I.
VULINDLELA
Bebesithi _ people said
Unyana wam ulisoka _ my son is someone who doesn't get women
Angeke ashade _ he would never get married
Vul' indela _ but open the gates
Siyashadisa namhlanje _ I'm taking my son to the altar
~ Brenda Fassie
As a child, I would dress myself up, like a bride. I would tie my mother’s lappa around my waist, veil myself with her mayafi, fold my father’s long tasbih into a layering necklace, and wear either of my aunties’ heels. I would perfunctorily reduce the fullness of my countenance.
Here, a bride is expected to be coy and to comport herself with propriety. An eager and restless bride is seen as shameless, one who would get an ultimatum from a troop of women. Is it not a man she is eager for? Give her a year, just a year, after she must have welcomed her first child. Shameless thing! I would imagine being taken by two of the no-nonsense aunties in the family, escorts who could straighten anyone who threatened their nephew’s comfort, even my in-laws; they would hold me by hands as they lead me to the car, to my new abode, to my husband.
*
Should my mother today become a soft salubrious wind that ripples through her children’s clothes — a hand that grasps them with a tender and warm assurance when she becomes one of the guardians of this compound, firmly standing behind her children, praying for them to be, I would have many things as memorabilia to wear around my neck, as a reminder of the intimate relationship we share.
I often wonder how bland a soul that is stripped naked of music would be. One of the many things I would forever remain grateful to my mother for, is music. I have come to love Bob Marley, Brenda Fassie, Mariam Makeba, Elton John, Lucky Dube, Celine Dion, Onyeka Nwenu, Brandy, Sani Aliyu Dandawo, and others, because I grew up listening to my mother play their music.
Much later, she explained every lyric with an unquenchable enthusiasm when I showed interest in her rich playlist. My mother loves telling stories. Of her favorite artists, she often talks about how Bob Marley’s baggy jeans are still in vogue today and how Brenda Fassie was dubbed “The Black Madonna.” Her personal stories are even more interesting. She once told us how she went back home to her parents in Anambra, after a long stay with her grandma in Edo, how she and her cousins took the shillings that were offered to the shrines in Onicha to buy okpa and gulisuwa. How she climbed Ikpoba Hill in Benin in the mornings to help her paternal grandmother sell goat meat pepper soup and cornmeal and akara at Eki Osa, and how at ten she used to board boats to go see her maternal grandmother at Agenebode.
When she tells these stories, you could see a sparkle that has been lurking behind her eyes. It is as though no man had ever shown interest in seeing and hearing about the hills she had climbed, the shrines intruded, the paths walked barefooted as a girl plying the route to womanhood
This, my wanting to see and hear my mother, to finally be seen too, is perhaps one of the reasons she loves me in a fashion that’s glaringly different from my siblings.
*
My mother talks about my wedding with joy. She envisions the kind of woman I would marry: a handsome, educated and lettered young woman; one who would complement my beauty, who would fill her beloved son’s insecurities and uncertainties. This wife, this woman, is a trophy my mother is willing to go to any extent for.
She talks about how she would wrap her head in gogoro, her train of friends behind her, spraying money on her as she dances: doing for her as she had done for them, too, at their children’s weddings — a customary refund.
I have never heard my mother talk about any of her six children’s weddings but mine. While many mothers anticipate their daughters’ weddings the most, I can’t pinpoint a single event where my mother talked about any of her four daughters’ wedding, or my elder brother’s.
Lately, I feel my mother is walking on eggshells. One time I had a boil somewhere around my groin and walked as though I had been forcibly penetrated. My mother refused to send me on errands, she told me to try to walk properly, to avoid people talking. Another time, I came back home from school to complain about how little my allowance was, and why it must be increased. After all, isn’t she the one who said I shouldn’t go to school and be doing nonsense? She flared up and told my aunt that I wanted to be sleeping with men for money. I wonder, till date, how my mother interpreted “doing nonsense” as sleeping with men for money, and not cyber fraud or cultism. She knows.
