The last time I saw you, you’d been stranded in Los Angeles for ten hours. Ann lives there, and I was flying in to see her, but you didn’t know any of this until I hit you up and got into a shuttle to find you after I landed. When you ran across the terminal to hug me, you looked just like you did in New York: a god in flesh-colored garments, with a body trained for channeling, trained for the kinds of magic I wish I could perform. You were taller than I remembered. You held me so tightly and it felt like my skin didn’t fit, because you were holding me and this skin felt clumsy between two gods. I can’t remember what snacks I had: sweet potatoes, a guava, something that I fed you with. I called Ann and she swung by from work and picked us up and we went to a terrible little restaurant and sat at a table together. Three nonhumans together in the same physical space is a force that weights the world in the place we are gathered. The only other time I’ve seen it happen was when you and I and Eloghosa ate burgers in New York, and I think we were shy then. I wonder what it would be like with four of us, five, six, eighty-seven thousand of us.
Los Angeles brings out my godmode—which is just a thing about remembering, not a thing about being. I can breathe and my lungs draw power in. I am not even remotely afraid. I am a deity in hotel rooms. The three of us ordered soup at the terrible little restaurant and talked about home and belonging and what it was like to claim ontologies that we might not be accepted in. I cried when you told me about that museum, about the walls that folded open in its vaults, and the entities they had locked away in there, wrongly, too close. We’ve been hunting for homes and I think it’s been hard to see that so much of it is threaded inside us already. We’re drawing maps, back to our villages, back to our languages. If I remember correctly, you’ve been learning Fijian lately and unlocking doors with the back of your throat. How does it feel? I gave up some of that journey because I realized that I’m making work too fast and too hungrily to carve out time for perfecting another language. I do know the power in it, though. I only speak Igbo when I talk to Ala and my chi. I don’t have a country of vocabulary, but I learn enough, clawing my jaw through it because it’s worth it to speak to them with this tongue.
After I decided to write Freshwater, I knew I had to go home and complete something. I wasn’t sure quite what. There’s a river in Anambra State called Idemmili, which is also the name of the god who lives in the river. She comes on land as a python, curls herself around the children who live on her banks and sleeps in their beds. I knew I was following a python, so I thought I had to go there and find a priest of Idemmili. I don’t know how I was so blind, looking in all the wrong places. Every attempt I made to organize a trip back home for that failed. I wanted someone else to anoint me, to mark my forehead with ash or blood or clay and tell me I was right, that my divination of myself was accurate. Everyone else seemed to have a babalawo, a padrino, a tío, someone who would guide them. There are some roads you don’t want to have to walk alone, but I’ve never been allowed to touch my hand to another entity’s feet.
I remember when a former partner took me to see their babalawo—how the rage simmered inside my chest, hot with contempt that wasn’t mine, itching under my skin, wanting to be away from there and the wrongness of that world. The babalawo told my former partner what sacrifices would have to be made for our relationship to succeed, then laughed and said the sacrifices would never happen. You’re fucking right, a voice in my head hissed back. I kept quiet. My former partner got angry when I told them I wouldn’t do any of it: no knife slicing across the feathered neck, no blood slipping into the sand. After I broke up with them, they found me dancing on my birthday with a new lover and gave me a bag full of things: scraps of fabric, a letter. I threw it in a trash can on a street corner, because they were all cheap spells and I am my deitymother’s child. Do you have stories of how people tried shit with you like you’re not who you are?
I tried to go to Ile-Ife. I tried to go to a Yemaya ceremony on a beach in Trinidad. I could feel the roads closing in the air, the stench of you are not allowed thick and thrumming. I don’t remember how, but I figured out that I wasn’t meant to go to the Idemmili River because I had no business there. My python wasn’t the one from the water, it was the one from the land—Ala’s avatar. So I figured I had to go home and find one of Ala’s shrines, talk to a priest or something, tell them what I was, who I was. I wondered if they would recognize me, if they’d feel it in the red earth under all our feet, or if they’d just see someone with no language, with tattooed skin and a Western contamination in their voice, with a face and hair that betrayed outside blood. I know you know how that feels. I worried that they’d laugh and send me away, and what would I do then? These claims I was making were not small things, to call Ala mother when she’s the most powerful deity to my people, you know?
In Brooklyn, over tea, I talked with Zina Saro-Wiwa about what makes a folktale a folktale, how it can break timelines, how it is defined, how in the end it is just a story in this form told by a person from this culture. Zina told me about Ogoni masquerades she was making to be worn by women, since the men claimed that no woman could carry a spirit, which is of course bullshit. She asked me why I felt I needed permission from the priests, and you know, Jahra, I didn’t have an answer. I thought that was just the next step in the journey I was on, getting that blessing.
