Read first 3 pages of Tope Folarin’s "Genesis"

14:13 - 20 July 2016

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Tope Folarin

Folarin's story ‘Genesis’ about a boy coming to terms with his mother’s abuse is a must read.

Tope Folarin, the Nigerian author, who won the Caine prize for African writing in 2013 was one of five writers shortlisted for this year’s Caine Prize.

Although South African writer Lidudumalingani took home the prize for his beautiful story 'Memories we Lost’, Folarin's story ‘Genesis’ about a boy coming to terms with his mother’s abuse is a must read.

Read the first 3 pages below:

She told me I could serve her in heaven. She accompanied me to school each day. School was about a mile away, and a few hundred feet into my trek, just as my family’s apartment building drifted out of view behind me, she would appear at my side.

I don’t remember how she looked. Memory often summons a generic figure in her place: an elderly white woman with frizzled gray hair, slightly bent over, a smile featuring an assortment of gaps and silver linings. I do remember her touch however—it felt cool and papery, disarmingly comfortable on the hottest days of fall. She would often pat my head as we walked together, and a penetrating silence would cancel the morning sounds around us.

I felt comfortable, protected somehow, in her presence. She never walked all the way to school with me, but her parting words were always the same:

“Remember, if you are a good boy here on earth, you can serve me in heaven.” I was five years old. Her words sounded magical to me. Vast and alluring. I didn’t know her, I barely knew her name, but the offer she held out to me each morning seemed far too generous to dismiss lightly. In class I would think about what servitude in heaven would be like.

I imagined myself carrying buckets of water for her on streets of gold, rubbing her feet as angels sang praises in the background. I imagined that I’d have my own heavenly shack. I’d have time to do my own personal heavenly things as well.

How else would I get to heaven?

One day I told my father about her offer. We were talking about heaven, a favorite subject of his, and I mentioned that I already had a place there. “I’ve already found someone to serve,” I said. “What do you mean?”

Dad smiled warmly at me. I felt his love. I repeated myself: “Daddy, I’m going to heaven.”

“And how are you going to get there?” I told him about the old lady, my heavenly shack, the streets of gold. My father stared at me a moment, grief and sadness surging briefly to the surface of his face. And then anger. He leaned forward, stared into my eyes.

“Listen to me now. The only person you will serve in heaven is God. You will serve no one else.”

My father has told me many times that he settled in Utah because he didn’t want to be where anyone else was. His cousins and siblings had left Nigeria for Athens, London, Rome, New York City, and Houston. My father wanted to be an American, but he also craved isolation, so he decided he would travel to the one place in America that he knew nothing about.

He left Nigeria in 1979, after a school in Utah, Davis State University, offered him a place in its mechanical engineering program. His bride, my mother, accompanied him. They arrived in a country that bore little resemblance to the country they expected.

Dad, a devout fan of television shows like Gunsmoke and Bonanza, was disappointed when he discovered that cowboy hats were no longer in style, and he sadly stowed his first American purchase—a brown ten-gallon hat—in his suitcase, and under his bed. Mom arrived in America expecting peace and love—she had fallen for the music of The Beatles and Bob Dylan as a high school student in Lagos while listening to the records that her businessman father brought back from his trips abroad.

Though she had imagined a country where love conquered all, where black people and white people had finally managed to surmount their differences, Mom and Dad arrived, instead, in a place where there were no other black people for miles around, a place dominated by a religion they’d never heard of before.

But this was America. And they were in love. They moved into a small apartment in Ogden, Utah, and began a family. I came first, in 1981, and my brother followed in 1983.

Dad attended his classes during the day while Mom explored the city, and at night my parents held each other close and spoke their dreams into existence. They would have more children. My father would start a business. They would become wealthy. They would send their children to the best schools.

They would have many grandchildren. They would build their own version of paradise on a little slip of desert in a country that itself was a dream, a place that seemed impossible until they stepped off the plane, shielding the sun from their eyes, and saw for themselves the expanse of land that my father had idly pointed to on a fading map many years before.

As I look back now, especially with the knowledge of what will come after, the rest of my life set in unflattering relief, I realize that my first five years were the most ordinary of my childhood. We moved around frequently, but I can only remember joy.

One of my favorite memories from this era: for some reason I’m chasing my brother around our tiny apartment with a red crayon. When I catch him I pin him against the wall and color each of his teeth red as he screams. My mother shrieks when she sees him; she thinks he’s bleeding because of the red wax that’s shining from his teeth.

She laughs when I tell her that the blood isn’t real, and then we all laugh and I allow my brother to color my teeth as well. Then we color Mom’s teeth—she prefers lime green. Life flowed easily until we moved to Bountiful. We settled there because my father had found a job at an auto repair shop in neighboring Layton, and Bountiful was one of the few places close by with any affordable housing. My father couldn’t find a job as a mechanical engineer anywhere in northern Utah, but he knew a bit about cars, and he figured he would work as a mechanic until something better came along.

My mother’s illness began to reveal itself to us shortly after we moved into our two bedroom apartment, a tiny place near the center of town with pale yellow walls and bristly carpet. Mom’s voice, once quiet and reassuring, grew loud and fearsome. Her hugs, once warm and comforting, became cold and rigid. And then Mom became violent—she would throw spoons and forks at my father whenever she was upset. She quickly worked her way up to the knives.

One morning my brother and I scrambled to our parents room because we heard Dad crying. I didn’t think such a thing was possible. We saw Mom standing over Dad, her eyes boiling with rage. Dad was almost naked. His clothes, now nothing more than torn rags, were arrayed haphazardly around the room. He was bleeding from a wound on his thigh, and his face was wreathed in a constellation of sweat and tears. My brother and I reached over to him but Mom cursed at us:

GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!

I was terrified. I looked at Dad. His bottom lip was shaking. His teeth were red. “Yes, go!” he said. “What are you waiting for? Go now!” We obliged. We hugged each other in the corner of our room. Moments later, Dad began to scream.

Over the course of the next few days my brother and I witnessed this scene many times, my father cowering on the floor, my mother standing imperiously over him. He took her punishment whenever she descended into one of her moods, and afterwards he would tell us that Mom wasn’t feeling like herself, but that everything would soon be OK. We believed him because we didn’t realize how sick she was.

Before long we realized the truth. After Dad left for work each morning my mother would lock herself in their room. She rarely interacted with us, but occasionally she would open the door and ask us to come inside. She would ask us to stand in the corner of the room, near the dresser. She would point to various places in the room: her closet, Dad’s desk, the empty space near her full-length mirror.

She would ask us if we saw it. “See what Mommy?”

“Don’t you see that? What is wrong with you?” My brother and I would look at each other. Was this a game?

“Mommy, I don’t see anything. Can we go now?”

“No! Not until you tell me what it is doing there. Tell me why it won’t leave!”

Sometimes my brother and I lied. We made up stories about what we saw and my mother would nod sagely. Sometimes she disagreed with us and told us to look again. We were always confused. We felt anxious. This could have been fun, but the wild look in my mother’s eyes was unnerving.

She was seeing something we would never see, some figment of her afflicted mind had gained substance, was haunting her. Sometimes she told us that we had to leave before they came to get us. “Something about this place isn’t right,” she’d say. “Not right at all.”