If I Was A Feminist

If I was a feminist, I'd go about saying things like: virginity is this crazy idea in people's minds that women should be lashed for doing something that men do and get applauded for. That a woman doesn't have to be a virgin, as long as a man isn't. But I'm not a feminist. Though, I don't think a woman absolutely HAS to be a virgin, keep herself, till marriage, I think it's quite important. I think women are women, men are men. You know why I think like this?? Because society is screwed, and society tells me that is how it should be. If I was a feminist, I would have blasted the lady who had tweeted this, I quote "the best thing a woman can be, is a house wife." I would call her names, who told her this?? It's ridiculous. And she's female. I would block her, even. What insolence. But I am not a feminist and even though I think there is so much more a woman can be than just a 'house wife', I also think that it is very important for a woman to find a man and live with him, and cook for him, and have sex then give birth. It's also society that tells me this. I'm not a feminist. If I was a feminist I'd say a woman can go on and become president of the world, if she wants. And forget about her husband - when he gets hungry, he'll cook for himself, or go somewhere that smells like a bakery and buy fried rice, those ones that are the green colour of a leaves placed next to a bright light. But I'm not a feminist, I think a woman must cook for her husband. Except on special occasions like when she's pregnant, or when he wants to give her a treat. Apart, a woman should be there to make her husband's food. I also think like this because of society. Because society says this is how it should be. If I was a feminist, I'd say that a married woman does not absolutely have to conceive and give birth to a child, that it will mess with her figure and shape, that the beautiful figure she had, will disappear. But I'm not a feminist and while I think it's important that a woman should decide when she's ready to conceive, I think it's also extremely important that she conceives, at some point. I think it's important that she gives birth eventually. Personally, I'm of the opinion that nobody should get married for the sole purpose of bearing children. That said, I think it's imperative that a woman performs this role of child bearing. This also is my opinion because of what society has made me believe. So you see, I'm not a feminist because society does not want me to be, because society is screwed and has managed to convince me, for some strange, inexplicable reason, that women are women, and that men are men. This is unfortunate. Till next time,, Keep dreaming!!

Of Rich Streets and Peasantry

You take a walk, you like to take these walks periodically – it helps you clear up your head and put things into` perspective. The sun is about to set, it hangs low near the horizons; the sky is the colour of stale smoke. You breathe in, trying to take in the atmosphere, the clime smells like burnt food. You walk for some time, listening to Taylor Swift complain about her boyfriend through the earphones of the second-hand ipod touch you recently bought. You like Taylor Swift’s voice you wish you can have her sing to you every night. You arrive at a part of town you have never been in: HBA. You wonder what HBA mean. You have never been here but you have heard about it several times: your friends say it is the part of town reserved for the extremely rich, people who have so much money, it reeks. Seeing the place now, you think your friends have completely understated the finesse and class of it. It actually looks like heaven. The roads look like the ones from Hollywood, the sidewalks that you walk on look like they are made of some sought of product that makes walking easier. You feel unworthy stepping on it, it apparently wasn’t made with people like you in mind. You walk gingerly from then on, as if your leg hurts. The houses look like palaces, as if God Himself lives there. They are painted in white, with highlights a certain unique, subtle shade of blue. You wonder how many rooms will be in each of these houses, cannot be less than ten. You wonder if up to ten people live in any of the houses, you doubt, it seems very quiet. The walls are really high, you wonder if it can stop the devil from entering. They are all painted in that unique, subtle shade of blue that you can’t quite give a name, the one that reminds you of the sky on some days. Someone comes out of one of the houses. She looks voluptuous; her complexion is the colour of tea, mild tea that does not have too much cocoa, the type that your mom used to make for you when you still lived with your parents. She’s almost fat, but not yet. You imagine that there is a gym inside her house where she exercises to keep her weight from skyrocketing. She has no makeup on but her lips are the colour of blood, the type of blood that your secondary school biology teacher would say ‘lacked hemoglobin’. You intentionally look at her face, you want to find a pimple, a bump, something, anything that would make her look less perfect, you find nothing. Her tea complexion is steady. She looks at you as if you are foreign, indeed you are. You walk faster, away. You’ve had enough of this HBA, you begin to walk back home. You are now listening to Eminem; he is telling you to ‘lose yourself’. You no longer like Eminem, not like before – he doesn’t follow anybody on twitter, you don’t think that is right, he should follow at least one person, like Kanye West, how he follows only Kim Kardashian. You wonder what will happen when they break up, Kanye and Kim. You notice how different the part of town that you are now in is, extremely different from the glam and reeking wealth of HBA. There are houses here that are not even up to an eighth of those mansions, palaces that you saw. Some of the houses have not even been cemented; it is still the blocks made of cement and stones, the one that are the colour of soda that you see. There are no windows on some even, yet people live there, people with families, with lives. The roads here are not tarred, the rain that fell last night has caused it to be an irritable sight, brown, slimy and semisolid it looks like human excrement. This place doesn’t smell like ice cream the smell is acrid: there are so many refuse dumps around, no wonder, you say to yourself. You see a madwoman she’s wearing a clothe that used to be white but is now almost brown, she’s holding a polythene, disposable bag, picking things up from a refuse dump and throwing them into the disposable bag. She stops suddenly and laughs then empties the contents of the bag back unto the dump, then starts again. You get angry. You wonder why the rich are so rich and the poor are so poor. You wonder why there is such division – why the rich has to live away, in another part of town, from the poor. You don’t understand why there is so much difference between the rich in the society, and the poor. You wish you can change things. But then again, maybe you can’t, maybe this is how things have been designed to be. There has to be the rich – who will live in extravagance, then, the poor – who will live in peasantry.

