Busayo Akinmoju is a writer and a Doctor. Her work has been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Lucent Dreaming, and The Republic among others. She was a category winner in the Welkin prize for flash fiction. She likes to read, and to relax on long walks.
The Drummer Arrives
by Busayo Akinmoju
Kikaiye, Nigeria, years ago
The talking drum was the only thing that would always make sense to Yemisi: rhythmic, firm beneath the hands, able to take a beating from anyone and still create a pattern of sound so beautiful, so varied in what it could say that the world melted away. You were mesmerized by what the drum was trying to do in its variations of mi-ré-do, do-ré-mi, do-do-mi.
A tonal pattern as ancient as a language, as the Oyo Empire. As storied as all the wars, the kings, the civilizations and emotions that yielded from the rubble of human life.
When she played it, it sounded like life was playing out of her fingers, out of the heels of her hands. And in all of it, she felt like she could speak.
That it was a voice that would be listened to.
A voice that must be listened to.
She didn’t always feel like that: at the university campus, she spent several months bumbling about the grounds. Surviving on a pittance from odd jobs working in the various hostel canteens. Mixing ingredients in a pot, soaking beans for moi-moi. Clearing up plates left behind by people who didn’t give her much thought.
And every now and then, the odd humiliation from someone transferring aggression to her over change incorrectly counted, or a mixed-up order. Sneering at her faded clothes and plain, unremarkable face. Or just because she was sitting there, quietly. Looking far away somewhere. Strange and lost and planning something.
But Yemisi stayed on.
Because life in the university was bigger. Larger than the small world of Kikaiye where she grew up: an old, slumbering town set in its ways. Unwilling to give anyone who wasn’t royalty, or male, or larger than life a chance at anything.
Running away from home wasn’t something she could say she had done—home had let her loose the day she was born a girl. A disappointment. Unable to carry on the legacy of her father’s lineage and all of its fraught, complicated importance. She wasn’t a son that could rightly be called Alayande; the drummer has come. The mouthpiece of kings, the voice into other realms. Bringer of sonic beauty that melted hearts and humbled warriors. The line of drummers her family came from had won wars with the sonic thrum of their drums. They had influenced minds, brought kings to their knees with just music.
Still, it didn’t matter that Yemisi had begun to show promise of that same gift. Kikaiye let her go. Her father let her go. Without a thought, no message asking, begging for an only child to return home because she was sorely missed.
It was just silence.
In the weeks after she realized no one was coming for her, Yemisi decided to make her way to the university. It was the biggest place her life in Kikaiye had let her dream of. She didn’t fully know what a university would look like. But she knew it was a living, breathing place. It was where the young go to expand their minds, their lives, their circles.
It was where she would begin to play her drums. Where she would show everyone the craft she was learning to perfect. And when she was ready, she would bend minds and emotions with the heel of her palm striking a drum.
People would be in an auditorium, or in line at a canteen waiting for food, and she would play for them, making them hear all of the beauty and rhythm only a drum could create. Coaxing them into a dance as elemental as the breath of living.
*
Years before, it was early one morning. The neighbors heard a woman crying, her voice cracking open like a wet, rainy dawn. It wasn’t the first time, so the neighbors shouldn’t have been bothered. The woman was often heard through the walls of her house, screaming her innocence about something. Sobbing. Pleading with the man she lived with.
This time was different, she wasn’t crying indoors: her clothes, bags and petty possessions were littered all over the front of the house. She was on her knees, holding onto her husband’s trousers begging him not to let her go.
“Please olowo ori mi, let me try again.”
The man seemed bored by her pleading, by the scene they were playing out. As though he were an actor already over-practiced in a particular act, and slightly irritated at having to play it out yet again. “There is no need for this. And there is no need for you to call me that. Your parents and I had an agreement, in two years of marriage, you should give me a son. Otherwise, I will return your bride price to them.”
He looked down at her sobbing face, uninterested.
“And now it has been three years. There is nothing to show for that time. No son, no child in fact. It is better you go back to your family. I have no use of a woman whose womb is unwilling to hold anything.”
