Just Say The Word, and My Servant Will Be Healed

. . . Jesus said to him, "I will come and heal him." But the centurion said, "Lord, I am not worthy for You to come under my roof, but just say the word, and my servant will be healed. "For I also am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to this one, 'Go!' and he goes, and to another, 'Come!' and he comes, and to my slave, 'Do this!' and he does it.”. . . And Jesus said to the centurion, “You may go; as you have believed, let it be done for you.” And at that very hour [his] servant was healed.—Matt 8:7-9; 13

I have always known as far back as I can remember as a child that when we keep quiet about injustice or abuse, someone dies a death, but when we are able to open our mouth and say NO, someone’s life is spared. I was in primary 4 when one of my classmates farted loudly in class and in the manner of 10 years old, everyone laughed excitedly, and following this, they began to call the boy who farted, Fart. He was embarrassed and each time he was called Fart, I could see him wishing for the ground to open up and swallow him. I couldn’t take it and one afternoon about a week after the incident, another boy called him Fart and I lit into him as I yelled “will you stop it! Everyone farts, you fart, your mummy farts, your daddy farts and even Gowon (the military head of the government at the time) farts, so let him be and stop calling him that, that is not his name.” The whole class including the teacher, I remember his name, Mr. Oyesola went quiet, and no one spoke for about five minutes. Mr. Oyesola stared at me and I steadily held his gaze, he nodded approvingly at me. Slowly, the class returned to what we were doing, but more important, no one called him Fart ever again.

I have always had a huge issue with unfairness in whichever way it presents its face and my blood would boil for a long time, as I am not able to put it out of my mind no matter how much I tried. And I have been a victim of what is not fair and just many times as well.

And there is a lot that is not fair in the world we live in which has led to the birth of the adage, “Life is not fair.” It is true that life is not fair, just like the fingers in our hands are not equal, but those are in the purview of destiny of birth as to social class, race, geographical place of birth, body shape and etc. and those, most of us can live with, but what tears our souls asunder are the oppressions and the prejudices that we visit upon one another every day, as in rejecting, discriminating, abusing, killing others because they are different from us or have a different way of living their lives or because of their gender, sexual orientation or their belief systems.

None of these are new, each human being from the beginning of time has always been lazy about doing the hard work of expanding his or her view of the world, and would do everything in his or her power to have the whole world comply with what he or she believes or is comfortable with. This is called Egocentricity, when a person believes that he or she is the only one that matters in a whole world of 7.125 billion of people and each of that 7.125 billion people should live their lives to make him or her comfortable by not doing anything that will be upsetting to him or her.

A lot of people that I know, good people, are upset at the thought that some people’s sexual orientation are different than theirs and would want such different people to disappear from the world, that way, and when the said different people are hurt or killed because they are different, they tell themselves, ‘they had it coming to them by their choices,’ instead of seeing such an act as a gashing wound in the world that we all live in.

A lot of kind and well meaning people say to themselves when yet another black boy is killed by the police, ‘he was a thug,’ and when people take to the streets to protest the killing would say ‘these people are ruining their case by these acts of vandalism,’ instead of seeing it as something that de-humanizes them and makes them supporters of genocide.

Women all over the world are expected to be in the degraded position of second class citizens and the woman who dares to step out of that place where she had been put is punished with the names, bitch when she is young and witch when she is older, other names are whore, ugly, fat.

My daughter recently told me that in schools in the US, black girls are in detention and suspended more than even black boys, and this is because people can tolerate a vocal white girl and a boisterous black boy but a black girl is expected to be submissive and quiet, and when a black girl is articulate and assertive especially in defense of herself, she had violated a sacred rule that says a black woman is supposed to contain all the dumping of negativity on her without complaining, and if she is not made to be quiet now, she would become an angry black woman like her mother and aunts in the work force.

For months, I have wanted to blog about this train of thought but I couldn’t really find the words until help arrived in the form of a story in Paulo Coelho’s book Aleph. I will not go into the details of the story, but in summary, the author on his personal quest to find out what could be blocking his joy in his present life was able to go back in time and to a life that he lived during the period of Inquisition and witch burning. Nine women, all under the age of sixteen were accused of being witches, being able to see into the future, and of having had intercourse with the devil. Their actual crime was that a farmer who liked to have sex with girls had tried to have sex with some of them and they had refused him and so he accused them of these hideous crimes. The crimes of the others were that they were very beautiful women, or that they were from rich and noble families.

They were tortured until they confessed to things that they didn’t do to prevent their bodies from being torn apart as they were tied to the torture ‘bed’ designed for just that, to tear a body apart. Paulo Coelho in this past life operated the torture bed. One of the women was in love with Paulo in that life time, he was the love of her life and though she was a noble woman and he a peasant, and as such their union was forbidden, she had been thinking of ways to be able to run away with him. He was a member of the Church and he loved this woman as well, and so in order to prevent the more sadistic soldiers from operating the torture bed, and to spare her unnecessary pain, he opted to be the one to extract her confession from her, and she confessed to the love that she had for him. That was her crime and her sin before the Church.

Paulo Coelho in Aleph continues:

[the Inquisitor said] “Gentlemen, I await confirmation of the verdict in writing, unless anyone here has something to say in defense of the accused. If so, we will reconsider the accusation.”

 They all turned to look at me, some hoping I will say nothing, others that I will save her, for, as she herself said, I know her. 

Why did she have to say those words here? Why did she bring up feelings that had been so difficult to overcome when I decided to serve God and leave the world behind? Why didn’t she allow me to defend her when I could have saved her life? If I speak out in her favor now, tomorrow the whole town will say that I saved her only because she said she had always loved me. My reputation and my career would be ruined forever. 

