jmix:
Dreams Of Our Fathers
What she stumbled upon that evening was nothing but what her world had become. The sight wasn't just unpleasant, it was unholy and inhuman. The body laid stark naked, its decomposition an evidence that it had been there for days. The evil smell that oozed out of it was pungent and it punched her in the face. She reeled and her spirit staggered. She fought the intense urge to bolt, she had to take in the resolve of her generation. She moved closer to the abominable sight and stared at what the world had become .
It was the body of a lady, dead and beastly mutilated. One breast was gone and her shame was shaved, swollen and bloating. As she stared at it, her stomach was becoming jumpy, and she fought the sensation of gag. She understood what she was staring at, yet it fascinated her. A sensational wave hit her, she turned away from the cadaver and emptied every bit in her stomach. As she spat the last bit of what was in her stomach, it occurred to her that the soul of that poor lady would wander in this world, confused in a world that was even more confused.
She knew she should leave now, but she didn't. She kept staring at what she knew was a victim of a generation gone mad. A generation lost in the failures of their fathers and leaders. A generation floundering in the dreamless world of their ancestors.
This was what her world had resolved to, she thought out loud. The smell had began to make her head ache and she felt faint.
She knew it all, she knew the mind of those that had done such a savagery to the poor lady. There were those that lived without a sense of direction. She was a victim of a world that saw no road to a destiny, and as such, they began to cut corners with desperation. But even as she stared at the dead lady, it occurred to her that what she was staring at wasn't an approximation of positive change, or a step towards it.
And so the gravelling into a failed world continues. At a point she became sentient of the whispers coming from the wind, the murmuring of the trees, and she knew it was time to go.
She walked towards the path that led to the police station. There was no excitement in her mind, no feeling, no sympathy, no empathy, just her thoughts.
She fell deeply into a thought of the past. It all began in the past, of course everything begins from a past, what was their past like? She saw a bunch of generation fighting and killing for baseless things. They were all railing against science, theories and art; Positive changers of the world. And in their foolishness, they killed the infancy of a better tomorrow. They left suffering as inheritance and hunger had become their heritage. And now poverty stupefied more than half of her world.
When she got to the front of the police station, the reality of what she had seen gripped her with cold hands. Obsession, emptiness and hopelessness seized her all together. They squeezed into her being, conjuring suicidal images in her mind. She made her way into the police station and as she did she wished this horrific reality would just become a dream, but of course the world is not a wish-granting factory.
She met a police officer whose face carried marks and lines of burden. She told him what she had seen and gave him the location. The police officer made no move to take down note. And when she was done, he unenthusiastically and sluggishly told her she could go they would investigate the matter.
As soon as she got out of the station, emotions flooded her and she began to weep. She knew there wasn't going to be any investigation. She knew that in death the lady was going to be a victim of injustice. Somehow it occurred to her that the spirit of that lady would forever wander on the surface of the earth screaming for justice but no one would listen because the wouldn't hear her. She cried uncontrollably, that people began to look at her as though she was mad, but she was ok with it, they were all mad.
Weeks passed, but she kept seeing the lady in her mind, she thought about her and she dreamt about her. She wondered what had happened to the body ravaged by madness. Maybe tossed into the seas, or buried in an unidentified ground. Then forgotten in no time, and her memories, through the passage of time, obliterated like she never existed. It saddened her. She knew that that body was the ignominious flag of her generation. She wondered which generation would bring the light of transformation, because she knew her generation was failing.
She saw no happiness in the world of her generation, she knew it was a result of their unfulfillment. And although they kept saying happiness was free, she knew it was a mere gloss of words, because in the light of truth nothing was free, not even freedom.
The image of the cadaver hit her with a pang in her head, and in her mind she saw a generation with a future that loomed with violence.
Someone had to take the blame, she thought. The blame of this cataclysm had to fall on someone. It didn't take her long to blame her fathers.
She stood up from her bed, opened the window of her room, she stood there, staring at the world. She wiped the tears from her face with the back of her palm, and saw the world much clearer. They badly wanted to live, but there was no means to reach out to that life, and so there was a desperate resolve of rapacity. They had become blind, their humanity, lost.
She thought about those that accepted this infernal life as "meant to be", they embrace their suffering as their destiny and fate. They turned to religion for console, and because it all they had, they became fanatics, and religion was eating up their rationality.
She had read somewhere that happiness comes to men when they are caught up absorbed in a meaningful task or duty to be done. A task or duty which in turn sheds justification and sanction back down upon their humble labour. She looked around and saw no duty and labour for her generation. Now they disregarded education, after all in the end it was a paper with a result screaming wasted time, it broke her heart.
She thought about how love was lost, sex idolized and the sacredness of trust trampled upon. They believed that it was from the soil of sex that the tree of love grows. But even if it does grow, it is a tree with no root, and when a mighty wind blows, it comes crashing down.
She sat on the bed, picked up a book and a pen, pushing the image of the lady cadaver aside, Ujwu began to write. She wrote strongly of an utopian world, she wrote with a furnace of hope burning in her heart.
©Adumati Olumide