My Face is a Portrait that Bears my Father’s Name.
Photo by Barbara Burgess on Unsplash.
On Saturday mornings, I am stirred awake by the fragrance of fresh akara, the oily sweetness filling my nostrils like a perfume wafting off a young girl’s purse. But that Saturday, I was awoken not by that, but by my mother’s cries as she lamented over my father’s corpse, which lay before her, cold and rigid like marble.
The neighbours—vultures swooping down on offal—flocked to her, their eyes, vintage cameras waiting—longing—to capture the apex of her pain, when her demon would rise, swell from her belly like a growing wave, and she would slam her body against the dust and pull at her braids. A woman among them called to me. “Come, child,” she said.
She cuddled me against her shrivelled breasts, permeated by the smell of spices and smoke, a scent forever tied to my mother. And from the folds of her dress, she pulled out a toffee, which she slipped into my mouth like life. Then, with a voice muffled by comfort, she murmured into my ears: “You must become a man now that your father is gone. You will be the cane that will hold your mother up when the days grow weary. You are to fill your father’s shoes, to do the things he did for her.”
I yearned to tell her that my feet were still too tiny for my father’s shoes. To become a man, my father used to say, one must be able to fill one's father’s shoes. And so, on Sunday mornings when I dab his boots with a rag for him, I would try them on, hoping to fit into them.
I laid my head against the woman’s breasts, and as her heartbeat trickled into a song that drowned my mother’s wails, I longed to become a man. In my adulthood, my feet have filled my father’s shoes, straining to break free. But I have long learned that becoming a man is not about filling shoes or waltzing a perfect pirouette in them. To fill your father’s shoes is to carry his roles on your head like a beggar carries his bowl—everywhere.
Over a churning pan of oil, my mother’s hands create life again. She moulds ball after ball of akara, her fingers moving with the intricacy of a mother spider weaving webs in and out. Please, permit me to use this metaphor, for my mother’s face is an old fabric untouched by an iron. It wears her stress like a tribal mark, open for the world to see; not even the smile she offers me as her eyes find mine through the heavy smoke shrouds it. Her shoulders hunch, as though she carries the weight of the world on them. Well, she carries my world, day in and day out, since my boyhood, how heavy it must be, to bear someone else’s world while yours cracks slowly like the bark of an old tree.
As I pass my mother a wooden bowl for the akara, I wonder if my bones will ever be strong enough to heft her world. And if, someday, I will become the man she needs, because for now, my face is just a portrait that bears my father’s name.
