Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun: Don’t Cha Wish your Grandma was Cool Like This?

Seeing Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s book sitting on that shelf, yellow, black and with other colours, I was drawn to it. It was a sealed deal that I had to buy this book that had a title that touched my heart (I get sentimental that way). Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun. I knew if I did not get the book, I would be doomed to creating versions of the story in my head. Yes, mules worked so hard. They did. But not even a mule deserved to take ice cream to the sun.

Wait, why would a mule take icecream to the sun? A love offering. It wants to make his love offering with the icecream but is doomed to a Sisyphean task. And we know the ice cream would keep melting off. What makes this mule keep returning to get ice cream for the sun anyway? Will it ever succeed? Even mules, beasts of burden that they are, do not deserve to work this hard. Maybe this mule would succeed. Maybe it would get such a heap load of icecream. It would melt and melt but it would be large enough for it to have a little to present to the sun...

Enough of my rambling. I had to see what was in this book. My mule did not make an appearance in this book. What I found within the pages was an encounter with the soon to be 75 years old Morayo Da Silva. She is not your typical 74 year-old. Morayo, a retired professor of English is feisty. She has toe rings and stuns her younger friend when she announces she wants to get a tattoo on her back:

You want a tattoo?

I do.

You mean that while I’ve been trying to convince Zach that tattoos aren’t cool, you, his honorary grandmother, are about to get one?

(69)

Morayo, on the brink of her 75^th birthday is sensuous. She loves flowers. She fantasises about sex, about being touched and she carries the memory of a beautiful affair with the Brazilian photographer, Antonio.

She currently lives in San Francisco but has lived everywhere: New Delhi, Lagos, Jos, San Francisco. She has dined at the Buckingham Palace, dined with Mrs Gandhi. She has been everywhere. Through the hundreds of books she has read, she has even been to more places. She currently lives alone, lonely sometimes and very eager to reach out to people, particularly the younger generations.

Her body is in top shape. Her eyes are aging fast and she has occasional lapses of memory like when she forgets to lock the door.

I read the book for the second time this week and what did I find most fascinating about it? Just like the first time, it is the beautiful and bare way an aging woman is depicted. It is a remarkable portrait of a woman as woman, not as a mother, not as an embittered lover. Morayo Da Silva is a woman who has been through it all but is really hardly defined by it all. I remember being on the cusp of puberty and seeing an elderly woman seated, topless, her nipples resting on her stomach. She was in her sixties and did not appear to be bothered about anything anymore. It was a jarring image and I wondered if that was what old age did to everyone. Remember Enitan’s scary grandmother in Everything Good will Come? Old people are not supposed to bother about many things, except maybe find religion.

Morayo wins the battle against her aging body, even when she has the fall and arrives to a strangely orderly house from the recuperation center. When her eyes fail her and it appears she will lose her driving license as a result, she still has the final word by driving her Porsche the way only a woman with her spirit can: “This will be a great drive. I can just feel it in my bones. ‘Come on now, Buttercup, let’s make this next light! Let’s overtake this slow poke in front of us. Come on baby, gimme what you got.’ I rev the engine, sit up tall, and roaring, we go” (118)

This novella gives you the gift of Morayo Da Silva in the sophisticated-without-trying narrative style of Sarah Ladipo Manyika. Manyika’s narrative style is so beautiful that you feel like reading portions aloud to yourself. It is not an angry book. It feels fresh, different. You are almost guaranteed to fall in love with the protagonist, that is, if you do not overdo it like her young acquaintance, Sage: “... I almost wanna ask her if she’d be my grandmother, like my spiritual grandmother cos she has this calm about her and just talking to her makes me feel better. And then she wants to know about my tattoos” (115).

Yes, I can picture Morayo Da Silva, a la The Pussy Cat Dolls, going: “Don’t cha wish your grandma was cool like me?”, except she is too cool to brag about being cool.     

