Dark Letters A Daughter's Letters

By Mcphee Uyi Elaiho

People think abusive people are people with ugly characters. This is almost always not the case. The popular grammy award winning musician R. Kelly has been charged with a ten count charge of sexually abusing women, some of whom are underaged girls. In the same vein, a prince of the church and catholic cardinal of New York has been forced to resign his position by the vertican over child abuse related offences.

Elsewhere, another Catholic Cardinal has been sentenced to 6 years in imprisonment over child abuse related offences. Again, the Catholic Church has come round to admit in recent times that priests have been abusing women, children, nuns, parishioners.

This shows that stories about abuse are real, universal and deserves our attention.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mcphee Uyi Elaiho
• Release date: Apr 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463097250

Book preview

Chapter 1

Dear Auntie Adesuwa,

I have come to trust a woman in a world of wily men and a world that vilifies women. You have been my lifebuoy on contrary tides of men in a man’s world. You seem to stand in their numbers, outnumbering them even to their enterprises. You talk tough, beating men at their own games. I am beginning to trust you. I greet you on behalf of womanhood. I salute your courage in this wily world of men.

I want you to realize that ever since we became friends on Facebook, I have been following your posts. You have been my consistent feminist. And I don’t think you are a feminist as a result of ill treatment at home from a high-handed husband whenever times were down. You don’t seem to waver in your feminist’s choice of status, subjects, and topics. I write you in trust of the same, so you may know my states, remembering me too in your prayers.

Sent from iPhone 5 p.m. 30 July 2017

Chapter 2

Auntie,

I still feel my life stopped at a point to take up Dad’s life, like a clock that has stopped working, and with a dead battery sweating with infernally condemned black acid cells escaping. As a child, I once lived unpolluted. I was once truly happy, truly pleased, especially because I once loved those airs of Dad’s features, like feathers as beautiful as the colours of the rainbow that society and the church has known him to be or has painted him to be.

But truly today, I no longer have a life. I died that night. This prognosis finally reached a crescendo the night after my daddy, Executive Director Dr. Otiti, celebrated his promotion at work in St. Anthony’s Anglican Cathedral Church. He had appeared in my room licking his lips. I could still see my lips gleaming on his lips, a nostalgic nuance of the color of a purple onion. There seem to be nothing lighting it, except of course the lightening courses of the chandelier.

I initially thought he took from the pack of TomTom that Mother bought for us to take to school. When I didn’t see the pack on the refrigerator in Mother’s room that evening, I thought Agbons, my younger brother, had taken them. ‘But why must it be a pack?’ My first question. ‘Agbons wants to finish our sweets?’ My second question.

I noticed late and was too tired to check the house all over before accusing him or reporting him to Daddy. Ha! ‘So, Daddy, it was you who took our pack of sweets all along?’ I asked in surprise.

‘What sweets?’ Daddy asked, stopping midway. The lights from the chandelier caught him like a pit toilet’s green bottle caught in the spider’s web.

He tried to find his way around it. ‘You now sleep with lights on, my friend? Will you use the switch? Don’t you know thieves can be monitoring you from outside through the glass windows?’ he asked. I turned to the left side of my bed, pushing my duvet downwards. I touched the switch. He sighed when he said, ‘Good girl.’ There was a taste of satisfaction in his smile. He was still standing by the door with his long fingers on the knob.

Those fingers that Daddy once tried to slap mother with then. She dodged Dad’s outstretched hands at full length, breaking the door’s handle in the process. Then in a flash, the metal buckled in ruin on the white-streaked, rubber brown tiles, like smashed ceramic figurines of the crucifixes in churches in areas of northern Nigeria with Boko Haram insurgency.

He used it on Agbons the other day, when he went out to play football on the street. Daddy was crackling with anger when he said, ‘o you went defying my orders to play football on the street? What is a street boy?’

‘A boy who is always on the street,’ Agbons replied.

‘So, you even know.’ Daddy released a hell of a slap, carrying Agbons like the talons of a hawk carrying the chick, and like it carried the thief that once tried to steal Daddy’s briefcase at King’s Square by the post office.

