Ceremonies of Togetherness

 First, I take the bus to Chicago. There I am standing in my purple hoodie at 2am on East Court Street waiting for the Greyhound as the wind slaps water into my sleepy face. Victoria Orenze’s voice is in my ear chanting worship in Yoruba. It is the twenty-fourth day in March; school is in session but something very important is happening back home. My mother’s sister, my Besto, is turning seventy in four days and I promised her not even this fancy writing degree in America would keep me from dancing with her that day. 

     I come from a lineage of women whose words are heavy like gold. Women who make things happen, women for whom showing up is never a suggestion, but always a duty. And I am nothing if not dutiful. 

     As the rain intensifies, the bus eventually arrives, and I begin a five hour journey to Chicago where I catch a flight to Lagos. The flight is mercifully short, well, as short as possible for a journey of a thousand miles. Chicago to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Lagos. As I step into Murtala Muhammed Airport, the odour is the first thing that tells me I’m truly home. The faint smell of urine and stale breath. I smile a little. Welcome to Lagos. The heat, courtesy of the never-functioning ACs, greets me next, closely followed by the vibration of my phone as Maami flashes across my screen. I put my phone to my ear and my mother speaks: Kaabo omo mi. 

     Welcome, my child.

*****

     The very first day my mother and I visited Iowa City in June of 2021, she said, If you live here, you will need to come home often. I remember being perplexed by her statement. Why would I want to leave the land of my “dreams”? Why would I, even for one second, want to take leave from pursuing the MFA I prayed for with every bone in my body? I remember the way her eyes scanned the city and its evident lack of people who looked like us. She knew something about me, about us, that I would soon find out.

     I come from a very, very big family. My mother is the last of nine children, and my father was his father’s thirty-fifth child. I have more aunties, uncles and cousins than I could ever count. All my life, I have been surrounded by people. More than that, the people I descend from, the Yoruba, are people for whom communal celebration is the lifeblood of our culture and existence. We begin life with naming ceremonies where there is lace, meat, prayers, dancing and we end life the same way. My earliest memory is from my paternal grandmother’s burial when I was two years old. I remember that we all wore purple aso oke; our traditional cloth woven with exquisite silken threads. My sister and I wore matching iro and bubas, with fringes of purple swaying on our little legs. Through many celebrations I remained enmeshed in a cluster of love and jubilation, like a rose blossoming in a lush and watered garden. That was all I had known, until I turned twenty-three and left home to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing in a faraway land. 

     At first, leaving your entire community to chase your dreams seems like a fair deal but you learn very quickly that it is not. Premature euphoria sours quickly, like milk left in the sun. 

     Six months after I moved to Iowa, after a winter so severe, my skin hid itself from me, after homesickness ravaged my chest like a ferocious disease, after I went days and days and days without hearing my name correctly pronounced, I understood exactly what my mother said that day in June. 

     You will need to come home often.

*****

     I left many things behind to go to Iowa. I left behind my family, my boyfriend, my language, my food, my hairdresser, too many things to count. I thought it a worthy trade but the days have shown me that nothing, not even a dream come true, can feel like your mother’s arms wrapped around you early in the morning before the sun rises. There is no accolade the same texture as hot moin moin, fresh from bright green leaves melting on your tongue. There is no award like sitting with your sister on the balcony at night, laughter spilling from your mouths as you swat mosquitoes away. I did not always know this. It was only when; on a dark dark day in November as the wind howled around my room and my body curved into itself in search of heat in the dead of winter, that I knew. So when I returned to Lagos, a hug from my mother was not just a hug, it felt like a taste of salvation. Returning home took on a completely different shape to me because I had felt the blade of loneliness. 

*****

     When I’m in Lagos, my entire being rises like the sun.

     My skin soaks up the humidity like a deer panting for water. Even my hair feels different. Driving home from the airport that night, I left the window open as we headed home to Gbagada, the breeze caressing my face with a gentleness that grounded me. That night, I slept in my mother’s bed, feeling the warmth of her body beside mine and it was the best sleep I had in ages. Something that had been tightly wound inside me, loosened like unspooling thread. I stood in front of my mother’s mirror staring at my overgrown eyebrows, my neglected hair, my skin starved of sunlight. No beauty parlour in Iowa City knows what to do to my hair, or my skin. My Besto’s big day is only two days away and I will not let her down. Over two days, my hair is braided, my nails painted, eyebrows waxed, dresses fitted, and aso oke selected.

     I am home.

*****

     Abosede Bakare turned seventy on the last Wednesday in the month of March. She is the third of my mother’s siblings, her birthday is a day after mine and and just like my mother’s people, her fiery spirit rallies around you so entirely that loneliness runs when it smells your skin. Husbands have come and gone but my mother’s sisters have remained for themselves, tethered. It is in this tethering I was born and I have crossed an ocean to be with her, another generation entrenched in the ceremony of belonging. Regardless of the jetlag that was still toying with my sleep, I marched out of the house chasing the sunrise as I made my way to her. The sky – clear and crisp – spoke its assent, offering a glimpse of the beauty to come. As a partaker of this same beauty, my skin peaked out of resplendent crimson lace bespeckled with gold and pink sequins that shimmered in the sunlight as I moved. As divine as my dress was, the hues rendering me almost god-like in radiance, what I loved most was my gele. 

     In Yoruba culture, on days of celebration, a woman’s head is adorned in fabric formed into the most exquisite shapes. You can tell a lot about a woman from the way her gele is tied. My Aunty Lanre is particularly gifted, her curves are pristine and symmetrical every single time. My mother’s geles are just like her: uncontainable and unconventional. There is no neatness and perfection, instead there is flare and freedom. On that morning, my gele, selected from my mother’s wardrobe, is made of gold, pink and wine stripes, the aso oke softened from being tied over and over again. An old woman with slender, red-tipped fingers wrapped my head with pleat after pleat, working at it tirelessly like a sculptor committed to carving beauty from stone. 

