A Self Portrait Of My Mother's Fear Painted In My Blood

Frida Kahlo painted my dying mother. Decades before my mother was even born, Frida captured her with the surety of her paintbrush. Isn’t that the wonderful thing about the agelessness of art? I look at Marxism Will Give Health To The Sick, that abiding encapsulation of clarity in the midst of pain, and I see the frailty of my mother’s last days. I see the shattered pieces of my love. I see the permanence of my grief and the abrasiveness of my rage. Some wrongs will never, and in fact, can never, be made right. Because death is an irreversible solitude that cares so little for questions of restitution.

When I look at that painting, I see my 15-year-old self in my shop at Mayor market, crying my heart out because I am afraid my mother is dying; because I am afraid that after all the pain she had endured to survive her disease, after all the novenas, after she stuffed herself with so many vegetables and fruits that she had to turn her face to the ceiling and press her eyelids shut to keep the vomit down as tears formed in her eyes; after I slit my thumb open while squeezing Limes for her to drink; after I went to Mayor to open the shop because we needed money to keep her on oxygen, instead of being on Christmas holiday like other children my age; after I promised her nothing would happen to her; she would die and all her suffering would have been for nothing. When I look at that painting, I see all the emotions I did not have the words to speak.

The day my mother died, I dreamt of the scar on my thumb. I dreamt of the night that accident happened, and how the blood gushed and splattered all over the tiles. I dreamt of the taste the blood had when I put my thumb in my mouth and suckled on it to stem the bleeding.

“Ogini?” my mother shouted from the living room. She came out to the veranda and stared at me with a tired look, like I had just complicated things for her, like a bleeding son was the last thing a dying woman should be worrying about. Anyway, she looked beautiful in that dream. She looked heavenly. Not misshapen and defeated, not afraid and puffy-eyed. She looked glorious, as though just like in Frida Kahlo’s painting, hands had swooped down to pull her up into the clouds, into the bosoms of eternal peace.

*

In my mother’s last days, she was terrified. I know now that she was terrified. Terrified of death and terrified of the future that would go on after she died. It is a deeply painful thing, to take on the memory of this fear.

The Christmas before she died, I saw that fear, swollen in her shrunken eyes, unconcealed. It seized me and shattered me. The last time I had seen her before that was the day she drove me to my hostel back in October. We stopped at a filling station because I had completely forgotten to buy kerosene and she had remembered to ask. At the hostel gates, she held my hands and she prayed for me.

“Jisie ike inugo?” she said, hugging me. It is hard to translate that into English. The best I can do is “Be steadfast” but even that leaves out the tenderness that Jisie ike has.

That was the last time I had seen her. That Christmas, I came back and saw a woman who knew, despite the dogged Christian stubbornness that swam around her, that death was at her door. I couldn’t hug her. Her stomach was swollen so big that it bent her spine backwards. Ascites, something about liquid building up into her stomach as cancer spread through her liver.

I kept excusing myself to go blink away my tears. I told her of my study plan, how I studied for five hours every evening, because I knew that would make her happy.

“No wonder you’re so thin now,” she said, and I smiled humbly.

“If there is one thing I’m trusting God for,” she continued, her yellowed eyes holding mine, “it is that there is none of my children that will not finish school. Don’t worry,” she told me. It was said so casually, so plainly. And I, too, replied plainly, as though my mother had not just told me that she might die. I excused myself from the room to go battle my tears. I was always afraid of crying about my mother’s illness because crying made it real, gave it a presence that consumed me. Throughout her illness, I only cried a few times. The first time I cried was on the day she called my siblings and I into the kitchen and whispered to us.

“I don’t want you kids to be worried,” she told us, “but I said I should tell you people. Ka ọ ghara ịdị ka.”

She had just found a lump in her right breast and the doctors were testing it to know exactly what it was.

“I’m hoping on God that it’s nothing to worry about. I will live long and see my children fulfil all their dreams. Amen. No matter what, I’m here.”

That day, I cried and cried. The next day in school, I found myself tearing up. My classmates would ask me why there were tears in my eyes and I would say, “I laughed too much” or “I don’t know, there’s something in my eyes since this morning.”

