The Photograph by:
Tolu Daniel
CW: Armed robbery. There is a photograph of a place lodged somewhere in my head, refusing to yield to time, refusing to become memory, refusing to disappear. It stays fresh as photographs often are, glossy at the surface and colorful from afar. It is of a place I once called home. In the photograph, my father is standing with his face turned to the left on a portrait that sits on the wall while my mother smiles besotted with him. This is the picture of our sitting room in Ijeja, the room where the gun of an armed robber jammed when he tried to blow out my father’s brains. This is the room that follows me everywhere like an annoying toddler. I don’t know why the photographer chose this angle of our house to shoot but I know why I can’t get over it. This was the angle of the sitting room visible to me that night the robbers came. Whenever this photograph emerges from my consciousness, it is often triggered by a sense of danger, a possible loss. A week before the day that brought my third decade on earth into being, I decided to visit Ijeja. I imagined that perhaps, it was time for closure. I wanted to be done with the anxiety that the memory of the photograph always brought with it. That afternoon, I arrived in Ijeja as a stranger. The houses lining the streets remained as they were when I was a child. New ones peeped through from behind the old. When the car arrived at the gates of my destination, I was assaulted by nostalgia similar to the kind arising from my memory of the photograph. The gate was open, so I walked inside the compound. Nothing had changed. Even the large passion fruit tree that witnessed my childhood was still there. The wind blew its leaves from side to side as if it was celebrating my return. I walked towards the door of the apartment that used to be my family’s, the door was different, even the railings had been substituted. I knocked on the door and received only the sound of my knuckles cracking the plywood platform on the door in reply. There was no one but I felt a strange calm just standing there. *** This is where I was born, the home I knew till my parent’s salary swelled enough to move us elsewhere. Whenever my mind takes me back to my childhood, this I remember. The house with the wall-less gate, the big compound, and the four apartment units where we converged Friday nights to listen to the sonorous and chilling voice of Kola Olawuyi croaking from the radio telling scary stories. This is the house where I played daddy and mummy with Funmilola before she died of a disease with no name. This is the house of another boy who answered to my name but whose skin color earned him Tolu Pupa while I, a six-year-old, became black for the first time. Tolu Dudu will be my name for several years because it was easier to differentiate us by the shade of our skin. This is the house I first learned how to be jealous of a person because fair was better than black. This is where I learned to hate myself,