“She knows, and now she doesn’t talk about my wedding with the usual excitement. Now it is with a loud, lingering plea, a reminder that come what may, it is my destiny to marry a woman, to save her from being ostracized from society and the company of her fellow women. It breaks my heart to think of what would become of my mother, the day she comes to know of who I truly am, this inextinguishable part of me. She would break; she is that fragile. But not being who I am, to avoid her breaking, would be choosing to die a second at a time. To shrink for her to bloom on the grounds of societal expectations.”
I anticipate my wedding, perhaps more than my mother does. I want to have a colorful Hausa wedding. But I know my chances of getting married; having an elaborate wedding as a Nigerian Queer man are quite slim. It is immeasurable, the level of ephemerality in which most gay men love you. And as each day passes, I tell myself that it is pretty much okay if I don’t have that or its equivalent at all. It won’t reduce me in any sense. And I am not even trying to cushion that into my conscience. It is a reality of life, one which we must all come to terms with, Queer or not.
When I look at my mother these days, I feel pity for her; I feel it is undeserving, the heartbreak she would suffer when the ifs and buts are eventually knocked down. Now, I hold on to each and every moment we spend together, for tomorrow it might all cease to be. I might no longer be her beloved, I might be thrown out to the streets with nothing but my first name—that’s if I am shown much mercy to keep it.
I wish most times that my being were a switch where I could break what I am connected to and make a connection to something entirely different from who I am: to the person my mother and others expect me to be. But it is impossible, a barren attempt. The contextual meaning of Brenda Fassie’s song “Vulindlela” is, “Accept The Situation”. People who had thought her son would never marry must now accept the reality. Here, for my mother, as much as it breaks my heart, and unbearably so, she must accept the situation that engulfs my being and the entirety of this being in itself. I do not know how not to be me. As Virginia Woolf said:
“_unless I am myself, I am nobody.”
II.
HOME
Ayodele was the very first home I would want to occupy. He joined the JAMB tutorial center weeks after I had joined.
He was tall and slightly bent. His sporting waves haircut shone of Pears Baby Oil, and he smelled of scented water. I always had the impulse of dancing into that scent. It was a peaceful and homespun smell. Ayodele was sturdy in gait and in character, which owes to his father being a military man, I suppose. He never flinches whenever the tutorial master use his whip on him. I wanted to feel his warmth and security, to be enamored by him.
Weeks after his resumption, we clicked. He would drag me to go outside for lunch during the break period, even though he bought nothing but a bottle of water. He didn’t like street food.
When I pulled his legs, he would twist my hands behind me with a playful intensity, or pull the hairs on my legs.
I dreamt about him. Sometimes in the dreams, he was in my bedroom, at the center of my bed, having a pillow fight like I had with my elder brother. In another, he was my defender, punching the boy next door who at every given chance called me a boy-girl.
I felt safe within the warmth of his gentlemanliness. He was gentle with me. I was weary of most boys, reserved before them. I never knew what it felt like to be seen as me by most of them.
To him I was simply Abba, a whole, and not the half-baked effeminate boy that other boys saw me as.
*
I left the tutorial because my immediate elder sister gained admission into the university. I would sacrifice a whole year for her so my parents wouldn’t be drained financially by two children’s school fees.
Ayodele and I continued our friendship on Facebook, even though his “last seen” most times read: active one day ago. I was content.
He texted me one day, asking me to come to the tutorial center, that he needed to see me. His words carried a sense of urgency. I was happy, I felt so filled that I gave my yam pottage to my elder brother. I thought: finally, there was a rainbow in my cloud.
Do you have Porter’s number? His words and countenance became a bar to my hope. I saw a steady and calculated version of me in him. Unlike me, he didn’t tremble. Unlike me, he’s privileged. He told me within the codes of brothers to talk to Porter, my fair skinned female friend, with thick long kinky hair that she cradled in protective twists or weaved with rubber thread. He liked her.