“If just one voice is raised in her defense, I am prepared to demonstrate the leniency of the Holy Mother Church.” The Inquisitor said. 

I am not the only one here who knows her family. Some owe them favors, others money; others still are motivated by envy. No one will say a word, only those who owe them nothing. 

“Shall I declare the proceedings closed?” The Inquisitor, despite being more learned and more devout than I, seem to be asking me for my help. After all, she did tell everyone here that she loved me. 

“Only speak a word, and my servant will be healed.” The centurion said to Jesus. Just one word and my servant will be saved. 

My lips do not open. 

The Inquisitor does not show it, but I know that he despises me. He turns to the rest of the group. “The church, represented here by myself, her humble defender, awaits confirmation of the death penalty.” 

The men gather in a corner, and I can hear the devil shouting ever louder in my ears, trying to confuse me as he had earlier that day. However, I left no irreversible marks on the bodies of the four other girls. I have seen some brothers pull the lever as far as it will go, so that the prisoners die with all their organs destroyed, blood gushing from their mouths, their bodies a whole thirty centimeters longer. 

The men returned with a piece of paper signed by all. The verdict is the same as it was for the other four girls: death by burning. 

The Inquisitor thanks everyone and leaves without addressing another word to me. The men who administer justice and law leave, too, some already discussing the latest piece of local gossip, others with their heads bowed. I go over to the fire, pick up one of the red-hot coals, and place it under my habit against my skin. I smell scorched flesh, my hands burn and my body contracts in pain, but I do not move. 

“Lord,” I say, when the pain recedes, “may these marks remain forever on my body, so that I may never forget who I was today.” pp188-190.

Some might say, but this is not the era of inquisition and witch burning, but isn’t it? Have we really stopped burning people who are different than us at the stakes?

In the past year, Nigeria along with some other African countries arrived at writing laws that criminalize two men or two women who love one another. And it saddens me because growing up in Nigeria; it was a common sight to see two men who are bosom friends holding hands in public, but now showing such affection will land you in prison.

Only say the word and my servant will be healed. This is the power that we all have; each one of us. At the age of ten, I said the word and a boy was spared the agony of having his beautiful name well thought out by his parents to celebrate the joy of his birth change to fart.

My boyfriend when I was 19 years old predicted that I would divorce when I get married because I was intolerant of abuse and mistreatment.

My roommate in college in exasperation called me a feminist, to her it wasn’t a compliment but I felt very proud.

We are all responsible, even for things that happened in history before we were born and not necessarily because we had lived in the past and participated in the evolving history of this world like Paulo Coelho, but because we are all nursed with the milk of the history of our different societies, and we identify with them and unconsciously perpetuate them in the manner in which things are transmitted down generations. Henrik Ibsen in Peer Gynt (1828-1906) said,

“Everything I have written is most minutely connected with what I have lived through, if not personally experienced; every new work has had for me the object of serving as a process of spiritual liberation and catharsis; for every man shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs. That was why I once inscribed in a copy of one of my books the following dedicatory lines: To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul, To write is to sit in judgment on oneself.”

And so we all have the power to say NO for that is the WORD that could mean life or death for someone. Just say the WORD and a life is spared.

Our silences, our non-involvement and our sitting on the fence condone Inequality, Maltreatment, Oppression, Injustices and Prejudices of different kinds, they are not neutrality but they are resounding Yes.

We need to say the WORD when our gay colleague is being ridiculed or marginalized. We must say the WORD, when the transgender in our college is being picked on. We should say the WORD when that child of color is being put down and we should say the WORD when women are paid less than men for doing the same work. We must all teach our children to say the WORD when a classmate is being bullied in their school or on the playground.

Just say the word and my servant will be healed. And the centurion servant was healed.

Paulo Coelho: Aleph
Henrik Ibsen; Peer Gynt

The Thought of Being a Creator . . .

This is a story that was recently told to my 82 year old mother by relatives who are older than her, as they were convening to bury my grandmother’s first cousin who recently passed.

It is about my maternal great, great, great grandmother who contributed 1/32 of my genes, and 1/64 of my children genes.

Here is the story:

Once upon a time, that time being someplace in the mid-1800s, in the town Ado-Ekiti in Ekiti State, Nigerian.

This was a time of simplicity and innocence, that if for example you were a trader who sold bags of potato at one dollar per bag, and you had 20 bags to sell, you would display your ware in front of your house, like by your mailbox, return to your house to take care of other businesses like sweeping, washing, cooking or what have you. You would leave a dollar by the potatoes so that anyone who wanted to buy from you would know that it’s a dollar a bag, they would pick a bag and leave a dollar behind. At the end of the day, you would go there and collect your $20.00 or less and the remaining bags of potatoes. This practice was all but gone by the time I was a little girl but there was a vestige of it that I remember in the late 1960s, and early 1970s, and that is, you could still leave those bags of potatoes out there but you wouldn’t leave any money. If someone wanted to buy from you, on arriving there would yell for you with, “I will like to buy a bag of potatoes,” and you would rush out from whatever you were doing, wiping your hands on your apron to attend to them. No one would steal those bags of potatoes, even though they were unattended.

Back to the story of this ancestor, she was the daughter of a very wealthy man and married to the heir to the throne of Ado-Ekiti. They were very happy together and loved one another deeply. They had a lot going for them, they were wealthy and in time the heir became the king and she the queen. But there was one cloud over them, they were childless. They waited many years but no child was born to them. The woman whom I will call Queen did what childless women of the time did; she found a wife for her husband so there would be children born into the family. The wife had many children, and still, Queen didn’t have any. She found a second wife for her husband and the second wife had many children while she remained childless.

