My First Girlfriend Finally Explains
Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo
Monday, May 19, 2008
“The reason why there is a huge romance industry of songs and movies and dressing to attract and all that is because on the whole most people’s lives are not very celebrated. And that first time when you are in love and the other person loves you too, you feel wonderful, you feel potent. Because you are loved you feel you can talk about yourself and be listened to and you listen too in a way that you never listened to your parents or your friends. And it is the preciousness of the experience that makes the dream of love so important. It is not just a trivial thing. And it is not just about the sensation of sex. It is about feeling that you are your whole full self.”
– Nuala O’Faolain speaking to NPR’s Terry Gross.
I don’t know why I am writing this, which is usually an indication that I probably should not be writing it at all. But I assumed that you, my reader, had a first girlfriend or a first boyfriend or both. Apart from taking you back memory lane, I hope there is a lesson to be learnt here.
I don’t know about you, but embedded in my memories are some questions that still haunt me. One of the greatest was why my first girlfriend chose to marry when she did and the man she married. I now know that women mature earlier than men and all that, but still….
Edna, my wife, enjoys making fun of me whenever the girl’s name comes up in a conversation. Edna will say, “the girl you lost ebe i na-aju amu oyi ... being penis-shy.
That wasn’t exactly what happened. But nobody believes me. Maybe it was because I was fifteen years old when she crossed my sky and like a comet she was gone before I turned seventeen.
I won’t use her real name here. Let me just call her "Adaobi," palace daughter.
It is debatable whether Adaobi was really my girlfriend. My guess is that she will dispute that suggestion very seriously. But I like to believe she was. And I am sticking with my story. She was the first girl that made me conscious that I am a man; sorry, scratch that: a boy. She was responsible, intelligent, and beautiful – RIB. She was the gold standard of future relationships. Many passed and failed on the strength of the influence she left behind.
I first heard about her when her West African Examination Council (WAEC) result came out. Her performance was excellent. In the words of those “success cards,” she passed with flying colors. Coming from a town where women do not do particularly well in school, she quickly became the talk of the town. Every man wanted to marry her. Every boy wanted to date her.
She left secondary school a year before me. As my Uncle and I drove around town during my final year in secondary school, he showed me her father’s house and a copy of her WAEC result. He told me to make sure I outperformed her in my WASC (West African School Certificate) exams. “Don’t let that girl outperform you,” he warned.
Because she grew up outside our hometown and schooled in Akure, she was more of a mystery to us. I did not get to see her until one year after, when I had taken my own WAEC exams, passed with flying colors and was admitted to the University. She was at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), while I was at the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA).
We met at the summer extramoral classes, which college student conducted at home for high school students. I beheld her, and it felt like my eyes beheld sunlight for the very first time. Her beauty, poise, and aura surpassed what my imagination had conceived. Her built was like the plum of cashew seed. She was the golden star of the summer classes full of tiny stars. She was a smooth pebble in clear water surrounded by tadpoles. Like a hibiscus flower with a fountain of nectar between its petals, she attracted boys.
The big boys were all around her. They drove in and out of the venue, fulfilling every righteousness while at the same time pursuing greater things. I remember introducing myself to her, but that was as far as I could get. The circle of boys around her was as impenetrable as the skin of a crocodile. There was no further opportunity to go beyond the preface. (I know what you are thinking – I am a ju-man. I accept. I am.)
After the summer, when I returned to FUTA, I wrote her. I remember asking for a copy of a Sociology-class handout she used at UNN that would be helpful for a class I was taking at FUTA. Knowing who I was, I must have also added some lines of poetry saying that she blew me away. I did not get any response. A friend of mine from Akure went on a visit to Nsukka soon after. I gave him a letter to deliver to her. Once again, I did not get any response.
I met her again a year after, at another summer event for students. This time, it was confrontation time. Why didn’t you reply my letter? Why didn’t you send me the handout I asked? What’s wrong with you? You may be all that but come on…? Well that wasn’t me quizzing her. It was her quizzing me.
