1. Buried

Your eyelids flip open at the throbbing of drums. In your nostrils, the moistness of freshly cut wood. Your first sight—a well-lit lid, around which my arms are wrapped. You have sixty seconds to live.

Oluyemi. In the previous minute, you were standing alone, your hand stretched towards a glinting emptiness. In the very next—this—you have been buried under piles of my body, next to two still, silent men. If a man sealed into a coffin suddenly wakes up with a whistling gasp, how much breath is left in him to remember his journey?

. You and Your Children Once Laughed

Your memory starts in a car eating up the road, a haze ahead, the windscreen so bright the zip across your jumper burned your skin, in a town called Sagamu. Last day of the West African exams, and you were driving your children home, louder leaner versions of you, one crumpled in the front seat, the other in the backseat, all of you singing a holiday song. You told the one beside you, the younger one, that he would go to School of Theology first before his JAMB exams later, as a pastor’s son. He stared out the window and said, “Yes, Dad.”

“And maybe your sister can go to the convent,” you said, laughter in your chest.

“You thought you ate, Daddy,” your daughter said.

You raised an eyebrow at your son.

“She means she disagrees.” He chuckled. “You should keep up with our generation’s lingo, Dad, for real.”

“I work as a civil servant, my son. I’m afraid I have indeed not moved with the times. Just like your sister still hangs onto that ancient radio player.”

“That’s not giving, Daddy. It’s not ancient; it’s antique. I may be Gen Z, but I prefer organic recordings to all these noisy digitals.” She laughed, gently caressed the blue Rolton on her lap.

. But What Good Can Laughter Do?

Of the three men lying in the grave, side by side like long platters on a table, you are but the trickle of a memory waiting to spread.

You can hear more drumming now and what sounds like women singing and clapping. It sharpens your horror because now you don’t know whether this is some sort of heaven, where people make music, or you have gone mad, because how can sound pierce the density of my body wrapped around you, six feet down? It must be a sick comedy, illogically cruel, an ill-placed joke.

When you humans are about to die, your whole lives are compressed into your last seconds of breathing. Also, the fastest way to die after you wake up alive in a coffin is to lose it, to throw the shackles of calm reason off your lungs and limbs and start banging on the lid of the coffin, yelling and crying for release, anybody to notice through the reams of my body that your burial has been a hasty, terrible mistake.

You have wheezed out your chance at slowing down your death. You have pummelled the wood above you for a miracle that would unclench my arms and make me yield you up to grave diggers on a random rescue. Your vision is blurred, and your perceptions squeezed in and out. At first, the two motionless men are in the same wooden closet with you so that the cover stretches like one rough, yellowish-brown sky.

Then you look again, and you are the only one, the edges of the wooden floor pressing into your sides and against your head, constricting you so you can barely thrash around. Then again, you are twisting your head and shoulders in desperation for room, and you realise you can roll around because the coffin has widened again, and you can see the two men, and your eyes are flicking from face to face, and one of them seems to look exactly like you but you cannot be sure because the arcane lighting in the coffin has dimmed itself.

You mouth your son’s name—Jomiloju, whisper your daughter’s name—Mosewa. You allow the picture of a miracle, the wonder of holding your children close once again, of laughing at Mosewa’s sarcasm and watching the light in Jomiloju’s eyes.

Twenty seconds left to drain all air from the box. You start crying.

. In the Middle of Your Ensconced Lives

The landscape of your second memory is the one where you slapped Mosewa—heavily. You were standing in front of her room, your hands quaking by your sides, when you slapped her, a cracking in the middle of your ensconced lives, a slap so weighty she felt the constriction on her lungs. I felt it, too.

It was because she’d talked to one of the “lawless neighbourhood boys” in the dark. And when the crack appeared, it exposed your son’s love for a man and his hatred for the theology seminary you were about to send him to.