My legs went limp. My brain failed me, too. The only thing I remember was that I got home in one piece. I met no one at home. I brought the floor of the living room to my knees and cried my heart out. I looked upward and started begging for forgiveness of sins unknown. I thought I must really have done something wrong to have had to grieve: not the loss of someone who was taken by death, but of someone who simply could not be with me.
Ayodele taught me that this love, too, breaks.
*
As a gay man, you would think every man is a home to you. But the lot that we are subjected to doesn’t even make us ponder the realistic question, “what kind of home is he?” before we walk into it. The struggle is the lack of deserving men. A man to call yours, a man to hold hands with, to walk down the avenue with, to be safe with. You would think come what may, you have someone by your side, even if it ends there. A home to run to. You see nothing else but the man.
But the truth is, many of the men out there aren’t home enough. In some, you can barely close your eyes, talk more of exploring the depth of sleep and rest.
While as a femme Queer man, a bottom, my one belief had been that I must search for a home to occupy, a home to provide for me. I have shifted that earth. I am putting conscious efforts to be that home, too; to be desirable to others and offer it rent-free to anyone who truly merits it. I am home, too.
III.
LINGUA FRANCA
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
~ Toni Morrison
I grew up with no language. All my life, until recently, I thought I was a tiny fragment pinned to an insignificant space on the surface of earth. And when I found out otherwise, that there are a plethora of me scattered in different angles and surfaces of the earth, I learned that just like me these people, most of them, are/were dumb.
As a Black gay man who is Muslim and Hausa, doubly marginalized, I have no language. Who do I have to teach me this language, who do I have to communicate with the few sign languages I have garnered over the time? Nobody. Even if we do have a language, as Queer people, is it a lingua franca? It is a language spoken in hushed tones and codes.
*
When I was first molested as a child, I was ten or eleven. The man, a neighbor, should be in his late thirties at the time. He would make me come to his room on Sundays when his wife had left for church.
Nobody thought I needed protection from such a prey; it was a man after all. What would he possibly do to a boy?
I felt stained years later. I felt robbed of something clean and pristine even though I had always wanted to go to him or he to me.
I had contemplated many times to tell my mother, but what could I possibly say to her? That a man, her good neighbor, who had impregnated a seventeen year old and welcomed a pretty boy with her, started molesting me the very day his child was dedicated at the church?
To speak in this language is to speak in jargon. She would never understand.
*
My father died on the 2nd of March, 2023. The first thing that came to my mind after it dawned on me that truly he is no longer here, was that the silent and the gentle strength that pushed me to whatever zenith I think I have attained, now knows his boy is gay.
I was relieved at first; when he was alive I carried the burden of the inability to explain, and equally the fear of him knowing that a man’s embrace, no matter how light or tight, is home.
My father was born in a remote community in Kebbi which has no electricity till date. He grew in the delight of rice plantation and fishing.
I knew so little of him; I had declared him illiterate until a few months before his death because he couldn’t write and read in English. But my father was lettered, he wrote and read in Arabic.
He attended an Arabic school in Sokoto.
He could make rubutu — Quranic verses, written with tawada – caramelized sugar ink — on a wooden slate and wash it into a bowl for my siblings and I to drink.
Days after his death, still in the jaws of grief, I remembered the clergyman’s huduba, sermons, of parents’ duties towards their wards and parental negligence. How each parent would give accounts of how well they brought up their wards. And how some parents are so negligent that their wards now engage in nefarious acts, such as homosexuality. Such parents would meet their doom in their graves first, before the day of judgment – yawm Ad-Deen. They would be hit with a heavy rod, so that they would sink into the seventh floor of the earth, which would squeeze them until their rib cages lock into each other, and barf the very first milk they sucked from their mothers’ breasts.
