Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction (10 page)

We are unsettled. My aunt sits in one of the vans, holds her head in her hand, and quietly begins to cry. I feel like a tuning fork, vibrating with an unfamiliar will to violence. There is nowhere to run to and I have no desire to run. I can no longer bear the violation, the caprice, the air of desperation. If they attack, I say to myself, I will crush their throats. I think of myself as a pacifist, but what I want now is to draw blood, to injure, even to be injured. Crazed by the situation and by the need for an end to it, I no longer know myself.

And then, as suddenly as they appeared, they leave. They shake their forearms at us, turn around, and head for the gate. We stand stock-still as they open the gate, step out, and close it behind them. The sky darkens rapidly over Surulere. My uncle says:

—Will they come back? Will they wait outside for us?

—Don’t worry about it, Mr. Wuraola says. Empty threats. But you know, it would be wise to leave the car here tonight. It’s safe in the school compound. Come back and pick it up in a few days. They won’t bother us again. They’ll
take some money from the trailer driver when he leaves, but not too much. He knows it is part of his expense.

We all work at double pace to finish loading the vans. Nobody can avoid the thought that one of the four vans might be waylaid on the way. We agree to drive in tight convoy. My uncle and my aunt enter one of the vans, and I another. I feel sad. This is life too close to the edge of danger for me. It is too severe a tax on the right to private property.

Night falls. The convoy streams out of the school. Each driver nervously looks right and left as we move through Surulere and onto Western Avenue. Finally, out on the open road, we relax. The traffic thickens at Ikorodu Road and we lose sight of each other. The van in which I am riding selects an unfortunate route—we run into a total standstill at Anthony and yet another on Allen Avenue. The fight lies sleeping like a snake in my veins. We do not arrive at Ojodu until two hours after the others.

NINETEEN

“O
ne can’t say it aloud, but there is a lot of repressed violence here. That is why the furnishings seem so heavy. And why it is so difficult to see the other thing present: a spot of sun that moves over the house walls and slips over the unaware forest of flickering faces, a biblical saying never set down: ‘Come unto me, for I am as full of contradictions as you.’ ”

I pretend for a moment that these lines of Tomas Tranströmer’s were written with Nigeria in mind. It is not hard to see how they fit our situation. The contradictions he writes about are the contradictions of poetry, the voice that says: maybe this, maybe that, maybe something else. But in an atmosphere in which the past has been erased, contradictions
are forbidden. The typical middle-class Nigerian living room is a dark space. Anchored with weighty upholstery and veiled in thick curtains that banish all light, it announces to all visitors that the household is prosperous. The windows are never opened, the furniture has to be immovable. These are the rules. What is this place? A cipher enclosed within a riddle.

It is late morning, a Wednesday. I wander around old Lagos. There was a brief, sudden shower earlier in the day, the only rain I have seen in these harmattan weeks of my journey. As the downpour began, the congested streets opened up as people fled from one spot to another. The rain in Lagos takes everyone by surprise, regardless of season. The bright heat has now returned. At the artery of the CMS junction, which is always dense with rapidly moving human bodies, my mind makes a heavy and unexpected connection: the secret twinship this city has with another, thousands of miles away. The thought is of the chain of corpses stretching across the Atlantic Ocean to connect Lagos with New Orleans. New Orleans was the largest market for human chattel in the New World. There were twenty-five different slave markets in the city in 1850. This is a secret only because no one wants to know about it. It was at those markets that buyers came to bid on the black men and women who had survived the crossing, but that is a history that is now literally submerged. Actually, it was submerged long before the recent flood, the city’s slaving past drowned in drink and jazz and Mardi Gras. High times: the best cure
for history. The human cargo that ended up in New Orleans originated from many ports, most of them along the West African shore. And here was another secret: none of those ports was busier than Lagos.

The fratricidal Yoruba wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a great boost to the transatlantic traffic in human beings. There were constant skirmishes between the Ijebus, the Egbas, the Ekitis, the Oyos, the Ibadans, and many other Yoruba groups. Some of the smaller groups might even have been wiped out from history, as the larger ones enlarged their territory and consolidated their power. The vanquished were brought from the interior to the coast and sold to the people of Lagos and to communities along the network of lagoons stretching westward to Ouidah. And they in turn arranged the auctions at which the English, the Portuguese, and the Spanish loaded up their barracoons and slave ships. Some of these intertribal wars were waged for the express purpose of supplying slaves to traders. At thirty-five British pounds for each healthy adult male, it was a lucrative business.

Slave ships visited the river mouths of the Niger Delta, the broad network of tributaries that stretches between Lagos and Calabar, for a period of three hundred years. Here, they needed no forts as they did at Elmina in Ghana or on Goree Island in Senegal. This is because the calm waters of the delta made it possible to berth the ships for weeks or months, however long it took to fill them up with slaves. And because of this geographical peculiarity, little
physical evidence remains of the long and bitter engagement. There is little for tourists to see here. According to a memorandum attached to the Report of the House of Commons Select Committee on the Slave Trade in 1848, the trade out of Africa was in the tens of thousands every year in the early nineteenth century, much higher than it had been in preceding centuries. It reached an annual peak of 135,000 in the five-year period between 1835 and 1840. At that time, several hundred ships were being loaded up each year along the Niger Delta. And this was in spite of a British ban on the trade in 1808, and a British naval presence in Nigerian waters. According to Alan Burns in his
History of Nigeria
, Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian ships often sailed under American colors until they were out of range of the British ships. This history is missing from Lagos. There is no monument to the great wound. There is no day of remembrance, no commemorative museum. There are one or two houses in Badagry that display chains and leg-irons but, beyond that, nothing. Faulkner said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But in Lagos we sleep dreamlessly, the sleep of innocents.

