“It wasn’t until Gabriel squeezed away what was empty in him that the Prophet could be filled with miracle.”
— Kaveh Akbar, The Miracle
1.
Your phone vibrates in your pocket and you pull it out with a soft drag, afraid it’ll slip out of the soft of your hand onto the hardness of the concreted floor. When you raise the light of the phone to your eye’s reach, you see a foreign number splayed on the screen. Hmm. Even if it is a foreign number, it looks like your father’s. You don’t feel like talking to him today. Why is he calling today?
You tap on the green of the call interface, hoping to cut the call short with, I’m at work now, Da. I’ll call you back later. But first, you begin with, Hello da.
There is an arrogant coarseness streaming on the other end of the phone, beats of a distasteful song. Hyɛ wo ho den repeats like the chorus of the song and you are drifting into so many places and so many things except the chorus of this song you do not want to dance to. You walk through the room, towards the door and then to the road where dust welcomes you, the afternoon white sun dying down to golden-yellow and the greenery along the road watching, staring to see where exactly you are heading to. You are not going anywhere really but there is a calmness that comes with the idea of moving, walking as if you can walk long enough into the past and change all that cannot be changed.
One of the places you drift to wants you to ask how this person you have never spoken to, who does not know what you look like can speak to you with such familiarity and bring you words that can break you, while telling you to stay strong. Why do I have to carry this bag of live bombs on my back, drop it in front of my sister, my brother, my uncles, and say:me Papa aka bɛbe. Daddy don die. Take this bag and make of it what you will? You want to ask how your father, whom you just spoke to three or is it two days ago, can just go and die?
2.
Heartbreak changes an Artist. After Heartbreak, here comes God Mode. Like God, you can roam the face of the deep, darkness everywhere, and say, let there be light and there will be light—the formless finding form from a word spoken.
You do not remember where you heard those words but they sing, a crowing rooster at dawn. The problem is, you have chosen to not write another grief poem. What do they call it? Grief Porn. That animal that has made lover of the world. The world returning this favour to love it too.
Day One, you report to work like it was just another morning, the darkness of moon giving way to the brightness of sun. Your subordinates arrive on time. You have been on their ass for months, hounding them about timeliness. But like a teenager fresh in love, all your warnings, threats and sanctions have been for naught. It is news of your dead father that finally breaks them. The things that can break a man bemuse you.
Day Three, you are still keeping the count of the people who know of your loss. People like drama. People feed on drama, you tell yourself and you do not know how many I’m sorry for your loss you can handle before you start cussing the next person who tells you one. To maintain the number, you break your news sparingly with an endnote, No pity parties. Do not tell anyone. Of course some of your friends do not listen. Because if you share your victories with everyone why shouldn’t you share your losses with everyone too?
Day Six, here, if a heart is garri and the desire to write about your loss is water, your heart is soaked in it but not fully swollen yet. So, you pick up your phone (you have begun to name it the conduit of bad news), hoping that you do not receive another call, your heart pounding unsteadily. You search through the Internet looking for something to stay this desire to write anything about your loss. You enjoy humour, so maybe some will help like sugar to appease an alcoholic seeking to stay clean. Maybe a video will help: someone smiling like they’ve won a bet or that victory speech from The Originals, We Are Officially Orphans. You do not find it and so you endeavour to create your own relief, maybe another video with a caption that can weave into a poem titled We are Officially Orphans.But, before you can make your own release, a friend sends a text: You can come and stay at my place if you want.
Day Seven, you finally decide to join the world and make love to the animal.You read Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, hoping to find something close to what you feel. Two pages in: “You have never known the body of a woman?— —I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying”. He is aware the question speaks to something sensual, a merging of bodies between himself and a lover, and yet he does not care. He finds this intimacy the equal of his caring for his sick mother. Barthes tapping into intimacy allows you to tap into yours. To love your animal. To engage with this “Grief Porn.”
Day Nine, you are six poems into a new chapbook, When Your Heroes Are No Longer There, writing fast as a horse rummaging through a field, excitement finding form in a book, loss finding form in poems.
3.
