NELLE 8 | 2025
Excerpt
Be born somewhere they weren’t. Somewhere where you’ll have the space to become more porous than they were ever allowed to be. Start in a place where saying “good morning” to everyone is not a way of life, where people who look nothing like you are the majority and could care less if you or your parents live or die. And since you’re nine, and can’t imagine death, you take everyone’s ambivalence as proof that no one outside your parents will love you, so it’s better to cleave to them, or as they’ve told you, obey them. And you accept that your parents are your wardens, deciding when you pray, eat, sleep, go outside. Inside those four walls you call home is their re-envisioned Nigeria.
Jiffy is now stirred into boiling water in a saucer to produce substitute fufu because your mother knows you don’t prefer the real taste: cassava or yam. You don’t get to see the time it takes to peel away the hard skin, pound the vegetables till they turn into a gelatinous mush. Your understanding of their homeland comes in a blue box filled with white powder, with a cooking time that runs for about five minutes. Substitute fufu for a daughter plucked away from the land her parents loved the most. It’s one of the few concessions you’re granted.
But beyond their hobbled-together country is a winding forest where you can go into another world with the neighborhood kids: Skip, Luisa, and Jimbo. From rock to rock you leap, enjoying the crunching of dead leaves beneath your sneakers. You touch tree bark with the palm of your hand, the scaly surface bringing delight though you can’t say why. You’re panting hard, about to lose your breath as you wind through the forest, a forest your parents would call a bush. Recalling this—that to your parents a mass of trees is a bush and to you, it’s a forest—makes the delight you had seconds ago evaporate. You trip over a rock and scrape your knee. Now your father’s words bounce inside your head, his warning—don’t play in the bush. You’ll meet ghosts there. You’ve left parts of skin and blood on the rock, the rock where you forgot that good daughters can’t come home dirty. The neighborhood kids are angry that you fell. You’ve ruined their carefree flow, the way Skip went first, you went after, and Luisa and Jimbo followed, moving through the green like blood moves through veins. Such fun before you stupidly became a clot. Skip glares your way. Being the nicer one, Jimbo corralls everyone to help take you home. They’ll drop you off as a courtesy before going behind your back to wind through the forest well past their bedtime.
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