How The Homes of My Past Continue To Haunt My Life

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I was born into a second-floor flat on the Lagos mainland. It was the kind of flat with a living room that blurred into pale muslins of smoke whenever we forgot to shut the kitchen door before turning on the cooker. Outside the flat’s door, stray dogs and cocks bathed in the afternoon heat and rangy cats maundered through refuse for abandoned ponmo. In the mornings, I would rush out the flat to buy powdered milk and butter mints on credit from far mallam, a tall smiling Hausa man whose corrugated metal kiosk flanked our building. In the evenings, I would stand by my bedroom’s louvers to watch the neighbors perform ablution outside the estate’s mosque, a sea of plastic kettles scattered at their feet. It has been years since I set foot in the flat on the Lagos mainland. Still, it runs in a loop on my mind—a melancholic ad for a simple life of tumid dogs sunbathing in afternoon heat.

At eleven, I left the flat for an all-girls boarding school in the heart of Lagos. My parents loved the boarding school for its airless classrooms and their rare flair for churning out graduates who would go on to become household names. But the school’s dusty brochures left out its less chaste bits, like the hordes of girls packed into hostels like cold storage inventory. Girls who slept to the tingle of mosquitoes and the rhythmic thrum of rats scurrying across the ceiling. That we were quick learners in more ways than one—chemistry, and geography, and waking up in the dead of the night to catch midnight thieves and lovers. That we learnt to wash our pinafores in foamless water, to avoid the hideouts of brutish older students and the war path of middle-aged matrons who walked barefoot on damp earth and demanded reverence with their whips.

But the hardest lessons are the ones that stayed with me the longest. Like the violence that permeated our daily lives until we no longer flinched in its presence. The scathing words and fists we flung at each other with practiced deftness. The IT teacher with a thing for flogging girls on their ankles. The biology teacher with a thing for flirting with his teenage students. We swallowed each new violence like the well-behaved girls we were taught to emulate. We assumed the shock therapy would sharpen our blunted ends, toughen us up like prized bulls at the rodeo. Instead, the boarding school altered my relationship to violence for the worse—my earliest revulsion thawing into a stoic acceptance of violence’s ubiquity.

Some lessons came to me in hindsight, wearing the faces of girls I would never see again. Girls who disappeared into thin air or perfunctory marriages in the hazy years after our high school graduation. Girls who died on operating tables or tweeted their last words from the floor of a bombed train. Each girl, a bitter lesson about the human capacity to compartmentalize everything—but especially the unimaginable.

I would trade the boarding school for a shiny house on the Lagos island, complete with a carpet of foliage, a thatched gazebo, and a detached guesthouse that doubled as a gym. The shiny house would be one of many shiny houses in a gated estate of jogging neighbors who shuttled between Lagos and London to recharge their waning British accents. I would become a jogging neighbor as I followed my mother on long estate runs, matching each empty plot of land to its famed music producer or retired soccer player owner. At night, I would wrap myself in folds of duvet as I wrestled with memories of a different bed—thin and sagging in a sauna of sweating girls.

The shiny house was a makeshift classroom. Within its walls, I learnt of Igbo customary practices that once barred women from inheriting their late father’s property, and of landmark Nigerian cases like Mojewku vs. Mojekwu that outlawed such practices. I learnt too, of the cunning tactics employed by greedy kinsmen to circumvent the law as I watched my mother successfully challenge her disinheritance. Years later, I would draw parallels between my mother’s grueling battle for her late father’s house in Enugu and the institutionalized obstacles American women––and especially women of color––face in their quest for homeownership, a turnstile of manufactured injustices that run the gamut from gender pay gaps to discriminatory lending practices that keep homeownership beyond the reach of many American women.

At sixteen and freshly arrived on Texan soil, I spent my weekends camouflaged between Forever 21 clothing racks and the butter-scented back rows of the local AMC. That is, until I learnt that assimilation would not save me from the long arm of American immigration. That I was doomed to my nomadic life of gathering I-20 forms and EAD cards like infinity stones and begging America to love me back. The transience of my F-1 visa manifested in the structures I called home, a portmanteau of mid-range apartments that were no more than holding cells selected for their affordability.

My parents handpicked my first American home, a minimalist multi-level apartment in Houston’s medical center, for its proximity to the train. The apartment’s stark white walls remained untouched from the day I signed the lease until my inevitable departure. Our arrangement was purely a marriage of convenience. Rent for a roof. Fridge for a 52 oz. bottle of orange juice and cardboard pizza from the strip mall across the street from the complex. It was a master class in frugality, in assessing thrifted furniture for bugs before dragging them into my lair. For the first time, I was acutely aware of bills. Of the tumbling naira to dollar exchange rate. Of daylight robbery in the guise of international student tuition—a taxation of sorts for foreign born dreamers. I dealt with my ennui by bonding with other Nigerian international students over our shared diasporic disenchantment and moving into a bigger apartment in the same complex.

