Boys Don’t Cry

A little boy of seven years was sitting in front of the television. His aunt, Amaka, was perched on his lap. At that time, she was a twenty-two years old undergraduate studying at the Obafemi Awolowo University. Dave was just a seven years old boy, no tags, no extra abilities that weren’t fictional. Sure, he sometimes believed he was superman and could touch the sun without dying.

He also sometimes thought he was Auntie Amaka’s husband. Partly because she told him so and also because he knew they both did what his own mother and father did in the dead of the night when they thought their room door was locked securely. Nevertheless, he enjoyed having Aunt Amaka on his lap. Enjoyed the popcorn she put into his mouth as she sat there.

The first-day Aunt Amaka had told him to suck her breasts, he had refused. Why would he suck her breasts when he wasn’t a baby? Only babies suck breasts. But she had whipped out her phone and played a video for him. True to word, a man was sucking a woman’s breasts and he was certainly not a baby!

She took him to his parent’s door at night and they watched. While they watched, Aunt Amaka touched him all over his body. That was the beginning, he could say they got married the next day because his aunt christened him. He was shy but she plied him with sweets. He didn’t want to do it but she threatened to never play with him again.

Dave knew that Aunty Ada did a lot for him. From exempting him from housework to defending him whenever his mother wanted to beat him. She was his personal person and besides, it wasn’t painful, was it?

***

“I see naked women every time I close my eyes,” I said to my roommate Junior. We were lounging the balcony of our hostel. The other young man grinned at me.

“I told you not to break up with Jacinta, now look at you. Konji wan finish you guy!”

“It is not about Jacinta man. I have always seen naked women since I was little,” I said. It was a cool evening, the right time to remember past mistakes. I reached out for the wrap and Junior gave it to me. Between us, we had finished seven of those. The wraps were small and fit between our fingers well. Smoking them also made it possible for us to limit the amount of Hemp we took. Neither of us was very good with large amounts of the stuff.

Junior generally avoided it more than I did since the day he passed out in the kitchen and almost burnt down the house. When I got home that day from class, I was greeted with thick smoke at the door. Our kitchen was built in a way that the gas cooker was close to the window. Oga had put rice on fire and was about to remove it when he slumped.

Most of the smoke went out through the window. Perhaps if it hadn’t, I would have come to meet him cold and stiff on the ground or the whole house would have burned down. The landlord would have thrown us out if Junior hadn’t lied that he had slumped in an epileptic episode, and if our parents weren’t rich.

“What do you mean by ‘since when you were little’?” Junior asked. The waning sun shining on his wide forehead, creating a soft halo. Junior was a young man racing through the cusp of manhood. The kind of person who was always eager to experience everything and quickly too.

I was the slower friend. The weight of my experiences in life gave me a different, less trusting perspective of people and their intentions. For instance, I broke up with Jacinta because I saw her spying in my documents. Another person might have ignored it and moved on but I couldn’t. From the moment I caught her, I stopped knowing who she was. I wanted to know what she was looking for but she tried to laugh it off.

“Hey, baby. I’m sorry. I was just curious,” she said.

“I won’t take that for an answer,” I said, my voice cold and brittle. She tried to touch me, reach for, and reason with me but I was already far away. That was the last time I let her into my house. Junior tried to understand why what she did was enough to warrant our separation and failed. To him, it just didn’t add up. Our conversations were always inspired by weed. We smoke and talk. Without weed, there could be no bonding.

I had told him about my father’s general disappointment in me, my mom’s absence, and my growing depression over wraps of weed. He had told me about his sexual dysfunction and why he had chosen to remain celibate for so long. Our stories were ridden with peculiarities made special because the outside world thought we had perfect lives. The son of an ex-commissioner and a deputy governor must be rolling in cash and happiness right?

“My aunt sexually assaulted me when I was seven years old,” I continued. “Doing that burned the image of her naked into my mind’s eye”

“But you said ‘women’, not woman,” Junior noted. I stared at the space above his head, afraid that he would see the tears gathering in the corners of my eyes. Sure that he would be stunned to realize I was so miserable that even the weed couldn’t help.

“Other women I have slept with too. But always her first,” I explained.

“Kai. That must be bad o!”

“Yes, it is,” I admitted.

“So sorry bro,” he passed me the blunt. “You just need to move past that.”

“I am trying,” I said, inhaling deeply.

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***

I was in a cab back to school after a one month holiday. It was 7:30 in the morning and I and the Uber driver were nodding our head to the beat of Burna boy’s music. My phone beeped and I brought it out of my pocket to check. My dad had sent me a link and a message. The message read “What is the meaning of this?!!!” So I quickly clicked the link wondering how its contents would make my dad so livid.

The headline knocked me off my feet “The First Son of The Aliu Family Confesses To Having Sex At The Age Of Seven” I kept reading.

“In a voice recording now making the rounds on the internet, Dave Aliu, the son of the Edo state commissioner of works confessed that he was molested by his aunt when he was seven years old. He said “I see naked women every time I close my eyes”, blaming the incident for his promiscuity.

His past girlfriends took to Twitter, sharing their experiences with the young man. They described him as a selfish and conceited person who was prone to random acts of emotional abuse. His girlfriend Jacinta however had a different story to tell. She tweeted from her handle @JacieX “Dave is not a selfish person. I agree that he can be quite cold and closed off (which I understand now) but he is a good guy. Don’t listen to them Dave, wherever you are, hang in there.”

In contrast, the male folk have taken it upon themselves to champion the issue. Trending hashtags like #Wearehuman2 and #StopRapingUs to address issues of sexual violence against boys and men.

