Editor’s Note: In partnership with The 2024 Abebi Award in Afro-Nonfiction, Isele Magazine publishes the winner, the runner-up, and the notable essays selected by the curators of the award. Azeeza Adeowu’s “I Know How Stories Like Mine End” is a notable entry.

Award Founder’s Note: What do you do when the yearnings of your heart are in contradiction with the demands of your religion and culture? In “I Know How Stories Like Mine End”, we feel the tensions that exist at the intersection of romance, desire, culture and community. Set against the lush and teeming backdrop of Ibadan, we are invited into a deep internal reckoning where love and hope triumph over the pressure of conformity.  

But Still, I Hope

The first time I visited Laolu’s home in Old Bodija, I immediately felt like I was back in the house I grew up in Alakia. The masquerade trees, leaning into his compound, carried me to a time when I was convinced that a masquerade living inside the tree was chasing me. The chatter of his faceless little neighbors reminded me of simpler years when my greatest worry was if my mother would find out I’d eaten at our neighbor’s. There was also the louvered window: little Azeeza expected the pockmarked design to grate her skin, but it was smooth—an odd combination that surprised me. Now, this same contradiction reflects my life. 

Laolu was part of that warmth I felt in his home too. He has that gift of making people feel at ease. He would talk to you as if you’ve been friends for years. Whether it’s a newbie who he teaches salsa, the bike man complaining about the cost of fuel, or a group of people at an event…you could feel people he interacts with shelf their defenses, laughing with him as he makes funny jokes, annoying jokes, dad jokes, serious jokes. That ease he made me feel was one of the things I fell in love with, and the fact that I first met him at a book event, then at a salsa night that my friend, Femi, invited me to. A man who reads and knows how to have fun? My genre!

In those moments when we were talking on his blue rug or his sofa, sharing stories of our childhoods, discussing a topic on Twitter, and speaking of our ambitions, I could forget the looming storm—the one I knew would come from both our families. But sitting there with him, his laugh dissolving the tension, his eyes sparkling, I could pretend, just for a while, that love was enough.

2. 

My former workplace wasn’t far from Laolu’s place, so it was easy to drop by on my way from work. We would laugh and talk, sometimes with a plate of spaghetti steaming from the space between my thighs on the rug. I told Laolu one day that I hated to sweep as a kid because I always got a weird feeling when the broom grated on the rug. He told me that I had been sweeping the wrong way and showed me how to sweep “with the grain.” Why didn’t I know this as a child? 

Now and then, while talking or buried in our phones, we would hear the voices of his neighbors who are not quite his neighbors. Although they shared a fence and we could hear their voices, they lived in another area that borders Old Bodija. 

For a long time, I thought my favorite thing about Laolu’s home was his big compound. When it rained, we would sometimes sit or lie on the spare mattress on the veranda and watch the wind threaten to snap the necks of the trees, the lashing sounds of the rain quieting our minds.  

But my favorite thing was the voices of little children from the next compound, playing and screaming. Sometimes, it’s their mom screaming. 

“Hanat, did I not just call you now? Are you ignoring me?”

“Mummmy, mummy. Abdullahi has started again o.”

“Firdaus, don’t you know it’s time for Ile Keu? Ehn? Is it every day I will be reminding you?”

We know the children by their names; we learned it from their clattering and chattering. I could tell who was the oldest—her voice had a certain tired patience, as though she was already used to being blamed for things. The youngest and the loudest, a boy, came across as the stubborn one, always scolded by his older siblings and by his parents. The middle child seemed to have a guarded level of extrovertism that she probably unleashed in full when outside the house. 

We never saw the kids, but it felt like I did. For months, the little kids came up in our conversations. They made us laugh and gave us talking points that made us unlock memories: the grumbling when they woke us on a school morning, the scolding when we played when we were not supposed to, and the screaming when NEPA brought light. 

3. 

I knew from the beginning that being with Laolu would be silly. My Muslim parents would disapprove, and his Christian parents would never understand. It felt reckless, but at the same time, it was the easiest thing I had ever done. Today, I acknowledge the recklessness while holding on to hope. I know how stories like ours end, but I continue to hold onto this love, this ease and certainty I feel with him. 

As a Muslim woman, I am told I can not marry outside my faith. It’s written in the Quran that Muslim men can marry non-Muslim women as long as they are People of the Book (Christians and Jews). Nothing was said about whether it’s the same for Muslim Women, but the unanimous opinion by male scholars is that women are forbidden from marrying non-Muslims. Men are the head of the home, and the children, by default, follow the father’s decisions. By extension, his religion. Muslim women who marry non-Muslims risk having their household run by a non-Muslim and converting to their husband’s religion. 

