My mother loves to tell stories, and my favorite pastime includes sitting at her feet, staring up at her, and soaking in her words. Her words float around in a sea of oxygen and carbon dioxide, painting vivid pictures of worlds I have never known but feel so strongly drawn to. It is during one of these encounters that I first hear the story of the hawk who never learned to fly.
The story goes like this: Long ago, when animals roamed the earth freely and man hadn’t yet made a meal out of every bird, a hawk’s egg got displaced. How it found itself among a clutch of chicken eggs remains a mystery to me, my mother, and the ones who told the story before her. Some said it was a hurricane’s doing, others said it happened due to carelessness on mother hawk’s part. None of these theories hold water for me, so the mystery remains as unsolvable as why flight remained an enigma to that hawk. Born and raised among chickens, the hawk learned to live like a chicken. It tilled the soil for worms and wore its wings like vestigial organs.
Each day, it gazed upward and saw other hawks soaring through the air. Watching them, it longed to rise too; like the dreamer that it was, it wanted to feel the rush of wind beneath its wings. One day, it summoned the courage and marched its tiny chicken feet towards its father and demanded answers. “Papa, why can’t I fly like that?” I don’t remember my mother saying what the father’s response was, but if that hawk was Nigerian, it would’ve been dismissed with something along the lines of, “My friend, join your siblings to find worms and stop asking silly questions.” In the end, the hawk lived and died as a chicken, tethered to the earth by an environment that kept it grounded.
Now, years later, as I look at my own reflection, I catch glimpses of my mother staring back at me. I see her in my smile, I hear her in the gentleness that is my voice. I find my father in my footsteps, running from one end of Finance Bridge to the other. This morning, as I handed a two-hundred-naira note to a stranger whose smile I’d started looking forward to, I felt a familiar benevolence, a trait I know belongs to my mother. I wonder if, like that hawk, I too am made up of parts I have yet to fully recognize, shaped by air I have yet to fully breathe in.
But the air in Lagos, they say, is different. People claim it’s putrid, mangled with the stench of ambition and desperation, a thick cloud of dreams both nurtured and crushed. They say it leaves an imprint on everyone who dares to live here. It chokes you, moulds you, makes you want things you didn’t even know you wanted, and forces you to confront the version of yourself that will either survive or suffocate.
On a particular Tuesday, after a day of doom-scrolling on Twitter—not X because I am rebellious like that—I came across a tweet that said, “Before you choose your wife, choose her mother.” As I stare at the tweet that implies a daughter is a mirror of her mother, memories of my childhood began to surface. I thought of a time when, as a young teenager, an equally plump nurse pointedly called me out for being “fat.” I shot back, defensive and stubborn, saying, “My parents are fat, so I am too.” She laughed in my face, telling me her husband was big, but her son was slim, lanky even.
With that scenario in mind, I have come to a conclusion: It is a dangerous thing to confine a person to their environment, because to do that is to clip a person’s wings before they even learn to take flight. Though influenced by our environment, we are not doomed to repeat the mistakes of the people who came before us. Stephen Chbosky, through Charlie in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, tells us that even though we cannot choose where we come from, we can choose where we go from there.
I believe my favorite preacher puts it better when he says that we come into the world looking like our parents, but we leave it reflecting our decisions. As much as we breathe in our parents’ essence, there’s a point when we choose the air we want to exhale.
My cousin, a sweetheart who has only experienced four years on earth, reminded me of this when she looked up at me and said, “My sister, we have to find a husband for you!” Stunned, I asked her what she knew about husbands, and how she concluded that I needed one. Fascinated, I watched as she scrolled through pictures on my phone, categorizing my friends into “husband material,” “weekend husband,” and “the one who absolutely can’t marry me.”
I realized something; like the hawk, she had soaked up the environment around her—the adult conversations, the casual remarks on “finding a husband”—and let it shape her understanding of relationships. In computer science, they call it “garbage in, garbage out.” She was breathing in the air around her, and it was shaping her in ways she might not understand until years later.
