Wind and Water.
Photo by Mohammed Nahessi on Unsplash.
In Kamazou, the people do not like it when the sun rises. If you listen close enough, you can almost hear their voices in the wind cursing the sun and God by extension.
We do not like the sun because it does all what every other form of light does, expose.
The children are the only ones who are jolly when the sun wakes us up and that might be because they really don’t have anything to hide.
They usually spend most of their days exploring the remains of the sins of the adults.
When Sule, a child with no sin, walks into the big empty house that drew him in with all its colours and echoes, he will stumble upon a picture of something so rare one could safely argue that it was a myth.
He will see the picture of a man and his son, and there will be something strange about their smile and radiance.
Curiosity will lead his hands to feel against the picture and then he will see.
In Kamazou, we don’t listen to stories, we watch them, literally. And this is what the boy will see:
On a sunny day, a man dressed in grey clothes will stroll across one of the streets and he will have an unusual glow about him.
Adults out in the day time are harder to find than sunflowers in a desert. He will come across a baby caught in a snippet riddled with mud, blood and water.
He will pick it up with so much joy that if you stood afar off, you’d think it was a mother cradling her child, but dressed in the wrong attire.
By this time, our young story-watcher will have known the identity of the strange man. His name is Atyap; “the one who stands out of the darkness”. The only man who didn’t have anything to hide and stirred up storm clouds of hate and admiration from the people.
Hate, because he had every right to be scoffed and mocked, admiration because deep in their hearts they wondered what it’d be like to take a walk in the sun without having anything to hide.
When they all heard of his recent adoption, they were mostly glued to their windows with curtains thick enough to block the sun, but transparent enough to know someone was walking by.
“So e no do dis idiot say na only him bin dey, we now have two goody two shoes idiots abi?”
Hate, the one evident in the people’s retort when they saw them stroll by.
Hate is the most powerful because he is the emotion that has the lion-share in all their hearts.
So, when he speaks, he speaks for all. And one man sponsored his campaign, Atyap, the one good man.
The boy will grow like his father. He will learn what love is because he will fall in it. He will chase after the girl as young kids chase after the things they love even when everyone else has told them they are impossible.
He will chase, even when he’s not a child anymore. She will ward him off because the last bit of her humanity won’t want him to be fallen, like her.
It is the only way she can speak what she understands love to be back to him.
He will question his father, and Atyap will sigh as fathers do when they know that words won’t be enough to explain things to a son deep in the forefronts of his prime.
They will do what neither of them has never done before, and that will unleash things that have never happened before.
There’s an old saying that inviting chaos brings change and if chaos was a wind, then these two were the twin hurricanes she spun up.
As they walk around in the night, she uncovers herself to them; baring forth her naked lusts and debauchery and sensualities without order.
In her, they see what would’ve become of them without the light, the one that makes them stand out so that even the moon knows and hides herself behind the clouds that night.
Just when they’ve decided that they’ve seen enough and want to head home, swelled emotions burst out around them and there’s a mix of a lot of things; of rage, envy and anger, murderous intent, all flowing through the same source outlet; violence and blood.
But nonetheless the two of them make it back home. And the boy will finally understand his father and the woman he loves.
Two men made it back home, a son and a father, but only one of them will be there to welcome the sun when he wakes up tomorrow.
The events of the night before will open the door to Hate to take charge and wipe out light once and for all.
The boy won’t know, he will be with death and grief, and soon know that they make terrible acquaintances.
The girl he loves will be taken; taken because Hate doesn’t like to waste time and wants everything good, everything puppies and rainbows wiped out; and because he knows that the boy will chase after her, the way we all do, especially when you realize that it isn’t a dream and that you only have one life.
There was one unspoken reason why everyone else hated Atyap the way they did, and it wasn’t just because he was a good man, but it was that his goodness allowed him power.
Power resides in speech here. Only a man good enough can talk, and when he does, everything he says happens as he says.
That is power to be terrified of. So, when Atyap died, the people thought it died with him, but faith can be a gift too like love and when the love unfolds from the soul of the boy, Hate will wish that he had killed both the boy and his father.
Hate will ascend to the highest mountain with his bait so that he can slay the last good man and his blood can flow for all to see. The boy will follow behind.
When he ascends the mountain, he will find Hate and Death waiting for him. The only business Death will have there will be to take away a body and he never bets wrong.
Hate will try to stir up every form of hate he can in the boy, and the boy will begin to fall, and Hate will consume him, the way a past who knows something his opponent doesn’t know does.
The boy will cough and bleed, the girl will cry and scream and the entire Kamazou will echo heavy with silence.
What makes a boy a man is that he remembers all that his father has taught him to be. Then he becomes.
In the deafening moments of his dawning defeat, he will remember the voice of his father telling him that certain things exist only because of the absence of another.
It will make sense now why Hate has thrived in Kamazou for such a long time, Love wasn’t here, and it’s now looming effect has made Hate desperate.
The boy has seen the light, and Hate will have to go because in the first place, he only was because love wasn’t.
He will become, and then hate will be no more.
They will head home as all lovers do after a long night of fire and flames. But by the break of dawn, only the woman he loves will awaken.
She will see that he bled out quietly in the middle of the night. A blade from hate that his love never healed from. The things we don’t forgive don’t always make us monsters, sometimes they consume us until we’re no more.
She will hold his cheeks and she will remember the words he spoke to her every time he chased her into her abyss:
“You and I, we’re like wind and water. What is the wind but water that lost her clothes? And now she runs around bare and naked, without remembrance of who she is, nor where the tragic accident occurred.
Some say she became so when the first men fell. You rub against my waves to remind you of a love you once had. I allow you stay, because I’ve understood what it means to be lost, to have nowhere to go.
I see you. I hear you.”
So, when she catches Sule in the living room staring at the photo, she’ll wait patiently for him to finish watching the story and when he turns, she’ll be ready to ask him:
Wind or water?