Your daughter had housed your son’s secret for months now, but when your hand tore down one side of her face, it unzipped her mouth, and the story poured out: Jomiloju’s secret friend was a Hausa trader living in Sagamu. They met on Instagram, and Jomiloju planned to visit the man soon.

You grasped the doorframe and tried to still your legs. Jomiloju stood by the TV, remote in hand, watching. You turned to him with a tell me your sister is lying gaze. But he glanced away from your face kia, with what looked like relief, like a siblings’ plan finally hatched. Outside, the wind had picked up, throwing sand against the leaves and doors. And thunder growled.

You remembered how much you exalted Jomiloju’s morals to people in church. You’d never monitored him the way you monitored his sister, never even thought to monitor him. Yours had been an unrumpled trust.

And it was what made you implode. Your stomach stung, your chest tightened, and you just wanted to scream and scream. What would the church elders say? If they knew, would they ever allow you bring him to the seminary, full of boys? What would the neighbours say?

The rain had started. You touched the walls so they would suck the heat from your palm. Had you been blind and deaf? Had there even been signs? He talked to girls. Took selfies with them. Played football on the streets and led a small music band where they sang about love for girls. And he was invested in news reports rather than pretty shows.

You often discussed the politics of other lands with him; the year Desmond Tutu died felt like a personal loss for him. Desmond Tutu was his hero. “I like his activism,” he’d say. “It is not biased at all,” he’d add with the ring of one who wanted his listeners to hear what he did not say. Was that what you should have heard?

You seized his phone, but he had deleted everything about his lover. He refused to tell you the address either, swearing with the Bible that he had never gone there and the man had never seen his nakedness. You rummaged around for healing, rubbed on the ointment of possibilities, hunted for testimonies of boys who stopped being abnormal and decided to start your son’s redemption from home, where the shame would never seep into another ear.

At first, your praying was fervent, loud questions hurled up at God, so loud you couldn’t hear God’s answers. You read your Bible, leaned on hymns. The strain left slackness in your faith; you stuffed your mouth with more prayers, but none of them reached your heart anymore.

You became a shell. You couldn’t focus in church. Your being fluttered, your belief system crumbled. You bought chickens one afternoon, held their fluttering wings to your face, and told them they would keep you company now that your children were slipping away. Or perhaps it was you slipping away. You found notes Jomiloju left you under your pillow or on the bathroom mirror.

Some of them were airy, others burdened by something dark but disguised as airy. One of them read: There were very few ways to make this less difficult to say.

You felt like screaming.

You tried to shield the blow with your daughter’s achievements, but you were too disconnected from her, had always been. Mosewa wrote fiction, had that intemperate hunger for books by which invested writers were known. She sometimes missed meals just to read. And her stories were haunted by the want for a mother.

One quiet Tuesday, the morning air was broken only by the chirping of birds, the clatter of Ludo being played somewhere, the murmur of voices in nearby houses, and the distant revving of automobile engines, you told her as you knotted your tie, “I saw your story on Facebook, people liking it and commenting that it is great. Nice one, my darling.” You were smiling. It was one of those days you could muster enough presence of mind to go to work.

“Thank you, Daddy.”

“You are going to study medicine, though. Not storytelling,” you said and slammed the door after you.

She smiled. If only you knew how much that statement irritated her, like a little stone in her shoe. Of all three of you, I connect with your daughter the best because she is the one with the medium through which I can easily thread my tendrils: writing her stories barefooted.

I knew she was going to say what she said that night. Jomiloju needed someone with spine to tell his truth and, therefore, crinkle the theology plan. It could easily have counter-worked, but they knew you would lose direction, and it was a risk worth taking.

When she asked him, weeks after, why he slunk around indoors like a guilty prisoner, he said, “I think we did a childish thing. It doesn’t even feel like home anymore. Looking at Daddy breaks my heart into tiny pieces.”

But of course, you didn’t know he said that.

