Terms.
Sometimes, it feels like I know her from somewhere. Maybe, she was one of those kids I played with in the barracks.

Sorry, not Terms. I meant Tems.
Tems. The female musician😂

Nothing like barracks screams from her, so I will pocket this dejavu and tell you why I think my quiet self who is only loud on social media feels this kind of connection with her.

I picked a shift outside where I work. It’s the first time I have stepped out of my comfort zone, outside the group of oyibos I do “ain’t” and “gonna” with, sounding like an olofufu and trying hard to pronounce sachet as “sashay”, water as “wo-a”.

My Nigerianess is an olodo, I learn to pronounce one word today and tomorrow I am rolling my tongue in high pitched tenor to the echoing voice of an oyibo saying “say that again please!”. I say it again and again until I begin to wonder the difference between “scan” and “scan”, maybe my voice doesn’t wrap the word properly or my mama didn’t do a tongue tie check?

So, I say it again and again until we understand ourselves and I hear the relieved line: “oh! Was that what you meant? Sorry my ears are bad too!”.
I know it’s my Ugep accent dipped into a pepper Igbo voice. Try as I try, my accent may never change.

Tems is on my mind as I humm to a line from her “free mind”.
𝘐 𝘸𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘶𝘱 𝘵𝘰 𝘧𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘺 𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴

In a split second I reject it. My spirit man did. If it were in Nigeria, I would have spat through the window of the bus driving me to the new ward. I would have done a proper tufiakwa, circling my hand round my head and flinging the thought of fighting for my earnings into the air.

I would then have my mouth mutter “I am rich, super-duper rich in Jesus name. I don’t fight for my earnings. my earnings fight for me. Na my earnings Dey rush me”.
But I am in Youkay, I just stopped humming and began to create mental images of smiling oyibos everywhere on the ward. They say it is visualisation.

A few minutes to 7pm, I am standing in front of the ward, wondering if to tap my card on the door and enter or kukuma cancel the shift because money is not everything😂

But stroding towards me was an Ayra Star fan, girl was singing “I’m feeling vibes on vibes”. I thought she was Nigerian until she looked me in the eyes with a bright smile: “ Charley, you came for the shift? You are Ghanaian?”
I said a “No” with happiness.
“I am Nigerian”
“Let’s go vibe, Charley. Aseme kpocgdgghhhff”
She spoke a few words in her language and pulled me in a side hug as my face brushed against her dark shinny skin.

We vibed on vibed.

Great shift, busy though!
This charley never told me her name until we hugged again at the end of the shift and promised to book another shift same day on the same ward. It may never work though.

Tems and Ayra star should be friends because I and my Charley vibed on vibed as we fought for our earnings😂

Your tongue tastes like it was dipped several times into another woman’s loins, thrust against the walls of her insides, and moistened by the waters of an experience you created.

You bring that stale organ into my mouth, and your nervous breath pours hot air on my face. You don’t smile today; you keep a straight face with closed eyes and pretend to savour my lips.

When you held me by the waist in front of the church, did you think about a day like today? A day your tongue would wander into the nakedness of a stranger’s mouth? My mama was almost in our faces that day we chose to be married. She sat in the front pew with lips smeared in red stain. She bought the lipstick the afternoon you asked me to plunge my mouth around the bulge in your groin. She would later tell Mma Nnoso that I brought her the lipstick from Calabar, bought directly from the men in Tinapa who ship items from obodo oyibo.

Our first kiss wasn’t really our first kiss, but the church roared in excitement when Father Nduka announced that we join our lips in holy matrimony. My mama raised her saka-saka tambourine, waved it in the air, and triggered a noise that spurred the choir to release a song for our “first kiss.” Your hand on my waist, my lips buried in yours, our eyes shut, and for a moment it felt like we were alone, kissing in church. Your lips were like grapes, succulent with a refreshing fluid of sweet flavor. I drank draughts of your saliva and chewed on your tender lips until I heard my mama in my head scream a loud “Tufiakwa!”

Who is the other woman? Are her lips better?

