Keep This For My Sake

osara is a person of many dreams. They dream of the rivers and the stars. Of farms with ridges and ridges of Cassava leaves swaying in the wind. Of collapsing bridges and the rainbow-coloured puddles that find themselves on highways and near filling stations. Of revolution and a sky bursting with birds of all types that sing songs of all kinds.

We share them in the mornings, these dreams, against the backdrop of crinkling weave-on wrappers and the aroma of hot Nescafé wafting from the bright red trolleys of the coffee boys as they push their dispensers through the muddy wetness of the market. Some days, Kosara struggles to remember this or that detail, or the whole dream in its entirety. But mostly they remember, the blank stills of their memory filling out, bustling with faces and songs and things so fantastical they have no frame of reference in real life. I love the way their eyes light up when they recount their dreams, pouring them out the way one empties a bag of onions into a basket, all at once, breathlessly, eyes blinking rapidly as they try to get their words out in spite of their stutter. Because what if they forget again? Dreams so easily vanish, like shadows escaping light.

The Darling Yaki weave-ons keep falling off the wall. One slips from its position and all at once the others follow in a cackle of polythene. They form a small heap on the floor near my basket of tools.

“You will not arrange your weave-on well,” I say to the hairdresser that comes to pick them up. “You will still tell me what my weave-ons did to you that you keep falling them,” she banters back.

She gathers the packets, and as she hangs them up one after the other, Kosara arrives for work looking lost, as though they had mistakenly wandered into the wrong salon. They are rarely ever late so I know before they enter that something has happened. My first guess is that they have fought with their father again. Nothing unsettles them the way those fights do. People find it hard to believe when they recount these fights.

“Fight, as in argue okwa ya?”, people are quick to ask. The mental image of a teenager physically fighting their father is too much to swallow. But if they knew Kosara’s father, perhaps it wouldn’t be. The few times I met the man, I thought he looked menacing, with his mean frown and angular face, all cheekbones and jawline. It is hard to believe they are related at all. Kosara takes after their mother; her thin frame, her soft eyes, her oval face. 

Today Kosara is wearing their brown hoodie, the one so faded the brown looks like an aged yellow. They give me a quiet look before peering into the salon to see if sister Vero is in, and wave to the girls inside.

“You did not come early today,” the girl rearranging the weave-ons says.

“Nwanne m, today is just somehow,” Kosara replies.

They sit on the low stool near the entrance of the salon. I can see no wounds on their body.

“Kosara, what's wrong?” I ask, quietly.

They sigh and shake their head, as though to say it is not something worth voicing, but then they say, “I dreamt of Sankara's body riddled with bullets.”

“A guitar?” I ask again.

“Yes. Sankara owned a guitar. It was wine-red and white,” Kosara replies.

I cannot imagine Sankara with a guitar of any colour. In all the pictures of him I’ve seen, he is dressed in full military uniform; camouflage, boots and beret to match. I am looking out of the salon as I listen, trying to catch wandering eyes amongst the passers-by so I can beckon to them before the nail technicians in other salons. I perform the motions of filing my fingernails.

“Nails?” I call out. “You want to fix nails?”

I turn back to look at Kosara. They are bent over a woman’s fingers, filing, blowing on the nail, wiping, and filing again. They are lucky. They get to work all day because they do both manis and pedis. I am mostly a pedicurist and my regulars come by only in the late afternoons and evenings, after they have escaped whatever obligations they had to chase around that day. Secondary school teachers, grateful to kick off their low-heeled shoes and let strong hands ease the muscles of their feet. University students fresh off lectures, perhaps getting ready for a party or a date. Sometimes, it’s people who just came to shop, for whom a pedicure was the last thing on their to-do list.

Around us, Holy Ghost is unfurling. I love how the market awakes like a sleeping beast. If you come early enough, you can hear the market's voice grow slowly from perfect silence into a roaring bustle.

“Do you ever wonder if the person who conducted the autopsy loved Sankara?”

“Huh?” I ask, moments before my brain registers what was said. 

“It’s very possible,” I reply.

