Let me tell you about the day I started to hate my father –
Papa Alika had started to pound on Mama Alika so mercilessly, a usual occurrence for them as a family and for my family whose veranda glass door overlooked the uncompleted building the couple lived in.
We were always there to witness it. Sometimes my mum stood between the man and his battered running wife, other times my father yelled from a distance to pacify the man, and there were times when she ran into our open veranda gate and dared the monster of a man to cross into our house, something he never dared do.
Let me mention that Papa Alika and His Wife had three extremely beautiful children, I was 13 when I befriended Alika, the first daughter, who shared my age. It was almost inevitable that we’d become friends, given that our mothers had bonded over the abuse Alika’s mother suffered.
I loved their friendship and I loved my friendship with her daughter as well, they were such happy people, a fascinating thing for my young mind to fathom. Who remained so full of life in a situation as evil as that?
Mama Alika.
She used my mom’s old machine to sew new clothes for her children, she sparked my interest in tailoring. I once made her daughter Alika a blue dress from a new Ankara fabric my mother gifted to me.
Allow me to digress a bit about Alika’s beauty, she looked like what I thought I looked like with a lighter skin complexion. It was her light skin that got to me and her perfect small nose plus her beautiful textured voice.
She sounded like her mother and was forced to grow up too fast, witnessing the dehumanization of her mother.
I liked Alika, I can remember when we bathed together and imagined we were mermaids. I’ll cut the story of the memory of us short, hopefully, you understand the point.
One day after Mama Alika and her children left our house, my mother wore on a gloomy expression and I inquired as a child would do, Why? What happened?
“Do you know that wicked man wants to infect his daughter with what he has infected his wife with?” Yes, you thought right, the man was HIV positive and the story was he’d been watching his daughter bathe. No, not in a sneaky way, even worse, he did it in a;
“what is there that you’re hiding, I’m your father, prostitute, you’re growing breasts now and you’re hiding” type of way.
“Ah! Alu!” I liked Alika, not my Alika!
I felt rage, pure unadulterated rage, but what did I know?
Rot will inevitably spread if it is not nipped in the bud. That’s what I knew.
I asked her of this the moment I laid eyes on her despite my mother’s serious warnings to speak nothing of it and my heart found new depths for its scattered pieces to sink into.
Mama Alika started to work in my mother’s workplace as an assistant to one of my mother’s colleagues, a step in the direction of my mother’s master plan for Mama Alika’s escape. As simple as it was, the woman needed someone who’d hold her hands firmly through the experience.
Where did my father come in in all of these? you ask,
NOWHERE, I reply.
However, if you ask me on a deeper level, I will tell you that my mother kept me updated on all the plans she made towards Mama Alika’s escape in hushed tones whenever my father was home. I knew when Mama Alika made first contact with the Lagos State domestic and sexual violence agency (DSVA) but my father did not.
The question was why?
However, the life of a girl I liked was at stake and my father might be tempted to tell her father, so my questions remained within me.
Then the hushed arguments began between my parents,
“Why are you interfering with a man and his wife?”
“Mama said she has seen the woman in a dream and she has bad spirit”
“Every day the man is bad, what of the woman that gave birth to three children for a man who did not marry her”
“People that didn’t put mouth in their case since, do you think they’re stupid?”
I did not know if it was the fresh introduction to misogyny from his words or the fact that my father listened to the reasoning of another woman because she upheld Christian misogyny in her old age.
Mama had noticed the closeness of my mother to Mama Alika and Papa Alika had come to her to tell her all his versions of the issue between him and his wife that painted her worthy of the extreme assaults. So as a patriarchal upholding woman and old whisperer, she had started to whisper in my father’s ears to curb his wife’s excessive relationship with that woman before she corrupts her.
So what did the head of house do?
Back to the day I was telling you of; my mother, tired from cooking and serving us hot semo and egusi soup had had it to her neck with the painful wails resounding from that uncompleted building and was about to go out, to attempt to put a stop to that nonsense.
The trigger got worse as she was about to tie her wrapper to step outside when we heard the man shouting “I will stab you and you will die” while the stomping sounds of the woman’s running feet around the house resounded. It was too late to see clearly but I was sure the children were huddled up together somewhere in fear and blank stares, Alika had mentioned how they were already tired of crying.
Alikas youngest sibling Pearl was six(6) years of age and her brother Michael was ten(10), all three children were forced to witness and live with this.
“Don’t go there” We all paused our eating or attempt to, my mother’s mother, my brother, and my father. I hadn’t touched my food, I had Alika’s current state of dilemma to think of, food was the last thing on my mind until my father spoke those words. Did he want to go himself?
“Would you go?” Asked my mother,
“No, I’ve told you to leave those people, she must have done something again, by now shouldn’t she know what to do to avoid all this?” My mouth fell open and my mother’s mouth?