A few neighbors had gathered to witness the scene. But they could not ask the man to reconsider. He had said the truth—what use is a woman who cannot give her husband something as basic as a child? And after three years? It was better she took back whatever strange curse was following her back to her parents’ house. And quickly.
The man left for work, shrugging his drum’s strap over his shoulder. This was the New Yam season. There were songs to be played, money to be made. A king to be praised.
A woman who couldn’t help him continue his family line as she had promised, was the least of his concern.
He left.
And the neighbors came to comfort the woman, half-heartedly consoling her. Telling her to plead again with her husband once he was back from work. But they knew it was a closed deal.
And it was better she left before he was back. The drummer, short-tempered as he was could come home, see her still there and play a beat so deadly, so convoluted in what it was saying that the woman would lose her mind. Willingly go into the forest and never come back.
Yemisi, eight years old, watched the scene play out with sadness. She had liked the woman, her third mother in five years. A woman she felt would finally stay, and fill up the hole that had been created when her own mother was kicked out years ago.
It hurt to watch this new woman disappear similarly, under a chorus of cooing words by people who didn’t care.
*
One afternoon a few months later, the sun was a hot lamp in the sky.
Yemisi watcher her father play at the palace that day. She was under a canopy with the other guests at the party, shuffling between the legs of an aunt or the other. Mesmerized from the moment her father’s palm hit the drum’s firm skin. Her father played a lifting, frantic beat for the crowd. Energetic in the words it said so clearly: dance with me.
Dance with yourselves.
Dance for your king.
Yemisi obeyed, and sank into the music. She heard unmistakably what the drum was saying. Like its rhythm was calling out to her among all of the other guests.
And the noise around her became like a far-away whisper. All that existed, was the drum. And its steady, insistent music.
Enveloping everything in the air. Enveloping everyone.
Singing like a herald to a king:
Oba wa
Bata a pe l’ésé
They were standard greetings for a Yoruba king but to her, hearing those words through a drum, it sounded like she had begun to hear creation begin to sing. To praise the works of its maker. Like she was hearing a melody only allowed in the splendid white halls of the king of the universe. Heaven’s throne room welcome into their tiny Áfin—with a rhythm that could not be ignored.
And so the people joined in the music, and began to dance.
At first shyly, then with a remarkable vigor. Their shoulders moving in time with the music. Their feet working the sand around them into a bright, yellow smoke—suffusing the atmosphere with an emotional vigor that was both mind-numbing, and freeing.
Before Yemisi joined the dance, she marveled at her father. His unflinching concentration on the melody he played. The small smile tugging at a corner of his mouth. Yemisi had always seen her father as an ordinary, fearful part of her life. Coming home as he pleased, looking upon her with an irritation that made her always scramble out of his presence.
But in that moment, he seemed like the most beautiful thing. Like a herald that brought and sang only of joy. Like if she could reach out, she would touch the colorful sound playing out of his palms.
He had done this to people, Yemisi thought. The king himself was dancing, throwing away caution and protocol.
Yemisi joined the dance, and she decided, looking again at her father, that she would play just like he had: create beauty.
*
The rain pattered down the roof in a simple, steady beat. Underneath the crash of the thunderstorm and the mellifluous hum of rain droplets hitting the ground all at once, the rain slid down the rooftop in a steady drip-drip as it fell into a pot beside of Yemisi. If she tried hard enough, it brought to mind music.
Like drumming. A beat.
And it brought to mind scenes from the joy. The dancing, the party that day at the king’s palace.
Today however, had been a hard, sad day.
Yemisi was once again alone. And alone in a new way. Not the familiar pain of having no defined sense of family, or being shunned by neighbors and playmates as a child abandoned by her mother. This was fresh.
For months, she had been trying to ask her father to give her a chance to join him at work. To play the drums and do exactly what the music had done that day: make her forget all of the pain of the last several months before the party. The hurt of losing yet another mother, losing yet another fragile sense of family, losing a defined place in the world, in her father’s heart.
At twelve years old, already wearing three rows of waist beads, Yemisi felt old enough to speak to her father about the sort of life she wanted. She felt mature enough, wise enough to have a say in her own future.
So that day, before it began to rain, she placed her father’s breakfast on a low table in front of him. Hands trembling, her heart beating a familiar tattoo of fear in her chest.
