SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue Two - Journal - Page 80
SINE QUA NON
The plantain trees outside are bending in the wind now. The rain is hitting them
sideways, slanting like a body thrown to the ground. The leaves flap like wings with nowhere
to fly. I remember when we planted them. You dug the holes and I carried the seedlings.
Mama said they wouldn’t survive the first storm, that the soil was too soft. But you smiled and
said, “Madu na-aku osisi, chi na-eme ka ọ too,” that man plants the tree, but the gods make it
grow. They did grow. All of them. Even the smallest one, the one Mama said would never bear
fruit. It gives us plantains now, though they are not as sweet. And still, they grow.
It is strange the things that hold on when people do not. You took your presence with
you, Papa, but the trees remain. The suya man still stands by the junction. The rain still falls.
And I am here, at this same table where you once taught me how to hold a pen, where your
left hand hovered over mine and guided each curve of my first letter. I remember how your
breath smelled of groundnut and tobacco. I remember how your palm was warm, and how
the heat from it made me sit up straighter, afraid of making a mistake.
I make mistakes now, but you are not here to correct them. I write letters to a man who
will never read them. I measure the rain by how much it reminds me of your absence. That is
the kind of man I have become.
I wonder if the rain sounds full where you are.
The rain has slowed now. It has become a thin, steady thread unraveling across the roof,
no longer heavy enough to shake the windows or drown out thought. It is that kind of soft
rain that makes silence louder, the kind that slips between moments and lays bare the sounds
inside a house: the distant creak of wood expanding with damp, the lazy tick of the wall clock
near the door, the quiet scrape of my chair against the concrete floor as I shift. I have re-read
the first part of this letter three times already, each time hearing your voice in places I did not
intend. It is strange how even in your absence, you still occupy the spaces I try to fill.
Mama does not listen to music anymore. I noticed it about two years after you left. One
day, I came home from university and the air in the parlour felt too still. It took me a while to
realize that the music was missing. That blue Philips radio—the one you used to keep on the
windowsill by the front room—had disappeared. It used to play lowlife highlife records on
Sunday mornings while you shaved, the volume always low enough to suggest humility but
high enough to command attention. That radio was a fixture, as permanent as the portrait of
your father in the corridor. After you left, the harmattan dust began to settle on it. First just
a film, then a layer. It sat untouched for a full year. One day, it was simply gone. Mama never
told me where she put it. I never asked.
She does not sing anymore, either. She used to hum while cooking—nothing fancy, just
little bits of church songs or lullabies—but now her silence has become its own song. It is
not the silence of someone waiting. It is the silence of someone who has stopped expecting.
When she cooks now, the kitchen is a place of transactions. She does not linger. She does not
stir the soup slowly like she used to when you would come home late and she wanted to keep
dinner warm.
She finishes and leaves. Her silence wraps around the house like old bedsheets pulled
too tight over a mattress—smoothing everything, concealing every shape beneath. We do
not speak of you in her presence. Not because of anger, but because of something worse: that
slow, sinking heaviness that has no name in any language I know.
There are things we keep untouched. I suspect you would not believe how much of
you remains in this house. Your green plastic chair still sits on the veranda. The one with the
crack in the middle of the seat—the crack that grew each time you leaned forward to beat a
fly or tell one of your loud stories. It has faded now, the colour drained by years of sunlight
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