Memory has a wicked sense of humor.
I used to think it was gentle—that it visited in fragments, a picture here, a sound there, like small kindnesses. But, it never visits politely; it barges in, drags up chairs you did not set and sits down with you, and insists on retelling old stories.
Mine always starts in Enugu.
I was nine when I moved into that house. People called it a family friend’s home, but really it was poverty’s living room. Poverty was the main tenant; the rest of us were subletting. It crouched in the corners of the kitchen, where soup stretched thin over too many mouths. It peered out of the broken ceiling fan, whirring only when it felt generous.
It saw it rearrange itself into everything we touched—into meals of watery okra soup, into the fights about money, into the prayers that sounded more like demands than requests.
And poverty has a way of editing people’s morals.
Ijeoma was the eldest daughter. Too beautiful for that house, they said, as though beauty was not another form of poverty, demanding to be fed with good luck. She married a wealthy man, and the neighborhood sighed in relief—as though her marriage were a visa application that had finally been approved.
But visas expire.
When she returned home bruised, I watched her mother weigh tears against bags of rice. The balance was always delicate. One more tear, one more grain of rice. I watched love recalibrate itself under the pressure of poverty, until it looked like something else entirely.
Her mother would speak with a strange firmness. “Stay. Endure. He is feeding us.” The words carried both instruction and plea, as though she were convincing herself as much as her daughter.
I did not yet have the words for it, but I understood then that poverty teaches you to confuse endurance with love. It bends the spine of affection until it resembles sacrifice. It takes tenderness and translates it into transactions. A daughter’s body becomes a small price to keep the family fed.
Each time Ijeoma returned home crying, I watched her mother fold love into currency notes. It was arithmetic, cruel but efficient: daughter’s tears minus hunger equals survival.
And survival, there was not a triumph, but a duty. It was not celebrated. It was endured. Poverty did not allow for applause; it only asked you to wake the next morning and keep breathing. It taught silence to sit at the table like another child. It taught all of us that sometimes the cost of food was dignity, paid in installments we did not speak about.
Then one day she didn’t return.
The call came in fragments—shouting, static, silence. A hospital that smelled of disinfectant and despair. A doctor’s eyes that darted anywhere but at us. And then the word: dead. Her still body had injuries that spoke louder than she could.
I left that house when I was fourteen. But Ijeoma left with me.
When I fell in love years later, in the kind of University relationship powered by suya and late-night text messages, I kept waiting for the slap. Not from him—he was soft, too soft even—but from history. My heart had learned suspicion too well. He once asked me why I always braced when he touched me, why laughter with him felt like a loan I was reluctant to repay. I said nothing. I could not explain that I was living with a ghost.
I just kept finding myself searching his face for shadows. He was kind, attentive in that almost eager way teenage boys can be. He wanted to talk about football and movies. I wanted to ask: “Would you one day raise your hand against me?”
Of course I did not ask. I smiled instead, I nodded at his stories, but inside I braced myself. My friends thought I was cold. He would later tell me, after we broke up, that I had never really let him in. He was right.
Another boyfriend accused me of rehearsing breakups before we’d even started. He wasn’t wrong. Each time he smiled, I heard the echo of a scream. Each time he reached for my hand, I saw Ijeoma’s bruised wrists. He thought I was cold. I thought I was careful. Perhaps we were both right.
I had inherited suspicion, a generational hand-me-down. My heart learned to pre-empt disaster, to search for bruises before they formed.
I sometimes wonder: if Ijeoma had lived, would I have learned differently? Would love feel less like a trap door waiting to open beneath my feet?
Marriage is supposed to be the Nigerian woman’s final exam, and endurance the compulsory subject.
It is not even a question; it is a sentence you are expected to serve through the years, whether you want to or not.
By the time I turned eighteen years old, my aunties were already practicing their dance steps for my wedding. “See how big your breasts have become? Soon, we’ll come to dance and eat your wedding rice.”
I wanted to reply, “What if I don’t want to get married? What if I am tired of weddings that smell like funerals?.
But these are dangerous words in a culture where womanhood is measured not by achievement, but by endurance.
Sometimes, when I remember Ijeoma, I also remember my grandmother. There is a photograph of her in my aunt’s living room: black and white, edges yellowed like old teeth. She was married at thirteen, to a man she did not choose. When I stare at her face, I try to imagine what she felt. Was she afraid? Did she cry? Or did she bow to duty, believing this was what it meant to be a woman?
I cannot ask her now. I can only stare at her portrait and wonder how much of her story runs through my veins.
Because from all I have witnessed, tradition is a heavy load. Women are told to carry it until their backs bend, and then to pass it down to the next woman. And perhaps what frightens me most is not that the load exists, but how gracefully we are trained to carry it, smiling as though the weight were featherlight.
There is a kind of Nigerian humor that sneaks into even the darkest moments. At Ijeoma’s burial, someone whispered that at least she had lived in a house with a generator. At least she had eaten chicken more than once a month.
The joke was not funny, but it stayed with me, a reminder of how poverty forces us to find consolation prizes in tragedy.
I still pray. At dawn, when the world is hushed, I fold myself into sujood and whisper for clarity, for courage, for relief from suspicion. My mother tells me, “God knows your heart. He will send you the right man.”
But how do I explain that my heart is already colonized by memory? That I see marriages not as beginnings but as crime scenes waiting to happen? That when I imagine children, I also imagine teaching them how to dodge flying fists?
That when she prays for children in my future, I am still deciding whether I want them? That when she asks God for a husband who will love me, I wonder if love can survive poverty, if kindness can remain intact under the weight of tradition?
Enugu lingers. Each time I walk its streets, I see young girls heading to market with baskets balanced on their heads. I wonder how many will be told to endure, how many will confuse bruises for blessings. Marriage is not the villain; poverty is. But marriage becomes its accomplice, hiding the evidence beneath lace and rice and highlife music.
Ijeoma’s story is not unique. That’s what terrifies me.
Once, a friend laughed at my paranoia. “Not every man is violent,” he said. “You think too much.” He was right, but only in the way statistics are right. Percentages mean nothing when you’re haunted by the exception.
Love, for me, has always been a negotiation between hope and fear. Hope that maybe this one will be different. Fear that history will always find a way to repeat itself.
I write now, not to solve it, because some questions are insoluble. I write because silence is a luxury I cannot afford. Because each time I think of marriage, I see two faces: my grandmother’s, calm in her portrait, and Ijeoma’s, fading too quickly in memory.
I keep asking in the quiet,
What does it mean to love when poverty edits the meaning of love?
What does it mean to endure when endurance kills?
Perhaps I will never know.
But I will keep asking.
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