Subscribe to our Newsletter

I

At a point in the not-too-distant past, when all Akinde knew as a young uninitiated man was all he knew: a shortage in worth and wit, a burning hunger for things unripe for himself— he had pursued winged interests… like a fanatic, a wanton boy without a sense of sound direction. His unguided pursuits had often led to his discovery of outlandish subjects: birds in the image of women, snared in dark holes. And he had, in various unlucky ways, taken to them.

He desired the sparrows that didn’t know how to be birds, the ravens who strived for invisibility, the herons who ached to be bothered by no weight or matter, the owls that craved to become untouchable by descent. Girlbirds, all of whom coursed through packed pastures with afflicted grace, affliction and grace bidding for space within and around them. Who were without a core. Who longed to be nothing but an instinct: flight. These were the prototypes Akinde was enamoured with, routinely, unable to control his gravitations towards their type, as though it were some fated ordeal, designed inevitably to teach him something or, likely, punish him.

They were all cryptic, the girlbirds. Perhaps the most peculiar of them was Ifewa, the hummingbird, who, having plundered the earth for over two decades and found no worth in it and no love to give for all of its depravity, disappeared. Into the cadence of everlasting heights.

Before Ifewa disappeared, took her great flight and lost touch with the wanton boy, she told him he’d fully become a man if he gained discipline. The one superpower, an initiation, of tempering successfully fitful emotions, of cautioning bodily impulses. He needed only to yield to it, and could afterwards easily stop bothering her with stiff overtures. She said this, not particularly to get him to stop circling around her. It seemed more a matter of her indeed knowing what it was to neutralise desire, and was simply offering a friend some hints.

“Teach me,” he had asked of her.

“Teach you what?” she asked him.

“How to be disciplined.”

“I should teach you how to be a man?” Akinde thought she would say. But she had turned her neck instead, scanning his face briefly for indications of humour.

“You’re funny,” she scoffed.

Akinde said nothing.

“Whatever. Sha, I feel it’s something anyone could yield into if they really wanted to,” she added briefly, almost as consolation, her words heralding a rhythm as they both walked the boulevards of campus, the air around them immediately clutched by a throbbing flow…

*

Discipline, self-control, how to be a man, restraint. Whatever you call it. Akinde asked to be taught it by the girlbird for two reasons. One, he desired to cure himself from the ailment that was his then-life. Life as one who chased, rather too spiritedly, after beauty and pleasure and pain. Two, because to the unskilled eye such as his, Ifewa seemed to have eased into a reservoir of calmness, which gave the impression that nothing fazed her: not beauty, not pleasure, not even pain. And he had wanted this resolve characteristic of her. However, as Akinde later suspected, if one looked closer, they’d find that the source the girlbird seemed to fetter around was a rather sinister one, unlike any calmness. If one inquired closer and she let you see, you’d find that it was as though she was already at the gates of resignation, tramping wanderingly on a wilderness where nothing sprouted, where the air was still.

Akinde had later imagined that the reason the girlbird didn’t oblige him was this: if she, in fact, could and had taught him the secrets about her supposed mastery of calmness and somehow managed the training successfully, then he too could stop to appreciate wonder and how special life was. He’d stunt his own growth and depreciate, the way she taught herself to, out of the fear of growing older.

The girlbird detested the weight that becoming a woman would surrender to her. So, she gripped her mind and whispered lullabies of girlhood into it, teaching herself to remain little as years went by, till she endured a girl in the body of a woman. When she laughed, it was in the voice of a child. When she cried, the torrents were veiled beneath the immutability of her undesired adulthood. This internal ambiguity of hers would bear constant consequences:

crippling migraines that extended for days. Insomnia. Anxiety. Acne plastered

on the greasy paleness of her face. Receding hairline. Weakness of muscles.

Withering curves…

But she didn’t mind any. She yielded to all. Embracing pain like it was part of her. Embracing the occupation of caving, such that she grew to resent sunlight and natural air. She coiled within dimness and faint lights like sunset, the brown orangeness of it. Or perhaps it was the descent of it that appealed to her: how the sun drowned into a vast scale of nothing, every single day…

II

Akinde carried pictures in his head, the anatomy of his many imaginings about Ifewa’s life’s design:

a).

the girlbird, a princess with a lost princesshood, snatched from her, wishing invariably to recover her loss and remain a princess for life. A prayer too complicated for God to grant. The girlbird, then left to flutter in the motions of her unanswered prayer, cascades along the path of stillness, signs of delight and promise wavering around her.

b).