#teamnatural #teamrelaxer #teamobserver

There is one big madam I want to talk about today. We spend most of our time making sure she is beautiful. Sometimes, she is grateful, sometimes she is not grateful and will go ahead and do her own. Who hasn't had a bad a day when bob refuses to bob, sleek refuses to be sleeky? Days when your hair makes you realise she has a mind of its own... Task-master proper. When she is happy, you are happy, When she is not happy, well, you are lucky if there is a wig nearby. As if that wasn't headache enough, now I have to make up my mind between #teamnatural or #teamrelaxer.  Let's look into this hairffair.

Hair is a trending topic in 2016.

My hair, richly black hair. Kinky, strong. We go way back. My earliest memories of my hair are of me seated between the legs of Aunty Moji. I had very thick, very full, very black hair. My hair was stubborn. If the big black comb went in, it could go in and pull me up. The comb and my hair might not have been ready to part ways, but I could tell that my scalp was getting tired of having anything to do with the two stubborn lot. Some days, it felt like my soft innocent scalp, caught between the two stubborn one could not bear it a moment longer.

It wasn’t long before I discovered that my hair was a capital issue. The hairdressers dreaded digging their hands into the thick, black forest of my million coarse strands. When they made it, they kept muttering and complaining. If it were straight, it would reach to my neck. I did not enjoy the trips to the hairdressers either.

Then someone got the bright idea of relaxing my hair. The hairdressers liked my hair better. Before the end of the quarter, I had lost all the hair at the back of my hair and become an iya eko proper. It was clear I had to cut it all off and start again. But, no, I did not give up. My hair taught me my first lesson in determination. I went back to making my hair again.

Following that, I went through the horrors of having my hair partitioned, pulled and imprisoned in twine. It hurt but I did not want to cut my hair. We eagerly nursed it for the next encounter with relaxer and how it would blow out. My hair is a warrior, you see, since then, it has survived sleepless nights of being entwined in threads, braids, heat that made me wonder how come my brain never got baked. I became bald on the back of my head and learnt not to rest too much on the back of my head. I learnt to run away from rain.

Then, after enduring relaxer burns here and there while having no relaxed hair to show for it, I was advised to tow the path of no-lye relaxer. My story changed. :d

My hair and I were in a good place or so I thought when Adichie’s Americanah came along. Americanah, a book someone has said is 5% about hair. Ifemelu could not handle relaxer and my friends and I concluded, beht Adichie can exaggerate jor. Relaxers aren’t that bad now. How can she talk about a character’s hair getting that destroyed over common relaxer? With all the no-lye relaxers out these days...

I should have knocked on wood. That same month, I suffered a hairccident (don’t worry, I won’t coin another after this). It was a ghastly accident. I tried a new salon o and that was how my sweet no-lye relaxer became fire and brimstone in five minutes. I washed it off and spent the next few weeks hiding under wig (they said I looked beautiful with it, if only they knew what it concealed). It became a matter that warranted medical intervention and calls from friends and family: eh ya, sorry, dear.

But no, I did not cut my hair. My mom begged me not to. I did not really want to in my heart too. It was a “Hold me, I will commit suicide” affair. I relaxed again. Using that same pack. Same product but different salon. I relaxed again and again and again...

All is well again...

Or is it?

All of a sudden, I see #teamnatural hair. This hair is fine o. So natural hair can be soft like this. I booked appointment with my barber. I pinged girlfriend who was natural and pulled it off really great. She had gone back to relaxer. Hard to maintain. No time. Over the couple of days, I see many relaxed to natural, natural to relaxed. I have made the move to and fro a hundred times in the past couple of weeks. All in my mind. I started to wonder, this #team natural of a thing, is it for real? Do these naturals get tired of it and just ‘form’ because, well, you can’t just go back especially if you were the nazi kind of naturalista? Do you get tired of all the products you have to buy and keep up with? All I just mean to ask is: whatever side of the fence your hair belongs to, what do you think of  “going natural”? 

As for me, Lupita might be my next turning. Or dreads. Or the Amber Rose lane. I really do not know yet. I belong to #teamobserver. While I observe, I will go natural in my mind today and remain relaxed in my mind tomorrow. I will even transition briefly and maybe get loced. What is your hair up to?  

P:S You wonder, all this long talk on top hair? Hair is a serious issue. Ask little dude who had his hairccident this week and sent me the message: “I am dead”. Men, sleep and wake up to find a prankster has shaved off all your brows. Women, wash your hair and discover your shampoo isn’t actually shampoo but shaving cream and something... and the prankster smiles and says: Just Kidding.

