There are exactly three photographs of my grandmother.
One: a monochrome passport photograph. Circa 1959. Taken years before my grandparents began to look alike, as old couples tend to. She is not beautiful in it. Yet, her features remain striking. Perfect teeth waiting behind unsmiling, unpainted lips. Keen eyes lined with tiro, forcing the camera’s lens to blink first. An even sweep of dark skin. Lush, dark cornrows with sprinkles of precocious silver. All striking parts of an ordinary whole. There is nothing to suggest she is away from home, studying in London.
Two: her wedding photograph. June, 1967. My grandmother’s gloved hands hold a bouquet of silk peonies. Her face is unveiled. Her dress—brilliant white with lace cuts coiling around the bodice—flows and flows. Silver heels hide under the cascade of white. She smiles with perfect teeth. Underneath inherited English composure, a black three-piece suit and a stiff bow-tie aspiring to noosehood, joy betrays itself in the arch of my grandfather’s left eyebrow. My grandmother’s hair is sectioned and wrapped in rubber threads. Where the rubbers end, her hair sprouts into large, fluffy balls. Each dark coil stretches from her scalp and droops to line the sides of her face. Two pairs of steady eyes in that afternoon glow, wide with a blissful, imagined future. The Civil War is still weeks away in a country newly weaned off a forced suckle. Outside the photograph’s frame, distant waters of Eastern discontent grumble to a boil.
What I know of the last photograph, I know from what my mother, her sisters and brother have told me. Their stories differ, but they all agree that six people were in the family photograph. Uncle Ademide. Aunty Omolola. Aunty Tejumola. Maami. My grandfather. My grandmother.
As Uncle Ademide tells it, all six of them are dressed up in different cuts of the same cream Swiss lace. He and my grandfather wear embroidered royal-blue filas. His sisters and mother tie geles of the same shade of blue, each gele charting its own course. Aunty Omolola’s gele is the most ambitious of them all, and her smile in the photograph is proof.
When Aunty Tejumola laughs at this version, it is not only because the most impressive gele is misremembered. Her laughter is at her brother’s memory of colour. We don’t say it often, because he grows petulant when we do, but Uncle Ademide is colour-blind. The lace was probably not cream and the filas and geles were very likely not blue. In Aunty Tejumola’s picture, the lace is brilliant white and the filas and geles are lavender. My grandparents are seated on a black leather sofa and their children fan out behind them.
Maami disagrees that anyone was sitting in the picture. She remembers everyone standing, youngest to oldest, left to right, because my grandmother insisted this was the only way to enter into a photograph. Did they remember, she would ask her siblings, how their mother made them all pose in profile? How the family photograph looked like they were marching out of its frame? My grandmother leading this exit and Uncle Ademide completing it? Did they forget my grandmother’s repeated warning? That every photograph is an affront to time and death?
***
When I asked her about her warning, she sighed.
Help me with that, she said, pointing at the bookshelf in the guest room where she was staying with us for the week it took winter to thaw into spring, before joining my grandfather in Aunty Tejumola’s home in Toronto. I retrieved her copy of Fagunwa’s Ògbójú Ọdẹ nínú Igbó Irúnmọlẹ̀—a novel I struggled through in its advanced original Yoruba until I found Soyinka’s translation. She riffled through its pages and I glimpsed a familiar thin card, somewhere around its middle, before the pages continued their rhythmic fall. She returned to the part of the book I had glimpsed and handed me her monochrome passport photograph.
Is this you, grandma?
It was.
When was this taken?
In the late ‘50s. I was forced to go to some little shop in London.
Forced to?
Yes. I needed it for my papers then, and I didn’t want to be the Nigerian who dropped out because she thought photographs could kill her.
Kill you?
See? She hissed. Just like my English colleagues. Raising their noses at everything. Understanding little.
I wanted to apologise, but knew it would only annoy her. I waited a while. How could a photograph kill you?
She looked at the book in her hands and put it away. Gently. Her mind went elsewhere. Her eyes narrowed. I waited.
Ademide tried to leave his wife three times before he was able to divorce her. Did he tell you?
No, ma.
If you ask him or your cousin, they’ll tell you his new lawyer made it happen. But it was his wedding photograph. If he didn’t cut it in half, like I told him to, they would still be married.
But. Grandma, that didn’t kill anyone.
Except their marriage. She smiled. And a small part of your cousin.
I thought of a few things to say, or ask, but sat on the orthopaedic queen-size bed instead. I stretched the passport to her and she waved me back.
Death is very proud, my dear, and photographs have a way of offending that pride. How would you feel if someone told you that you couldn’t do the one thing you were made for? If Death ever looked at that passport, he would be looking at a woman telling him she cannot be killed. I try not to make him prove a point.
I looked at the monochrome passport and the changes on her face. Finely creased skin. Every strand of hair turned silver. Even her lashes. Looking from her face to the passport and back, felt like toying with time.
He proved enough with Folawe. She sighed and handed me her copy of Fagunwa.
Grandma? I slid the passport back into her book. Who is Folawe?
***
Often, a photograph begins as a wall against death, only to be the door it enters through.
***
When my grandmother was twelve, her best friend died in an accident. Fifteen passengers and a driver. Fifteen survivors. No injuries. One death.
Two years before the accident, Folawe had been in a photograph with her family members. The photographer was said to have come from Lagos—where wealthy families made it a point of status to call her—and was the subject of quick-travelling whispers in the week she arrived in their little town.