Her father uncovered the pap and made no comment. He picked up a spoon and started eating.
“Baba,” Yemisi whispered without courage. Not feeling strong enough to speak louder than that.
He didn’t answer.
Yemisi stared down at her fingers. The wind knocked out of her already.
And minutes passed.
Eventually, her father looked up from his food, chewing with a satisfied look on his face. Yemisi recognized that look as one of the few times he would be willing to listen to anyone.
“Omo,” he said, “what do you want?”
Omo. Child. It had no qualifications to it. No tenderness as in the form of Omo mi.
My child.
She was simply that: a child. Born and then caught in an impersonalized namelessness. A house with no lights in it. No one calling it home.
Still, Yemisi decided shaking her head, this might be the only chance she would get in months. She chose to press on.
“Baba mi,” she said, louder than a whisper this time. “I have been thinking a lot about how I could be useful to you.”
She had decided to go that route. To plead on the grounds of usefulness. She was aware that her father—artist though he was—adored practicalities. Defined roles. Things and people that could be used for something.
“Would I not be more useful to you by being out in the world with you? Learning to play the drums as you do. Everyone says I have such a sharp mind; I am sure I would learn this craft and one day play as well as you do. And in the meantime, I am sure I would eventually become good enough to play on the days when you would rather rest.”
Yemisi heard the silence after her words. Surprised that her usually quiet, timid voice could fill up a room that also contained her father’s presence. It felt odd. And if she dared, thrilling.
Outside the window, the rain had started. A light drizzle, a small breeze stirring the banana leaves.
Suddenly, a roar of laughter filled the room’s silence.
Outside, the first peal of lightening rang through the sky and for a moment struck a gleam over his incisors: over the whites of his eyes. He looked like what ojuju should look like—the frightful spirit-beast that haunted the playtime songs of childhood.
But really, he was only her father. In the room, in flesh right in front of her. Two half-eaten bowls of food between them.
When he stopped laughing, Yemisi put aside how humiliated she felt and tried to speak again—
“What do you want to say—”
Her father cut her short. “There is no room for a woman, for a girl in this world of mine. How can I let one wield a drum?”
Yemisi had heard all about that. For years, the same refrain; what would people say? What would people think if they saw her tagging along behind her father, striking her palm on an instrument that had been played exclusively by men for generations? It was a craft taught from father to son. Exclusively. And here she was, wanting to be a daughter-drummer.
“You know this is not something that can be done, child,” her father said to her, almost softly. “The drum isn’t only an instrument of music, it comes with its own power, what you see when I drum is not only music at play, but the very music heard in the halls of the divine. It is why I can speak with a drum—say words in the ancient staccato that is our language—and move people’s minds and hearts to entirely different realms.
“It is not a gift that is taught. It is an endowment on our lineage—we were called to sing through drums, to edify with music. We translate the essence of life through these humble instruments. Even if I wanted to teach you—how could I? One is just born hearing the music in their heart. All a father can do is teach one to harness it.”
In his bleak words—Yemisi heard a note of hope. That one is born just hearing the music in their heart. She remembered again the day at the palace, where it seemed like her father’s drums were calling her home. Calling her into a music she already heard in her chest.
If only she could explain that she was the son he needed.
“Baba mi,” Yemisi started.
“Enough!” He struck the plates in front of him. “There is no way. No way! It is bad enough that I have been given a daughter and at present, my lineage and craft show no continuity. Why mock me, and the work of our ancestors with the silly words of a mere girl?”
“Get out of here,” he commanded.
And she did.
Ran out into the rain that had begun to pour unhindered from the blue-gray skies. She retreated into her hut, the familiar music of the rain drumming on the roof.
*
Weeks later, the forest called her into a silence.
Because she had nowhere to go to, she went into it. Heard the eerie sounds of a world teeming with lives unhindered by opinion, or by definitions of what should be. Or what shouldn’t be.
She just listened.
To the Irokos and their barks like old men’s faces—etched with a longsuffering wisdom.
Teak trees pouring out music with the insects that vibrated their thoraxes in-between leaves. Bushes, for miles singing the songs of small animals. And the silence of the blue sky above, the sun burning down bright decibels into the world.
