When I was in my third year, our best quote was followed your dreams and success will chase you. It was adapted from the Three Idiots movie. Just like Rancho, I was a menace to my lecturer. Today, I’m a celebrity, but the pain of those years are the scars that many called beautiful today.
Snatched away by the troubles of failure of early admission into the University, I couldn’t take another failure as a prospective student of the prestigious Fortune City University that blessed 2010. So, when I couldn’t meet the cutoff mark for Law, I opted for Linguistics. Yes, everyone wanted to be a lawyer. Do you think I lie? Ask anyone studying Arts, they either want to be an actor or a lawyer.
So, when I couldn’t make it into my preferred department, I chose Linguistics. But not what I was thinking. It was hell on both ends.
I was admitted to study language and its intricacies. I chose Yoruba because my uncle, Sola, had a friend of the Oyo royal family had that connection. Ever heard of the phrase never trusts men, but God? Well, that was my case.
I agreed with my uncle and chose Yoruba. In my first year, I discovered that Linguistics wasn’t about learning how to speak languages. What a pain! My life was thrown into turmoil.
“I should have waited to be a lawyer”, I lamented to my uncle.
He insisted that I kept up with my Yoruba study and include Theatre arts.
“What?” I yelled.
I could feel my already big eyeballs popping out of my head. I could have sworn that I saw my jaws.
Linguistics was like studying Maths because of the evil useless trees we have to learn for grammar- both English and Yoruba.
So, imagine my pain when I had to add theatre arts to an already creatively exhausting Yoruba language, with Mrs Ronke Ige as the course advisor. She fought against my intentions. I think that gave me the ginger I needed to do better and come out on top. She faulted everything I did. My cloth was too tight. My creativity wasn’t creative enough. My songs were too pitched. My proverbs were not as deep. I couldn’t pass a simple test she set.
“Did you make a move at her husband?” My school daughter asked after experiencing the same evil for being associated with me.
Her classes and training were tough and demanding in all wise. At one point, my uncle assumed I was ripping him off funds because my demands were too much. My father couldn’t help much.
Everyone suggested that I was too beautiful and that it was the same with my school daughter. Truly, Mrs Ige called both of us whores. She reported us to the Dean, who studied Yoruba too. So, she took my course advisor as her left hand in the Yoruba sub-department.
It was hellish for us. I went to my rehearsals for both theatre and Yoruba, plagued by her words. Busty, I couldn’t do much in covering my huge body and what attracted men to me. Even in flowing gowns, I still felt like reason men run into walls, missed steps, chew on their biro, gasped, slurred, or even shared their surprise with their girlfriends.
At the theatre, it was rigorous work. Morning, we were singing. Night, practising dance. For me, afternoon, I’m practising oriki and odu ifa. I’m studying the pain that led to Oranmiyan’s replication of a far world. I was buried in the books of what is called Linguistics and had to deal with the trouble of pleasing Mrs Ige.
So, on my graduation day, when my uncle died in an accident while coming to FCU, I couldn’t say much again. I slumped and was bedridden for two weeks. My dad and my uncle’s wife were by my side.
However, things changed. Yoruba said the calabash placed in God’s hands cannot be broken. Well, luckily for me I’ve prayed about my uncle’s promise. So, it was no wonder when I was suddenly called to come to a big Yoruba program on cable because my uncle had made all the plans for years.
A few months later, I began to act in TV series and have transitioned to movies. My name is out there. Only a few knows it and half of them are dead. The remaining half are either struggling with their lives or the fact that they know a celebrity and can point to me on the TV.
I’m happy I forged on. Now, all I can think is “What’s Law?”