The king and the queen were very unhappy, he wanted to give her children and she wanted to assert her identity as a mother, so they sought help from many traditional healers. The best in the land advised them to return home and continue to enjoy the love that they had for one another as well their wealth and claim to the land as the rulers, but that they would never have children together. They both bucked at this and insisted that there had to be a way.

The only way, the traditional healer then told them was that the Queen had to give up all her wealth and her right to the throne as queen, leave Ado-Ekiti and start to walk west, there were no automobiles at the time and everyone walked or rode horses/donkeys everywhere. She would arrive at a river and in the river would be a man bathing, that man is her husband and the man that would give her children.

Queen, desperate to become a mother agreed. She and the king returned home and bade each other goodbye; she gave up all of her wealth and embarked on this trekking westward. In due time, she arrived at a river and indeed there was a man bathing there. She hid in the brushes and waited. He finished bathing, got out of the river, into his clothes and set off towards his home. She followed him at a distance. She arrived at a fork in the road, and didn’t know which way he went. She first went one way, it led deep into the forest; she retraced her steps and followed the other fork in the road and arrived at a village.

She walked around the village and saw the man disappear into his family estate. He was the lesser king of two villages that made up Oye-Ekiti and were connected together by some history.

She waited on the outside of the compound that housed the palace of this lesser king and spent the night there. In the morning, when the household awoke, the women of the house saw her there and greeted her as they started on their way to the river to fetch water for the day with their clay pots on their heads. She joined them and fetched water with them. They returned together, they prepared breakfast and offered her food and she ate. This went on for many days and the women of the house, the wives of this lesser king eventually told their husband about this strange woman. The lesser king invited her in and asked her what she needed. She told him that he was to be her husband and the man to give her children.

They got married and she gave birth to only one child, a daughter.

She never returned to her first husband the king of Ado-Ekiti.

The one daughter in turn gave birth to 4 daughters. These were my great-grandmother and her sisters, who were my grandmother’s aunts.

My great grandmother Adesoro died in 1958, four years before I was born.

Her sister Fagbola, known to us as Mama Coca-Cola (she lived close to the Coca-Cola manufacturing company in Ibadan) died in my late teens.

Another sister, we knew peripherally, and her name was Alhaja (she converted to Islam), and the fourth one, my older sister Ronke told me a story about her, and I am sure I must have met her. The story is that she sustained a hip fracture at some point and was bed-ridden because doctors told her they couldn’t help her. On a trip to Oye-Ekiti from Ibadan (with our grandmother Adelubi), Ronke remembered that she was bedridden because of this. But the following year, on another trip to Oye-Ekiti, when they arrived, she was busy pounding yam in a mortar with a pestle.

Adesoro, my great-grandmother gave birth to lots of children, by two brothers. The older brother died after she had had four children for him and then the younger brother inherited her and they had many children together, I think they were about eight or nine children in all, and my grandmother Adelubi was the second oldest.

Adelubi in turn had 6 living children and my mother, Adebimpe is the oldest.

Adebimpe had 6 children and my twin and I are the 3rd and 4th.

This woman who earned the right to be called Queen, she was married to two kings, one big and one lesser, but her queenly dignity lie more in the fact that she fought to give birth to her own children, sacrificing the deep love of her first husband, and great personal wealth, and she is the reason I am here today in this form.

Which makes me wonder, how many things had to be right, the vagaries of love, how many fights, anxieties, jealousies, rivalries, fears of not being attractive enough, rejections endured, hearts broken and etc. that your ancestors had to brave in different formulae and equations before you are able to arrive here on earth, and like Rainer Maria Rilke said in the Letters to a Young Poet: “The thought of being a creator, of procreating, of making” is nothing without its continuous great confirmation and realization in the world, nothing without the thousand fold concordance from things and animals –and enjoyment of it is so indescribably beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the begetting and the bearing of millions. In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation.”

The Queen gave me 1/32 of my genetic makeup, and so this is the story of 1/32 of what made me who I am today, what about the each and unique stories of the other 31?

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni -- ISBN 978-0981393926 Available at your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

Nigeria, A Wasteland!!!

The truth about Nigerian government is finally revealed to the whole world but more important I hope to Nigerians. Nigerian government has never done anything for her citizens but harasses, abuse, assault, kill them and pillage the treasury.

The defense continues to take the lion share of the budget but domestic terrorism has been given free reign and endorsement by the military and the police, from armed robbers constantly attacking and killing people in their beds and homes, and on the roads, to now out of control killings and abduction of people en masse. In Nigeria, you are allowed to kill in the name of whichever god you chose, and it is acceptable.

Nigerians have always prided themselves on their adaptability, ‘Suffering and Smiling’ is one of our saying, but are these things to adapt to? We need to replace that phrase with some serious expletives like WTF--yeah What the fuck!!!!!

Every Nigerian has always known the above, but we have individually condoned it by using one psychological defense or the other to hide these truths from ourselves, I understand, because these things can be too overwhelming to take in at once.

In the past, I have told stories of our experiences in Nigeria to people in the books I wrote, foreigners had thought it to be fiction, while some Nigerians, knowing it to be the truth had been angry with me for exposing the truth, they had accused me of being shameless in the way that I talked about my country, and that I was washing our dirty linen in public. Well our stinking linen(s) are out there now for the whole world to see!

We are about the most religious people in the world but all the devils of hell are now in the country.