Here, in the forest. She had no name, or the need for one.
But she felt a kinship with the trees, with the woods that anchored her to a specific lineage of priests—the bearers of the drums.
On old, dried trees, she began to play the music she heard in the forest—the still life of the streams, the vibrato and hum of insects. Interrupted bursts from her palms like the screech of monkeys—and for her own self in that tapestry; a wail, heart-weary and hopeful of better things. Like the foolish and brave way that all of mankind dreamt. The foolish and brave language that all of mankind spoke.
Without her father’s presence or approval, she mastered the art of her forbearers in a forest.
And her perseverance was rewarded.
In a trance, she saw all of her ancestors lined up in front of her; brown faces baked darker in the savannah sun. Some of them with the temperament to smile, some of them with the tendency to look away. And strangely, some of them women—only much further down the line than where her grandfather stood. All of them holding that same instrument—the talking drum- looking priestly. Looking like they were commissioning her.
It was all she needed.
*
Lagos, Nigeria, 2019
Tonight, she would play a dirge. A sad, lilting beat for all of the souls that were lost to death, or lost in the world. Having no home or person to belong to.
And the crowd loved it. Ate it up.
Their rapt attention focused on her as she hit the drum with her palms. Pausing now and then to breathe through the emotions. Interrupting her drumming with the song’s few words.
Yemisi had been blessed with several years, several nights like this. The crowd breathing in the melodies that she wove for them. It was a strange thing, when she started out—she had been plagued with the usual sneering questions about playing the talking drum—why should a woman do it? Are talking drums even relevant in the 21st century? The one she found most perplexing was the question about if it could be understood.
The talking drum only speaks Yoruba. Only Yoruba listeners would understand what it said.
She had always smiled in those early interviews and said that music was a universal language and she trusted that her audience would be able to feel the emotion and beauty of her work, even if they could not tell where the tonal do-re-mi of the Yoruba language started or ended.
That was what she said, but she knew a deeper truth. The time she had spent in the forest had opened her eyes to all of the particular ways that her lineage could play the drum. In the usual, simple way as one does in practice, but with mastery—one creates literal magic. Any crowd would be transported by the drum, any listener would connect immediately with the words, regardless of it they understood Yoruba or not. She knew that in the forest, she saw it come to life in her early improvised shows at the university campus.
They could all hear what she was saying—the drum a conduit from her heart to theirs. Mind to mind. Human to human.
And it was just like that tonight.
She played a song for her mother who she hadn’t seen in years. For her old town and the tiny comforts it allowed her before it spat her out. For her own self, lost in the world now. Famous, renowned, with every award of recognition possible. But no real home.
She felt like crying and translated that emotion into the words in her drumming. The crowd in response became teary eyed. She could see some people in the audience, waving their hands in rapture, their faces about to crescendo to the catharsis she was leading them to. Leading herself to.
And all of them—she, the crowd she was working, went to that forest she had learned to play the drums in, and all was quiet for a moment. The stream sang in their ears. The sun burned gently into their skin. They were safe now, home in the arms of a place that would never forsake them.
*
Backstage, all was quiet.
The diffuser scented the air with ixora. It felt like an evening walk through her back garden in Almoruf.
Yemisi loved moments like this. After a show well done, and after this one in particular. When she had been teeming with so many emotions she had laid to rest.
Therapy had done that for her. And the new religion she had discovered that preached forgiveness, and moving on towards a life of light.
She was letting go of those old, ragged emotions and taking the crowd along with her through music. Just five more shows and the tour would be done. She would retire to her back garden for a week or so. Then finish the album before her self-imposed deadline three months later.
For now, she soaked her thoughts into the mist in the room, relaxing. Breathing in meditatively. Hearing the last of the drum beats she had played earlier as she drifted into a nap.
Then, a knock on the door.
Yemisi’s eyes startled open. Everyone knew better than to bother her in her quiet time before or after a show. She was annoyed, but had an inkling that this was important for what anyone to knock at this time.
“Yes” she replied
Her assistant walked in. He had taken off his suit jacket, sweat patches were in his armpit.
