Dreams, Pursuits, Things
Emmanuel Olabiyi
SECTION 1: DREAMS
Dear B,
I. Little nails in my mouth, someone puts them there one by one, and I look on, unperturbed. Like it’s something the wholeness of my mouth craves. Locks of hair, unkempt faces incline at a traditional angle to me from downstairs; I vomit these nails on them in torrents. And they receive them with an alacrity that is disturbing. They do not drop dead, they are excited – these things feets below – they are interested in more. Preposterous.
Other times, at least, last year, it was my [redacted] I saw and I remember how much I had cried when I resumed reality. They are an interpreter, and I interpret with them because I am linked with them because I, unlike others sitting with me, am their [redacted]. When they grip the unders of the mic, and they lose touch with precision, I mumble under my breath from where I sit, I help them with the English word (not because I study it in its rawness in school), and they listen with the aid of the god of connection, and time will continue, and my lungs will relax. They sweep the ‘parlour’, this my [redacted], and it is a very strange something for me to behold. I am the one tasked with the role, and I have been overly efficient since eleven. I bounce in like the fẹ́lẹ́lẹ̀ we adulated in primary school days. I do not collect the petrified broom or whatnot from them, and they do not object. Then they ask where I emerge from, or where I explore before coming here, and I say nothing, and they tell me, in precise English language void of my help, to review my life, and that they want for me to see them in heaven lodged within the people of God from Abel’s age and to come. I cry from my dream into reality. My room suddenly feels engaged, the air tense with some discernible meanings. I understand these meanings, and so I let the waters out of my eyes till I slip again, into the beyond. I should have written the two dreams long before now, B. I only remember one and it is the first there. But after J comes in here to say hi and I see how much his smile is not effaced by the holidays, and after we laugh over the family men around here that figured the death of the transformer is the birth of the generator, I come to the knowledge that I do not understand any of these dreams I have dreamed. They are not writeable; my brain only affords me bits, and I am not content.
SECTION 2: PURSUITS
Indelible! / I am like a tumbleweed that leaves hurried scratches on the yellow soft sands of the Savannah / I speak, I roll, I do, I laugh, I cry, not like one whose moans of pain now sound interesting or lack appropriate echoes but that of purpose / Loss can be defined as the eternal ostracisation of a belonging and a possessor. I had said at a high school’s morning assembly once & the ovation was unnecessary like the grammar / According to your definition, have you ever lost something? The principal had enunciated / Yes, sir. My mom. /
Most times, Death halts in awe of our deeds, the hasty ones, not in preparation for its inevitable arrival, but of selfish amassing of the mundane. Each stroke of that wall clock – that one in grandfather’s room! – leaves this tear, branchy cracks, like a delicate glass hosting the flat, heavy weight of a hammer’s head, in me. It is fleeting, time, & it is calling with a fading-at-the-end sort of voice, from abyssal plains, that it is near. What is? Hope? Relief? Dreams? Mom? Death? Heaven?
II. My dreams [sleep] are not insignificant. / They are cinematic, like wind-up, curvy plots of thrillers – eventful! / My dreams [goals] are not insignificant./ They are well-deserved, I mean – hand me that trophy already, life; sanity did not arrive on a plate of scented ease. / Let these cups of pursuits pass over me, but His will be done. /
Pursuits must hold importance. What a man deems useful, he chases, until loss seeps right after he grabs it. The chief goldsmith in our village, miles after Osun Osogbo, is now dead. His iron ores burned his soul to sleep. He chased his death in disguised quickened sales, & his imminent sleep, unknown to him, was packaged in an illegal bounty of cowries. Oró! Ah! Oró! Oró nla! Ẹdákun, ẹ jí mi! His wife had screamed, a rehearsed outburst, dramatic, as expected, when his whitened corpse grazed his hut’s floors. The conglomeration of several pristine advice of hopeful living lended eventual sweet assurance & she’s doing fine with a content chief of three farmlands. She felt the loss, or so I thought, my kind of loss, not the ‘eternal ostracisation’ I experienced with my pencil in Grade 2 but the fleeting yet reverberating one, one that leaves a replete remembrance in the room it lodges.
There is this surge, no, urgent warmth of the heart against my chest. Its quickness comes with an extended fear, not of aborted thoughts, or of scary, seemingly insurmountable tasks, but of a (il)legal quest. I desire holiness, perfected arcs of holy living, unconcerned about others’ perception of me & this is bad, isn’t it?
How exasperating it is – hear me out – to behold temptations with its caramelised lips smiling at how weak you can seem. Pursuits are what you lack – or have, just that you have not acknowledged them yet. But the fear of having to lose in the end, everything hastily amassed or not, because all humans will when Death knocks, is justifiable.
