MEMORIES OF CHRISTMAS

I flip through the pages of my mind nondisruptively — a boy in a manger, star in the sky, preacher on the pulpit, happy faces. Each scene melds with the other — firecrackers decorating the sky, the haze of harmattan, a parade of masquerades, a busy market and a smiling trader counting crisp naira notes. I raise my hands and catch the air. I feel it tingle with joy and swell with a hundred sounds and smells. On my writing desk is a radio playing Mary's boy child by Boney M. I follow this song to a sea of memories. I follow this song to Christmas.

In my childhood, Christmas began with firecrackers, red rods blasting in the air — boom, crack crack and again, the cacophonic melody grating against my eardrum. Here, we call these bad boys knockout — a name that suits it much better, in my opinion. It was a natural thing to wake up in the night to the sound of knockouts. I liked what it did to my parents. They'd whisper, half asleep.

"Hei, is that a gunshot?" They'd listen again, their eyes widened with shock, their breathing faster, and I could hear the lub-dub of their heart beneath a heaving chest.

"The big ones get scared too," I thought.

They'd be at peace only on witnessing little sparks of fire lighting up the night sky, and this would accompany Dad's muttering about mischievous street children and how my brother and I should never be like them.

I grew up in a house built by my father's father. It was so large it had two addresses, 6 Udoma and 20 Enwe street. It was a family house, and it was different, the first structure of its kind in the area, the main building standing at twenty-two feet above the ground — a height children like me marvelled at as well as the men on that street when it was first built. I thought this house was a hand's reach away from the sky, and sometimes I imagined climbing the roof to stand at its tip and raise my hands, see if I could touch the clouds. But I wasn't a fan of heights.

As far as street children go, we were already like them, knockout-wise. Our Uncle, Iniobong, took trips to Aba to get a good supply of knockouts before the festivities. He usually got them along with a couple of other goods from Aba to sell for Christmas. Occasionally, he'd call us for a display at the esa, a large area in the family house for such things. These were the sweet times when knockouts were allowed. They were of different types, and I cannot remember their names, but there was this special one. I'll call it cupcake because it looked like one, with a red dot on its head like a raisin. For the display, he'd run off to one end of the esa close to the fence and light a wire connected to the raisin, and then he'd run off and scream.

"Fuk Utong!"

It was funny watching him run to us, his legs like cockroach appendages pegged to his thin body. I usually laughed and never closed my ears, no matter how hard he screamed. The point of knockouts was the sound, and I could not afford the displeasure of not hearing.

"Boom!" The cupcake would explode, and Aunty A or Uncle B would appear at the scene complaining about Iniobong's knockout display. He'd crack a joke, laugh it off, and the next thing would be an Italian shoe or a Christian Dior shirt (made in Aba) on exhibit for sale.

"Original ke ado," he'd convince them with a strong mouth and happy teeth. It wasn't long before I realized he was one clever businessman.

Harmattan is the weather of Christmas in Uyo. In this part of Nigeria, when you hear the word ekarika, you know it is the season. This word, when said or heard, casts a spell almost instantly. You would feel your mouth salivate, your throat dance, your stomach rumble and the smell of Christmas — the spicy scent of fresh stew, the aroma of goat meat peppersoup, Nigerian jollof, the musty odour of ekporoko, wafting across the harmattan breeze to your nose.

While we cannot make Christmas angels on snow with harmattan, there is dust. I made art out of the dust, sketching figures with my fingers over dust-stained glass. I'd draw all sorts of things, but it was usually a cat, the only thing I knew how to draw at the time. Aunty Id taught me.

"Small circle, small circle, big circle, dear mama, dear papa..." and I do not remember the rest. I once dreamt of becoming the next Picasso — cat sketching over harmattan dust as my speciality.

