How do we live as ourselves with courage, and what does courage ask of us? We spend time with francesca ekwuyasi’s “Na Condition Make Crayfish Bend,” first published in ROOM 45.1 Ancestors.
This post is part of our 2025 Black Futures & Black History Month feature, where we’re republishing brilliant works and conversations with Black organizers, writers, and artists from Room‘s past issues, to live on our site in perpetuity.
1.
You’ve been having these nightmares lately, where your partner’s mother, Ami, attempts to flay you. The dream often starts the same; you are all seated for one of the Sunday suppers that have become obligatory since her husband’s cancer scare. As usual, the dining table is impeccably set—ornate dinnerware, intricately patterned silver, and crystal glasses all sparkle with warm light from a low-hanging chandelier. There is not a single morsel of food, however, save for the bowl of cornflakes your partner, Riva, quietly devours. And despite the prettiness of this dreamscape, there is always always that sour stench of ripe sweat or rotten fruit permeating the air. So potent is the smell that it lingers even after you’ve awoken. At some point in the dream, you start to make small talk; you hate small talk, so it’s horrible, but it is always here that you are jolted by a sudden pain so sharp that it feels almost ice-cold and burning all at once. You look down to see that your mother-in-law, seated beside you, is slicing off strips of skin from your arm with a mild indifference as she nods. Dark skin sloughs off like butter under a hot knife, and the flesh beneath is momentarily a pale shade of pink before droplets of scarlet meet each other and there is a small pool of blood pouring from the wound on your arm. You scream but cannot move, and Riva never looks up from her bowl.
2.
The dreams started shortly after Riva asked you to marry her. You’d said yes without skipping a beat, but afterward, when you thought about telling your mother, your joy faltered. Then, when you imagined her telling the rest of the family, your joy shrivelled up into a tight knot.
The rest of the family; your father already had two wives by the time he married your mother. She lives in a flat on the third floor in his compound in Surulere. His first wife, Mama Shakirat, lives on the fifth floor, and his second wife, Aunty Halima, lives on the fourth. Your father is on the sixth floor. An old man, traditional; your mother begged you to be a bit more discreet about your life in Canada, about your “choices”—that’s the word she used. She hadn’t meant to teach you shame like that, not when you first started to bleed at twelve and she taught you so many ways to hide all evidence of your period, including the cramps that doubled you over in shocking waves of pain (till today you can bear all manner of anguish with a detached stoicism, the trick is to vacate your body from time to time, you know this). Not when you told her, at thirty-three, that the person you were with, the one you’d been telling her about for the last several months, was a woman, and it was serious.
You called to tell her on the day you were to meet Riva’s parents because your life away from home felt more real—took on more dimensions, more weight, depth, and meaning—when you shared it with your mother. Her only response was a silence that stretched out so long you had to check the screen to make sure your phone hadn’t died or that your call hadn’t disconnected. It was neither; she was just silent until you asked,
“Mommy, did you hear me?”
“I heard.” Her voice was small, strained. “I have to go and help Sister Halima. We’ll talk later.”
She hung up before you could say anything.
3.
You met Riva’s parents with your mother’s silence yawning wide in your mind; it made you quiet, respectful, but reserved. It made the whole evening at the ramen place feel like a TV show you were inside of and watching simultaneously. One in which you weren’t even the main character, just an extra who kept forgetting her lines.
Riva’s mother, Ami, was the main character. She walked into the restaurant with the air of someone accustomed to being adored. Statuesque in a white button down and red satin trousers. Her husband, Joel, trailed behind, also in a white button-down. You looked at Riva’s shirt; it was a white button-down.
You laughed. “I didn’t realize there was a uniform,” you said to her.
She chuckled as she got up to greet her parents, and you followed her lead. Deeply ingrained home training had you bending at the knees and bowing your head slightly in greeting. You had to remind your body where you were; you straightened up and smiled.
“It’s great to finally meet you.”
“Likewise.” Joel offered a soft smile and pushed his wire-framed glasses up his nose. You saw echoes of Riva in the gentle yet confident cadence of his gestures as he pulled out a seat for his wife.