Democracy 101

I Know What Democrazy Democracy is

I wanted to paint the word “democrazy” over till it was gone but Aunty Primary Three beat me the last time I did that. She said I should simply draw a neat line over it. You can’t blame me. I was new to writing with pens. Pencils did not bring this much headache. Why couldn’t I wait to give up beloved pencil for biro? So, there in the neat line, you see the good education my parents paid for.

Those teachers back then taught us that “democracy is the government of the people for the people and by the people.” Boy, was it fun having a definition for once that had just four words, give and take a couple of preposition? It was fun, I tell you, and I shake my head for you if you did not know that definition. How on earth were you going to learn the gbim-gbim definitions of osmosis and photosynthesis then? So we loved that definition. The teacher who put the definition of democracy as the number one question was well liked too. It was a single word, “Democracy-Is-The-Government-Of-The-People-For-The-People-and-By-the-People!” We got up and swayed from side to side chanting it. We sat back smug. If I will add sweetener, I would say sit back, arms crossed with the smile and look of “beat that, dummie”, plastered on our faces. We only knew that we knew our democracy. Our country did not have democracy that time but we knew our democracy.

I belong to the generation of children born during the military era. We were taught Head of States, not President. Ask my kid bro who the Head of States is and he would wonder what you are talking about. We knew head of state, we did not know president. It was perfectly normal for us to sniff tear gas in the air and learn that the troublemakers had started again. Troublemakers were people who would not leave well enough alone. They will go and be provoking the government and getting killed. They were the crazies that would stone soldiers with pure water and get sprayed with bullets. No one would ask why they stoned soldiers or why the response was to kill them. Everyone would shake their heads and hoped their kids got the warning. Back then, 10 going on 100, fed on TELL, I said I wanted to study journalism. The looks I got said I was asking for a visa to the grave. You say what? Jour-what? I still had the definition of democracy locked in my memory card.

Then there was secondary school and the ultimate catastrophe. Teacher asked what democracy was. When we sang it, he said “Hmm, that’s correct but let me teach you another one.” So he gave us a long definition. Many of us good crammers were lucky to remember where the word “representative” “election” and all went. The old definition was good enough as it was, thank you. That is what I remember most easily today. I can force out the “new” definition but I liked it better when the definition was a chant, not a speech.

Someone has even said democracy means equal participation for all in governance through elected representatives. But as we would come to discover with many things afterwards, those people in school did not always get it right. We got democracy in Nigeria and then I learnt firsthand what democracy was.

I learnt from a good teacher, experience. I learnt that first it was representation all right, and you had better be thankful for that. How come you are so ungrateful to complain that it was not equal? We were meant to be careful about expressing dissatisfaction. Rome was not built in a day. Democracy is young, they said. Do you want the military to come back? There were doubts from a few angle, it was too good to be true that military governance could go just like that.

Many said democracy was too young anyway. Do you expect years of rot to be healed just like that? So we voted. It is democracy. Be satisfied. Even if the options were Bean Burger and Black-eye sausage to your non-vegetarian self or corned beef and tinned sardines to your non-flesh-eating self, it will be on records that you voted. It was your choice. You chose corned beef, we asked you. Why do you have that look on your face? I am cook bean burger. You chose me. If I turn your stomach, it is cook black eye sausage. He is trying to sabotage my culinary skills. He does things like sneaking beans into my pot at night. Can you beat that?

By the way, you complain too much. Wailers, that is what you all are. When there are people in other countries who do not get to vote and are still under dictatorships, you choose and you dare to complain? Listen, you know how these things play out.

Democracy is sweet. Let me tell you how. You are ignorant. Most times, you do not know what is right for you and your country. So, at the polling booths, you receive help. If you arrive with doubts about who to vote for, you become sure when you see stony faces that will banish your doubts immediately. You are spoilt. Confused wetin, when plenty rice and Ankara wrappers are being given? Wiser folks collect N5000 on the queue and do not have doubts. I heard somewhere in a Nigerian state, an entire local government was robbed for hours. Day light robbery... they were held at gunpoint. Do you know what I found interesting?