Kosara gets really gloomy when they dream of death. They take their dreams seriously, to a point of irrationality. And when they dream of dying, of being killed by their father, they wake up terrified, as though every dream is a prophecy. In a way, it is a bit of a relief that this time they dreamt of the death of someone who was already dead.

It was I who brought them this dream. A few days ago, while my Facebook feed was still cluttered with memes about Nigeria being a failure at 55, I saw a BBC post about Sankara’s trial and it made me think of them. I always send them things like that. Articles about China. Or Cuba. Or Nicaragua. In January, I sent them an NBC News article titled, On Gay Rights, Vietnam is Now More Progressive Than America, and they replied with a 15-minute voice note of excited pride, the way a mother croons when her child brings back an excellent report card. Later that day they wrote about it on their Facebook.

LOML sent me this article and it got me thinking about how the atmosphere of revolution lays fertile ground for queer emancipation. How it breaks open the consciousness and demystifies culture. How it subjects the people to a constantly renewing humanization of each other. Nigeria When?

The post racked up thousands of likes, and hundreds of angry comments. I do not know how they manage all the engagement they get. I cannot imagine maxing out my friend limit, let alone having tens of thousands of followers.

“Go to Vietnam then, fucking gay commie fag,” one account said.

“Bitch pay for me and watch me go lol,” Kosara replied.

They find the vitriol funny sometimes, they laugh at it and shake their head.

“Don’t worry. Anti-gay law is already in effect. You will die a very painful death soon,” another person said.

And now Kosara is talking about Sankara’s autopsy, occasionally looking up from the fingers they are filing because looking up helps them manage their stutter. It worsens with emotions, and Kosara is someone who recounts dreams as though reliving them. 

The customer squirms occasionally, but she is looking at Kosara intently as they recount their dream. Kosara had seen Sankara die, his guitar shielding him from so many bullets before it fell apart, like sand washed away by the sea, and left him exposed.

“I was just thinking,” they continued, “imagine how chilling it would have been to be face to face with his body counting all those bullets. More than a dozen, even under his armpit.”

By the time the customer leaves, Kosara is in a much better mood. It helps that the woman always tips. One thousand naira, two if she really likes her nails. Kosara folds the money and puts it in their apron. 

“I hope they convict Campaore,” I say.

“Yeah, but what does it matter?” they reply. “Like, it matters, but it cannot resurrect the Burkinabe revolution.”

They stand and tap the chair. I dust off the filings before I sit down. They sit in the customer’s chair and stretch their fingers towards me. Fingernails and toenails are similar, almost the same, but the fingers are more delicate, errors are more easily felt. Being able to do manicures is all about alertness and stillness, because people are rarely able to keep their fingers as immobile as they can keep their toes.

“This world sef,” I sigh as I start.  Kosara flinches, pulling back their hand. “Sorry,” I say.

“Nna eh,” they respond.

“Sorry, ah,” I say again and kiss my teeth ironically. I almost have the hang of it. Last Thursday, a day when I felt lucky, I told someone I did manicures. Sister Vero was so happy when I did that. The nails weren’t perfect but she lavished compliments on the customer when I was done. If I start doing manicures regularly, I will have to pay more to work in her salon so her excitement is not surprising. 

“Well done,” Kosara said after the customer left. “Your coat was too light but it’s good for a first time.” 

They paused to look at me, then at themself in the mirror. “Wow, I’m an excellent teacher.” And they laughed.

Today, as I bruise their cuticles, they’re not so self-congratulatory. “You should be paying me for this o. It’s not just sorry.”

“Wow, your capitalist tendencies are showing,” I retort. I blow the filings away and, satisfied with what I’ve done, move to another finger. Doing Kosara’s nails is practice, yes, but it also feels very intimate, the sort of thing I am uncomfortable with other people seeing or interrupting. It is such a tender warm feeling to have their hand in mine, filing, moulding their nails into curves.

They smile.

 “Capitalist,” I repeat. 

“Get out,” they say, stretching the last word.

Kosara is on Facebook a lot. They are always pulling their phone from their apron in the middle of a manicure to check their notifications. I am sometimes proud that I knew them before they registered an account, or back when they still posted things like, “Why does Mark want to know what is on my mind?” only to get a few likes, before they started writing two-thousand-word posts talking about Miriam Makeba’s A Luta Continua or the 1964 general strike or the riots that rocked the streets of Lagos after Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. Nowadays, the comment sections of everything they post are a battlefield.