She didn’t have time to keep it open when the sound of the running called back her attention. She stepped out yelling, picking, and throwing stones at the animalistic-looking man. I also ran out to see what my mother was doing and I was so proud of the stance she took at that moment, slowing the man’s chase and opening a gap for her friend to escape with the children.
The animalistic man yelled at my mother, they exchanged words;
“Weak man!”
“If e sure for you fight your fellow man”
“Why this your anger na for only mama Alika you see an do, fool! Weak man!”
“Yeye man”
“God punish you!”
Those weren’t even insults, my young mind knew all those to be factual statements. Alika had escaped and that I was grateful for.
“Didn’t I tell you not to go there?” Was my father’s welcoming speech, my mother was too breathless to deign him a reply and it all went downhill from there.
I may not remember most of the actions of that night as they happened in a blur, but I’ll tell you what I remember.
My mother went into the kitchen to get her food and he followed her like a hound dog sniffing blood,
“you have finished scattering other people’s marriages so you want to scatter your own?
If I ask you a question, you open your mouth and answer me” that was it, that was when my mother crashed out,
“Answer you?
You’re a coward! I thought you were smart and firm in your thinking but you’re nothing but a coward and an easily swayed one, blind to your cowardice…”
“Who do you think you’re talking to?
I’m the head of this family, you do what I tell you to do, if I tell you to stay, you stay” he cut her short.
I wasn’t looking, so when the hitting started, I heard it from my hiding place in the dark passage, hidden away from the kitchen view but it only dawned on me what was happening when my mother ran past me in shock and urgency. I didn’t stop to process the scene, I simply moved behind my mum as he went out of the kitchen through the dining room door towards the parlor and in turn, the master’s quarters where my mother was running into for safety. I helped her hold the door to the quarters with my little body as he hit it with his palms in anger. Still, without properly grasping the situation, I heard the man who was supposedly my father drag out the cutlass he usually kept behind the couch for emergency safety reasons.
It was then I heard my grandmother who was frozen with her hand in the washing hand basin last I saw her, obviously confused at the aggravation of the situation, begging my father to calm down.“Ogo’m, biko, biko” I also learned on this day that women who are male-centered would not have the amount of rage needed to save me from evil. This was her daughter a man was raising a cutlass to after hitting her and she was begging him.
Or maybe I didn’t see the rage she saw that made her take that stance. It was a man wielding a weapon, driven by rage. I asked my mother to hide in the bathroom during the back and forth which she did. The pounding on the door started again, more violently this time it shook me, my instability making an opening for the man who’s supposedly my father to barrel through, cutlass in hand. Our master bedroom door was wooden, the wood was so weak from water it no longer looked like the creamy coffee brown color of wood it originally came as, but an almost irritating black color. To give a clearer picture, the next stage of the dilapidated state of that door would’ve been the growth of molds and mushrooms upon it.
Why I am giving this much description of the door is to give you insight into the only thing standing between my mother and my weapon wielding father. I had hopes I’m sure my mother shared, that the fragility of the door would prevent my father from hitting it at all.
I want you to take a minute to imagine the shocker when the man hit the weaker part of the door till its pieces scattered around and into the bathroom towards my mother. The animalistic man then swiped under through the broken parts with his cutlass, hoping it hit my mother.
Let it be known that I was standing and watching this action in full view, it all happened in front of me.
When my mother refused to come out of the bathroom, he dropped his cutlass and opened the door himself from under the broken mess, jumped on and bit her on the breast, the pain propelled my mother to action pushing on him with strength she didn’t know she had as she ran into his room and jammed the door behind her, he on the other hand, picked himself up and ran past me standing in my mother’s room frozen on the spot, expecting the rage to turn to me.
In breathless haste, he dragged my mother’s beautiful boxes outside the house, with my mother’s mother in the house. It was the longest night with an even longer week after that. The man carried the boxes back into the house himself at exactly twenty-four hours after that.
The events that unfolded between the night of the incident and the week that followed are etched in my memory like a scar. I recall begging my mother to leave my father, promising to abandon everything with her if it meant escaping the toxic relationship. She reassured me that his behavior was an isolated incident, fueled by alcohol and that he had vowed never to harm her again.
Yet, as time passed, I witnessed the erosion of my mother’s spirit. The woman who had always been a beacon of strength and hope for others couldn’t save herself from the suffocating grip of abuse. My father’s words, ‘I am the head of the family,’ hung in the air like a menacing threat, a constant reminder that the abuse could happen again at any moment.
I was powerless to stop it, and my mother’s gradual decline was a painful testament to the devastating consequences of abuse. I knew it was only a matter of time before my father faced the repercussions of his actions.
SO HELP ME GOD.
Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction inspired by true events. While the experiences and emotions depicted are rooted in reality, all characters, names, and settings are fictional and not meant to represent actual individuals or locations. Any resemblance to real people, places, or events is purely coincidental and unintentional. The author has taken creative liberties to enhance the narrative and protect the privacy of those involved.
