You, stay in the closet. Make yourself invisible until the thunder passes. It may also never pass.
Stay quiet. No one should hear or see you. If someone knocks, don’t rush. Take your time, open your ears and listen. Is there just one of them or are there more? If it is a single visitor, stop breathing. You can only breath once you are sure the sounds of his heavy bludgeons hitting the floor are far enough from your closet. But you know better than me – they mostly come in groups. If that’s the case, lie. Is there anyone in this closet? Speak up. No matter how sweet your voice is, answer
with boldness and bravery. Say your name is “Nobody”. Say your name is “Invisible”. They will insist. Say you’re also looking for the same thing. What thing? Nothing. It doesn’t exist here.
Lie with confidence, lie with sincerity, lie with proudness. Lie no be die. No worries, lying is a virtue.
Your closet is amidst a hungry crowd, amidst the bloodthirsty fools.
Your closet: four walls + two. Try to keep yourself not crashing into the top nor the bottom. Mostly the top, if not, you’ll literally go crazy. There are no windows, no doors, no way to escape. Glory be to God for the holes. Make good use of it. Enjoy from your inside. You might think what you are going through is unbearable. You are right. And so what? You better dream. Dream is the delicate exercise of inside, not outside. Meanwhile the crowd can’t dream as one, you, you are better prepared to blossom in your dreams. Because you are alone, in your tiny closet, holding your thing in between your balls.
The inner surface of the closet is covered up with screens, ya many-many screens. The space is so narrow you can’t see a thing. Listen carefully. Here, at the level of your painful ribs, them say they can get married. Can you perceive the sweet sound of the bisou between those two men who just got married? Actually, one of those men has a womb. They will have a child, very soon. That child, of course, will have the same rights as all other children. You, Adaku, ma Oga man! You ma Aladji! You ma griot, you ma chaud gars, ma blessed unculu! You, listen, this I’m telling you is not a fairy tale oh. This be di reality Oh. This be something that already happened somewhere else, out of ya closet.
But please, don’t be in a rush, eh, stay well in your closet. Open your ears. Can you listen? Can you listen up there, just behind your bleeding earlobe? The left one. People are shouting. Voilààà! Them screams fill up the whole closet. “Same right for all!” “Equal right for all” Them di shout again and again. Oh don’t rush. Stay quiet. Don’t move: the drop of sweat from ya nose tip can fall down to the bottom of the closet and make a big noise. Something suspicious, fishy, shady. The kind of noise they might use as bait to make you visible. Yet, you should not be visible, at least there where you live. Now.
The people shouting on the screens are visible. You are not. Because you are in your closet. The people shouting on the screens are not doing that for you. How can they fight for someone they can’t see? How is it possible to fight for somebody you can’t even imagine exists, a ghost there in an invisible coffin?
You, just stay in your closet. Don’t move at all until the thunder passes – it may last your whole life. Harvest your silence like an invisible Ma or Pa working hard in the cotton farms, under a ruthless tropical sun. Whiplashes are even more visible. Does all this matter? Yes. Uhuh. It is a price worth paying to step into life.