The Responsibility of Remembrance
By Mofiyinfoluwa O.
‘The only mercy is memory’ — Lucille Clifton
My great-grandfather’s house is tucked into a narrow street in Ebute-Metta, and it is a very, very old thing. My mother tells me the house - fondly called Peti - was built in 1948, and I can see the passing of every single day on the skin of its body. Lagos is not a city that keeps things. Everything rots here. The house rings of the kind of oldness that is seen in every peel of paint, every cracked wall, every layer of dust that wraps it in eternal embrace. Unmissable decay.
There seems to be a scent that envelopes the entire building. There is a way old things smell, a way your nostrils know that what travels through them precedes their own existence. It is the same way we gaze upon mountains, and become deeply aware of their anciency, of how little we have seen of this world. A great many things have come before us and a great many things will come after us. Our existence is achingly transient but relics of our past tell stories we would be wise to listen to. There are a hundred stories scrawled in the crevices of this house, tucked into tiny corners, enmeshed in the concrete of its very body and the entrance opens like a warm mouth that could swallow you whole.
***
As I stepped through the entrance of the house into the dark corridor with floors lined with faded brown tiles, it felt like I had stepped into another time. Nostalgia became a potent elixir as I was immediately taken back to the mindless joy of my childhood running through this very same corridor, up the steep and slippery stairs to my grand aunt Alhaja Gbadura who always met me with the assured gladness of someone thoroughly pleased by my mere existence.
I had not been to this house in over fifteen years. We moved away from the area, grew up, travelled for school and gradually forgot to bring our feet to the homes of our ancestors. As children, my mother would bring us here every Ileya, our tiny faces constantly alight with excitement. Long after the excitement of childhood had given way to the cautious optimism of adulthood, it was my mother who summoned us here again. This time to do something I had never witnessed before. It was a Sunday afternoon and it was hot as hell. We had just left church and my sister and I toyed with the idea of going home instead but my mother is not a woman you refuse. So right after church, we drove down to Peti in the sweltering heat. I wore a sleeveless blue adire dress that stopped three inches below my knees but left the wide expanse of my shoulders exposed, brazenly displaying stretchmarks my aunties would have expected me to hide for their sake. This was the house where my mother, and her mother, and her mother had planted their feet. Of course, I was never going to hide here. Part of knowing who you are, is knowing that no one has the power to ask you to diminish yourself, in any way, for their own comfort. We honour ourselves when we refuse to hide. With my bare arms, and a confidence buried in my bones, I climbed up the stairs, pressing my feet unto ancestral land.
***
As I ascend the steep and creaky stairs, I am met by a scent I cannot not place; its distinction lost to the combination of many unnamable things. Faint urine, dust of many, many ages, the air a brand of staleness caused by a scarcity of habitation. At the end of the stairs is a short corridor leading into the central living room, spilling onto a perfectly quaint balcony. In the living room, the top of the walls are lined with old photographs of those that existed before us, those that we come from. In this house, it is easy to sense a legacy of remembrance. A refusal to forget. The walls are specially aged into a rare shade of beige that houses many secrets. The ceiling is brown with wear, and there is a wall clock in the corner whose hands do not move. A pile of shoes and slippers greet me at the entrance to the room. My mother’s eyes tell me to remove mine. Being raised Christian all my life, I never had proximity to the practices of the Muslim religion, even though it was the religion of my ancestors. My grandmother was born in Kano, Northern Nigeria, to a family of devout Muslims. I was beginning to see into a world I had no prior knowledge of. Seated at the edge of the room, perching on a plastic chair next to the door, I peek into the room and immediately feel sojourned into another age. The whole room bleeds sepia with the shadow of things passed. Right above the door to the balcony hangs a picture of my grandmother, the one we have gathered for: she is wearing a white lace buba with black and gold damask tied for her iro and gele. The look on her face is one of easy confidence. This was a capable woman; with hands that held many many things - including my mother, settled in a yellow chair, two feet from The Imam seated on the floor.
There are seven men seated on woven mats in varying shades of brown and beige; the colour of sand baked by the sun. They sit, some with their legs crossed beneath them, others with their legs stretched outwards. All their heads are covered in caps of differing appearances. A white lace cap, seemingly merged to the skin of his skull. A plain burgundy velvet cap adorns the head of another. An embroidered Fulani cap for The Imam, who commences the ceremony by mentioning my grandmother’s name in full: Monsurat Abebi Lasaki. The heaviness of her name permeates the atmosphere, honouring her spirit. This is why my mother has called us here today. We are gathered here to remember my mother’s mother and to pray for her as is the custom of her people. This year, it has been twenty-nine years since she passed and her children, grandchildren and sisters have gathered in her father’s house to remember her. Hauwa, my Muslim friend, tells me that these are called fidua prayers; sending love to our dead. Islam is uncompromising in its remembrance of the dead. You are raised, in the faith, to never forget your dead, to always pray for them, to keep them alive in your memory. This responsibility of remembrance felt alien to me, as all of my life, through the Christian faith, there has always been more emphasis placed on resurrection. Only saints are remembered in death, and we cannot all be saints.
