Page 23 of Death of the Author

23 Interview Tolu

The first time Zelu smoked weed was my first time, too. It was during one of our family visits to my father’s village in Nigeria.

We’d spent a week in Lagos, then a week at the palace in west Yorubaland, and now we were in the southeast, Igboland. After

residing for days in a small palace, being in our parents’ house in the village was a relief. Especially for me, the oldest

son. So many expectations and duties. It was aggravating. I was about fourteen, and Zelu was nineteen. Everyone else was inside

for a meeting with the extended family. I was outside, sitting on the front steps. Zelu was beside me in her wheelchair.

I have no idea who she got the joint from. Maybe our cousin Osundu. He would have had access to that kind of thing. Osundu

was the shadiest guy we knew. At the age of twenty-five, he would have been in college if it weren’t perpetually closed due

to strikes. He drove a kabu kabu to make ends meet and lived in Lagos in one of the shittiest apartments I’d ever seen. He

more than likely had some kind of side hustle going.

Inside, all our relatives who had descended on the village for the family gathering were shouting and laughing. It was hot in there, and I’d come out for a breath of air. Zelu was already out there. She was in her first year of college, and I remember she’d come home different. She’d taken out her braid extensions and twisted her hair. My father hated it, but both my parents had seen this hairstyle before, so they weren’t all that surprised. It wasn’t her look that threw me off, though; it was how she seemed so much more... herself. She was reading all these books by authors she’d discovered in her classes; she’d even written some of their names on her chair—Zora Neale Hurston, Jamaica Kincaid, Ijeoma Oluo, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ta-Nehisi Coates. And she was always talking politics. She seemed so smart to my fourteen-year-old self. I kind of avoided her. So when I saw her sitting there, I nearly went back inside. She grabbed my leg.

“Where’re you going, Tolu? Come sit with me,” she said. “That meeting’s going to last forever, so might as well get some fresh

air now.”

When she brought out the joint, my eyes must have gotten huge, because she burst out laughing. “You look like you’ve seen

a ghost!”

“Is that... are you going to smoke that?”

“Of course,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Right here?”

“Why not?”

I looked at her like she was crazy. “Mom and Dad.”

“Uh, no one’s coming out of there for a while.”

“Doesn’t it smell?”

She shrugged and brought out a lighter. She lit the tip and then took a hit. She looked relaxed, and I remember it smelled

kind of pleasant, too. Behind us, I could hear our grandfather saying, “ Igbo, Kwenu! ” and everyone responding, “ Ya! ” The meeting was starting.

“Want some?” she asked, holding it out to me.

Ten minutes later, we stepped into a room full of relatives: cousins from seven years old to forty-five, our father’s parents, aunts, uncles, five of our father’s sisters, three of his brothers, their husbands and wives, our siblings, and our parents. Grandfather was watching the room as his brother offered a platter with broken kola nuts, peanut sauce, and alligator pepper to people. We sat in the back, and as we did, I had to stifle the most powerful urge to laugh I’d ever felt. Everything was funny—the musty hot smell of the large meeting room, how serious everyone looked, Grandfather’s gravelly voice, the way his brother carefully held the tray before all the elders first, the overworked air-conditioner in the front whose hard effort was not paying off, even the enormous spider sitting in the dark corner near the ceiling on the far side of the room. The audacity of that spider. It was horrifying, and no one was paying attention to it. My stomach cramped from stifled laughter. Oh, the pain. When I glanced at Zelu, the sight of her made it worse. She was in the same state, tears in her eyes.

Zelu and I sat beside our grand-auntie Nnenna and grand-auntie Grace, both Bible-thumping members of the local chapter of

Mountain of Fire. They looked at us and frowned. We must have smelled so strongly of all the weed we’d just smoked. The room

felt like it was the size of a cathedral. Things also seemed to have slowed down so much that I could see between the cracks.

I let out a soft giggle.

“It is good to see you all this Christmas,” my grandfather announced in the front. “My son Secret has traveled the farthest

with his family to be here. All the way from the United States. Let us welcome them.”

Everyone clapped and smiled. It felt like there was a moment when everyone in the room turned and stared at me, and I grinned,

despite being totally creeped out. I heard Zelu snicker beside me, and that set me off again. I was so strained holding back

laughter, I was sure my nose would start bleeding from the pressure. Zelu leaned toward me and whispered in my ear, “It’s

like...” She paused, her shoulders shaking. “It’s like something is inhabiting my brain, like a little person, and that

person is talking to me and threatening to betray that I’m high!”

I got up and mechanically walked to the door, making sure I did not meet anyone’s eyes. When I got outside, I let out the largest burst of laughter I’ve ever had in my life. Large, but not loud, because the meeting was right behind me. Finally, I didn’t have to control my face or breathing. I snickered and giggled for at least ten minutes. Everything around me was so, so, so funny. The disheveled house across the compound, the owl hooting from nearby that probably made someone cross themselves,

the pencil-thin palm trees gently swaying in the breeze, the very fact that I was high in a southeastern Nigerian village.

