The unmaking of a human body; the making of God
There is something human bodies do. These vessels like to act like they are nothing more than vessels, like they run the show, like the pain from a flesh wound is all that matters. But then, a child is in the car as it flips over, a mother’s spirit forces her vessel to extend, to become a mountain shielding the child. Both are pulled from the car wreck; the child is safe. Now, the mother can tend to her vessel’s bruises. In that moment, the mother mindlessly lets her vessel act like the vessel that it is, a tool to be used by the spirit to do great things.
Spirit completely runs the show in this vessel. Vagabonds! played a part in this.
Let us begin with the little note the author left me on the signed copy she graciously sent to me. Eloghosa Osunde told me to let the world move to me.
I consider Toni Morrison’s words holy canon. Some of them have come to take the place of scripture. Instead of prophesying that I would have more than I think or can imagine, I prophesy that I will stand at the edge, claim it as central and let the world move to me. So, imagine my joy when one of my favourite authors sent me a copy of their book with the words “let the world move instead”. This is what I need in this season: a knowing that it is okay to exist in the bubble that I am wrapping around myself; this bubble that is creating a world that is wholly mine; this bubble that will pull the world to see the beauty that I have created, a beauty they cannot possess like everything else.
People often feel that the only way to learn life lessons through text is by consuming tons of nonfiction. I used to know people who lived by the dead philosophies of men with views tainted by the violence that only a world obsessed with social status and hierarchy can produce. I used to be one of those people, reaching for empty words in books that claimed to show you the road map to power. I got tired of the emptiness. I returned to mostly reading fiction even as I morphed from a fiction writer to someone more in love with giving my existence form through writing nonfiction.
Fiction has shaped my existence in the past few years. Fiction has taken my human body and gradually unmade it by showing me that there are so many things that are possible.
A friend once said to me that he is in awe of how I seem to move through life like I possess more than 24 hours in a day. I told him that my mind compresses time. My mind lacks the ability to see time as a straight line. I start my week with an idea of all the things I need to accomplish in the week. Each thing has a particular deadline but because my mind compresses time I simply pick any of the tasks and work on them regardless of what day of the week it is due. Typically, I end up completing all my tasks by the middle of the week and I can take on the next week’s work. On rare occasions, I realise that because of my ability to compress time, I have taken on too much work. I eventually finish.
Fiction made this possible. When people paint worlds so vivid in the pages of their books, it’s easy to believe that these worlds are possible. When I read a book about a time bender, I begin to embody timebending.
It is no surprise, that Vagabonds!, a work of fiction, is now a core part of my becoming. It is the key that has unlocked the door to the possibilities that abound on the other side of the fear of becoming. As I read every page of Vagabonds! I saw holiness, a holiness the world tells you cannot be found in my kind because we have chosen to defy rules. It is this holiness that makes me understand that my becoming is a sacred thing that must happen.
In reality, Vagabonds! goes beyond fiction; it is affirming that worlds which you know to exist do in fact exist. For example, in Tatafo’s narration of the identity of Èkó, you come face to face with the fact that cities are entities; they are spirits, and money is the God of these cityspirits.
I grew up in a small city in Nigeria, known for a deity that visited you when you looked in the mirror while dancing, a deity that possessed your body and expressed its abilities and beauty through your mortal vessel. You were warned to be careful while dancing ekombi so Anansa would not claim you for herself. They were many stories of people she had claimed. As I read through Tatofo’s narrative, I wondered what parts of Anansa are the true tales of the spirit of Calabar. Beyond this, I wondered all the things money had accomplished in Calabar. There are stories of drugs, strippers, and illegality perpetuated by people who have the coin to be above whatever spirits Calabar embodies.
Èkó is a mirror for other places we have called home, with spirits that are both dark and light, spirits that tell you that every adventure you choose to embark on is possible as long as you have the coin and access to do so, spirits that embody the saying “money for hand back for ground”. Èkó is also a portal to the knowledge that there are endless possibilities, multiple ways to exist in this world.
Vagabonds! tells me that it is possible to exist in this world with a spirit that is too large for the cages of flesh, of what the world identifies as love, of a brick and mortar home, of biological family members who cannot really see you, of how society thinks plus size feminine presenting bodies should look like, of the idea that you owe the world androgyny when you step out of the binary.
My life has been a journey of existing spirit first, with a spirit that has hated the confines of flesh from conception. Ask my mother about the circumstances of my birth. It’s why she did the right thing; hand me back to God through my name, Chinwendu – God owns life. An affirmation for the days when the world tries to take my life by questioning why I exist.
Eloghosa’s Vagabonds! reintroduced me to the knowledge that I am god; not just because of the characters in the stories but because she wrote these stories. With every page I read I realised not only the possibility of the existence of new worlds in old spaces like Nigeria, but also the possibility of me creating my own world, the possibility of taking the spaces that merely allow my existence and bending them into worlds where I am deity and I hold the ultimate power.
Eloghosa Osunde is like my fairygodgirl, placing Vagabonds! in my hands in time to awaken me to the creative force that I am.
Do you know what happens when you begin to create, when you stop acting like creation is a skill you borrow to move through life? Do you know what happens when you understand that creation is who you are, when you realise that you are a unique expression of God and that makes creation your identity? You die to this mundane world and become alive to God. You become like God. You become god.
