This harmattan, my first memory of home was my father’s well. Ìyá Aláró, my grandmother, had insisted he build it when I was six weeks old, placing it at the back of our house where the pawpaw tree circled our fence. Their dry leaves rustled, peeping into our compound. My father’s house, painted green and yellow, had faded in some part and bore a dusty visage.

Two kiosks and a few houses stood behind my father’s house, and a new building stuck out from the houses like a stubborn tooth. The aridity of the noisy and dirty street blended with the harmattan. The well’s image recurred in my mind, looping like persistent memories. I remembered how people gathered around the well and the pawpaw tree. They injected an ambience that rippled through the street, the noise as loud as I’d ever known it would be.

The noise in the street reached my ears as the driver drove into one of the streets in Abéòkúta. There was the sound of grinding engines as the motorcycles maneuvered dangerously around corners, the clanging of pots as buka owners attended to their customers in the queues, and the endless arguments between people. I peeked through the noisy street, pulling apart houses and schools with my eyes, until I caught sight of the old Centenary Hall, the only place my father had once worked as a janitor before I left home. The story of the hall, which claimed my father’s reason for working there, was chanted several times in our home. “They built the hall and many old things we still have here,” he’d say, but I could never tell if it was admiration or resignation in his voice, a conflicted narrative that danced through my father’s mind anytime he relished from memory how the whites came into Abeokuta as saviors, his inventory of Ìwé Ìroyìn for the Ègbá. The problem is I will never not understand what my father carried with him.

The car crawled over the bumpy road. I was not alone in the car. Beside me sat a stout woman, her hands resting on her knees, gaze fixed on the passing scenery. I had met her in Ikeja through a taxi driver who, upon hearing my destination, suggested I travel with her. The woman moved with a deft swiftness, a woman who had once lived in Lagos for years but returned for her adire textiles in Abéòkúta.
I had journeyed through this road fifteen years ago, as a rebellious teenager relocating to her uncle’s house, and there were bumps and potholes on the road. There were no changes since then. As if my thoughts weren’t good enough, the stout woman who had been speaking with the driver broke the silence and riddled tales of bad roads that ended with questions.
“Iwo ni Òjó?” she asked in Ègbá dialect, her hands moved deftly on her luggage.
“Yes ma,” I responded.

I was used to stabbing conversations that came out of curiosity about my name. When she first heard my name, her face was filled with questions. Now if she had asked “why Òjó,” I would’ve understood. Or if she’d said, “I want to know why you bear a man’s name,” I still would’ve understood. But “iwo ni Òjó was weird.” Name, after all, shouldn’t be a gender thing, so her surprise was completely wrong. And what about the way she said it? The tone of her voice was exactly the same one she might use to say, “you’re just a child.”
The driver drove into the fuel station at the junction of Ajíbólá Crescent. The road fell into a settlement with rusty brown roofs and faded-colored walls. There were few men at the entrance of the street, stopping bikes into the street with such defence. The bikers yielded themselves willingly to them, and a few of them flocked around them, and a familiar smell of gin stiffened the air. As the car neared my father’s house, my chest tightened. I tried to picture what part of home was still around, the well or my father?

Between twelve and fourteen, those years I felt like I was pushing against something unseen. Things around me felt so constricting that I questioned them with an intensity that frightened people around me. One harmattan season, I had climbed into the well, removing sand from its bottom to allow more water to collect. My father returned home furious. His eyes spilled with anger as he heard the news. My mom was silent; she never argued with him. “If you are not possessed,” his voice cracked in disbelief, “then what kind of madness made you go climb into that well, especially as a girl? From where did you learn all this strength?” He paused to examine what went wrong with the way he had trained me, was it my name or just my stubbornness? “It’s better for you to go and live with Ògá Sójà, my sister’s husband,” he finally pronounced. My father’s words hung in the air. Mother and I stood there, wondering why my actions had prompted the pronouncement to live with Ògá Sójà.

My father asked that night again. Are you possessed? I was not possessed, and this part of home was still with me. I felt a numbness on my knee to walk about bearing the weight of a stubborn child who defied her father and the shadow of a woman finding her peace. The conflict donned me, dragging me back into moments I thought I had left behind. I was tired on most days. When you’re going through the echoes of a self you’ve not outgrown, it’s hard to move without tripping over the loose threads.

On my twelfth birthday, the year into my senior secondary school, I got an indigo adire dress from Ìyá Aláró. It was a simple dress with intricate patterns that reminded me of the ripples in the well at the back of our house. I smoothed the edges of my adire dress, brushing off the stray thread fallen from the stout woman’s bag as though clearing away those words Iya Alaro always told me about my birth.
“Òjó, your umbilical cord was around your neck when you were born,” she’d say to me.
“It’s just something doctors would have named a nuchal cord or a complication,” I replied, but her eyes said something different. Her eyes said it meant something more, something beyond what doctors could explain with their sterile words and clinical chart. Something she called a sign, a thread or survival tying me to a burden that could be relieved by digging the well, so she christened me Òjó and, most times before she died. I carried the weight of these words for years before I traveled to Senegal. My body had nurtured this part of me long before my becoming in Senegal, and it had grown into a definition that people could name as weird or being too defiant. But I understand what it was — a burden that escaped many generations but settled on my shoulders.

“You need to start growing into your own,” my fiancé told me on one of the evenings we walked in the street of Dakar, before we had our space. His tone said something different, that I had come into a kind of shape that could not be confined by his understanding of who I should be, like my walk and my body being too forceful, like my struggles to survive, like finding my own. That evening, I clutched those books he bought for me, crushing the papers until they split free from their bindings. I emptied the rippled books and everything in my bag, desperate to find the part of me I needed to grow into.

“Our àdìré business is now losing its value,” the stout woman, who had been complaining about the state of Abéòkúta, said. Our mothers lived this life for a long time. People found ways to transform their hard work into something affordable for the average person. It was a shift that reached my grandmother, stopping her in her tracks. One day, she decided to start making àdìré, sitting at the back of our house where she could fetch water from the well.
“Where are you heading to in this Abéòkúta?” the woman asked in Yorùbá.
I slopped the words coming from my throat with the observation that if they slipped out at the time, it would be the strange piece of me speaking to the woman. I felt my voice falter, a weight in my chest as I stared into the woman’s eyes.
“I am finding my way,” I said, and it made the woman happy to see young people tracing their home after a long time. She pounded me with many questions, trying to know the years I had stayed in Senegal, the part of Abéòkúta I came from, and why I needed to go home at this time. I said nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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