This Saturday is For Collapsing Walls | Enit’ayanfe Ayosojumi Akinsanya


The house held an uncomfortably still air, for a place known for noise, when Folawiyo walked into the living room, where his parents sat discussing the recent presidential primaries, and told them that he liked a boy in school. Not like-like, but like-feel-like-kissing. The scary, silly manifestoes of young Nigerians being conscripted into the army and fed with corn, cassava and sugarcane blew away, and a swollen cloud stood in the air, hovering just beneath the chandeliers. It was not the Nigerian thing to do: walk into a room and tell your parents that you were homosexual. But it was 2022; it was June, Pride Month. And perhaps, Folawiyo thought with a bubble of glee, unNigerian things like that should start happening already in Nigerian families.

The newspaper in his father’s hands crackled. The man yanked off his glasses. “What in the devil’s name did you say to us?”

Folawiyo’s lips hung open. He had expected the first reaction to come from his mother—his friends had prepped him that, in situations like this, mothers were the first to erupt—but she remained perched on the sofa, the same way he had met her when he walked into the room: legs crossed, body tilting slightly to the left, her white nightdress clinging to her curves and her fingers holding  a glass of wine as though she were holding her own prickly placidity in a delicate clasp.

“I am crushing on my coursemate, Effiong,” Folawiyo repeated, a little too gently this time; too slowly, as if to suggest that his father was, perhaps, dense. But that was not the case; he was all knotted up, a bundle of buzzing nerves. Blood beat at his inner ears, his heart nudging the base of his throat. “I like boys. I like boys the way Sister Dupe and Sister Tomi like boys.”

New silence fell from the ceiling—the first had been of incredulity, but this one was of a horrified consideration. It landed in the middle of the room—gbahh! The ticking wall clock gathered loudness, the drumroll in Folawiyo’s chest more insistent now. Folawiyo was on a fast hurtling path, unable to stop, unable to rationalize, unable to hesitate. His father’s next reaction was one everybody had been expecting.

“Abomination, my son, that’s what you just said to us. Did you hear me? Abomination. Not under my roof! I believe you are joking anyway. A very stupid joke, too! You must think we have the time. What actually came over you? Man-to-man? Where would you say you got such an idea from? Who would you say you are copying? When did that start?”

Folawiyo interrupted—“Daddy, it didn’t even start—” but his father continued to sweep. A tornado breaking on earth. 

“How come? Oro buruku! You know I have no time for this. Better stop kidding around with such a demonic thing. I know it’s those amoral oyinbo films your mother lets you watch. She did not have a lastborn in her former life; that’s why she spoils you silly. Now she has seen for herself the consequences. Insanity! Abomination!” 

Folawiyo could have rolled his eyes. He had grown quite used to spinning his sclera inward when his male classmates talked about the differences between among the colors, shapes and sizes of the vagina. He had thought it the most preposterous topic to ever sit and discuss. But he had been wrong. What could be more outlandish than the conclusion that sexual orientation was something passed from a TV screen to the human body? 

He turned towards his mother, his whole being slanted at a skittish angle. His mother would be worse. “Mommy?”

“Well, I‘ve always known.” She swirled her Chardonnay delicately. 

Folawiyo goggled at her. Was she kidding him? She had left Nigeria before he slipped into the complexities of teenage life and had only just returned January this year. He had never hinted about it to her. Heck, his siblings—to whom he had already come out, after having them swear they wouldn’t breathe a word of it to anyone else—said he was the straightest gay person they knew, because he didn’t want a pink bedroom wall, neither did he twirl his fingers while talking; he also never avoided neighbor-to-neighbor violence. He had always wanted to laugh, though, whenever they psychoanalyzed him. The heterosexual space had always struggled with the waters of preference, individual difference, and the ugly, hulking instance of stereotyping. But everybody fumbled at sordid situations, and they would be forgiven, for the gay heart is large, colorfully large. 