That they would later see the gang leaders on television and be powerless to do anything about it...

That by the time the robbers left, money was intact, no material property had been carted away.

The only thing they had stolen was the people’s mandate. The people voted at gunpoint. They were robbed of their choice...

They say democracy is a representative government where everyone has a say in the government, I have been saying, everybody has been saying.  Does anyone listen to us? Does anyone think about us?

Spoilt child that you are, complaining... did you know that one Yoruba word for democracy is “al’agbada”? , that is, those who wear agbada... This is the government of agbada-wearers. Why then must you complain about their expensive wardrobe allowance when you voted them in to wear agbada? Wasn’t that why you voted them in?

I know what democracy is. No school taught me this. Once, our leaders wore khaki. We did not like it because their faces were too strong. Their voices were too hard. They put trouble makers in prison. They shot troublemakers. They looted us blind. They did not ask anybody’s opinions before they crowned themselves. Then, we wanted democracy. Our leaders wear agbada now. They smile. Their voices are not always too hard. Once in a while, they tell widows to go and die. But when we talk, we have a say, right? They invite the widow to dinner... Most importantly, they wear agbada, dasall. 

IT IS NOT MOLUE…IT IS AN AIRPLANE O! (By Oluwole)

Struggling, pushing, shoving were the actions one could see from the pictures and video that rent the social media today about passengers trying to board their Arik flight to Lagos.

Déjà vu was the effect it had on me. Same scenario, in fact, same airline subjected us to this undignifying and embarrassing situation on April 25, 2015 at the Katoka International Airport, Accra Ghana.

My colleagues and I booked our return ticket long before we even left Lagos for Accra a week before. It was supposed to be a 0700hrs flight from Accra to Lagos. We got to the airport and checked in before 0600hrs. And then the wait began. 0700hrs – and there was none. 0800hrs – we were still hoping. 0900hrs – hope alive. 1000hrs – were we feeling hunger? To make it more interesting, no announcement from anyone. The Arik staff on duty was about to go off duty and did the best she could, which was to bring a trolley full of snacks and drinks for us. We were too angry to eat. We did not want food but Lagos. Time indeed heals all wound. One after the other, we walked to the trolley and helped ourselves, getting slight succor. We, however, still forced ourselves to remain angry.

And the lady for afternoon duty arrived. And before our very own eyes, passengers for the afternoon flight to Lagos started arriving for check in. 1200hrs – boarding passes were being issued to afternoon flight passengers. Morning flight passengers would have none of that. And all hell broke loose. Screaming, shouting, several punches to the table top of the ‘innocent staff.’ It only abated when we were assured that two flights were on their way from Lagos – placebo.

1500hrs – grade one hunger, I had to leave the airport to spend my last five cedis on proper kenkey and fish. Did I tell you all of Africa is the same? I bought ‘pure water’ just like in Lagos – that story is for another day.

After several hours of craning our necks to see the name on every newly arriving plane, an Arik flight landed at about 2200hrs. Wasn’t my flight supposed to be for  0700hrs? After yelling serious warnings to those loading our bags into the plane to attend to morning passengers first, we proceeded to the boarding gate. Over two hundred people struggled in no particular pattern to pass through a door that could accommodate only one at a time.

I shall never forget the look on the face of one of the cabin crew of a Lufthansa flight as they passed by us to board their plane. The look of disdain followed by a shake of her head said, ‘Africans will always be barbarians.’ Because most of the Lagos bound passengers were Nigerians, Ghanaian airport staff easily got tired of enforcing decorum. They left us to our devices.

Struggling, pushing, shoving…tug of war, or better still, survival of the fittest. I joined the band wagon and I got a place on the plane. And when it was filled, yells of, ‘I will stand. I will sit on the floor’ were firmly rejected by the cabin crew. We arrived Lagos at about 2345hrs. My 0700hrs flight.

So Arik air can mess up Nigerians with impunity. They can conveniently choose to merge two flights into one knowing fully well that many would definitely lose out – of course, no refunds. What a cool way to make money! In today’s case, they deliberately overbooked a flight to unethically maximize profits, leaving faithful passengers to tear themselves apart.

