Nigeria: Time to Run

30 January 2014
opinion

I don't know at what age Soyinka wrote poetry to his first white hairs, but it must have been exhilarating or debilitating to discover the white intruders in his all black congregation of hair. I just realized recently that when human beings get to a certain age they begin to have intense conversations with their body parts. My mother has been talking to her knees now for some years. She suffers from arthritis, but she can still move around the house and the courtyard. She is in her 80s. She used to sprint like a cheetah after an errant impala, whenever I misbehave, which was often as a kid. My mother would walk miles to the market if there was no car. Then gradually, her knees and legs started rebelling. Like a sully immigration officer denying one a visa to attend a best friend's wedding in London, the knees said NO to some of her moves. She visited us in America a few years ago. Instead of talking to us, it was always about - If not for these my knees that say I wont go anywhere again, I would have done this or that.

Now I am the one talking to a part of my body, the way my mom speak to her legs.

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