Her ears, like that of elves—curvy and pointy, shaped like mini-large leaves, appealed to him. Though she believed they soiled her beauty. So, she always tied a scarf around her head like a turban or wore a wig. Burying her ears in silence, out of the rhythm of the winds, sights, and potential admiration…

“Let your ears breathe. They’re always covered with that scarf of yours,” his voice, one rare evening; both sat in a garden on campus, evaluating the spectacle created by the sunset.

“Lee me alone,” her voice glazed in such childish playfulness. “I have rabbit ears.”

“Oouu. Now I want to see them. But really, isn’t it strange how I’ve never really seen your ears? And we’ve been friends for how long now?”

“Don’t stress my life, Akin. You will see them only if I wish.”

Fly to many weeks later: The day he saw them in their full glory, one delicate evening. On a football pitch in the university. It was the most he had seen the girlbird free. It was their final year at the university. A sports event was imminent. She had miraculously volunteered (as if to give life a chance) to be part of the school affair as one of the athletes representing her class. Akinde had signed up for volleyball. She had come into the sports centre (from her home, where she lived chastely and limitedly with her family, a few walks away from campus) for training sessions coated in an Abaya gown, a scarf around her head, but had sooner transformed into something much sportier. Detached her ears from the silence of the scarf.

Her ears sang as Akinde saw them. Sang to him. They looked at each other. Shared mute smiles that couldn’t have passed as smiles.

“Elvish, your ears. You look like an elf. Not a rabbit.”

“Oh. Okay.” 

He searched the girlbird’s face to catch traces of her blushing. Found none.

She ran around the pitch with the other guys in class. After he was well spent, he sat his sweaty, dark-skinned body on the grass, sniffing the earthy smell that whisked in the air around him, watching as she upped and downed with the boys with thicker and taller frames, trailing their speed. She looked so small, delicate. So precious, he thought.

A moment later, she joined him. “I finally watched Babylon,” she launched… “I didn’t like it.” …an attack.

It was as though she had struck him with a bat in the chest. “What? Why?”

“It was too much.”

“Too much how?”

“A lot was happening all at once for me. Like…I couldn’t get into the characters. Too messed up. Gbo gbo won. Just here and there. No head, no tail.”

“But that’s the beauty of it!”

“Stop raising your voice. I have a headache.” She cautioned.

“Sorry, but…”

“No buts. I just didn’t like it. Shikena,” she patted his thigh in two quick successions, drawing a closing curtain over the topic.

They sat down there together, watching the others run around. Watched them leave and said to catch up with them.

The demonstration by the sunset spread and continued before them.

“Look up, Akinde! The sun. So beautiful.”

Before looking up, he scanned her face briefly. The little army of acne dotting strategic areas on her face. Her eye bags. Her receding hairline. Her gaunt collarbones. Her elvish ears. The drowning melody around her, that yet seemed almost unlaboured, as if sinking of its own volition into water.

“Yeah, it’s nice,” he managed, then: “Where do you think it falls into like that? I mean it’s going down some hole, isn’t it?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Just enjoy the view. Stop asking questions. You analyse things too much,” she snapped, gently, without meaning any offence.

So, they both shut up for a while and watched the sky momentarily lose its palely-gold delight.

“You’re not much of a great runner from what I saw today,” he teased a while later.

“Ehen.” Her eyes stayed fixated on the darkening sky. “I used to be a good runner when I was younger sha.”

“Hm. So, how did you lose it? Your superpower.”

“I don’t know. Life just happened.”

“And talking of superpowers,” she resumed. “I’d never pick superspeed. I have rather always secretly wished I could become like…invisible. Like, being here without anybody seeing me, because I’m very distant. Yet I’m seeing and hearing everything. Everybody’s secret.” She looked straight ahead as she talked, as though picturing herself in the exact situation she was describing.

