The Egusi Base.

Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash.

There’s something comedic about speaking what I feel.

My friend recommends it, says something about repressing and the dangers of it.

I have never bothered enough to listen because when my life becomes comedic—when I become the joke, that punch line for everyone to reminisce over— she would not be there.

She would be protected on that cloud she lives in, far away from reality and life.

She assumes that life can be solved if we all shared our feelings. Emotive radical that she is, I’ve asked her not to near me.

Besides, Silence is a skill passed down through generations. It is culture and nobody will make me lose my culture. But she has found some way to break into my sub-conscious, smart girl that she is.

That is the only reason I think that I am in the kitchen with my mother waiting on an impulse. If I say one word, I would have to continue. I just have to start. It is hanging on my tongue, literally.

My mind though refuses. It chooses instead to play my life as it could be in the next moments.

Scene one, I tell my mother that when she turns the oil for the Egusi base, I can already feel how it would solidify round my arms, my stomach tightening and clutching around my will.

I tell her that my fingers are clasping already in my throat because I must get it out, get it all out.

My mother is livid and worried: an African mother’s balance. She asks me who I think I am, ‘You don’t know what is wrong with you. You don’t have sense.”

She would make sure to inform me that if the highest of my problems was oil, I had no problems at all. It would end that way—the conversation I mean. The vomiting will not end.

But it will be dismissed which is another word for “hidden” and that is enough for everyone because if you think about it, it was a very stupid thing to make my weight such an issue.

Aren’t there bigger problems in the country?

What did I know of life?

What have I ever suffered?

What kind of exaggeration am I speaking when I say I feel out of control? What rubbish?

Scene two, she would call my father crying, wailing actually, because her child has been lost. She has been swallowed up in western movies. This is what happens when a child is on her phone every day.

Tiktok? Could I not see how my life was “tick tocking” right in front of me?

My father would call me to the living room and I would kneel right in front of “Daddy’s chair.” Head bowed, I would have to find the balance between looking at him and looking at the floor (respect is a series of very calculative gestures and postures) but I will fail.

“Come on, look at me when I am talking to you.”

“Are you mad? Is it my eyes you are looking at?”

You never win in such moments. I am a disappointment… as always. He would say I had watched too many movies. I was living an artificial life.

Did I not know that here in Africa, it was women with meat that were beautiful? I would not know how to tell him that I always thought the vegetarian lifestyle was made for me. Did I think I was American?

He would raise both hands, curving them at the wrist, swinging them left and right because that was what Shakara women did—women who were too shallow and airy to have any true grasp of life’s issues.

They lived like they walked on clouds of indulgence and luxury. Apparently, I would be the shakara woman who lived in a luxury of a two-bedroom apartment with three siblings and one bathroom.

He would tell me of every mistake I forgot. Was that not how I failed my exam? I would not concentrate on what was important. My mother right behind me would interject like an adlib to a catchy song that I had even started meeting boys.

There are no boys, of course. I had no interest in them simply because they had penises but that is another day’s disappointment. I could not speak of that.

My mother would tell my father how I had been shaking nyash for the carpenter, the tailor, our neighbour’s son, Ojo, Paul.

Any name that would come to mind would do. Embarrassment does not have to be true.

Scene three and this is the one that could kill me. My mother would look me dead in the eye, blank like I had spoken a foreign word. She would blink twice and her wrinkles will suddenly show on her face as I had made her age in a few seconds.

She would tell me “I no understand. When that one start?”

And before I could garner up the courage to speak, she would change the subject and tell me to do something for the soup. She would say to check the meat, cut the ugwu, make the Egusi paste, anything else but speak to me about it.

I would do what she asked without thinking. My body would move on its own to obey.

Obedience and silence are two sides of a coin. Your body knows this routine.

There will be a tug on your heart and a pull on your tongue to unroll. Your mind will tell you to stop biting your cheeks and speak but you could not because you would not.

It is disrespectful to speak if you are going to express agitation and we have never been allowed disrespect.

Just move, your body will know what to do. I would be weighted with folly and regret. I would be confused. My life would flash before my eyes and I would ask my stupid mouth why it opened.

Why did I not bite down on the need to be heard? Why did I listen to my friend?

Later at night, I would overhear my mother praying to God that I would not go astray. I would wonder why she could not talk to me before she snitched and reported me to the Lord.

Conversations are not that hard to have, are they? Or are they just hard to have with me?

So I have decided that my friend is dumb. I have spent all my life learning silence; how to speak so they can hear half a speech and let me be.

She should let me be. She should take a lesson or two on how to live with parents. She would be less beaten.

I would pretend that I did not vomit chunks of myself little by little, every day. I would pretend that even then, I was not calculating numbers and numbers of carbs, proteins, fats—grams of calories that I would need to expel.

I will pretend I am jolly and ask my mother:

“Ahan, Mummy. The oil don do now. You and daddy no suppose dey chop plenty oil.”