Perhaps it’s that same air—the weight of expectations and unspoken rules—that drove me to take a leap without a safety net: I quit my job, plunging myself into the uncertain waters of unemployment. Before making the decision, I’d weighed every piece, questioned my motives, and asked myself hard questions.
“Am I running away from a challenge?” I wondered.
Someone newer and more dedicated had been outperforming me, and I wasn’t sure if my frustration was simply my ego bruising at the realization of being second best. Was I capable of more here? Could I dig my roots deeper and thrive despite the suffocating air around me? But after months of stagnant growth and frustration, I knew I’d exhausted my options.
In the end, I accepted that this wasn’t a challenge I was willing to face. My palms were still sore from gripping the reins too hard, from pulling strings that refused to budge. Some environments, I realized, are like sandy soil to seeds—no matter how vibrant the seed, it will never yield fruit there. And so, I walked away, leaving both myself and the establishment changed. This ship deserved a committed passenger, and I owed it to myself to steer in my desired direction.
People say you either adapt to Lagos or Lagos breaks you. And I wonder if we, like that hawk, have become so conditioned that we can no longer tell if it’s the air that chokes us or our own wings folded in self-preservation. I sometimes envy the hawks that never settled, that never learned to live as chickens.
As NYSC took me from the polluted, soot-ridden air of Port Harcourt and plunged me into Abuja’s quieter, cow-dung-laden atmosphere, I realized just how much the air around us affects who we are. On the day I was to leave Abuja, I paid an outrageous sum for stitch braids and learned to stay clear of salons that offered you snacks. One shiny forehead and an empty bank account later, I was on my way home when it dawned on me that I forgot my charger at the salon. Panic set in. When I told the friend who had accompanied me, she shrugged, “We’ll just get it tomorrow.” I was shocked because where I come from, such forgetfulness would have been a catastrophe, a cause for alarm. But here, in Abuja, and with my friend Gije, everything seemed slower, less urgent.
The next day, we simply retrieved the charger and continued to Niger state for NYSC camp. I spent three weeks in Paiko, Niger State—a place I hadn’t known existed before then. The air there was different, a blend of early morning horns, parades, cold showers, and personalities as diverse as the dust clouds that seemed to settle on everything. Some days, I wondered if it was a fever dream, but the photos on my phone prove otherwise.
For three weeks, I observed as people from different backgrounds navigated life in ways peculiar to them, and arrived at a conclusion. The hawk who never flew lives on in each of us. We are creatures of our environments, shaped by the spaces we inhabit, the people who happen to us, and the silent expectations that wrap around us like a harmattan breeze. Some of us learn to spread our wings despite it, while others remain tethered to the ground, our wings folded tightly, weighed down by a familiar gravity.
*
Yet, I remind myself, air is not just something we breathe in—it’s something we exhale, too. We take in the lessons, the stories, the pressures, and we transform them into our own narratives. And sometimes, we can choose a different atmosphere, refusing to let the pollution of past expectations limit our flight.
The air in Lagos may be thick, but I have come to love it. It carries the scent of ambition, of people who wake up every day determined to thrive, no matter how heavy the odds. And maybe that’s why I’m still here, breathing it in and exhaling something new. I’ve learned to carry pieces of my father’s determination, my mother’s benevolence, my sister’s childlike wonder, and my own resilient spirit. These are the qualities I bring with me as I navigate the paths I choose, despite the smog.
I don’t know what kind of hawk I’ll become, but I know I’m no longer a chicken. And as I look in the mirror, I see traces of my mother and father, but I also see someone who has learned to spread her wings, however tentatively, in a world that would rather see them clipped.
About the Author:
Inokoba Tovia is a creative nonfiction writer with a knack for turning everyday chaos into compelling narratives. Known for her ability to find life lessons in the most unlikely places—whether it’s a barren mango tree or her reality as an African first child—Tovia’s writing is as introspective as it is relatable. She specializes in stories that resonate with Gen Z and Millennials, blending humor, wit, and reflection to inspire and amuse. When she’s not crafting essays that make you think and laugh, she’s probably watching a Kdrama or consuming enough milk for a small country.
Isele Magazine 