But generally, I tried my best to avoid tears, especially in front of my mother. I told her to stop crying, and that there was nothing to cry about. And I convinced myself of this, that she would sail through this. I had faith in my mother, more than I did in God. It was time that weathered my faith. Even her treatment weakened me. The loss of all her hair, the part of her breast that was beamed with so much violent light that it shrivelled into itself, the lines that were drawn around the infected tissue. The inversion that was the post-op scar. But then my faith recovered. She was put on remission, and I saw a ray of light. But this victory did not last long. When she started feeling fibrous growth in her liver, the fear returned. The doctors told her it was nothing. There was nothing there. But she knew it was not nothing. She took my hand and she placed it on her side.

“Are you not feeling this thing?” she asked me, and the fear seeped from her liver, through the stretch marks that ran beautifully across her stomach, and it clawed its way into my chest. She would have to take out money for a private diagnostics centre to confirm something she already knew.

I remember her telling me about it, about how when she went back to the teaching hospital, the doctor apologized to her. I imagine now all the motifs of that scene. The doctor’s off-white shirt, his collapsed face, the rotting walls of the hospital symbolizing the death of the poor. The betrayal of all those who could not afford to be listened to. And I imagine my mother there, glowing, ethereal, her face brutal, its roundness girdled by straight unforgiving brushstrokes. Her luminous eyes staring past the doctor and into the disintegrating walls, into the prospects of her own death.

*

I used to say to my mother, “Mummy nothing will happen to you.”

I am not sure now whether I actually believed that, especially towards the end. After she died, as my life came apart like an anthill battered by heavy rains, I felt relief. I have never spoken about this to anybody, the relief I felt knowing that my mother’s suffering had ended. It took me a long while to even examine this feeling wholly enough to identify it as relief. I just knew that that restlessness in my chest, that ache that came with being the son of a woman that was watching her body die, was gone. And in its place was a vast emptiness of being.

In her last days, my mother was terrified of her own death. For me, for my brothers and my sisters. She tried to allay her fears by gathering promises. She first forced my father to promise. He did not want to.

“Promise me this one thing,” she would say, and my father would shake his head no. “I’m not promising you anything. Nothing will happen to you. You will be here to raise your children yourself.”

But she pushed and pushed and pushed. Sometimes he scolded her.

“Ifeoma kedu kwanu ihe ọ kịtaa?” He said. “I’ve told you I don’t like this. Stop it.”

But she knew she would die. And she accepted it before anyone else did. She kept pushing and pushing until he promised her. The day my father told me about this promise, he was a little bit drunk and a little bit chatty. He was talking about many things and this was tucked into it. How she kept crying, “Ụmụaka m o, Ụmụaka m o” as the dread seized her. My Children.

“I told her that she will not die, she will be alive and raise her children. But peradventure anything happened to her, God forbid but if anything happened, I promised her that one,” he said counting it off his fingers, “that none of you will stop your schooling. Not even one. I told her even if it’s for me to sell everything I have left, even if I have to go hungry, I will keep this promise to her. Two,” he said counting the second finger, “That none of you will become maid. Nobody born of a man will ever maltreat her children. No woman will come into this home and maybe deny you children food or school fees. Even after she died so many people offered to take one of you, to raise you so that it will be easy on me but I told them no. Because I promised her.”

He says this with pride and I think of how she must have cried as he promised her this. How it must have made her death real, finally.

His promise was not the only one she got. She made her sister promise her too. That she would be a mother to us, that she would make sure we did not suffer the fate of the motherless.

When I think of how this sort of economic violence affects the way we care for our sick and the way we grieve our dead, I become enraged. After my mother died, everybody who offered me sympathy did so by telling me not to worry. That I and my siblings would still get to finish school, that we would not lack food, that nothing would happen to us. I could not properly grieve my mother because of this. I could not fully process my mother’s life and death because I kept thinking about how her illness and death was commiserated only in terms of money, in terms of how exposed Ifeoma’s children would become now that Ifeoma had died. It was like they were saying, “the dog-eat-dog world that killed your mother might not spare you. Prepare yourself.”

