To the Night Dancer
I am fresh from a trip and out on a stroll when I see you shambling up the street in a half-dance, half-hobble. It is dark, but the village is not quiet; there is music coming from a distance. Some festival or other is underway. Besides you, the music, and the shrill cries from the silhouetted trees, there is not much going on. The streets are almost empty and, with the passing minutes, even the music starts to fade. It is what I would come to expect of nights here, this languorous emptiness where it feels like I could almost hear the electric humming of the stars. For some reason, though, this night feels different.
I have just arrived from burying an uncle, an important man of the family, who had been a chief and an engineer. There is sombreness and tiredness, but there's also relief and gratitude at having laid him to rest in a befitting manner, this man who had lived a long and full life. Although I do not know it at the time, I would come here again in another two years to bury my aunt. Home is a place where we all go to rest. It is also a place where we go to say goodbye, and, paradoxically, where we know we can return for brief visits and reunions at those times when we cannot bear the finality of goodbye.
This is a place you call home. I know it means something to you that it doesn't to me. You are no visitor, your knowledge of this place is not built solely of stories. You are native to this soil. I remember your breasts, how they appear peaceful and liquid as you dance, your body solid, squat, and dark, more something of the night than something in it. I see your sureness and your mirth. Sometimes you'd greatly slow your pace—itself a kind of dance—and swivel your torso, your feet making quick beats on the ground before continuing on. You are celebrating yourself in this place and by so doing, celebrating this place. It is a celebration into which I would love to enter but find I can’t. I am mourning my uncle, but also grieving a home in which I fear I would always be a stranger, a place shot through with the colour of loss.
I return home shortly after I see you, briefly attend to a few things, and come back outside to sit under a tree. Dew falls on my shoulders from its branches and the scent pouring from its leaves fills the night air with a heavy tang. An uncle comes outside, talks cheerfully with me for a bit, and soon begins to brag about another uncle who has gotten his permanent residency papers to live in the UK. He speaks with such pride one would think it was he who had gotten the residency papers. “It's wonderful,” I say, smiling, happy with him in his moment.
While he talks, I imagine the uncle who’s in the UK, a loving family man possessed of quiet grace. I try to picture the home he has made there, with a wife and three kids. As I think of him, I also remember other members of the family who have struck out to make a life and home in diverse places, several of whom may think of this village as home, albeit in different ways and to different degrees.
Two days ago, on our way here, the bus broke down at Agenebode, close to an MRS. Filling Station. The driver jumped out and bought petrol. “Na Fuel stop the motto,” he kept apologizing. The heat was stifling. We had been travelling, it seemed, for interminable hours. From Lagos to Benin and then through Asaba to Ogwashi-Uku and on to Auchi. The road long, the dust high in the air, several members of the family journeying across the south of the country, and I wondering when we would ever arrive. We finally arrived in early evening. Nothing much was happening. My grandmother, so happy at having all of us, couldn't hug us enough. We had a meal of jollof rice and smoked fish. An uncle sat outside speaking Etsako with a few old friends of the family who had stopped by. I couldn't help feeling that he had lost some of his fluency in the language—it had been years since he had spoken it properly to anyone.
After the meal, I went to stand by the road and looked out. Everything was tranquil. The people were unhurried, every one of them remarkably slow and even-paced, in no rush whatsoever to get from where they were to where they imagined they ought to be. I went back into the house, and, thinking of the people whose unhurried pace contrasted so sharply with mine, I tried to adjust myself to this way of being, I who had lived in Lagos so long. I had become so accustomed to rushing through life that a more slowed-down pace both amazed and discomfited me. With the image of the calm walkers still in my mind, I moved to another area of the house, a small dark space that abutted the kitchen entrance. Standing at this threshold, I peered through two doors facing each other across a short distance—the doors of the kitchens of the two houses in the compound. I lingered a while looking through these doors. They seemed to be in conversation, a conversation they'd been having long before I came.
“Its sureness and celebration reassure me that there is in me this dance, hidden like a kernel, which, once discovered, would teach my feet, so that no matter how far I travel, I can always find my way back, to a place where, even if only briefly, I fully belong.”
To peer through facing doors is to travel from one station through to another, from one life into another. Could it be that those doors had held a presentiment of my seeing you, echoing that it was possible not only to look but also to walk across to you? Could it be that your doors, even then, had already opened unto mine?
Now, two nights later, having seen you, I feel like a man drawn into a warm confidence, sheltered in a balmy knowledge that only you and I possess. The night has deepened and under the tree where I sit, the mosquitoes have begun to trouble. You are by now lost in the womb of the village. The music has stopped, and I feel my eyes probing the dark, searching. It almost feels like a search for you, but I know it cannot be for you exactly. The search is more for the presence you left behind, for the living memory of your body. In its rhythm and rootedness, I feel a kind of kinship, a kind of hopefulness. Its sureness and celebration reassure me that there is in me this dance, hidden like a kernel, which, once discovered, would teach my feet, so that no matter how far I travel, I can always find my way back, to a place where, even if only briefly, I fully belong.
About the Author
Joseph Omoh Ndukwu is a writer and editor living in Lagos, Nigeria.
Read Joseph’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
Header photo by Ruan Richard.