Houses down the street, modernised hut owners – fools that never knew the ‘loud gun shouts’ are only corrugated metal sheets roofed above them kissing the soft & hard rain – lack pursuits like we do. They hold pain, hate, love, loss, nostalgic mistakes by heart & a foreign kind of assurance fraily assures. They fail. We should not.
SECTION 3: THINGS
A conversation between a sky and a sea:
S¹: ‘You know what I realised.’
S²: ‘What?’
S¹: ‘Answer me this, is communication the art of speaking or the art of being understood?’
S²: ‘It is neither. Communication is not denoted by speech but by the silence, the untold truths, gestures, waves, and intentions.’
S¹: ‘And why do words fail to capture our pregnant minds?’
S²: ‘Because words are only symbols. They cannot express us.’
due to the rains, listen, i and a darkness encourage my room. i sleep for three minutes before a rooster dies. silence does not always mean consent. because you hold your bare breasts in the bathroom, nodding a ‘come over’ at me. i should do this and sin to
god? where is your potiphar’s prison? I will trek there.
R.
It is a season full of sweet uncertainties, Rolls of years, of dreams ahead. The ache to amputate, or Reverse, oh my. But it is never so wrong to get fired up early now with the Reluctancy following closely like the noise of Iya Roheemoh’s grinding machine does; the abnormalities – Reveries in smokable rolls – are wake up calls on a windy morning to all Reelers of that storey building guarded by mountainous Rocks.
My noise is the Reluctance, mother. The tugging, mad feeling not to venture out for dream-achieving tasks. I feel burdened, Right-cornered, mind-clogged when I see vastness of the space, existential dreads, of tasks I must carry-out to feel “among”, “successful”, “Respectable”.
III. < Roheemoh came bouncing with her hijab covering part of her face. She was just putting it on, like I put on my teen secret of rat-eaten socks masked by green and white sneaker girls love. She held the index of my right fingers, held one of hers to her lips and pulled me down the stairs built in the storey. She peered into a hole, of doors, gateways to childish trysts, the bricks were perfect passages the evening red sun did seep through with that agility I never had. No one was outside, but God was. She came, looked intently into my shaky pupils – oh, she saw the light! Certainly. But I did not. I do not. I may be too blind or too eye-blurred or too (…) ‘Close your eyes’, she whizzed, with her phonatory organs, her voice was like a slow outpour of waters on soft soils and the breeze did that for me, unasked, unapologetically. For they closed, my eyes, ready, braced for unassured, assumed impacts. She [redacted] me and I [redacted] her. >
The noise is back, in the present, now, my head is a dirty harbour housing ships of thoughts Roheemoh has planted, preserved, nurtured, sailing on their own without the vikings.
400.
I am a finalist brethren now, mother. You had christened me in those white wrappers. You held these trembling palms: ‘Go and be successful.’ And the tears had flown like rivers on the acrid land of our faces. 4 years now feel like 4 days. I am reminded of hope, of starts now ending, of the glory a mother has when her son ‘is now in the university studying’. Of tears that filled the bottles I held onto in Part 2. Of midnights I let out high-pitched cries because mosquitoes wrought transfusions without my permissions and I have Language and Style tests the next dawn which must not be taken in swollen skins.
I am a(n acting) novelist. Each chapter of my debut-in-progress feels like a mountain. Chronicling deeds of some characters – my secret-inclined friends – while they are reluctant, like myself, to speak, is hard. So I steal, under the cover of the night moon, into their cupboards, without stress – foolish friends – they leave their cupboards open! And the skulls of their skeletons roll down onto my feet. Then I write.
NYSC feels like a lucrative slave trade the government sends us to with the consent of our parents. I picture the rurality of Sokoto, or Benue, or Bayelsa, or Imo. I will collapse under a minute’s pressure, mother. The horror of separation from family for a year, expensive! The thirty-three or seventy-seven coins will never suffice. My novel will build worlds there – that’s the good part!
Dusts
Wake up! Roll here! Step here! Do not step there! Run! They are behind you! We are behind you! Arghh! Eat this! Tomorrow you die! Wills! Write your wills! Estates! Cars! Wives! Cash! Rivers! Indifference! Fame! Wake up! They will be gone! Teased! Wasted! Have Christ! Have love! Have God! Have sense! Have sense!
“Shut up!”
My words, bi-syllabic, out of the sweat-soaked blankets held firmly by my hands, are like the soft speech of a sheep to a jungle tiger. Cajoles! They will be futile.
What if we achieve dreams, and pursuits, and Death screams those 28 shouts of ‘battalic’ commands to your unexpecting eardrums right in the midst of the galore?
Answer me, mother. Answer us from the grave.
Emmanuel Olabiyi studies English Language and Literature at the University of Ibadan. His works have appeared/are forthcoming at Ikike Arts, The Weganda Review, Herlore, Shallow Tales, Isele Magazine.
*Image by Storyzangu Hub on Unsplash