All I could feel was rage, though not at them. I wanted to be angry at them but this was what my mother thought about too. And because I was angry at something I could not even articulate, even my anger did not bring me any comfort. For so long, I couldn’t properly cry. All those emotions built up in my chest until the day of her burial when I looked into her casket and saw her blackening face. And even after that, my grief remained dysfunctional. Because I knew that my mother lived her last days in fear that she was “wasting” all the money she had been saving for her children’s education on herself. I could feel my loss, I could feel my devastation, I could feel the tears welling like an ocean in my chest. But those emotions simply festered without release and grew heavy on my spirit. Until I saw Marxism Will Give Health To The Sick.

*

The most beautiful part of Marxism Will Give Health To The Sick is not the colours of the heavens. It is not the sturdy face of Karl Marx. It is not Frida’s flowing green skirt with its white hem. It is the way Frida casts away her crutches. It is the way she is floating on the palpable hope of revolution. In that painting there is triumph, there is an ascendancy for all those who are trapped under this inhumanity. I read somewhere that she said of the painting, For the first time, I am not crying any more, and it made me realize that the biggest thing for me was that I experienced, through my mother’s illness, the dehumanization of the poor. I saw how much capitalism did not have a care for people like me, people who did not have money, people who could not afford to live. I saw how it was a rigid track, guiding the underclass, making worse every aspect of our lives, impacting every waking moment of our decisions. I experienced dehumanization and, at the time, I couldn’t see any hands that would lift me because no hands lifted my mother.

A society that provided healthcare only to the rich, a society that provided education to only children whose mothers could pay, a society where mothers died because the hospitals are hollow imitations of Hippocrates, is not a society that could ever look at me and recognize my humanity. It did not see my mother as human and it could not see her children as human either.

There are so many wounds in this story. Wounds that I carry with me, some raw, some putrid scars made less present only by the distraction of time. Many people say that with time the pain of loss gets bearable but Marxism Will Give Health To The Sick speaks of something more powerful, a transcendence from bereavement to power. Frida’s brushstrokes are as adroit as they are true. Only through socialist reconstruction will the poor get, finally, the right to life. So long as Nigeria remains beholden to capitalism, so long as our lives are ruled by capital and the profit motive, there will always be mothers dying for the crime of being poor, frozen in the dread of what will become of their children after they are gone.

I could not give my mother a better life and I could not give her a more humane death but when I look at Marxism Will Give Health To The Sick, I see that it was never my responsibility to do that. I was practically a child. And that aside, I am only one person. Of course I could not be a society to my mother. I know this now. I understand so much about her life and death now, as well as my place within it. It is such a complete picture, despite the fact that Frida never finished it.

I am my mother’s son. I am Ifeoma’s son. I am a manifestation of her dreams. I am her sweat and blood and fear. Her life, her death, her hopes, are patterns in the fabric that sculpts me. At my lowest, I think of her laboured breathing; I think of the way her retouched hair framed her face like a halo; I think of the way she danced, jiggling her hands, moving from feet to feet; and I think of her voice, or at least the idea of it, because I can no longer remember what she sounded like. I can no longer remember my own mother’s voice. But I know it will find resolution in the people’s eventual victory.

Ani Kayode Somtochukwu

Ani Kayode Somtochukwu is a 22-year-old award-winning Nigerian writer and queer liberation activist who lives in Enugu, Nigeria. His work interrogates themes of queer identity, resistance, and liberation and has appeared in literary magazines across Africa, Europe, Asia and North America.
His work has appeared in The Enkare Review, The Rustin Times, Gertrude, Ake Review, Bakwa, Plenitude Magazine, and Protean Magazine, among others. And has received wide recognition, having been longlisted for the 2017 Awele Creative Trust Prize and the 2020 Afritondo Short Story Prize. He was shortlisted for the 2017 Erbacce Prize for Poetry, the 2020 ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award, and the 2020 Toyin Falola Prize. His debut novel manuscript was awarded the 2021 James Currey Prize for African Literature.
He is the founder and Central Committee Chair of the Queer Union for Economic and Social Transformation (QUEST9ja), a radical queer collective organizing towards queer liberation in Nigeria. He was a finalist for the 2020 Prize for Difference and Diversity and was the recipient of the 2019 SOGIESC Rights Activist of the Year Award presented by the Initiative for Equal Rights.

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