“You want to be like God?”

“No, ah!” she turned swiftly and slapped Akinde’s knees. “Look at where you’ve gone to again. Simple explanation, you ran and brought God into it. I’m tired of you.”

If Akinde was startled by this placid show of aggression, he didn’t show it.

“But Ifewa, think about it. That’s like being God. Seeing everybody from a distance, but no one is seeing you.”

“Is it only God who can be invisible? Spirits nko?”

“Okay. So, your superpower is being a spirit.”

If the tone of his voice was anything playful, it didn’t sound like it to her. It instead sounded affirmative, as though he was certain on her behalf, and was, in some way, at that moment, showing signs of slight dim-wittedness. 

“Okay. Yes, whatever you say. Spirit. God. Everything. I’ve heard you.”

And Ifewa had conceded rather lazily in the end, tired of engaging further his fixed and somewhat narrow-minded view.

But she added afterwards that he stressed her quite a lot. He perceived a seriousness about her claim. It was as though she actually meant it and could really use the suspension of his curiosities and probing. But he also detected that the tone of her voice was a little cheerful and the way she dragged the words from her mouth slow and amiable. So this further encouraged him to press his chance.

“Why aren’t you dating anybody?”

“I don’t feel like it. Never have.”

“You don’t like men?”

“Well,” she paused for a second. “I do.”

“So?”

“So, nothing. I’ll punch you. I mean it.”

“Sorry.”

Pause.

“I wouldn’t date me,” She softened, shifted her gaze at him, highlighting the point of another subject that they were yet to unite on. A subject she knew he was headed to once again and had to beat him to it, squash it before he brought it back up.

“Akinde,” She called his name. “Trust me. You don’t.”

“But…”

“No buts. See, it’s getting dark and quiet here. Let’s leave.”

Akinde, nodding and lifting himself from the grass, yielded.

“Ehen,” Ifewa muttered, recalling something as she stood. “What movies do you have?”

“What movies do you have?”

Hands exchanged phones, browsed each other’s movie collections as they both walked out of the sports centre.

“The Color Purple. 1985. That’s old. Is it good?” he asked.

“Yes. It’s one of my favourite movies gan.”

“Any popular actor I know in it?”

“Plenty. Whoopi Golberg. Oprah. Ehm, what’s this man’s name? Danny Glover. It’s really good. Spielberg directed it.”

“Your husband.”

“Where would you now put my Denzel?” she smirked.

“Oh yes. Of course. Your one and only.”

“Mm-Hm. You can read the novel too, by Alice Walker. The movie is an adaptation of it.”

“The Color Purple… Purple Hibiscus… Purple… What does purple symbolise? Is it a metaphor?”

“Good luck finding answers on your own.”

“I’m a writer. I should ask these sorts of questions.”

“Good for you. And by the way, your story, still yet to read it. But I will soon.”

Pause.

The humming again by the same bird returned: a throbbing that had floated quietly, that had accompanied their talk from the start, punctuating every expression exchanged.

Rhythm. Speech. Rhythm…

III

Akinde was quite stubborn about the whole thing.

He tried different times to understand why Ifewa was as thick as a wall. Why she couldn’t allow herself to love or be loved by anyone… besides Denzel. Whenever they talked, usually about a story he’d written and she’d reviewed, he tried cleverly to indulge her and get her to talk about herself. They would go on for minutes but quite never reached anything whole. When she told stories about herself—a task she wasn’t so forthcoming about— she did in scraps, leaving room for more of his curiosity. More questions. She avoided the big talks. She’d say:

“You think I’ve told you anything? But this is nothing compared to what I’m withholding. And don’t bother. I’m never talking about them. This is the farthest I can go.”

And afterwards, he’d carry little defeats within himself. He couldn’t quite grasp why she didn’t give herself whole but in bits as if writing a script with a pen as heavy as a millstone, crafting her stories in the droplets of tedious words.

