His Life, Now Known

As many of you know, our dear writer friend @James recently posted a very open essay about his life. With his permission, I have written this. 

Sometime many years ago cerebral malaria stopped him. Blood transfusions that his family couldn’t afford forced his fragile spirit into a coma for nearly a week. When everyone thought his life had ended, he opened his eyes. It took him years to recover, to become fully functional. He lost vital memories of his childhood, either by selective memory or a result of the illness.

A father who prefers to smoke and drink and beat his mother sits in the corner of that childhood home. He growls when James comes near him and only ever bothers to spit accusations. A mother who insists that her rape at eighteen forced her to marry that man sitting in the dark corner rarely bothers to do anything to help. She prefers to lament her woes in silence, brooding over the day the father will die and she will finally be free of the constant reminder that she was taken against her will. Family heritage and respect runs deep in Nigeria, and with shame, she has been the bride of a man who beat and raped her in the back of an alley when the night was dark and the moon was absent. Though she cried out, her painful screams went unheard. People in the city prefer to imagine that rape doesn’t happen. Besides, it’s always the woman’s fault. The rape baby in her womb became the oldest of four. A girl who repeated the cycle of her mother, now with two daughters under-nourished, dying from lack of love.

And James, the last of the line, is the most stubborn of all. He sleeps a stairwell of the main library in his city rather than going back to that home where beatings are as common as food is scarce. He wears the same pair of trousers for a month at a time. James is determined to rewrite his family history. He has stopped going to class, preferring to be isolated from the imaginary idea that life in Nigeria could ever be anything but brutal. The state of the country is dire, and James’ future is bleak. Cycles repeat over and over. At night, he sleeps hungry, huddled in the doorway of businesses, wishing he could find a home.

When he begs for money, he uses it to buy time in an internet café to write. He sends out his words to the world to be read, hoping someone somewhere will understand that his is a plight not intentional. It is the environment into which he was born. He is determined to find a way out, his spirit indomitable and his will unmatched. And yet, he believes he can change the world. He’s a young man broken, still with a smile on his face.