Omoonile
by Ijasan Adelehin
Driving by Agee road you could see for yourself, the naked man, adorned only with a necklace of strung empty peakmilk cans, parading his estate, muttering to invisible cohorts, chewing on dirt and tugging at a phallus that made women blush and men green with envy.
His name was Omoonile. It was not a name his mother had given him but one he had acquired and borne unconsciously as a man unknowingly bears a wart in the center of his back where his hands can’t quite reach. It was what the children who taunted him all day with stones called him. It was what the adults who drove past and spat in his face called him. It meant Owner of the Land.
The land in question was a sprawling three-acre dumping ground adjacent to the Agfa Photo Factory on Agee road. It was said that he’d roamed all of Lagos before finally settling there, cavorting about maniacally all day and sleeping in the large yellow incinerator at night. On this land, it seemed that he was utterly happy; it was his final camp, the end of a long sojourn through unimaginable realms and against insurmountable odds. Here he was sole proprietor, lord and king over rotten vegetables, empty beer cans and lots of waste paper. Here he was Omoonile.
Everyone believed him to be mad and they were right. He was as mad as dam backwards. Nakedness was his major feature and he’d been thus for almost twelve years since he escaped, according to legend, from some sanatorium; or, more likely, from the frail clutches of distraught relations. Twelve years of nakedness and as a result he was as black as soot. Even the whites of his eyes had turned a certain shade of black—a sure consequence of years spent frolicking open-eyed in mud and dirt with the ardor of a feverish pig. His hair had tangled together into long tawny dreadlocks which hung about his wizened and perpetually petrified face. And despite his descent into subhuman existence, his body was quite muscular, lean, and sculptured with a certain perfection reminiscent of Greek statues. He was a man who might have been something with the ladies had he been sane.
He was a man who had been something with the ladies when he was sane! Now all that was gone, along with the humanity which he once treasured. His former niche in the world, however small, was now closed to him forever.
The animals loved him, though. In the eyes of rodents and stray dogs, he was one of them, he was friend. When he scavenged a new heap of debris, they joined him unwarily; and if he suddenly burst into tears as was his wont, they rallied to his side to comfort him. And at night, when fear gripped him with its taloned hands, cold as steel, and shook him till his teeth rattled it was the animals that kept him company.
And, understandably, he had come to affiliate with them. The humans had shunned him out of their world with spit, stones and satire. They had over and over again asserted that he wasn’t one of them. They had with their inhuman actions pushed him into places he would rather not go, unreal places the worst of which he withstood as if in the eye of a tornado whilst centrifugal fiends pulled at his hair, taunted him and poked with pitch forks.
The animals never showed hate, disgust, judgment or criticism. They never threw stones or spat into his face and above all they were the best conversationalists. He would spend hours talking with a dog or rat or cat and subsequently, his vocabulary dropped from inarticulate—but humanoid—mumblings to barks and squeals and mewls. If a stranger walked unto his land, Omoonile would dart out from behind the incinerator, barking, his mane of dreadful locks trembling with excitement; and if he happened to step on a sharp stone he’d roll over whimpering.
Now, on a cold starless night in November, this creature of the dump heard a sound. He’d been sleeping in the big yellow incinerator with his head propped on a pillow of feces when the sound awoke him. He recognized it as the squalls of a child and it evoked in him a tense reaction. Omoonile peeped from his bed box. His compound looked exactly as he had left it, a seeming disarray of debris cresting and falling with uneven undulations. But then he noticed a new addition—a Samsung VCR carton. He jumped out of his incinerator and hurried to it. He opened it carefully and saw a pink baby wrapped up in a pink shawl.
Now, Omoonile was a madman, in the societal sense of the word at least, but he was a man nonetheless and amidst hallucinations and delusions, lack of judgment and thought reversal, anarchy of reasoning and manic-depression, he comprehended abandonment like no other. At the sight of the child he crumpled slowly into tears—he, Omoonile, probably deserved to be abandoned for he was old and must have sinned some in the past but not this baby; innocent as grass it was.
Omoonile picked the baby up and cradled it, cooing until it stopped crying; then he hurried to his kitchen which was about three steps away and comprised of a stool, and a large cauldron sitting atop firewood logs shielded from the wind by rusty roofing sheets. The baby was hungry, Omoonile surmised; he would cook some soup for it.
In the horizon, clouds were beginning to shimmer with the first tendrils of sunlight.
#
It was the women who noticed first, on their way early to
work. They, in their skirt suits and high heeled shoes,
milled outside the perimeter of the waste disposal site,
clutching at their bags and accessories, horrified at the
sight before them. The scenery looked like something out of
Hansel and Gretel, except instead of a cottage there was a
dumping ground and for a witch there was a madman.
And to see him like that, naked, muscled and under the
incompetent control of a presumably decayed brain,
clutching at a helpless baby in one arm and stirring the
boiling and steaming contents of his pot with the other,
evoked a unified conclusion from the women: There was no
way they were going to stand back and watch a mad man cook
a child, absolutely no way!
Calls were made and men roused from their beds. Within
minutes, a throng of angry men, women and children had
assembled.
The whole thing was over in a heartbeat: The baby was
rescued and even though the madman tried to run they
surrounded him, kicking, pinching, punching, and pelting
him with rocks and sticks until he was lying supine,
exhausted and whimpering for help. Finally, the crowd
parted for a large man to pass. He was carrying a cement
bag that had hardened over, the weight of which caused him
to wobble. He raised it as high as his strength would allow
and then let it fall onto the upturned face of Omoonile.
There was a sound, like the crushing of a beer can and then
silence, tainted by the feathery noise his hands and legs
made as they thrashed frantically in agony. With that,
everybody ran.
#
Driving by Agee road you could see for yourself, the naked
man, partly covered in debris; he has a stone for a head
and if you look closely, his legs are still twitching.
Copyright
2008 by Ijasan Adelehin