I went mad with fear and the rage of the injustice, I reached out to God and told him how unjust that would be. Of course, the very first thing I learnt as a law student was that law is not justice, but a means to justice; for justice to the poor isn’t justice to the rich, justice to cis-het folks isn’t justice to cis-queer folks. Nevertheless, It was brutal and indescribably unjust to picture my dad in his grave going through that because of me, because I love men. I cried my heart out; the thought of it was heart wrenching.
My roommate held me loosely; it was foreign to him, a boy wrapping a fellow boy in a hug. He had no words for me but he held me regardless.
It is sad that I could not have possibly talked to my father about my sexuality. He grew up in a community where boys, at seventeen, are already betrothed to much younger girls, albeit, he didn’t want that for any of his children. But he would be of strong belief that a boy is to a girl, and vice versa: it is the life to lead. Daddy led a quiet countryside life, even in a municipality with the hustle and bustle of urbanization. I am glad I didn’t bury him long before death even came to him.
IV.
TODAY IS YESTERDAY
Being Queer is like a child sitting on the edge of a cliff and watching peers immerse themselves in a lake. You watch them from your sitting position and at the same time, wondering if that is the measure of your life: to fall and break into pieces like a broken china. But someday you would go back as an adult, realizing that you’re ever deserving of immersing yourself in the lake, too. They would stand far from the cliff, pointing fingers as to how childish they act. But they don’t know that their yesterdays are very much your own today.
*
One day at one of the societies that I belong to, we had one of those meetings that cracked open with reflections. We were asked to talk about our highschool escapades. Everyone talked about their first kisses, dates, crushes, heartbreaks, coy loves that were suggestively expressed. I coiled into myself, dreading my turn; I had nothing to share in that regard, yet.
The fact: how could a boy as good looking as I am, not suit normality. It would be suspicious.
Abba, it is your turn. The patron’s raspy voice jolted me back to reality.
I had none to share. A level of fragility cloaked my response. My palms dripped with sweat as eyes fell and withdrew from me. Odd, they said.
Highschool wasn’t altogether a beautiful experience for me. I watched mates blooming in the bashfulness of boyhood and girlhood, while I nursed a deep cut. The one remedy I had was concealment – I buried myself in books. It was one thing that made me feel purposeful, something I held on to hungrily. I was seen as a nerd, the studious type who had no interest in the frivolous affair of dating and sex. When teachers threw questions at us, I was quick to answer. My classmates revered me because I seemed impenetrable. But truth to tell, I could have been an average student as most of them were, if I were straight.
I graduated at the top of my department, Arts and Humanities. I read that childlike envy in most of my classmates’ eyes, in their perfunctory congratulations. But they had more than I did. I would trade all that, to get to walk down to the school’s cafeteria on a date, to love and be loved, to date and be dated by a classmate or schoolmate, not in their own fashion, but in mine, that swirls with a boy’s.
When I gained admission into the university to study law, after the excitement of having made it to the admission list, lay a hope that I would get to finally be who I am. I applied to that university because I heard it had a significant number of fags who wore crop tops, leg chains, and septum rings. Even though it was said with a heavy condescension, I wanted to go to this university, to see these boys that reflect me. To be there is to have a chance to break out of the carapace of yesteryears.
There was a boy in my hall of residence, he used to come down from his floor to the kitchen on my floor to cook, alongside his roommates. He had black hair, with a skin tone like that of the ant hill. He was well proportioned. I liked him, but I was quick to bury the feelings, for all I had dared to love, I loved alone.
One blessed day, however, he walked past me and a friend who happened to know him. They exchanged pleasantries. I revealed my feelings for him to my friend, who told me that he was Queer, too. And he offered rll consent days later. I was with my girlfriends when the feedback popped up. I smiled. It wasn’t just positive, but he sent a screenshot of their chat, where he had said: I do see him in the kitchen, he’s Ali. I have always liked him, too. I was delighted, immensely so.