DIVERGENCE

He sits on your sofa, the same way he used to all those years ago. Your best friend, well, not your best friend per se, he used to be your best friend, but not anymore. You don’t like him that much anymore; your likeness for him is just ‘there’ now, you like him no more than you like Golden Morn, or Semovita, or Wheat, or Poundo Yam – the way it tries desperately to be pounded yam but it just can’t. Your friendship is like that, you are really not friends but you still try to keep up appearances. He laughs exaggeratedly at something you say swaying his small head back and forth, it wasn’t even funny like that, you think. But you smile. You wonder what happened to him, he used to be your wingman, your sidekick. Now you can’t stand him and you’re almost a hundred percent sure that he can’t stand you either. He tells you how he is pursuing a career in singing; you nod in excitement and say ‘really? That’s interesting.’ But deep inside, you think he is better suited for a rapper. Inside your head, you say ‘you will never make it there; the industry is oversaturated; besides you cannot sing. Leave the singing for people with soulful voices.’ You remember how smart he used to be in school, how he used to argue with the mathematics teacher on one particular question for the full fifty minutes period, rendering the rest of the class redundant. You used to like it when he did that, especially when you were tired and were in no mood to be taught. You wonder if he’s still that smart, you doubt it. Even in conversation you can see that your IQ has risen farther than his, in such a relatively short time, it’s shocking. All you see is dumb and muscles when you look at him. He’s now a devoted Christian, he says. His friend is a pastor and he assists. You find this strange. He wasn’t a good Christian in school, you were; now he’s the devotee while you are considering becoming an atheist because you’ve seen just about enough fake miracles, just about enough men that were blind from birth and then immediately they ‘receive their healing’, they can tell the difference between colour red and colour yellow; enough dumb-from-birth men that receive the miracles of instant English language speech as well as hearing. You nod your head and smile. ‘Interesting.’ You say again. You believe that churches are springing up here and there because the rate of unemployment has greatly risen. You have a theory: The degree of successful citizens in a particular location is inversely proportional to the number of churches in that location. You start talking about the future and getting married. He says he wants to have four children and that he has to be married within the next two years; you feel it is stupid that he has a timeframe within which he ‘must’ get married, but you don’t say that to him. You see the way he looks at you as if you are from another planet when you tell him you don’t want children, his liquid gaze, his brown iris that look as though it was squirted over his sclera in a hurry. You remember that, you can’t forget. ‘You don’t want children?’ He asks, flabbergasted. As if the only thing we are here to do is procreate. ‘No,’ you say and raise both of your shoulders up for a second or two as if to say: I don’t know what the big deal is anyway. ‘How can you not want children?’ he asks. His face wrinkled from surprise. You no longer want to talk about it; it’s just going to start an argument that would never end. You wonder why he does not think like you. His mentality is now quite different from yours; you wonder also how you two were ever friends. He believes what everybody believes: Everybody must get married and have children, Gay people deserve to be buried from neck down and their head stoned until they die, the village is the best place to celebrate Christmas, a woman’s place is by her husband, and so on. You have a feeling that he has lost his ability to think for himself, if he ever had it. You shake your head and then smile. He asks you if you would come to his church tomorrow, Sunday. You lie, you say you will not make it as you are a chorister in your church and you have a ministration. You wonder why you did not tell him the truth, the truth that you no longer find any meaning in religion, that your belief in an afterlife – which is more or less the rationale behind religion, is gradually eroding, waning, dissolving into sweet nothing. ‘You can sing?’ He asks, in a pleasantly surprised way. You hope he wouldn’t ask you to sing to him. That would be ridiculous, you imagine. ‘I try.’ You reply, after a long pause during which you act as if your phone is vibrating in your pocket. You wonder what has happened to him, still. Why you have become so different, so opposite, so divergent – like magnets of the same pole. It beats you. Is it the time that has passed? Perhaps it is, perhaps it is distance and time that has blurred your friendship into mere acquaintanceship, and acquaintanceship into, well, nothing. A short time passes and he stands to leave. You exchange fake smiles, smiles that lack happiness. You are no longer impressed by him, just as he looks disgusted, the same way he has looked since the moment you told him that you are in no place to judge a person that is gay, as you are also a sinner. You thank him for coming and say to him that you will probably visit him next week. But you hope never to see him again; of course you would not visit him next week. Sometimes, there’s nothing more suffocating than hanging on to a friendship that has let go of you.