But how do I reconcile this with my belief in the equality of both sexes? I am tired of religion’s default that positions men as greater than; allowed things like leading prayers, 4 wives, and the right to marry whoever they want just because they are men. Why are men entitled to a higher percentage of inheritance? Why is there a curse placed on women who wear beauty products like wigs and perfume? 

These are the questions that religion never answers convincingly enough for me, leaving me stranded between faith and feminism, between my sentiments and doctrine. 

In the first few months of our relationship, it was easy to ignore the voices in my head asking how I planned to pull this off. My parents will not find it funny; it doesn’t look good on them at all. I imagine that the day they find out, my phone would ring all day and nobody would ask if I loved him, instead, they would ask what I was thinking, how could I do this to them. I imagine it may deteriorate from quiet interventions to loud ones as they start to assert their decree as my parents. I imagine the grip that holds me whenever I’m disagreeing with my parents would come over me, leaving my voice shaky. I wonder if that’ll be the day I announce that I have become an adult capable of making her own decisions and chesting the consequences.

In Islam, it’s almost a curse for your parents to be displeased or angry at you, so here I am in a limbo where I can’t choose between my parents’ displeasure and the love that warms and cools me.

4. 

Laolu and I are able to talk through everything, address what I did or what he did, and find solutions to keep our relationship healthy. My biggest flaw as a relapsing overthinker is that I like clarity; I like to talk about issues until it’s completely drained out of me. I do not have space to store anger, hurt, and misunderstandings that can be talked through. 

The one thing that has been difficult for us to make headway is how to deal with the differences in our religion and what it means for our romantic future. When we talk about it, we often have long pauses in between, both of us staring at space, the music from the clubs around his home filling up the silence. 

When we find our voices again, my anxiety works its way to my chest, and my head starts to work too slow and too fast. I get consumed by different thoughts: do I want to be the reason he rebels against his parents? Will the heartbreak that will scrunch up my mother’s face when I tell her be worth it? Am I prepared for a life where I might unconsciously give too much to make our relationship perfect? Because I don’t want people to be right about us not working out?

Once, a friend I hold dearly had said: 

“You guys are just having fun, yeah?” 

Fun? You think I’ve just been having fun for 18 months? Is this what people think this is? That we are having fun? 

I wept that night, overwhelmed by this adult decision I never foresaw. A constriction took root in my chest, my eyes burned with tears, and when they poured out, I hoped for a release in my chest, but it just held on stronger. My chest ached and ached, and it was there when I woke up the following day. 

Usually, when Laolu and I discuss our “future,” it ends with:

“We will figure it out.” 

“All I know is I want to be with you, and I do not see a life without you in it, so we figure it out.”

“But how?”

I think one of the first steps for me is to tell my mom. This idea comes to me on days she’s talking about my just-married childhood friend or some potential suitor that her friend recommended. Sometimes, I’m on my mom’s bed, trying to tell her about my relationship. My mouth moves then stops, moves then stops, and what blurts out isn’t the relationship but other mundane things like Seyi Makinde selling Agodi Gardens or the acid reflux that woke me earlier. 

I am not yet brave enough to watch my mother’s face break into a million pieces when I tell her. My friend once said, “Your parents really have a hold on you,” and he shook his head with the shocking kind of pity reserved for people who have it worse than you. 

5. 

As I grow older and my life becomes bigger, I realize how storytelling, whether an essay or a make-believe, makes people feel seen and less alone. This realization became stronger when I started to wonder if there were any books, stories, or essays on a Muslim woman and non-Muslim man relationship. How did they navigate it? How was it for them?  

I searched Google with different keywords, but the most I got were convertees and Muslim immigrants in the US, highlighting how the Muslim dating pool is too low to enforce a law that Muslim women have to marry Muslim men only. I also came across three scholars who disagreed with the belief that Muslim women have been forbidden from marrying non-Muslims. Where is it written? They argued. 

But that wasn’t enough for me. I needed real-life examples, someone like me from a practicing Muslim family in love with a man from a practicing Christian family. Instead, all I see are threats masked as righteous concerns from self-proclaimed scholars that my marriage is invalid if it’s not to a Muslim, that I would go to hell if I don’t marry a Muslim, that my offspring will be confused forever because of a selfish decision I made. Sometimes, I would try to hold my tears, lulling them with thoughts of not letting strangers’ opinions get to me. Most times, the saltwater that always seems to be too much in my eyes finds its way out, and I cry and cry, and I keep scrolling for someone to say otherwise. 

Why has nobody written about this? Why has nobody shared their story? Am I supposed to just figure this out on my own? I possibly can’t be the only Muslim woman in Nigeria who has fallen in love with a Christian and doesn’t have plans to end it.

One afternoon on Twitter, I saw pictures from a mutual’s court wedding. She wore a scarf, and her husband, whom I’ve interacted with before, isn’t a Muslim. From her tweets, I could tell she was a Muslim who was comfortable with calling out doctrines she didn’t quite agree with. 