My girlfriends said I was acting like a highschool lover, and being overdramatic. They knew nothing beyond my being into men. They didn’t know where the shoes hurt. And I had no language to tell them that even at twenty one, I was very much sixteen.
V.
LESSON NOTES
I have heard so many older women, my mother is one, tell the women behind them not to settle with men they love more than the men love them. For such affairs rarely ends well.
The second semester of my freshman year is one period that would always remind me how brutal the reality of not having a single formula as a Queer person, to navigate the goblin realities that encircle you, could be.
*
A chilly breeze rose from the lagoon nearby and held the night tightly. I sat on a concrete bench, and folded myself: chin resting on my knees, hands wrapped around my legs. I wondered if he could sense the anxiety that hung over my face.
We would arrive nowhere if you don’t open up about what really happened that night. He said with a calculated authority, his face wore no expression.
He was my therapist.
I had never thought I would have any reason to see a therapist. I didn’t have any opinion for those who did, I had no choice but to see one. I had attempted jumping into the lagoon the week before, for a reason I couldn’t grasp. I needed clarity and help. I went to the school’s counseling unit, but what I got as help was to pray more and to man up.
My father had died weeks before, but I knew it wasn’t grief that had made me want to offer myself to what lies across the bar.
After a chronological detailing of how my day went on the said day, and allusions to some days in the distant past, my therapist arrived at a diagnosis. It was plain and piercing, how he told me: you’re suffering from PTSD. Each word that made up that expression carried an equal amount of certainty, though with emphasis that it might change in our subsequent session(s).
PTSD? It was ludicrous to hear that. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from what? I argued with him. What gave him the right to analyze my situation with such certainty? But he was calm. He gave me a week to reflect.
And then I remembered three days later, while folding clothes, it all came back to me: I had felt my neighbor’s hand, the one who molested me as a child, scrubbing my body. And then the professor, who touched me without my consent. And that time when I was nineteen, I had called a man who was twenty-six at the time, love. On our first date, euphoric with great expectations for my very first date, we met and his idea of love was to kiss me whether I liked it or not. He didn’t stop there, he went for my groin, too.
I paused folding the clothes. Indeed, the night I had attempted to jump into the lagoon, I was coming back from what was supposed to be a date with a guy I matched with on the yellow app. He, too, had touched me without my consent. I was shaken. I searched within my being and I asked myself: is this what I am reduced to — a reservoir of dirt?
I felt pity for myself and was almost helpless. But what could I have done? There is no formula nor a manual attached to this being. You pick up your lessons from trying experiences. And you either come out alive or go with the flood of these experiences.
I am told that this love is not taught. And the one solution we have for this is patience. Gay boy, be patient with yourself, as I am learning to, as well.
VI.
COURAGE
The first time I adorned myself with courage, the earliest I recall, was in 2019. I had stumbled upon the wall of a young Nigerian Queer man, on Facebook. I was surprised at the number of engagement his updates garnered from Queer people. What was more surprising was that it wasn’t from burner accounts. I had never thought in my seventeen years of life then, that it was possible to be carefree as a Queer person in Nigeria.
I spent hours on his wall, until my phone battery went flat. I had never been so restless for power to be restored. The mention of his handle was like a prayer in my heart. I messaged him the next day. He took time to explain things to me.
I created a burner account to connect with many Queer people. I joined groups on Facebook, where I kept getting messages such as:
Do you receive well?
Are you btm or top?
Where do you reside? Are you a Twink?
I was overwhelmed. One blocked me because I told him that it was inappropriate to ask me if I could receive well or not, without first asking if I would like to sleep with. He was in his late twenties. He said I was disrespectful and in his language: you go tey for shade. That sort of rejection, for a seventeen-year-old me, from my very own, was more heart wrenching than any other I had known prior. I ran to A to ask if my action was inappropriate.
He laughed and told me to brave it. And even years later, I am still braving it.
