Your African mother is a lesbian

Nwa m Oluchi,

I write to you from a place you don’t exist in and a time diagonal to yours. I take in the air extra delicately, ensuring I breathe enough for the two of us. I watch people pass by this park bench and I try to find your features in them. I spotted your pair of eyes in a young girl who sat next to her mother silently, staring at the other children play. I saw the intensity and the careful observing she did. The way her eyes, black pools, captured and absorbed the secrets of others. Our eyes met and I knew this was your eyes Oluchi. Even in this place, you somehow found me, watching me in that intense way that you do. This takes me to the time, our time, where your gaze never left me. I can only admit it now, but your stares frightened me. I wished to ask you how much you knew about me – your mother, the woman of many secrets. But as you grew and the years morphed our paths alike, I knew those eyes unearthed all my secrets. So here I am, telling you a truth you already knew; Oluchi, your mother is a lesbian.

As I write this, my heart still skips a beat because I can imagine the terrors those words can ignite in the actions of your father and his people. But then I remember that I am no longer there, that he doesn’t exist here, just like you. It saddens me to know that I can’t show you this life that I have built here. My true self emerging everyday. Oluchi, I am the same age I was when I had your brother, Nnamdi. However, this time I have a business instead. My purpose is now more aligned, beyond child rearing. This is what I wished to show you, that people like us can have more to life. Oluchi, I am sure you know this then too, but I envied your father. I watched as he built a business on ideas I fed him at night. I saw the way he would come home with notes and notes of naira but unable to understand its value. I counted them slowly, ensuring I felt the rumpled papers at the pads of my fingers. I am sure you saw this nightly ritual too, how I hunched over at the dining table with a kerosine lantern illuminating my shadow. Those nights were a form of remembering for me. Oluchi, your grandmother once thought me a male spirit because I had the same desires as her sons. This is a notion I want you to reject, because desires are free to belong to any spirit. Your desires, they belong to you first and foremost and not anchored on what people deems you worthy. I want you to remember this.

My desires, Oluchi, are as rich as they were at our time. I hesitate to share this with you because you are my child and there are topics a mother must withhold from her children. However, since we share similar journeys, my duty lies in honesty. I hope it reaches you well. In this place, I found your aunty again, Haleema. Her spirit playing a silly joke that she enjoys by picking a vessel that looks exactly like her in our time. She is as boisterous as I remembered and even more daring. I met her in a conference where she was giving a speech about colonization and its effects on African queerness. Her voice always so leveled but the fire in her eyes, blazing. I didn’t think she remembered me but a week after this conference, as her hands caressed my body, the sureness of her fingers, she remembered. I enjoyed the way she said my name, drenched in lust and coated in mischief. In the beginning, I still carried the same fear that I would be caught and what happened, with your father and his people, will happen again. But Haleema? Well, she did what she did best. She dragged out the lust in me. A type of lust that paid little regard for consequences but was always present to feel it all. Each day I spent with her, I saw the way my speech boldened and my desires deepened. Haleema carried the same disruptive personality as before. This I witnessed in her confidence to speak her mind in conferences and in everyday life. She will share boldly her opposition to men and their comfort. I wonder if the men of this time reminded her too much of her husband then. You remember your uncle Musa? He hated Haleema as much as she despised him. He would berate Haleema because she had more education than him but Haleema being a woman that knows herself, let those insults roll off her. She would tell me in one of the afternoons that she visited at that time, that his opinions of her never reached her because she knew of insecure men all too well. Men like your father, Oluchi. Also, the man I turned your brother, Nnamdi, into.

Do you know that Nnamdi is my father in this place? Almost as if I am being punished for my neglectful parenting, I see reflections of your father in Nnamdi’s face everyday. The way he feels entitled to many things in life because he believes it is his birthright as a man. I saw this in him the moment he started learning about the world. He knew immediately that he was preferred, sought after. He indulged in this and I let him. Oluchi, this is another secret of mine, I never wanted to be a mother. So can you understand the ways I felt ill-equipped to raise any of you. I do love you all deeply, but I wanted to live Oluchi. I wanted to know myself outside of my obligations as a woman. I wanted to understand the extent of my desires, ways to indulge in Haleema’s touch and to own a business that became an international success. I wanted to live a life where my clothes were of my picking, not dictated by what I should be wearing as a woman. I wanted to travel to various countries just like your father did for business trips. I saw the freedom that your father, your uncles, men of that time had, and I wanted it too for myself.

So, I write to you now because I know you too took after me. You have a lust for life and a defiance that I chose to ignore then. I ignored how I saw your eyes lingered at your friend and the way you talked about her so much more than others. I knew it before all of this. Call it a mother’s intuition but I knew. I didn’t want to acknowledge it because I knew the despair that coupled those feelings, at least of that time. But Oluchi, if I am being honest, I just wasn’t as brave as my desires were. I didn’t fight for a different life that would have freed you and me. Because of my cowardice, I lost you and Haleema. I have so much regret, so I write to you today Oluchi, for my words to coax you into remembering. That If given the same opportunity to return, I hope you grip at life with the ferocity that I do now. That you embarrass fear with your lewdness and that you let your desires lead you to your becoming. I want you to remember this Oluchi. I hope your chi guides you to this letter and that you forgive your mother for not being the woman that I am now in our time. Though I live for both of us now, I hope you return to taste the fruit of this life once more.

Your lesbian mother, Nne gi,

Olaedo