Bassey Ikpi - I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying: Essays

I NEED TO PROVE TO you that I didnt enter the world broken. I need to prove that I existed before. That I was created by people who loved me and had experiences that turned me into these fragmented sentences, but that I was, at one point, whole. That I didnt just show up as a life already destroyed.

The problem is that I dont remember much about my childhood and have only fragments of everything else. The things I do remember, I remember with a stark clarity. The things Ive forgotten are like the faded print on stacks of old newspaper, yellow and so brittle that to touch them risks their turning to dust. Pages left for so long that you cant remember why they were saved. These headlines have no clues; theyre just proof that there was a history, that a thing happened on a day before today. My childhood is all that ink-faded newsprint on yellowed paper, with only a few words, sometimes just a few letters, that can be made out.

My memory isnt empty. It isnt blank. It isnt dust or moth filledit is a patchwork of feelings and sensations. The way the air smells when a plantain is fried in an outdoor kitchen. The gentle yet firm way the breeze moves when a rain is headed towards Ugep. The subtle shift in energy when a visitor approaches the compound. I dont know if it was Tuesday or May or if anyone else was there. I can assume they were, because why would I have been alone, but I also cant assume because my brain doesnt remember it that way.

I feel like most people remember in orderfirst, then second, and finallylinear narratives like the ones we were taught in school. I could be wrong, my relationship with normal is tenuous at best. All I know for certain is that my memory is moment and emotion and then moment and then moment and then what I think could have been a moment because I need an explanation as to why my heart spins and ducks when the name is mentioned or when a story feels far more familiar than empathy alone allows. I remember the minor pains and extreme joysbut I know that my brain protects me by disowning the dangerous memories. Lets change this over, my brain says. Lets make sure that when we return, it will be less tsunami and more leaky drip.

This is what we do.

* * *

I REMEMBER THE RUSTED slide at crche, preschool, in Nigeria. The sting of iodine or alcohol when someoneI dont remember whotreated the cut on the backs of my thighs, that returns every time there is a fresh split or cut or scraping of a layer from my skin. The phantom paper cuts that go unnoticed until the blood appears and, with it, the memory and stench and sting of iodine or alcohol.

* * *

I REMEMBER MY MOTHER, her face like sun-soaked clay. Beautiful before I knew there was a word for the way her face glowed and how her smile hypnotized your own lips to lift and spread. Your mother is so beautiful, everyone always said, and I would nod because she was something, and if beautiful was the word, then she was the only one it belonged to.

I remember my mother, appearing and disappearing at will. In my memory, she arrived right before my fourth birthday. I recognized her from the framed pictures that lined the walls in my little bedroom in Ugep. A photo of her standing, smiling into the unseen camera, her hair a halo around her head. Photos of her with a younger, chubbier baby me in her arms or straightening my dress or patting my hair into shape. Her eyes were kind, but sometimes held a fear I didnt understand. She liked to grab me and pull me into her, not just a hug but a signal: a reminder to us both that I was hers. Not the aunties, not the grandmothers, not the villages. Hers.

One day, during her visit, she noticed that I didnt call her Mommy. Her name is Okwo, but others called her Eugie, short for her English name, Eugenia, and I had joined them. Eugie sat me on her lap and stared intensely into my eyes. Her pretty face set with determination: Mommy, she said. Mommy. Mom-my. She repeated the word over and over again, asking me to join her and so I did, both of us chanting in unison, Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. I giggled and clapped at our new game. She smiled and chanted with me. Once she was satisfied, she let me off her lap to go and play. I ran off yelling, Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! at the top of my lungs.