Stop Asking When I'm Getting Married! Dammit!

Source: http://goo.gl/BfFu1V

So! My twin brother, Diran, got married last December. It was a beautiful wedding and he married a beautiful bride, Folusayo :) (See pictures below).

And as much as I love weddings, this one had one downside: the funny looks I was getting from 'supposed' friends and family. You see, when your twin gets married, everybody starts to wonder when you too are going to tie the knot. 'Everybody' fell into the following general groups:


Frank Family: These were sincere family members, who honestly believed Jide was getting old.

FF: Jide, you know you're not getting any younger. Ehn? When do you want to settle down? Ehn? When are we meeting her? Ehn? Why is she not here for your brother's wedding? Ehn? Don't you know this is the best time for her to meet the family? Ehn?? You better marry now oh. Ehn?? Do you want to pay school fees when you're 70years old?? Ehn?? Ehn???

Jide: *shoots own head*

Party Planner: These ones were just looking for the next owambe to attend

PP: Jide, when are we coming for your own wedding na? Give us enough time to prepare oo. And we dont want Ankara, we prefer Lace...

Jide: *runs into a speeding truck*

Believable Brutus: On the surface, this group seemed to be empathetic to my plight. I felt they understood my pain about wanting to be free of all the 'conjugal' pressures, and they were pretty much believable...complete with sad faces and all. But behind the scenes, they also had their own agenda

BB:  'Jide, don't mind them jare. Take your time. God's time is the best. Don't put yourself under pressure, okay?'

Jide: 'Thank you Aunty,' I replied with a half sigh of relief

BB: 'It's okay my dear. Pele. But have you met my friend's daughter, Bisola? She is sitting beside me on the table, whenever you are free you can come and ...

Jide: 'Et tu, Aunty?' '*slits wrist*

Match Makers: These shameless ones made no attempt to cloak their motives. They went straight into business:

MM: Jide, wa, see this lady's picture on my phone. Do you like her? She is a very good girl oh. Hmm. A very good homemaker too. Omo dada ni, I'm telling you!. She will take very good care of you gaann. Oya take her number down...zero eight zero...

Jide: *picks up table knife and stabs self repeatedly*

Sophomoric Sage: These ones are the absolute worst! They are newly weds, who suddenly believe that, just because they're already married, they have more marriage or spouse-finding wisdom, than the rest of us brain-dead, socially-stunted, stupid, single folks - even if their marriage is only a week old.

SS1: Hmm, Jide, it's not easy oh...finding the right person to marry. You just have to trust God to make the decision for you. I'll be praying for you, you hear? Don't worry. See, before God showed me my wife ehn, I had a dream...

SS2: Ah ahn, Jide, all these girls that are around you nko? Pick one and marry na. Abi are they not fine enough? Na wa oh. What else are you looking for? You see, when you marry, the fineness will disappear! I'm telling you! When I married my wife ehn...

Jide: *picks gun and shoots both THEIR heads*

All these in one wedding!

LOL

Honestly, I found all these a tad annoying. I believe marriage, (i.e. when to marry, who to marry, how to marry etc) is a very personal something (I said 'I' believe. The word 'I' is also a very personal term. Biko, take note). I mean, it's bad enough that YOU think I'm getting old, and YOU think I don't have gehfriend, and YOU think I should settle down fast, but to come and blurt it right in my face, feigning contrived sympathy or whatnot, and telling me in supposed-to-be-humorous-but-pretty-damn-annoying ways to go get married quickly...c'mon! While we're at it, why don't you go ahead and zip my fly down and check if i'm circumcised? Since we're all about privacy invasion, we can as well go all out, no?

Rubbish and Nonsense.

Don't ask when I'm getting married. Don't hint. Don't haunt. Just pray. And wait for IV. If it comes your way.

C'est fini.

PS: I hear it's even worse for female siblings. If you're in these shoes, you all have my sincere sympathies.

Wedding Pictures:

Diran and I. Yes, they said I ate all the food, but truth be told, he didn't want any food! Whose fault?

