*
I map the route for my walks within days of moving to a new place. My favourite coping mechanism, walking is a relic from my climb out of a decade-long dysthymia. Here, too, despite the cold, wet weather pattern more fickle than a toddler’s sense of their best food, I walk. Not scientifically validated perhaps, and less reliable under these meteorological conditions, but how readily I embark on a walk is a self-assessed indicator of my anhedonia level.
Exiting the block where I currently occupy a shoe-box-sized apartment, I veer off the road to join a tarred path, obviously delineated for foot and cycling traffic. I stay the course of this path every time despite the instinct, when I first laid eyes upon this vista, to race hither and thither on the rolling expanse of grass, and burst into my rendered-in-a-Yoruba-woman’s-voice version of “The Hills are Alive… with The Sound of Music.” I do not do it, of course – all such impulses stay firmly within my imagination. On these tribute exercises to my sanity, as in the minutiae of my life, I keep my feet firmly planted in reality.
The trees still held onto their leaves when I first got Here, adding a majestic touch to the colour palette that nature and careful human landscaping produced. The leaves drop over the coming weeks, in a collage of greens and yellows and burnt orange I’d only ever read about in books, and seen on screen. I photograph this fascinating transformation. Trees shedding in layers. Not unlike bashful Muslim girls, raised on a lifetime of chastity, suddenly metamorphosed into brides saddled with the responsibility of keeping a husband satisfied. I take very few pictures of their nakedness, careful to bathe the frames of their vulnerability in bright glows of weak sunlight.
Soon, there is nothing left but the starkness of winter, my first.
Ignoring the row of student accommodation on my right, I catalogue the spread before me. The song-inducing hill at the top receives me as always. It descends with me, sloping faster on its downward trek, until I am at the midpoint of the path and, suddenly, on higher ground. Where everything of the land that has dropped off around me, as far as I can see, is covered in an unfamiliar lush green.
Grass is a rarity Where I Am From. Tropical rainforest lost the battle to Africa’s largest economy, and every surface in cities is either brutally developed or a neglected wilderness. There, too, where I came from, grass is only ever of the artificial, bottle green variety. Plastic and fake, or the cultivated-in-a-greenhouse version that always, always withers under the scorching desert sun.
Unless I am running late for something relevant to the reason why I am Here, I pause at this midway point, in an attempt to take it all in. To live in the moment, smell the roses. Different clichés for another coping mechanism, one that is much harder for a recovering workaholic to implement. Ukiyo in Japanese, ‘detached from the bothers of life’, is yet an aspiration. I try anyway.
My path terminates abruptly at a junction between two ugly concrete buildings, the kind that are done so well Here. A drip of questionable source is liable to fall on the head of the unsuspecting traversing this intersection. I’ve become adept at keeping my bountiful clothes unsplashed, moving my body through a series of sleuth motions simulating the love interest of a rakish PI in a Hitchcock movie.
Ignore the folly, Dearest Bewildered Reader, I digress.
The lawn separating these two structures boasts a criss-cross network of footpaths – I decide which to take at random – and a rain-replenished puddle at the centre of the long, main one. Larger puddles hide beneath the grass. Depending on the time of day, there are often men, too, with uniforms the unnatural green of reflective jackets marking them as responsible for the ‘nature’ I so enjoy.
Some time into the not-fun season called winter Here, sudden upshoots of plants I’d have thought were lemon grass, back Where I Am From, appear on the lawn. Darker, they grow in sprawling clusters and, later, spout a spread of lovely flowers in an eye-catching yellow. I wonder if nature or the men planted these not-lemon-grass. I consider asking the men the name of the flower, then I decide I don’t care. The flowers die out within a few weeks.
Daffodils, I will learn later, survive only a short while after blooming, but their bulbs self-propagate for three to five years. I remember thinking there was a parallel to be made there, a lesson I did not feel curious or clever enough to explore. Some symmetry, between me and the flower. Both trying to survive in the coldness of Here. Both burning briefly, bright and brilliant, flaming into a burnout. Both able to self-propagate for just so long.
By now, I have traversed whatever path I chose to the end of its course. I am at a crossroad. Left would take me down the longer, more scenic route that promises the allure of a lakeside promenade, a great selling point of this campus. Right is another kind of dead end; through more ugly buildings or into a shop with products I can barely afford. At this reminder I do not need, of the folly in giving up a life and career for the wild goose chase that led me Here, I make the only choice open to me.
I keep walking.
*
I self-diagnosed my major depressive episode within months of moving There. Vagaries of nation statehood and their need for visas, for a certain class of people, kept me apart from my family that first year. Low mood, loss of appetite, and escaping into sleep all seemed a natural response to this forced separation. It took a while to recognise.