Children who saw the large box that stayed in her hand at all times wondered what treasures were hidden inside. Whispers said that it was full of human beings. They saw them trapped inside little cards stacked on top of one another. Difficult as it was for the children to imagine all those people crammed into a box, they knew it was true. The woman dressed in the same clothes as the oyinbos—skirts that flowed to her ankles, sun hats worn at the same angle to hide her face, sleeveless blouses that showed her toned arms—the same oyinbos who had crammed people into boxes where they should not fit and took them far away many years ago. The adults, wanting to separate themselves from the children, confessed their curiosities only to themselves. When the children asked questions that the adults did not have, but also wanted, answers to, they shunned them and sent them on invented errands.
One of the questions was easily answered. The woman had come for Folawe’s family, to take something to look at, an àwòrán. The question of why the words for what she had come to do sounded like some volitional bondage—to capture them in a visual representation, to tear them apart—was less easy to answer. This thing she called art did not sound like anything the town’s artists had done before. They made visual representations and likenesses by carving, by casting, by moulding—all deliberate and time-consuming acts—as the Creator himself did. Soon enough, they left the questions as questions and blamed whatever was difficult to understand on the eccentricities of the wealthy.
The day of the photograph was a spectacle. Folawe’s family chose the wide field opposite the King’s market. In the hour before dawn, people heading to the market had seen Folawe’s father’s high-backed chair at the centre of the field, under a small blue tent made of adire. The sun rose over members of Folawe’s household making more and more elaborate preparations on the field. When the market people saw a procession starting with two bicycles and four horses, they knew it was time. The woman rode ahead of the procession on one of the gleaming bicycles as if she were born with it. Her limbs moved flawlessly—without the tension of newly conferred privilege—and it seemed that all the breeze in the world could not shift the sun hat covering her face. A crowd poured towards the field.
At the heart of the field, some paces away from the tent—the high-backed chair and its proud occupant, the horses, bicycles, stunning women and enviable children—the photographer opened her box. There were no humans inside, despite the blood colour of its velvet inlay. She brought out a rod, stretched out its three legs and set it on the ground. On top of this rod, she mounted a strange metal box with a glass eye that folded and stretched like a grasshopper’s abdomen. She waved her hand and the tent was taken away. The full glare of the sun poured on the face of Folawe’s family. They responded to her signals for posing and her countdown with fingers raised high above her strange metal box.
Three. Two. One. And it was done.
The tent was brought back. She tinkered with the box, pressed back its glass eye, reached inside for something the crowd could not see, and placed everything back in her large box. The procession reassembled itself. The woman rode off. Folawe dashed to my grandmother. Their bodies crashed into each other in embrace. Folawe found it difficult to choose between excitement and speech. When she eventually spoke, she told my grandmother the photograph would be ready for viewing at their house in three days.
Three days later, my grandmother felt she was looking at a memory. It was simply there. The afternoon. The matching clothes they all wore. All eight of them. Folawe at the extreme right of the frame in her iro and buba. Her father in the middle. Her brother, with a muscled arm around his horse’s neck, at the extreme left. The remaining five members of the family, fill in the gaps.
A week after the picture was taken, Folawe’s brother was found dead under his horse.
Mourning is a function of time and there was too little of it. Before anyone thought to ask how or why or what, Folawe’s immediate older sister—who loved her brother as much as her own eyes and blushed when people reminded her she was not his wife—rode a bicycle out of their compound to find her brother. What she found was her own death. As if that was not sorrow enough, there was also the strangeness of the bicycle mangled next to her body. The same bicycle that had stood next to her brother’s horse.
How? Why? What?
The townspeople knew, even before they started to look, that the woman was gone. She could have formed part of their mobs and they would have treated her as a neighbour. She could have joined them to pity the wealthy and they would have agreed that sometimes some people simply court tragedy with their eccentricities. They knew nothing about her except what she had done. The woman had trapped Folawe’s family in a frame with death.
It would be months before Folawe lost another sister. The story she told my grandmother, and her family told themselves, no longer held after that. It was no longer unfortunate or coincidental. The family portrait was no longer a fixed past, but a looming future. No longer memory, but prophecy. Left to right, death entered the photograph. The person closest to the most recently deceased looked at the photograph in dread, hoping their turn would take a while longer.
When her father’s high-backed chair was found in pieces by the end of that year, Folawe’s mother rushed her out of town. No goodbyes. Time, too little of it. My grandmother did not see Folawe leave, only heard that she would never return. No one survived the photograph.
***
By my grandmother’s estimation, she was supposed to die before her husband. She was four years older than him and he was behind her in the photograph. Everything was planned. She had forced death’s hand to travel from left to right.
The week passed. Winter thawed into spring and my grandmother flew to Toronto. Four hours before she landed, her husband passed in his sleep. Aunty Tejumola delivered the news at the airport. There was no reason to stay. After she saw the body, she asked for her return flight to be moved to the next day. His body followed much later. Sadness arrived weeks later, after Disbelief had taken their bow. You were supposed to die before your husband, Disbelief said, as my grandmother’s mind closed on their surreal performance. What she wanted was unnatural, some people told Maami, everyone knows the men go first.
Three: a family photograph. I saw it on the morning of my grandfather’s funeral. Uncle Ademide was wrong about the colour of their outfits and right about Aunty Omolola’s gele. It was truly impressive. Aunty Tejumola was right about colour and Maami was right about everything else. It was a strange family photograph. Everyone in profile, yet, my grandparents’ resemblance showed. I imagined him skipping over his wife and out of the picture. I imagined her loss was three-fold. In my grandfather’s death, she lost him, was reminded of her loss of Folawe, and started to lose the solace her story gave her. The one that said Folawe and her family did not die by mere coincidence. At the church service held in her husband’s honour, I watched my grandmother consider, then refuse, to let photographers into the chapel. E
