Notes on a Childhood

On resilience, love, and improbable joy

A passport photograph of me (age 11)

If I narrated the interesting parts of my childhood, it would seem as though my parents, especially my father, were negligent. But the truth, rooted in the context of time and circumstances, was that they were attentive, perceptive even. They put out many fires before the fires could burn me. The fires they couldn’t put out, they kept me far away from, so that when those fires burned themselves out, I could see the wreckage and say, “Good thing I wasn’t there.”

One could blame my father for living in what, by all definitions, was a ghetto. You know, badly built and poorly ventilated tenements with many different people living in them. The compound we (my father and I) lived in had communal bathrooms with algae-lined walls and earthworms squirming on the floor because the concrete had eroded; a caved-in pit latrine so that both adults and children had to do their business in potties (yes, there are adult-sized potties) and empty them into the latrine; and a communal, open-concept kitchen with soot-covered walls that smelled like smoke, rotting food, or rotting animals (usually big rats or lizards that had eaten rat poison), or all three smells combined. Some of our neighbors were questionable people: alcoholics, sex workers, promiscuous married men with dysfunctional families, Bible thumpers, unscrupulous “nurses” who dropped out of nursing school and performed illegal abortions, and corrupt low-level government officials. It was a strange crowd, and our family was by far the most conventional. My father was a mathematics teacher at a community secondary school, and when I first arrived at the compound, I was seven years old.

But one would be wrong to blame him. It was what he could afford with his meager teacher’s salary, and we moved into a better neighborhood a few years later. Plus, he tried his best to keep me away from the compound. I was mostly at my aunt’s house when I wasn’t at school. Her house was a 10-minute walk from ours. My aunt, too, had tenements for rent, but they were in better condition, and her house, where I stayed with my cousins, was a real house: a colonial-style two-story building with large rooms and wide glass windows.

My memory of living in the compound is mostly happy, though some things strike me now as odd. I remember shooting at lizards with small, handheld catapults and never hitting any; bathing outside with other boys my age and splashing water on one another while laughing hysterically. I remember the evangelical Christian couple two apartments away letting me wait in their spartan apartment when my father was away and the door to our place was locked. They seemed nothing like their reputation of intolerance. As a Muslim child, I was a prime candidate for Christian intolerance. They were just an old, childless couple who loved each other and believed in Jesus. I remember the old sex worker who lived next door, whom I could sometimes hear at night entertaining her clients because we shared the same roof with holes in the ceiling. She helped me bleach my white school uniform to make it whiter. She was my favorite neighbor. She always had a smile for me, even early in the morning when she had bad, bed-tousled hair. Once, I held a mirror for her while she did her makeup, and when she was done, she asked me how she looked and I said, “Fantastic!” Fantastic became our inside joke, a word we said back and forth to each other. I remember how her eyes creased when she laughed.

I remember negative things too, but none of them left me with deep, traumatic injuries, perhaps because I was a boy child who didn’t know better or because I was not smart enough to know that I had been traumatized. Domestic violence was a staple, burglaries weren’t uncommon, and even death that one time—the body of a thief who’d been stabbed was on the steps that led into our apartment; face up, eyes open, opaque like frosted glass, his deoxygenated blood a muddy reddish-brown that had clotted—but all of it was just life. I had nightmares that featured his dead eyes for a few nights, but they didn’t last long enough to alter the shape of my life.

My father kept me busy. Between school and sleep, he had me reading newspapers, summarizing the stories I read, and looking up unfamiliar words in the dictionary. On some weekends, we went to the public library, where he read newspapers and magazines, and I read children's books about clever pigs and beautiful birds. I loved those weekends. We ate the same meal every Saturday for breakfast: scrambled eggs, crispy fried potatoes, fried plantains, and tomato sauce with sardines. Because our apartment was poorly ventilated and the electricity was epileptic, he often had to fan me with a handmade fan until I fell asleep.

He left me at my aunt’s place on Sundays, where I monkeyed around with my cousins. We hunted small birds, played soccer, ran errands for neighbors, and bought sweets with the money they gave us. My aunt had a beer parlor, and we (my cousins and I) helped out sometimes during rush hours. That was where I learned, at 10, that older men had weak bladders and I had to remind them to go; otherwise, they’d pee themselves. I remember a particular incident where an inebriated old man with heavy jowls peed himself. I was the person closest to him. The bartender, busy with other customers, barked instructions at me.

“There’s a wrapper in the store; go and get it,” he said. “When you get back, remove his wet trousers and cover him with the wrapper. Then mop up the urine.” I did exactly as I was instructed. I had undressed an old man and cleaned his bodily fluids. I wasn’t supposed to be in a beer parlor, never mind being indecently exposed to adult male genitalia, but I was there, and I’m… fine. Well, for the most part.

The adults in charge of us should have known better. Children shouldn't be around alcohol or be allowed to help out in a beer parlor. Plus, we were exposed to cigarette smoke because every bar that sold alcohol also sold cigarettes. The adults were fighting too many adult demons of their own to care.