You think of the lyrics from Kreator’s Pleasure To Kill: My only aim is to take many lives. The more, the better I feel. You want to feel better, you want to see if you can find pleasure in something, in the killing of a thing and the only thing that comes to mind is your Celibacy. That jewel you have worn like a helmet of protection whenever you see a beautiful woman across the street. You have honed it so well, you have kept your body from all sexual impurities and yet God takes your mother and now your father. The questions carry you from your bed to the gates, all the way to a spot where you see a woman with the tar skin your mother once wore.
Days later, the game of attraction plays you both smoothly into a room where the fullness of her body adjusts to the movement of your hands. Eyes match eyes, two bodies in conversation. But there is a thin layer like glass separating the two of you. Talking through glass, watching something through glass, is no conversation. Close but not there yet. So you tell her, I like the heat of your body. I want all the heat from your body. Skin to skin. Please remove all your clothes and lay all your weight on me. You speak silently and slowly. She responds, an answered prayer. The bed does not creak. When finally the warmth kicks in everywhere, you search deep inside her to a point where your two bodies can be considered as one. Deep body-fishing, you breathe in the scent of cocoa butter on her skin, hoping to recover your mother’s smell. Deep, louder, faster the rhythm of the conversation goes, the back and forth heightens and you feel something like a weight leave your body.
Then, she is beside you, carrying the silence of the night. You carry it too.
4.
You are becoming a version of a person okay with the passing of a father. Okay: as in, he did not die so close you’d have to organise a party for distant family, well-wishers to come sing and dance to the music of sorrow, even if it means you end up bloodied in debt. Okay: as in, when they put him in the ground in that French soil, someone sent you photos and videos to help you feel a part of it, to give you closure that indeed he has been put in the ground, but you did not download any of the content, you deleted the entire chat with a closed eye, and not the kind people give afraid of an outcome of a thing.
It was just that you remember the pink plumpness of death on your mother’s face and often when you try to paint a memory of her, all you see is pink. You don’t want the last memory of your father’s face to be anything like that.
5
There is an intimacy to mourning. When your father died, you were expected to grieve, so you did. But how do you tell people that although your mother died before your father, you have had a mother more than you have had a father? That you only grieve that it took this long for you to officially be an orphan. You guess this was why all the poems you wrote during your “grieving” of your dead father were distant. You were drawing sand from a well, hoping to fetch water.
Months later, you wake up one morning at your sister’s, the whirls of the ceiling fan the only source of sound in a bougie room different from the tileless, faded wall-paint, plywood-ceilinged home you shared in childhood. Your sister, now carrying a voice, a skin, a face, and height comparable only to your mother’s, reminds you of the essence of the day like you wouldn’t know that it was a free day today, and free days meant you both had to clean the apartment and find something to cook.
One thing you love is having a fridge stocked with square-shaped plastics containing stew, egusi/okra/groundnut soup, enough for any hunger your stomach can hold. So, you get up, sweep the room, mop the floor, the sting of detergent fighting against your nostrils. Your sister cleans the kitchen, but has one eye watching the way you mop the floor. You for learn how to mop well. You need to drag the mop for the floor, then you dump the deti for the other side. Holding the stick of the mop, she demonstrates. If you no do am lai this, you go have to sweep the floor again after you mop. You grin a little and take the mop from her hands. You practise as she says. You do not see the difference but you do not say. You let her have this one.
Back from the market now, your sister calls you, come help me grind these things abeg. You do not hesitate. You cannot. You go to the kitchen area. You slice tomatoes and onions, embracing its sting, removing the foreskin of ginger and garlic and the stalks of Scotch bonnets before placing it in a blender.
You think about the time your mother would chide your sister, you be woman o you for learn how to do these things well. Things: a metaphor for cooking, washing clothes, cleaning. You remember your sister’s face, the frowns it held. You think about your mother while you cook with your sister, you grin at the thought and when she asks why, you do not say. The raw food miracles itself in the fire, and you think again about how in all your months of writing, you have never written about or for your mother. You promise yourself that today you will.
Because poetry is the closest language you have access to lately, you write poems. A few poems in and you agree that, you were too young to know how to grieve or how to mourn when your mother died. In writing these poems, the rush, the ease of breaking down a childhood memory, your mother’s laughter and vexings, bite at you.
You loved your mother and she loved you, but it has taken you ten years to put it on paper. You have a title for the set of 12 poems if you complete them: I use My Mother as a Metaphor for a Wound that Never Heals. After that, you will write an essay about the way loss moves through a body. You will call it The Intimacy of Mourning.
