OWO

The days got colder and drier, lips chapped and dust settled on everything. We cleaned the tables and railings, discarded old, musty clothes. We scrubbed the floor, rearranged the sofas, and gave the living room a fresh face. We washed the window blinds and removed the dirt clogging the nets with broomsticks and wet napkins. We put Christmas cards on shelves and doors, hung colourful tinsel garlands across the sitting room. Sparklers burnt between our fingers. Our eyes shimmered like the lights. 

Mother would kill chickens and dip them in hot water, heads dangling or severed. My siblings and I defeathered and fried them, stuffed a piece or two in our pockets when mother glanced away. We ate and told stories. Stories of wicked seniors in their boarding schools, of relatives marrying and graduating and dying. On TV, a choir wearing berets drawn over their ears and skirts an inch from the ground, sang, Ọdún ń lọ só pin o, baba rere… “Ember” months were approached with fear and trembling. Yes, we’d come this far in the year, but this was the devil’s most active season, heralding sudden deaths and illnesses and grief, so that families gathering to make merry were flung into sorrow. We knew to pray harder. On Christmas day, we went to mother’s church, CAC Òkè Ìtura, where the preacher reminded us that Jesus was the reason for the season. Had we fully invited him into our lives? Yes, yes. We returned home and ate some more.

A few days after Christmas, our gardener, Oga Abacha—who rechristened himself David after General Sani Abacha died, though the new name never stuck—helped kill the goat for ọdún ńlá. Stepping into a New Year called for a bigger celebration. He slit its throat and held it down as it twitched and twitched and blood spurted into the earth. He would hang it up on a spike to gently roast, its teeth blackening in the crackling fire. Vultures descended on the entrails. It amazed me, the swiftness with which they pursued their wants. The remnants ended up in the refuse dump—an education in decay.

Before New Year’s Eve, father would come home from Lagos, where he worked and lived. We crammed ourselves into his car for cross-over service at St. Andrew’s Anglican Church, surrounded by giddy people throwing bangers. The ceilings were high, dizzying even, and my head bowed in reverence to God. At 12 O’clock, a wave of Happy New Year! went across the congregation. People hugged and clapped and jumped. Oh, the joy!

In the morning, we cooked outside with kòkò irin balanced on three cement blocks with firewood arranged between them. Ààrò mẹ́ta kò gbọdọ̀ d’ọbẹ̀ nù. Ẹ̀gúnsí, goat meat and fish, pounded yam, Jollof rice and ọbẹ̀ ata; home was the scent of chin-chin suffusing everywhere. When the fire started to doze off, we gave the wood light kicks and tossed in scraps. The yellow grew. I walked around the compound, scrunching dried leaves underfoot with glee. The youngest, I discovered early that I had to raise my voice to be heard, work hard to be seen. Retreating to myself was easier and, slowly, I began defining the “I” in “We.”

Relatives visited, many of them Muslims, and I remember quietly wondering what their hair looked like beneath their hijabs. Mother dished Jollof and meat into glass containers for our neighbours. Some got more pieces than others. I knew little about the factors that went into this decision. Did the woman who plaited our hair every week get more than the woman whose dogs disturbed the whole street? My siblings and I went from house to house, giving out food and Happy New Year! We returned with crisp naira notes gifted to us to “buy minerals.” And who could doubt our joy?

LAGOS

I was thirteen when we moved to Lagos. For a long time, I experienced little of the city because I went to a boarding school and then university in other states. People minded their business during Christmas. We did not go knocking on neigbours’ doors with bowls of rice and goat meat. Harmattan was kinder.

My half-sister Bisi, a nun, visited every Christmas. She would come to my mother’s side of the house, announcing excitedly, “Mama Sola, it’s time for carol!” I knew what to expect: a cake, Catholic hymn books, and boredom. There was a year I told my mother I couldn’t join them because I had terrible menstrual pain. I had menstrual pain alright, but it wasn’t terrible at all. I just didn’t like being there. I’m not sure what changed, but somewhere along the years, I started looking forward to the carols. Family, imperfect as we were, became sacred in those moments. How sublime to share in each other’s humanity, to be here right now on this cosmic oasis, singing and breathing and praying? How lucky we were.

Sister Bisi would start a song with her sonorous voice, and everyone would join.

“Daddy,” she turned to him once. “Will you pick a song?” 

“Twelve Days of Christmas,” he said.

On the first days of Christmas, my true love sent to me, a partridge in a pear tree

Five gold rings…three French hens…a partridge in a pear tree

On the twelfth day of Christmas…five gold rings….a partridge in a pear tree

“Twelve Days of Christmas” is not the easiest song for most people. For the elderly, however, it was a great challenge. Father struggled to catch on, his lips quivering in anticipation of the words, ready to have them form on his tongue, but having them slide by. He had grown feeble. I felt a tinge of sadness. God, please. Year after year. My siblings left home, relocated to other countries, got married. Five became three became one.

Traditions demand our attention. They need time to become and remain a thing. The last time I saw Sister Bisi, she expressed how proud she was of my writing and my journey. She died suddenly in February 2018 and the carol died with her. A thing falls apart to reveal whose labour pillared it.

A few days to the end of December 2021, father sat in his favourite chair in the living room, face gleaming. He looked younger, his skin brighter. It was the happiest I’d seen him in a long time. I remember pausing to memorise that moment. He died less than two months later. For his funeral, we returned to his church in Owo, walking slowly down the aisle behind his casket. For you are dust, And to dust you shall return. The ceiling was not so high after all.