These are my thoughts as I visit the famous CMS (now called CSS) Bookshop on Lagos Island. From the arcade of the building that houses it, I can see area boys waving down commercial motorcycle drivers and collecting money from them. Those who resist are rough-handled. Earlier, further up the road, I had seen the police doing the same thing. Police shakedowns, as are also alleged to happen in New Orleans. Our shared sin. In the arcade, someone has spread books out on the ground, and it is as if the bookshop has spilled out of its confines. There is a copy of Samuel Johnson’s
The History of the Yorubas from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate
for sale, but I find it steep at almost three thousand naira. Samuel Johnson, in spite of his name, was Yoruba. He was a peace activist, a priest of the Anglican Church, and a great historian. He wrote his masterly text in 1897. There has not been to date another work of comparable scope by a Yoruba historian.

The interior of the shop is vaguely familiar from my visits here as a schoolboy, when it was the leading bookseller in the city. I used to come here with my mother when there was something we couldn’t find at the University Bookshop in Akoka or at the Abiola Bookshop in Yaba. I don’t remember
the offerings being as limited as what I see now: the books available for sale are restricted to a few categories. Many of the volumes are dusty and damaged at the edges. There are primary and secondary school textbooks and there are assorted volumes on computer programming, on accounting, and on law. The largest section of all is devoted to “inspirational” and Christian books. While I’m browsing, a woman walks in and brusquely asks the attendant where she can find Bibles. She is directed to a well-stocked section, the only section of the shop in which there is more than one customer. The titles of the books are reiterations of a few themes: how to make money quickly by adopting certain simple principles, how to discover God’s plan for your life, how to live a healthy, wealthy, and victorious life according to the precepts of the Pentecostal church.

The shelf given to general fiction is small. Other than a few tattered copies of plays by Shakespeare and Soyinka, all that is available is a handful of recently published novels, among them Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s
Purple Hibiscus
and Sefi Atta’s
Everything Good Will Come
. These two are first novels by young Nigerian women based in the United States, and they are here most likely because they have an energetic young Nigerian publisher behind them. There is also a single copy of Dan Brown’s ubiquitous book. And I see a stack of books by James Hadley Chase, a minor imitator of Ian Fleming’s, who was inexplicably popular in Nigeria when I was growing up and apparently still is. But where are the Nigeria-based Nigerian writers? Where is the selection
of international literary fiction? The reader I saw on the danfo had surely not bought her book here. Poets, too, are notable by their complete absence.

There is an information desk at the back of the shop. I go there with the idea that I might ask some questions. The woman standing behind the high desk is slumped over, like a large mammal felled by a single shot. But she is not dead, only sleeping, the same as the woman I saw at the museum. A standing fan slowly shakes its large head from left to right to left. It covers her in breezes. What I am looking for, what Tranströmer described as a moving spot of sun, is somewhere in the city. But it is not easy to find, not here where one has to forget about yesterday.

Why is history uncontested here? There is no sight of that dispute over words, that battle over versions of stories that marks the creative inner life of a society. Where are the contradictory voices? I step out of the shop into the midday glare. All around me the unaware forest of flickering faces is visible. The area boys are still hard at work, but I imagine they will soon break for lunch. The past is not even past.

TWENTY

I
left under a cloud. My departure was sudden and, to my family, a complete surprise. Only one of my father’s cousins, from whom I had borrowed some of the money for the ticket, had had an inkling about what I planned to do. I had recently finished school at NMS, the military secondary school I attended for six years. I made up an excuse to stay behind after that final semester, while I put my plan into action. Five years previously, I had darkened a doorway in our house in Ikeja and watched my father lie in bed, weak from tuberculosis.

My father’s death opened up the final cavern between me and my mother. The deprivations of life at boarding school became my refuge. It was better to be there with
those military brats, to struggle for survival in that Darwinian environment, than to sit in a large and silent house with my mother and her oppressive grief. Our relationship, never good to start with, got markedly worse in those years. I spent long vacations with my uncles and aunts and, by the time I entered my final year of secondary school, I knew I had to leave Nigeria. When she got my letter from New York, in August 1992, she wrote me back. Her letter was full of alarm and questions. Why have I done this thing? When do I plan to return? Why do I act without thinking through the consequences? I read it once and ripped it up. I never wrote her back. I needed to restart my life on my own terms alone. And that has been the limit of our communication since then, a commitment to silence that, even now, I am surprised I was able to keep up. My communication with those who remained at home was almost as bad, not out of any ill feeling, but from the need to make the break complete. There were also the pressures of remaking my life in the new place. Uncle Tunde wrote to tell me my mother had left Nigeria not long after I did, that she had moved to California. He included the information on how to find her if I wished to. All my time in the United States has been on the East Coast and in the Midwest: New York, Wisconsin, and, for the past several years, back in New York. She, as far as I know, is still on the West Coast. We will not meet accidentally.

In this journey of return, the greatest surprise is how inessential her memory is to me, how inessential I have
made it, even in revisiting sites that we knew together, or in seeing many people who knew us both. People know better than to ask about her. This is what it is to be a stranger: when you leave, there is no void. Mother was a stranger here. She left no void after eighteen years, as if she had never been here. And I, fatherless, am also like a man without a mother, even if it is her face and her pale color that looks back at me from every photograph and reflective surface. I roam all over Lagos, and even once travel along the road that links Unilag with Yaba bus stop, but I cannot bring myself to revisit the site, along that road, of my father’s grave, at Atan Cemetery.