Editor’s Note: In partnership with The 2025 Abebi Award in Afro-Nonfiction, Isele Magazine publishes the winner, the runner-up, and the notable essays selected by the curators of the award. Chinwendu Queenette Nwangwa’s “Hold Me in Love, Hide Me in God” is a notable entry.

Award Founder’s Note: The brutal and the divine collide in this raw, unflinching account of a young woman’s journey to love. Directly responding to the theme of ‘witness’, Hold Me in Love, Hide Me in God is a survivor’s voice belting beyond the cage of silence and shame, claiming victory even with bruised palms.

I have no childhood memory of my parents vocalising their love for me. Yet, I knew their silence was not neglect. From them, I learnt of a love that is present in the dailiness of things, in answered requests, in finding ways to improve a loved one’s life.

Evidence of this love abounded. The dazzling floral and pastel dresses of beloved childhood, with matching hats, socks and gloves procured for me when I asked. Enrolment in a music program which, they hoped, would offer friendship to their lonesome six-year-old. Writing lessons, received on my father’s knees, to build confidence in the expansiveness of my ideas. My parents’ beaming smiles as their little one—in the loose green shirt and too-long tan shorts of her Boys Scout uniform—saluted Donald Duke in Calabar’s U.J. Esuene Stadium. This joy, a reflection of their desire to help me build a self-image and worldview unlimited by gender. Is not investing in the well-being and future of one’s offspring irrevocable proof of love? If there are memories of their vocalised love that elude me, I blame the treachery of my brain. An organ I learnt to distrust as a teenager. What began as suspicion festered into distrust with each journal entry that showed me a different memory from what my brain recalled. Only in my most wounded memories does my brain align with my journal. In its treacherous mirror, I am a child failing to forget the first time I was told I was loved.

The first time I heard I love you, it was my cousin’s justification for his behaviour. He was twenty-one, dark and tall, with a slightly protruding belly and hands that seemed too large for everything they touched. I was nine, and my chest had been grief’s resting place for months. The adults said I was too young to understand my father’s obituary which claimed he was seventy-five; too young to comprehend loss as his body—fair skin still supple and barely creased—was sealed in a coffin and lowered to a liver-brown grave, too young to understand the tradition that made me dance through the thunder and dense greyish smoke of 21 cannon shots proclaiming the burial of Ntigha Mbano’s paramount ruler. I understood enough, and if my father’s death broke my heart, my cousin’s weight broke the body clinging to it. Before I heard the first I love you, I heard his ragged breath in the humid darkness of a Calabar June night, felt a large warm palm steal the scream from my lips, his other hand moving over goose-bumped flesh. I heard menacing whispers in my ears next, an assurance that he would kill me if I told anyone. Then I heard promises that no one would believe me. I heard that even if they did, I would be accused of not only enjoying these transgressive sessions but also orchestrating them. By the time I heard his first I love you, I was aching to understand what was happening to me. So, I believed him. From him, I learnt of a love that is pain. For years to come, it would be the only one I recognise.

The second time he told me he loved me, two years later, it was a familiar pain. Before I heard this second I love you, my body turned traitor. Menstruation had arrived a year before, staining a cream bedsheet, my plump body doubled over. The moisture of ovulation drew a different violence from my cousin’s hands. A rain of slaps across my face as he accused me of infidelity. If my brain had learned to rewrite my memories, my body now learned it could bear false witness against me. I am not sure what stopped him, only that his palms stopped smacking my face when they became wet with tears and mucus. The minacious tone slipped from his voice as he flipped me over, whispering sweet nothings. Face pressed into the pillow, struggling for air through crushed nostrils, I hoped his hand on the back of my head would push hard enough to break the bed frame. I wanted evidence; something outside of me as proof of the inward splintering. Instead, I got an explanation for the beating wrapped in a second love disclosure.

The next time someone said he loved me, it was on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in Calabar, the air heavy with petrichor and the sharp ammonia stink of chicken droppings from the poultry shed nearby. He was my childhood best friend’s 24-year-old brother. Home alone, surrounded by the pale-yellow walls of his sister’s scattered bedroom, we traded stories from our lives. Something close to awe warmed my chest at the idea that an adult thought there were enough stories in my brief existence to match his. I was staring at his angular face, so it was easy for me to drown in the murky pools of his eyes when he slipped I love you into the pocket of silence after I spoke of my cousin. The rasp behind those three words was so familiar that there was no mistaking what was asked of me. I love you meant hands parting legs, weight pressing down, my body no longer mine. There was no confusion in my mind, save one—why he harassed the teenage boys who tried to befriend my friend. What had I done to deserve the love he thought his sister did not deserve? He also gave me Postinor-2. Two small white circles pressed into my palm. For your health, he said in a flat voice removed from the passionate grunts of minutes before. I did not know what they were. Yet, I ignored the acrid taste of uncoated pills on my tongue and swallowed them dry while he watched. I trusted that his love could cause no harm to me, beyond pain.

