It’s hard, I have learned over the past few weeks, to process grief. It’s even harder when you have to live, to exist alongside reconciling yourself to that grief. And if you’re very far away from the natal origin of your grief, it becomes unbearable. I’d thought the plasticity of a strange land would help to salve the immediate pangs of the grief. It’s a lie.
There are times I want to see you, even if physical contact is never going to happen on this earth. Forever. But you’re not gone. You’re only not of this world anymore. I live your presence. I see you as I saw you in those years in the market, at home – when you thought you’d slunk into my room without my notice and I held your hand when you were about anointing me with Goya oil in the dead of the night. To arm me of course from lurking harm of….!
But I am afraid you’re receding, fast and furiously. Your images, innumerable, dazzle my eyes, they make me dizzy as I try to pin some of them and reconstruct memories. I fear all the time that I might lose them. Will I lose them? Would being in the midst of and around your personal effects have helped crystalize those dazzling mirage?
I have another issue that bothers me. In what language do your memories come to mind? Often time when I get a spark of your presence in my thought, I hear them in the language of my education, and I wonder if my mind is translating my native language, the language you bequeathed to me. But from what source is it translating it from? We spoke Yoruba 99% of over a quarter of century I had with you, but your memories are transcribed in my mind in English. I am afraid those memories are replica of replica – or are memories not in themselves reconstruction of what had happened?
I am trying to see why that happens all the time. I see now how your face lit up when I led “Daily Morning Devotion” in that language. You’d planned it with dad to make me lead it. That’d draw me back to the fold I had closed my eyes to, so you thought. And what better way to help retrace my feet into it than in that language you’d invested so much of your money, sweat and hope into, but whose successes on your son had also somehow drawn him to read some literally “impressionably” tabooed words that now threatened to pull him away from “Oluwa”?
It was your dilemma.
I see your face lit with joyful contentment that your investment was bearing fruits when I read those religious words written in English in those morning tract. But I see faint creases also on your face. You watched me carefully, checking to see how the words I read out and I explained affect me in anyway. I’m afraid, mother, that I might have been playing with your feelings too. I have been trained, from your investment, in the literary tradition of this language to be able explain few almost simplistic paragraph expositions of the scripture contained in those tracks.
And did I game you to believe they had effects on me? I don’t know. I really don’t know. I knew back then I had caused you great concern when I started questioning what we read few years earlier before I went to Ibadan for BA in English.
Now, I merely wanted to ease your concern by not only stop questioning, but also by inducing immersion in those words. More and more I led those morning devotions and those words came in English, you drew your legs in stealth to touch your husband, my father, of the sudden change. I sighed relief and waited for another day to impress you further. English at the service of God, finally.
But was I gaming you?
Now your memories come to me in English, and I’m afraid they might not be right.
Tobi Idowu 