. Freedom Song

Inside the coffin, your final memory morphs. The song above comes so sweet, but you can’t grasp the words. You try vocalising along, but your lips are now a prison against the freedom song you should have lustily sung before now.

. Echoes of Farewell

On the day Jomiloju left home, you were in the backyard, standing before your chickens, praying, and Mosewa was in Lagos. She’d been shortlisted for a writing award. She took second. She came back breathless, sweat running down her temples, and went straight to Jomiloju’s room, her entire being tilted away from her good news.

She met a cleaned-out room, a goodbye letter. She hurried to the backyard and asked you where Jomiloju was. You stared blankly at her because you did not even know Jomiloju had left. She started shrieking: Daddy, do you know what I saw on my way into Sagamu? Do you know what I saw?

She dragged you to the living room, snatched up your car keys and said, “We are going to look for my brother.”

It dawned on you that she knew the address all along. She grabbed her radio player and tuned it from station to station as if waiting to hear something. She never told you what she had seen. But you drove, obeying her directions to Jomiloju’s lover’s house. She’d started sobbing and mumbling, “Jomiloju, please be alive.”

There had been news of attacks on TV. Someone had caught two girls in a slick bathroom, their fingers sliding between each other’s legs, one’s lips fastened on the other’s nipple. Neighbours undressed them and flogged them on television. “See?” you’d said to Jomiloju days ago. “That is what they will do to you.” And Jomiloju had burst into tears, crumpled on the sofa next to yours.

The attacks swelled. Any boy that looked or walked in a way boys were not supposed to was stripped and whipped. Girls started leaving their hair to grow so they could plait them, so they could look like normal women that were attracted to men.

As you drove, you thought, Perhaps he did not run away. But when Jomiloju bent down to scoop me in his hand, the ritual of sons that would never return to a home lost, I’d listened to his prayer, to his heartbeat, and said, “Amen.”

Inside the car, you said, “I love you, Mosewa. I’ve always loved you.”

She wiped her face with a handkerchief. “Yes, you love me. You just never respected me.”

The silence swayed like an echoing accusation. She refused to look at you.

You drove past a church. Again, you were about to lose those who mattered and you could not afford to.

“Your mother did not die from a third childbirth.”

Mosewa whipped around. “What?”

The Camry started jerking. Then it rolled down to an empty stop. The fuel gauge needle hung at red; neither of you had noticed the descent. You were in the middle of a deserted lane, the outskirts of Sagamu. As if to fill the silence, you began the story: their mother was an Ifa worshipper’s daughter before you converted her and married her.

After Jomiloju clocked two years, she asked you to drive her to a Christian outreach in your former Volvo. Along the way, you realised that she actually wanted you to attend her people’s festival. During a furious argument, you crashed into a pit, thick outgrowths smashing the windows and windshield, splashing blood. You struggled to crawl out. But she remained trapped under the branch-cluttered, crushed chassis.

“I left her there,” you whispered, shuddering.

Mosewa shook her head slowly, as if to make sure she’d heard right.

Then—“You didn’t know she was a babalawo’s daughter before you married her?”

You started sobbing. “My wife changed. My whole family changed. Look at your brother. He stopped being a child of God.”

Mosewa thumped the dashboard. “Is he a bad son? Is he a bad brother? What did your bible say? By what shall you know the children of God?”

Your sobs rose. “By their fruits.”

“Thirteen years, Daddy and you carried on with us as if what happened was fated.”

You stared through the windshield at the gathering clouds.

“Did you leave her to die because there was another woman?” she asked. And even before you shook your head, she already had a self-loathing look as if she could not believe herself asking the question. You realised with a sharp jab in your chest that your image in her eyes would always be creased.

You mumbled, “I couldn’t save her. I was too weak from losing blood. I could have tried. I should have. But I was so mad at her.”

Mosewa said nothing.

“Before it happened,” you went on, “she made you a tape. At first, I didn’t know where she hid it. She was going to play it privately for you on your ‘Sweet Sixteen’. She seemed to have her reasons. She made it at a time tapes were in, and she joked they’d still be in by the time you were sixteen.” 