“We now have people openly supporting communism? Our education has failed.”

“I don’t know why the police have not picked you up.”

“If I was your father, I would have killed you myself.”

But their father has tried. In many ways. Kosara has had numerous dreams of escaping that man. I’m with them in the dreams, in a flat of our own. Sometimes they become unsure of the details, and they ask me. I always remember. I remember like they are my own dreams. I remember the feel of the flat, the smell of it, the fan’s noisy whirling, the small passageway only as wide as a sink that serves as the kitchen, the mini-fridge behind the door that prevents it from opening all the way, the big portrait of Fidel Castro and Samora Machel hanging on the living room wall.

Kosara's father makes it into their dreams disguised as all types of monsters. A snake-headed bipedal. A mass of crushing concrete full of spikes. Sometimes he is formless; a booming voice or a harsh wind. At those times, I wonder how Kosara can tell they are dreaming about their father. But they are always so sure. Once, they dreamt of being surrounded by water, knee-high and freezing.

“I don’t understand,” I told them. “How can you possibly know that that is your father?”

“I just know. I know my own father’s energy. And then again, the water called me Akwuna. Who else has ever called me that?”

Because their father called them Akwuna, Kosara dreams of the Anglo-Aro war. They dream of the caravans of Akunakuna women who British invaders took from their homes and brought on the long journey of war to Arochukwu.

“It’s hard to be ashamed of that word when you know its origin,” they say. 

It is after the dreams of the water, after the dreams of the war, that Kosara begins to dream about escape. For years, Kosara fought their father to be able to live in his house because there was nowhere else to go, but something about being called Akwuna gives them the freedom to dream about leaving. Eventually, we begin to try to make the dreams real.

First, we look at two-bedroom flats. 

“Your room. My room. Our very own place,” Kosara says.

I know we cannot afford it, but Kosara is adamant that we at least search. I am hesitant to object because I do not want to appear too eager to share a room with them, sleeping in the same bed. I love Kosara, and not just the way they love me, not just as a friend.

The first agent shows us a flat that costs three hundred thousand naira per year, plus fees. It is an old building but it is in a good part of Chime Avenue, close to Holy Ghost.

“Very secure,” the agent says as we enter the compound, “with car space.” He motions to the empty space in the compound. There are drying racks arranged next to each other. One of them has napkins pegged to it.

We giggle to each other at the thought that we would need car space. The agent scrunches his face at us. It is obvious he doesn’t want us there at all, but we already paid the 2,500 naira consultation fee.

“Are you brothers?” he asks.

“No, friends,” Kosara says.

“Friends?” the agent repeats, smiling incredulously.

“Any problem?” Kosara asks. I tug on their shirt and shake my head.

“No, I want to know what he means by that,” Kosara says, their words coming out in staccato syllables. “See, it’s not by force. If you don’t want to show us house, just refund us biko.”

 “Is it not house I’m showing you people?” the agent retorts.

Again, I signal Kosara to let it go. I know they want to say more, but what is the point? 

After that, we pay another agent 5000 naira and he takes us to see a few more two-bedroom flats we cannot afford.

“Na wa o. No part of Enugu is liveable again o,” I say to them in the keke ride back to work.

“Nna eh. These landlords are not even toning down their wickedness,” Kosara says.

“Time to resurrect Chairman Mao. Landlords should not exist,” I reply, smiling.

“Anti-landlord action!”, they laugh.

We shelf the dream for the meantime.

“Let’s just try to put more money aside,” I say to them. “Something will turn up for sure.”

I have dreams of my own too. Sometimes I share them with Kosara. Other times, I don’t. Mine are not as fantastical as theirs. I too dream of us, in a place of our own, but without any of the detail. Just the solidity of walls that protect us from the outside world. I dream of going back to school. I always wanted to be an engineer. In one dream, I am in Nsukka studying to become a Chemical Engineer. When I share it with Kosara, they smile gently and say, “UNN doesn’t have a department of Chemical Engineering.” The next day, they send me a list of all the universities in the country where I can study Chemical Engineering.