“Share the joke with us,” Ami requested and sat down. Her hair was almost waist length, parted in the middle so that it fell on either side of her elegant face like silver-streaked dark curtains.
They were both graceful in a way that wealth allows; some things about Riva’s easiness began to make more sense to you.
“Oh, just we’re all wearing the same shirt,” Riva said and reached for your hand under the table.
“It appears we are,” Ami said, eyeing your bare shoulders. “That’s a beautiful dress. I love the pattern.”
It was one of your mother’s old iro and bubas; you’d used the mottled deep blue fabric to make an off-shoulder dress that started to feel too much next to these white people and their white button-downs.
“Yeah, she made it.” Riva tried to hold your gaze, but you were elsewhere. She squeezed your hand.
“Very impressive,” Ami said, “and this is an African print?”
“Yes . . .” You wanted to tell her that it was Adire—waxed and indigo-dyed by your mother’s hands. You wanted her to know that your mother runs a small workshop where she teaches traditional Yoruba dyeing and weaving techniques; that you wore this dress today because you were afraid of what your mother’s silence meant. Instead, you smiled and nodded. “Yes, it’s African . . . Yoruba.”
“So Lola, Riva says you’re an engine—” Joel started to ask.
But Ami interrupted, “Ah, yes, Yoruba. We have a sculpture that I believe is Yoruba, right, Joel?” She looked to her husband, nodding. “That gift from Colleen at the university, you know, the brass mask over the fireplace?”
“No, dear, I think it’s . . .” Joel shook his head slowly. “I don’t think it’s West African at all.”
“No?” Ami blinked rapidly, her cheeks reddening. “Oh, well, it’s beautiful anyway, you should see it. Riv, you must bring Lola to dinner at ours soon.” Distractedly, she waved a server down. “It’s a nice drive down to Chester. You could make a weekend of it.”
“We could make that happen.” Riva kept her eyes on you. “Right, Lo?”
“Absolutely.” You nodded and smiled.
“Shall we order?” Joel asked.
4.
“What’s up with you today?” Riva rested her forehead against yours. Then, she wrapped her arms around you, waiting for your reply.
“I told my mother about you.”
“Damn, that’s a relief; we’ve been doing this for almost a year.”
“No, I mean, I told her about you before. It’s just today is the first time that I told her you’re . . . not a man.”
“Oh.”
“Yes . . . I wa—”
“Wait, so this whole time she thought I was a guy?”
“I was trying to find the right way to tell her.” Your pulse quickened. Your mother’s silence remained blank and stretched in your head, your throat grew tight, you inhaled a ragged breath. “I didn’t know ho—”
“Hey, hey hey.” Riva cradled your face, shook her head. “Babe, it’s all good. There’s literally no rush or pressure at all.”
You looked at her face for a long time, trying to understand how your lives could make sense together. You wanted to see yourself and your relationship how she did. Her world seemed so clear-cut, her life so straightforward.
This one time, you told her of the thing you wryly call your minor plague, a suffocating sensation that weighs your limbs down and pins you to your bed and makes many excellent arguments for why it would be best if you disappeared altogether.
She’d looked at you for a moment before asking, “What helps?”
Why had that question never occurred to you? You felt entirely foolish that the notion of taming this suffering had simply never crossed your mind. It had simply never crossed your mind that pain could exist without meaning or purpose.
“What did she say?” Riva’s voice interrupted your thoughts.
“When?”
“When you came out to her?”
“Oh.” You shook your head. “Nothing.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, just silence. Then she said she had to go, that we’d talk later.”
“Ouch.” She kissed your forehead. “I’m sorry.”
“Your parents are nice.”
“They’re a lot, well, my mom is. She struggles.”
“With what?”
“Me,” she scoffed.
“What about you?”
“Everything, but it’s all good; I still gotta live my own life.”
5.
Living your own life seems to be a problem for you.
Your mother wears her disappointment like a saint would their piety. She’s seemed disappointed for as long as you can remember, long-suffering without any verbal complaints, but you can smell it on her. Everyone can.
As her only child, you don’t want to be another reason she stinks.
Once when you were eleven years old and had just started secondary school, you came home full of questions. You asked why your father had other wives.
“He’s a traditional man,” your mother had replied.