“You knew?” He finally found his aplomb.

His mother sighed and pulled the hem of her nightdress over her knee.

“What mother wouldn’t know, or at least wonder? Then she has failed in her primary maternal instincts.”

Wawu.” Folawiyo wanted to sit down and enjoy this testimony of distinct, sparkling motherhood. But then, you don’t sashay into a room where your parents are seated passing the weekend languorously, tell them you are homosexual, sit down, ask for a splash of Chardonnay, and listen as they react to your revelation. Naahh, you don’t. Not even in 2022.

His mother’s eyes found his baby picture hanging over the Plasma TV. She began to share more of her early maternal secrets. “I knew. That day you introduced your girlfriend to us—you were just too dramatic, like you had a point to prove. I knew something was up and it wasn’t a penis. I just knew.”

“Olanike! Please, watch what you say in front of our son!” His father dropped the paper. He looked bewildered, so robbed of certainty that Folawiyo wanted to walk across and hug him. But whoever did that, walk right up to their father and hug him and say, “Oh Dad, ressssst. It’s fine, we’ll be all right”, right after telling him they were gay?

His mother threw his father an exasperated glance. “Well, I am watching what I say!”

“But, Mommy?”

“Yes, baby?”

“How exactly did you know? You left me before I clocked twelve. And since you came back, I’ve not let out a clue. So…?”

She laughed, the laugh of someone who remembers the intrigue of many years past, of holding a secret about one’s child and nursing that secret, year after year, until it grows as tall as the child.

“You didn’t give a clue, yeah. You were the dreadfully normal male baby. You hated being held and cuddled by people. You wouldn’t even let me rub talcum on your back and neck and naked butt. You played all the rough plays in the world; you skinned your knees too many times; you were stubborn and hard. Nothing was soft or delicate about you. But then, I knew. Those days you played video games with your guys when they dropped by after school and on weekends. The way you ribbed one another and laughed, leaning against each other. You were just ten. But I watched you, and I knew. One of your friends then, I saw you pulling at his earlobe with your lips. I saw how you sauntered past girls, a cocky smile on your face, as if you knew better than to bother with them. 

“And then, there was that way you read the letters your female crushes back then always sent to you, a mixture of boredom and amusement on your face. I saw all these things. I am your mother.” A smile lit her face like Christmas lights. Her eyes climbed down from the photo and held her son. “Are they still writing those hopeless letters?”

That was when Folawiyo began to laugh, a laugh that took him by the midriff, weakened his arms and made his knees buckle. A laugh that brought out all his veins. A laugh that was not afraid to come out of its closet. A laugh like a pride song.

His mother laughed along. “I was excited when I noticed your most likely sexuality. I was like, ‘Whoa, hunnie, I have one of those as a son, my son. I was shocked that I wasn’t shocked. That I wasn’t behaving nor-mal-ly. You know how it is, sweet. I spent all my growing-up years in Nigeria, under a solid Nigerian mother. As a mother, you are supposed to freak out and recommend potent pastors and powerful prayer points and grow thin and breathless and curse and rave and grab your boobs and threaten. But I didn’t. I couldn’t find the energy for that. Instead, hunnie, I became extra active in bed. Your father, clueless sugarcane that he was, thought he just got lucky. I prayed for another rare breed, a girl this time, a different girl from the ones I’d had, a les-bi-an. But God said, you greedy woman. And I just laughed and rolled away.”

“Oh Gad, no!” 

Folawiyo needed to find a seat; his knees were melting, his tummy caving in. His father sat where he was, holding a limp paper in a limp hand, dumbstruck.

His mother finger-dried a  teardrop from her eyelid. She sipped from her glass and tossed her hair back. “When you brought your girlfriend home in February, I was a little mystified. Wait. I think ‘disappointed’ is the word. One of those ‘uh-oh’ moments. I asked myself, ‘Could it be that he was just being a teenager? Was he simply being bicurious? But what I saw in him was not a bloody phase!’ ”

“Olanike!”