I was lucky. A lot of children who grew up the way I did either got molested, turned to drugs, or became alcoholics. I also think my father’s proactiveness shielded me from the worst of it. My mother was away in another town, working. I’d lived with her for the first seven years of my life in a small village, another magical period in my life. My mother and I had lived in my great-uncle’s mansion in Ihima, a small village tucked away in central Nigeria. But my father said I needed to attend better schools, so I moved to Lokoja, the state capital, to live with him while he spent almost all of his salary on my school fees. Living in a bad neighborhood for a while was the price I had to pay for a decent education. The jury is not out yet, but I think it was worth it.

It took me nearly two decades and my father dying to appreciate just how much effort he put into raising me. I have two older brothers, and they unfortunately were the guinea pigs of his parenting journey. By the time he had me, he’d learned what worked and what didn’t.

On his best days, my father was an intellectual. Humor would come easy to him, like a happy dog, tail wagging, running to its master. His jokes would land. He was brilliant with an acerbic wit. He was present in a way typical Nigerian fathers were not. He checked all my notebooks after school and knew everything significant that went on at school because he paid attention. He was big on rationalization. Liking or disliking something or someone wasn't enough; he had to know why. I thought this was tedious as a teenager, but in hindsight, I appreciate this rather unusual behavior of giving thought to every decision and understanding why I liked or disliked something or someone. I am not impulsive because of this.

On bad days, he was difficult for no reason. He’d find fault with everything. My father hoarded praise but gave out unsolicited critiques.

Still, he was a great father. He overcame poverty and a wild young adult life. He’d experimented with drugs when he was much younger and rode parties across multiple states in Nigeria and West Africa. It’s a miracle he fathered no child during that phase of his life, or maybe he did and never found out. I sometimes imagine there’s a middle-aged man who looks exactly like him somewhere in Accra or wherever he once partied. He used to be wild, and all of this information he confessed, disguised as advice meant to steer me towards being responsible.

Although he never admitted it, I think literature saved him from a life of drugs. He read right up until the year he died. I read most of the books he collected when I was a teenager. Some I liked, some I didn’t understand. He loved Shakespeare. I’m not sold on Shakespeare: the thous and thines overwhelm me. But we agree on Faulkner, Achebe, Twain, and Morrison. “This is an excellent book; you should read it,” was a sentence I heard often. I think our bond was different—stronger—because of all his children, I was the only child who enjoyed reading as much as he did.

Stories were the crutch of my childhood. My father wanted me to encounter them in books, but it was my mother’s folk stories I hungered for as a child. I attributed her great storytelling skills, in part, to her being a primary school teacher. She had to keep many children entertained for hours every weekday. She incorporated dramatic pauses, exaggerated flairs, and the most convincing facial expressions to give life to her stories. It was special. Stories told in rooms where candlelight cast wobbly shadows of common objects on the wall. Stories in which animals talked, birds sang and pooped money, fathers cut off the ears of erring sons, ants held court, tortoises outwitted everyone, lizards swam river lengths, and lions were the brave but often dim-witted leaders of all animals. She'd sing dirges when a main character in her story died, sorrowful dirges that would fill me with mournful sadness for days. There were wedding songs for when an ant married a beautiful lizard. These songs transformed our bedroom into a wedding reception where animals came from far and near to witness the enchanting but ultimately fatal union of an ant and a lizard. The impracticality of all this didn't register because I was a child, and I wanted everything to be true.

I’ve struggled with depression as an adult, especially after both my parents passed. I am still struggling, still trying to find my place in the world. I think about my parents a lot and wonder if they knew they got it right for the most part. They weren’t perfect, but is there such a thing as a perfect parent? I think parenting is trying one’s very best, putting out fires (sometimes literally), doing things with the best intentions, unlearning wrong things, and hoping your children turn out fine.

My childhood, filled with many events that were supposed to scar me beyond repair, is what I often go back to if I need a jolt of happiness. Although my parents probably didn’t intend for it to happen, the most long-lasting effect of their parenting is my need to think (and maybe overthink) things through. Sometimes, this is a handicap, and other times, it saves me from making stupid decisions. Their parenting is also responsible for my love for stories in any and every form.

My adult life doesn’t have any of the magic of my childhood. Things were a lot simpler then, and I didn’t have to worry about my future and what to do with my life. Adulthood is filled with too much strife: the strife for financial freedom, the strife for a better future, for purpose. I miss just living.

But if the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer is to be taken seriously when he said, “the life of the individual is constant struggle… he discovers adversaries everywhere, lives in continual conflict, and dies with sword in hand,” then I am living. What I miss, I think, is the ease and relative lack of adversity of my childhood. Schopenhauer would rather I embrace all my adversities—mental and physical—and learn from them. I doubt I’ll die with a sword in my hand, though. It would most likely be a pen. But still, I think even Schopenhauer would allow me a moment of weakness, a moment of clinging to a time that wasn't adversarial, especially since I have a lifetime of constant struggle and conflict ahead of me.