But my dreams are fleeting. I do not hold on to them the way Kosara holds on to theirs. I wake up knowing it is only a dream: of my brothers and sisters all together, posing for a picture with our parents. Of Kosara and myself walking slowly along the abandoned rail tracks that go past Holy Ghost, all the way to the coal mines, our fingers interlocked. Of us in my room on that Sunday last June when they told me, “You bring me peace. I don’t know how to explain it, there is just this ease that comes with being with you.”

My head had been resting on their bare stomach, my eyes closed.

“Awww,” I replied. “That’s so cute.”

“Fuck off,” they said, and we laughed.

Kosara and I met in St. Bartholomew, back when it was Achara Layout Secondary School. After the state government handed it over to the Anglican Diocese and mission school fees were introduced, we both changed schools. But we kept in touch. I always knew they were special. My heart would do a little dance each time I saw them in the morning in their off-white shirt and oversized blue shorts. Their mother died in our second year of junior secondary school, from a ruptured appendix she ignored for too long. On so many afternoons afterwards, I walked them home before heading home myself. They would share endless stories of their mother with me. Like when she bought them a copy of Oliver Twist for their birthday even though her shop was failing. Or when she took them back to her village in Ezeagu because their father had beaten them really badly. They stayed there with their mother until their father came to beg her to return, promising to repent.

After we both changed schools because our parents could not afford the new mission fees, we would meet at church and talk till the last service was over. It’s been almost three years since we left secondary school, and I now know that what I feel for them transcends friendship. Still, for a long time, I said nothing because I was afraid of voicing what was in my heart. Our friendship is precious to me. I love that we grew up together. That we bore witness to the different stages of each other’s lives. I love that it was me they told when they decided they wanted to change their pronouns.

“Don’t you sometimes feel like you’re not really a boy? Like ‘boy’ is like a cage? I don’t know if you get.”

We were in SS2. I did not get. I was a boy who did not behave the way the world expected boys to behave, and I hated it. But it never occurred to me to think I was not a boy at all. I believed Kosara still. Why would they lie to me? I did not yet understand, but I did not have to. If they thought ‘he’ could not really represent them, then it was true. If they said they were not a boy, then of course they were not. It was a truth I was so proud they expected me to uphold, because with everyone else, they let it go. They did not expect teachers or classmates or other friends to uphold this truth. But they expected me to. 

I love, too, that Kosara indulged me as I grew a liking for Filipino telenovelas. The Promise. Love Is Timeless. Her Mother’s Daughter. Marimar. They still tease me about it now. “Remember?” they ask. “You were obsessed with them. Angelo Buenavista and Angelika Santibañez and all those people.” And I tease them about their obsession with historical figures; Lenin and Chavez and Amilcar Cabral and Fidel.

“Biko, Fidel is not a historical figure.”

“Ehn?”

“He’s still alive. He’s like 87.”

For years, I did not want to risk losing what we had. What if they didn’t feel the same way? But now, I cannot go on without knowing.

 “You know I love you, right?” I tell them one day as we walk to the keke park one evening after work. The road is lined with honking buses and cars, crawling in the slow traffic.

“Of course,” Kosara laughs. “I love you too.”

I am quiet for a few moments. I look behind me, suddenly afraid that someone is right behind us, listening to what we are saying.

“Like, love love,” I say.

They look at me like I have said something nonsensical. “This is love love.”

“You know what I mean nau,” I protest, and they laugh.

“I’m not sure I like you like that,” they say when their laughter dies down. “We don’t have that type of chemistry. Do we?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

They put their hand over my shoulder. “Anyway, we have our literal whole lives to find out.”

“Yeah,” I say and chuckle. But my heart is breaking because it feels like a rejection.

A soft knocking on my window rouses me. There is no light and because my room is pitch black I think for a moment that I am still asleep. But the knocking is persistent. I reach for the torchlight next to my pillow and totter up. It is Kosara, and my heart sinks even before I see that they are badly battered. I let them in through the front door. My mother hurries from her room to see who it is, her eyes still squinting from sleep. I go outside and fetch some water from the drum so they can take a bath.