“Sorry to disturb…” he began.
“What is it?”
Her assistant shuffled about his feet, a pained expression on his face.
“Actually… I don’t even know how to say this.”
“You can start from the beginning. It’s usually a safe place to start,” Yemisi said with a small smile.
“Alright ma. Let me be direct then.”
“Okay…”
“There is a man here claiming to be your cousin. He said your father is sick.”
“What?”
“I had a feeling it was a lie,” her assistant said under his breath when he saw her confused expression. “I got security to kick him out of the venue but he found his way backstage and is still insisting he knows you. The other staff said to hear him out since he has tried so hard. That he might be legit.”
He sighed and looked around the room, the frustration of the past hour or two telling on him, beads of sweat on his forehead. Knowing him, he probably had been yelling at everyone: the man with the claim, the staff that contradicted his opinion, the security that had let the strange man back in.
Her assistant, he was a small man drunk on a little power.
He reminded her of her father.
With a small pang in her chest at the old wounds, she decided to see whoever it was. No one could make such a claim and she wouldn’t be able to ascertain who he was. How many cousins did she have anyway?
“Bring him in.”
Her assistant hesitated for a moment then slunk out of her door, shutting it gently.
Yemisi took in a deep breath, steadying her heartbeat. Strangely she was nervous. After all these years, a small part of her hoped her father would reach out once he saw how well she had done.
But he had waited until his dying moment almost.
Such a stubborn man.
Another knock on the door. But the person didn’t wait for a response.
Yemisi turned around slowly, stilling her heart in case she was disappointed—in what way? Because it was true, or because it wasn’t?
The face of the man she saw at her door was impassive, smug—like he had won a small victory he had been sure of since the beginning.
His face was ordinary, she realized with disappointment. She might know him and she might not know him. His face was like one familiar with the farmlands of Kikaiye; baked in the sun, dark and dried out by an arrogant poverty.
He could be anyone, really.
“I” she began.
As though he had been awaiting her reluctance, he brought out a drumming stick from a plastic bag he had been holding. It was curved at the end, forming an elegant L.
Yemisi took the raffia woven thing from his hand and recognized it immediately—the inscriptions in red and blue. It was her father’s.
“Where is he?”
The man smiled a bright, triumphant thing.
*
On her father’s own drum, she played a lilting, weary song for him. At his funeral.
Unlike her shows in front of an audience, she didn’t pour herself out to the crowd. She didn’t translate her emotions into words only a drum could speak.
Everything was a restrained perfection—she was dry eyed. Today, she was only going to tell a story, nothing more.
And the crowd—unusual for a funeral—was rapt. Quiet.
They belonged to her: their minds, their hearts. But she wouldn’t manipulate them as her father had done. Making a reluctant crowd bleed out of their pockets, bleed out of their hearts.
All she wanted to do, was tell a story.
And she started close to where it ended. In her father’s sick bed. Dying bed really—he had refused her help.
Yemisi could sing a healing balm into his spirit, untie him from the shackles of sickness. The drums were that powerful. He knew it, the other people in the room—onlookers, the cousins from a life before, old neighbors—knew it. He chose to waste away.
And Yemisi had thought it a deeply selfish choice—to deny them the only chance of reconciliation.
Then she thought how selfish her own desire was. What could one see in this cold, dark world that would make one stay longer than they had to?
He should go if he so desired, Yemisi decided.
The forgiveness was up to her—with or without his help. The song she played for him was a quiet, reverent thing; she showed the crowd the morning she had hoped to be her father’s legacy.
All of the mothers she didn’t get to keep.
The loves she didn’t taste.
Bright music heard only in a palace, only from her father’s palms.
The way an acacia tree bends in a breeze—in a storm. Lightening and all of its attendant blessings. Shrubs and their cricket music. Night, the sound of stars twinkling through a cloud. Children—loved or forgotten—playing. Wild shows with a crowd bent around the wave of a drumbeat.
Silence. Childbirth. The forest and the new life it brought her.
She showed them that ancestral grove in the forest. Her father now in the line of all the other drummers. Waving back at her, almost forgiven.
Copyright 2024 by Busayo Akinmoju