Only A Girl

ONLY A GIRL

She was only a girl. That was why her father shook his head in disappointment after the doctor gave him what he, the doctor, felt was a good news ‘Your wife has just delivered a beautiful baby girl.’ He was never there for her when she needed him, always waiting for her to grow up a little, so that he would dispose her to the highest bidder. He wanted a boy who will become a man, something, worthy. Not a girl, nothing, worthless.

She was only a girl. That was why the several times she came first in her class, her father would smile one of those his incomplete smiles, those ones that meant less than nothing. A smile that was missing its most important ingredient – happiness, he only had them on when he needed to fulfill all righteousness, when he needed to act as if it mattered. He would tepidly say to her: ‘Clap for yourself,’ as if ‘clap for yourself,’ was reward enough for coming top in a class of eighty five students.

She was only a girl. That was why on her fifteenth birthday, her father introduced her to the man with whom she will continue the rest of her life with, he said: ‘This is your husband, he will take care of you.’ But she did not know him, he was too old for her, besides, she was not finished with school; she wanted to go to the university then obtain a doctorate degree and become a lecturer and impact knowledge on the future. But her father had sold her off, like an object. Like a farmer would sell his hen – he feeds it until it is old enough and then he sells it off – it means absolutely nothing to him, the farmer. She means nothing to him, her father.

She was only a girl. That was why despite all his initial promises, her husband did not enroll her in school, and she was not able to complete her secondary education. While all of her friends were still in school, she became a house wife. ‘You now have a family to think about,’ her husband said. ‘You do not need to go to school; I will provide everything for you. You are now a woman. A woman’s place is by her husband, not in school.’ But she was sixteen. She wept. She blamed her father, it was his fault that all of these happened, it was his fault that she was not in school; She was not good enough for him, he wanted a boy who will become a man, something, worthy. Not a girl, nothing, worthless.

 First  published on oyamag.

Blast

Hello!! How's it going? It's going very very cold here, any further and I would freeze.
I like this weather though, much better than the heat that threatened to bake us. I'd much rather freeze than bake to be honest.

So, my prose got featured on omojuwa, Here it is, it's titled Blast

It's about insurgency and how it kills dreams.

I've always found it strange how people say 'Have a Blast.' What even? lol!

See ya!

Babble!

Hello people, I've been away for a while, sorry. I've been hustling. lol!

Anyway, as I have not much to talk about, I will just talk about this piece I wrote for an online magazine, it's titled 'The Hopelessly Shy'


It’s the 5^th time you’ve looked in the mirror in barely 2 minutes, you know you look good but you want to look better. You cock your head to the left and gently dab your already very well combed hair with your right palm. You wonder what she will say when she sees that you’ve cut your hair. The first and last time you saw her, you imagined that she will prefer you when you get a haircut. She didn’t strike you as one of those girls that like men on afro – she probably thinks afro make men look rough and unkempt, she looks too clean to like unkempt men. You will definitely talk to her today - that last time, at your friend’s elder sister’s wedding, the place was too crowded and she was sitting next to her friend all through, that was why you did not get a chance to say a word to her. Your friend thinks it’s because you are shy, but of course not: you’re not shy; you just don’t talk too much.

You can read the rest of the short prose here

Till Next Time,, Keep dreaming!! 

It’s the 5th time you’ve looked in the mirror in barely 2 minutes, you know you look good but you want to look better. You cock your head to the left and gently dab your already very well combed hair with your right palm. You wonder what she will say when she sees that you’ve cut your hair. The first and last time you saw her, you imagined that she will prefer you when you get a haircut. She didn’t strike you as one of those girls that like men on afro – she probably thinks afro makes men look rough and unkempt, she looks too clean to like unkempt men. You will definitely talk to her today – that last time, at your friend’s elder sister’s wedding, the place was too crowded and she was sitting next to her friend all through, that was why you did not get a chance to say a word to her. Your friend thinks it’s because you are shy, but of course not: you’re not shy; you just don’t talk too much. - See more at: http://oyamag.com/prose-the-hopelessly-shy/#sthash.r2dtAgqo.dpuf

It’s the 5th time you’ve looked in the mirror in barely 2 minutes, you know you look good but you want to look better. You cock your head to the left and gently dab your already very well combed hair with your right palm. You wonder what she will say when she sees that you’ve cut your hair. The first and last time you saw her, you imagined that she will prefer you when you get a haircut. She didn’t strike you as one of those girls that like men on afro – she probably thinks afro makes men look rough and unkempt, she looks too clean to like unkempt men. You will definitely talk to her today – that last time, at your friend’s elder sister’s wedding, the place was too crowded and she was sitting next to her friend all through, that was why you did not get a chance to say a word to her. Your friend thinks it’s because you are shy, but of course not: you’re not shy; you just don’t talk too much. - See more at: http://oyamag.com/prose-the-hopelessly-shy/#sthash.r2dtAgqo.dpuf