Three bedrooms. A revolving door of roommates. Nigerian girls who needed affordable housing and the promise of a roommate who won’t turn her nose up at efo riro. Peruvian postdocs sourced from the Craigslist haystack. A Korean transfer student who fed me Tteokbokki and Japchae, and swore I looked like Beyonce. Girls who brought with them achiote and wall art and lovers whose unannounced visits caused me to scurry into my bedroom for a pullover and a scarf. Girls who taught me to tiptoe across the apartment’s carpeted floors because my footsteps rang in their bedrooms. Who posted reminders on the fridge that dirty dishes were meant to be washed, not stacked in the sink as conceptual art.

When law school happened, I ditched the Houston apartment for a furnished apartment in North Philly. Its furniture was a muted grey, handpicked by my anonymous landlord for its soulless practicality. In the mornings, I grabbed my casebooks and rushed out the door and towards the SEPTA. At night, I dove beneath my sheets to shield my dreams from the mice behind the wall. The North Philly apartment taught me that home is still home even when the elevator is out, and packages in the hallway are stolen for fun. That a neighborhood stroll is still a neighborhood stroll when you clench your fists and train your eyes on muddied snow to avoid the unfiltered thirst of the men who linger outside the Rite Aid. I learnt too, that the American dream is still the American dream when America makes you wait on it, because the Nigerian dream is to leave Nigeria for anything foreign. That to be Nigerian is to be born with one foot out the door.

By the time I graduated law school, I was sick to death of the monotony of liminal spaces. So I fled North Philly for a no-name studio apartment in University City where the view from my skylight was populated by preppy Ivy league students traipsing the Schuylkill river trail, and young professionals hurtling in and out of 30th Street Station. There, I basked in the simple pleasure of renting a space without roommates, a quiet joy that was swiftly snatched from my grasp when an acquaintance asked to visit my place. I learnt that renting a studio is only cute if one is a broke college student, a New Yorker, or a troubled artist. Still, my studio allowed me to build a nest egg with the spoils of my law firm paycheck. It taught me that money can be a blanket, a weapon, a drug. That even if the radiator in a studio apartment refuses to heat up, money can buy me a hotel room and keep me warm at night.

When Biden won the election, I entertained the possibility of permanence. After all, elections have consequences for people whose homes are lessons. Elections mean a permanent residency petition may pick up steam, that on an otherwise unremarkable day in March, an envelope with a green card may arrive a mailbox. The green card—compact and cool to the touch—would be the hard fruit of years spent paying international student tuition and abominable rent to landlords who recognized my dollars but were threatened by anything foreign.

I rang in my freedom by moving to a Fairmount apartment in a high rise with floor-to-ceiling windows and Rococo trappings of western ostentation. If I stand by my living room windows and strain my neck just right, I catch glimpses of the art museum, a park, a storybook blue sky. Slowly, then all at once, I fill my new space with impressionist art, West African figurines from a Lagos art market, a larger-than-life Serax vase, and a blue tabby cat that demands my subservience.

On weekends, I look up houses on Zillow and allow myself the fantasy of permanence. I argue with old friends about the best neighborhoods. I make grand plans with the women in me who want a suburban house and neighbors that jog at the break of dawn. I have a different itch—a condo with 360 views of the city, a balcony with a hammock. We compare notes, the women and I. Philly or Houston. DC or Chicago. We flesh out the pros and cons, and I calculate the exact number of avocado toasts I must give up for my dream of homeownership.

The avocado toasts are never enough, and neither are my paychecks, each one slipping beneath the tide of mounting bills—rent hikes, and credit card fees, and that one health scare from last year. I course correct by working longer hours, a gilded smile stretching across my lips as I cavort around my umpteenth networking event of the month. I would give anything for a pay raise. Anything to lengthen the distance between me and my past—the stray dogs, the hostels with insomniac rats, a flurry of sticky notes tacked to a fridge housing expired fruit.  Still, the houses of my past inch closer to me at every stop, their crimped fingers brushing against my nape.

There it is—the familiar clink of a key in its lock. The scrape of metal on metal. A hot blast of air on my face. A hundred limbs pulling me under as I shut my eyes and wait, bated breath between teeth, for the houses of my past to tumble down on me.

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