Pfft. Then I thought, ‘Hey, is some asshole out there bullying my baby? Am I gonna have to kill somebody, barely weeks after I had flown in from the States? Nu-uhh. Didn’t think so!’ “

Folawiyo giggled. “Oh, mom.”

“I watched the girl you brought. You were all smiles, all over her. You even kissed her right in our presence, and she clung to your hand with that god-awesome familiarity of one who had been clinging to it for a good while. I was touched, but I was not moved.”

“Mommy!” Folawiyo was finally living his dream: throwing back his head and hollering with laughter after the disclosure of his sexual orientation to his parents. It turned out to be that fantasy that could happen after all, even in a dark country.

Nah, baby, do not blame ya mama. I know the son I gave birth to!”

They laughed. The AC was on full blast, but his father was really sweating.

“Your father believed all that acting. I mean, a twenty one-year-old bringing home his girlfriend. What could be more indicative of seriousness, more soul-lifting, in a world of perky, rudderless youths who still don’t know what the word ‘relationship’ means?” She rolled her eyes. “He believed it, but I’m no ignoramus. I didn’t believe shit. I saw the gaudy flirtations you were having with the girl. But then I checked your face for the light.”

“The light?” 

“Yes. The Light. You see, there’s a light that comes into our eyes when we are with someone we really want to be with. I checked my baby’s eyes and it wasn’t there. All I saw were unshed tears.”

“My God. Mommy.” Tears were coursing down Folawiyo’s cheeks.

“Poor girl. She probably knew there was no light, too. Hence, her clinging.”

“But Mommy, I almost still can’t believe you knew! And yet you didn’t flip? Why didn’t you freak out?”

“Why?” She sipped her wine. “Why would I freak out? Did I give birth to a freak?”

Folawiyo was speechless. He thought to dash towards her, throw his slender arms around her curvy body, bury his head in her bosom, bury his gratitude and love there. But he thought better of it; he might spill that wine on her nightdress. So, he just stood there and smiled, and smiled, and smiled.

“Besides, I saw more of you than a gay child. I saw the boy who completed my four births. I saw the boy who sang incoherent love songs to me as a four-year-old and the nine-year-old who cried along with me when I lost my jewelry box to armed robbers. I saw the child I chose to have. I saw my baby. If I had freaked out, I would have failed as a parent. I am not ashamed of my son, because I know him and I raised him well.”

Folawiyo ran then. Hugged her. Many years of silence, of self-hate, of fecklessness, had collapsed. She rubbed at his head. And in a voice thickened with emotion, she asked, “But what emboldened you to come and tell me and your father about it? What gave you such courage?”

Folawiyo was tongue-tied. He didn’t know. He really didn’t know. His sexuality had always been a part of him. He had spent the first decade of his life denying it, but he had also known it was the blood pumping from his heart, running through his veins, spreading his nature in a way he could neither divert nor stop. He had panicked at nine, when his broad-chested eleven-year-old cousin came for the New Year holiday and they embraced,  and an unexplainable frisson running through his smaller body and he felt a firm, breathing pressure between his thighs. At eleven, he had already been crushing on his male classmates, gazing unselfconsciously at their lips and jawlines and waists,  picturing many things. He came home one afternoon (when? what year?) and locked himself in his room to pray vigorously. In 2014, when the anti-gay law was passed, he would listen to his father rant about these queers, these children of perdition who would  forever burn in whatever fires that remained of Sodom and Gomorrah. He went weeks without breakfast. He lingered after church services to see the pastor, but changed his mind when his father started noticing how often he delayed after church. When he left secondary school, gaining admission into the university, his feelings lost their bizarreness. Though he still loathed the naturalness of his response to suggestive male touching, it had become normal for him somewhat. In fact, it had become so normal for him that he sometimes sought seemingly abnormal ways: like trying to wank with straight porn, like finding a girlfriend. An actual girlfriend.