Days after, I’d meet another, who kept urging me for a meetup. Three days later, I left home to go see him, miles away. I never knew gay people were (are) lynched, robbed, burnt, because of such meetup. He was a predator, a kito.
It was on a windy night, with a chillness that held lightly and pierced its way through. And yet my throat was parched, my thirst, unquenchable; it was as though the Sahara held me by the hands and took dwarf strides with me.
I had sworn to never take that path again. But I did. For every path I made, it led back to the one place I know — men.
*
Briefs, shirts, pants, and bags flung over the four bunks in the eight-man room. Dirty plates heaped at one angle with the hotplates. Signatures of previous occupants were scribbled on the cream colored wall. The louvers, turned shoe racks. Different colognes, mixed with the smell of sheer masculine sweats, dirty clothes and plates masked the air.
I took note of what would be my room with twenty other occupants for the whole academic session. It was my freshman year at the university.
I sat on one of the lower bunks, my luggage at my feet. My heart yoyo up and down. I tried as much to collect myself together, but I couldn’t. I never had to live in the midst of so many boys. My phone vibrated, it was my mother. I picked and she asked me how well I was settling in and went further to ask what hall of residence I got and the room number.
Biobaku, Room 006. I don’t know where I’d sleep yet, I’m a floater, the lowest status in the hierarchy of a room in the hall. I muffled my voice, my eyes fixed on my shoes. I felt as though all the boys peered at me, as if they could pick up the feminine scent on me, in my voice, (even though I have come to have a coarse baritone now) my effeminacy, which would be plainly interpreted as homosexuality.
Akwai Allah. She reassured me of the presence and capabilities of God. I hung up.
I was broken, shattered, and forged, in that room. I fell and equally rose in courage. I slept and woke up with the thought of what if they come to know. But they came to know one day.
On that day, my roommate, who I had come out to long ago, said during a heated argument with other occupants:
Gay people deserve to be killed. I’d kill them, if I could. Why man go dey love man?
I felt betrayed.
It wasn’t so much as his words, but the fact that I had taken three hours of my time to send him an email in which I lifted my veil for him to glimpse who I truly am. I had thought of him as a safe space.
I set the room ablaze with that reveal. The sting turned everything gray. For some minutes, a heavy silence hung over the room.
I breathed freedom that day: that quill-in-air lightness. I looked at the universe, I ransacked it, I looked at what I called troubles and I asked myself, what is it really, am I to lose ? Nothing! And from that day I lived, a free bird amongst them.
But if I would be honest, I don’t think I’d have this sort of courage when it comes to my very own folks. The accommodation my roommates made of my sexuality is tinted. They revere me because I cook for them, because they see me as an intellectual, and partially because of my course of study—law.
The respect (it’s not even an acceptance) is conditional. Remove all that, and I would most likely be treated like a cancerous tumor.
*
On some days, I find myself consciously thinking about the character of Pray Tell (Billy Porter) in the movie, Pose.
Pray Tell died before death came. He buried himself, even before his body became cold. I grieve his character, his tragic fall. Man was extinguished. Even with liberation at hand, the damages done were irredeemable. On some days, fear engulfs me. What if I’m not half as strong as I think I am? How far is the journey of courage? If we don’t die for who we are, what else would we be dying for? How many times do we really have to choose between living and merely existing—is it a one time thing or a never-ending affair?
But the bitter part about courage is that it is not a one time thing. It is something you have to constantly renew.
Courage, as with all charms, becomes impotent and fails you. I cannot say that I will never ever succumb to family or societal pressure. Many have before me, and many would after me, sadly. Nevertheless, may I have the courage to always choose to be.
About the Author:
Haidar is first a storyteller, before a writer. He is a law undergraduate and a social media manager for the Hominum Journal. He considers cooking his love language, a part of him shared with others: to feel his love. He hopes to become a full-time husband, someday: homemaking, tending to his children, gardening, and having an undisturbed time with his writing, and also volunteering for some community services, such as pro bono.
Isele Magazine 
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