The deceptiveness of strength

He was too strong for his own good.

“Training Day” is a fine film, I wonder why it has taken me this long to see it. As with all the Denzel Washington films I have seen, it is at its core about morality and everything wrapped up in that: love, family, responsibility, friendship, and, although it appears there only indirectly, humility. When I got to that final scene, where the man, shot and dying already, comes out of the car he is in, and tries to reach the boot, I thought to myself: “Strength, strength, this is the problem with strength.”

Strength fails us, not because it runs out, but because we can have too much of it. I wrote in my journal last night, “In many ways, I am Alonzo. Not a bad guy, just too strong a guy.” People have told me I have become a kind of “monolith,” and I quote Lumumba’s words in Cheswayo Mphanza’s “Open Casket Double,” “Here I was thinking I was a monolith in this world,” precisely because it accurately describes who I think I am at this point.

Strength itself is no problem, like intelligence. The thing itself is alright. The thing is that a man can be so strong, so mature in the area of courage and so infantile emotionally, morally, or spiritually. Was David strong? Yes. But he was strong in a much more comprehensive way. Samson, on the other hand, was strong in a single aspect: the strength of arms. Not until he lets out his secret to Delilah do you feel that he has touched a region in himself that the sheer intensity in which he moved could not allow him touch. We see it, too, in the last episode in his life where he prays that God allows him to avenge his two eyes; that scene has so much grace in it and prefigures the death of Christ with sinners.

Soyinka is a man like Samson. So is his “Ogun,” who wipes out a whole village in “Idanre” and feels no remorse nor pity. (I hear Julius Caesar killed about a million people, too, and felt no remorse for it.) Strength, man, a type of strength that nothing pierces, not even the affection of a woman, in the case of Alonzo in “Training Day.” He reminds me of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. He gets into bed with a woman thinking that is love, the touch of her hands, the kiss while hemming the door, but he is coasting, merely performing routine, he has lost touch with the spirit, he functions solely at the level of the letter. And this is a sad thing, the saddest thing in the world: that a man, in his strength, can become numb to the very things that matter; brilliant but totally dumb, unseeing. That there is a blindness that pursues a fine critical eye, a weakness he has ignored so long, or argued for, defended, because, well, Alonzo is a brilliant madman (I believed him in every scene, every argument, till I got to the end: it is a movie that makes sense at the end, the end clarifies all that came before, like a life), even though an argument is no justification.

He tells Hoyt to never wear his ring at the office, because this street thugs could use her as a thing to bargain with. Protect her, he seems to be saying. And you discern, or I do, that he has protected his love so long that he cannot love what he has preserved. This is the thing with Okonkwo. This is the thing, if my memory rings true, with Eugene in Purple Hibiscus—the suffering they caused their loves arose from a genuine need to guard them. But you can stifle to death your own promise, your own delight, if you cannot let it be.

When did I begin to be strong? I can’t say exactly. I have suffered a great deal in my life, and, be assured, I am not trying to impress you. My mom left my dad when I was two, so I moved from one place to the other all through my life. (My ideal life, really, is to move from place to place, traveling, to never bond long enough with anyone, to love for a while and leave. It is a life in motion. Where nothing ties you down, nothing makes you responsible. I saw a woman I liked and let her slip away because of just this reason: I want to move, to just keep going, and I can’t make you wait; you’d be a hindrance to my life. This was part of the argument I had, but it was corrected—thank God.) I have a memory of my mom visiting my aunt’s in Satellite Town when I was about six. She had travelled from Abidjan to see me. I had been told my mom was a witch, so she left just as she had come. I wouldn’t see her. I hid in the room, she stood in the compound, but, no, I wouldn’t see that witch of a woman. I wore the baggy Brazil jersey she brought and this pair of suede shoes. I did not think the shoes were something precious, I played football with them till they broke.

When I moved to her place, I was about ten. My first memory of strength happened when she was sick and we were at this white-garment church—they call the stuff “Abo,” protection. We’d moved from Abidjan to Nigeria and her sickness had worsened. We lived in a small BQ apartment around Popo in Ejigbo, Osun state, but I was too young to be watching my mom die and tending to her. So, my grandma suggested we move to her place, also in Ejigbo. From there, we moved to the white-garment church: If medicine could not answer (and medicine might have answered if we weren’t wretchedly poor: I need not go into details), maybe this prophet can do something. (My mom was a devout Muslim.) At the Abo, they fed the woman these miserable things, like perfume mixed with water. On one of those days, she shat herself. (I have written about this in the Hopkins piece.)

The prophet had two or three children from an earlier marriage, their mother was gone. He had this younger lady (about 19) who took care of the children and likely serviced his sexual appetite. (I am not sure he’d married her, he intended to.) That young girl faced my mom, abusing her for shitting herself. You are nineteen, sis, my mom is not your mate. Na craze? I was twelve. I grabbed a cutlass. I knew I wouldn’t cut her feet, just labeled the ground with it after she had raised her leg. And then I left the church and went to town.

When I returned in the night, everybody was waiting for me. The prophet, a huge man, my mom’s brothers, Rafiu and Jamal (both of whom are dead, the latter by suicide as a result of the other’s death, both were bricklayers): all slaps.

Years later, after her death, I moved to Lagos. I was staying in this small room with about six or seven other adults. My dad slept in the room when he came to Lagos, but he often went back to Abeokuta to spend time with his wife and my siblings. There was this short guy whose favorite gin was Sabrina, lean green bottle. (My story, “Mercy,” is set in this compound: Mama Agbor is a real person, sold beer, though the story I tell is different.) He would send me to buy him beans or Sabrina or something at a time when all my mates were in school. It was a shameful thing for me. The day came when I refused to go.

That night, when I went into the room to sleep (he slept in the same room), he was waiting in that sparely lit, choky passage for me. I don’t know if I have felt more dread in my life than I did that night. He slapped my face against a wall. Just once. That was all about that. But I lay that night in the midst of these older bodies and I was shivering, not from what had happened, but from what might happen. If you have read my story “Birdboy,” the lady living under the bridge at Oshodi, much of her suffering is a re-articulation of my own.

You build resolve. And you tell people they can go to hell. Even God can go to hell. When you have seen terror, original terror, in various forms, people on Twitter can “go fuck themselves.” In all humility. I have lived seven decades in two. And that is a humble way to say it.  

My years of depression were years of weakness, terrible, terrible weakness. There was a war on the inside. It was hard to be strong at that point. I had a crazy manic episode before Christ came and rescued me in 2021. The experience of that reminded me in many ways of a different form of injustice, not of “living in the dark quarters of the world,” as Agostino Neto put it. I came to conclusion, which is true, that an un-regenerated man cannot be trusted. You cannot trust people. My default attitude to people who are not Christians, especially writers (with few exceptions), is one of appropriate distance. It is why I don’t keep companies. I said to a friend this week that I know how to receive evil gifts from people, I don’t know what to do with their kindness. I am okay with being attacked, that I can handle. But what do I do with kindness? It leaves me in an utterly ambiguous state.

How many times must Alonzo have taken with suspicion the graces he was offered? O, man is desperately wicked. But each man bears the image of God; something of God’s light, however minor, burns within them. Yes, they are depraved people (so were you). No doubt. I understand this from the aspect of the Christian: I am okay with doing good to you, but I don’t expect you to do it to me. I feel life as a duty, the same way Alonzo did, “You did what you had to do.” But that rationale is dangerous. Very, very dangerous. You do what is right.

And here we come to the scandal of the cross. That a broken man, a man willing to be broken once again, not by blows, but by kisses, is the glorious man. “Let me die with them.” 🔷