Since I walked barefoot through Ibadan streets whose names I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask of, partly because I had imbibed too much gin and partly because I was overwhelmed with wonder and reverence and a new awakening of a shared humanity I already honour.
Since that day I dedicated strictly to honouring the Yoruba divinity Yemoja, mother of fishes and all that life has birthed since the tail-flipping magicians perfected life under the waves to their best ability.
Since I passed a crumpled Naira note across to someone I trusted will pass it beyond there to join the offerings of dozens of others, my body brushing against one devoted body after another – queer and non-queer alike, Yemaya doesn’t care who you sleep with – as I stretched my tired hand. Since that beautiful memorable day that shot my body through with power to keep living, I have healed many things by simply seeing the correlation I remember seeing in that procession to the origins of myself, of my mother.
Here is what you need to know about that origin for this piece to make sense to you.
I am a Hausa/Fulani man who was raised in the ways of Islam. By rights I should have no business being in awe of a deity worshipped through effigies and Her manifestation in nature. That is considered shirkh - the worst sin a Muslim can commit. But I was also raised by a woman who instilled wonder in me through stories that transported me wholly every night from our one time spacious house in the outskirts of Kano to places in States and Countries that only came alive in her stories.
Daura, for instance, and its legend of the origin of Hausa people – Hausa Bakwai and Banza Bakwai.
In that story, a traveler with the name Bayajidda is said to have met a settlement where people couldn’t fetch water from the local well after dark because a massive snake dwells there and swallows whole anyone who doesn’t honour the curfew.
My mother never failed to mention how odd it was that this man who met these locals somehow founded their history (there is another oddity I will find for myself that is embedded in this man’s very name - his very name is Hausa for he didn't understand the language before and yet for some odd reason he founded Hausaland - how?) But she left the challenge open because that too was a chance to teach humility.
“This is what I know about this story,” she will say, “this is why I think it is odd. But in the end it is the place of historians to determine the facts. Make of it what you will.” And I did.
Her stories introduced me to everything that filled my child’s mind with wonder.
Stories of Gizo da Qoqi, perennial characters that feature in moralistic stories told by Hausa people to their little children to teach them right and wrong in the best way mankind know to do so, through tales that stir wonder about what the world contains beyond us humans.
Gizo is short for – Gizo Gizo, which is Hausa for Spider. Qoqi is short for – Qoqi qoqi, Hausa for Praying Mantis.
These two main characters feature as a married couple, warring exes, competitors in adventures, or collaborators in chaos, and they somehow always got each other. Every mother’s son and daughter born in Hausaland has heard at least one of the endless tales of adventure of this unlikely pair.
She introduced me to the spirits that filled the hearts of ancestors long dead with hope and sometimes dread. Spirits old and new in a land that was fast changing around us, around her.
Islam had brought new fears juxtaposed on things that didn’t use to scare. Things like the family guardian spirit of many a Fulani family called Inna, a mother spirit figure that watches over everyone in the family that allows her in.
“That is all in the past of course,” my mother once said after a terror-inducing story about Inna, but who can stop a child’s wandering mind once it takes off? My Islamic upbringing made my child self shiver while walking through dark alleys at night fearing Inna, who I believed then was always just close by, waiting for me to call on her so she will reveal herself to me since I am half Fulani. Now I think of it, what was to fear from a guardian spirit? A being that was, and remains, for the sole purpose of holding her own. Islam sowed that terror in its own ill-guidedness.
I learned about old Gods too in the histories she recounted of our hometown.
Of Tsumburbura – the mother Goddess of Kano’s hills and valleys, and her devoted priest Barbushe – the last standing priest of a spirituality that now exists only in invisible traces and histories written by those who won the fight against the old Gods.
It is with all this in my chest that I would listen with reverence years later and miles away from home, in Ibadan, as a beloved friend – Ayodele Olofintuade, tells me about Yemoja.
Here is a spirituality I could see that connects all our base fears to the grounds we are walking on, that our forebears have walked on for hundreds of years. I could see in the motherliness of Yemoja that of Tsumburbura, even though the former dwells in the water and the latter in the hills that are the greatest wonder my Hausa ancestors could behold in nature.
In a continuance of thought, logically by all count, this led me to ponder all I knew about God being someone raised a Muslim, in Kano.
