Pictures of Harmony
By Akinsanya
There is a pharmacy store in my hometown in Nigeria. When I go out and my mom calls, I drop by this store. She has their number, so she texts them beforehand. My job is to pick up what she wants. On a few occasions, the money transfer goes through, but most times, it doesn't and we have to wait until they get the alert.
One of them is from the Igbo tribe. He always insists that I go with the goods and just keep trying on my way home. His colleague, also Igbo, smiles along with him, at me, an encouraging, relaxing smile. I am a young man fron the Yorùbá tribe, so their trust startles me.
Today, the same thing happened. One of them said, “Please go, my brother. Attend to her first. Excuse me.”
I said, “Thank you,” and he waved it off. I stood by the long counter, stared at him as he went from shelf to shelf, and tried to picture him being violent in a tribal clash. I couldn't.
In Nigeria, the tribes are clashing like swords, and these swords are held by those at the helms of politics. In Lagos, the scape of my thoughts while writing this, Yorùbá thugs are threatening non-Yorùbá citizens—the Igbos particularly—with banishment and even death if they do not vote in the Yorùbá candidate for presidency at the polls. It does not matter if the Igbo candidate, from records, holds more promise of steering the country more progressively and productively. Nor do these thugs care if the Hausa candidate is convincingly ready to throw himself into pushing Nigeria to the vista of a common dream. What matters right now in Lagos is saving your life by voting for the “choice” enforced by the thugs at the polling units. A Lagosian was shown on TV a while ago, her face peeled off with a machete, bumpy and bloody under hastily laid wool and plasters, making me gasp and recoil in my armchair.
Beside our house is a story-building where a man and his wife sit on the balcony and prattle Igbo sentences into the air. Once they see me climbing our stairs, they switch to an accented Yorùbá and reply my English greetings, and I feel a small sense of loss that they had to snap off their Igbo for me. On the day we voted for our president and I stood on our stairs so that I could ask them if they had fared well at their polling center and they said yes in English, I waited until they started speaking Igbo again, so that I could close my eyes and listen to it, like music floating into the wind.
Their children are always running around, or fighting, or staring at me over their railings like they expect me to transform into a doe or an eagle in the next second. “Munachi,” I would say to the second child, whose eyes light up anytime I call out to him. The first son always giggles, but I don't call his name, because it is his English name that always appears in my head. I keep trying to grasp his Igbo name, and I would rather not call him any name that is not Igbo. The baby girl of the house—Ozioma—is pretty and silent and smirks back at me rather than smile. Their dad hacks firewood in the backyard below, smoke wafting from his wife's cooking hearth behind him, wafting into my nostrils, my eyes, until I pull the transparent glass windows closed. His wife breaks things into the whispering pot of stew, rows her spoon through the broth and taps the edge on her open palm. A lick, and then a verdict signaled by a nod. Their children trot in delight above, on the balcony, anticipating the evening's treat.
I watch their dad, how he easily hacks wood so his wife can cook, how he is sometimes the one who cooks. It is a familiar sight, because of the kind of home I grew up in. Yet, anytime I watch him, so young, so casually non-complaining, I see in him a reappearing grace that the world once thought it could never grasp.
Afterwards, they sit on the balcony and the dad calls his daughter Ozioma, holding combs and small creams, and bids her sit between his legs, on a low stool. Then he takes her hair and plaits it for Monday school. I watch the scene, jet-black hair curled around his fingers, his daughter's head pulled back slightly as he knits the plucked and well-oiled strands into braids, and I try to glue it to my brain, so that I can replay it over and over. And so that, if Yorùbá and Igbo people are fighting, I can reach into my head and find the strands of a dream, and weave them into utopian coiffures, weave them into a story, a true-life account, where I watched an Igbo man make his daughter's hair with such casual grace, the skin of his face folded in concentration, while his wife washed their sons' uniforms, and that all of this happened right next to my parents' house.
I will also remember that an Igbo shop attendant sells me meds without collecting payment immediately, an act so full of trust, grace and goodwill it makes me look at what is happening in Lagos with terrified, guilty eyes.
THE END
Author Bio: Akinsanya is a writer from Nigeria. He won the 2022 Itanile International Short Story Award.