He had collected The Color Purple from her the other night but failed to watch it, until she disappeared. It was after watching the movie that he speculated that perhaps the reason behind Ifewa’s evasive behaviour was the impossibility of speech, of articulating the graveness and intricacies of her issues. Rather than talking directly, she had, without meaning to, given him a film to do the talking in her stead. The girlbird always said the best films, fiction, etc. are the ones that are in themselves great, but special if we can relate to them, finding pieces of our past and future destinies in certain plots and characters. They both had agreed once that people always loved best the thing they identified most with. So, Akinde figured presumptuously that this movie was a favourite of hers because of its relativity to her.

After watching, he arrived at the theory that the girlbird was an ensemble of certain female characters in The Color Purple. The potential this speculation had of being the truth saddened him. In the movie, most of the black female characters, in one way or another, are detached from joy and their true heart desires, their wings clipped so that they are unable to fly. These women—Celie, Sofia, and Shug— fight battles and defy forces to get what they want. And they lose, many times, more than they can count, to the men in their lives and society, who tended cruelly to orchestrating their fates.

IV

Like Celie,

Ifewa had daddy issues.

You could tell she resented her father. And Akinde often wondered why. Perhaps because he made her life difficult, joyless. Just like the man— who, for the most part of the movie, Celia thought was her father— and her cruel husband Albert (old enough to be her father), behaved towards her. Treating her like she was a thing to be controlled and used; hit her, dictated to her how and when to speak, when to smile, how to be.

Celie this, Celie that.

Celie come fix my shave.

Celie make sure to fix my dinner before I get back.

Don’t you dare talk back at me, girl!  (Slaps her) I have the upper hand!

“He’s a hypocrite,” Ifewa had said to Akinde on the phone one evening.

“Who? Your dad?”

 “Yes.”

“That’s …rude. The way you said that,” he was going to say.

“Sure you’re meant to say that about your…dad?” He had said instead.

“Why not, if it’s the truth? And you don’t know me sha. I respect you only if you respect me. Whether you are my daddy or my mummy.”

“You know how these people are. You respect them a hundred times before they attempt to return the favour once.”

“And that is wrong.”

“Yeah. It is. Our generation, I think we will do better as parents.”

“Good luck.”

A voice called out Ifewa’s name from her side of the phone.

“I’m coming, mummy. Akinde, I’ll call you back.”

*

Like Sofia,

Ifewa was a fiery one.

She kept a dagger in her purse everywhere she went. To protect herself against evil— men mostly. When she fought once with her older brother, she brandished the dagger and had sworn to stab him. Said he was moving mad and had wanted to hit her. That she would have stabbed him before letting him touch her. Like Sofia, Ifewa was a fighter. Something in her wanted to retaliate against men for being abusers: women-beaters, women-killers, women-rapers, women-controllers.

She had a storm brewing in her like Sofia, who beat her husband after he laid hands on her. Who, a black woman in the twenties America, looked a White man dead in the face, stood toe-to-toe with him, mold her fists into a punch after he’d slapped her, and knocked him to the ground. The girlbird was closely that fierce too. She stood toe-to-toe with the faculty’s security-man, a male Professor, a male Dr, and a female Professor, all at once. After they had told her:

“You can’t dress this way if you want to go through the faculty gates.”

“Look how short your skirt is.”

“Shut your mouth, you silly girl!”

And she had responded, sharply:

“You can’t talk to me like that, please.” Her ‘please’ managed out of a fast-draining resolve for courtesy. “I’m not silly. And what is indecent about my dressing?”

“You’re very silly! Such a spoilt thing. You need to be taught a lesson, young girl.”

They cast Ifewa out of their sight like a thing to be disposed of and shoved her into a wagon to be taken to the security station. But she couldn’t, of course, had done jail time the way Sofia did for standing up against a White man.  Sofia was beaten and battered; did jail time for years, for refusing violence from a man. For trading words and striking back.  For refusing to be controlled by certain manipulators of fortunes.

Upon finding out about this incident, Akinde tried to picture the girlbird as a victor that day. But he wasn’t sure she felt that way. Instead, the picture in his head, a blend of what and what could: her victory, if indeed it was one, was sickly and bruised.