Theory in medical jargon and well-packaged tales from popular fiction do not prepare one for the reality of depression. Until they came visiting, these symptoms had been interesting concepts that happened to other people, a Western phenomenon. People like me, from a long line of strong Yoruba women, do not have those problems. We are too busy surviving, carving the lives we want for ourselves and our progeny. So I thought. So, acceptance took a lot longer.
Maybe someday, when the collective “we” address the weight of women’s mental health burdens, we will acknowledge the domestic tethers that keep us there. With so much dependence on them, we rarely have other options than to shut up and show up. By the time my family joined me, I convinced myself I had beat ‘it.’ With my self-imposed regimen of exercise and dancing, increased human contact and journaling, tahajjud and du’a. I had gotten ‘better,’ moved on.
I would cycle through dysthymia and bursts of depressive episodes for the next decade, too ‘busy’ to seek help. Behind a front I imagined was steel; a brittle, shiny surface in reality; I built the life I thought I wanted. In a land four thousand miles from Where I Am From, I laboured in the assembly line style career that capitalism made of the so-called most sacred of professions. I groomed the little humans I birthed, the ones who grew steadily to tower over me. Nurtured their minds that became astute enough to ask, ‘but how are you, Mummy?’
Because they, too, could see it. The fog. Anhedonia. Such a pretty word for my ugliest depressive symptom. A thick blanket of grey cocooning me from…everything. Robbing me of feeling. Joy, purpose, meaning. Life.
And the fog? It hovers. Descending periodically, denser, more frequently, becoming harder and harder to push back, it blocks out the shine. Each encounter steals something from me; naivety, spontaneity, optimism. Hope. And it is tenacious, the last to let go. Even after you break, seek –then struggle to accept – help. Mind ‘wounds’ leave disfiguring scars, scabs of dead tissue take the place of previously vibrant living cells.
For the Muslim woman, it is arguably worse. The building of the home, the continued propagation of the ummah, has long been made our exclusive prerogative, a burden we shoulder with nary a demur. After all, the Muslim is always grateful. I, too, have long accepted the unsolicited burden of representation, of inspiration – on account of my job, my dressing, my parenting choices. When you are a niqabi homeschooling Mum, a doctor ma shaa Allaah, no one can see you break.
This, ironically, makes anhedonia easiest to hide. Particularly if you live There, where I came from. That unique mix of Islamic customs, traditional close-knit Arab tribal system and individualistic hyperconsumerism, all of which leaves the ‘expatriate’ isolated. You go to work and drink qahwa with colleagues that never become friends, in all of the years you deliver babies together. You return home and attend to your own kids; there’s no one else to do it. Then you withdraw into the privacy of your room, and stare into the void that is your life.
So, you learn to perform joy. To answer perfunctory ‘how are you?’s with a smile, To say alhamdulillaah at appropriate times. Because ‘you are strong, managing to do all that!’, no one probes what ‘fine’ entails. You fool your family back home for years and years and years. All the while anhedonia hollows you, leaves you empty; a shell.
My unravelling began when the world plunged into a dystopian novel. In 2020, unlike everyone else, I experienced the kind of calm I hadn’t lived for years. As governments fumbled and people died in exponential numbers, and capitalist greed threw a harsher glare on the world’s inequalities, my mind was the clearest it had been for a long time. Away from the job, the home, the million daily activities and everyone who ‘needed’ me, by the global travel ban that trapped me in my mother’s guest room for six months, that clarity had been blinding.
I hated my life.
There was no returning the water to the calabash after that. Nothing, not the expensive therapist, or the more exorbitant productivity coach, worked. I prayed, I journaled, I affirmed. I danced myself into YouTube’s top 0.1% Pentatonix fan position. I took the kids on the maybe-someday trips left too long – repeated pilgrimages to the haramain and to extortionate resorts at the heart of Al-Ula.
I walked. Hour-long strolls, watching the sun rise over the winding streets of my neighbourhood. Until someone called the police on me because There, no one walks. Not everyday at dawn. I moved further afield, having the luxury of the beach of Jazan all to myself because There, beach visits – like most social activities – happen at night.
I hid out in cafes on my days off and I wrote.
Eventually, I gave up, accepted the inevitable, finally acknowledging that whatever I’d been seeking – belonging, acceptance, Home – was no longer There. I left the job first; I’d come, I’d done it, I had been thoroughly conquered. Then I left the house: my gorgeous four bedroom with multicoloured glass chandeliers and a divine bathtub. Finally, they came for the visa.
And I left There, too.
*
‘You are too modest!’
It is an almost-accusation I’d heard countless times before. Myself and the industry mentor my university career central linked me up with are discussing my options. After two decades of clinical medicine, I was exploring a different career path, hoping to avoid returning to the noose physician burnout saved me from. She is justifiably frustrated with how little hope I place in my prospects. I am justifiably despondent over the number of “although your qualifications and experience are commendable…” emails I’d received.