“I don’t know, mum,” he said. “It was like drowning; I just…couldn’t breathe. Not since after bringing Lola home. I felt so guilty. I was using her. I broke up with her yesterday. I think that was what emboldened me, the grief of letting her go after giving her so much hope. I wanted to stop it. I didn’t want it to repeat itself in the future. I didn’t want to do it to another girl.”

His mother sighed and clutched his hand. “That was really brave of you, baby, and I am proud of you. Imagine that you had kept on the drama. Imagine that you had married her because we wanted you to. And then she knew eventually.”

“She might never forgive me,” Folawiyo said quietly. 

She squeezed his hand. “The fewer and earlier the broken hearts, the better.” 

“Yes, mommy.”

“I hope you are no longer confused about you.”

Folawiyo smiled. “I have had a crush on Gun Jun Pyo for three years, since before I met Ade in senior secondary school and I kissed him and my Gun Jun Pyo world stopped looking like a childish castle. That was when I knew this thing was going nowhere. We die here.

His mother giggled. “You’d better live, son. My brilliant, creative son. This stupid world does not know yet how much it needs you.”

“It’s just an expression, Mom.” 

“I know, baby.” She punched the air. “I’m a mature Gen-Z.”

They chuckled.

Folawiyo sighed. “I’m glad I have you, mom.”

“I’m gladder I have you, son.”

“Both of you are mad.”

“Ahn ahn! Demola!”

“Don’t call my name! Your son walks up to us and tells us he has sexual feelings for a fellow boy and both of you are giggling over it like two gossipy high-school girls. Are you mad? In fact, you are mad!”

“Daddy!”

His father looked set to pounce on him. “Who is your daddy? Answer me! Who’s ya daddy?”

“I saw what you did there, daddy.” Folawiyo chuckled.

His father looked lost. “What I did, where?”

“What are you gonna do? Disown him? You better not have hypertension! I had been wondering what your reaction would be when you finally knew. I should have called you and told you myself, but it had to be my son finding his own courage and telling his own truth!” She shook her head, a gentle sad sway. “So, Demola, your love for your children is a condition that must be met. What a father you are! You can only love them as long as they remain lovable by your standards, eh? Well, sorry to burst your bubble, my son can’t meet yours. He can’t, not because he will not but because he simply can’t! You will have to love him. And accept him.”

“Your head is not correct, Olanike.” 

“Of course, the progressive head is not defined as ‘correct’. I would have had this conversation with you privately, but now that you are on the verge of exploding, let’s get it over with! Heck, what’s wrong with being different? He did not grow a second head. He only falls in love differently than what you grew up imbibing. He didn’t kill anyone!”

“Our tradition—”

“Be damned! Some bunch of silly, dogmatic, sexually frustrated assholes will not sit over my son’s life and judge it through their myopic lenses! If they chose to live in denial and abominations, my son refuses to live like that! My baby will get all the happiness he deserves, oh, he will!”

“Woman, don’t let me curse you! This is Nigeria, not your America! Don’t bring strange cultures here, especially not under my roof!”

Our roof, hunnie. And since when did white people need to tell our children how to fall in love or be attracted to someone? Oniyeye!

“What are you saying? What does the Bible say?”

“The Bible says what biased writers said God said on this matter. God Themselves came down to earth and did not say anything against love. Even if They did, what sense did it make to stop someone They created from living out their undeniable creation? Bishop of Righteousness Diocese! Continue taking Panadol for a headache that does not concern you.”

“Okay, ditch what the Bible says then. I am the lord of this manor. I am your husband and lord and I say I won’t harbor a son who walks up to my face and tells me he wants to have a boyfriend!” He clenched his belly, his fists. He turned upon Folawiyo. “What temerity! What chutzpah! A boy that has the same thing that you have between your legs! A boy with muscles like you! A boy that has no place where you can—”

“Oh, cut it out, Demola! And sit your ignorant ass down!” The woman wagged a finger. “I’m legit mad at you right now. Don’t make me bring up your bachelor’s days stories. If you know, you know. You know I know. How we got these kids together is still a miracle for me. And then you keep saving those pictures on your phone, thinking nobody sees you. Don’t make me.”

