AN OBSERVATION ON THE DIFFERENT COLOURS OF REALITY.
By: Festus Obehi Destiny
Tags: Nonfiction, Socialism, Classism, Nigeria, Nigerian Economy

AN OBSERVATION ON THE DIFFERENT COLOURS OF REALITY.



Written by Festus Obehi Destiny



Being poor will make you so angry. Your emotions so taut. Your thoughts overwhelm you until you feel claustrophobic. Your freedom is not yours to give. Your lips are locked, emotions pocketed, until you explode in different drabs of depression. Depression keeps you angry and anger is the spice of poverty. Although many of us have mastered the art of introducing humor to our situation to make an euphemism of the hyperbole that anguishes our everyday thoughts. How gruesome it is to wake up everyday to a recurring state of disappointment, go out, see the life you are living, the life you are trying to avoid and the dreams you are struggling to sail in. in secondary school, we are indoctrinated to master the arms of government and the fallacy of the fundamental human rights. But reality is far different and disappointing. You realize that the average man in Nigeria cannot afford his rights or even use them. He is in a situation where rights do not function in his reality and it is only his pursuit of wealth, the pursuit of happiness, that matters. Even though he isn’t free to use this right as a collective, even as an individual, his hands are still tied. He lives in a crappy bungalow with seven other neighbors, sharing a bathroom too small for the average height and too slim to pick up a soap. He wakes up to the noise of the neighbor’s child at midnight scrunching for milk and refusing to swallow the dusty bit nipple of his malnourished mother. he can hear the banging of the neighbor by his other side and he cannot tell if the noise is the intensity of rape or is he just beating his girlfriend like any other normal Tuesday. His privacy, just like his fundamental human rights do not function in his reality.



Where I come from, you either pocket or unleash your emotion depending on who is seeking your attention. For many an example, when the grumpy landlord comes with his first born illiterate son seeking rent, approval, respect or an enactment of a ridiculous rule for neighbors unfortunate enough to stay in the dingy crooked apartment, your parents smile and nod their head. Of course they do not agree with whatever he says and they would rather not spend their Wednesdays on a very insignificant meeting, but they realize that they cannot afford to be disrespectful or even be honest with themselves. Any contradiction will offer them a quit notice and with the rising rate of houses in Lagos, one can say that the fear of rent in Lagos is enough to keep you silent. Your parents keep their anguish and anger for the little children who misplace their lunch money, forget to greet or even for the ridiculous reason. The slap meant for the oppressors will land on the cheeks of the unfortunate victims that dangle with the patience of the oppressed.



Amidst the growing rate of poverty and insecurity in rural areas, one resources that never seem to be scarce is the children. The poor man works hard in labor in the day and gropes the skirt of his house wife at night. With no care in the world for family planning or the use of a condom, his wife’s stomach grows every season and small parties are thrown depending on the sex of the child. the children are thrown into the pursuit of excellence in public schools. Their intelligence is based on whose memory works the fastest. Indoctrination takes the center stage, religion keeps them in moral check and the cane is used to remind them of how good a citizen they are supposed to be. But even these mesh of love and torture doesn’t work forever. For as puberty knocks, growing questions surrounds their actions, thoughts and desires. Questions that the house wife mother cannot answer and the father is too ignorant or cannot afford the care to answer.



For a family that survives and not live {Because living is very different from surviving}, there is hardly anytime for a parent to sit down and discuss the boundaries and climax of puberty. Many of us were left to figure out the answers to our unexplainable bulging desires from the colorful pages of our biology textbooks, inquisitive neighbors and the friends who knew more they should. And so we embraced them all, myths, truth and lies. And when our desires overwhelmed us, we bade no concern to morality, rather we explored and desecrated the boundaries that separated boy from man, girl from woman, and a child from youth.



The years that comes make puberty look like a foreshadowing to the terrors that would later hunt our realities. For the boy, he begins to realise that he is treated and talked to differently. His choices are limited, his desires are franchised and his responsibility emerge out of the curtain as if they were invisible before he became aware of them. He realizes that his worth is tied to monetary value. The same way a slave is. If the family is very poor, the boy might not achieve his dreams of education and might be pushed into the streets into the world that embroiders the word ‘hustle’. He might scan the environment where he lives and try to adapt the same way that men that have come before him have used and succeeded. This might involve the legal or the illegal franchise depending on where he lives, who he meets and what he believes in. His lady counterpart, at the inception of puberty, comes with a fear as the body grows. It is hardly ever talked about the fear that comes with puberty. I do not mean the emergence of age but seeing the body that you once owned and control, grow out of your own control or thought comes with a slight scare.



Just like the boy, the lady’s choices depend greatly on the family she is brought up in, where she grows and what she believes in. where I come from, we have a lot of poor families with ladies strutting after rich boys or men, exchanging pleasure for money. These girls see their elder sisters who have seen other sisters grow into puberty, explored boundaries and realized that they couldn’t cross back into the shores of morality unscatched. The shame, the consciousness and the realization of their actions keep them on the side of their choices until salvation comes, if salvation comes.