An average citizen is so traumatized and feels so totally helpless that everyone runs to church and mosque (every other building is now a church or a mosque) to pray, and most of us have become religious fanatics. But sadly, religion used in that manner simply hypnotizes a person and makes him or her less able to act effectively in his or her own behalf, it acts as a drug and numbs a person.

I respect the religious belief that someone has chosen for themselves because it is an expression of their soul, but maybe we need to pray less and act more.

There are some things that are simply not acceptable and that one should not adapt to at all.

What we have in Nigeria as government, to bring it home to us, it is like having a mother and a father who are constantly beating up their children, not feeding them, not giving them medical care, raping them and as soon as they have new babies sell the older ones into slavery. We need to stop running away from this truth. We need to raise the bar of our expectations of the people in our government.

It is not just our right as citizens to demand accountability of our government, it is our individual responsibility and obligation, and when we fail to do so, we have failed ourselves and our country and we are as culpable as the people in our government.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mud-cracked houses
                                    If there were water….

The Wasteland. T.S. Eliot 1922

Plight of Women in Nigeria

Plight of Women in Nigeria and our indifferent government is the theme of this book. Nigerian women are incredibly strong, courageous and hardworking, but this hasn't helped us with our despotic government. Maybe women should secede.

In Yoruba mythology, women were once fed up with the cruel treatment at the hands of their men and king, then Obatala, and they seceded. And so they went to heaven. Life on earth grounded to a halt, the rains stopped, there were no one to farm, and there was starvation in the world. Obatala had to appeal to Olodumare to entreat the women to return so that humanity can continue.

In Greek mythology, when Persephone was abducted by Hades, her mother Demeter cursed the world and there was barrenness and famine. Zeus had to step in and appeal to Hades to return Persephone to her mother.

Seriously, Nigerian men, this is not just women's problems, you need to stand up and by your stance make it clear that you are not a part of the abduction of these girls, because this act taint all Nigerian men in my opinion, where are you guys when the women were marching in Abuja yesterday?

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni -- ISBN 978-0981393926 Available at your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

Quotes From Long Walk to Freedom

I read Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela about 12 years ago, and I compiled this list of quotations from the book. From time to time, in my own moments of needing courage, comfort and reassurance, I will return to them and read them again. I would like to share them with you.

There is little favorable to be said about poverty, but it was often an incubator of true friendship……………..Yet, poverty often brings out the true generosity in others.

—Nelson Mandela,  Long Walk to Freedom

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

I learned that to humiliate another person is to make him suffer an unnecessarily cruel fate. Even as a boy, I defeated my opponents without dishonoring them.

—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

I also learned that to dishonor or neglect one’s ancestors would bring ill-fortune and failure in life. —Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

The answer, as far as the ANC [African National Congress] was concerned, was that we could not remain indifferent even when we were shut out of the process. We were excluded, but not unaffected: the defeat of the National Party [Pro Apartheid] would be in our interest and that of all Africans.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer. People spoke without interruption and the meetings lasted for many hours. The foundation of self-government was that all men were free to voice their opinions and equal in their value as citizens.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Only mass education, he used to say, would free my people, arguing that an educated man could not be oppressed because he could think for himself. He told me over and over again that becoming a successful attorney and thereby a model of achievement for my people was the most worthwhile path I could follow.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Streaming from the Divine

Each time a child is born, the world is created for the first time is a thought that struck me a while ago, while looking at my newborn niece. My brother had called at about 2:00 a.m. as he and his wife set off for the hospital; I had bundled my sleeping children into the car and gone to meet them there, arriving from opposite ends of town. We were allowed to see the baby barely minutes after she was delivered, still covered with vernix caseosa and the umbilical cord clamped. My sister-in-law had been shown the baby, of course, but she hadn’t had the chance to examine every part of her yet, counting her fingers and toes to make sure they were all there. The doctor and nurses were still with her, but she anxiously shouted across to me, “Sister Kehinde, does she have lots of hair?”

Does she have lots of hair? Why would that be the most important thing you want to know about your newborn baby? I wondered, but she had just pushed a big baby out of her, and she was entitled to her anxiety and what she did with it. I reassured her that the baby had lots of hair on her head, and she lay back down.

My children suggested that she looked like one parent or the other as we stared at this new arrival from heaven.

Each time a child is born, the world is created for the first time, and it is not only because the child will come to see the world in her own unique way, which would be hers and hers only though there are zillions of people in the world, and so she would be one in a zillion, and this unique way of hers will be based on the combination of her temperament and how it will react with her environment of her home and parents first and then of her larger world, depending on where that is. But also because she has brought to this world great treasures which have never before been seen on earth, and which will never be seen again, and it is hers and hers alone, and I think that this is the question we are all called to answer.

The Migrating Eyes

Consciousness—it is best understood against its opposite, unconsciousness. It is more than being awake as opposed to being in a coma, but where unconsciousness can be imaged as an ocean, in its darkness and vastness, consciousness usually is like the tip of the iceberg (i.e. 1/8 of the iceberg) in the ocean.

It usually is limited and can be with one thing at a time and requires a lot of psychic effort on one’s part, because the default mode of functioning for humans most of the time is to be unconscious, we are in our own dreams all the time and only come out of that dream from time to time to interact with the world. And this is because attainment of consciousness is an injury, an insult and no one volunteers for it. That default mode of psychic functioning is one in which we are all that matters, we are IT and we have it all, and know it all, and in that economy, it is only me, myself and I, but then consciousness which is a prize of conflict resolved, challenges our egocentric position, and conflict is inevitable when we have to interact with another human being, but when endured and apprehended is the only way that we grow.