I felt so relieved scrolling through her page. She felt like a gift, a glimpse into a possible future that awaited me. I had the need to message her, to ask her how she did it. Did her parents throw tantrums, how did he get his parents to accept it? Are they religious? How are they dealing with the differences in religion? 

It is when you’re in gray situations like this that you are most reminded of the importance of story, the need to find someone else who will remind you you’re not alone. Someone who would hold your hand and show you that they did it, and you can too. I’ve never felt so alone in my life. 

6. 

One Sunday morning, I sat in front of the mirror, relocking the first roll of my locs, and Laolu left what he was doing to sit behind me on the floor. One of the things I’ve learned from relocking my hair myself is that no one can be as gentle with me as I am with myself. Hairdressers made me believe that relocking had to be painful, that it was part of the process. Until I learned to do it myself. 

Laolu wrapped his arms around me, and my hands paused, letting the interlocking tool I was using on my hair fall into my lap. I told him I wouldn’t be able to continue with my hair if we were both seated like that, and he wrapped his arms tighter. 

He made a comment about how, with this pose, it was hard to tell where his arms began and where mine ended. I glanced into the mirror to see what he meant. My peering eyes moved past our form to my hair. My locs are a visual reminder of my self-discovery journey—something I put off for many years, fearing my mother’s disapproval. When I finally did it, it was an act of defiance, a quiet declaration that I had grown into an adult who no longer prioritized what others wanted for me over what I wanted for myself.

When my mother saw my locs for the first time, her reaction wasn’t what I expected. She didn’t disapprove, not outright. Instead, she wondered how long I planned to keep them and I said I didn’t know. She looked at the growing roots, curious about how they would become solid like the rest of my hair, and I explained the process of relocking.

“I like you very much,” Laolu whispered to me, breaking my concentration from my hair back to him, to us. 

“And I like you very much too,” I replied with a smile that spread across my entire body. 

We rocked side to side in slow oscillations, and I felt myself floating out of all this, this reality where I’m supposed to throw away a love that warms my heart, that cools my body, that catches me when I’m falling, that reassures me that I am neither too much nor too little. 

7

The last time at Laolu’s apartment at Old Bodija came with a lot of emotions: nostalgia, exhaustion, disorientation, gratitude, anxiety, and then joy—a miracle. 

Laolu was moving out of his home that had become my second home and I understood, at that moment, that a home held more than just roofs and walls, clothes, and books. A home is more than just protection—it’s a keeper of our memories, a witness to the lives we’ve lived. I wasn’t ready to let go, so I lingered, dragging out the packing, tracing my fingers along the louvered window, trying to capture that feeling I had as a child, trying to hold onto familiarity. The house held so much—our shared moments, our laughter and distress, my memories tangled with his. But I was too exhausted to cry, too drained to give in to the heaviness in my heart. I’d cry later. For now, we just needed to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind. 

We had just loaded the last of Laolu’s things into the moving truck when we heard them—the children. But this time, they weren’t just voices drifting from some unseen corner. They were right there. I turned, and I saw them right there, leaning on the rusty staircase, smiling and waving like they had always known me. These kids I’d never seen but whose noise and laughter had woven itself into the soundtrack of this place, stood there, beaming at me. 

I suspected the children were drawn by the commotion of our moving and the noise of the new dog, but no. In that moment, their appearance felt like something more, a miracle. They just appeared after months of imagining them. When I guessed their names, they lit up with surprise, and I smiled because I had long wished for this.

“I have a friend called Azeeza too,” the Middle child, a girl about 7, said with a shy grin after I taught them how to pronounce my name. She wore a loose floral gown that I suspected was passed down to her. I remember the youngest ran inside to call his friend to come see, “Auntiee.” I was filled with a sweet joy that pushed aside the longing I’d been carrying about Laolu’s move. 

This has now become one of my favorite memories of this house—the little kids showing up, real and close, almost exactly as I imagined. It gave me a little confidence that wishes do come through, even the small ones. 

I know how stories like mine end, but still, I hope. I wish. I pray. I sink into my lover’s chest, I whisper: 

“We will make this work. We’ll make this work, right?” 

 A statement, a question, a delusion, a manifestation, a prayer. 

About the Author:

Azeeza Adeowu is storyteller based in Ibadan, Nigeria. Some of her works have been featured on Amaliah, Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review, and Blue Minaret. In 2022, she was shortlisted for the Kendeka Prize for African Literature and nominated for the Awele Creative Trust Award. She spends most of her time reading, painting flowers, and going out to have fun (read: watching people go about their lives while imagining their stories). You can connect with her on her blog at thezyzah.wordpress.com.

*Feature image by ilham akbar fauzi on Unsplash