We drive into the compound, with its towering fences, just as high as everyone else’s. I am foolishly surprised that I do not recognize the gateman who drags the heavy metal gates open.
“Where is Mr Suleiman?” I ask Taiye.
“He left a while ago.” She shrugs. “I’m not really sure. This guy’s name is Hassan.”
The house stands three storeys tall. There is a wide balcony jutting out from the master bedroom on the second floor and two narrow ones on the third floor, like bulging square eyes and a straight line for a contemptuous mouth. The house rises above a bungalow used for storage and the security post. Swaying palm trees surround it, so many of them. And mango and pawpaw trees and plantain palms cluster behind it. It’s a large compound, a large house; I expected that being back as an adult, everything would seem smaller and less enchanting. The thrumming in my chest proves me wrong.
Our mother is waiting at the doorway, dwarfed by the comically oversized door frame that eats up most of the front wall of the first floor. Her hands are clasped in front of her. She’s beaming, rounder than I’ve ever seen her, round in her cheeks and her belly, and I think it is good because she is glowing. She is wearing an adire bubu with a wide neckline that slips off her shoulder.
We are in each other’s arms before I can decide how I feel. We are holding each other tightly, and I don’t realize it at first, but I am sobbing into the warmth of her perfumed neck.
“What’s going on with your hair?” she asks, as she pulls away from me.
I laugh and say, “Mami, this is Farouq.”
“Ehen, so this is the reason you haven’t come home since abi?” She clasps his face between her small palms, studying him after he plants kisses on both her cheeks.
“I hope the heat doesn’t kill you with this bush on your face,” she says to him, and to me, she teases, “He’s handsome sha, even though he is oyimbo.”
Farouq laughs and says, “It is a pleasure to finally meet you, ma.”
“Oya, you people, go and settle. Your sister and I will finish cooking.”
I am relieved that she seems lucid, and I choose not to be alarmed by the desperate thing flickering in her eyes. It is so subtle, but I recognize it well.
TAIYE AND ME, our bedrooms are next to each other on the third floor. Mine is a large room with a twin bed covered in brightly coloured tie-dye linens tucked in the corner farthest from the door. The polished wood vanity with an ornately framed four-foot mirror sits across the room from the bed exactly how I left it. On it are my old things: tubes of sticky fruit-flavoured lip gloss, stacks of Vogue and Time, half-empty bottles of nail polish—their shimmering contents long dried—and a tattered French-English dictionary, my initials written on its spine in thick black marker. On the floor, against the wooden base of the vanity, are stacks and stacks of books: novels and poetry collections; a mixture of secondary school–assigned literature by Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Cyprian Ekwensi, Ama Ata Aidoo, Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Wole Soyinka; and books that sixteen-year-old me read voluntarily, like Harry Potter and Purple Hibiscus and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. They are covered in a uniformly thin layer of dust. I devoured these books; every single one of them drew me in with its words until I was so deep in each world that any ending seemed too abrupt, and I would just sit with the closed book on my lap, the characters like old friends to whom I had just said good night. I would have to wait a while for the lingering aroma of one story to fade from my mind before diving into another.
I don’t think my things have been touched at all since I left. The floors have been swept, the bed made, and the worn red rugs that used to cover the white tile floors replaced with these woven multicoloured square ones, but aside from that nothing has changed. The framed posters of Bob Marley and Fela Kuti still hang above the headboard, and they rattle against the wall when Farouq throws himself onto the bed and moans into the pillow.
“Finally, finally,” he says. Then he looks at me with heavy-lidded eyes and asks, “Sleep or food?”
I laugh because I know that he will fall asleep before he chooses, but I suppose that is a choice. I open the windows and the sliding glass door leading out to the narrow balcony, and by the time I turn around he is asleep, with his hands tucked under the pillow and his feet hanging off the side of the bed. When I slip off his shoes and remove his socks, he stirs and mumbles something about being ticklish.
WHEN HE WAS FOURTEEN, Farouq left his mother’s tired one-bedroom flat in Aulnay-sous-Bois. She sent him to live in the fifteenth arrondissement with his father, a man she had fallen in love with during her first summer in Paris, a man whose last name Farouq bore but whom he barely knew.
The story goes that his mother, only a few months off a cramped flight from Tangier, met his father at her uncle’s café near Parc de Belleville in the twentieth arrondissement. An anti-xenophobia rally had been organized in the dimly lit tea shop. He was slightly older, a thin baby-faced activist with reluctant patches of wiry reddish hair on his face. It was a poor excuse for facial hair, but she found it adorable. She looked at him for a long time and found him beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that later during the same week, when they were alone in the small flat he shared with two other men, she slipped off her emerald-green hijab, unpinned her thick henna-reddened curls, and let them tumble softly down her round shoulders, so that he could see that she was beautiful, too.
Because her family was devoutly Muslim, they asked her not to see him. Because she was strong-willed and in love—or merely intoxicated by the idea that someone she wanted also wanted her—she saw him anyway. After many secret evenings full of ripe fruit, music, and cheap wine, she became pregnant. I can only imagine the fear that must have gripped her gut when she found out, how difficult it must have been to come clean to her family. She was only nineteen years old. They never married, and apparently, Farouq’s father outgrew his activism and settled back into his life as an upper-middle-class white boy.
Farouq traces his interest in racialization and critical race studies to his fifteenth birthday—the year he moved in with his father, who ceaselessly tried to hammer whiteness into him. He couldn’t be Farouq and Étienne—the name his father had chosen for him. He had to be one or the other. Maghrebian or French—that is, white. His obsession is the force behind his doctoral research. Three months ago it took him back to Paris, where he spent weeks holed up in the special collections reading room of the Sorbonne Library, wielding his keen intellect in an attempt to sort out the angst that his family stirs up in him. He Skyped me at four a.m. once, drunkenly ranting about growing up Moroccan in Paris without ever having been to Morocco: the absurdity of the prejudice he endured, the fucked-up way that white supremacy slyly slips a chip on your shoulder, only to turn around and innocently question its position there. A few times, he moved into French and spoke too quickly for me to follow, pausing and smiling sweetly at my interjection of “English, please.” This, his obsession, brought him here with me, as part of an agreement we half-jokingly made between glasses of wine on his thirty-sixth birthday: he comes to Lagos with me now, and I’ll go to Tangier with him in a few weeks.
I watch Farouq’s chest rise and fall in tune with his audible breath, his snores in ragged inhales and silent exhales. Let me tell you a secret: sometimes I scheme, I keep myself scarce from Farouq, but only to stoke his longing. No other reason, I swear. My mother, in dramatically different ways, kept herself scarce from my father, and I have never seen any human being adore another as thoroughly as my father did my mother. I want that so bad, you don’t know.