I SAW A MAN LOOK BACK, I WITNESSED HIM TURN TO SALT
First published in the Creative Zine, 2022 fall issue, page 90 - 92. CONTENT WARNING: this piece contains references of sexual assault and child abuse.
There’s been an ongoing crisis in Cameroon for a long couple of years now. There’s been the physical side and effects of the war then there’s been the mental agony. But just like other countries, for example - Nigeria, crises which are big enough to be so small can be happening right within its boundaries yet life could still go on quite normally for a large number of people, this is what boundaries; dividing people into locked pseudo regions in the name of culture, language and (non)community will yield you. Fruits of war, killings, unconfronted trauma, abnormality, hate, corruption, the list goes deep and long.
This "anglophone crisis" as it's been referred to for many years has been on for what some would claim to be five years, others would claim six, many would probably say it's been on since two stars were planted on the first flag, while a few would refute and claim it has been on since one of the stars on the flag got knocked off. All I know, as it concerns my family, is that the war started long before it began and by that I mean it started from all the independence declarations which happened between Nigeria and francophone Cameroun, from the time British Cameroonians were asked to choose a side to belong to. Every time I talk about the crisis in Cameroon I drag Nigeria in by its neck, because how can we not? At the end of the day, if you trace my family tree with any number of fingers you will find Biafra buried in there, and you will find that at its core at the blood stained fingertips of every surly politician, it’s the same plight. But this is not a story about their history, this is a story about a man I knew.
I knew a man, he was an uncle or we could say a lover, sometimes a priest. All of those (titles) depended on what day his hands decided where to go, on top of my head to lay blessings or underneath my shirt to see what he could wake. He was on the right side of his vision and on the wrong side of politics, it wouldn't be wrong to say he was also on the wrong side of history in the eyes of many people's children. In 2016 or 2017 ( trauma does things to certainty ) when the first ( popular ) internal crisis began in Cameroon he decided to stay back and defend his people despite his easy access to flee the land to the Americas, he chose to stay and fight. Fight who? My mother would ask him and he would say, it's not who it's what…we have to fight the system and I would wonder to myself why this strange man was lying to my mother, why couldn't he just say he liked touching children and it was easier for him to carry out ungodly things in camps that were already troubled.
In the eyes of my mother and a lot of other people's mothers, even to some fathers except the ones who could tell he had the same hands as them, he was a hero. A man who stayed back to try to help God defend its people. Until one day, one of the children whose shorts he liked to go under screamed so loud, too many people who had feigned ignorance to what had been going on had to come running out of their tents in broad daylight to try to catch this boy's scream. The child's father was one of those who came out in a haste, a member of the vigilante group for the camp. And when he traced and found where the scream came from, he also found this man who I knew, with an erected penis and a child- his son.
Gunshots were fired, a death occurred first, then several deaths occurred later, no one could tell the difference between the soldiers who tried to attack the camp that day with stray bullets and the man who tried to save his child. It did not matter as much. All that mattered was that we were at war, the Ambazonia War, the Cameroonian Civil War. We were in the midst of the ongoing civil war in Southern Cameroon, we were part of the long-standing "Anglophone problem" and it did not matter how many mothers had to lose their children, how many people had to lose their homes, how many abusive penises were getting erected, how many hands were going underneath shirts in confession booths or how many people refused to not look back. All that mattered was that we were at war.
—
Yes we were at war, but life carried on. I was constantly surprised by how many mothers still wanted to baptise their children despite the fact that there were still pools of blood stinking up the streets somewhere not too far from the doors of the church or even their home. They still needed so desperately to baptise their children, what were they trying to really wash away was all I could think of. This thought disturbed me so much I got baptized voluntarily twice myself, because all those mothers who looked out for their children in the body of Christ must have known something my own mother was not interested in telling me about.
My mother, she never invited me to join her to morning masses, she never asked me to pray with her, she never offered to buy me a rosary, a couple of times when I walked into her room and caught her eyes while she was hailing Mary full of grace, she would always look away but she never stopped praying. But she gave me a bible because according to her it was important to read all things, especially those things that contained keys to the locks that were used to chain your people. I noticed she never closed her eyes while praying though, or at least I never saw her do it, and when I asked her about it she simply said God does not need you to close your eyes while praying only people need you to do that and I never quite understood what she meant until the day I closed my eyes while praying in the empty Chapel and felt someone's hands on my breasts. When I saw who it was and asked her why she touched me, she simply said she was checking to see if I was wearing my chaplet. But the cross hanging in front of us fell and I felt that must have been Jesus's way of saying, what a lying bitch. But we were not allowed to swear in church so I said nothing, to no one, ever and I never prayed with my eyes closed again until I stopped praying altogether. All I know is I felt what I felt - unpermitted hands caressing my breasts.
Let me state clearly and for the record, at this time I was not a child, I was definitely somebody's child but not a child. I was already in my early twenties, old, tired and traumatised. God only knows what they call such people. People like me who jump to their late sixties in early adulthood, not by choice, and if we're fortunate enough after sometime we start to age backwards. Things force their way into your chest then they crystalize there and block other things from making their way in or out. You begin to have frequent chest attacks which the doctors give you names for, they say it's panic attacks one day and another day they tell you it's anxiety attacks. Grandma's voice tells you in your head not to listen to western doctors, that what you feel in your chest is death trying to avoid you. Your mother tells you you need to see a therapist but she dies before you can get your first appointment anyway. You try and try and try to get rid of the aches in different parts of your body then you realise that your body knows you've become an old soul, you've been in contact with too much pain in your short life and some of it stuck, you're the only one who forgot. The body does not forget, boundaries, borders, displacement, death, rape, attempted suicide, passion of the Christ penance marches, no the body does not forget war, of any kind.
—
I knew a man who should have left his country when he could have, but thought he was too important to miss out on war.
