My Personality Comes to Life (HOME III)

                              MY PERSONALITY COMES TO LIFE

This piece is a direct follow-up to I MET MY FATHER (HOME I) and AFTER  I MET MY FATHER (HOME II); therefore for the best appreciation, it will be necessary to read these preceding pieces. An appreciation is possible, though, without reading these pieces,  only it will raise many a fundamental question..



Now that we had resigned ourselves to the fate that kept us down in Nigeria, life and growing up went on quite peacefully. “Resignation” quite correctly describes our attitude, for, though we found solace and reassurance in discussing and looking forward to the arrival of our belt, watch, factory or calculator, we still harboured a subconscious reservation which actually made all our hopes seem quite unrealisable. Despite our faith and enthusiasm, these psychological contradictions confined our dreams to the airy-fairy realms of unrealisable imagination. The everyday reality around us made these dreams and realms unreal to our subconscious mind, so that we never consciously acted as though we expected their materialisation.

Our lower-middle-class living conditions had persisted interminably with no signs of an upcoming improvement, much less of the arrival of our sacred powerhouses. Besides, our parents, though kind and caring, were implacable disciplinarians who never spared the punitive rod on any occasion of our serious misbehaviour. Thus the downputting and rough floggings we earned from them from time to time, made me feel too small, too insignificant and common-place to become the custodian of such all-embracing magnificence (How could such splendiferous heavenly catholicons be bestowed on this half-naked mess disdainfully crying out his life, frantically darting about from room to room, screaming for forgiveness under the barrage of the wild lashes of cane descending mercilessly on him from the furious hands of his mother or father?) Finally, I knew of many a really devout and faithful Christian around us who had prayed and prayed, and whose prayers had not been fully answered, according to their expectations. This strengthened the subconscious doubts in the power of our ceaseless prayers. (What the Lord will eventually give you might be mere shadows of your fantasies, you little Christians!)

However, we did persist in our hopes, dreams, discussions—and prayers— apparently unaware of the significant self-contradictions we were displaying. But Sola was less self-contradicting than I; being more reflective, he lived more in the world of these dreams than I did and retained them as an ever-evolving collection of self-alluring conceptions.

In the course of years, I developed a marked love of ease and an aversion to physical work. It became customary for my brother and mother to scold me with a sharp and irritated “You see, only food!” after I exhibited a repulsive reluctance to carry out a domestic assignment or to do it quite to their satisfaction. This derogatory remark appeared to be the invention of my brother, occasioned by acts of domestic indolence and disobedience on my part. Depending on whether we were at table or not, it meant either “You see, reluctant laziness! You know only how to eat your food!” or “You see yourself grinding your food away so seamlessly; you know only your food!”  It was usually shortened into, “Only food!”

I habitually fought shy of domestic chores a boy of my age ought to be engaged in, and virtually left it for my brother either to do from start to finish or to redeem after I had botched it up or merely scratched its surface.

But I inwardly contended: It was true I enjoyed eating, in common perhaps with other young children of my age, four or five years below the age of ten, but food was certainly not all I knew. I knew I could prance about, bustle around within and outside the house with Sola and playmates, and initiate creative mischief or thoughtful destruction— wondrous feats of domestic derangement.

For instance, after days and weeks of wondering what animated it, I one day decided to open up one of my father’s mostly prized and perhaps costliest wrist watches which he placed on his bed. I did that, of course, not as a repairer would do, but, figuring, from its elaborate and exquisite appearance, that its structure and mechanism must be complex, I wound it to its limit and then forcibly prized its front cover open before performing one or two pernickety operations that relieved it of its soul.

It did lead me to a discovery—of how mad my father could get. He soon discovered my achievement. Unmindful of my young age, he swooped down on me with wild lacerating strokes of a tough electric cable, ignoring my near-to-death yells and screams that threw the entire house into wild chaos. For many years after, he kept referring to the distress I caused him with my “investigation”.

The following year, because this was not about wrist watches, I again carried out another “investigation”. It involved an operation on the knob of our living room television. Not content with the two local channels the economy-class television could receive, I felt more channels would be received if the knob was turned slightly “beyond” its two-channel cycle of turning. I had been turning the knob clockwise and anti-clockwise with no more results than the monotonous two local channels. I therefore resorted to my feeling, and ventured a little beyond the clockwise limit. Turned it to death. The whipping I earned from my father on this occasion was cumulative; his ructions embraced his anger from the previous occasion of the wrist watch. So much chaos did I generate with my toothy screams and yells, vainly pleading for mercy, letting loose a wild domestic turmoil, and attracting the alarmed intercessions of neighbours. 

On another occasion of a less unsettling venture, I thought nothing of exploring the mouth of a sleeping female cousin of mine, Kate, many years older than me, to investigate a matter of personal significance and to liberate myself in the process. I had found Kate exceedingly beautiful. Fair-complexioned, her spotless face was irresistible—enchanting eyes, ruddy cheeks, lovely lips— and there was a striking harmony in her elegant figure, in its well-proportioned features. There was also a mysterious charm in her smile that enslaved me irretrievably. She never smiled widely in my presence—and therein lay my push-over, in her gentle smile. It had a disarming effect on me that lingered for hours, filling me with a strong insatiable desire for something I could not clearly define. No doubt, Kate would have had me do the most stupid and impossible things for her as soon as she stared at me and offered her gentle smile, dissolving me instantly and infallibly. But she had no cause to make an unusual request of me, only ordinary errands that did not require her to smile at me. She called at our apartment only occasionally, so her spells came from distances that lent enchantment to her figure. This unfathomable charm in her smile! It radiated through as her snow-white teeth, half-revealed, were brought to view by her reddish full lips, moderately lipsticked. 