At night, the heat comes with a terrible haunt and hurt. And if you can survive that meandering fury, what tears into your privacy is the cries of the children. Not your own children but the ten or dozen children squabble that always erupt from your neighbor’s home. They say wall have ears but in your own case, the walls have holes in them. Gaps that age and rats have chewed fiercely and now it seems there is no wall at all in the first place protecting your ears from the squabbles and discordant symphonies that always erupt out of the night into your vulnerable lobes. I moan about these cries because with them arise the birth of a new terror, that is the day that your conflicted soul will face again, at least for a fleeting day. Then, I say again, with these children cries, comes the suckling, and fingers, scratching for food and attention. But of course the children surround and limp over an half empty bed with the comatose mother, sleeping and fading away. Today, you cannot tell if she is simply running from her own world or if she has just been raped again to a comatose state.



What comes next is the banging on your door. The knock of one who does not sleep behind the same doors as you but certainly owns the floor you sleep on. The fingers keep bulging and slashing until your mouth responds to calm the knuckles. And then you stretch your shorts, wipe the spittle off your face, twist and turn so that your legs do not kick against the teeth of any of your own siblings. You stand in for your parents as you see other parents with shrunken bodies and furious eyes, who have obviously endured the same nightmare of an evening that you have staggered through. Greetings are exchanged, rejected and spat. The landlord of course throws a tantrum about topics that you have condemned to your unnecessary folder. Words that you will receive and reject before you see your parents again at twilight to pass it on. You sleep through half the sermon and only jerk awake when the flies buzzing out of the toilet comes close enough to rest between your nose or sing choruses behind your ears. You catch the sleepy lackadaisical eyes of the other tenants and you can still hear the cries of the dozen children behind your rooms, limping and singing for a mother whose spirit is miles away from her torment. The only person alive this morning is the landlord punishing you with his authority, anger and a restless ego seeking to renew its worth by reliving its strength and tormenting the helpless tenants with a cliché Thursday morning. At last, the words end and greetings are exchanged, picked up and spat at again. You cannot recall if at one point, voices had been raised, tempers had been tested or threats had been issued, all noises now operate at a familiar frequency of disturbance, stress and abuse. You crawl back to the warm floor. By now, it is wet, dusty and you had left the door open on your way out and the mosquitoes had swarmed in to make a meal of your siblings, half sleepy and half listening to the cries and raised voices. You barely close your eyes before the alarm tears off. The same scathing ring that had torn your parents from their arms and sent them off now wakes you up reminding you that it is a crime to be poor and be at peace or even at ease with rest. The alarm is a reminder of that fact, a torment, a punishment that slowly finds itself becoming a solace.



The queue at the bathroom is long. Children who are naïve in body and mind choose the easy task to bath outside the house with brown water and detergent. But you, have to queue along with the older ones. A treatment that you are getting used to. Not because you have to queue at only this part of the morning but because you have realized that you have to queue and wait at every part of the day for anything you need. The queue is a measurement for the yardstick of patience and the poor have the distinct quality of being patient. We stand in queue to vote in election and anchor the same patience for the next election even though we know that we would always been forgotten and abandoned immediately the votes are counted and carted. We anchor the same patience after we slip thin, almost invisible ward of cash into the hands of security guard and wait for the call to inform us about our interview for a job. Whether in reading, or praying, or even waiting for the fingers behind the clouds to open up our prayer requests and answer our prayers, we anchor the same patience and so you stand at this queue, watching your neighbors go in and come out with exaggerated fervor. This is the most quiet part of your day. There is no need for discourse in shame and filth.



Now comes your turn and you barely have the time to rest your towel before the grunts come in. they come the way the water from your bucket empties. First in quiet small lumps and finally the big ones. You do away with the sponge, the songs, the dreams and just wash your ears, lips, legs and your pits.



The grunts and smell of the overheated soup hits you and threatens to throw you over immediately you emerge from the bath. Your siblings, six or seven, you are beginning to lose count, hop and jump all over the tight walls picking up clothes and looking to make themselves the ghetto consideration of what the word beautiful is before they all disperse into their different halls of struggle and torment. I call it torment because this exercise is done out of the utmost unnecessary desire except the idea that this has now become the normal of the day and the only way their idea of a well spent day is thought of. It is the only way it functions in their reality. and then comes the stage where you have to search for their answers with them and stop their fighting if anyone comes up and they mostly do. Your own fighting begins at the busstop. There, you punch, kick, yell and scratch for a seat at the bus. Sometimes your hands even slip behind another person’s pocket and you cannot fight off the temptation to squeeze and pick off what you would call a Friday’s blessing from God. There has been no light for days and now you pick up your cloth from underneath the bed where you have left it for two days to maintain the gaitors that you have planted since you were a child.