‘I’m a Muslim woman,’ I retort. ‘It kinda comes with the territory.’
My standard quip, this isn’t a lie, just not the entire truth. As the person who has to write out my professional CVs and writer bios, I am not oblivious to how I come across on paper. There’s something about the sheer magnitude of what we have to achieve in order to practise medicine in modern times that, laid bare, would wow all but the most cynical people. I’d brought the same ethics into my creative life, with the single-mindedness of voracious craft learning and profuse output. At the risk of sounding immodest, I know I am accomplished. This is more than some expect of a woman who presents like I do. To many, sometimes even ourselves, Muslim women are expected to be, as a default to modesty, under-achieving.
Being Here makes this expectation a double-edged sword. I am often met with astonishment for doing what anyone else with my training and experience could. Yet those achievements seem to count for little, against the unarticulated bias of a people too polite to acknowledge what my presenting so differently means for how I experience being Here.
It is in the little things; it is in the big things. Like falling flat on my face in a crowded university square and everyone walking around me without a word or gesture of assistance. Like receiving feedback, unironically, on how “brave you are to write something so outside of the western experience” from peers who pretend not to see me outside the classroom. Worst of all the things, little or big, is the questioning of myself.
If any of this is real. If it matters. If I am overthinking.
I went left at that crossroads at the end of my walks, once. I have since given up trying to explain the primal bolt of fear I experienced that afternoon. At unexpectedly finding myself isolated in place with only a pack of young men, and their dogs, for company. I eschew talking about why I avoid going into the city alone; why I haven’t visited the capital yet. Why I have a phobia-esque aversion for underground rail stations. Why, despite the hopes I had coming in, I now question if this is a place for me. Here, with its culture of aggressive politeness, during an unfolding genocide going on elsewhere that no one will talk about. I have seen eyes glaze over when I do.
To be fair, even I am still trying to unpack my triggers – to borrow another cliche – and their antecedents. Being chased, as a child, by a dobermann much taller than I was. The boys from my neighbourhood who formed a robbery gang that eventually killed my father. The group of university male students, “cultists” as we call them Where I Am From, architects of the second most traumatic experience of my life, one I have yet to write about. Another group, six boys a continent away and several years later, twelve and thirteen years old who beat my son into a head injury. The many reports, in places similar to Here, of seemingly unrelated attacks on people with skin that look like mine. That one girl’s tweet about not wearing a scarf while cycling so motorists don’t think she’s a hijabi and try to run her off the road.
The deep-seated anxieties I harbour about being Here are as varied as they are specific to the particularity of my existence. No one’s ever had to ask me, ‘but where are you from, from?’ I lay it out during every first introduction.
‘I am Nigerian, by way of Saudi Arabia.’
It is my way of heading off the perplexity others may feel at the intersection of identities I so loudly promulgate. Fully-veiled, Black African, Muslim, woman. My way of acknowledging the dissimilitude so we can, please for the love of God, move on to the reason for which I am Here. Which – I now feel the need to disclaim, Dearest Patient Reader – is not to take over anyone’s jobs (beyond what I need to survive), or replace any race, or – shocker! – to introduce the shari’ah, or islamise this ageing bastion of the Empire, or …
‘So, will you remove your niqab in the UK? You have activated your licence, abi?’
I am not sure what it means for my sense of validation that the person who most shares my fears about existing Here is my mother. Convinced that I would have been a brilliant success, had I not saddled myself with the face-veil in my early twenties, my mother hasn’t given up hope that this trip, or that next move, will be the one during which I abandon it. She drops hints like anvils.
“You are kukuma already licensed, their NHS needs doctors.”
“If the job market is so hard, look into Ob-Gyn roles.”
“You can just take off your niqab na. Only for work of course…”
She is a good woman, my mother. A woman of her generation; with all the glories and limitations that entails. First generation colonial-era education and a lifetime of Good Woman respectability does not prepare one for a daughter who wilfully chose the most restrictive of religious attires. Then twenty odd years later, goes off to ‘find herself.’ She is a better mother than the teenage me gave her credit for.
Even when she didn’t understand, my mother has been my stalwart pillar of support, the consistency of her path giving me the permission to meander down the many trails of mine. Even when I spiralled, and during the self-detonated explosion of my life, she remains, unwavering. Everything I am is a testament to that support – doctor, writer, student, budding social entrepreneur. To her indefatigable dream that someday, I will become the daughter she raised. Successful, but not too much. Demure, unquestioning. Submissive to a man, to tradition – not religion: faith, like my authentic Self, is too ephemeral for my mother.
I let her hope.