“Why didn’t you give it to me? I’m seventeen, almost eighteen.”

“I later found it. But I never listened to it. I’ve carried it around in my car ever since then, waiting,” you said, like that answered the question. You unlocked the dashboard and brought out the small cassette.

She took it. She held it to her chest and said, “So close, and yet so far away. I can’t believe it.” She hung her old radio player around her neck and kicked off her sandals. “This is hope. I will find my brother. We have found our mother.”

You wanted to speak, but there was no voice left in you.

Your daughter stepped out of the car. She swung down the sunlit road, unleashed and unhinged. There were birds in her chest, and they flew—a roiling march of wings, flapping loose everything with which she had always guarded herself. 

You turned the key. The car engine surprisingly whined back to shaky life. The stereo crackled, even though you hadn’t had it on.

“A timbre trader named Ukachukwu has alerted the police, reporting a case of a mob action around a church in Sotubo, on the outskirts of town. The boy was dragged down from an okada. The rider fled. The police are on their way. If you spot a slender boy of about fifteen being attacked anywhere, please place a call to—”

The car engine died.

You bounded out.

“Mosewa!” you called, your hand outstretched as if to grasp her image already petering out in the distance. Was her radio player still on? Had she heard what you just heard? You took two steps forward, and that was when I shifted my body and hurled you through time—and you woke up inside a coffin.

. Lines, Lies and Bondage

I am the most downtrodden and the most worshipped. There is a line on my body that mortals must not cross, for they cross into a plane where I am not just Earth but a storyteller. You crossed into that ethereal realm. And I chose to make its settings the same coffin into which you had squeezed your wife, son and daughter.

. The Bedtime Story

Mosewa stopped under a tree and listened to the tape.

“Omosewa, my daughter, is that you?”

There was a rising, swelling choke in her chest now. All the birds were singing. 

Mum, it is me.

“I’m sure you’ll grow up to be my replica. At sixteen, do you plait your hair the way I do? Or did you cut it?”

Mosewa touched the suku on her head, a tapering basket of braids.

I do. Daddy said to cut it, but I insisted. I saw your photos. I didn’t really know you, but I wanted you.

There was laughter on the radio. “Of course, I’ll be there to see it. But now I will tell you the story of your mothers and how brave they were. It has no conflict; it will soothe you. It’s a bedtime story of courage, and a language long kept.”

After she listened, Mosewa smiled, lowered the Rolton from her ear, and—tasting the saltiness of her tears—repeated her mother’s final words,

“This is where I came from. This is where you came from. This is where we came from.”

Once upon a time, there lived a people whose government left little

blood on the skin of earth. They lived close to the biggest lake God

created, where the air was cool and blue. They spoke Òmìnira, the

language of freedom. Their god was a woman who had conquered

and remained the last standing in a land besieged by male warriors.

Òtun. She travelled over hills, up mountains, down valleys, through

forests, and through rivers, and came upon a clayey glade, where

she built a hut from mud and stones and ate and slept alone. Every

night of the full moon, a band of colours appeared on her radiant

black skin, as though she slept underwater amidst piles of

gemstones. And during the day, the hues stayed on her wrists and

ankles, like ìlèkè beads. One day, while hunting, she found a lonely

hunter, his flawless ebony skin flushed with a little colour, and took

him as her lover. She began to fill the glade with her children, their

skin glowing with all the colours on her and his bodies, and she

taught them the language of Òmìnira, the secret to her victories.

They grew up wiser and braver, privy to the oracle of their birth. They

could not touch the sky, but they could touch their mother, so after

she slept for the last time, she became their god, the one whose

stories had empowered them. Her shrine was a rainbow crest,

mounted on pillars moulded with multicoloured mud into deer

shapes, for deer meat had been her favourite. Generation to

generation, they kept the language alive, handed it down, a priceless

heirloom, and it was this language that gave meaning and

expression to all the multihued kinds of love and body that existed

there. Breasts and muscular arms in one body. Then epicene bodies

with long flowing hair and longer cocoons between their legs. When

anybody’s colour faded, it meant the end. And they assembled for a

funeral.