I am too young to nurse the pain of betrayal, a tag that follows Ozubulu. I heard he was your kinsman; I heard his wife was his good luck charm. They said she hid her juju beneath her tongue and transferred it to him in a kiss when battles called. But what did your kinsman do? Just like you, he muddled his mouth between a woman’s thighs, carried his useless mouth without scrubbing off the spills, and chanted war songs after he conquered our enemy village. The village drunk said he kissed his wife that night with the same lips and was reduced to Ozua—the one who sings of his past glory.

Today, you bring me that stale tongue? I am not Ozubulu’s wife; I am Agatha. I sing church hymns in the choir and eat the holy communion with my tongue. I stay awake to pray for your business, and you bring back a mouth that has feasted on other women? Oga di.

When December of 2023 casually strolled by, I and my lover had plans to paint it “detty”. We would storm Nigeria unannounced, get our parents checked into hotel rooms with king sized beds, the ones with chandeliers sitting pretty on the ceiling and shinning a brilliance of white rays on white painted walls.

The idea was exciting especially because visiting Nigeria would be an opportunity to see my lover don his doctorate gown for his convocation, I had planned to replicate an instagram video I watched a few months back. I would stand by an elevator and wait patiently for my lover to emerge while I chant “the emperor, the conqueror, the lion is here! Nzugbu! Nzugbu!! Enyiba Enyi!”. Swinging my frame from side to side and stamping one foot at a time just like I saw the lady in that video do. He would come walking towards me with smiles, decorated in a pair of suit we ordered from London and his long gown, a testament of true knowledge.

We had it all figured. The previous month, my man had bought me a dress for the event along with a pair of shoes with heels so high, I rang my mama to show her the pair and we laughed together calling them “akpola koc shoe“.

Everything came crashing when my phone rang in the early hours of the second of December. It was a call that announced death. The morning cold slammed the news hard on my chest. For a second, I thought it was a bad dream but the caller on the other end kept echoing numerous “hellos “ when my silenced seamed like a network failure.

My lover chuckled, he looked me in the eye this time and laughed. Disbelief and uncertainty in his eyes, he laughed again. Then he took the phone from my hands, put the loudspeaker off and plastered the phone against his left ear.
“Jeka “ he shouted!
The news bearer said the same words to his ears and that was when this man walked straight to the shoe rack, grabbed the pair of shoes I had gifted him from timber land and began to pace the length of the house.
He wasn’t crying and I wasn’t crying either. I couldn’t cry , I just could not process the information. I didn’t even know what to believe. I just sat there, right on the spot where I had received the call, while my man paced the house in silence, with shoes on, walking from the kitchen to the living room and back to the room and then to the toilet and the cycle continued for three hours until I heard him scream into a throw pillow in the living room then a burst of tears and wailing and more tears.

How did I console a man wounded by the sadness of the death of a loved one? I don’t know what words I said.

How did I cope myself? As my mind kept playing the track of our last conversation in my head.
I remember every word of his voice vividly. I still hear them.
December got dirty before it arrived, we never painted it detty.

I am at the age my mother was when I first noticed that she preferred to wake up with soft music playing quietly in the house at dawn, always around 5 AM.

It used to be a slow Igbo song by a woman who danced in her music video, her head wrapped with a large Gele. You might think she was the bride at a traditional wedding. She would step gently to the left and then to the right, her smile widening as if her crush had just waved at her.

The music was gospel, and when translated loosely, the Igbo words meant, “You are my God, the eyes I see with here on earth, the voice that counsels me at every crossroad.” Somehow, the music always blended with my sleep. I would even hear my mother hum along as she began her day, calling my name to do the dishes or asking the rhetorical question, “No school today?”

I am that age now, and all I want is to lie in bed with soft tunes waking me from sleep, not a harsh alarm jerking me awake. I want my mind feasting on something surreal, fresh, and peaceful at dawn. I want that calmness I saw my mother enjoy. It was a sweet calmness. The one thing that got close to that sweetness was when I learned that Chibuike, the tall, fine boy from the next street, told someone who knew someone who knew me that he liked me. The teenage me slept beside my mother that night with a smile plastered on my face, a calmness that felt just like my mother’s.