“You mean your father did this to you?!” I hear my mother ask. “Is he a boxer?!”

Kosara doesn’t reply. Their stutter is always worse when they are upset.

“Even if he is,” my mother continues indignantly to herself, “it’s now his child he’s using to do practice? What did his wife say?”

“What would she say?” Kosara replies. 

Kosara’s stepmother never involves herself in their relationship with their father. She is not cruel to them, but she never stands up for them either. 

“Sha, I sha landed my own punches,” they add.

I try to hold in my laughter. My mother makes a sound of disapproval. I cannot see her face but I know she is frowning. She does not trust Kosara; she has always been suspicious of them. Wary that they are a corrupting influence on me. Unforgiving because she does not think being a pedicurist is a decent job for a man, and she believes Kosara is the reason I decided to learn to do pedicures instead of going to Kenyatta to apprentice for my elder brother who cuts aluminium window frames. I have always hated the screeching sound the frames make as they are cut, but my mother blames everything bad in my life on Kosara. She always thought I would go to university. She was hopeful when I got admitted to ESUT, but I did not have anywhere near the money for it. And even this she blames on Kosara.

“Is it not other men of your age that are putting themselves through school?,” she had complained when I didn’t go. “But no, you want to follow Kosara everywhere. If you're not careful, Kosara will put you into serious trouble. You're laughing? Okay o. Okay.”

The day Kosara corrected her about their pronouns, she gawked. “I don’t understand,” she told them, and then turned to look at me.

“I use They/Them pronouns. I’m not a He,” Kosara shrugged.

She looked at me again, and then back at them. “My dear, how? Are you….multiple? Multiple personalities?”

“No,” Kosara said. “It’s like Igbo language. There’s no he, no she. Just the person.”

“But this is English,” my mother said.

“And They is a good translation,” Kosara said. “‘He’ is a gendered pronoun and I don’t identify with it because I’m not a man.”

“Hian. You’re not a man? What are you? You don’t have a penis?”

Kosara smiled uncomfortably and turned away. “It doesn’t matter,” they said. Kosara is bullish about many things, but not about their gender. They will argue with a room full of people on just about anything, but they never argue about their gender. Instead, Kosara shrinks into themself and disappears. I am surprised they tried to convince my mother.

“Kosarachukwu, you’ve come again. You are always saying strange things. Ahn-ahn.”

“Mummy, just say they. There’s nothing there,” I said.

“I will not o! I will not.”

Later that day, after Kosara left she asked me, “What kind of nonsense is They/Them? Which one is they/them again? Are you children nowadays even with your senses?”

“Mummy, there’s nothing hard in just saying they,” I said.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that you could have just said, ‘Go and get them malt from the fridge.’ It won’t have killed you. The sky won’t have fallen.”

“Is it me you’re talking to like that? Chineke nna napu Ekwensu ike!” she snapped her fingers.

We are close, my mother and I, perhaps because I am her last child. We never quarrel, so naturally, she blames that quarrel on Kosara too. But all this falls to the wayside when a 19-year-old knocks on her door in the middle of the night on the run from their father. She adjusts her wrapper, picks the rechargeable lamp back up, and brings it closer to Kosara’s face. We dab their wounds with methylated spirit before my mother goes back into her room.

Kosara peels their clothes off and takes a bath. I sit in the living room waiting. When they are done, I hand them a fresh change of clothes. We don't talk. I know everything that needs to be said. And I know that if they try to talk about it now while they’re still upset, they will struggle to voice the words. I know they got their blows in. And I know fighting their father physically comes with its own relief, as well as its grief. We lie in my bed, my hands wrapped carefully around them so I don’t touch any bruises, so that all they feel is the solidity of my body next to theirs. They start to cry, shoulders shaking, nose running.

“It's okay,” I whisper in their ear. “You'll be out of that place soon. We'll get our place soon.”

In the morning, they pack their roughed up clothes into a polythene bag and head back home. 

“Oya nau,” they say, “We'll talk later in the salon.”

Again their father will demand that they leave, and again they will say no.

After Kosara leaves, my mother calls me to her room. She is powdering her face, getting ready to leave for work. My father is in the bathroom.

