When news reached you that your father had died, you broke down and cried, shocking yourself. Why were you crying? You weren’t bereft, nor were you bereaved. You didn’t love him, nor did you hate him. You had had the opportunity to mend your cracked relationship, but you didn’t. You had been certain that it was too late to make amends. Many years had rolled by, and many waters had passed under the bridge. So why were you sad? The message about his death wasn’t sent to you so that you could come home to pay your last respects. It was simply for information. A picture had been attached as proof of his departure. You had felt certain that you didn’t know the man in the image. Dark-skinned. Thin. Old. You had not seen your father in years.
Your sister wept over the phone as she told you how it had happened. She had been able to make peace with him, and they had become close again. For you, it was far too late to be father and daughter again, so you never bothered to rebuild the bridge he had set on fire years ago when he abandoned your mother for not giving him a male child. Sometimes you wonder if your sister made up with him because she knew she would need him.
As you grew up, your mother’s brother, who had raised your sister and you as his own, had constantly reminded you both that you would have no choice but to go look for your father when the time to get married came. For in Yoruba culture, the groom has to go in the company of his father and family members to visit the father of the bride and make known his interest. Only when the father of the bride is dead can the father’s brother act in his stead. If he doesn’t have a brother, then another male member from the bride’s father’s family may act in his stead.
After your father’s absence at your mother’s burial, you made a vow never to go looking for him. You blamed him for your mother’s untimely death caused by a heart attack. He threw your mother out of the house with your sister and yourself. He took a second wife who bore him two sons and two daughters. He never sent a penny for your upkeep. He did not pay a dime for your education, from primary to tertiary. You were certain that a man who would love you enough to want to marry you would understand if you were unable to produce your father.
You were not able to attend your sister’s wedding. The formal introduction between the groom’s family and the bride’s family happened on a Thursday at your father’s compound in Ikorodu. A place you had never been. The court wedding happened on a Friday morning, followed by the engagement and traditional marriage in the afternoon. The church ceremony happened on Saturday morning at your father’s church, where your sister had never worshipped.
You boiled over as you watched the wedding video. It disgusted you to see your father in agbada and fila, being treated as the important person at all of the events especially during the traditional wedding. A deadbeat father who had proudly waited for the daughters he abandoned to come look for him to play the role of the father of the bride, even when he had not lifted a finger to help in raising his own children. He shamelessly received the Eru Iyawo—the bride price of cash, clothes, food and other gifts—offered by the groom’s family. It was meant to compensate the bride’s father for raising and taking care of the bride from childhood up till now. As far as you were concerned, your uncle, who had raised you and your sister, deserved those gifts.
You understood that your sister had to take the necessary step to make peace with your father as she reached marriageable age. Your father had been certain that you too would soon come looking for him, but at that time you had left Nigeria and had discovered that Belgian men loved differently, more gently, more expressively. To top it all, you had learned that you wouldn’t need to produce your father to get married before a Belgian Registrar. A decade has since passed, and you are yet to find love. The black men flee when they hear that you are undocumented. The white men rarely look at you. If you want to get married and have kids someday, your only hope is to go back home and meet a man with a deadbeat father too, who will understand you.
The gloom that settled over you upon receiving news of your father’s death tarried, yet you couldn’t identify what it was. It didn’t fully feel like grief. You knew grief well. You had spent twenty-five years in the school of grief, mourning your mother. It didn’t feel fully like sadness. You knew sadness, too. You felt it deeply when you got news of your mother’s death. It wasn’t fully emptiness. You have been courting profound hollowness since you left everything you knew behind to start all over again in Belgium.
You kept asking yourself why you were sad. It wasn’t because you were going to miss the burial or because you missed him. There was absolutely nothing about him to miss. It took three nights of soul searching before the cause of your heartache revealed itself to you. It came to you at a time when you least expected. At dusk, as you lay in the dark on your bed, reflecting on your life and how far you’ve come. The strange feeling you couldn’t identify for days became stronger and more palpable until you were finally able to put your finger on it. It must be how people who suddenly realise that they have become orphans feel. You felt like you had been completely cut off. Like a link detached from a chain. Like a branch that has been cut off a tree. Like a plant that has been uprooted. Like a dilapidated house whose foundation has collapsed. You are an orphan with no offspring. You are nobody’s child. Nobody’s daughter. You belong to no one. You belong nowhere.
Ayo Deforge
Ayo Deforge is a Nigerian writer based in the south of France. An alumna of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Creative Writing Workshop and the Faber Academy, her work has appeared in Litro Magazine, Brittle Paper, Ayo Magazine, Kalahari Review, Lucy Writers Platform, the Love Grows Stronger in Death anthology, and other publications. She is the author of Tearless (shortlisted for the ANA Fiction Prize and the Chinua Achebe Prize), Grips of Grief (shortlisted for the ANA Non-Fiction Prize), and the poetry collection the Mind is not an ally. Her second novel, Under the Rain, was released in December 2025.
