We could solve so many problems if we just went mad. I mean all the way mad, so lost that it never occurs to us to even think about how other people see us, what ripples we’re casting in our families, what hostility we will provoke by showing our true faces. When we push forward with power, other things push back. I wonder if madness would function as a shield.
It would certainly be easier if we didn’t know who we are, what we are—if we were the kind of entities who let other people describe and define us, if we lived inside the lines spooling out of their mouths. People want to be the ones drawing the lines, building the boxes, making the names. Maybe because stories live inside all those structures, and if you’re the one controlling the stories, then you’re the one in power. So they get really angry when you name yourself, especially if you’re the type of thing they were expecting to name. You know how it works: they form a circle around you, point, and call you a name you’re supposed to flinch from, a name you’re supposed to deny and be afraid of. That way, their naming becomes a weapon and what you are becomes a shame, a sentence, a tire around your neck rich with fire. Witch. Demon. Ọgbanje. When you name yourself, however, you take the power from the wet, foaming flesh of their mouths and mold it in your hand as if it’s nothing, swallow waiting to slide down your throat, slickened with the soup of your self-knowing.
I thought about this a lot with Freshwater—what it meant, first of all, to publicly name myself ọgbanje. Being one used to be a secret, something to hide from the humans, because once they found out they always tried to destroy the ịyị-ụwa and lock the ọgbanje into flesh. But culture is not static, and we are decades away from that world, so I can afford to be bold and open. What are they going to do? Which human is going to force me to a dịbịa? You can’t find my ịyị-ụwa, it’s disseminated in my flesh. Did the humans think that time would move forward for only them? Everything advances, mutates, we are in new worlds constantly.
I knew that other Nigerians would call me a liar, claim I was making it all up as a publicity stunt, something white people would find interesting. You know how our people are. To self-name as an entity breaks the rules, because then it means we’ve taken the naming and storytelling power, to wield it for ourselves. It’s arrogant on their part—how does it make sense that only humans would have the authority to identify and name nonhumans, that we’re not allowed to name ourselves? Some of it is because they see themselves as the center, with the unquestionable right to define what is other. The magician once said it was an effect of colonialism—this interest in taxonomy, a white man asking questions about our criteria for our entities, the way we ran with it like a diagnostic guide, like a ruler we could hold up against each other. I wonder how this plays into the losing game of authenticity. I’m curious what you think about it.
At the end of the day, we know we will be challenged. We prepare for it. There can be nothing they ask us that we haven’t already asked ourselves. There can be no weak spot, no question that presses on a secret insecurity and buckles our knees. This is what fighting looks like, I think. This is how I get ready for the level of visibility I’ve chosen to hunt down so the work I make spreads like a contagious gospel. There can be no weapon they use against me that I haven’t tried against myself first. It’s a form of excavation, or interrogation at the very least. I knew people would ask why I was calling myself an ọgbanje, that they’d ask for proof, ask to be convinced. Which is really just them asking me to acknowledge power over me, that in order for my naming to be valid, they’d have to sign off on it. They don’t. They don’t even matter. None of this has ever been between us and them, it’s between us and God and we know what we are, what we were made to be. When other Nigerians challenge me about calling myself Ala’s child, I don’t argue with them. I can’t. That would be like saying their voices matter on this, and it’s not possible. It’s not a human issue; it’s not a human’s business.
You and I have talked about when you will uncover yourself to the humans to be the beast that you are—God in your mouth, an empire at your feet. You know you will be challenged. They will want to know on whose authority you speak, on whose authority you teach, who allowed you to do all this without an intermediary. You will have to remind yourself that it is on God’s authority, and they will challenge that, too, because they are used to mediators, intercessors, and we are here saying we have direct lines, that we need neither permission nor guidance from humans. It must be galling for them, to prop up these men in their churches, these priests and pastors, only to have us ignore them. We have to be sure. We are sure when it’s us, those who see each other, but it’s harder when the humans bring their doubts and dismissals, heavy spells of their own whispering that we’re crazy, we’re making it up. I wrote to Eloghosa about how much work it took to tear off the years of believing their stories about us instead of our own. It’s a constant practice, I think, to hold on to what we know is true even with human realities shrieking around us. It strengthens our centers, roots us deep in them, iroko trees planted by the waterside.
It is a different kind of power to be able to anoint yourself instead of kneeling for someone else to do it. We could spin out endlessly if we listened to their stories about how we aren’t what we are—what would it be like to never forget that it was God who marked us directly and set us apart? The oil drips from our fingers onto our own foreheads. The world between us and God is the only real one. Maybe this is what madness is.
I can live with that.