But the good news is that once consciousness is attained in one area or with regards to an issue, it is never lost, it remains forever ‘out of the ocean’ so to say. If this is challenging for an individual to attain, one can imagine what it must be for the collective as in a society or a country!!

My grandmother used to describe consciousness or the lack of it with a metaphor of migrating eyes. For example, with regards to child rearing practices, and force feeding those babies and toddlers who would just refuse to eat, I had two of them and trust me it is tough for a mother. The mother sits on a low stool, and straddles the child across her left thigh, she traps the child's midriff under her left armpit, so the child is upside down, and almost face down between her legs, she then covers the child's nostrils with her cupped right hand, this forces the child to open his or her mouth to breathe, when the child does this, she pours in the food usually a corn meal or other liquids into the child's mouth using her cupped hand as a funnel, and the child, so she can breathe gulps this down quickly. To the child it feels like imminent death. She did practice it with me, but then she stopped with my younger cousins and when they would refuse to eat and she was frustrated, she would say, ‘when the eyes were at the level of the knees, I would have force fed you.’ In essence, she was referring to a time when there was no awareness of the dangers –physically and psychologically to force feeding a child. Quite a few children died from aspirating the food being forced into them by well-meaning mothers who didn’t want their children to starve to death, or become malnourished.

And Then I Fed my Father’s Dog.

He had a booming laugh,

He was a very handsome man and he knew it.

He knew how to read the minds of a toddler and the kinds of play that they loved,

And he would join in with them and go on forever.

Such was my father’s love.

Symbiotic in your preschool years but freeing after your first day of school.

He loved to hold court, surrounded by his children while the gifted one of us told of folklore.

He did love his beer, as he sat bare-chested in the evening cooling air, but I hated to rub his back.

I didn’t understand him, I was a child and he towered and as such scared me.

He loved his dog Tiger to distraction, but Tiger had love for him and only him. 

I hated that he made me give to Tiger, the bone from my drumstick that I was still working on,

And in his absence, when I called to Tiger to come with me on a walk, it would give me an arrogant baleful look and return to lazying in the sun, stupid dog!!

The background noise of my childhood: my father insisting “let the boy do what he wants to do.”

The other was not happy, "make him do what I want,”

“It’s his life, let the boy do what he would do,” my father pronounced and returned to his newspaper and Tiger, watching the scene, would cozy up to his legs.

Such was my father’s love.  It didn’t take the stance of conquering the world and laying it at my feet.  He left the conquering of the world to me and my soul’s dictates.

Kehinde's Israel

I will begin this blog with a disclaimer:  This is NOT a political commentary on the State of Israel by any means.

Sea of Galilee

Israel is a very beautiful country and this is one thing that I never heard said about Israel until after my trip when I stumbled on a page “Israel is Beautiful” on Facebook.  But like someone responded, “Is it any more beautiful than the rest of the middle east or the whole of the Mediterranean coast for that matter?” and another response was ‘my mother in law visited there a few years ago and she didn’t think it was all that.” Well, for many years now, I have learnt not to listen to just the words being spoken but to understand what is doing the speaking. And in these situations what was speaking didn’t take anything away from me about the beauty of Israel.

My son said to his sister, “Mom is Jewish now, she came back from Israel and now decorates the house with mezuzah and menorah,” he left the other half out and that is “Mom is probably Arabic too because there are also hamsa by the doors to keep away the evil eye, figurines of a camel and Aladdin lamp on the mantel and a Bedouin Arab quilt hanging on the wall, not to speak of lots of Arabic jewelry and scarves bought from the souks in Jerusalem.”

A few weeks after I returned from my one week trip to Israel, I had this dream:

I am driving by in a landscape that is unmistakably Michigan and I saw a big road sign pointing to Migdal, so I followed the road and I arrived at Migdal, and it isn’t just a namesake of the Migdal—the birth place of Mary Magdalene that is in the Galilee area in Israel, but it is the very Migdal that is in Israel that is now in Michigan in the USA, and in the manners of dreams, it was conveyed to me that the USA has stolen this real Migdal from Israel. I was furiously indignant, and had a lot of un-publishable words to say about it in my dream. On waking, the meanings of the dream are totally personal to me, and my psychology.  And Migdal was returned to her rightful place in Israel.

I Dreamt of Many Children

What treasures are you bringing to me? I asked of them.

For that is the meaning of children in a dream.

They are never still, busy, running, climbing,

jumping, skipping, pushing, touching, breathing,

hugging, crying, laughing, and through it all,

wide-eyed with expectations.

Expectations and Anticipations.

For they believe, 

that I have it in me.

They want me to bring them to life.

Bring them to life?

What a huge responsibility!

“But you can do it.” their anticipating gaze pulled at me.

“But you are so many.” I cringed away from my destiny.

“Yes, we are.” They chorused in giggles.

“And there are many more of us. There are zillions of us where we came from, and if you bring us to life, many more will come, and they will keep coming and coming and coming and coming . . .”

I am the wide-eyed one now,

not in expectation but in terror.

I had wondered before in my waking mind

‘what would it be like to have 365 children,

One for each day of the year?’

Terror! Abdication!

But they could read my thoughts.

“No silly,” they giggled again, as they jumped, skipped, hugged and kissed,

And yet some were in the tree that I didn’t see before.

“You will stay and embrace us, and we, we will take care of you.

All you have to do is hug us and listen to us.”

“That is all?” Skepticism!

“Yes, silly,” they chorused again, and they were touching me, breathing on me, shoving me, pulling me, jumping on my knees….

Crossroads.

