Ali Shuaib - Narratives

Kí ni orúkọ mi?

I couldn’t recognize my mother’s voice through this pound of flesh that separated us. This pound of flesh had kept me breathing and alive; and was continuing to grow the human form my body would inhabit.

I swam back and forth like a sailfish kicking the edge of her stomach, upset that I was finally leaving the spirit realm.

Leaving the ancestors and thus becoming a compass for them on this earthly plane.

ìmọ́lẹ̀ mi ńlọ (my light was leaving)

ọkàn mi ń sunkún (my heart was weeping).

I could hear the soft tune of my mother’s humming, her way of calming me down, but I couldn't wrap myself in the warmth of her voice or let her joy of having me soothe my worries and disdain for what would come.

I was trapped in this filthy flesh that kept stretching and growing but simultaneously bounding the rambunctious spirit I was.

The magic swirling bright on my fingertips dimmed with each passing moment.

ìmọ́lẹ̀ mi ńlọ (my light was leaving)

ọkàn mi ń sunkún (my heart was weeping).

I couldn’t recognize my mother’s voice as she screeched like a wailing banshee.

Her screams pierced my ears and rumbled the dome that I called my home.

ìmọ́lẹ̀ mi ńlọ (my light was leaving)

ọkàn mi ń sunkún (my heart was weeping).

I couldn’t recognize my mother’s voice as she continued to heave in pain for hours, her body not prepared for the first birth of not only a human child but a bonded spirit resisting earthly warmth and love.

I thrashed and kicked at the red linings of her stomach, not fighting to come out but to stay in.

I wanted her to continue to hold me in her haven of organs and for her to continue the 45 week pregnancy, as I wasn't ready to lose the tether to our ancestors, to my home, to her spiritual home that she had casted away.

I thrashed at the idea of being human like her, forgetting my roots and lineage and becoming susceptible to being woven into rancid colonial hypocrisy.

ìmọ́lẹ̀ mi ńlọ (my light was leaving)

ọkàn mi ń sunkún (my heart was weeping).

Kí ni orúkọ mi?

My mother had fought against me for seven hours now. The other mothers in the rundown ward had had their babies and gone. Both mothers and babies had cried tears of joy for smooth births, and were now home celebrating new seedlings that graced the earth.

“Take it easy, díẹ̀díẹ̀, your child will come don’t worry, Iya omo.” Iya Idowu, the midwife said.

Her hands cupped around my exitway, her white lace Iro and buba stained with my blood.

Iya Idowu was familiar with children like me, children who resisted their mother’s pushes. Children that would rather float in the ether of luminal fluid than take a step into this mortal realm.

As my mother continued to scream for her first child to be born, her eyes rolled back. The gray ward walls and her soul began to fade away.

“Ye Ye Ye Ye Ye” she wailed, not knowing she was calling our mothers, Yemoja and Oshun.

The mothers of all mothers, so as to guide my birth alongside Iya Idowu. For them to both see I actually made it through the pool of crimson fluid I was drowning in.

The Red-hot blood pulled at the skin of my face, filling and burning my lungs.

The pool got bigger and bigger with each lap I took.

Iya Idowu’s sweaty face got paler and paler.

I was ready to stop fighting, to let this river of blood engulf my human sack.

Then I felt not only my mother’s tears and fears but Yemoja and Osun’s coupled with the hum of my ancestors' choir like voices.

They sang and yelled for my strength,

They prayed for my human birth to be an unearthed success.

They pushed me with their red clay hands as I resisted this death/birth.

Iya Idowu’s face was now close.

Her pale stricken face rose like the Rose of Jericho.

She continued to encourage my mother to keep pushing, I was finally almost here.

She could see my Ori crown, and choose for me to be my mother’s daughter.

My mother gave one last push with the little and last energy she had left.

And thus the human version of me was born.

Kí ni orúkọ mi?

Iya Idowu quickly wrapped my bloodstained tiny body in a yellow and blue patterned aṣọ ebi, a cloth that has been in my family for generations.

I could instantly feel the compassion and care of my earth family, but I instantly wailed when I also felt the disconnectedness they had with our ancestors, culture, and rituals. I weeped realizing how soiled my cord to them had already gotten, how the cords of my earth family had been burnt to dust.

Remnants of the ashes no more.

Iya Idowu held my newly formed visage to the lantern that flickered beside my mother. The second glow of light in the room.

She wanted to get a good look at the child that almost slipped from her grip.

“Kí ni orúkọ ọmọ yìi” she asked my barely awake mother, laying on the blood stained floor bed.

My mother could only mutter the word

ìmọ́lẹ̀1

before the room and Iya Idowu holding me faded to black.

Ìyá mì — Wura

My mother touched the path of the living and the unborn for the third time as her knees buckled to the tile floor, the Orisha’s holding her hands and guiding her thighs through the rockiest part of birth. Yemoja and Osun especially, both on her side, caressing her waist as my mother’s first son graced this dirt-stained earth. My mother became an Iya for a third time, as my brother shot out of her like he was slipping through those slides that lined thousands of amusement parks. Each bump on bacteria covered plastic shooting immense pain out of my mother’s pot full abdomen.