The harmattan was bad for some things. One, I never liked the cold breeze. I buried myself in cotton sweaters during these times and remained buried even when the haze of the morning had vanished to a hot golden afternoon blazing with the sun. People thought it odd. They didn't know I was like human frost still frozen many days from the last blizzard.

Two, the harmattan cracked my lips and made it bleed. It was also a good thing because I had to use my Mum's lip gloss. It was strawberry-flavoured, and I had never tasted strawberry. Many times I licked it, each time, disappointed at the taste. My friends who had tasted strawberries said it was their best fruit. Sweet. Yummy. But this strawberry-flavoured lip gloss tasted like sugared snail slime, and the smell was funny, something between milk and lizard dung. My heels were cracked too, partitioned with white striae encircling nests of crusted skin. I liked to peel these parts off and chew them.

The Ekpo masquerades were once part of the Christmas magic. I miss them. Those days, every December before Christmas, there'd be a procession of them along Enwe street. The Ekpo had black faces and black bodies painted with charcoal. I was told they were spirits of our ancestors. These spirits carried sharp machetes and scraped them on the ground till they shot little sparks of fire. They'd roar and chant songs. They staggered with vigour from one end of the road to the other, and I thought I could dance better. Children would cry about the Ekpo, but I never did. The enigma of the Ekpo puzzled me till the day I saw one approach a woman with a machete. The woman took to her heels, but eventually, she stopped, smiled at it and gave it some naira notes. Do the spirits collect money? I didn't understand. Then it dawned on me; these were ordinary men.

Christmas was not complete without a trip to my village. These days we almost never go there, and there are reasons. There was a unique freedom in the village air; there was a purity to it. It felt wild and savage to run in vast open fields and wander a forest, listen to the eben leaves rustle beneath your feet, hear the call of the bomonkuku, behold the glorious sight of the wine tapper — a man monkey on the mystical palm tree. We never wandered too far off because of the stories we were told. My Mum would remind us of the bushbaby that lurked in the bushes to catch wandering children. Most times, we played in a veranda outside the bungalow of our family house, another one in the village — a decent blue painted structure, sitting on the earth like a wise chief. My grandfather was buried at the front of the compound, and my father took us there to see him, as he put it. He pointed to the stone slab over his grave and read the epithet. I never knew a man could have so many names. The name read to the seventh generation before him. My father called out our full names, my name and my brother's name and the generations before us.

"This is where you come from, remember," he said, pinching and pulling his earlobes.

I had never known until that day that we were royal blood, although fourth in line to whatever throne there was (my father had three siblings before him). There was a strange yet pleasurable feeling this realization gifted me. I thought about it carefully. This is my land? Wonderful. It almost made me want to walk in long strides and pounce my chest like a little King Kong. The only issue here was that there was no crown, and the throne must have gone to another family for some reason. I nodded as my father narrated tales of our origin. I call this Christmas "the Christmas of Origins," the word 'remember' ringing in my ears to this day.

Throughout my many visits to the village, I never visited the stream from which I drew my name. My other regret is the bush rat. I never trapped even one. The ones my father would have called street children teased me for it, like the idea of trapping one was rewarded with a trophy. If that were the case, I never won the Olympic medal for bush rat trapping.

I met Father Christmas, alias Santa Claus once. It was on a Christmas in December 2003. I didn't know of the tale that he rode with reindeers in the sky on a sleigh packed with gifts for good children of the world. It would have made me less naughty.

It was the 24th, and my Aunty Id took my brother and me to Mr Biggs. It would be our third time there. This time there was a Father Christmas dressed in the traditional red and white Santa suit, with an impossible beard on his chin. I knew this Father Christmas must not be real. The one I saw on TV was fair, but this one was dark, and the white beard seemed odd on his face. I wondered if this was another version of him.

After eating meat pies, ice cream and sausage - these things were much cheaper back then, the little children were handed gifts by Father Christmas. We stood in a queue watching him some distance away, sitting on a chair like a king, ho-ho-hoing and making the young ones giggle. When it was my turn, I snatched my gift away from him with suspicion.

