To the "Divergent" at the Barbershop
June in Abeokuta is a month of rain. It was drizzling on the day we met—the evening wasn’t excessively porous; yet, somehow, water still found a way to seep in. Okada riders thronged in their usual park, beneath a vast assembly of dwarf palm trees, waiting. Headlights of advancing vehicles tore through the skinny reeds. Water the colour of coffee snaked down the roads, its body, like many of the pedestrians, an aimless venture.
I’d just returned to campus in Abeokuta after a brief visit home, where I’d gone to see how my ailing sister was faring. After coming back to the city, I didn’t want to be seen or spoken to. First semester exams were fast approaching, & the stratum of grief that lurked at home was the last thing I wanted besetting me. In my room—one of the hostel rooms on campus—everything looked disheveled, just as I’d left it. The used cooking pots sat precariously on a table half-covered in soot from cooking stoves. The dishes piled over old newspapers. Three roommates were arguing football in a rehearsed language, & when they asked that I contribute my opinion to a debate, I shook my head, too exhausted for words. I decided instead that I needed a clean shave.
Maybe I needed the walk, or was hoping my barber’s magic touch would ease my emotional burden. I was at Guaranty Trust Bank’s ATM, withdrawing cash, when the sky began to bleed. I was too impatient to outwait the rain, & not far from me, inside that silver of evening, another barbershop beckoned at me. The pavements were puddled with brown water—a by-product of the muddy perimeter upstreet. I’d folded up my pants for ease of traversing, still, the water reached out to their edges.
The shop was one I’d visited maybe twice or three times before. I stood at the stoop before entering, trying to collect my breath amidst the composite of generator fumes that mixed with rain, the vibrating noise that I could almost taste, the potent whiff of stale meat from the butcher’s stand, the glares from the salespeople in the contiguous shops, who appeared to be mad at the rain for slowing down the day’s business.
This was when I saw you. Quiet, in the soft, matte glow of a dampened evening. You were sitting by the door, too engrossed in your phone to notice I’d arrived. Your hair was roughened by hours of being untouched. Your denim pants were soiled & chafed at the knees, the blue of them fading like dying applause.
The shop owner was busy with a different customer &, consequently, assigned you to me. You were an apprentice or an employee, hired to give fine looks to people for weekly stipends. You didn’t smile much, but maybe you were being professional in your own way. Before you touched my head, you connected your phone to the not-very-loud speaker, as is the way of most barbers in Nigeria. The candid voice of Zayn Malik's Pillow Talk leaked out. My brows furrowed in shock. From your rough, street-urchin looks, you’d come off to me as the type who listened only to aggressive Fuji music. Perhaps I’d been too presumptuous. I stared at you in the mirror with renewed interest, watching you apply kerosene to the clipper, then set it on fire for a couple of seconds to cleanse it of foreign things.
Your fingers were callused. Every physical thing about you had abrasiveness to it. I noticed you avoided staring at me in the mirror for long. Mid-shave, the drizzle paused, & so did the generator. The youngest of the apprentices was sent to see what had gone wrong. While we waited, I saw you looking at pictures of a light-skinned young man on your phone. His moustache was a flimsy strip of greenish black, like old, starved moss. Your eyes sewed into a smile. I noticed you developed a bulge, & when you caught me staring, your body morphed into a frantic state of unease. The generator came back on, the fan blowing your features into a mild scowl. I wanted to tell you that you, too, were a child of rain, & you needn’t be afraid, but I remained silent. We didn’t exchange personal words, even as you rubbed talcum powder onto my edges. Your voice, when you mentioned my bill, sounded like a crawl.
Before I left, I touched your shoulder, looked briefly at your phone as you hid it in your pocket. I wanted you to know I had male friends, who, like you, would stare at pictures of men they admired in the dark. & that they entrusted me with their silence. Words were futile, I reckoned. That singular tap was my only way of registering my presence as well as my knowledge. Of saying: “I see you.”
“I’d always thought they weren’t allowed to be physically rough, both in looks & in their handling of things, humans. For the first time, I met someone who defied this stereotype. Someone who didn’t have to be excessively pretty, handsome, or gentle to be soft. ”
After that day, I visited your shop more often than I’d ever thought I would, not because I was impressed by your skill, but because I wanted to have more unvoiced conversations with you. To peruse the redacted phrases in your eyes, to feed them with water & more water. To let you know that it was okay to be tired of being silent. Each time, you attended to me. On one of such evenings, a dark-skinned girl (a friend of yours, I surmised) came in, sat on your lap & played with the knots on your head. I can still see how you shoved her away, while the other boys there taunted you with words that hinted at you being impotent & unmanly, too scared of girls. One of them, a guy with incipient sideburns, said: “Oga, I go do anything to dey with that girl. Shey you need tutorial for woman matter? As you big reach?”
You didn’t respond. Your lips tapered into something that resembled a sigh, & you looked in my direction, a bit abashed. Your Madonna’s Take a Bow still played on the stereo. I’d always believed queer people, “divergents,” in a country as hostile & insensitive to them as Nigeria, had this pattern of excessive cleanliness, of unctuosity—a way of compensating for what their environment had made them believe was a halfness. I’d always thought they weren’t allowed to be physically rough, both in looks & in their handling of things, humans. For the first time, I met someone who defied this stereotype. Someone who didn’t have to be excessively pretty, handsome, or gentle to be soft.
The next time I visited, you weren’t there. I didn’t ask the boss of the shop, but I was pretty certain you were gone. Your music didn’t play. I didn’t even know your name. I created one for you, in my own intimate space. I call you Shantyrose. I still remember the evening when you were fixing someone else’s hair & signalled for me to wait. You didn’t smile. & after you’d finished resurrecting my edges, you refused money. You stood before the mirror, pretending to be rearranging the plastic containers on the dressing table. That evening, I gave you an atypically longer shoulder tap, & you sighed with relief. I don’t know if you know this, but that sigh was, to me, spring. The knowledge that somewhere in the universe, a rose was blooming in the middle of a sandstorm in a shantytown, & I happened to be a part of its journey. That I could find someone, who, like me, was cradling a specific kind of grief, & understood that words were needless in the process of release.
Wherever you are, Shantyrose, I hope you’re not still holding your sighs in a fist.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Salvy Snr is a Nigerian writer of fiction and opinion pieces. His work has appeared in Expound, Brittle Paper, Public Goods, and on Medium. His writing aims to alleviate the silent suffering that society imposes on the boy-children of the world, and one of his dreams is to see the colour black appreciated for its beauty, without undercurrents of malice.
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Header photo by Ivan Cortez.