The women were fearless adventurers, hunters known across

oceans, commanders of battalions during wars, and winners of these

wars. They stirred the politics of the land, and distributed power

accordingly. Their bodies were responsible for moulding and

finishing the human form. They were God in female bodies. Their

men farmed, cooked and taught children under the trees, under the

stars, without books, but with words blowing out of their mouths like

air that can vanish, filling tiny ears with the legends of the women,

patterned after the conquests of the first woman, their god. If any

woman didn’t grow heavy with child, her man was punished for not

performing his duty, for men had only one in the natural order: the

duty of installing children in wombs. This punishment was to send

him away from the house until he was able. 

The people of this land held festivals for Òtun their ancestor,

where they sang and drummed and danced and received annual

blessings for the land to burst green and healthy. Òtun allowed them

to serve other gods, because in her was no egocentrism. So the

Òmìnira people bore victuals to temples of Òsùmàrè, the rainbow

deity, and to Ulè, Mother Earth, who absorbs all histories and

catches all offenders. Òsùmàrè taught them how to paint swaths of

colours on each other’s backs. And because the winds were always

cool and the sky always clear, they wore light clothes made of cotton

washed in aró, and called them àdìre. These àdìre clothes were their

insignia, and they ranged in colours from red to violet. Anybody who

wore dye colours outside this, or refused to wear any, was seen as

dead, and banished by the women from among the living, to be

forgotten forever.

But the greatest law that must never be broken was their

language. It had one attribute: its ability to evolve with coming times.

But it also possessed one great risk: it could die. Anyone who robbed

their offspring the knowledge of Òmìnira would be caught by

guardians of Òsùmàrè and Ulè, the earth, and buried alive to

appease Òtun—unless the robbed child or children decided to have

mercy and release this flouter before they suffocated to death.

This is where I came from. This is where you came from. This is

where we came from.

. An Extinct Language

Back in your coffin—this is the last flicker. In five seconds, if the drumming above you doesn’t stop or change its tempo to a dirge, if nobody digs out my body to lift the lid of death from your face, if I refuse to slacken my arms around you, you will die.

Your great-great-grandfather was an Abóbakú in the Òyó kingdom. They were descendants of Òmìnira, of Òtun, but they forgot the language of their beginning.

Blood bloomed on the land. The colours faded. When they installed their kings, their aláàfins, they installed the King Reveler too—the Abóbakú—who lived and enjoyed as the Aláàfin.

When their king climbed the roof to sleep among his ancestors, the Abóbakú must be buried with him. And a retinue of slaves must be hurled, alive, into the ìpèbí vault where the washed body of the king would sit in repose.

On this fateful day, they dug me up, placed the silent slaves in me, and when they went to find your great-great-grandfather, he’d fled into the forest.

The Ògboni, cult members in charge of crowning and burying kings, went after him. They invoked all the gods and goddesses, called on me to stop him. I raised my shoulder in the forest; he stumbled, twisted his ankle, and the èmú the Ògboni members sent after him bound him to my breast, and there he moaned and bawled until they found him, dragged him back and buried him next to the Aláàfin.

They didn’t just stop at wrapping him with a white cloth as usual; they built a coffin to keep him in the ground.

Then the sojourners from across the ocean came, their skin a mottled paleness, and brought with them a man that had the skin of your people.

He read from a big book in the language the Òyós knew and talked about a God who lived in the sky, and who came down to earth only to return to the sky and then would come back to earth to take people hostage.

Most of their stories were nonsense to the people of Òyó kingdom, but the sight of big mirrors and the tartness of brandy these sojourners brought convinced them to finally listen and stop stuffing my body with the cries of people buried alive.

