IF YOU BELIEVE YOU ARE NOT…LOOK AGAIN.
No one sets out to conquer that which is not; if someone’s entire focus is on ‘cutting you down to size,’ it can only be because there is something in you to be cut down to size!
The scars my grandmother referred to were on my right cheek and along the upper part of my left cheek — they are faded now, but if you look deeply, you can still discern the one on my right cheek. It is flat, about an inch wide and an inch and a half in length. I got it when Aunty dipped a kitchen knife in a boiling pot filled with pieces of hot yam, hooked one piece and slapped me across the face with it. Her reason? I was boiling the yam with very little water and risked burning the dish and the pot. I don’t remember how I got all of the others. But a few were from the chain of her wristwatch when my skin got trapped in the holes between holes in it; others happened when she dug her fingers into my skin as she pulled me closer for a hit.
It wasn’t difficult for my grandmother to conclude that I wasn’t the same child who’d left for Lagos. Before I went she used to tell me, ‘Slow down! The world will not take off without you if you stand still for one minute!’ Now it seemed as though I was permanently in a ‘sleepy’ state, she said.
Nne wasn’t wrong. Underneath my evident gladness at being back, the jumpy, fearful teen I had become showed. My grandmother noticed. And subtly but earnestly began to attack it. ‘What, nothing to say?’ She would tease when she said something that would typically have elicited a snap response from me but didn’t.
Despite wanting to see me heal quickly, Nne sensed that I wasn’t ready to speak about my experiences. Instead of pushing or trying to force things out of me, she adopted humour. ‘Lagos must be an unusual place indeed if my talkative granddaughter has now learned the virtue of silence.’ Or, ‘I’ll bet even the dumb woman from Udua Watt has more to say these days than you, Nene.’ She was referencing a woman from the community’s weekly market who sold more goods than an average person even though she couldn’t speak.’ Nene was one of her nicknames for me. It means beloved, or grandmother (meaning I was her own mother’s re-incarnation). By the way, when my own daughter was born years later, I also named her Nene. She was born within hours of my grandmother’s passing. The news was relayed to me when I went to labour. I used to say that my grandmother cared so much for my well being that she couldn’t wait to turn right around and come back to me.
