I dragged myself to my mother in the
dark and leaned
my weighty head on her laps. My hot
eyes into her laps—the cleavage in
between them I
guess. She lowered her head to my neck.
She was
weeping too. I knew this when a hot
liquid ran through
my nape.
The night was lengthier than ever. The
last time I
checked the time, it was 2pm. Now it
should be 4pm, I
thought. But then I had to wait and wait
and wait. Sleep
couldn’t graze my eyes. Mother was not
also sleeping.
We couldn’t communicate since
everything needed for
communication was under bondage; eyes
dim, hands
tied; no way!
A poem began to form on my befuddled
brain. I would
rock the world with it in the nearest
future. I hated lie
more than anything in the world. Why
should we deaf,
dumb, lame and blind people keep
deceiving ourselves
by giving ourselves hope that we are able
when
actually we are not? We say that what
normal people
can do, special people can do better.
They tell us
stories of Nick Vujicic who was born
limbless in
Australia. They tell us the story of a
headless chicken
who survived for eighteen months after
its head had
been chopped off its neck; the story of
one Spencer
West who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro
without legs and
many others. I don’t believe any of those
craps. They
even showed us pictures of those people
to back up
their claims that we are able. That
chicken, I could
remember, was named Mike the Headless
Chicken.
My class teacher would not let us rest
while telling us
those stories to motivate us and keep us
away from
thinking of our predicaments. She would
say, without a
head, Mike the headless chicken could
run about for
eighteen months, how much more you
who have
heads?
I could remember challenging her that
day by asking,
“What is the essence of a piece of bread
without
butter? What is the use of a house
without furniture?
What is the use of a head without
functions?
“What do you mean by all these?” she
demonstrated in
annoyance.
“A head with useless lips, mouth, tongue
and ears,
what’s the use?” I replied her that day.
She was
speechless.
So where is that specialty right now? We
deaf and dumb
can’t communicate in the dark, yet we
have something
called mouth. Why at all am I even born
with a mouth
when it isn’t speaking, or should I shift
the blame on the
tongue? We can’t enjoy movies because
they were not
designed for we the deaf people. How
could we hear
their speech? No way!
If only I have an ear that could listen, my
mother was
ready, even now, to tell me to detail
everything that
had transpired between herself and her
husband. Why
should I even need her to tell me what
happened when
I would actually have heard them myself
during the
heat of the brawl?
We spent two months in the dark.
Actually, it wasn’t
two months but it seemed so because of
the torment
we were passing through. Maybe we had
a shorter day
and a longer night, who knows.
The day began to dawn gradually and the
blanket of
darkness left the face of the wall clock. I
checked the
time; it was 5:25 am. The door flung
open and three
souls trooped in, Toyosi, John and Bode.
They were
leering wickedly at us. We are dead!
Toyosi began to unleash the content of
her mouth. She
pounced on my mother and then came to
me to do the
same. She taught me a lesson I never
learnt. She
smashed my head on the bed wood. She
was pointing
at the smashed calabash, the scattered
bed, the opened
wardrobe and every other thing my
mother and I have
scattered during the course of our search
for Bode. My
common sense told me that she would
use them all a
evidence against us in the court of law.
By 7am we were still in bounds, only that
we could now
see each other. They had shut the door
once more but
our hands were still tied. My father tied
them purposely
to render us incommunicado. I leaned my
back against
the bedside and raised my legs up in the
air to
communicate with my mother. I managed
to ask a
question with my legs. She understood
me vividly and
she was shocked. Now how would she
give me a
reply? She couldn’t demonstrate anything
with her own
legs. It was a surprise to me when she
nodded to
signal to me that she wasn’t able to do
that. She
couldn’t control her toes to make any
sign, but I was
finding it so easy to do. I used my knees
as my elbow
whenever it was needed. I could easily
fold all four
toes and let the fattest one lie straight,
but my mother
couldn’t dare it.
To be continued
