…in Keana, children carry their mother’s names before the advent of surnames
because a mother does not need a DNA test to father a child. I watched my father, the years
his lungs were still full of air, tilling the soil and watering the seeds of his loins, before i
learned earth has enough chambers to swallow even the sea…
In elementary school, I was exposed to the art of letter writing through my class mistress, Mrs. Iweke. At the time, I didn’t know words had such power to communicate to another person in a faraway distance. I was in primary five and was the co-class captain.
For some reason, my then-class mistress singled me out of the kids to run her errands, having me go to the post office whenever she had a letter to post, this was often a weekly or every fourth night. These letters, I went to the post office for were the foundation of my creative writing path. I didn’t know this simple errand would be an adaptation that would follow me into adulthood and later become an integral part of my life.
After a few times of going to the post office, I had an idea to write my own letters and have them sent to my uncle who lived at Obalende at the time, I had his address because that was where I spent most of my summer holidays. So, the next time I was sent to the post office not so far from my school, I brought along the letter I had written for my uncle, with his address neatly written on the back of the brown envelope. I never got a reply from him or if he ever received the letters I sent but the one I remembered so well was the one I sent to a television program called SPEAKOUT showed on NTA Television back in the day. I was in primary six and was addicted to this weekly program on NTA, the program was mostly a debate amongst kids, I think, where various schools (mostly private) from all over Lagos, got invited to be on the show.
These kids with their fancy English-speaking tongues, became an obsession for me and I wanted to be part of their debate so bad that I wrote the producer of the show, expressing my desire to be part of the weekly debate. Unfortunately, the day my letter was read on the show during their letter-reading session, I was not in front of the Television. It was my friends who told me my letter was read on SPEAKOUT the following day at school. For the entire day at school, I was the celebrity who had his letter read on SPEAKOUT. I was proud of that feat.
Poetry came to me in secondary school, I didn’t know if I had ever come across it during my elementary school days but it was in secondary I discovered and knew what poetry was. However, a few years ago, as an adult, I found a report card from my nursery school days where I took poetry as one of the subjects offered. This was a complete shock to me, no one ever told me about this, and the only person who could have said anything about my earliest years and poetry is no longer alive. But after coming across that past report card, I knew it was not an accident at all, my flair for poetry, has always been there.
RESURRECTING THE BODY OF A FATHER WHO WAS DROWNED BY THE EARTH BY HADER OTAKI.
men in my family are raised by women whose men are drowned by the earth.
our mothers dressed us in garments left behind by our fathers,
and we learned the scarring palms of responsibilities early before our first kiss.
for the past 3 decades, I have lived with a wooden spoon in my mouth,
feeding the dreams my family could not afford,
paddling me toward honeycombs.
in Keana, children carry their mother’s names before the advent of surnames
because a mother does not need a DNA test to father a child. I watched my father, the years
his lungs were still full of air, tilling the soil and watering the seeds of his loins, before i
learned earth has enough chambers to swallow even the sea.
now, i am old enough to resurrect the body of a father who was drowned by the earth,
i am old enough to repair the nose of a father who stopped breathing,
because what is a surname without the soft breath of a father?
whoever says death has no shame has never seen the hawk stoop
to snatch the chick from its mother’s love
i now believe calendars are liars of dates, only the seasons can be trusted
many seasons have passed since my father failed to return home,
failed to return from that place uncle Osana took him to cure his failing nose.
a few days ago I called my mother to ask why Alago women outlive their men
she said it is because Alago men do not know how to love less
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