A SHADOW ON THE CLIFF

To Esther Afolabi, 

It’s been seven years since we started this journey together. I hope you are observing. I really hope or wish you do. 

Between me and the passengers on this bus were my firm memories unfolding in my head. The memories persisted, transforming from roaring noises to a soothing whisper as I expected. They remained unwavering, stomping through my mind, curious that I might whimper as they shoveled the moments I had forsaken. Without anything to go with, I was on transit with these memories very early in the morning. One after the other, these memories kept rushing in, roaring and whispering, and without any hope to hold onto. 

It’s okay! I thought, and leaned on the bus window, with a black polythene bag and a medium-size-Ghana-must-go stacked with shoes and clothes on my lap. I couldn’t bear the vivid memories in my head this morning. 

The early morning dew began to filter through the bus windows. The driver drove past Wásìnmí and stopped to pick up three women waiting at the edge of the road. They stood near a handful of people beneath a shady tree opposite a wooden shed that had a sparse painting of two men, with bottles of beer, feasting on an empty bowl. The shop owner might have thought about his customers when painting the two men. He knew his customers could either be bus drivers or mechanics because those men either looked like a driver who was in a hurry or a mechanic taking a nap with his shirt stained with engine oil.

  The women entered the bus, bearing complaints and sacks of garri, gbúre, and efó tètè, rebukes of their children’s misconducts – how one had refused to go to school again after being flogged in school, and comparison of their husbands’ shortcomings, shared stories of the things that happened in their small town, and calculations of how much garri and gbúre and efó tetè they would sell in market today as alájàpá. Why would your creditor stop you from coming to sell on the last market day? Why would she do that? Was it not her money you were raising? So your gburè got rotten two days after plucking them at the stream? Why did your son, Omóyelé, follow the plank traders to Oko Gedù? Was he not supposed to be in school?

There were ten women on the bus that morning, and they were all going to buy or sell at the market. The women were strangely anxious, and there was a frustrating air. Their conversations were filled with–frustration of their husbands, discussions about prices of goods in markets, determination regarding how to instill discipline in their children, and hope for their sales at the market today. An old portly woman, who sat beside me, wouldn’t stop talking about anything she heard the women complained about. She wore a faded ankara blouse and wrapper, and a long cotton scarf to wrap her head, neck and ears from the morning cold. She spoke in a high, loud tone. 

“Bring your son to market next time so he can see what life would become of him if he thinks going to school was too tough for him.”  The old portly woman forcibly sipped the juice from an unripe orange, squeezed it to extract the juice, spat out the seed, and then she continued. 

 “This is what I did to Motara, my late sister’s daughter, when she started failing her schoolwork.” she snapped her fingers. With spite, she added how her late sister had trained Motara to be slow to neglect, that Motara spent days pondering every instruction given to her, she would linger on chores and that this habit, perpetuated by her late mother, had left Motara behind in everything.  

“Motara followed me to the market five times to work as an alabaru”. The woman asserted, slapping her chest to emphasize her authoritative actions with her late sister’s  daughter. 

“My daughter begged me…”  She shrugged, perhaps to dismiss or demonstrate how she brushed off Motara’s plea. The old woman’s stern words cut through the bus chatter, triggering the memory of Fola, my elder brother. Listening to her, Fola’s distant cries echoed somewhere in my thoughts while the bus moved quietly. Fola had a little history of his own; a history that was nothing but little cum pain. I was forced to remember his struggles vividly.   

Fola started leaving  home when my mother was sacked at the bread factory. He started with small things at first–staying out late, creeping into the house after disappearing for two days–but soon he stopped coming home and so his absence from school followed. 

“But I only answered her when I saw the little improvements in her mid-term tests.” The woman added, without mentioning her daughter’s scores. Instead, she smiled, somehow sensing my gaze. By then, she had finished the juice in her orange and had tossed the peel out of the window, a simple gesture that brought back memories of home.

Some years ago, my family had the oldest house on the street and we were many that lived in the house. We were so many, yet lacking, and like a sea of faces in a barren home, we shared a collective burden of our empty hands and hungry souls. My father had six children; two sons and four daughters. With the numbers, a sense of desolation seeped through, weaving us together in silent suffering. We were all taken away, somehow it always seemed we lost ourselves while struggling to survive, except Fola. He was different. He was like the edge of a cliff, looking under to watch how his family moved beneath, and it did matter if nothing came out of it. 

“What’s your name and where are you going?” The old woman nudged me after sensing my gaze. Her eyes were kind,  yet they also held fear I wished I could understand.  

“My name is Kúyè and I am traveling to Odédá.” I said, with a trembled voice. I made a noise that sounded like a halfway between stifled sob and a nostalgic sigh that surged within me. 

As a child, no one ever talked about dispersal of siblings without being scorched by a strange remorse afterwards. I had heard stories about a mother or father’s loss and how siblings were whisked away by family members, but mine was entirely different.  My siblings were taken away from us because our parents could not afford the means to care for six children. My father was alive, but he had no job and no means to care for us. He had only an old family house, an inheritance he got from his late father, a barbing salon that was later demolished by the chairman, and a wife with six children to look after. It was as though he had not only inherited an old house, but given permission to expand a family tree that would later be whisked away. 

“Nbo ní Odeda?” the old woman asked, but I did not answer. Instead I pulled out a microchip my mother had given me last night. It was a description of her sister’s shop in Odédá, Ajòké Alámàlá. She instructed me to show it to anyone who asked me about my destination in Odeda or anyone I encountered along the way if I seemed lost. The old woman relaxed her back, her lips moving silently as she read to absorb the information. This reassured me. I wasn’t merely searching for her response; I was accepting that what was happening to me wasn’t incidental, and whatever was to follow was deliberately planned by my parents. I would now live with my mother’s sister–she has more money, or perhaps another means to care for me, since my parents couldn’t fight for my living. They couldn’t fight the hardship that wrapped us around, or fight for the situation that tore my family apart. But now, I wondered if this was what Fola was fighting for–despair, food, until he disappeared from our lives. I wondered if he was fighting to fit in, to find a place in a world that had already taken so much from us. 

Before the old woman returned the microchip to me, the bus slowly came to a stop. The bus driver hurriedly rushed out of the bus, complaining that one of the tires was flat and he forgot his spare tire at Abúlé Mékò. Voices inside the bus slowly shifted from a smooth chatter to dissent murmurs about how the heat in the bus would affect the fresh gbúre and efó tètè. At intervals, the voices always remind the driver that alájàpá wouldn’t tolerate any disruptions of their morning. I couldn’t complain as a child soaked in distress. Instead, I looked into the surrounding bushes on the edge of the road, watching as the morning dew slowly began to fade away, and wondered, with my hands on my chin,  if these memories of  Fola or my family could fade along with it.