 Oil and Water, by Yemisi Aribisala
Today: Yemisi Aribisala, writer, editor, essayist, painter, and author of Longthroat Memoirs.
Issue No. 159Books and Ruined Women
Yemisi Aribisala
Books and Ruined Womenby Yemisi AribisalaMy mother was convinced that reading was ruining me. No, it had ruined me retrospectively. She grasped her justification with both hands when books became a bone of contention in my marriage and my bookshelves were banished from the living room of my Calabar home. You only needed to read so much if you had exams ahead or if there was some other inescapable obligation. Obviously reading was a necessary skill but it should not collide with sociability or hospitality. If it does, then there is no dispute on which one of the two needs humbly to step down. If you were a married woman and had not fully interiorised these simple (simplistic) premises, then there was a problem indicative of stubbornness and arrogance on its face, and stupidity not far beneath. Reading could not seriously be one’s favourite pastime, to cut a long story short. My mother has a postgraduate degree and understands well the functionality and desirability of reading, but it was something else entirely if you chose to stay in your room for long hours, if you had no friends, if you refused to engage with the friends that your benevolent family had grown concerned enough to match-make for you. She asked me pointedly one day what the middle of a book was for. The beginning and the end of it surely sufficed to get the gist of the tour, especially when the book in questions was the seven-book series under the heading of The Chronicles of Narnia. I was ten and she was being facetious but I had no sense of humour where my mother was concerned. We weren’t friends or anything like that. We lived in the same house and she was responsible for my well-being. I stood at the opposite end of the room searching for an answer to the question and finding none, kept mute. I had brought the books back from New York on a trip with my Uncle and Aunty, a beloved set in a glossy cardboard case. I spent more hours stroking the books and looking at the case and book covers than reading them. But that admission would have been so much worse for me in cultural court than saying I was just reading the books. The real fear, for my family, was the unfamiliar quirkiness in a person—the root cause of the stroking of books. In those days books were expensive, imported from overseas, passed from hand to hand with a queue behind the last reader. Case in point, the Mills and Boon titles we passed around until the covers and the final pages fell off. Beginnings sometimes fell off too and you had to fill in the gaps with your imagination. Luckily this only happened with the highly recommended Mills and Boon titles featuring sudden unexpected bruising kisses and impromptu crushing against walls in their pages, the sort of scenes now disgraced by Me Too. I can’t remember one single library in my childhood neighbourhood in Lagos. So how much more precious were those books, new books that had been carried in a suitcase from a trip to the United States. A trip that had been diplomatically coaxed out of my parents because they had better things to do with N400, then the cost of an economy return ticket via Paris. My father wanted a new lawn mower, my mother wanted something else or the other, but my Uncle had convinced them somehow to pay for my fare to go on holiday with them. I returned home by myself with a tag around my neck, since my Uncle and Aunty were staying on in New York and I had to go to secondary school. Everyone wanted to know what I had brought back from two weeks in New York and were puzzled to learn that the highlights of my small suitcase were seven books and a sequined Michael Jackson glove. Not one single new dress. One day I discovered that two of my books had disappeared. Over the course of the following weeks I searched, heartbroken, for The Horse and his Boy and The Silver Chair, books 3 and 6. For days on end I ransacked the house. There was just an inexplicable hole in the middle of the box where the two books had been. I asked everyone, and of course their indifference and annoyance about being quizzed over these nonsensical items only intensified my dismay. In the end—when, I suppose, my mother was finally fed up with seeing me tear my hair out—she informed me that a family friend named Kemi Adubi had come round with her mother. Kemi had hoped I’d be around to have a playdate. My mother had searched for something to give the girl on their departure, and had found nothing suitable except two books in the middle of my precious Chronicles of Narnia. I was so furious, I was breathless with rage, but there was no allowance to express anger in that household and I went into my room and thought about what the middle of books were for really. I was sure Kemi Adubi had accepted the books because they’d been given to her by a Nigerian mother, not because she wanted them. They were under her bed, or in the bin or left in the car. What was she going to do with the middle of a chronology with the beginning(s) and end missing? I never forgave my mother. But I say this only in a manner of speaking. There is no such thing as Nigerian children forgiving or not forgiving their parents. There is absolutely nothing to forgive, or not forgive, because nothing happened. Nigerian children were not allowed to look their parents or elders directly in the eye, still less express even the mildest irritation, still less express rage. You had to look away when you were spoken to. So I bottled my anger and retained a small knot in my chest from the painful violation. As soon as I was able to afford it as an adult, I bought boxed sets of The Chronicles of Narnia. I gave them to people who didn’t even care for them. I found The Horse and His Boy for $6.95 in Barnes and Noble. I have two volumes or three, as well as the deteriorating original books from my New York trip. I bought an audiobook version too.