Blood purity in doing the work we do is such a thing. I wish I saw more people talking about it. We worry so much, we question ourselves, as if we have less of a birthright because so many humans have told us we do. I let all of that go when I accepted not being human: blood is only a flesh thing, and there’s no way that humans would be the ones with the authority to “authenticate” me. Gods don’t give a fuck about what outside bloodlines run through these bodies; we belong to them so utterly either way.
So, then, I had to ask myself: If it wasn’t necessary to get permission from the priests, why was I going home? What was I going home for if I accepted that my birthright was the only authority I needed to move in? I don’t know if this happens for you, but most of the time my prayers are answered by a knowing I have no way of knowing, a ray of clarity piercing my mind, a thing that no one has whispered but that I know is true. As soon as I asked, the answer showed up. Go home to greet Ala. That was it, stunning and simple, go home and pay your respects to your deitymother. The road unfurled like a red tongue in my eye.
I bought the ticket home, and this time I was allowed to return. I flew to Lagos, and then to Owerri, and my human father came to collect me. As we drove back to Aba, I looked out of the window at the land leaping by, the waist-high grass a cool and fast green. Nne, I told her in Igbo. I have come home. I have come to greet you. Please, open the road for me.
A thousand snakes appeared in the grass, translucent in my mind, swimming through the green like it was water, leaping in bends along the car. Escorts, avatars of her. Welcome home. You are not alone. I exhaled, knowing she had received me. I only had four days to find my way to one of her shrines, and I had no idea how I was going to do it, but I wasn’t worried. The road was always hers to open, not mine. My job was to show up.
The next morning, my human father told me we had to go next door to say hello to his neighbor. I didn’t want to. This neighbor wasn’t the man who had lived there when I grew up and thank God for that. The old neighbor had groped me when I was twelve; he called my little sister his wife because it was his car that took her to the hospital when she was run over at six. When I started avoiding him, after that day he cornered me in his parlor, everyone scolded me. I was pleased when he died. I didn’t particularly want to go back into that parlor again, no matter who was living in it now, but my human father is stubborn and insists on propriety, on showing off his foreign-based children, his prides who rarely come home. We went next door.
The new neighbor was a redhead, with skin like a road in the village. He asked what brought me home; I told him it was research for a book I was writing—half a lie, cobbled together with truth. He kept asking for details and I kept stalling because I didn’t want to talk to him about my deitymother. He was a complete stranger; why would I tell him about Ala? I kept her in my chest, scales pressing against my inside flesh, filling me up. He kept asking and I could see my human father getting impatient with my reticence, so I told the red neighbor that I was looking for a shrine of Ala, but I didn’t know where to find one.
He laughed. “Ala is everywhere,” he said. “I can help you.” I heard that line quite a bit: Ala is everywhere. It’s so literal because she’s the earth, but also because she’s a deity that’s ubiquitous across Igboland, she’s not restricted to region like Idemmili is, so there isn’t just one central shrine to her. Ala’s shrines are, like her, everywhere. When the red neighbor made his offer, my human father bristled. I’m not sure if it was because we were talking about a deity, or if it was because another man was giving his child something he couldn’t. He can be proud like that. He started blustering about how it was unnecessary, but the red neighbor ignored him, which surprised me. I expected him to defer to my father because I was his child; if he didn’t want me traipsing into the village looking for a shrine, the protocol would be to comply with his wishes. Instead, the red neighbor got on his phone and called a man in Umuahia who could take me to the shrine. In that moment, I realized that the road was opening. I had fought coming to the house, fought telling him what I needed, but now that I’d surrendered, two days into my stay, here was the path slashing its way into existence right in front of me. I had prayed and my deitymother was answering.
The red neighbor’s connect in Umuahia said that it would be too much for him to come all the way to Aba to pick me up and take me to the shrine and back. By then, however, my human father had surrendered to the excursion. What else is there to do when faced with the will of a deity who is bringing her child home? You bend, you bow, even if you have no idea what your spine is doing.
The next day, a pastor friend of my father’s arrived to take me to Umuahia. Perhaps, to them both, it felt like protection for what I was doing. We got on the bus on Aba-Owerri Road and sat in front, next to the driver. The pastor began an impassioned prayer over the vehicle and our journey, and the passengers welcomed it with amens. I could feel the prayer, hot and fervent, pouring like itchy syrup over my skin; disgust beat at the back of my throat. Be quiet, I told myself, let him do his nonsense. The road can’t be closed, it’s already too late. I could feel Yshwa’s amusement and it irked me. “You know he’s talking to you,” I muttered in my head.
“I know he thinks he’s talking to me,” Yshwa replied. “They’re so loud, aren’t they?” I didn’t answer.