Now, by some quirk of my subjective reasoning, I came to believe that the source of her charm quietly lay spread along or within the upper gum of her teeth, that part of her teeth she never fully revealed in smile.  It must be there, an absorbable quintessence, vibrating with super-earthly charisma. I therefore resolved to demystify her, to savour her beauty in the most concentrated form. I resolved to uncover her pink gum at the earliest opportunity, to gaze at it as closely and as intently as possible, to absorb all the charm I could from it, and gain my freedom from her ceaselessly tantalising enchantment.

Confirming that she was deeply asleep on a bed in our visiting room, I looked around to ensure I was in no one’s sight. Fully assured, I gingerly opened the room, but  suddenly had to shut it very slowly and quietly.  After a minute of remaining on the spot and starring at her with cautionary suspicion, I crept to her, gently stretched out my right hand towards her mouth, but suddenly retracted it into my pocket in a rather jittery gesture of uncertainty. She did not stir. I felt assured. I repeated this gesture for reassurance. No stirring. Now, feeling completely safe, I gently stretched out the slim hand and, delicately holding her upper lip between my thumb and index finger, I managed to open her mouth, and freely scrutinised her gum quite, for five to six extremely cautious seconds. I gazed at it in half-conscious expectation of a satiating epiphany: Now, won’t something great emerge from this gum, engulf my feelings, remain within me for as long as I wished until I have completely absorbed its essence and it begins to cloy?

That was not to be. Rather I saw and discovered very little: Her beauty had vanished, and its origin and essence, which I strongly believed lay quietly concentrated in her upper gum in a dazzling form, remained elusive. Her bewitching attractiveness came from the interplay of her cheerful eyes and her smiling teeth, and there was cheer in her eyes only when she was awake and she smiled. Now her eyes were shut and the life in her features had departed. The charm I expected to savour more closely in the gum I exposed was absent! It lay only in her wide-awake smile.  Her sleeping looks were too lifeless for my “investigation”!

Incidentally, all this while, Sola was peeping at me through an opening in the door lock. He had noticed me loitering with intent around the visiting room, and seen how I had furtively crept into the room and had shut the door behind myself. During my trials and errors and ultimate exploratory performance on Kate’s mouth, he had been shivering quietly with epileptic giggles. When I had finally satisfied myself and came out of the stuffy room perspiring with frustration, he greeted me with a burst of his wildest laughter—he suppressed it, nevertheless, until we had moved away precautiously from the visiting room towards the dinning room, far away enough not to upset Kate’s sleep.  There, in the dinning room, he set the whole room vibrating with his fits of epileptic laughter which had tears coursing down copiously from his reddened eyes. Sober as a surgeon after an unsuccessful session at the theatre, I stood staring at him. I found his laughter much more annoying than puzzling. 

Closely considered, I believed, such acts of investigativeness were expressive of something I knew how to do. Acts of discovery that took some doing, really. In addition, I knew of my artistic bent for copy drawing, whose expressions my brother did not really countenance. Sola had no such tendency and considered it an arrant waste of time and ability drawing with pencils and on papers meant for “serious” academic work. To him, sketching out boys and girls, houses, cars, trees, books or pencils was mere frivolity. But it was one of the things I “knew”, something I believed took some serious attention and concentration. It boosted my sense of practical achievement. 

Therefore, I did not wholly accept being told off with “Only food!”, though it generally made me feel fleetingly guilty and irresponsible.

But after a year or two of continual subjection to this withering chastising, I outgrew the need for it. I had satisfied my mother’s domestic-work expectation on a good number of consecutive occasions. The deliverance from the spell of rebuke came during one breakfast. I had shown an excusable, negligible reluctance to assist Sola in a few household chores—sweeping, washing plates, etc.  A little later, my mother, he and I sat at the table for breakfast, and, soon after, glued to my chair, I was quietly savouring away my plate of delicious yam and egg, fully concentrating, oblivious to my surroundings.

“Only food!” he ejaculated

“No, Makinwa has become hard-working now,” my mother rejoined, “he is no more a lazy boy.”

My brother had no answer to the bridling retort. That was the last occasion of such rebuke.

A few years passed this way, and my reluctance to partake in domestic work again appeared. It re-emerged to become one of my prominent childhood characteristics, like an inveterate trait.  In the meantime, I had been enrolled in a primary school, and now had academic duties in addition to the domestic ones. I had left the nursery school after an academic session, ten months of a gradual emergence of my personality in its likes and dislikes, its strengths and weaknesses, its fortes and idiosyncrasies. These naturally had to adjust themselves to my childhood, remaining a child’s “version” of the tendencies. Thus my aversion to domestic work was in relation to the home chores of a male child; my curious investigativeness did not concern serious domestic or academic affairs, and my sense of superiority, apparently deriving from my consciousness of the place of my birth, was directed more at my peers than at adults.  These traits became increasingly settled in my character and grew into my personal identification.