Yes, she had, in fact, later charmed the school security and had strolled out of their station like a princess; she had gone back to the faculty, lurked behind the gates, and stuck out her tongue at the security-man, whose face grew red. But it could have been more. Her victory. She could have been in more control of her own circumstance. Her tongue, like the dagger she kept in her purse at all times, could have done more. Could have said more. Akinde imagined her wishing. They all could have known a considerable measure of pain. The faculty security-man and the male Professor and the male Dr and the female Professor. Her dagger. God’s Her hand of justice could have danced. She could have moved later, undetected, putting her desired superpower to use, and drawn blood the colour of water. Or lifted a blade with her mind and let it do her bidding.

*

Like Shug,

Ifewa was a radical.

Akinde could argue the case that she was a lot like Shug Avery, the singer, the pastor’s daughter whose father long rejected her. The girlbird too was a singer and pastor’s daughter, who knew the rejection of a father and pastor. Once she formed a mind of her own, she mostly did things her way, caring less every day about what her father would say or do. All he could do now that she was old enough, he’d already done to her in the past. So, no further outburst or abuse would be new to her.

She wore an armless dress to church one day, a gown that pronounced what was left of her curves. The ushers had looked at her like one who had missed her way. Or perhaps some newcomer who wasn’t yet accustomed to the ways of their church. But they immediately recognised her, upon viewing closely, to be their pastor’s daughter. They had shaken their heads and contorted their faces. One had even walked to her after service and talked in hushed tones.

“But sister Ifewa, this your outfit is a little like you’re going to a birthday party. Please try and wear something churchy next time, ehn.”

A comment to which Ifewa had simply replied, “Okay.” And distanced herself from church for weeks, refusing her mother’s soft warnings. It was as though she did this to provoke her father who, for most of the time since she turned eighteen, became even more occupied with the ministry of God to even notice his daughter’s bold appearances and blatant absences from church. On occasions when he did, he summoned his rage, wrapped them into stones dancing on his tongues and spat them at his daughter, then his wife, and finally his other children. He would blame them for how bold Ifewa had gotten under his roof, under everyone’s eyes and he would punish them for it. He would go on evangelisms in remote towns away from Lagos and would not call home for days, even weeks sometimes. And when he returned, his rage returned with him, sometimes dissolved into a quieter grudge thrumming in his chest, sometimes sprung into a facial expression of distrust at his daughter, the girlbird who could make a resolute utterance such as:

“I don’t want to have kids.”

She had called back. At the other end of the phone was her smitten audience of one.

All the while they talked, Ifewa hummed at precise intervals. She did this quite often. She loved humming anything that waltzed into her mind. Jennifer Hudson. Angelique Kidjo. Elvis. Whitney. Beyonce. Don Moen. Novo Amor. Lara George… She was hardly ever not purring with rhythms, punctuating her conversations with them.

“Take a look at the world we are in, Akinde.” She was humming Whitney now. Speech interspersed with rhythm, as though two separate voices were in her, making this subtly bilateral delivery.

Speech. Rhythm. Speech. Rhythm. Spethm.

“It’s a cruel world. I, for one, am tired of being here. So, of course, I’m not bringing anybody else into it to suffer.”

Rhythm.

V

In Akinde’s theory, Ifewa’s father and home were the causes of her despondency. He wished he had more to charge the man with. He suspected something hideous about him. Something unplaceable but gravely imaginable. The man was a FFC pastor.  Fountain of Fire Church, where serving God was serious business. A business negotiated by fire. Where every pastor carried fire in them and was obligated to mould their family by it. 

Akinde had half-met him once. Scary man. He couldn’t forget the way the man had stared as he drove by him and Ifewa, along the roadside, the night they had both just left the sports centre. Ifewa had hinted that it was her dad’s car coming their way. The stare from the man lasted a second or two. There was an intensity about it, a relaxed coldness too. Akinde met the gaze which somehow managed to trap him right on the spot. He listened to himself say, “that was awkward” after the car drove past, but he was unable to move forward. A part of him was stuck, entranced on the spot where all he could infinitely sense was the simple meanness of the man’s stare, which stayed embalmed on his mind. In the simplicity of this stare, he saw reflected a dark current, and for a moment, he was consumed by the dark hole of it.