I grew up with this proverb, “Iko rita meta, idamu alejo,” i.e. A crossroad is the predicament of a visitor/stranger. And each time I heard it, I had this image of a stranger arriving in the metropolis that was Ibadan of my childhood from my grandmother’s small village in Ekiti, and he would be in the traditional four piece suit of Fila, Agbada, Buba and Sokoto all of which were made of Aso Oke and he would have a horse tail in his hand. He would be standing at an intersection with three, four or more roads meeting and he would be reeling around and around and around in confusion while waving the horse tail, perhaps to ward off the ever present flies, or, to maybe clear the fog that he thinks its in his mind for he knew he was in a quandary.

Why this image? I grew up in a household ruled by my maternal grandmother who missed her small village very much and so most of her discourses were about this nostalgia. And her relatives did come down often to visit bringing with them lots of yams, some vegetables, chickens and a goat once in a while along with lots of stories about the happenings in the village and these, my grandmother would savor with relish. The relatives in turn would be overwhelmed with the city teeming with zillions of people and so many roads and vehicles, and my grandmother in turn would reassure them.

There were other references to crossroads as well, I remember walking to my elementary school with my twin brother early in the mornings, and on arriving at certain crossroads in our neighborhood we would find pieces of broken clay pots, and in some of the larger pieces would be a peculiar combination of stuff—palm oil, a coin, dead rat, chicken skull, some large feather belonging to some bigger bird like a hawk, and once we saw the head of a dog, at another time, the eye of a big animal, and usually some precious beads like corals and other weird and bizarre combinations of things. Each time we see this, I would freak out as I felt my head expand and contract, and as we had been warned several times by my superstitious grandmother and other housemaids, we would give the offering, for that was what they were a wide berth as we hurried along on our way.

Oriki is ‘The Call of the Head.’

It is poetry loved by the Yoruba of Western Nigeria and perhaps other parts of Africa and had been taken by the black race into the Diaspora because a vestige of it was featured in the movie “Ali,” in which the character of Drew Bundini Brown played by Jamie Foxx, repeatedly sang poetry to Mohammed Ali before, during and after his fights, calling on Ali’s ‘head.’ There is a poignant scene in which Ali had kicked Brown off his entourage after he admitted to selling Ali’s championship belt on the street for $500 to feed his heroin addiction, Brown shows up to beg for his job back and he was clean of drugs; Ali relents when he starts the call of the head poetry—“Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee,” and the two of them finished the poem in unison.

At the lips of talented orators, it is something to behold. An example was the Premier of Western Nigeria in the early 1960s Chief S.L. Akintola all of whose political speeches be it state of the union address, canvassing for votes, cursing out his enemies, or lauding his supporters were poetic orations powerful enough to hypnotize a person.

Oriki includes family history, praise, warnings, admonishments and admirations. It is not flattery, but based on real accomplishments and failures of the family. It goes back many generations, thus each family has the Oriki unique to them. It is sang for a person usually by his parents and loved ones in times when he/she is depressed, challenged, going through trials or tribulations, or after the person has accomplished something remarkable like moving from one threshold to another, or as an appeal to the person. If the individual is in despair, it reminds the person whom he is, where he came from, and where he is hoping to go. It is one of the rituals to accompany the person through the challenging tasks of life and for him/her to know that others have faced the challenges before and have succeeded.

Forgiveness: According to Nelson Mandela

I put Nelson Mandela up there amongst the gods, as a contemporary of Prometheus. “Civilization begins with a rebellion. Prometheus, one of the Titans, steals fire from the gods on mount Olympus and brings it as a gift to man, marking the birth of human culture. For this rebellion Zeus sentences him to be chained to Mount Caucasus where vultures consume his liver during the day and at night it grows back only to be again eaten away the next day. This is a tale of the agony of the creative individual, whose nightly rests only resuscitates him so that he can endure his agonies the next day. But note also that Prometheus is released from his sufferings only when an immortal renounces his immortality in Prometheus favor. This Chiron does. What a vivid affirmation of human life, one of the essential characteristics of which is that each one of us will some day die! It is saying: I willingly give up immortality to affirm humanity; I am willing to die in order to affirm human civilization.” Rollo May, Power and Innocence.

Mandela did steal ‘fire’ from the gods and gave it to the humans of the 20th century and as such he increased our level of consciousness in our dealings with one another regardless of the color of our skins and I know that race relations in the world since then has improved.

The history of South Africa has fascinated me since I was in secondary school and in the late 1970s there was a massive influx of black South African students into our schools, this was Nigeria’s way of helping the disenfranchised South African blacks. The five students that ended up in my school had left home, family and friends behind. At the time, I was still struggling with the feelings of abandonment from my parents who I felt had banished me to boarding school at the age of 12, but I still saw them about once a month, on vacations and holidays, I wondered how these students fared without seeing their parents for years and some of them swore never to return to apartheid South Africa.

We Have All That We Need

I have been thinking of this quotation by Erich Fromm from his book, The Art of Loving, “The truly religious person if he follows the essence of the monotheistic idea does not pray for anything, does not expect anything from God; he does not love God as a child loves his father or mother.

He has acquired the humility of sensing his limitations to the degree of knowing that he knows nothing about God.

God becomes to him a symbol in which man, at an earlier stage of his evolution, has expressed the totality of that which man is striving for, the realm of the spiritual world of love, truth and justice.

He has faith in the “principles” which God represents; he thinks truth, lives love and justice, and considers all of his life only valuable in as much as it gives him the chance to arrive at an ever fuller unfolding of human powers—as the only reality that matters, as the only object of ‘ultimate concern’ and, eventually, he does not speak about God—nor ever mention his name.