There is a reason in Yoruba-land, weddings are called igbe'yawo, which is literally translated as 'The carrying of the wife'. As the legend goes, when young men in the village reach a ripe marriageable age, on a particular market day, they storm into the village square with the intention of finding a young virgin. When such one is sighted, the young man hurries to her, lifts her with his hands and carries her to his father's house, like an antelope caught from the forest. This is where the marriage rites of both families begin. This is why weddings are called igbe'yawo, 'The carrying of the wife'. Soon enough, the tradition was abolished in most villages, because, as it turned out, young men who were not strong enough to lift full-bodied and sometimes voluptuous virgins were growing old without wives; and also, plus-sized virgins were growing old without husbands, as there was nobody strong enough to to lift them! The Confederation of Yoruba Obas (CYO) convened an emergency meeting and unanimously agreed that this tradition should be stopped immediately. But the name of the rite was preserved as a memento for posterity - thus igbe'yawo is called so even until this day . It is rumoured that in some deep corners of the Ijesha kingdom, this 'barbaric' practice still goes on without inhibition.

See how fine Folsayo is. Diran just set the bar unnecessarily high oh, Chai! That's how people will come to my wedding and start whispering that after taking his sweet time he didn't even find fine wife!

This is what happens when the priest threatens to take away the bride if the voice of the groom isn't heard throughout the church: the groom sings with all his might! Hehe...

OK, so this last one isn't about the wedding. it's about the coming elections, and it's courtesy the small billboards at the mall. The message is pretty explicit. Please go and get your PVC and vote. Don't sit on the fence for any reason. Decide. Vote. And let your vote count. After you have cast your vote at the polling booth, wait for the votes to be counted and results announced. That's a sure way to ensure that your votes truly count. May the best man win.

God bless Nigeria!

Letters

16-09-2009 0335hrs

Where do I begin? Should I start from the beginning where you were calling me incessantly, and though I was initially wary, I began to love every moment of it? Or should I start from the middle where the love became mutual and we began looking forward to seeing each other first the first time? Or should I start from the end - yes there's an end - where an undisclosed and therefore an unfulfilled expectation resulted in bitter disappointments? Where do I begin?

Usually, endings create an atmosphere for retrospective thinking. So I've had more than enough time to think about what happened to us; what went wrong. I've analyzed, I've scrutinized, and I've thoroughly evaluated. And even though I make it a matter  of deliberate policy not to point the blaming finger at anybody, I'll have to take an exception here, and you'll have to pardon me upfront. Also, forgive me for the blunders that may exist in my words. I don't intend making this any literary masterpiece. I'm just going to tell it as it is...

---

23-05-2010 1743hrs
I wrote those words last year in my jotter. Then I was filled with indignation and was slightly peeved at the way you were behaving, and the distance you were bringing between us. I wanted to mail it to you, but, somehow, I never got around to completing it. Thank God I didn't, cos it would have simply complicated things further. I know there's a lot of things that has happened between us. Can we just let it go? Can we move on? Can we forget the past, the hurts, the pain, and move on?

Whats the point of being friends and loving if we don't get to forgive? Some times people mess up, and most times they make up. Please don't be a past chapter in my life. I want you perpetually at the forefront. It's too late to think of letting you go. You're already a part of me. Letting you go will hurt many times as much as this break you've put us in.

I desperately want my friend back, Sue Loom*. I need my friend back.

Please.

Me.

---

20-08-2010 0257hrs
Once again, I read my words, but this time I'm filled with joy. I'm filled with a variety of exhilarating feelings because you understood; because you took me back; because you accepted me. For this, I'm eternally grateful. Words cannot begin to tell the extent of the emotions flooding my heart. I'm like the luckiest man alive: I have you. Thanks for being there. Thanks for being you. Thanks for understanding the errancy of the human nature, and the clemency of the divine one. Thanks for putting the past behind. Thanks for sharing my present. Thanks for the existence of an anticipated future. I know you know I'll still mess up; thanks for sticking your heart out all the same. Thanks for being the greater person, better than I'd ever be. Thanks for loving me; even though you don't say it, because sometimes the words don't count, especially when the deeds are screaming loudly against your ears.

I love you back, for now that's all to be said. And I'll always love you, from now, even till my death bed.

Me.

*alias

Where is home?

I had a little argument at work today. The minor dispute was between me and some of my colleagues and the issue was about the concept of home. Diran, who is one of the most verbally constructive person I've ever known, was of the opinion that home is a psychological phenomenon. Using his quick command of the English language, he put it straight forward that where you call your home doesn't have to do with who or what is in there, but how you feel. And I totally agreed with him.

Arinze on the other hand, who is one very brilliant chap and who calls everybody 'fellow' ("Why is this fellow parking here??", "When is this fellow coming?") objected vehemently. He said, "How on earth can your home be a thing of the mind? That's not possible!"

Odunsi, also, who is my boss, joined the Arinze train. He said that there's no where on earth that can be compared to his village, in spite of any dearth of social amenities. "I feel totally at home in my village", he said.

The argument spanned our entire break period, and even spilled into our work time. Arinze was busy spilling words like 'roots', 'origin', 'family' etc. "Your home is your connections to your roots," he argued. "It has nothing to do with the mind". In fact he gave a very funny analogy. He said when one goes to the toilet and feels at peace, does that make the toilet your home? I couldn't help laughing, in spite of the jab towards my argument. In a little while the row subsided, and we went back to work.

On my way home, I had to reflect further on our heated conversations. Who exactly had the right definition of home? Was I wrong? Or was Arinze just bamboozling everybody?

Having looked at both sides critically and objectively, I came up with one conclusion: we were both right! The home has both concrete and abstract elements. Concrete in the sense that a proper home, in the ideal sense of the word, must consist of your parents (or children), or other memorable elements. It could be your favourite tree in the centre of the garden, or the smile on your grandmothers face when she sees you - something tangible should be part of what we call home.

But on the other hand, if we isolate these physical components, on their own, they'll mean nothing! What is there in a bloody tree surrounded by weeds?? Or in a crooked old smile with brown dentition having one or two teeth missing?? These by themselves don't have any special meaning, except those we give to them. In other words it's the feelings we associate with these things and people that make them special. It's the artifacts, and the emotions they effuse in us, that make a home a home.

Having established that both reasoning are sound, there is now the question of superior argument. Which of these two logically sound arguments is superior to the other? Two arguments may make sense, but one has to make more sense. To me the one which makes more sense is...(yes, you guessed it!)... Diran's argument - what i'd like to call the psychological logic!

It would be severely limiting, not to talk of unfair, to link the word home with family, or roots, or origin, or any of those other sentimental phrases my friend Arinze was touting. What about those with no family or no clear discernible roots? What happens to the orphan whose first conscious moments were in arms of an angry and dissatisfied social worker? Where would the orphan call home? Under the bridge where he was born and discarded? Or should the poor thing, in his quest for home, go looking for his parents who abandoned him?

Why am I even going too far sef? What happens to the regular kid who has strong roots, and origin, but who is grossly maltreated, or simply misunderstood 'at home'? The only place he would likely call home is the little corner of his room where he retreats to each day.

Or consider someone like me who has never been to his village before. I'm Ekiti, and proud; but if I get Arinze and Odunsi right, when my parents dies, then there's no where I can call home again. Kai.

Odunsi said whenever he goes to his village, he is thrilled, happy, content, in short, he feels 'at home'. But if I dare venture into my village square, I'd feel lost, confused, dejected and severely unhappy. What's missing from these two seemingly similar experience??

Let's look from another perspective: If home is about ancestral roots and origin, then half the population of the free world would come and celebrate Christmas in Africa, just because their great-great-great-great-(perhaps, even another great)-grand parent was an African slave. In fact, Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling author of Outliers traced his ancestry through his Jamaican mother, through his slave grandmother, down to his 'roots' to some certain Ibo tribe of West Africa. I wonder why I don't see him carrying his backpack and mosquito net every winter on his way to Naija looking for home.

I think I've written enough. And I'm sure you catch my drift. Home is where your family is; the place where your fondest memories exist. But more importantly, home is just where and what you make of it!