 Image via Nairaland Forum I don’t remember who taught me to read, but I do remember vividly a Queen primer with my name in it…It went missing too, and was discovered later in a dark corner of the house, chewed to bits by a heartless mouse who had spared no thought for how I was going to ask my mother for a new copy. I now believe the mouse accelerated my reading abilities, as I did not want to have to go and ask for a new book. It is important here to explain my parents’ point of view, coming from a Yoruba culture that esteems education highly, but de-emphasises intellectual women and expects them to obey the cues and conventions, not present as domineering, ostentatiously erudite, or in any way superior or even mildly challenging to men. When my father told me years later that I was unloved, I understood this pristinely to mean that I was ruined—uncooperative, un-Nigerian, non-conformist, eccentric, yes clever—but ruined, and definitely unmarriageable. It was down to two things: the spoiling, the interference of those two, my uncle and aunty, who had taken me to New York and convinced me out of the common-sense parameters that had been taught me, and those stupid books I was always lugging around. For five years my children and I lived in the oddest, ricketiest rented house in Hampstead Garden Suburbs, in London, a place made still more bizarre by the lack of bookshelves. As migrants from Calabar, South-Eastern Nigeria, to Lagos, South-Western Nigeria… to Somerset-West, Western Cape, to North London, all in the span of six years, with half a shipping-containerful of books…it felt like a curse that we should land so unceremoniously in a house with no shelves in sight. Not one shelf. The books ended up everywhere: in storage in a warehouse somewhere far away, on radiators, on the kitchen floor and counters, and under the bed, and in the kitchen cupboards and in recycled boxes, and stacked up to lift the fan high enough to cool the expanse of the bedrooms in summer. This house was over 5000km away from Nigeria but it became the fulfillment of a prophecy: here it was, the ruination of a perfectly good woman with her exuberant attachment to books. The end as expected was the eccentricity, the out-of-placeness of an overqualified divorced woman in a cave of books. Miss Havisham minus wedding dress. If I was despondent, it was because I was reminded of something poignant; of the prohibition and unloveliness attached to books and reading in my childhood. I consoled myself by pretending to be Abdul Kassem Ismael, the grand vizier of Persia, who maintained his library of 117,000 books aboard 400 camels arranged alphabetically in a walking library. Or traveling library in our case, a rough index held somewhere in my head. I have in my hand The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, And Breakthroughs in Modern Art by Sebastian Smee. This is one of those books that I stumbled on when dragging my feet through the Book Warehouse at Golders Green waiting for my son to choose something. My copy is special because its bright turmeric cover is irrationally more attractive than the current cover. It is old, imported from America where books show off their status symbolism by having rough fore-edges. It has a bright red spot on the bottom edge to indicate that it is a “remaindered” book that can’t be sold above a certain price. I guess I am showing my love for physical books, colour, smell, character, disfigurement. I need something concrete under my fingers, the turning of pages is important for me where reading is concerned. I don’t own a Kindle and never will. The Art of Rivalry explores art by using the egalitarian language of human emotions? That is a very bad summary because the book is so much more and full of delightful, wicked stories. To have works of art discussed in easily accessible language of envy, love, deceit appeals to me. I love that story in Maya Angelou’s Mom and Me and Mom, where she finds herself in front of a Matisse and becomes so overcome with emotion she weeps. Stories and books power the world with the vibrating sonority of Nigerian generators; they are anathema only to those who have something to hide, suspicious, apprentice-despots and sociopaths. I haven’t successfully discovered what it is about book-strokers that so irks their detractors to the point of wanting to destroy them. There is overinvestment in there for sure, in some rearward mythology, for what is more innocuous, more nerdy than someone who lives in a library and carries books around with them. It isn’t after all that explosive mix of reader/political writer/journalist that necessitated the creation of a Nigerian Department of State Security list with the heading Enemies of the Nigerian State, for writers who challenged the Nigerian government. In London, where you have to posthaste calculate your safety by others’ appearances, a reader makes people snuggle closer. They don’t hide the fact that they are looking at you. You might get a smile. Perhaps it is because you have no extra appendages to beg, grab or mishandle with, no matter how shabbily dressed you are, the conclusion is you must be safe. People with books are like people with Yorkshire Terriers in a city where dogs are loved almost more than children. Yet a woman with bookshelves on the Nigerian domestic front I fled can be condemned as conceited, domineering, overwhelming. Dangerous. I compared notes once with a famous black British author who claimed London was a strain to live in, because he is over 6 foot tall, black, towering and self-possessed, he has been stopped by police numerous times, mistaken for a fleeing transgressor numerous times. I told him London on the contrary offered me safety from familial allegations of being anti-social, a reader, quirky fringe-dweller, and ne’er do well. I had no fear of prejudice on the streets, nor behind closed doors at home. I disappear, as I wish, without a ripple, book in hand like a tool of enchantment, ruins and all.
FLAMING HYDRA IRL  Cover image of The Hammer, by Hamilton Nolan Wednesday, September 25, Hydra Hamilton Nolan will be speaking at Flagler College at the Ringhaver/ Gamache-Kroger Theatre in St. Augustine at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, September 26, Hamilton will drop in at Gainesville's The Lynx bookstore at 6:00 p.m., for a conversation with labor activist Candi Churchill. Event link here.
Sixty writers and artists thank you for reading Flaming Hydra.
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