People Are Going to Mistake Your Self-Dignity for Pride, Carry Yourself with Dignity, Anyway!
Only in the mind of those who are full of pride themselves is your self-dignity mistaken for pride.
In the course of my ‘interesting’ life, I have witnessed people humiliate others for no obvious, logical reason. Sometimes, when asked what the other person or persons had done, they responded. ‘She’s too proud.’ Or, ‘she’s stuck up — I want to cut her down to size.’
After my uncle’s wife poured the porridge all over me, she had pulled out a trash can brimming with waste from under the kitchen sink and told me to go empty it at the main trash site 300 meters away from our home, across a busy road teeming with traffic. Treating me despicably wasn’t enough. She needed the added humiliation.
There were torn bits of old newspapers in the bin, so I’d groped around it for pieces that I could use to wipe the sticky mess from my face.
‘Just look at her; look, look at the useless thing! So the pride in you won’t let you walk out of the house like that, eh?’ Aunty yanked my hand away from my face. ‘Se enye idem, ndisime mkpo — look at her, stupid thing. Like it or not, you are going to empty the bin exactly as you are.’ So saying, she’d kicked the bin at me and pushed both the brimming can and me out the kitchen door. As I walked, dragging the heaving bin behind me, some of the mushy mess had fallen plop, plop in thick lumps off of me. I will never forget the looks people gave me. Those who were driving slowed down momentarily, their mouth opened in confusion at what must have been a strange sight indeed.
As God bears me witness, that ‘little’ incident led to my sleeping outside for three days — not that it was the first time my uncle’s wife had kicked me out of the house. But she’d always sent one of her children to get me after a few hours later or before nightfall. Not this time. Aunty said she wanted to teach me never again to ‘waste’ her food.
That day was the second time I came close to being raped while under my uncle and his wife’s care. The first time was a few months after I arrived in Lagos, when a neighbour’s teenage son, who must have been about sixteen years at the time, began exposing himself to me. The boy’s name was Yomi. I was barely nine years old when it happened; still, I will never forget that name. When I reported to my uncle’s wife, all she said was, ‘So, as small as you are, you’ve started noticing men?’ When I shook my head and told her that I hadn’t called for the strange gesture in any shape or form, my uncle’s wife replied, ‘You are lying. You must have done something to make him do that.’
Aunt’s verbal onslaughts were not directed on me alone. She derogated my parents, too. This made me really sad. I could have taken any beating, any punching, any pinching, any slapping (however hard) than have my parents spoken about in the manner she consistently did. But I had no say in the matter. Again, my little cousins picked that up as well.