Where is the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA)? Where is the Ministry of Transport? Why are Nigerians always a soft target for unethical business practices? Where is the defender of the defenseless? Why hasn’t the wind of change blown to this sector? Arik air is a Nigerian airliner. Let us treat ourselves right before expecting good treatment from others. Others are actually watching. I rest my rant…no, case.

                                                                                                                           

The Audacity of Being too much Woman: Yoruba Parties and other Indignities Surrounding being a Woman among women

Preamble:

You see, in my mother’s womb, I did not behave like a girl. My mother said I was so restless that she thought I was a boy, turning here, turning there, tumbling... She said it got to the point that whenever she was in the doctor's waiting room, she had to turn aside slightly to hide the “unbecoming” way her stomach appeared to be the only one performing acrobatics. Before the scan, she was convinced I was a boy but I was not a boy. When I started walking, I wanted to be dressed in nothing but my brother’s clothes. I had my way but I soon received a memo that I was a girl, not a boy. That has made all the difference. And because I am lovin’ it, bent on not allowing anyone to make it a cage, and that has been all the problem. It has always been tumbling around, finding that spot where I am not being taught how to be a woman.

Scenario 1:

I go on a date. I am seated opposite my date. A waitress strolls in and turns to my date: “What do you want?” You would think she would acknowledge me, but no, the message was clear. She was not going to. I really do not know what was going on in her mind but my date had to ask me what I wanted before relaying it to her.

Scenario 2:

Yoruba parties get to me. I use the word “Yoruba” here before I am accused of hasty generalisation. You are a woman, you are related to the celebrant and you are seen, for one minute, to seem to be enjoying the party. If you watch the other women’s faces, it is the grimace of a cat when it is feeling what I don’t know (who knows what goes on in the head of cats anyway?), it is the shock that is usually reserved for rampaging cows. How can you be a female relative and dare to look good, dress like you are not a house elf and not have a pinched face? You see, the average family, from the minor “shooking eye” that I have done here and there, believe that when it comes to cooking party food for the family (of which there are plenty in the average Yoruba family) it is the “wives” of the family that constitute the work-force. I heard of a woman the other wives came to pull away from the party where she sat all well dressed - (feeling uppity, as they deemed it) beside her husband to come and join the other wives. Her husband was livid...

Scenario 3:

I sat down last week, doing my own thing when a conversation about a woman claiming her property rights started around me. It did not interest me until the woman talking said, amazed and disgusted: Obinrin-birin, (in the tone of “common woman”) doing that to men.

Scenario 4

300level, I was at a bus-stop when a mad woman made for me aggressively, yelling: “ashewo” besides other obscenities. I do not know how this fits in but let it just sit there. Don't tell me she was mad, I know. If I was in the mood for mental acrobatics, I would go on and say why I think it all adds up. For me, it adds up.

 Scenario 5

I walk into a room. I see two tables. A man behind one, a woman behind one... Most often than not I approach the one with the man behind it because it is usually easier, not always, but usually.

I find that it is all about women picking on women. Women staying within a box and wondering who that brazen woman is... What makes her feel she is special? What does she take herself for, us lying here in the mud and taking it, why can she not take it?

You see, I have observed that women with the biggest sob-stories on their marriages are very vocal in telling other women to “find someone and marry quickly.” What is it sef? Is it something about misery loving company or what?

If there are men who love to cook party food and women who love to dust the chairs, why must the man be shooed and booed off the cooking like it’s an exclusive club or something? I have seen women drive men off cooking, hair dressing and other affairs even when they wanted so much to do it. At that point, cooking which I love so much loses meaning and I just step aside. FGM, it is an old woman at the other end of the blade. It is mothers teaching their daughters to be good girls: Shut up, conform, behave and swallow it. Look at Janie of Their Eyes were Watching God, see Shug of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, see Sula of Toni Morrison’s Sula. It was women hating on them. It is mothers making some men feel like all women are their footstools.