ANN ARBOR

I moved to Ann Arbor in 2022 to begin an MFA program. I quickly realised that I preferred my loneliness in America. Perhaps because I have not been here long enough. My loneliness in Lagos was embarrassing. Here, it makes sense. It’s not my country and I’m still trying to build friendships and I’m surrounded by people who are very different from me and I’m aware of some of the stereotypes that come to their minds when I tell them I’m Nigerian and there are racial and systemic issues that have existed long before I was born. And. Of course it makes sense. Anyone would have moments of alienation and out-of-placeness in such circumstances.

I miss Nigeria for many things: the food, the live music, the character, the zest, the collective drive, the humour! I miss being surrounded by people I could laugh with till I tumbled on the floor, kneading my stomach, thinking I really could die right now if I didn’t get some air in my lungs, yet unable to stop, the side of my left eye wet. I miss constantly hearing people speak Yorùbá, this language that I live in. I’d also been seeing, with more clarity, that many of the professed ọmọlúàbí, a principle rooted in the values of integrity and compassion, were bloated with bigotry. The presidential election was coming; the country was racked with anxiety and ethnic strife. Home had long stopped feeling like home for many. Lagos always seemed to me a place I was passing through.

I had planned to spend Christmas with my brother, but thousands of flights got canceled because of a storm. Outside my bedroom window was white with snow. Further out were trees with some browns and plenty of grays as far as my eyes could see. Huron River had frozen over. Many evenings, the orange brilliance of the sunset splashed across the sky and I followed it as it disappeared behind the horizon. How quickly darkness had been descending compared to when I arrived months ago. The University of Michigan Hospital stood at a distance. On occasion, I watched the air ambulance flying to its pad on the building and my heart ached for the person fighting to remain here. Will they make it? God, please.

I got into a taxi. Strewn all over social media were pictures of couples in pajamas sitting in their living room, wrapped gifts and a Christmas tree twinkling behind them. Social media displays of romance have been on the rise in recent years, becoming a thing, along with other public expectations ranging from sweet to egregious.

At my uncle’s house, I posed with their tree, watched Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery with his family, ate Jollof rice, and got a present. This surprised me, moved me. I’d only received a Christmas gift once, a sum of money from my father, promptly used to buy a guitar that I tried and failed and tried to learn, until my nephew and niece broke the strings, rescuing me.

I spent New Year’s Eve in a club with a couple in an open marriage. I’d been seeing him for a few weeks. It was fun and delightful, different and low-stakes. Transience can be thrilling. They knew an Afrobeat party would please me and they wanted to please me, which was nice. We drove into the night. The DJ was shockingly good. We danced and drank and flirted, counted down to 2023 on top of our voices. Morning came. Laughter and chatter over breakfast. They are history now, like many people I used to know, lost to death or life.

My family is scattered across four continents. Multitudes are fleeing Nigeria, shedding their selves and ancestral lores. The gap yawns between friends and lovers—no one’s fault, sometimes. The building in Owo still stands. The building in Lagos still stands. But what is a house without its people? What is a person without shelter?

Traditions are steady; they are also malleable—like what Louise Glück finely called, “substitution of the immutable for the shifting, the evolving.” Not everything must endure. Accepting this comes with a flavour of grief, one that is helping me approach shifts and endings with something that is starting to look like calm.

ENCOUNTER

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn / A red wing rose in the darkness / And suddenly a hare ran across the road / One of us pointed to it with his hand / That was long ago / Today neither of them is alive / Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture / O my love, where are they, where are they going / The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles / I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder – Czesław Miłosz.

I learnt this poem by heart in 2015. It made me grieve a past I did not know. I recited it to myself often: walking alone, standing in a queue, on the cusp of sleep. I wished to peep into Miłosz’s head for the memory of writing it. What life had he known to view loss with wonder?

An encounter can be a place, too, a city of two, a private universe spanning a few seconds or lifetimes. Life is long. Sounds banal but I’m still learning to grasp its significance. Life is long because several lives can be contained in one. Life is long because there is time to change the one you’re currently living, but not many have the privilege, support, or courage. Life is long because you can face the work that lies before you with grace—the grace to be patient with yourself until you start walking like yourself. Life is also short. Fortunately. Time gives value to its brevity. If experiences and encounters could be repeated forever and ever, if we could live forever, how would we truly cherish anything?

It’s Spring as I record this. Flowers are blooming after months of dark and cold. Kayaks glide on Huron River. Everywhere, the ephemerality of everything. Perhaps, someday, I will be with my family under the same roof. Perhaps I will be able to pick up the carol again. A lot can happen for the worst, but an assurance that life deeply loves me comes from the mixed bag of possibilities. Here, for now, living a life I am proud to call my own.

Everything is passing. Everything will pass.

About the Author:

Kemi Falodun is a writer and journalist from Owo, Nigeria. Her work has been published in Al Jazeera, Catapult, Guernica, The Guardian UK, and several publications. She has an MFA in fiction from Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she won the 2023 Henfield Prize in Fiction, Hopwood Award in Nonfiction, and the David Porter Award for Excellence in Journalism. She’s currently a Zell Fellow.

*Feature image by Viviane Okubo on Unsplash