That day we talked. We made up. And we became friends for the very first time. After the confrontation, I walked home with her. We come from the same village. As she walked by my side, I was floating in the air, like a grain of excited dust. Adaobi, walking by my side, talking to me, laughing at my jokes, smiling, nudging my shoulders, patting my head, pushing me ever so gently… that was heaven! I saw butterflies fly out of my stomach into the tropical rain forest, dancing and singing. I saw rainbow perched on my eyelids, clapping. My belly was stuffed with so much happiness that I got drunk watching as the evening breeze passed by.
The next day, for the first time in my life, I went in front of a mirror to dress up as I prepared to go to the Civic Center where students met. I changed clothes several times as if none was suitable for me – or more like for her. I wanted to look good for her. That morning, I skipped the chewing stick and brushed my teeth with McClean. Though I did not know it then, I now know I was in love.
Suddenly, it was all about her. I dumped all the friends I was hanging out with. It was with her that I pinched my tent. I stood when she stood. I smiled when she smiled. I frowned when she frowned. By the end of the second day, as I walked her home, in my head, it was difficult to believe we had lived without one another.
You got to love a woman who reads. She read a lot, mainly romance novels. I borrowed some from her. Being an efiko myself, it was proper that books should connect us.
The week was going well until Friday came. Too fast, I felt. The prospect of a weekend spent without seeing her was dreadful to me. As my little brain conceived plots that would bring us together during the weekend, a friend of mine who seemed to have seen my agony came to me.
“Thinking about her,” he said.
“About who?” I responded angrily, in self-defense.
“Like we haven’t noticed,” he continued, ignoring my pretension.
“Whatever,” I said in Igbo.
“Just know that she is getting married next week,” he said so casually. “Someone is coming to pay her dowry.”
For a moment, I froze. Thick fog descended on my brain. Then it was as if a tree fell and broke an electric power line that sent electricity to my house. The light inside me all went off. My stomach became cold. My friend could not be joking. He wasn’t known for humor. Despite my effort to remain calm, my eyes blinked repeatedly. I looked around for her, but she was not there. I staggered outside where I saw her walking back inside the main hall. She came to me and said she was traveling for the weekend. I said OK.
I did not see her again.
She got married as reported and went on to become a big girl.
Recently, she was stuck in a desert, literally. She spent her time doing her consultancy job and reading some of the 24 romance novels she took with her. In a chat over the Internet, I asked her the question that had been haunting me for a long time: Why did you marry when you did... so early and so young? Why? Why? Why?
After watching my questions why, why, why, flash all over her computer screen, she wrote back saying, “Now shut up and listen.”
I clasped my fingers and read her words as they popped on the screen. She had three reasons.
The first reason I knew already because my query to everyone who knew her unearthed that – there were financial constraints that prodded her to marry in order to continue her education.
The second reason, which I did not know then, was the number of men coming to marry her and the pressure she was under. Many men were giving gifts to her mother with the hope of being the chosen one. Meanwhile, her mother had her own preferred man and was putting pressure on her to go with him. On her part, she disliked most of the men because they were just moneybags, many of whom would not guarantee the continuation of her education -- which was very important to her.
The third reason was the one that blew me away. Unknown to me, her family was attending one of those churches we called Prayer Houses. She had been told that punishment of an unimaginable proportion would befall any girl who would have sex before marriage. And being that she had read all these romantic novels, she wanted to have sex. And the only way to have sex was to get married.
She was a character in Nuala O’Faolain’s memoir, Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman. She believed in passion the way other people believed in God. Passion was the thing she was pursuing as she read through novel after novel.
I had wanted to ask why didn’t she marry me, a 16-year-old second-year student, instead, but I kind of figured it out.
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Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo will be signing copies of his book, Children of a Retired God at the 100 Cummings Center, suite 221 E, Beverley, Massachusetts on Sat. June 14th at 5pm; at Igwebuke Hall in Hapeville, near Atlanta International Airport, Georgia on Sat. June 28th at 8.pm and at the People’s Club Hall in Boston on Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 at 8.00pm. For more information, contact Ehimen Edokpa at Integrity Business Group, 129 Union Street, Lynn, Phone: 978-335-4451. More dates and venues will be announced as soon as they become available. His latest books, How I Helped to Elect Obama President & Africa: The Shit that Happened will be out soon.
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