It is 3:00 a.m.; the owls and stray cats are out to play. In the room, alone, I feed on the last tablets of a sleeping pill, pain relief cum antidepressant.
I think it is the last day of my life even though I try to be faithful to the pills the doctor promised to keep me here longer.
In my head, someone knocks me steadily. I have put so much of myself out in the world I don’t know what not to expect. Everything is a natural disaster to me; it is like living through a tsunami or having a house built on an iceberg. Everything is OK, even jumping in front of a moving tanker. The knock comes with an order; whatever is signified by the knock is what the body does immediately.
Icicles of my diseased body suspended in air, nonetheless, fall.
And convinced no one cares to catch the falling body and because I love myself the most, I think more of how to bring all this to an end. It ends this night. It ends here, in the midst of these unopened bottles of lager beers and spirits.
Forgive me, Father.
It is Sunday. It is October. It is the anniversary of my cousin’s passing. This is not a confession, but they carried the body, in a casket, shoulder high into the angry weather.
And as everyone gathered round the grave, his property was discarded. His clothes were burned. Both the spoons and the last plates he ate with were all thrown—everything, into a latrine. His siblings kept wiping a tear from each other’s eyes. It was an unfortunate death, so no one called in a priest to pray over his corpse before the grave was covered. I remember the old men shaking their heads and lamenting on the huge number of things the earth swallows. He was such a handsome young man. Wow. How did this fine boy end up this way? It’s a pity. Youths of nowadays—leave woman, no!
Even as everything about him was discarded, family members were careful not to have direct contact with those items. There was a rumor that HIV/AIDS kills whatever is in its way—they were trying as hard as they could not to be in the way. And because of this, the Igbo coined “Obiri na aja ọcha” to mean “HIV/AIDS,” which literally means “it ends in the grave.” Meaning: there was no remedy.
Everyone was dying. Everyone was dying fast, and the rumor was the same: AIDS was the cause of death.
Meanwhile, the first known case of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria was detected in 1985 and reported at the International AIDS Conference the following year. Six more cases were reported in 1987. And today the total number of Nigerians living with the disease, according to Nigeriafinder.com, is 2,600,000. Adults between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine have the highest percentage.
It was estimated in 2006 that only 10 percent of both genders infected with the virus had access to medical care. Only 7 percent of pregnant women got medication to prevent mother-to-child transmission.
It is dark today. In the room I am in, the ghosts of men I never saw are in a conversation with me. The door unhinges itself; we are alone in the dark, facing the emptiness that comes with darkness. The first ghost, Robert Rayford, starts talking. I know his story by heart but not his voice.
Robert was fifteen years old in 1969 when he first walked into a Saint Louis hospital with a rare health condition. The doctors had thought it was chlamydia, common among sexually active gay men. For fifteen months the doctors gave their all to save him, but he was exhausted.
It wasn’t until May of 1981 that Dr. Michael Gottlieb of the medical school of the University of Los Angeles reported the first cases of AIDS. The victims were “five young men, all active homosexuals.” They were suffering from an unusual pneumonia called pneumocystis carinii. The number of people dying of this that year rose, but HIV would not be identified by scientists until 1984. And eighteen years after the death of Robert, in 1987, the New York Times ran a story: “Boy’s 1969 Death Suggests AIDS Invaded U.S. Several Times,” confirming signs of AIDS virus found in the stored tissues of Robert. Robert Rayford became the first known person to have died of AIDS complications in the United States.
Three years after AIDS got a name in the United States, the renowned Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera, was found “feverish, dehydrated, out of breath . . .” in his flat, by his lover, Flora Veit-Wild. He died two days later on August 18, 1987. But that was after a family doctor confided in Flora that Marechera had an AIDS–pneumonia-related ailment and was afraid Marechera had a few more days to live.
Freddy Mercury, the front man of the rock band Queen, died of the same ailment in 1991. And on the 2nd of August, 1997, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, age fifty-eight, followed suit in Nigeria.
It has started raining, but my companions are still here. I am freezing.
At 8:27 a.m., the earth finally welcomed him into her embrace, swallowed what was left of him. Even though he had been buried by now and his belongings burned or discarded, I was still not allowed to come close to the room he breathed his last. Who knows, the air might have carried some of those viruses.
That was October of 2007. Along with Freddy, Dambudzo, Fela, and Robert, I am exorcising his ghost. He was my cousin.
I frequent the hospital.
I am always in an examination or consultation room. Many things bring me to the hospital, but I am young and my people think the only thing that could bring a young man to the hospital all the time is testing positive to the virus.
After the 2006-07 AIDS epidemic in Nigeria, people have unconsciously schooled themselves in the act of poke-nosing into people’s privacy, probably to know whom to avoid or not. The stigma is a web that traps every soul willing to pull through the realization of the virus.
Every time I sit to think about my life: mental illness, retinitis pigmentosa, cardiac condition, and queerness, I am forced to think also the possibility of testing positive even when I haven’t been exposed to means of getting the disease. There’s so much stigma surrounding carriers that whenever I think about life in general I feel God is a river and when we want we can run to him for drowning.
I have sat through counseling at the hospital with friends who came out positive, and others who came out negative. I have done this as a way of reminding myself that nobody can be too careful; it might be me sitting before the doctor discussing prospects and healthy lifestyles.
Visibility quickens a death sentence, I wrote somewhere. HIV/AIDS is not a death sentence, at least I have reasoned with my friends, pointing to the Ebola outbreak, how everyone who came in contact with a carrier died in fewer than three days.
