by John Chizoba Vincent
Sometimes I always get myself into some thoughts I’ll rather avoid on a good day because some issues are better left behind than talking or writing about them. Some other times, I refrain myself from these thoughts, from putting them on a piece of paper for other eyes to have them just as I have them in my mind. I just have to hang memories here and there because if I don’t talk or write about these stuffs, I’ll become frustrated within hence, the best thing I can do to help myself is to write them out on papers just to be sane.
Sometimes ago, I once shook tables of some hard feminists and the experiences I got from them was really interesting. The arguments, the fear, the abuse and many other things that came around our neck-to- neck chameleon arguments made me to understand more and distinct characteristics of these very species called feminists. I wonder how they will train up their boys if they eventually have one. Would they abadon them in the street for their counterparts, Girls? Or would they give them the same treatment they give to their girls? I keep running away from this but the more I run, the more I come face to face with the reality. The other day, in my neighborhood, one of them told her son to go and meet his daddy and stop bothering her. She told him that he belongs to his father while the girl belongs to her. I wondered why a mother was painting that kind of scaring picture to her son. I wondered why she made that clear enough to him that he belonged to his father and not her. It amazes me how these so called feminists throw some clothes against their boys and expect to have peace of mind in the future. You can’t eat your cake and still have it. The world is changing drastically and in the nearest future, women who called themselves feminists will start aborting their pregnancy if they discover it to be a BoyChild.
And this is exactly what will happen if I have someone like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as a mother. We’ll never agree to each other’s opinions, we’ll always step on each other’s toes because some of these feminists ideologies suck. They are out of this world. I will make her understand that the fact that some girls or women are sexually abused and assaulted by men, some men out there suffer the same thing from women. The fact that they don’t cry out to the world does not make them stones. Men are not truly beast, I will tell her. Definitely, there will be clash of idelogies and thoughts because I won’t bring myself down to dance to every of her rhythmic beats. Or whatsoever that proceed out from her lips, I won’t! We were humans first before we became people of different genders. we were birthed in different environments and these environments have some fundamental principles and policies which once stood as a guidelines through which our parents trained all of us. And as we grew up to become men, we learnt to make our own royal paths which may seem so perfect to our eyes, sometimes, abandoning those paths created by our own parents. I think from the onset, everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion and not withstanding, there are some striking opinions that one needs to look into. You wear some people’s thoughts in defense of what they concluded to be the real truth about how and what humanity should be or look like. Nature can’t be cheated, it can’t lie; it made man and woman and gave us insanity and sanity. Life and death, white and black, and choices to make. Nature gave us positions to suits our individuality and personality. Although the society betrayed us all, the society lied to the men. It made us look like super heroes who have no reasons to laugh, cry and express our feelings and emotions and still remain men or boys. Yes, the society lied to us all.
If Chimamanda happens to have a male child, I wonder the kind hand or method in which she would train him. whether she would give him the same opportunity she gives to her daughter, whether she will beat the drum closer to him or farther away from him. Whether those suggestions she made to Ijeawele would be applicable to the BoyChild. Maybe she would like to take total control of his emotions and feelings, maybe she would have him look desperate and sturborn just like her son, Jaja. Maybe she would abandon him for the honour of the GIRLCHILD. A boy like me won’t allow her to drink water and keep the cup where it suppose to be. We will have to argue about many things. Our philosophies and principals about these two genders won’t work for each other. We’ll have to break and re-arrange things and break again many times before we may likely come in term with each other on a longer head. Two strange beings can’t be living in the same room without having to loose themselves and gets mad at each other. We will have to disagree on many things ranging from the fact that boys are to be given attention and privileges also as girls are being given by the society. Boys have emotions and feelings; they are not stones. Patriachy is of nature, it is natural.
I’ll like to run into her thoughts as often as I can. Ever since I was a child I have this dream of protecting the boys from so many harms that the society has foisted on them. I don’t think of male children just like everyone out there does, It’s not the normal way you think of them, following your instinct as quickly as possible with your right mind. It’s something you can’t really understand about me. Something so perculiar with me.
When I run through my head over and over again, I zoomed drastically into the deepest secrets of boys whose mother are feminists, edging closer to something potentially more dangerous to whatever I’m thinking about. How do they keep Standing aloof from their mother? How do they try to balance their feelings and emotions together without that of their parent who happens to be a circled feminist? I try to understand why I’m always on the way thinking of these things , and the more time I spend trying to understand this, the more difficult and absurd the whole thing becomes to me.
The things I talk about faminists like her aren’t abstract and by logical consequences and understanding of what the contextuals are. But by context, when you choose to be a little bit figurative with these logical consequences or with what they stand for in their real self or by implication, I’m sure you’d see them in a deeper picture of who they are and what they actually fight against. Have this unsatisfying truth that we can’t change what is already designed by God, though — I can sit on the steps calmly and watch the world around the boys fainting into tears and sorrow, as you see me down through my words, looking steadily into the eye of the future, and would still be on the defending part of what I believe in. I can be writing about boys caught in the web of lies while she writes about the girls left unattended, smiling at an imaginary shy character she created just like Kambili and I’ll still be thinking about the boys birthed by feminists. I can be in front of people, talking about my life as a boy, teaching boys how to breath through themselves and not trying to harm girls, trying to stretch lips by evoking spittle-thread between boys and girls, yet I’ll still remain me.
I will ask her why a feminist like her created kainene (a woman like her) and allowed her to get lost in the forest without looking for her, why she would allow her creation to go into oblivion and still tell the world that she doesn’t know where she has gone to. I will ask her why Jaja has to pass through those pains just to protect her mother prestige and image, why? Hopefully, I’d loved to defend Jaja just like she defended Kambili, perhaps that may be the difference between being me and her. Or better still, defend the two, maybe that is a better way to serve humanity than defending one side of it.
I started running into these thoughts right from the day my feet stepped into University of Nigeria, Nsuka, and I scanned through her descriptions of the deepest part of her inner memories and I realised as much as my memory can figure out her thoughts then, she has no space for the BoyChild. when I first discovered the implication of being a boy in the world full of feminism and aggitations and protest and fight for survival and existence between these genders especially in a class dominated by eyes which only behold the struggles of female and not struggles and assaults of the boys also, I was made to believe I represented everything else those boys out there in the street needs. Voice. Courage. Bravity . Greatness.
So I began to writing yesterday, I ran out of myself to the street to sit closer to these boys born by feminists to know how they defend themselves against the flare and glaring state of their feminist mothers. I ran out of myself learning that boys birthed by these feminists learnt to carry themselves by them selves at a tender age. Life is bias somehow but the cruel
©John Chizoba Vincent
#The_Boy_Hero.