Folawiyo watched his father shrink like a patanmo leaf that had been touched. He looked up at his mother, afraid of his own coming question. 

“Mommy, what are you talking about?”

“Never mind, son. I am just reminding my husband that he is not even a saint, so he should drop the judgmental airs already.”

Folawiyo smiled then. A slow, simpering smile. The smile of someone who has inadvertently shared in a salacious matrimonial secret.

“Who puts it into whom?” The man’s voice was merely a whisper. “Who lies down? Or do you people knock things together?”

Folawiyo gaped at him.

“What does it matter?” the mother asked. “What is the detail for? Our son is just eighteen. The important question to ask is, Is he happy? Does he feel alive? Are there no more questions in his heart?”

“Oh, I see. Olanike, you amaze me. Nobody in my lineage was ever like this. In fact, they were all chronic womanizers—”

“As you were. You have nothing to hide, Demola. Your children know these things, even if they don’t tell or show. And about your lineage not having gay people, oh you must have dipped into their sexual privacies so deep. Since when anyway did sexual orientation have anything to do with one’s heritage? Cut it out.”

His father paled, drained of all energy. “I won’t argue with you, Americanah. You seem to know what you are spewing from your mouth. But I have to ask you… You don’t want grandchildren?”

The mother smiled. “I want grandchildren, my love, the way Dupe wanted her early painful menstrual flows to go away, fifteen years ago. She so badly wanted it, but we could not make it happen. Nature had to take its course. It may have been our duty to take our daughter’s pains away. But it was not in our capability. If my son is incapable of giving me grandkids, shall we throw him out then? Love is the greatest duty. I won’t love him less. Even if I didn’t have other children that could give me grandchildren, my son will still be my son. My own capability.” She paused and wiped her left eye. “Shall I now begin to educate you on several ways that gay couples can have children of their own flesh and blood? Demola, what do you read in these papers anyway? This is 2022 for crying out loud!”

The father heaved a helpless, clueless sigh. His eyes held the bottle of Chardonnay on the table. The mother picked it up and placed it well beyond his reach.

“Now, I need to talk with my son. I want to know his new crush. It is bad enough that it took him this long to open up to us. Yo, it’s like my daughters hiding their crush flames from me!” She turned to Folawiyo. “I want to see that you don’t make awful mistakes. It’s not too late, I hope?”

Folawiyo sat beside her.  He stared at her, his Americanah mother, with her stylish sitting and smooth inflections and “currirouts”, and he knew he could never be prouder.


About Ayo

Born and raised in Nigeria, Enit’ayanfe Ayosojumi Akinsanya won the Climate Change CNF Anthology Project Intercontinental Award in 2022. His unpublished novel was also a finalist at the 2018 National GTB Dusty Manuscript Contest. He read English Language and Education at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria and was a House of Levite Ready Writers Fellow there. His writing has appeared in Brittle Paper, The Kalahari Review, The Shallow Tales Review, Arts Lounge, One Black Boy Like That, Afrocritik, The Airgonaut, African Writer, CỌ́NSCÌÒ (forthcoming), Fiery Scribe Review, Livina Press, Writers Space Africa, EgoPhobia, and elsewhere. Enit’ayanfe Ayosojumi Akinsanya lives in Nigeria and, when he’s not spending time with his amazing family, friends, Afro music, series and books, he is raging about LGBTI+ rights, feminism and (ir)religious excesses @Osumare_Ayomi.

2 thoughts on “This Saturday is For Collapsing Walls | Enit’ayanfe Ayosojumi Akinsanya

  1. David says:

    I love your story Ayo. I love the way you wrote it with expertize.

    Reply

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