ERINOLA DARANJO- AJIBOLA
My grandfather asks me to bring his ogùn [medicine] from his room,
but I confuse it with ogun [war] and look within myself only to find nothing. Papa tells me the absence of war does not mean peace, so I return to grandfather to tell him I found no war.
He knocks my head and says, “iwo omo òyìnbó yi.”
I apologize in English and sit beside him. He looks out to the sky and then back at me. “Òjò ti fẹrẹ rọ,” he says through grunts.
But I confuse òjò [rain] for ojo [coward] and I begin to fall
because Papa tells me a man who knows not his language is like a coward. That a man who loves another man is a coward When Mama was still alive, she called Papa Baálé [husband]
but I confused it for Baálẹ [Lord], and in my dreams,
Papa became a God. Grandfather tells me that you have mastered a language the moment you begin to dream in it.
He calls me òmùgọ, a word he won’t translate
but I know is an insult by the way it undoes my name. So I swallow it with a grain of salt [iyọ]. The day grandfather started vomiting and convulsing
I kept shouting, “ogun, ogun, ogun.” I was calling for someone
to bring me his medicine but all I kept saying was “war.”