Some people will say it is not really women; that it is patriarchy pushing them but no, there is no mistaking the vibe, the venom you get from a woman who believes you aren’t staying in your place. No, I am not calling women together to come and be forming “sistahs”. And yes, I know women have each other’s backs sometimes like the legendary tap you are likely to get from any woman of any nationality, tribe or standing, the whisper in your ear: “Am I stained?” I know that.

 

What I question is why some women are content to wallow in the mud and hate any woman who is “full of herself, thinking she is better than us”... bhet why?

“Mommy, I am not a virgin anymore.”

Ayo stood by the door. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She tried to think of other things, other places, of being the one who led green house to victory. Everyone had concluded that green house was jinxed. Green house had only had red house as contender for the last position. She had been miserable at being in green house until she saw that Uduak was assigned green house for the session. Not even Uduak could really look fine in the pumpkin-leaf colour that passed for green.

And now, today, it did not matter that she had led green house to glory. That her report card was a uniform blue... This instance, she had shrunk to the size of her hymen. Her mother, the custodian of the passageway between her daughters’ legs held court in the master bedroom. When her sister came out and hurried to the room they both shared without looking at her eyes, she knew her sister had passed the most important exam.

That result was more important than the report card that was still on the table, unchecked. It was only after they lay with their legs splayed opened on their parents’ bed and passed the test that the homecoming could really happen. Before then, they were suspended halfway like vagabonds. Today, when Ayo went in, she didn’t know what came over her. She merely blurted out: “There is no need to check. I am not a virgin anymore.”

First, there was the shock, the slaps, the teeth and all. Not once did she feel the urge to say she lied. As she lay there, bruised and pained, she stood straight in her mind, proudly stripping off the straitjackets of the good daughter and there had never been greater joy in stripping than at that moment. Where she stood, she was happy knowing she would never be raped that way by her mother anymore. It had always felt the way she imagined rape would feel. At that moment, she basked in the joy of knowing that the next time she would strip, it would be of her own choosing.  

Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen: Beyond the Fishermen, Let’s Play Spot the Mad Men?

For those who just want to enjoy a good, engrossing book and have no time for isms and literary reviews, Obioma's The Fishermen is a very interesting book. It is suspense-filled and has the capacity to truly surprise you. Sometimes you see it coming, sometimes you don't. Go read it. For the rest of you who are interested in long story, read my review :) :

During the weekend, I read Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen. The reading was punctuated by an unending commentary that may be summed up thus: “You should read this book.” I cannot believe this book is this good. I will try to talk about the book while not giving spoilers. It is a book that thrives on the suspense so skilfully woven that leaves the reader quivering on the brink of many emotions. It will make you laugh. At some points, I could not help but gasp. It is the story of Mr Agwu, his wife and six children: Ikenna, Boja, Obembe, Ben, David and Nkem. What I find most beautiful is the intense animal metaphors through which Obioma builds plot and characters.

I enjoyed the book immensely. If I were to have a say, I would say while the book is titled “The Fishermen”, do not be deceived. There are fishermen in the books but the mad men stole the show. The book has madness springing up where you do not expect it.

It calls to mind Chinua Achebe’s “The Madman.” When a well-to-do man on the verge of picking a title runs into the village naked on the heels of the mad man who has stolen his clothes, we cannot help but feel his anger at the mad man, however, we must concede that he had his minute of madness during which he forgot that he was naked.

In Obioma’s The Fishermen, Abulu, the madman speaks and turns the Agwu family upside down. It is a madness that will fall to the ground and tumble around for years. In the end, one would ponder if they were mad for dancing to the tune of the mad man in the first place.

What I find most interesting however is the way Obioma succeeds in engaging the bigger issues of postcolonial Africa and leads one to find the madness of a postcolonial society. What is more, Achebe’s Okonkwo becomes the motivation for Obembe’s actions, to dire consequences.

In the end, Obioma’s The Fishermen by intricately depicting madness and its course invites us to contemplate our own collective madness and be compelled to be ashamed of our nakedness. It catches a postcolonial nation lingering at the edge of the market naked. If we, as a whole, hearken to Obioma’s voice, perhaps it is time for us to leave the mad man to get off with the clothes he has stolen, it is time to  return home and be sane.