     With my head held high, and my gele bold and audacious, I make my way to my Besto’s home. The house is tucked into a small cul-de-sac in Ogudu GRA and at eight o’clock that morning, there was already a smattering of canopies being assembled for the festivities of the day. The street is lined with short banana trees whose leaves are majestic in their sway, a hundred shades of green dancing in the morning breeze. The houses are almost all the same shade of brown and warm yellow, housing families who have lived here for decades. As warmth and welcome saturate my being, my mind travels there: to all the strange houses on street names I cannot pronounce and I remember the words of Ghanaian poet Tryphena Yeboah: ‘you only appreciate land when you remember your legs almost broke under the sea’. It is not lost on me that it is another African woman who gave me language for the loss of home, who made me understand that in many ways I was drowning over there and it was only here, only in the land that houses my roots that I would ever be able to finally breathe.  

     That morning, I filled my lungs to bursting.   

     Ekaaro o! 

     I greeted all the workers and family members around as I climbed across the shining black gate and into Besto’s living room. Standing clad in the most delectable silver-blue lace iro and buba, all the light in the room settled on her. Her gele—perfect curves seated gallantly—shimmered with blue, grey and silver roses. Her wrists glistened as a set of silver bangles refracted the morning sun in a hundred different directions. Her toenails were bright red, her feet strapped in stunning silver sandals. She was a vision clothed in radiance from head to toe. Her eyes flooded with light as I went towards her, kneeling to greet her. Although it was her day, she laid hands on me and began to pray for me in Yoruba; releasing blessings over me, willing life to favour me, commanding all my dreams to come true. Kneeling in front of her; honouring my elders as is the way of my people, the warmth of her hand resting on my back, my heart swelled with joy and belonging. To sit at the feet of my ancestors and watch them bless me into being, bless me into joy and prosperity.

     This was what I came home for. 

     But what of Iowa, that land where no one could utter my name with meaning, where no one knew the inheritance my people left me in the language of my name and here, in this place that birthed me, my name was being poured out like oil on the head of a newborn, bursting forth like water from a fresh spring. 

     I rise from my knees and she holds the side of my face as I smile so brightly my eyes disappear. The photographer is clicking away and her son, my cousin Obi, joins us in a mustard yellow kaftan with red-brown sandals, creating the most stunning flow of hue. We pose for pictures, too many to count as members of my family flow in from multiple directions. My Aunty Lanre shows up in green silk from head to toe, my mother in black and gold lace, with her gold gele spread on her head with so much presence it is almost a member of our family in its own right. My sister is clad in black and pink lace, her gele forming perfect circles framing her stunning oval face. The live band on the street outside begin their ministrations and my Besto is heralded out to drum beats we cannot stop ourselves from swaying to. 

     The music goes on till night as people chime in and out under the canopies we have set up. The band plays her favourite song and she finds me, drags me by the hand to the centre of the part where we step side by side, komole as we wiggle ourselves to the ground and shimmy ourselves back up again. I take so many videos of us, of everybody and everything because this joy – so palpable in the air, so tangible, so near to me that it feels eternal – will very soon be a memory I clutch close to my chest when I return over there. 

*****

     As the day’s festivities wind to a close, the sun has gone to rest but drumbeats still meander through the darkness. I watch them take down the canopies, stack up chairs, take away tablecloths as Besto shares all the leftover food to the people in her neighbourhood. I drag my feet to the car, and just as I am about to open the door, the smell of freshly fried fish finds me and I turn around to find my Besto handing me a parcel wrapped in foil paper. It is still hot when I hold it. She smiles and hugs me again. 

     Thank you for coming. 

     As I drive back home that night, there is such an ache in my heart because I know that I only have another four nights before I head back to Iowa, and that knowledge sours my mouth. My last few days are spent laying in the sun, soaking up as much warmth as possible, digging into my bookshelf to see all the poems I left behind, diving into the books that showed me what words could do in the first place. As day passes into night, the ache deepens and finally, the sand in the hourglass runs out and it is the last day of my trip. 

*****

     My last day in Lagos was a Sunday and my Besto—still felicitating—was holding an elaborate thanksgiving service at her church in Isale Eko. The night before, my mum, my sister and I had fallen asleep in her bed, laughing and.gisting. The tactility of community is something that can never be underestimated, it demands to be felt like rain pouring from the sky into moist earth. We woke up the next morning with our limbs intertwined, warm breath whispered good morning and my mother’s prayers whispered over us as we picked up the conversation from last night and started whiling away the time again. Our gist and giggles permeated minutes into minutes and the hour hand of the clock kept ticking until my mum’s eyes opened wide: ah we are going to be late oh! And the frenzy began. 

     The three of us scurried from pillar to post, hopping in and out of the shower, slathering each other’s backs in shea butter and coconut oil and my spirit felt watered in those moments because I knew deep down that this would always be mine: I will always have a love waiting for me, one whose hands will always reach for me, one whose mouth calls my name exactly as it was intended, one that knows who I am and tells me that no matter where I go, no matter how far away from home my dreams carry me, even as I sludge through the erstwhile world of there, I will always have this right here: the ground that birthed me will always sing my name. The people who ushered me into being, who have watched me become will never forget me. That night, I board the plane to Iowa with this knowledge heavy and settled in my belly and my branches are ready to spread and I know, more than ever, that I am too rooted to be swept away.  

     I know when I am home.