Today, the bus is slow. There is a tanker that has decided to rest its inefficiency in the middle of the road and now you’re the buses are moving like the legs of a constrained millipede. You are afraid to look at the fingers on your broken stop watch because you do not want to accept the reality that you might be late for your interview. Finally, this millipede moves slowly and slowly until you cannot bear it any longer. You jump out of the bus and start running through the waking streets of the city. Noises accompany and desert you and eventually you realize that you are alone in this race to salvation. You run, bend, sweat and rest until eventually you arrive at the front of the company that has managed to filter your number out of the thousand of application that they have received in the last year. You arrange your dress, smell yourself, wipe yourself with your socks and offer a little prayer before entering through the doors. Earlier in the week, your mother had offered a seed of faith in brown envelope at the pastor’s altar in hope that angels would grant you favor and drop this job and salary bonus in the center of your itchy palms. You look at the company again. You do not remember submitting you CV here and for a second you blink rapidly to make sure that you are not delusioned. You breathe in and throw your legs in front of you.



The secretary desk is empty. You do a little pace and search through the walls and perforated air before you call out. Finally, she comes. A tall woman who smell of foreign fragrance, mint and a raised eyebrow that spells arrogance. She looks at you and you can tell in that mini seconds that she knows you. Of course she knows you. She has seen you come into her office once every week and ask about a vacant position. She speaks in low tone and tells you off and does not shout or threaten to call the security except you linger and threaten to go on your knees. She wants no part of you. The smell of the heat and old musk that you carry around you is one she recognizes around the children that run around her asking for money whenever comes out of the shopping mall with big bags and wines.



‘Yes?’ she says without opening her mouth. All she does is cock her head and raises her eyebrow while walking to her desk to grab at her sanitizers and press her hands around the security number on speeddial.



‘My name is, she doesn’t care about your name. she probably will forgot it immediately you leave. I am here for the interview’



‘Which one? The one that ended an hour ago.?’



You want to tell her about the landlord, the meeting, the queue, the tanker in the middle of the road and the two hour leg walk through the busy lagos roads. But she does not give a hair and you know she doesn’t. she is already back to her desk with her eyes all over a figure that isn’t your. You have seen this scene a thousand times. You are tired of begging and asking and promising and slipping almost invisible seed of faith bribes into itchy palms. But you know she doesn’t give a hair and so you walk out. You walk out and search your pocket to see that you have walked out of the building alone. Your wallet gone. You are about to throw youself back into this secretary prescence again when you realize your folly. You had run out of the bus, forgetting your thousand naira with the conductor. Now the voices that had trailed you when you started running seem more familiar now. The conductors and passengers calling for you and your change. Oh, what story you have to tell when you get home to your family.



As you walk back home through the busy roads, now awake and roaring with fast cars, smoke and broken dreams. You do not wipe your sweat off your face instead you let them surround your eyes and flow down your hair, down your ears through your back. Your phone buzzes and at the top of the notification is a message from your girlfriend, Joy. A short text praying for you to get the job, and hoping your salary will be big enough to cover your parents and take her out to eat big chicken at the tantalizer eatery. You close your eyes and your phones and walk down the long lane as the sweat overwhelms your body.



What hurts more than the long walk is not the pain you feel but more than that, the agony when you realise that your fears are kicking in, winning and even stretching out of your body into the heart and minds of your siblings. You first see this fear in the life of your younger brother, who has started moving with the yahoo boys crowding around your home. Every word from your finite wisdom rises and falls back to dust when he realizes how deeper you sink into agony, thought and poverty. He does not want to end up like his parents. A bricklayer of a father and a mother who sells failing wares. He does not want to end up like you. A jobless graduate with a long list of dreams and unanswered prayers stretching out of his prayer mail into real life. He now thinks that the responsibility of raising his family from the drawls of poverty is his to bear now that it seems you are failing. Your sister comes back home today with a wet patch on her skirt. You recognize it but you do not want to ask her about it. Asking her is tantamount to accepting that it is real. That your sister is on the same path you led girls her age when you were twice her age. You remember don’t you, when you were younger and had the arrogance of a secondary school graduate. When you felt the world was at the tip of your tongue and fingers and dreams were as visible as puberty, yours to own, control and manipulate. How beautiful a poet karma is.



The heat comes again when you try to escape with a nap. The breeze spluttering through the window is not enough to sail a paper and now the dried sweat on your hair is stretching its stench through the whole apartment. The neighbor’s children are back from school and now the cries resume. The walls suddenly disappear and now you can hear the cries. For a moment, it seems that the universe is taunting you. Listening to sad songs to accompany your tears is not working today. Your ears have grown accustomed to company that suddenly they have become familiar neighbors, no more strangers. You look around the house, the dusty fans, the cob webs growing at the centre and sides of the room, the untidy clothes and the flies buzzing through the compound. You close your eyes, realise that there is no escape. Reality is a terror.



Again, you walk. To the crowdy rowdy market. The noise would stretch for miles and still reign over your thoughts when you are miles from it. You recognize the stalls, the familiar calls and the regulars. You walk over to your mother’s stall. Your father is already there. His head is buried over a bowl of garri and you can see the sweat dragging sand and age around his back and head. He has been laid off again. Your mother searches your eyes. There are no need for words to be exchanged. She knows. You know. Everyone knows.