My mother became an Iya for a third time as my father peered his neck and hand higher than the trees lining that moonless night, his brain split into multitudes as he searched for service outside to call an ambulance that he knew wouldn't arrive. Though he could hear my mother heaving in pain, he chose to leave her with my 8 year old self, my 6 year old sister and Gloria, a girl my mother took in to assist her in taking care of her children. But truly, she saved Gloria from a black hole many Nigerian girls fall in as there are massive potholes sewn in every street corner they turn.

My mother almost became an Iya on our slack handled toilet. The mole heaving on the sides older than my sister and I, the color of the toilet almost black that I thought it had been built that way. We had to flush our bodily excretions by fetching water from the well a few blocks away.

My mother’s grumbling noise had woken Gloria up first as she normally slept lightly, her tense body awaiting some sort of danger. Gloria shook my sweat ridden body lying next to her on our makeshift bed. A red patterned afghan rug spread wide on the floor of our living room. I normally laid in the middle between Gloria and my sister as a form of protection from any danger that came from the east or west. I didn't even know my east from west but I knew danger lurked in every corner.

“Wake up, Wake up. Something dey happen. I think your mom is about to give birth” Gloria whispers right in my ear, brushing me awake as my father turned on the living room light. His eyes filled with the rapid green of hyena as he dashed outside telling Gloria to assist my mother. I was so confused as to why my mom was groaning in pain, her steps heavy like she had a ball of iron hanging from her middle, her feet swollen as she waddled past us to the bathroom. She complained like a child, claiming she had to poop really badly but the orishas didn't walk with her as she tried groaning my brother into our unflushable toilet. She sat sweating into buckets like the rain pattering outside until she gave up walking back to our 125 sqf living room. My sister, Glory, and I clearing her path liked the parted sea of Moses. Her saggy breasts swung to the side as sat on our brown leather couch, a crease of sweat sitting right in the middle.

On Ojo Ikunle (the day of kneeling: birthing) my mother actually knelt in labor as she slowly slid from the couch she had retreated in, leaving a trail of wet stain behind. Clear yellowish liquid draining down her exposed thighs as she knelt to the amber tiled floor, her hands floating in space as if invisible hands were holding them with absolute stealth as she tore through realms of reality and divinity. A handful of moments to me but tumultuous hours for her as she battled the unborn world to make her precious child a physical manifestation. She wrestled for her roots as an Iya to continue on this earthly plane, for her new child to spring like a bud, forming his own roots along with hers and her other children.

The orishas held onto her even though she swatted their hands proclaiming them as false gods. She was still their child, especially as she embarked on this sacred journey of motherhood. My brother's birth was as smooth as red silk wrapped around the summer’s heat of Lagos Nigeria. His hair filled head tore my mother’s earth canal open as he crawled to the now blood stained floor. His Eleda marking his existence as he exited my mother’s heaving body. His newly formed soul will stand next to her spiritual body for the rest of his life even if their corporeal cord had now been tethered. His spiritual and physical mother identical to mine // my mother’s soul split at age of twenty three to stand with me my whole life. I often felt like a mother to my mother. My stained feet rooted here as her first child guiding her on her journey of being an Iya. Her calloused hand holding mine as she grows more into the archetype of motherhood. The embodied mother in me now reversing back to the child I never got to be.

I immediately screamed the word Iyama, a pidgin word to describe something sticky and gooey as I made eye contact with my mother’s split vagina, my just born brother wailing and writhing on the cold floor. The other definition for the word Iyama also means god knowing. My two loose toothed mouth was also giving hail to the miraculous form of creation happening right before my eyes. In my world i was also meshing the two words associated with motherhood

Ìyá Ma

My brother’s piercing cries had either woken up the other Iya’s in the compound or my father had given up on the ambulance and called the experts. They all walked in saying the words “Eku ewu omo” expressing their glee that both mother and son had made it alive. As if they each knew their assigned tasks, they immediately got to work and formed a circle towering over my mother, shielding her from the eyes of other people peering through our netted door. They were also giving her their golden strength of motherhood after she had walked through this difficult journey alone.

After an hour of watching these women clean my mother, my brother and the living room, my grandmother and grandfather walked in. My mother’s parents. My mom’s shoulders relaxed, I could see the relief on her face as she sunk into the energy of her mother. She screamed out “Mami ooo,” her hand extending to her mother like a five year old child that had just been lost in a store. Her mother held her like she was that child, yet patted her with an ease of proudness as she praises my mother for being a good mother. I watch my frail grandmother with her worn proud hands, lips painted cherry red as she holds her child while blessing the child that has chosen to take a place in our family. The light NEPA had given us all night had paid its dues and suddenly went off. I could hear my dad pulling the worn strings of the generator blending with the crow of a rooster welcoming the dawn of a new day.

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