You will fall in love with an Igbo Man.

Izuchukwu.

His pink lips drowns the brightness of his black skin. Lips full, caressed by a moustache he tickles when he stares at you. On those times of the day he speaks English, his mouth spills out words deeply submerged into a jar of our Igbo language.

He is gap toothed too, it gives his home trained tongue the opportunity to roll out “nne” with a glowing ease of our rich Igbo accent.

Chai! Igbo’amaka !

He will call you “nwa”.
Anticipate. It would be during those nights when his breaths are heavy and warm, when his arms capture you beneath his soothing thrusts, when sweat drills through his forehead as he labours to please you inside. Then his whispers will sock your lobes, in your clouds you will understand what it means to call you “nwa” in such pleasure.

Izu will hold you like a trophy, his pride. You will hear him tell his friends “Lekwanu babym, asa nwa”.

Follow his pace, run with his speed. He will propose marriage to you in a local joint that holds pot bellied men, a place where palm wine and isiewu is bae, on that night, the background sound of Osadebe’s tunes will rock your love for him to its highest frequency. You will say yes, then you will be qualified to earn the pet name “obim ” or “mummy’m”.

Least I forget, on the day you will birth his child, your child too. Izu will grace the hospital with his Ndi’ichie. He will pace the lengths of the corridor, praying to his chi and scanning his mind for the best gift to welcome you into motherhood.

You are Nwunye Odogwu, life will come soft for you because Izu will fight hardship off your. Motherhood won’t be just you, it will be his mother, your mother, his sisters, your sisters, aunties and distant relatives and friends.
Then, on the day you christen your child he will look you in the eye, wrap his arms around your waist and say “mummy’m Dalu o!”.

You will fall in love with an Igbo man.
Izuchukwu.

“…I don’t want to be having any kind voice, I want a louding voice.”- Adunni.

14 year-old Adunni shares her story with her voice, and in her own kind of English, in a way that keeps your cheeks laughing and eyes watering.

From being born in a poor home where she plasters unconditional love on her younger brother Kayus, to getting married off to a man with two wives.
Her dream of going to school and becoming a teacher is threatened and even with the glooming defeat of marrying Morufu, a rich taxi driver who holds her down with his “fire cracker” to lick the sweetness of her virginity again and again until she no longer feels pain but emptiness. She vows to win and tell her story.

“Not his-story, My own will be called her-story. Adunni’s story.”

She has dreams of having a loud voice through education. She survives Morufu with the help of his second wife Khadija who is also a victim of circumstance. Life tumbles for Adunni when her greatest help Khadija dies in her arms by the river bank in a strange village. Who would believe she didn’t kill her co-wife? Her story doesn’t add, the mob might come for her head, so she escapes to Lagos with the help of Iya and her brother agent Kola who traded her into modern slavery with no pay and very little food.

Adunni arrives Lagos to face more struggles. An abusive boss, big madam who hits her at the slightest provocation. Big daddy who is fascinated by everything in skirt and steals every opportunity to press himself into her. And a curiosity to unravel the missing Rebecca, a former housemaid in the house.

Adunni is every girl fighting to be heard and seen, pressing hard against the challenges and thriving against Rape, Sexual Assault, Child Marriage, Child Labour, Violence, Abuse.

The female characters in this novel hold some sort of shaky voices which was amplified by the author’s pen.
From Rebecca, who seem to be naive and watered by the lies of big daddy, to Ms Tia who knows what she wants but is slumped by the reality her husband kept away from her. The heart wrecking life of Khadija who tried to live but died finding a male child to “cement” her stay in her husband’s house or the rich and glamorous big madam who has got wealth but remains married to a jobless cheat who hits her and fills her with plenty rage and sorrow because she fears what society will say. These women at different points in life either try to give voice to their lives or deliberately give it up.
In all, you choose how loud you want your voice to be heard just like Adunni.