Here is a spirituality that invites me to look at the marvels of nature and when I think about how they come about the forces that come to mind take form of things that make sense to me, to my origins and that of my mother.
Earth’s protrusions that have awed and waylaid 1000s of my ancestors are phenomena brought to bear by Tsumburbura, who possesses the body of a black man to manifest here.
The raging ocean in faraway Lagos is Yemoja manifest, whose depictions are anything from a gorgeous black skinned mermaid or merman to a motherly figure regaled in Gele (she inspired the art below created by the amazing Raldie Young, featuring myself as a conduit.)
Mother Goddess Tsumburbura by Raldie Young.
This is a spirituality that comforts and grounds you in a way the stories of adventures by ancient Arab men in some distant strangely named country you try hard to picture as a child trying to make sense of his surroundings and absorb his origins ever could. Mekkah is a distant dream for the Hausa person, Kano is reality solid and answering back.
Today I am a cultural Muslim who has leaned on the wisdom received at the feet of the grandmotherly Yoruba Goddess, Yemoja, to begin the process of healing my maternal line. Starting with my ailing relationship with my dear mother who knows only one truth, as do I, that she loves me and I her.
She has heard stories of my homosexuality and called frantic about it. The truth is, I am pansexual cross-binary being. I call myselves non-binary for modesty's sake.
I have sat across from her and told her about the men I have loved and the future I see that seems unattainable – of a man or womxn and a puppy and walks down tree lined streets hand in my husband’s, wife’s or harem of partners’.
She has grappled with that since and prayed quietly and openly for Allah’s mercy, while grounded in the one truth – I love you, my child, and you I, your mother.
I hope to cede this healing to every child of a mother because it flows from one source, that umbilical connection that nourishes the zygote form of each of us into the fussy babies that kicked and pissed all over the place.
Even at abandonment that link remains in a seeking heart. I have looked out from deserted terraces and closed windows in far away Lagos, I have lied frustrate drenched in tears in locked homes in Eko's dark belly, seeking that connection that was at the time in far away Kano. I learnt later that she had experienced similar yearnings while I was gone.
Today I can look at the criminalization of my kind (quer Nigerians) – in the SSMPA and laws like that – with new eyes.
Somebody’s child, perhaps even with the blessing of their mother, decided that my existence in this queer body that the Gods bestowed me calls for criminalisation. My declaration and solemnization of love is an offence deserving of a criminal sentence of 14 years in prison or a death sentence - the gravity of which shocks all the Gods (because how dare you take a life you did not and can never give. Kill any erring man only if you can breathe life into the carcass of your mother. Otherwise, who born you? HOW DARE YOU?!)
Somebody’s children determined that other people’s children are wrong, damning any unconditional love a parent could have for their child, or even in the absence of that, damning their right to live with dignity.
Someone who themselves seek companionship in womxn or men (in the open or in the secrecy night affords the wicked) decided any companionship that doesn’t look like the one they maybe make a pretence of keeping in daylight - of a man and a woman - while they seek their true comfort in their true desires shielded by money or darkness - is wrong and its existence must be penalized.
For a God, for some God, or the claim of a culture.
And what is culture anyway? Is it not the combination of a willing people and their desires manifest in the calm a united people can hope to get in this life? When queer persons are threatened with jail and death, children of desperate mothers who know only that they love their children - whether they be Hausa, Gbayi, Yoruba or Itsekiri - doesn't that wreck culture? Doesn't it violate reality? And for whose gain? A God? Some God? Who are the adherents of such a deity and why do they think they are in the right? Is threatening the life and love of any diety's creation not the gravest sins of any religion? Where is your understanding?
But in any case Gods, like human beings, are varied and many and one cannot trump another in a country that foreswears its respect for all believers.
And culture is collective consciousness, and the queer as well as straight all count in the grand scheme of things. And one woman’s child cannot steal the right of another’s to live easy and know peace in the here and now.
I have healed many things with the wisdom I suckled at the teats of the mothers, I have been shielded on the mothers’ backs – held firm by their wrappers tied in four places.
Tsumburbura, Yemoja, my mothers (the women who fed me at their teats – biological and otherwise) and all mothers who have known the pain of a baby cracking its way through their once whole birth canal and those who haven't. I want that for EVERYONE.
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