The next person whose love I became acquainted with was his sister, a mousy girl, soft velvet skin the warm hue of caramel, who often peered up at me through thick coke-bottle glasses that made her eyes huge. We were 13-year-olds, hiding in a corner at the back of the cavernous secondary school hall because we did not feel like attending Junior WAEC prep classes. As we sat with our shoulders hunched in our failed attempt at disappearance, she took my hand in hers and examined it like a palmist. I fail to remember the specifics of our conversation. Yet, in my mind’s eye, I can still see the dust motes floating in the air as I love you fell from her lips in an almost inaudible whisper. I waited for the hem of my school-issued blue striped gown to ride up, for a hand to search the space between my thighs. When it did not come then, or days later, I took a private oath to make her happy for the rest of our lives. When she was mean to me, when she made me the punchline of jokes with little comedic value, when she pretended that I did not exist until she needed something, I reminded myself that this, too, was love. From her, I learnt of a love that is an idol, and I, a worshipful penitent, head permanently bowed at the altar of a nameless ache. 

****

Barely a year after her confession, my childhood best friend transferred to a Christian school. Accustomed to rearranging my life for her approval, I assumed a reunion would please her. One evening, blood drying on my knuckles, I suggested moving to my friend’s new school. My mother was so confused by how I had become wrathful enough to knock a classmate’s teeth out, and desperate to save me from myself, that she agreed. It is there that I found a form of godliness. In my first week, a classmate, a slender, pretty boy, the shade of moonless night, expressed his interest in me between disjointed praises of my beauty. I was still tethered to the mercurial embraces of my friend. I had nothing to give him. He settled for receiving my help with mathematics and further mathematics.

After three weeks spent beside each other, heads bent over equations on the same prep table, he gained enough credibility to weave a story of skin sliding against skin and held breaths at the filthy waste disposal area behind the prep halls. His lie fashioned wings from the loose lips of slighted teenage boys, and by the end of a windy evening in May, the boarding house mistress saw an opportunity to bring me to the light of God.

My Casio watch shone a neon 21:00 as I turned the door handle. I had gleaned from others that a trip to the boarding house mistress’s room meant something had gone terribly wrong. But she’d sent for me, so I stilled myself and stepped in. Close the door and kneel down. Though it was my first time there, the dread building in my chest robbed me of all curiosity. I paid no attention to the colour of the walls or how every object fit so perfectly in that neat, small room. As soon as my knees met the cold terrazzo floor, she sprang up, her tall body dressed in a pink t-shirt and grey leggings, towering over me. Stretch out your hands. Did you have sex beside the dustbin area? You are a dirty girl! You want to destroy him! Do you want to destroy yourself? Sentences and questions punctuated by the crack of a cane on my palms, drowning out my repeated No. Too confused to explain and too obstinate to claim a charge that was not mine, I denied her the admission of guilt she sought. So, she reached for something better. Give your life to Christ, and I’ll let you go.

Three looks were enough: one at my angry red palms, beads of blood blooming on raised welts, the second at the wicked glint in her eyes, and the third at the indifferent face of the small, round clock above her head. It was 12:37 am. I offered up my life to her Jesus instantly. And from her, I learnt of a love that keeps a record of wrongs—real and imagined. I learnt of a love that offers no forgiveness nor absolution, a slanderous love.

I confided in her the pains of my adolescence, peeling back layers to reveal festering wounds. Her verdict was of something inherently sinful about me, the sin in me calling to the lust in my rapists. I worked to be good enough for this Jesus who saved me from a whipping. I fasted and prayed for hours till I was lightheaded with the blinding hunger of my atonement. I memorised scripture to make my body a living temple. I saw God’s love as celestial accounting, where each denial of flesh brought true salvation within my reach. Yet, I remained no closer till I graduated—at least not in reports she gave to the school’s pastors. No matter how long I prayed, how many fellowships I joined, what leadership positions I assumed, rumours of a sordid past reached the places I went to reinvent myself. They told stories of a seductress, possessed by the spirit of promiscuity, sent to destroy the destiny of unsuspecting young men.