To love God, if he were going to use this word, would mean, then, to long for the attainment of the full capacity to love, for the realization of that which ‘God’ stands for in oneself.”

But as people we pray for this or that, concrete and material things, whereas what we should be praying for is the ability to be fully all of whom we were meant to be because we have all that we need. And in the faces of challenges, we should be praying for the strength to bear the challenges. We shouldn’t be praying for things to change to suit our purposes. This is hard, I know, but I think this is the way it’s supposed to be.

Of Nests

I have been thinking a lot about nests in the past few months, and I know it’s because my youngest son Mobolaji is about to leave the nest and fly off to begin his life as an adult. I have been preparing for the day he would leave for the past 3 years when my older daughter, Segilola left for college, giving me a taste of what it would be like. But how prepared am I?

I have provided a nest for him and his sister, and I remember expecting him 18 years ago and actually nesting. We had just moved to the US and I was shopping for a crib and making blankets, and drapes for the windows and I had enjoyed every moment of it as I had enjoyed it when I was going to have his sister. In the years since, the three of us have made a home together, but now he is on his way out to begin a life in which eventually he will be making his own home too.

This makes me think of making homes for our young.

Our first summer in our current home, a good sized snake that had made its home in the shrubs by the garage would come out with the sun to warm up. Whenever it heard us, it would slither back into a hole by the side of the house. I freaked out, my neighbor assured me that it probably was not poisonous and it had come to lay eggs there, but in Nigeria I had seen a man die from snakebite.

What’s in a Name?

In my teens I spent hours fantasizing on the names that I would give to the countless number of children I was going to give birth to, and though I didn’t exactly do that, i.e. give birth to countless number of children, I still have a lot of names in my name bank. I take pride in the Yoruba culture of naming children, how in its original form we wait seven days before we give the child a name and it’s the oldest member of the extended family who has this honor. He or she has to meditate on the name, going into the family history that is hopefully in the vault of his psyche, and consulting with the ancestors.

The ceremony is a whole day event that begins at the crack of dawn with everyone arriving at 5.00am and sitting in a circle around a table laden with all the ingredients for the ceremony.

These are Water—the indispensable source of life. Salt – It is sweet in moderation but bitter in excess; that the baby’s life would not be full of bitterness, the kind that we bring upon ourselves by looking back on what could have been instead of moving forward. Honey—that a life of hard work like that of the busy bees yields honey. The hope is that the baby will grow to be a hard worker and a productive member of the community. Atare—these are little seeds, lots of them in a pod. And the prayer is that the child will grow up and be fertile, giving birth to millions of children. There are money, the currency of exchange, pen, symbolizing education that has the power to transport the child of a pauper to the president of a country, and kola-nut—for wisdom, and many other ingredients used for their symbolic meanings.

And as the patriarch or matriarch holding the baby in her arms take these items one by one and touching the baby’s lips or hand with them, she would say these prayers and then they are passed on to the people gathered around for them to add to the prayers as they too taste or touch these items. The names of the baby are then announced and they could be from six to ten.

New York Times article on Genital Mutilation

Here's the link to an interesting New York Times article on Genital Mutilation.

If you've yet to read Kehinde Ayeni's Feasts of Phantoms, now's the time! 


Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni -- ISBN 978-0981393926 Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from the Publisher Genoa House.

The Avenue to Love

Tons of stories, poems and songs have been written about it, and yet it still plagues us. What is love? How do we Love? Why don’t we Love? Who should we love? Who shouldn’t we love? What do women want? How do you make a man love you?

And there have been as many answers as there are questions. Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. Men can’t love. Women only want you to serve them. Beauty will guarantee you love; fame will win it for you, it is money, no, the answer is just stay young, don’t grow up or old. Don’t be too smart, men don’t like smart women; be very controlling, women like men who are that way. Don’t show him or her that you care, he or she will take you for a sucker. The person who cares less is the one who has the upper hand in a love relationship.

Some have said that we are afraid of love. We do not fear love, we all want it, crave it, and are searching for it every minute of the day. I once read something where a man walks into a place of business and the receptionist asks, “Are you looking for someone sir? And the man responds “We are all always looking for someone.”

It is not love that we fear; it is intimacy that scares us like hell. What is intimacy? It is the ability to be open with another person, to let down our guards, to let ourselves be vulnerable. It is the ability to be able to look the other in the eye and hold his gaze with happiness.

Fear of intimacy is what makes us decide to take that call on our cell phone when we are having coffee or dinner with our friend, or just walking down the street with her. We are not with the person on the phone and we are not with the person right by us, we are not with anyone. It is fear of intimacy that makes us turn on the radio in the car rather than talk to our children, and it is what is actually behind that fight we started when the person that we care about was going away.

It is that same fear that makes us curb our enthusiasm and stops us from giving our neighbor all of our 32 watt smile when we see him, or from showing our co-worker that extra kindness, or hugging our daughter as if we would squeeze the life out of her, or telling our son ‘I love you’ at least twenty times in a day.

Most of my friends have dogs and their excitement when a guest arrives or leaves their house is simply priceless, dogs are built to love and they are not afraid of intimacy. They are the best teachers on the subject of love.

The Yorubas (Western Nigeria) have a proverb which translates to “It is pointless to hide your naked body from the person who will bury you when you die.” We are with the people that we love and who we want to love us, and yet we are afraid to let them see us as we really are. And this is the one big obstacle to loving. We want love but we are afraid to be vulnerable.

Feasts of Phantoms
a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni
-- ISBN 978-0981393926
Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from the Publisher Genoa House.