"An Impostor," I thought. This was not the same Father Christmas I saw on TV.

The day before Christmas, we kill a goat, fowl or cow. Never turkey. Once I witnessed the beheading of a goat. Saviour, my cousin, had called me to come and see. The day before, Emmanuel, another cousin, and a couple of other young men who lived in the compound dragged the goat in from the market. It was a Red Sokoto, tawny brown with a goatee and mongoloid eyes. They tethered it to a guava tree and left it there — a sacrifice for Christmas. When it was time, the two executioners, Dauda (cousin number 2) and Iniobong would grab its already tethered neck. Dauda would mount his weight on it as he was the larger one. When it started kicking its hoofs aimlessly in the air, Iniobong would catch them. It was dangerous work. One mistake was a free ticket to the hospital. A man almost died doing this. The horns were also an issue, but with a properly tied head, there was little or no movement at that part, yet the goat struggled, bleating, calling unto the god of goats or his goat ancestors for help. I could hear it say,

"My wife, mehhh. My newborn calf, mehhh."

Iniobong, my uncle, the shrewd businessman, was now a master executioner, goat beheader. He raised a long sharp knife glistening against the sunlight of Christmas eve.

Wham!

This goat must have had a stone in its neck. It resisted the knife as a loud bleat rent the air.

Wham!

I realized it is not stones that make a neck but the little, softer things like flesh and muscle and blood. Blood as red as the one coursing through my veins.

More bleating. Wham!

I heard no more. The head fell to the ground, the head with the horns, the head with half-open eyes and a mouth still bleating with its tongue sticking out. I turned my face away, and Saviour chuckled.

"This one you are doing like baby like this, after you will eat it and lick hand."

I shuddered at this fact. It was true. I didn't just eat meat; I tore meat. I chewed the living daylight out of them and complained about why they stick to the spaces between my teeth. I sucked their meaty juice marinated in oil and shredded them rudely with my canines. I never gave thought to the fact that the goat was a living thing and that it had to die to find its way to my mouth. This fact crippled me. I felt my stomach churn, and I retched.

"Don't vomit here o. One day sef, it is this same you that will kill it. No worry." Saviour said.

Iniobong chuckled.

"Eyen mmongeba." Dauda said, smiling with strangely beautiful fish teeth.

Eyen mmongeba or Milk child. I hated the word. An innocent word that could mean anything from spoilt child to overpampered baby who likes to poop in his pants and call "mummy" to come clean up. If Dauda were my size, my face would puff up and redden, my palms would make a fist and punch, but this was Dauda, and I couldn't punch a boy ten times my size. I could only kepe, tightening my eyelids as hard as possible to show anger.

"Iya! Done." Iniobong breathed in and out, slapping his hands together in that way that says "I'm finished," and it is hard not to imagine he had just killed a person, that this is something people go to Ikot Akpan Abia for, a crime worthy of the death penalty. Dauda sniffed the chopped head.

"Good meat," he said.

"Very good," the others chimed in, their lips parted, somewhere between smiling and laughing. Iniobong pointed to a 'barbecue' he constructed — a metal drum with rusted bars of iron as grill grates. There was firewood underneath.

"I go roast the head there," Iniobong said, on his way to the barbecue carrying a bloody head in his hand. Dauda, Saviour and I followed him. In a few hours, I would find this goat, head only and bodiless, spinning on a rotisserie, sooty and darkened by the fire beneath, smoking its way to heaven. The next few hours, I was given a piece of meat from the goat they butchered, and I gladly accepted, the solid taste of meat on my tongue blunting the dark memories of its death.

To this day, I have never placed a knife on the neck of an animal because it is "just plain cruel," I say to myself. But I cook them, I eat them, and this is another definition of hypocrisy.