There is so much one can take before character assassination becomes a fulfilled prophecy, and at 18, I chose to become that foul seductress. I shed the skin of faith. Rather than a sudden decision, it was the germination of a seed of doubt planted long before. It was the erosion of all the things I hoped were true about God when the boarding house mistress ushered me into his presence with her long, thick cane—a companion she may have loved more than God himself. It was sitting in hot rooms full of Christian teenagers testifying about divine protection, yet feeling like no heavenly hand had shielded me from anything. It was convincing myself that if there was a God, I was not on his list of priorities.  I was better off on my own, doing my thing, learning new types of love.

I did learn a new type of love—a love that is a transaction with desire as its currency. Determined to no longer be in spaces where I was regarded with poorly masked disdain, I learned to try on different skins, modelling myself after the novels I read and my observations of human interactions. The tilt of my head, a sultry unflinching stare, the slight upward curve of my full lips, the gentle, yet seemingly mindless placement of my palm on skin—my ability to spark the tinder of desire in others expanded with each new lover. For those who relished the chase, I wore the skin of the coquette. I developed a feel for the temperature of flirtatious encounters, adept at laying it thick or going so light that those who approached me sometimes thought they had imagined the entire exchange.

Being desired felt like power, and I was greedy for it. Greedy enough to wear a skin grafted from hedonism, eschewing no, because if I said no, was I truly the life of the party? I said yes to many things. Flesh bared to a room full of hungry eyes in a truth or dare game. Bottles of alcohol chugged till I choked on vomit and had an asthma attack. Lungs full of thick, herbal smoke as post-coital somnolence coaxed me into restive sleep. On many sleepless nights, I marvelled at how much harm one can do to themselves and keep existing, at how the body finds a way to carry on after the mind shuts down. I lent my flesh to people who borrowed bodies to pass the time. I lied to myself that I, too, was borrowing bodies, that this too was a bold choice. But in each space my body filled, the young girl who learnt pain beneath the body of her cousin and the one who was promised care by her friend’s grown brother hoped that this once, our body had found a home, a space shaped for me, that I and this person would eventually realise the pointlessness of seeking bodies and decide to seek out the essence of each other. 

However, hope cannot survive in a house built on lies.

****

On an April night of my mid-20s, God found me in Room 203 of a boutique hotel in Ikeja.

I had discovered a love that is self through articles and online videos. They promised that if only I could fake the love and light long enough, it would become real. They recommended journaling. So, I returned to journaling after years of outrunning memory. They recommended spending time immersed in oneself. So, armed with an overnight bag containing a change of clothes, skincare products, a lavender-scented candle jar, my journal, a pen, and a pack of Bohem cigarettes, I checked into the hotel.

I was in the shower, the candle lit on the sink, when my body began to quake with the force of memories flooding my mind unprovoked, when my knees found the white tiles of the bathroom floor. Hot water beating down my back, glass fogged into nothing. Grief cracked open inside me, and I sobbed till my throat was raw. I did not know the why of this torrent. I only knew who I was mad at. I barely made it to my journal and began an angry missive to God, an outpouring of my pain. I wrote till the page was soaked in tears. Though the desk was by a window, I remained oblivious to the rain till I ran out of words. Then, I saw the hard drops fall against the window. A strange peace lifted me from the chair and laid me flat on the room’s white sheets. As sleep pulled me under, I heard an unfamiliar I love you echoed through the broken pieces of my heart.

Days and months after, I would find love in the unsolicited God loves you messages from random strangers; in the disarming smiles of the woman who presses two tablets of Felvin—for cramps—into my palm on my first day back inside a church; in sermons that answer the burning questions of my soul; in Christian friends whose kindnesses hold room enough for dark days. And oh, I have many of those. Some days, hurt is a loud hurricane in my head; I want to feel less. Some days, rage rises in my chest like a tide; I choke out angry questions at God. Why? Why? Why! till nothing that comes out of my mouth makes sense anymore. Today, under Calabar’s clear sky and amber sunset, I hope for a time when love no longer feels like a battleground with all the odds stacked against me, when I am sure of the love that is God. 

About the Author:

Chinwendu Nwangwa is a Nigerian writer who lives between her childhood cities of Calabar and Umuahia, and Abuja. Her work explores the complexities of the human condition through self-introspective commentary. She is the co-founder of Yanga Bookclub, a thriving literary community in Lagos and Abuja.

*Feature image by Maxine yang on Unsplash