My grandmother was no saint, but she was a phenomenon of a woman. Strong, long legs, with chords of gold wrapped around her left ankle. She birthed four women, leaving in their veins an inheritance of fire. Her first daughter, Olori, is sitting to the right of my mother, with a black scarf wrapped around her head and with palms offered up in prayer. Her last daughter, my mother, Morenike, is sitting wearing deep blue, her face alight with the memory of her ancestors. After a brief exhortation by The Imam, he proceeds to the surat prayers. Staring straight at me, he makes a brief note to all women with unveiled heads to cover our heads as we begin the prayer. An auntie closeby, hurriedly thrusts a blue lace scarf into my arms. It is embroidered with tiny beautiful flowers that mesmerise me as they dance in front of my eyes forming a veil over my head. They pray entire booklets of prayer. Later on, my mother would tell me they were praying the entire Quran. I wonder how their mouths did not go dry. There was no water around for them to drink. With a steady rhythmic pace, they began to chant pages and pages of prayers. Their chanting is delivered through the medium of their low timbred, deeply soothing, almost hypnotic voices. They’re singing to their dead. Worshipping God for their lives. Their devotion is in complete unison. Not a single voice is out of tune. Perfectly synchronised. The fruit of persistent doing is this kind of seamlessness. They all have beads in their hands. Of all the beads I see, my eyes are immediately drawn to a set of pale green, almost translucent beads that refract sunlight everywhere in the room. The Imam’s fingers never leave them, the way we cling unto beautiful things. The Muslims are acutely aware of the transience of life. It is why they bury their dead so quickly but never let their personhood be forgotten. The observance of this ceremony is habit. They imbibe remembrance as duty. Our world would be different if more of us did the same. Some of us forget before death makes remembrance necessary. Perhaps, this is the greater evil we commit as human beings. Forgetting people who are not yet buried in memory. We are already guilty of it. I certainly am.
My ailing grandaunt, Alhaja Gbadura (one who prays unceasingly) is next door, and after avoiding her face for as long as I could, an aunt arrives and I must vacate the seat I am in. Spat out of the living room, I’m standing awkwardly in the dark blue corridor, with a cement wall perforated with streams of light from the sun. I stare at the intricate patterns carved into the cement block on the right side of the wall. They are four kite shaped holes merged at the centre letting light dance into the darkness inside. Light always finds its way. Even as I distract myself with light and concrete, I cannot help myself as my feet carry me towards Alhaja’s room.
I step from the light of the corridor into the womb-like dimness of her room and immediately learn that sickness itself is a kind of death. The illness, whatever it is, has robbed her of her own resemblance. She is nothing like I remember her. Just like my grandmother, she had these long, dark, sleek legs adorned with gold. They are folded beneath her now; shrunken by time, by forces outside her control.
***
The last time I saw Alhaja Gbadura, I had milk teeth. Like my mother, she possessed an unrelenting sweet tooth she kept sated, much to my delight. She would ask me simple, silly questions and give me Trebor mints for getting them right. She had packs and packs of these mints in her room and I came to learn that her gifting them to me was never really dependent on my answering any questions, but simply her desire to plant a seed of joy in my tiny hands. It was nearly impossible to match my memory of her to this reality. In that moment I learned that sixteen years could feel like a lifetime. She used to be so tall. Long, lean legs that told of an assurance of self that was simply unmissable. Now she lay in bed, frail and unable to speak. Withering. I lost my first ever tooth nibbling on a piece of Trebor Alhaja had given me. My mother’s people have always taught me of loss, and how to live with its inevitability. But there are some losses that are too much to bear. The loss of self and voice and limb. The loss of mind. It is devastation to see your sister’s children and remain completely unmoved. It is deep deprivation to see children that you watched from birth come into the adulthood of their lives, and not be able to bless them into being, the same way you blessed them at their birth. There are things that are too hard to be done. We are powerless in the face of our mortality. Our bodies will fail. So will our minds. This is why we must not forget one another. The necessity of remembering significantly deepens, when we recognise the frailty of our very lives. There is a greater standard of duty on us, those of us who remain, those of us who still have ourselves, to remember those who do not.
***
In ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’, Ocean Vuong tells us that in Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same (nhớ). I remain deeply fascinated by the symmetry of language. Of course, to miss someone, you must first remember them. It is memory that calls longing forth. It is memory that calls action forth. It is memory that keeps our dead. Perhaps it is the effort memory demands that makes it difficult. It is difficult to carry another, when you are already carrying so many. I think of Alhaja, of how sixteen years passed and she rarely made it to the front of my consciousness. So much has happened in that time, rapid transformations that have altered the pace of my life in countless ways. It is so easy to forget. It demands nothing of us. However, remembrance is our responsibility as children of this age. Those who came before us, are kept only by our memories. I never met my grandmother but my mother’s recollection of her is so sharp, so undaunted, crystal-clear, that I have come to know her.
As I step out of Alhaja’s room back into the corridor, I catch my mother staring at her mother’s picture with a faint smile on her face. She catches my eye and beckons me to her, describing the picture to me, telling me about the fabric her mother is wearing, how much she loved lace and gold, just like my mother, just like me. Lucille Clifton referred to memory as the only mercy; and what is more merciful than preserving one from the obliteration of the unremembered? We owe our people the honour of memory, and when we go, may we have those that will speak our names, praying over us, calling us forth from one eternity to another.
Mofiyinfoluwa O. is a writer from Lagos, Nigeria whose work delves into emotional interiorities, womanhood as an embodied experience and the redemptive force of memory. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Black Warrior Review, Lolwe and elsewhere. She is a first year candidate on the Non-Fiction MFA at Iowa where she is at work on her debut collection of essays.
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