On Christmas Day, we go to Church. Christmas is never complete without attending Church to hear the sermon about the birth of Jesus — Saviour of mankind, the Son of God from the Holy womb of Mary born in a manger. Children of the Church have their part to play. My Aunty Jemimah, now Mrs Moloku, would organize a little drama for her Church with us. She attended Ransom Saint Soldiers while we (my brother and I) attended the All Nations for Christ church, Winners' Chapel, and I can't remember the other numerous churches we attended, changing one for the other every Sunday based on which aunt or uncle we followed. For the drama, we took on various roles. I was Joseph, and my brother was one of the three wise men. A certain girl was Mary. Aunty Jemimah was wise enough to have some sort of backup child in case the intended performer forgot all his lines a minute to the drama presentation in Church. I am sure the baby was not Jesus but a fat girl doll wrapped in cotton. I had asked her if baby boys or at least boy dolls were hard to find. She laughed, and I cannot remember her answer. When I think about it now, I can only imagine the disaster, our Holy Virgin Mary dropping real baby Jesus on stage mid-act. Bad idea. This time I remembered my lines quite well, and the crowd was as encouraging as ever.

"The boy has talent," they said.

"You did well, Pom pom," that's what she called me. I don't know how the name came about. They cheered, clapped and the Pastor said a thing or two about children.

"God loves little children" or "Children are the heritage of the Lord," something along those lines. This would accompany a lengthy sermon on Christmas. It was a time of love, giving and sharing. From where I sat soon after my performance, I watched the Pastor, studying him. If he were to ask for something from God this Christmas, what would it be? "Ah! Some height," that's it, he just escaped dwarfism by two inches, but too close to the ground, I thought, too close.

After Church came the Great feast. My Mum and the many aunts and uncles of 6 Udoma street would prepare cauldrons of hot soup and stew and drums of rice. We would gather like a true family, just as Jesus did with his disciples on the last supper and feast. There was a special feeling about eating together, and it forged a bond between us. It was an act that seemed to say,

"We are family. We are one."

The unity, the togetherness, us watching ourselves swallow bowls of rice and chunks of meat was a great delight. Now and then, Uncle Goddy or my father and my aunts would tell jokes and stories. The little children, including my chubby pink-faced brother, would cackle and add a thing or two. For the rest of the day, it'd just be all of us, drowned in laughter. Family. One.

My childhood was beautiful. The innocence, freedom and carelessness in childhood is something we lose with age. We swallow it up like we swallow the other changes that come with life. But anytime I get the chance to remember these moments, I realize there is happiness trapped in that past that I can never regain and while this act, the reminiscing gladdens my heart, the surety of this fact — knowing you can never go back to those moments, freezes me like a breeze on harmattan morning. Adulthood, the antithesis of childhood, is not to say we are devoid of the things we felt as children. Many things linger there in me like the warmth with which I embrace Christmas, the importance with which I consider family, my refusal to slit the throat of an animal and my attachment to the other things — little fears, little pleasures, little passions. We still have a child in us, and after the stress of many months navigating life as an adult, I arrive at the end of the year — Christmas, and I remember.

TRANSLATION INDEX

Naira - Nigerian currency.

Hei - an exclamation.

Udoma - a street.

Enwe - a street.

Esa - a large open space.

Aba - a city in Nigeria.

Fuk Utong - close your ears.

Ke ado - it is.

Uyo - a city in Nigeria. Capital of Akwa Ibom State.

Ekarika - harmattan.

Ekporoko - Atlantic cod fish.

Ekpo - a kind of masquerade.

Eben - the African pear tree.

Bomonkuku - special bird named for its call.

Red Sokoto - goat breed in Nigeria.

Mehh - bleating sound of a goat.

Sef - Nigerian slang used for emphasis.

Eyen mmongeba - milk child.

Kepe - blinking your eyelids in a peculiar way as a sign of indignation,  done mostly by children.

Iya - an exclamation.

Ikot Akpan Abia - a prison in Uyo.

‍