Simply put, it has been a long while I read a book that did not beg the question “And so?” Read Obioma’s The Fishermen  if you want to know what boys are up to when they are not raping or bullying girls. It is- pardon me this singular cliché- a breath of fresh air.

Why You Should NOT Mind Your Business (For Harper Lee)

I assume you were probably brought up to mind your business. If you have forgotten or you think the advice is out of date, a quick search on YouTube will show you what happened to the elephant that stuck its nose where it did not belong. You should see that video.

But, no, it is not to mind your business I want to talk about. I want to talk about not minding your business.

Harper Lee, best known for writing To Kill a Mockingbird died today. I am not a card-carrying member of the post-mortem club who think, on an artist or artiste’s death, he becomes the greatest person ever. Death does not make you good or bad... No, in my world, You do not get cookies for dying. Neither do you get a reprieve for dying.

That said, that book is my book. If I were to give a list of ten books to a Martian, it has a secure place on the list. When I remember the book, however, what touches me most and never fails to touch my sentimental bone is the trial of Boo Radley. Yes, Atticus Finch was the courageous lawyer who took a lost case on himself, putting his neck on the line. I write to talk about not minding your business and Harper Lee, yes... so, bring on Atticus but somehow, Dill steals the show for me. Dill, the little white boy that burst into tears had to be led away from the trial.

You must excuse me for dropping names. I think Alice Walker feels the same way I do when she says in The Color Purple, that to truly see the truth about a people, we must observe the children. If a single child is crying, it is highly important. She says we should ask: “Why is the child crying?”

Dill’s tears were not over his business. It was over the stench of his society which the adults had adjusted to.

I have always been asked why I bother with some of these things I go up and down disagreeing with. What is my own with male circumcision? Or with being interested in reading up all I can on the Holocaust? Or being the one bothered about FGM... For most people I have come across, no be today..

And so I seem to be one of those people who got the memo late that the world is crooked and no one can fix it. Yet, I cannot look away. Even when do not know how it is my concern, I just can’t turn my head and look at the other side. So I pick –isms here and there, carrying my mental placard when I know in my heart that what I seek in the world is not captured in any one –ism. I stay behind anyone who can shed tears and not leave trash for Lawma.

I doff my heart for the Harper Lees, who like Laaroye of the Yoruba pantheon, shed tears even more than the bereaved, for the Dills, the seeing ones in world where to be seasoned is to grow hardened and be able to look on at injustice without recoiling inside. For the men who are feminists, for the women for whom gender equity is not only feminism, for everyone who can cringe and sympathise with a cause that is not his.

How do you know it is not your business anyway, in a world where private companies go public and privatisation happens within the blink of an eye? How does one keep tab on what is one’s business or not?

Look what happened to the man who (thought he) minded his own business:

A man was in his house. He heard them shouting “Carry it”, “Nooo, don’t put it there”, “Why Should You Put it there?” He turned left, covered his ears with the pillow and slept even more soundly, cursing barbarians for not minding their business. “Carry it this way”, “Carry it that way”; our man slept on...

When the party was over, he found the thing at his backyard.

No, the story is not mine. I merely drew it from a proverb my father is particularly fond of which is translated literally as: “If you hear the clamour: “carry it, lift it”, if you don’t join them, it will be put in your backyard.”

So, I carry my mental placard and stand behind any –ism and talk that is for the sidelined because the affairs of man are my business. Every time the world has taken a step forward, usually it may be credited to the man who would not mind his business.

N:B: Please, give me the address of the man who said:”The darkest place in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality”; I think he deserves some flowers from me.

The Equally Blameless Foreskin?

Hello, there is a part of your body which enhances sexual pleasure due to the presence of nerve receptors and perhaps, offers lifelong protection kinda. In spite of all its qualities and not, it harbours dirt... we will have to chop it off. No, don’t ask why.

(Conversation that happened in my head: Hello, this is your brain. Do you really want to write this and be known as the young woman who wrote about this?)

