A MAN IS A MAN

By Glory Otuto Mogbo

SAFACS 2023 ENTRY 4

You were ten when you saw the devil in your father.

His hands were blood-stained, your mother was groaning on the floor, and you saw the glint of evil in his form, the unnatural light in his eyes.

Now, you’re sitting in the dark, staring at your blood-stained hands and wondering when the devil will come to take you home. Deep in your soul, you have always known that home for you would be the deepest, darkest part of hell.

How does a little boy know that his soul is damned?

It did not start when you watched your father break your mother’s head with a pestle. The sickening sound of heavy wood hitting flesh was as normal to you as night and day.

It did not start when you heard your sister’s muffled screams and found a man on top of her that night.

It did not start when you used that same pestle to pound that man’s head and he did not make a single sound as he fell to his death.

It started when your father handed you the shovel to lay that last layer of dust over the shallow grave. He held you by his side and called you his son.

You heard the note of pride in his voice and felt the weight of his arms on your shoulders. For the first time, he was regarding you as an actual human being and not a pesky insect.

Your chest swelled and you wanted to remain in that moment forever.

Suddenly, your father became your hero. He beamed proudly when you slapped a girl because she refused to give you her pencil. He told you that women are devils that lure men to sin, that punishing them was a necessary remittance for their sins.

Now your hands are stained, and you’re waiting for the devil.

A leopard cannot change its spots.

What is love to a man like you? It's not in the smile of your wife, or the toothy grin of your three-year-old son.

When your neighbour knocks and tells you that your wife was revived at the hospital and chose to go to her mother’s place with her son, you are not surprised.

You are surprised instead when he seats beside you and gently places an arm on your shoulder.

You don’t know when the tears start pouring.

All you know is that you are tired of carrying these demons, of trying to change. But a man is a man is a man.

Your neighbour stays with you, telling you what you have always heard before. But this time, something is different. This time, there is a little flicker of light in your heart.

Like a hungry, desperate man, you crawl towards that light and you hold on tight. You cry all night and in the morning, your soul feels clean.

It’s two months later when you travel to Etche to look for your family. Will they believe that a man can change?