@DipeDupe tweeted: Men are not isolated from suffering but no one listens to us when we tell our own stories. Dave’s situation and the world’s reaction to it, just shows how the world takes everything from us, including our sanity. #Wearehuman2

@JaredOlu tweeted: My elder sister started molesting me when I was eight years old. She was eighteen. She is married now, with two children. I never stopped having obsessive sexual feelings for her. #StopRapingUs!”

Someone touched my arm and flung the offending arm away from me. My skin was already crawling with shame and the last thing my body wanted was the touch of another human. It took me a second to remember that I was present, I was in a cab, and that I was safe.

“I’m so sorry,” I apologized to the driver who looked shocked by my action. He blinked and swallowed.

“That’s okay. We have reached your destination,” he said. I looked out of the window to my hostel building. Junior would be inside smoking weed or something. I could not believe that he had betrayed me. Everyone in the world could, but not the only friend I had. What had I done to him to warrant such retaliation? I tried to walk my mind through the past, times when I might have spaced out on him.

My mind fell on one episode two weeks ago. Junior came back home and met me chucking the last of our weed in the trash.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he shouted when he caught sight of the dark blue weed container in the trash bag beneath me.

“Throwing it all away,” I said. He ran towards me and I kicked the bag to the corner and blocked it with my body.

“Guy comot from road. No dey fuck up!” He bellowed.

“I told you I don’t want us smoking again,” I said.

“That is for yourself,” he said, “I haven’t decided to stop yet. You shouldn’t be making such decisions for me,” then he stopped short and disengaged from me.

“It is for our good,” I said, but he wasn’t listening. He was looking at me with his eyes filled with bitterness and his mouth bent oddly to the side as though he wanted to cry.

“Is it because you bought it with your money? Because I am broke?” He asked. He was moving away from me. I knew I was reminding him of his father standing over him and saying “you are a disgrace. You do not deserve one Kobe from me”.

Yet it didn’t matter to me as I strolled into the gate, strung tight and ready to inflict injury. Yesterday’s betrayal doesn’t matter when today’s suffering is looming in our faces. I cracked open our door and there he was on the sofa smoking again. It didn’t take me much to crush him to the ground with my fist. I was bigger than him.

“Dave Stop,” he said, sounding more tired than hurt by my blows.

“Why. Did. You. Do. It!” I punctuated my words with blows to the shoulder he left unprotected.

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“I didn’t,” he said finally. After letting me hit him to my fill. I was still standing over him and he turned so I could see his face. There was remorse there but there was no guilt.

“What do you mean?”

“It wasn’t me. I never told anyone, nor did I record our conversation,” he said. He tried to get up and failed. I gave him my hand but he looked at it and did not take it. Rather he lifted himself up with his back to the fridge.

“I am sorry,” I said, after a while of us staring at each other. He looked at me and smiled wryly.

“I know. See me off?” He asked. That was when I noticed the pile of his stuff beside the door. In my rage, I had been totally blind to the fact that my roommate was leaving me. The funny thing was, I couldn’t even beg him to stay. My shame sat on me like a heavy bag of cement as I helped him roll out his two bags. Our parting was short and empty, the direct opposite of the time we spent together.

If he had left me under any circumstances but my physical abuse, I could have hated him. Could have despised him for jumping ship when I was at my lowest. But I had pushed him to the floor. The least I could do was let him drag himself up.

“Will I see you soon?” I asked, leaning into the car so our faces were close. He had worn his sunglasses, so I couldn’t see his eyes but the sides of his mouth drooped in a frown.

“I will see you when I see you,” was his impassive reply.

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The loud honk alerted me to my father’s presence. My phone lay meters away from me, holding urgent messages from him that were too heavily worded for me to handle. I was smoking again. When I got back into the house, I found that Junior had left two wraps on the sofa for me. Collapsing on the floor wasn’t hard, I was filled with heaviness anyway.

My life was suddenly like an open book before me and then came the slow acceptance that I had suffered in life. I thought back to my childhood, how my parents’ inattentiveness had helped my aunt shield her evil practices. I tried to reexamine my feelings then and how it had grown over the years. I had never really thought about it or tried to figure out why I had never asked my aunt for the apology I deserved, she, being the root cause of my depression and my reliance on drugs for survival.

I wondered what my dad would have said if I had brought the matter to him. My mother would have cried and done nothing but my father always had words. “You are not my son”, “You are useless to me”, “I wish I never wasted resources on you”. Perhaps he would have asked me to take it like a man. Thinking about it, I almost hear him change the topic to other “more important things”. Who talks about sexual harassment when there is money to make, an election to win?

Two solid raps on the door and then silence. My father never knocked for long. He always assumed you would open the door for him. I admitted him into the living room. This one was different from the one we smoked in. It looked neat, unlike the other one which still had evidence of a fight.

“What are you doing here?” He asked. He was already pacing. “Are you unaware of the havoc you have committed out there?”

“I am,” I replied.

“What are you doing to correct it?” He asked. He was facing me fully now, daring me to look him in the eye.

“There is nothing I can do, Daddy,” I said. His arm came up and fell back down.

“What I want to know is why you had to expose this abomination now,” he began. “Why now?”

His words were carefully aimed blows at my chest. So I went and married my back to the door, my feet becoming too weak to hold me up. Once again, no one was asking me how I felt and what I wanted.

Once again I swallowed everything (the shame and anger) when my dad who had never stopped talking said, “Sometimes, I wonder if you are really my son”.

I took it all in because who cared that I was drowning? The world needed to keep believing the lie that boys don’t cry.