Well, I did not have the good sense to listen, so, here goes:

Dick, prick... Words I have learnt to blush saying or hearing all my life. Especially “prick” a word I loathe very much. There is a story in there for another day. I take particular offence to the word “prick” because it reminds me of a lewd sick man (Now, I hate to even use the word “sick” in relation to the man, he contaminates the word) I met as a girl of fourteen. He was the first person to use the word “prick” to me. I hated his insinuations, his tone of voice, his lewdness; to cut it short, my encounter with him signalled a lifelong feud with the blameless word “prick”. Blameless, yes, because it is not about the word “prick”. What is wrong, for example, with a person saying “I pricked my thumb with a needle?”

It is about what it referred to: penis. Yes, I said it. Penis. A word we so love to shy away from saying. Did you know it was not pronounced “pe-nis” but “pi-nis”? As I grow older, I have found myself using the word on occasion and when I do, I sit up mentally and become all serious. Like, I dare you to make a joke of it. Yet, it is not about the word “penis”. If the word “penis” referred to school children marching on a lawn for example, there would have been no hush-hush around it. I have heard parents call it “tomboy”, “wee-wee”... children pick up the ... from their parents. I did. There, you have it, my penis subtext or history.

Before setting out to write this post, I spent a whole car-ride from Ibadan to Osogbo pondering where to begin. Should I begin with an announcement that I am taking on something people would prefer me to leave alone? I remembered my father looking at me as I made a point as a secondary school girl and advising: “Don’t be a leftist.” We always communicate in Yoruba. You can only imagine the seriousness that warranted that English.

Should I begin with a reference to the my status update on Facebook over a year ago on Female Genital Mutilation? We all spoke about it, angrily, passionately. It turned up important posters, one of them, a name I had only ever seen in magazines. People were angry. We were talking about the barbarism of mutilating the “blameless Vulva” as Alice Walker refers to it. We, amazons, picked up our spears and dashed out in fear of the blameless vulva. My sister and I, who can barely agree on women affairs, agreed on it. Female Genital Mutilation is a beast, Hitler, the devil, the this, the that. It was atomic bomb and all. We called it Female Genital Mutilation and addressed it as such but what we were essentially defending, which we did not mention, was the vulva.

Then, recently, I started to think of the foreskin which Sorrells et al (2007) refers to as the most sensitive part of the penis. Was the foreskin equally as blameless as the vulva? I remember my baby brother, boisterous, being taken to the hospital. He was some few weeks old. When he returned, he was subdued. He was not crying but he had the look of someone who had cried till he was emptied out. He returned as a half-empty sack of potato. Yes, children forget pain. I am sure if I asked him now, he probably would not remember the pain on a subconscious level. Yet, some people do not have the privilege of forgetting; one of them, my father, who vividly remembers his circumcision at the age of fourteen and the hellish two weeks that followed.

I started to wonder, why is there so much noise about FGM while everyone is very accepting of male circumcision? How many people know that every year, over hundred boys die from circumcision every year in the US alone? What is more, the deaths are often not attributed to circumcision in the death reports but to other causes like infection, bleeding, etc. And yet, experts, when pressed, attest to the point that circumcision has no intrinsic benefit. My question is not “why do we have to circumcise our boys?” My question is “Why do we have to cut off the foreskin of our boys, while ignoring their shrieks? What purpose does it serve?

Dan Bolinger’s stance, which seems pretty sensible to me, is that circumcision, which could be harmful and dangerous, should not be carried out on minors or babies. I agree with Bolinger that such decision should not be made for a person. Why is the foreskin the business of the society?

You would ask me if I would circumcise my son(s) if I had them. Well, to be honest, the answer is that I do not know. I think being able to stand and be honestly confused is the beauty of my journey as an individual. I had a lecturer when I was an undergraduate that would ask, “Are you confused? It is good to be confused. It shows that you are thinking.” In secondary school, I remember ending debates with a flourish, “I hope I have been able to convince you and not to confuse you that moinmoin is better than akara.”

Here, however, I do not wish to have convinced you. Heck, I am not convinced myself. I wish to confuse you. Our humanity lies in our ability to be confused... to be able to stop in our tracks and ask, but why did we choose this path?

N:B: In case you didn’t know, there is a process known as “Foreskin Restoration” and a movement, “Intactivism,” simply put, let the equally blameless “foreskin” be. I have heard the case for “Intactivism”, I have not heard the case for chop it off...

I'm all ears...