Feasts of Phantoms According to Dr. Tony Marinho

A review by Dr. Tony Marinho, Educare Trust Fund, Ibadan Nigeria

Since I put the book down, I have been struggling with my emotions on what to tell you. Certainly, it is a well woven, monumental commentary on almost all things female, suffering and strength, solitude and solidarity, troubles and triumphs, survival and ceilings.

As a professional gynecologist who has dealt with these situations in the flesh, I was happy and sad, mixed emotions, to see the reality of the various complications of female genital mutilation and related conditions coming out in such a powerful manner.

You are a master of the art of weaving themes into characters and characters into disease entities. Apart from the obvious repitition--in dreams, soliloques, musings etc presumably for emphasis and from a psychiatrist's viewpoint, the book was a heart rending and heart warming account of female and male survival in a harsh local and international environment where no one is safe all the time.

Happily the light was at the end of the tunnel but what a long dark tunnel to have to struggle through for Ranti in particular. She really deserved to win in the end. A must read and a prize winner, I am sure.

Good luck.


Feasts of Phantoms by Kehinde Ayeni,
Also available directly from the publisher Genoa House and other booksellers.

Retelling Tragic Tales of Womanhood

A Review of Kehinde Ayeni’s Feasts of Phantoms
By Folorunsho Moshood
Publisher: Genoa House
Number of pages: 342

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) has been identified as the greatest act of brutality against womanhood everywhere. It kills the woman as a result of the excruciating pain, physical torture, psychological trauma and complications arising from it. One of the reasons put forward to justify FGM is that it is a device used in curbing promiscuity in women. FGM is the cutting of the external tip of the clitoris, which may create a hole in the vagina, leading to Vesico Vagina Fistula (VVF) or Vesico-rectal fistula (VRF) - the leakage of urine and feces through the vagina.

In some parts of Nigeria, this practice is done to celebrate the arrival of the girl-child into womanhood with funfair in a carnival-like atmosphere. In some instances, the woman dies right from the formative stage of the girl-child.

Kehinde Ayeni’s Feasts of Phantoms, written mostly in third person narrative educates the reader on FGM and its devastating effects on women. It also deals with rape, abortion, prostitution, polygamy, homosexuality and teenage pregnancy. These themes are woven around the tales of love, hatred, pleasure, pain, friendship, enmity, loyalty, betrayal, kindness, wickedness, life and death, thereby conceiving many antitheses simultaneously to create unthinkable events with strong elements of conflict, irony, tragic tension, suspenseful emotion and unexpectedness.

It is not an act of serendipity that the novel begins with the news of the death of two girls and ends with the birth of twins.The novel, which comprises forty-eight chapters, is divided into two parts – the past and the present. The past events are type-written by Ranti, the protagonist on her laptop as a strategy to get out of writer’s block, a stumbling block against packaging a proposal for funding on the effects of FGM. The present events comprise what Ranti and her friends are currently passing through. Though full of antitheses that bring to the fore contradictory creativity, the past and the present are not used as opposites; they are connected like ends of a circle that meet and become seamless.

The birth of Esho begins the gory tales of the past. Her mother, Wura, dies giving birth to her. At tender age, she flees Alebido Ekiti after killing her father, her first rapist. She arrives at a Convent in Ilesa and there, in the bush, she kills her second rapist, a mad man who impregnates her. The fear of losing her baby to the orphanage makes her flee Ilesa. She finds herself at the Oshun shrine in Oshogbo where she delivers her baby, Oshun named after the goddess. She flees the shrine with Oshun because her fertile body is needed in the service of the goddess- infertile men need to sleep with her to become fertile. From the shrine in Oshogbo to Iwo, the tale is similar. She works in a restaurant in Iwo where an old Imam approaches her for marriage. Due to the pressure from her Boss who wants her to marry the Imam, she flees Iwo strapping Oshun to her back. She arrives at Bere in Ibadan where she nurtures Oshun into a beautiful girl.

Since the ‘gods’ fail to protect her in all her trips, she becomes an existentialist who carries a knife about. In Bere, Oshun grows to become a nymphomaniac who starts dating men, especially Akanbi, as revenge against Esho for killing her father. Oshun’s waywardness produces two children – Lana, a boy and Iranti, a girl. But Akanbi, the father of the children rejects them setting the stage for a mortal conflict between him and Esho. The third pregnancy also Akanbi’s claims the life of Oshun who dies in her sleep at the age of twenty-one.

Throughout her childhood and school days, Ranti completely takes to heart the bad and good lessons drummed into her by Esho. Some of these lessons live with her as a medical doctor. Esho, driven by fear of what has become of women in her lineage, carries out FGM on her obedient granddaughter thereby killing the woman in her. All the women in her lineage have one thing in common; they are beautiful and so they are ‘playthings in the hands of men’. Ranti gets into many instances where she believes that ‘Esho treatment’ is the best for rapists.

Esho nearly changes her philosophy seeing the opposites in Ranti’s friends and their families, but she’s deeply rooted in existentialism and shuffles off the mortal coil in that spirit after killing Akanbi, the last tormentor of Ranti. The lessons from Esho, the brief brotherly care and educational encouragement from Lana, who dies of tetanus infection, and the kindness, loyalty and love from her friends- Moradeke, Gboye, Depo, Boris, Grant and Abe- equip Ranti for the battles of life wage by Akanbi, Sahara, Gen. Jamba, Jide, Tolu and Brian. Everywhere she goes, she wins. Her final victory against anxiety, depression and hallucination, which makes her a real woman, is crowned with the birth of twins named Wura and Esho by Depo, their father and her gay companion.

Feasts of Phantoms
a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni
-- ISBN 978-0981393926
Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House