In the hospital people are encouraged to be out, tell friends about your status. What I haven’t heard most of the times I visited the hospitals with friends for counseling is: you’ll be stigmatized after coming out.
This is not different with someone who is queer and coming out to friends or family. We are encouraged to say things. No one has died from seeking understanding. That’s an old saying. David Kato in Uganda paid the ultimate price for being queer and HIV/AIDS positive. He was hacked to death, but before that, a local paper known as Rolling Stone had listed him, along with his residential address, as one of the Ugandan gays to look out for.
Identity comes with its own unsteady promises.
In Nigeria, it is found that oftentimes it is not the disease that kills the patients but the stigma. People die from overthinking, and other times, they commit suicide as a result of stigma. My friend F kept asking, “What do I tell people now?” “Who will hang out with me anymore?” and true to his questions, everyone he once knew or shared intimate moments with started leaving his life.
Gay men are mostly at risk of contracting and dying of AIDS in Nigeria, most African countries especially. And the worst? There are few organizations willing to offer tests and counseling.
Once you have an ailment or belong to a marginalized group, you become characterized and known and addressed by it. If you own it, it defines you all life long.
The people who suspect I am an AIDS patient have all gone out of my life and never came back. They left telling other people.
There are memories I’ve made I do not want to remember anymore. There are things I’ve seen and wish I could un-see and forget, like the fact that in the end we all die alone.
In the months preceding his death everyone he once knew stopped visiting. He was mostly alone except when a family member brought him food to eat. He spoke to himself and was sure that no one in the world wanted him even when we assured him otherwise.
Don’t believe that doctor, I am not a carrier, my cousin told my mum.
I know, she said.
There were tears climbing down his cheeks.
We tell lies to feel good about everything or the situation. That was his lie, maybe for a moment, to keep saying it like the Bible advised till the lies become your truth: the positivity you seek. This allusion would have been meaningful if my cousin, too, believed in the Bible and its teachings.
They are all running from me because they think I have it.
That’s why they’re called friends, mum raised her head and spoke, looking into his eyes. I was at the door peeping. I am here for you. We are family.
He stopped taking his medications the weeks he started getting better. He had lost sense of what the world held for him. Even if he got better who would accommodate him? He liked women and worried what the ladies would say about a man like him.
I had sat with him, listened to stories of his adventures when he was my age. When he got older, he was chasing happiness. In between narration he’d exhale, saying: Nobody cares. They don’t really care about us. Nobody gives a fuck whether we live or die.
That Sunday evening, he died in the presence of his older sister, my mum, and me. He was swearing and cussing everyone he thought mistreated him, the people that couldn’t stand up for him. That was how my mum knew he was going to die, that anger, the regret (he did regret thinking friends were like firewood gathered in the dry season for the rainy days), everything. He closed his eyes, slept, and never woke.
I am looking for an escape. I want this to be an escape story. I want this to tell a story of how instead of dying a boy found a way, but this isn’t fiction; a boy is dying and dying fast this night.
My cousin, who gave the family so much pain when he was living, three weeks before his death said he was tired of being a burden to the family. Maybe he had done the maths, the amount spent on drugs and the hospital bed that had inscribed his name for months before the diagnosis revealed it was AIDS. Other hospitals had found malaria, cold, typhoid, ulcer, sore throat, etc., but never the main thing. Whoever could afford the antiretroviral drugs in 2007 was wealthy.
At the hour of death, regrets keep us company, lamentations ensue.
I am in the hospital for an appointment with my cardiologist.
There are many of us here, squatting with the odors coming from everywhere, but I am thinking about my life as a queer Nigerian writer living with diseases that have freely allowed people to place me in other boxes they think I belong without me consenting to the placement. I am thinking of their biasness. I am thinking of the shame that comes from living with those diseases, especially the one that comes from trying to defend that I don’t have a particular disease I am accused of.
If most of these patients knew the freedom that comes with their ailments, regardless of how deadly, if only they knew how hard it is to be queer and positive to a disease everyone doesn’t want to associate with.
If only . . .
Someone eyes me, I smile, but not like a gold digger who found oil, not even like someone who won all their bets, rather like a grave eyeing a proud youth.
I nod in greeting, wondering if this man is one of my potential assassins, being careful not to show much teeth else a fellow patient diagnoses, arrests me, and calls for execution.
I am most frightened and writing this because I saw a tweet about a gay boy being gang-raped during his visit to a date’s place; someone he had met on Grindr. Some organization has stepped in to help, but nothing would be done to get justice for the said boy because after everything or legal battles, said boy would still end up in jail with his rapist (there’s a section of the constitution that clearly states this).
On the anniversary of my cousin’s death I am echoing his “they don’t care about us” sentiment. I am watching everything work against me. In the paper they keep printing: “All forty arrested gay men tested positive for AIDS”; “Look at what AIDS has done to this gay man”; “Be careful how you mingle with your gay friends, they may infect you.”
Though some of these are click-baits, I am tired of the shaming, the caricature, and the silence.
Silence is a luxury we can’t afford.
I am here because tomorrow is such a long time to live in this country of ours.
Should I show you my stripes? Do you think pain is a clear work of imagination and therefore nonexistential? Do you want me to dance naked? See, you are not as tired of this narrative as I am of the memory and the sad reality that this will keep happening if silence is the only language we speak and understand here.