They are hypocrites; I know exactly the kind of bile that this pastor and even my human father would summon up if they knew even half of what I am. Maybe some people forget, but I don’t. Did I ever tell you about the first time I came home after I disclosed I was queer? I was dressing more masculine then, with my chest bound and my hair cut short. I refused to go to the town I was raised in because I didn’t know if my human father would let me leave. Everyone told me I was being irrational, but I remember the man who raised me; I remember his face as he beat my sister in the corridor of our home, her small body cringing and crying as he hit her over and over, holding on to one of her skinny arms so she couldn’t run away. When he came to see me in Lagos, he asked if the friend I was staying with knew I was gay. I told him she did and my human father looked at me as his voice curled. “How does she tolerate you?” he asked, disgust sliming over his tongue.
Fuck these Christians, is my point.
Once we made it to the village, we met the man who was our contact, and he took us to a large compound. The owner had died, he explained, and it was his wife left. They were worshippers, and shrines marked the large yard. A goat was tied and bleating in one corner. When the woman came out, I was shocked to see how small and bent she was, how meek her movements were. I had expected a different kind of authority—but what do I know about being a widowed practitioner in a place like home, with men being the way they are? She led us into her parlor and the two men who brought me there started explaining why we’d come. “We’re not here for any fetish thing,” they kept saying, and I had to bite back a smile. She nodded, and then I realized everyone was waiting for me to start asking questions. The room snapped around me, cornering me. I needed to talk to her alone; I couldn’t say anything in front of these men.
“Can you show me some of the shrines?” I asked, calculating as quickly as I could. I knew the men would be too scared to come with us, and I was right. They flinched as she agreed, and I followed her out into the compound. She explained to me that there would be one shrine to Ala close to the house, and a main one in the forest. We stood by the home shrine and I explained to her why I had come. I told her what my name was, what had pulled me, how Ala spoke to me. She nodded and listened, impassive, as I spoke, and I started to wonder how much of her expression was a mask, which skins she was wearing around strangers. I asked if we could go see the main shrine and she said yes. As we headed out of the compound, she waved to a man in another house. “Bia,” she called out. “Anyị na-aga ịhụ Ala!” He got up and jogged over to us and I hid a smile. The way she said it was so casual. Come. We’re going to see Ala. She made it sound like we were dropping by a neighbor’s house.
I still remember that walk into the forest. Ala’s practitioner was wearing a synthetic red wig; the ground beneath our feet was red, too. Green vegetation rose around us past our shoulders and the sky was a shocking blue. I took a picture of it in my mind; I wanted to remember precisely this moment, if nothing else. What does your village look like? I saw my deitymother in mine, by a gorge in the earth, and I told the woman which village I was from, where I was born. We spoke for a little while as other villagers walked through the forest and exchanged greetings as they passed us.
When it was time to head back to the compound, I turned around and behind me, I heard her say softly to the man, “Nke a dị ike.”
This one is powerful.
Before we stepped back into her house, I made quiet arrangements for an offering to Ala, and took the woman’s phone number. The pastor and contact were waiting for us in the parlor, and they insisted on praying over her, calling on Jesus more times than I thought was polite, but she sat with her eyes closed and said amen with a fervor that even I couldn’t imitate.
Back at my human father’s clinic, the pastor exulted over how the day had gone. “God opened the way for us,” he said. “We encountered no problems! I am sure that our purpose was to speak about Jesus to that woman.” I remember marveling at his version of the story. These four men—my father, the red neighbor, the pastor, the contact—they had all been moved by my deitymother, pawns in a mission they were completely unaware of, thinking they were serving their God when really they were carrying out Ala’s will. The contact had kicked up a fuss when it was time to pay him, emphasizing over and over again that he wouldn’t usually do anything like this, he was a Christian, he didn’t like these fetish things.
I thought, What else could my mother do for me if I asked? Who else could she move, so smoothly that they would have no idea they were even being used?
That’s how I went home. It would have been rude for me to doubt who or what I was after that, but I didn’t share this story publicly for a long time. I didn’t need to tell it to validate who I was to the humans; those who saw me for what I am didn’t need this to believe me, and those who didn’t believe me wouldn’t believe me even if Ala manifested out of thin air and wrapped her scales around me in front of their own eyes. My point is: This is between us and the gods, not between us and the humans. The gods are always clear with us, they are the ones we need to listen to. Recently, I’ve been thinking about these earthly homes less as homes and more as places of origin for our embodied forms.
After our dinner in LA, when we were leaving the restaurant, Ann and I walked behind you on our way out. “She walks like a god,” Ann said to me, and it made me smile because you really fucking do. It’s magnificent, how you carve through the air. I hope you find all the homes you’re looking for.