuate, to keen minds, that she was accustomed to this treatment so much so that it had ceased to excite her. The only expression of pain noticeable in her reaction was a wince, and the stream of brimming tears, which never fell, hanging stubbornly onto her eyelashes and glazing her eyes, giving it that shiny lustre often seen in glossy materials. She lay there nearly as expressionless as a doll.

After the obscene beginning to the day, as this outrage took place in the exact time deemed proper for breakfast, the twins, feeling fagged out, slouching on the two three sitters in the parlour, now beckoned on their victim to feed them through the mouth like they had fed her through every hole in her body not long ago.

“Hey, foolish, we are hungry oh!” the first attacker bellowed, his eyes showing content and yet the embers of a more natural tantrum. The victim scurried out of the room.

“Taiye, I doubt if I can lift a finger to eat”

“You are so lazy”

“No, I am not.”

“Yes, you are”

“We shall see when it comes to the second round” he said throwing a challenge.

There was no whit of remorse lingering any where in their dark minds. If ever mankind’s conscience could be thoroughly decommissioned, this they have achieved through and through. They were devilish twins, devious and artful to the extreme. Alike in face; alike in feature and alike in crudity, their ego was paramount. There was no room for human empathy; there was no room for nothing else except self-servicing. It was the fount they were weaned on from childhood-selfishness. They would take, and take, and take and take and clench their fists tightly so as to allow no occasion for giving. Giving never occurred to them, whether physically or spiritually. From birth, every thing was lavished on their cocky heads and it only serve to harden their cocky hearts. They took and took and took and took love and affection from all that offered and then clenched their fist thinking to give out would reduce what they already had by denying them the singular pleasure of being idolized by the givers. They took and took and took and even stole money never giving any out except if it involved a more exalting return.

Their victim, simpering in the kitchen, cooked their food without a thought as to the possibility of poisoning those who misused her, which was the most logical reaction. Her disposition will make an intriguing subject and may make absolute sense in the claptrap, guesswork and non-science of a shrink.  For me, perchance the fear of the twins did not let it occur to her. Her heart was so full of fear and supplications to God. Or she has a good heart. But as the culture of fate, that evil could befall and pester to the grave any creature, even the good-hearted, always prevailed, so it did in her life; and evil befell her again after she had served them their food and waited on them. They violated her more passionately than before; she reacted more phlegmatic than before. She was helpless. They lived in a big house.  Experience had thought her that the only assistant the walls of this sequestered mansion could render was to echo back her cries of anguish. And listening to one’s own cry was agonising and recalling it, frighteningly dehumanising. The surrounding fence, walling the house from the street was as tall as the wall of Berlin she had seen on TV last years and she was the only thing near a servant in the household. Without help, there is no way she could scale the fence like she saw people doing at the Berlin Wall.  There was no help, no exit. After the second round, there was another interval, in which she cooked their lunch followed by the third round that completes the circle of daily existence. In the middle of this, a knock came at the door.

Knack! Knack! Knack! Knack!  It was already 8:00pm.

They had arrived. A crazy scramble ensued.

Growing up

Flat breast, calves and nipples

Twig legs, hands and groins

Sleek cheek, chin and lip

All as bare as a Saharan strip

Yet shiny and smooth as muslin

And for all my pride

I was but from the earth

Just three-feet of height

Nearer to the white home

From whence we all came

The asphaltic street, house and school

Were all for sport

And many a thing

I could countenance with ease

As it pleases my whim

And eases my dithers

No blight ever blast my blithe

It was the hour of the sun

Free as an element

Sportive as the minstrel lark

Till one day

As the balloon goes up its way

Age struck and the infant faints

Brawny breast, calves and knotty nipples

Brawny legs, hands and hirsute groins

Bristling cheek, chin and upper lip

From the pores of swarthy hairs

The first pale stub sprouts

And the fever of age ridges my brows

No more blithe

No more free

No more larks

Till I return to my infant days

All grey, crooked and faint

For it is the hour of the nightjar

And lost is that pristine hour in “clouds of glory”.

17th of august 2005, 21yrs, Billet Anubis copyright

the great unilag team

sedate

Have I really become a crank?

And my mind wreathed by a kink?

All this I have come to think

As the land dressed in evening pink

When the sun down the horizon sink

Sitting by the ocean, the air silk

And I am left to a scrutiny, so dank

From polemist prodding me with a dirk

Prejudiced into thinking my feet are fork

My hand fanged, teeth serrated like one that suck

Blood, because I am an orthodox maverick

Beside himself in prescribing the stake

For those footloose like an insidious rake

Am I holier-than-thou in your existential clink?

I know, my words, your heart prick

Cause I have streaks of time-mark

Burnt into the skin like insignias of a rank

Of brooders hovering over humanity’s murk

I bare the crucifix of Truth, christened freak

My earthy mind bare the odium from a shusk

In knowledge, my spirit I dunk

I am a crank with a kink

And I savour the wanton crack

From myopic human speck

Billet anubis, copyright 2004, September 8