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GENDER WAR
You naw go commot road? Abi you naw see?
Na ya papa road?
See trouble o! Becos dem buy you cellphone nau, na im make you come tanda for highway dey take call?
Na only where I stand you wan pass? You no see road everywhere?
Gina sat on the floor by the doorstep waiting for us when we returned late to Benin City from Iludun. I didn’t she was sitting there until the headlamps lit up the spot where she was and Felicia said, “Hey, is that not Gina?”
It had been a long day spent mostly on the road and it took me a minute to adjust my mind to what was happening. I was exhausted from hours of driving on rough roads to and fro Iludun, Mama Rufus’s place.
Obaseki, looked cornered. He certainly was not anticipating an encounter with me at the restaurant. His shrunken face looked collapsed with fatigue. The anxiety that he was feeling was palpable. His face began to twitch. It was bad enough when he saw me entering the restaurant. But the moment I informed him that Rufus was on his way to join us, his system could no longer handle the tension. He stood up. He patted his pockets.
“What is the matter?” I asked him. “Is everything fine?”
“Oh, I was-was-just checking my—my—my pocket. For my-my-my-house keys.”
“And is it in your pocket?”
Henry Drewall, the philosopher of sensiotics, wrote a couple of days ago that, “Moyo mi owon — you have turned pain into paint…for us to see and feel….”
He should know. Sensiotics is the archeology of feelings within the human sensibility.
This painting shared here is about the pain and joy of departures and arrivals, as one of my Transatlantic Series: in 1992, I started it in Nigeria just as I was relocating to the to the United States, where I completed it.
Now, please watch this one-minute clip after reading my short note.
This morning I went to my usual coffee shop, not too far from my house in Austin, Texas.
It was my favorite hangout before the outbreak of the Covid.
But now, it has become only a drive-in shop, and I sat in my Jeep, waiting for the young woman to take my order.
“Tall coffee and a banana nut bread warmed,” I told her.
“Sure,” she said. “That will be five dollars and seventy cents.”
“Come here and swear, you this adult, that you never were a troubled youth,” Iya Oyo said, when I told her the story of my friend, Gift Krani-Rijal. Her comment is a Yoruba proverb that says, “Àgbà wá búra péwe ò ṣe ọ́ rí.”
Being young is probably the most dangerous thing anybody could experience.