I eventually went back in and sat in my spot beside Zelu. We’d both mellowed out. And this was around the time that our grandfather

started yelling at our cousin Osundu for stealing a generator. Osundu was forced to stand up and ask forgiveness.

“What the fuck,” Zelu muttered.

“How do you steal a whole generator?” I whispered.

“From your own uncle!”

We both giggled, grabbing each other’s hands and squeezing.

“Osundu,” our grandfather was saying, “what do you have to say for yourself?”

Osundu stood in front of everyone, tall and lanky, in his dirty jeans and red T-shirt, a smirk on his face. “I am innocent,”

he said.

“Five people saw you do it,” Grandfather shouted forcefully.

Five of our cousins assented. One of them even said, “Stop lying, idiot. Confess. You did it in broad daylight with two of

your friends.”

“Ah-ah!” another added. “Just make payment if you have sold it, but do not stand here before your family and lie, o.”

Osundu sucked in his cheeks as if someone had stuck a lemon in his mouth.

“ Chey! God will punish you, o,” another cousin said.

I saw it all in slow motion. Grandfather leaped to his feet and smacked Osundu upside the head, hard. “Confess!”

Osundu held the side of his head. “Fine! Fine, I confess! Ah, my head! I sold it and I cannot pay anything.”

Everyone began speaking all at once.

“You will!”

“Idiot!”

“Fool!”

“You don’t know how to work, only steal!”

“You are lucky we don’t do jungle justice on you here!”

Lots of tooth-kissing, too. Osundu looked around, taken aback. Somehow he appeared utterly insulted, even though he’d totally

committed the crime. Did he really think he’d get away with it? And why come to a family meeting knowing what he’d done?!

So weird. He stormed out. As he passed me, I noticed tears streaming down his face.

I don’t remember much of the meeting after that. However, later, Zelu and I went for a walk in the evening. Well, I pushed

her. Never before had everything seemed this loud and alive. We stopped on the dirt road outside the house.

“You have your phone?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Cool, turn on the flashlight.”

I did and she suddenly started wheeling her chair. “Come on!”

She went to the back of the old house beside the new one our parents had built. This was the house that my father had grown

up in.

“Okay, push me, I can’t wheel here easily,” she said when we got to the back. “And hold up the light! Who knows what snakes

are here.”

I fumbled with my phone as I pushed her in the weedy backyard. There were old lopsided wooden statues that I preferred to

avoid. All the aunties told me never to come here because of them, though they didn’t explain why.

“This is our great-grandfather’s shrine,” Zelu said. “It’s called an obi, which means ‘home’ or ‘heart’ in Igbo.”

“How do you know all this?” None of us kids could speak Igbo. No matter how hard we tried and how hard our father tried to

teach us, we just couldn’t pick it up. I know more Yoruba than Igbo; our mother’s relatives were more open to teaching us.

Our father and his relatives always just expected us to pick up on it like geniuses.

“I asked,” Zelu said.

“Who? Not the aunties, I assume.”

“Grandfather,” she said. “He says he still comes here to talk to his father and mother.”

“Oh,” I whispered. I shined the light on one of the ancestors. That’s what it was, an ancestor. It was clearly female and

made of thick wood that seemed like it would last forever. We were quiet for a while. Zelu reached forward and touched it.

I was afraid to. I had a nagging feeling that these could get up and walk around whenever they chose, and I didn’t want a

personal visit from one that night.

She looked up at the sky. “You know Orion?”

“No,” I said.

She pointed out so many of the stars that night, even the milky way, which I’d never seen before! I didn’t realize she knew

or cared about all that. It was cool. She didn’t talk much to me when I was little, and I was always kind of fascinated by

her. The way she’d pulled through after losing her ability to walk. I was seven when it happened, and it really terrified

me. I was scared she was going to die, and then I thought she was going to kill herself, because how could one live without

walking, having been able to before? But instead, I saw her... become. To me, my sister was like a spirit, a sort of superhero.

That evening was the first time I really began to see Zelu as a human being, and she was awesome.

The weed she shared with me didn’t wear off quickly at all . It gave me strange dreams. Though who knows, the humid heat may have also caused them. In the first dream, I was back outside

at the obi. The ancestors stayed in place, but my father was there and he was a tall masquerade. It was daytime and he was

pruning a vine that was growing on one of the ancestors. Then Zelu came through the yard and she wasn’t in her chair, she

was walking . Not on regular legs. On robot legs. She was a robot herself. A tall humanoid thing with a face full of light. She strutted past me, laughing and more confident and comfortable than I’d ever seen her. I still remember this dream. It’s one of those dreams you never forget, not because it’s so profound, but because of the way it makes you feel. Dad was so happy and Zelu was so... Zelu.

Maybe I should have, but I never told Zelu about that dream. I always thought there’d be time to tell her one day, at the

right moment, when I was ready. Or maybe, if I’m being totally honest, it’s something I wanted to keep to myself. I’m a lawyer,

not an artist. I may have made it up in my subconscious, but it might be the most creative thing I’ve ever conceived.

But you should know, Zelu’s no robot. She’s all human, and she felt things deeply. Everything that happened, she felt it all.