The sojourners brought back a whisper of this extinct language, and balance was restored.

But they also brought books that your great-grandfather read, that your grandfather read, that your father read and that he made you read. These books were why you turned out this way: the forgetter of history, the eraser of colours, the killer of the truth.

. “I Am Not a Man!”

“Rón’lè!”

You find yourself now standing, the mustiness of my armpits and wood no longer in your nose.

“Rón’lè!”

You look up and see them, the women of Òmìnira, the elders, in a row, looking down at your shrouded body, chanting your name.

“Gbé’ra so! Rón’lè!”—They need you to wake. But you cannot because you do not know this language.

You see more of them in the morning land of your vision, in the wake of birdsong, rows and rows of more women, bearing pots on their heads, aró patterns on their bodies, on the edge of the forest, singing that song of elusive words, the hills propped behind them.

Suddenly, I toss you from there into another space where the clouds look like they’ve been dipped in indigo dye. Here, your daughter sits in judgment, surrounded by four glowing elders in àdìre clothes. She looks like before—the daughter you raised. Yet there is something different about her. Her eyes glow blue, and lightning flares from her hair.

“No man can stop what we have always done,” you hear the Ògboni cult bellow, and just as you wonder where they are, they appear and fall on Mosewa on the high seat.

The blue in her eyes blazes, becomes rolling lava. “I am not a man!” she shrieks and flings them off.

Thunder crashes. I hurl you back into the box. The sky has unleashed rain and softened my body. I groan as the first stab pierces me. Six feet down, you hear the metal ping of a shovel and its thuds against the wood. Someone throws the coffin open, and you drink from the sky. It is your son. He is crying. But instead of hollering your name, he is hollering his sister’s name and saying, Wake up! We shouldn’t have come here! On seeing that it is you, he begins to shut back the lid. Out of breath, you start pounding, pleading, jerking, tears streaming out of your eyes.

“This is tradition, Dad,” he says, “don’t fight it. Stay in there like you always preach.”

But you keep raining blows on the closing lid. And the drumming above ceases.

. I Return You

There is a prickly warmth on your nape. The tarred road glistens. Mosewa is tapping your shoulder from the back as you stand there along the bushy path. You whirl around and grip her. She shrugs off your hands. “Are you unfrozen now?” she asks. “Come and see.”

She is pointing at a pair of shoes by the bush. They look like Jomiloju’s trainers. There is blood in them.

You keep your eyes on the dripping leaves. As you move, your feet sink into me. Your clothes are gummed to your body; it has rained on you and your daughter.

“I smelled them,” she says. “They are his.”

Of all my smells after rain touches my cores, humans love petrichor the most. But you and your daughter do not stop to inhale deeply. In the wet sun, you wade into the warm, moist bush. You and your daughter shout and take branches and beat the bushes aside.

You yell his name. You dig into my body like the women of old, the men of old, the people of Òmìnira, had dug for their lost language through their descendants in newer generations.

But you do not find Jomiloju.

“Please. Please, say all of this is a nightmare.” You weep, blindly smashing your branch into the tall grass.

“I don’t want to see the body,” Mosewa whispers. She scans the orange trees above as if Jomiloju might be in the dense foliage. She holds the bloodstained trainers to her chest. “I don’t want to know it. My brother was not killed.” Her voice is horror-filled like she already knows what she doesn’t want to know. “We’ll go to the police station, the hospitals, anywhere.”

She begins to ululate. You reach for her. Holding each other, trembling, unable to say those things you should say to each other, you both breathe in what is everlasting, what has been found, and what is already lost.

. Epilogue

I am Ulè, Mother Earth. I’m a Healer. Things that heal, sprout from me.

I watch you and your daughter; I give nothing away. It is best to make this lesson private, un-intervened. The law of a lost language is that it must be truly mourned, for only in its mourning, can it ever be found again.