“That boy fights his father,” she says. “I don't know what other sign you need before you learn not to associate with him.”

“He is not a boy,” I reply and, immediately realising the mistake I made, I add, “They. They are not a boy.” 

Kosara doesn’t believe in things like God or destiny or soul mates, but I do. There is no other way to describe what we have; the raw, sweet, consuming fullness in my chest, or the certainty our friendship brings me, without invoking God. ‘Ease’ is the way they put it, but I find that such a watered-down way to describe what we have. Soulmate is far more appropriate because what we have is an anchor, for me. When I look into the future, I can’t see anything. I know I will not be a pedicurist forever, but everything after this salon is just blank, except for Kosara. 

When I was young, I always saw myself in a safety helmet, on some construction site. I saw a house, a car, a wife and children. But life complicates childhood dreams. Still, there is no way to describe, without invoking God, the knowing that Kosara will be there. Whatever the future turns out to be, I will have them. We will always have each other.

After months of saving, we secure a self-contained apartment in Paskan Jakes. It is the boy’s quarters of a three-storey building. The room is small for two people, definitely not the two-bedroom flat we dreamed of, but the neighbourhood is good. It is landscaped by flame trees. We are both a little bit surprised that this place is ours. After we decided on a self-contain, we found that no one wanted to rent to us. Renting a two-bedroom was one thing, but sharing a room was another. Most landlords did not say why, but some were bold enough to tell us.

“I don’t want people like you in my compound,” one in Achara Layout said.  “Friends, my foot.”

“What you’re doing, I don’t support it. Please find some other person to do your nonsense in their house,” the one at Meniru said.

Finding a place to live in Enugu is hard enough when you are working class, Kosara writes on Facebook. But when you are femme-presenting in a body from which society expects masculinity, just forget it. These agents and landlords will literally make you feel un-human, like you are not even worthy of existing. 

“You’re just speaking nonsense English,” someone replies.

“I’m so sorry you are going through this,” someone else says.

“People have the right to not want you committing a crime in their compound.”

PS: I will block everyone advocating housing discrimination in my comments, Kosara adds to the post. No fascists allowed in my comment section so really savour that comment because it will be the last one you leave on my posts.

Now that we actually have somewhere, now that our feet are planted on the cold tile floor, it is almost unbelievable. We do not have any furniture yet, but Kosara decides to move in. 

“I’m tired of fighting him,” they say. “He makes me hate myself and I’m so tired. I will sleep on the floor, so long as I have my peace.”

But I can't let them move in alone. My mother is unhappy with this. “How will you pay the next rent after this one? With nail money?”

But I know she is upset more because I am moving in with Kosara. My father is not bothered. He has heard a lot about Kosara’s bad influence from my mother, but he has only met Kosara a few uneventful times.

“I won’t tell you not to go,” he says. “After all, you cannot live with me forever. Just be careful.”

He prays for me the night before I leave, asks God to protect me from evil, and gives me ten thousand naira.

“A boy is now a man,” he says. “Don’t come back o,” he adds, laughing. My mother does not find it funny.

Kosara and I come early in the morning to sweep and clean. We keep our bags in one corner of the room and all through the day at work, we smile sheepishly at each other. When we get home from work, we spread a woven mat Kosara bought in Garriki and begin to draft a list of all the things we need: a bed, curtain rods, a gas cylinder. We lie on the hardness of the floor, the mat insulating us from the cold tiles. Shoulder to shoulder, facing the ceiling, we talk about the order in which we will tick things off the list. 

“Maybe today I will dream about this place,” they say.

“Maybe,” I say, taking their hand in mine, distractedly fiddling with their fingers as we look up at the ceiling-fan hook.

Tomorrow, I will go into the market and find someone to make a big frame of the picture of Fidel and Samora Machel from Kosara’s dream. I know the exact picture they saw. In it, Fidel and Machel are sitting on a sofa. Fidel is looking down into what looks like a newspaper. He is in his military uniform and there is white lint caught in his beard. Machel is in a suit, listening to someone off-frame. I can already see it hanging on our wall in this place, and then the place after it, and then the one after that.