*
‘Muti’ah claims Ibadan as the hometown of her heart,’ goes one of the earliest writer’s bios I crafted. It was preposterous; Nigerians are only allowed ‘belonging’ to the earliest known place of their patrilineal heritage. I, Lagos born and bred to a man from Ogun state, have no claim to the largest city in West Africa. I moved there for my undergrad, and I haven’t been back since. For its size, Ibadan moves in slow-motion, a welcome relief from the manic pace of Lagos. What I remember of it is a frozen tableau of the Bodija market.
Market is overselling it; Bodija spills all over the road. Imagine if you will, Dearest Visiting Reader, traders, unable to afford the local government rent on stalls, displaying their wares in the most innovative ways. Spread out on wheelbarrows, in trays balanced on heads padded with osuka, or right there on the road. There is no space here to regard traffic – foot, vehicular or okada. Bodija is a lesson in the patience of motion.
My hours of trudging through Bodija, repeated ordeals performed over the length of my years in the city, were affirmation that I’d left my sheltered Aje-butter upbringing behind. Mired in mud, to the ankles or midcalf, on rainy days. Enduring the heat, noise and smells of humans in too close proximity on dry days. Braving jeers at my attempt to haggle in my mi-de, mi-de version of Lagos-Yoruba. Existing in Ibadan was an exercise in anything-can-happen.
In Nigeria, walking is an endeavour born of necessity or poverty. One I undertook, in later years, only in hopes that my wailing baby, strapped into a Mothercare baby carrier, would finally, finally fall asleep. There had been no mincing of words on the part of any random person I encountered on those walks.
‘Eleha, you be monkey? Why you dey carry pikin for front lai dat?
‘Poor baby, see him arm and leg hanging out everywhere.’
‘Why can’t she tie the baby to her back like women have done through the ages?’
I had wanted the Ibadan identity. The assuredness of history and culture, the audacity to be obviously different, a refusal to be cowed. It was the opposite of everything I was raised on: relentless modernity and upward mobility. The history behind that upbringing is one I am only now comfortably growing into. Attempting to shed the weight of its expectations, decades after I’d shed the Lagos of my childhood without a backward glance. It is painstaking, learning what parts of myself to affirm, what parts to move away from.
The woman emerging, by degrees since the unravelling, is in parts familiar as she is unknown. She is not the woman Ibadan spawned, who ran headlong to another place because nearly every woman There was, by default of law and custom, an eleha. This woman is not the one who spent over a decade living There, either, lost to years of career-ing and parenting, overshadowed by a dense grey fog. She is the best parts of them, and some others entirely new; becoming. I find every one of these women infinitely interesting, especially as I am immersed in the project for which I am Here. Engaging the history of the women who came before me has become the lantern with which I’m searching for Self.
The women who came before me inhabited a land with differing languages and tribes, and a tussle for domination going as far as the Egba-Dahomey wars. What I know of them goes only as far as my grandmothers, both of whom walked long distances to the lives they chose. One, away from home to embrace a new identity, a new people. The other, returning to the arms and home of the lover her parents disapproved of, the baby from her forced marriage strapped to her back. Warriors wielding education and economic independence, these women fought everyday. For themselves, and for us, who would come later.
Their story is as winding as the river that names the land and its people. The Yewa of my memory is vast; tumultuous and awe-inspiring. But the last time I’d been at the Yewa river, I was all of twelve years old. Now, on spring break from Here, I am playing tourist in the land of my heritage. The river appears shrunken. Snaking through the land almost lazily, in a stretched out letter S, as far as my eyes can see. Greenish in places it reflects the plants growing off its generosity, mud-brown in the places it doesn’t, the water carries an occasional smell of waste that can only be man-made. There’s a stillness to the surrounding that is almost eerie, total in the absence of current human activities.
I close my eyes, listen. Nothing. Near midday on a weekday, I am alone with the river and its spirits, and none of us make any sound. I cannot hear the water sploshing as it flows. There is no wind, no rustling of the leaves nor whistling over the water. Even birds and grasshoppers are quiet. Unlike the mythologies of old, the Yewa has no answers for me.
I open my eyes.
Maybe there are no answers. It has taken us – several ancestresses and the different versions of myself – over a century to get me Here. Walking through places as diverse as they were troubled. Carving out the lives we wanted, despite hardships infinitely greater than temperamental weather and others’ opinions of how we choose to live.
Maybe the answer is that I chose to live. That I am here, Here, now. That I keep walking. And that wherever I tread, I belong.
*
Muti’ah Badruddeen, a reproductive health physician, is the author of Rekiya&Z, a 2022 winner of the SprinNG Women Author Prize in Nigeria.
Longlisted for the 2022 Commonwealth short story prize, Muti’ah’s work has appeared in Isele magazine, the other side of hope, Brittle Paper, and The Shallow Tales Review among others, and has been nominated for the Pushcart prize and the Best of Small Fiction.
Muti’ah is on Twitter and Instagram as @/deenprogre
Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash