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On Sunday, August 5, 2007, I attended a party in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on the invitation of a few friends of Sabella Abidde. It was the first time I had been to South Dakota, a relatively quiet state in north central part of the United States. Sabella, whom I have known for about ten years, had just returned from Nigeria where, a little more than twelve months ago, he had gone to live, we thought, permanently. We gathered at the only known African Restaurant in Sioux Falls, "The Palm Wine Thinker" on the 300 Block of South Phillips Avenue. The restaurant was huge and bustling with unbelievable array of whites, American Indians, Jamaicans and a few Africans eating, drinking, and dancing to high life music.
When I arrived, it was 7:00 p.m, an hour before the scheduled time for the event. Thirty-eight of the fifty people invited for the party, half of them men, were already there. They were sitting at a corner designated with a "Welcome Back Sabella" banner. Sabella himself had not arrived. We exchanged pleasantries and mixed freely with the other patrons, dancing and drinking. As we waited for Sabella, the men in our group kept whispering and pointing at a corner outside the front door of the restaurant. It took me a while to figure out what had captivated their attention. But when I did, I was captured: visible through the huge glass door, a girl, no a lady, no a charmer, was arrestingly standing by the door outside the restaurant. How could I have missed her when I walked in?
I had never seen a more beautiful girl even on the streets of Washington where you have, in the middle of the tourist season, a crushing landscape of shades, shapes, and shaking sides of ladies. I had never seen a girl more stunning as she stood under the bright fluorescent light bulbs by the door. She wore her hair short, close-cropped, and curly; the earrings, glistening nuggets of unmistakable diamonds, each the size of cowrie shells, hugged the sides of her face in perfect fittings; the tiny lines of eyebrows seemingly painted onto her face were, on closer examination, actually natural; as soon as her piercing eyes met mine, she immediately sent my thoughts to my pre-adolescent days when innocence and purity of thoughts were recognized easily by a boy in the eyes of his female peers.
But pre-adolescence thinking aside, her lips, embalmed in the most delicate coating of glazed fuchia lipstick, which was accentuated by her extremely smooth and cherubic cheeks, were, in my thoughts, an invitation to the basic instincts of a healthy man.
She stood erect, at that corner of the restaurant, wearing long, blue, embroidered skirt that hugged her skin with a very short matching top that revealed her belly button. I could clearly make out the outlines of her long legs under the skirt, starting from the hips to the naked ankles adorned with beads of African anklets.
Under her arm she held a small handbag that was apparently made with the same material as her skirt and her top. I watched her manicured slender fingers with subdued desire.
Finally, through the shoes, which also matched her skirt in color, peeped a pair of perfect feminine toes and such blemish-free ankles that often betrays a hint of what is sheltered from the naked eyes.
No wonder Sabella had warned me not to come with a date, insisting that he could arrange one or two for me. When the men saw my arrested interest in the girl, they went to work on me. With their encouragement, in fact outright prodding, I quickly went outside to introduce myself to the doll.
In hindsight, this was the easiest thing I had ever done in my life and, right away, I ascribed it to my good looks or was it my suit. Her name was Inatimi, she said. She had come to the restaurant expecting to meet her date only to find out that he had cancelled. She was just standing outside waiting for a taxi. A few very friendly minutes of conversation later, she agreed to join me and the rest of Sabella’s welcoming party. If I played my card well, she said, she would show me around town after the party. I was instantly high, already drunk from my own ego.
Holding her hand tightly, and walking like the king of the forest, my ego about to burst, we both strolled into the restaurant to the deafening applause of the welcoming gang.
This was when Sabella finally walked in. Sabella was visibly drunk! In all the years that I had known him, I had never seen him drunk. I had assumed that because he is a big man, he could withstand the assault of alcohol better than an average man. But here he was smashed.
As soon as he walked in, in the middle of the noisy handshakes and Naija-style loud expressions of ‘long-time-no-see’, I forgot, temporarily, about the girl sitting next to me. But after the others had said their greetings, I took my time, more to showcase my catch, pronouncing her name very slowly, introduced her to Sabella as my date. Sabella’s eyes lighted up. “Wayo’, he said in a slurred speech, “Inatimi is a real Ijaw name … this one is beautiful unlike those monsters you used to date … she deserves to know your real name. Forget that Wayo crap. Where did you find her …”
We ate. We drank. We danced to music. And all the while, I clung to my date like a Nigerian roadside police clings to a Twenty Naira note. I was happy beyond words.
After the usual Naija food and drinks and other formalities, we all settled down at the corner reserved for us. In lieu of a speech, the agenda required me to openly ‘interview’ Sabella while the noisy invitees listened and clapped. And clapped they did, as if their lives depended on it.
WAYO: Brother Sab, everyone knows that after living in the U.S.A for 36 years, you left the U.S.A. to relocate to Nigeria about twelve months ago.
SABELLA: That is correct.
WAYO: On behalf of all of your friends here, welcome back to the U.S.A.
SABELLA: Thank you Wayo.
WAYO: Sab, you look well-rested, even a little tanned, for a dark man. Naija must have been good to you.
SABELLA: Just between us, the mosquitoes in Naija were confused by my blood.
WAYO: Why so? You mean they didn’t bite you?
SABELLA: You are slow, Wayo. You’ve always been slow. How did you manage to pass the bar exam, anyway?
WAYO: Sab, cut the jokes in front of my date…
SABELLA: I’m telling you, after my 36 years of absence, my blood confused the mosquitoes so much that they couldn’t get enough of it.
WAYO: Were they female? You know that only female mosquitoes suck blood.
SABELLA: There you go! Just between us, I met a lot of mosquitoes, four at the passport office in Lagos, about twenty nine at different hotels in Abuja, seventeen at various restaurants, even five at the airports, all beautiful…
WAYO: Chei, Sabella omo Abidde, you don come again: you never change … mosquitoes indeed!
SABELLA: Wayo, are you a PP man or a PN man?. You know that’s the new thing in Naija now.
WAYO: That sounds dirty, I never peep, I swear I never …
SABELLA: Wayo, as I said, you are slow. The Perfectly Positive (PP) man is the man who is absolutely convinced that he knows all there is to know about Nigeria.
WAYO: Nonsense. That’s intellectual extremism. And who is a PN man?
SABELLA: A Perfectly Negative (PN) man is the man who is absolutely convinced that there is nothing to know about Nigeria because Nigeria does not exist.
WAYO: In that case I am neither PP nor PN. I am in the middle. Did you say that this is the nouveau Naija thing?
SABELLA: Wayo, I am a born again PN man. You can’t be in the middle.
WAYO: I am in the middle. I don’t know everything about Naija but I am convinced that Naija exists because I was born there and …
SABELLA: Wayo, you are slow, as usual. Are you familiar with the method of reasoning called the law of the excluded middle which, in its basic form, states that every proposition is either true or false. It states that there is no middle option.
WAYO: Yes, but I am also familiar with intuitionism which denies the validity of the excluded middle reasoning.
SABELLA: Yes, Wayo, intuitionism, which anchors its basis in mathematics, argues the capacity to directly understand truth without evidence or reason. Spinoza and Descartes are two of the philosophical priests of intuitionism. To me, intuitionism is a piece of crap.
WAYO: Sab, I don’t think you’re drunk at all. You sound too lucid.
SABELLA: Wayo, imagine your name to be NIGERIA. Now I say that you do not exist. But I think the girl beside you, Inatimi, whose hand you are holding, exists.
WAYO: Okay.
SABELLA: Now imagine that she is PP and I am PN.
WAYO: Okay.
SABELLA: Now imagine that you, the professed man in the middle, are preventing us, PP and PN, from coming to a final decision about our beliefs and our lives.
WAYO: Okay.
SABELLA: You then should be eliminated from the picture, shouldn’t you?
With that, Sabella pounced on Inatimi and started kissing her while she struggled to get away from him. The group of welcoming party began to clap and spur him on.
Mad like hell, flustered, and shaking with rage, I jumped between Sabella and the girl. Now Sabella is bigger than me but I am slightly taller. So mustering sufficient power in my closed right fist, I salvaged my bruised ego while protecting my date, by landing a direct blow to Sabella’s face. He reeled back and fell very badly.
The party came to an abrupt, unscripted, end.
When the police arrived, contacted by the restaurant manager, I was handcuffed and taken away to be booked for assault, while Sabella was taken to the hospital, with a dislocated Ijaw jaw. Sabella’s brand new wife, Inatimi, apparently brought to the U.S.A from Nigeria just a few days before the party, accompanied Sabella to the hospital.
All the people at the party, including Sabella and Inatimi, had been co-conspirators in the elaborate joke on me. I felt extremely small for reacting so violently.
While in jail, that PP versus PN philosophy promulgated by Sabella began to make sense to me. I kept wondering whether Nigeria actually exists, whether I am going to wake up and find out that I have been dreaming all along; and whether I am just going to die hugging the middle ground between the husband and the wife, the PN and the PP. My head is now all screwed up by this strange thinking.
The worst part is that I can't stop thinking of Sabella's wife. If only Sabella did not exist ...
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Posted by Robot| 14.08.2007 14:44