He was an unfortunately short and stout thief who was trying to steal from a man who was three times his height and whose waistline was taller than his neck. Even thieves ought to use their heads sometimes. Maybe their mania had them.

Daddy’s itching hands twirled Agbon’s head that day against the gated grille of the veranda. Agbon’s forehead was as swollen as a full-blown egg roll. I felt sorry for him. He cried and cried. While Mummy used aboniki balm on it later that evening, even she was grumbling when she said, ‘I told you to stay out of his way, but you would not. You went to stand in his path. You want to show you are now a man with the pride of those twin balls around your crotch. I always ran from those fingers of his. You see yourself now. No. See your head.’ She gave him a hand mirror.

Although she was addressing Agbons, I didn’t understand why she was looking at me.I held out the open aboniki balm for her to slice from.

Sent from iPhone 6:30 p.m. 29 July 2017

Chapter 3

Daddy was indifferent while peering at the Saturday’s punch newspaper and pressing his bifocal glasses angrily into his aquiline nose before the TV that evening. I still can’t understand how he does both. Daddy’s anger was that irreparable stammer’s outburst. Those were in days of our poverty.

Poor people were usually angry people anyway. We had days where we contemplated the next meal between Mum and Dad, with plenty of fights. You know we women are good with our mouths, and men were good with their hands and fists. It’s a balance of terror. Mother argued during one of their long fights as Daddy complained she could not be quiet. She went to stand by the doorjamb so the street would hear them. Daddy was too discreet, too shy for that. He prefers a private battering life. But Mother was once that shameless and lousy noisemaker who preferred the salvaged lifestyle of public outcry and battery.

Sometimes I believe it was because she was from a polygamous family. But Daddy was too, so I became more confused. I feel Daddy’s education had assisted in his redemption from a once malevolent, polygamous background. I still feel he felt he was too educated for illiterate neighbors to be bothering him about how to rule over his own family. Since that time, Mother has become Daddy’s numb doll. That was many years ago.

Sent from iPhone 8 p.m. 29 July 2017

Chapter 4

A moment of silence passed between us before I continued my nagging. ‘But Daddy, why do you want to finish our sweets? You know we take it leisurely, bearing in mind Mother Counts. This is what you call greed, Daddy,’ I said with salvation and the tone of a question. My voice sounded younger than my age, developing into the cadence of a baby’s voice harping with pleasurable difficulty.

There was this lyrical note around the infantile lullabies built on just the word Daddy. I loved the gongness like wells of hollowness reverberating around my torso. I simply gave thanks to my trachea or my throat. It was good, or meant good, to say the least.

‘Have you ever wondered who gives your mother money to buy everything that you and Agbons enjoy?’ he asked in a thievery toned.

‘Is it not you? Mother is a full-time housewife,’ I said.

‘Aha! So, you know, and you are asking stupid questions. Anyway, I don’t want to lick just sweets. I want happiness. Sweets and gum manufacturers target the children and women of society. You know women are a miserable frailty of deformed humanity. They weren’t planned. They were God’s afterthoughts. Their love for sweet things is a spell from Adam. They have the lives of Eve. They have the beauty of many birds put together like aves. They come like children. They live like children. They are like children. They claim men are like children, but they are our children. We care for them buying them things like pets. They laugh. They forget sweet things killed the sugar ant.’ He was gawking at me in the dark.He giggled in a broken baritone and combed his beard.

Sent from iPhone 9 p.m. 29 July 2017

Chapter 5

I didn’t want to argue with him. He was always an admirable figure. Fathers are. Didn’t Agbons fondly call him our hero? I had to keep it so. Do you know that Mother taught us to revere him too? That’s tradition. I noticed this from her publicist actions as published in our living room during the public holidays. She would usually bring the only picture remaining of him in the parlour down to clean it every morning as a precursor to washing his clothes. I thought even his picture should never be allowed to gather dirt, whether real or imagined.

There were days I had asked her why. I was more than shocked to hear her response. ‘Men are full