In this dark hole was the girlbird, assailed by the constant whips of her father’s words. In it, neglect was the specialty of parenthood. A neglect that hung carefully around the responsibility of shaping children strictly by the way of God. That accompanied every command, every reproval, and every wrongly justified biblically sanctioned abuse and other kinds of abuse that couldn’t be named. That shaped children and their futures in the manner the wild shaped wildlings. Unleashing them to attacks and wraths, defenceless. Till the wildlings grew in full form, learning to forge their own rules, revolting. Understanding that this was a crucial way to survive the wild: fighting back, through progressive acts of cunning, arrogance and disobedience. Through acts of shrinking. Like the sunset. Drooping into a vast hole of nothing, day after day.

In this dark hole, wives laboured as mothers, their voices wilting to nothing but, “Yes, Daddy. Okay, Daddy.” Mothers were reduced to the status of their children. Voiceless. And content in their voicelessness. But—

 “—Not me,” Ifewa’s voice cut through the gaze Akinde had been stuck in for an immeasurable period, bringing him out of the transfixion.

“And trust me. I’ve thought about it well. I can’t bear the burden of both humanhood and motherhood. It would…like, you know….” she stammered over the phone.

“…To bring a child into this world and watch it suffer like I did. Like I am…”

The midnight swallowed the rest of her words. The world was now asleep save for the both of them… and deep-seated emotions that had begun to rise from the nothings of miasmic depths. Flying with unrestrained mobility. Here and there. In and out.

“I read your story,” Ifewa said, changing the topic whimsically so that the deep-seated emotions began to withdraw their reach, their wings disassembling slowly.

Akinde, able to accommodate the girlbird’s whim, said:

“How many words did I use out of place this time?”

“Not much. Counted a few. But it’s an improvement on the last one. I loved it.” It sounded as though it dropped carelessly out of her, almost as a whisper. Caught Akinde by surprise.

“Oh, ‘loved’? Interesting.”

“Kini?… Anyways, I made some notes. I’ll send them to you in the morning. Before I go, let me ask… Why are the characters in your stories always so depressed and broken? Abi you’re depressed ni?”

She giggled, entering again that childish act, as if to understate the weight of her questions and had immediately after, before Akinde’s response, allowed her chords bring back her trademark craft, humming a song, this time by an artiste he couldn’t identify if he tried. Blearily. Mechanically. Like she’d been programmed to function this way in whatever state.

Speech. Rhythm.

“Say I’m depressed. Does that mean God too is depressed?”

The girlbird cleared her throat.

“I am a character in God’s story. We all are characters in His story. Just the way a writer is God to the characters they create in their story. So, you’ve assumed I’m depressed because the characters in my stories are usually depressed and broken, abi? So, if you are right and I am truly depressed, if we are both depressed, does that mean God is depressed or a part of Him is?”

Pause.

The deep-seated emotions were springing up again now, expanding into aerial positions.

“But…”

“No buts…” It was his turn to say this now.

“Your maths has a k-leg, Akinde. See…”

“Sleep on it, then we can talk about it after.”

The girbird hissed, “Okay-okay.”

Mild disappointment tainted her bleary voice. She yawned. Then, giving way: Rhythm, one of the very last renditions Akinde heard, aggregated with their goodnights, slithering around the ticking of time to season the morning sunrise. Sprawled on his bed, in a tiny fragment of God’s elaborate fiction, weeks before they fell apart, before the wanton boy’s pressure unnerved the girlbird, he read the feedback to the story. The girlbird didn’t quite fancy his female protagonist. Said she could be constructed better. Her rage, like her entire character, needed some kind of ‘cosmic regulation’. His writing, however, she enjoyed this time around. It made things take flight in his story, she remarked.  Things which carried much weight yet flew. It pulled her in and made her wish for new heights, beyond the immutable desolations of fate. Beyond everyone. Made her revisualise how much of a colossal failure humanity is and how it’s fated to crumble into more barbarisms. Reignited her courage to go away, disappear and mix with air; to sift across deep-seated emotions and flourish into the warming grace of sunrise, a skyline where elements echo in vast simplicity. Where girlbirds, wings flapping in the abundance of rhythms, come out of dark holes to be sparrows, ravens, herons, owls… and hummingbirds.