“Are you a traditional woman?”
“I suppose some people might see me that way.”
“Do you have other husbands?”
“Have you seen any other men here?”
“No.”
“Ehen, so no, I don’t have any other husbands.”
“Why did you marry Papa?”
At this, she roared in laughter. Then when she caught her breath, she said, “Na condition make crayfish bend.”
She never told you more than that, but the older you got, the more you gleaned about the conditions that made marrying your father seem like the best option she had. You’ve never met your mother’s side of the family, but you picked up bits of gossip from her fellow wives and their sisters and friends. The story goes that as a child, your mother was sent to Lagos by her grandmother. She was sent to live with some distant relatives in a home full of other children. It wasn’t a good time, but your mother lived through it. She lived to birth you and remind you of your luck by telling stories of other mothers who believed that the difference between love and cruelty depended only on the angle of the light.
Two of these stories keep you up some nights; the first is about a woman who was convinced that she could only truly love her children when they were ill, so she mixed small amounts of rat poison in their garri. She measured the amounts meticulously so that her children wouldn’t die, but stay sick, sometimes just teetering on the brink. She believed she could love them forever that way.
The second story is of a woman whose toddler learned to walk rather quickly for his age, and as his feet and legs strengthened enough to bear the weight of his tiny body, he squealed with joy at this new ability that propelled him forward. The woman’s heart darkened to see him so delighted to walk away from her, so she delayed in buying shoes to fit his rapidly growing feet. Instead, she would squeeze them into the tight ones he had already outgrown. She forced his right foot into the left shoe and the left into the right to slowly but certainly damage them.
6.
Early one morning, just past a year after you met Riva’s parents, after you’d told your mother that the relationship about which you’d been gushing was with a woman, Riva woke you up kissing and nibbling at your neck.
“Hi.” You yawned and turned to face her. You’d been dreaming something dramatic and mildly disturbing, something that escaped you the moment you awoke.
“Hey.” She pulled you onto herself and ran her hands up your back. “I want to marry you.”
Laughing and shaking her head, she added, “I mean, I know it’s a trash institution, and we have some shit to figure out. I just . . . I want us to be family. And, like, I want to keep learning all the possible ways to love you, but, yeah, will you marry me?”
“Yes.” You could hardly wait for her to finish speaking. “Yes,” you said, nodding profusely. You wanted to be family too.
Then you remembered that your mother had refused to talk about Riva since you told her the truth. Though you still talked often, several times a week. You still sent her money every month. You wondered how your father proposed to her, how he proposed to Mama Shakirat, Aunty Halima, and his newest wife, Faridah. Was it anything like this? Did their bodies feel at home next to his the way yours did with Riva? Even despite the loneliness, you were at home with her, and, you thought, that was a good enough reason for marriage.
7.
You hadn’t been back home since your father took a fourth wife. You were twenty four and in Lagos for your service year with the National Youth Service Corps. You’d spent eight lonely years in Toronto, and despite your mother’s protests, you thought you could be happier, more alive at home. So you returned to the compound in Surulere with some modest hope.
You tried to hide your judgement, your revulsion, when you saw that your father’s new wife was Faridah, a woman with whom you’d gone to secondary school. Faridah had been one year your junior when you were in school together. She was just as surprised to see you, but you both pretended it was a first meeting. Afterward, when you were alone with your mother, you asked her flatly, “Are you happy?”
You thought her answer might help you make sense of your minor plague. “Who happiness help?” She laughed joylessly.
Though ambivalent, you left Lagos again after your service year because your mother insisted that life in Canada could offer you more.
“Be strong, eh,” she’d said as you held her, crying at the airport moments from boarding a flight to Amsterdam, then Toronto, then Halifax —a new city for you, because it was as good a place as any. You knew she hated tears; you thought you were perhaps melodramatic, but you couldn’t help the feeling of being cast away, and for once, you’d just really wanted her to comfort you. You’d wanted her to ask you to stay.
You called her to tell her that Riva had asked you to marry her, that you’d said yes. “I see,” she said after another long silence. “And you’re happy?” she asked.
“I’m very happy.”
“And she’s still teaching at the university?”
“Yes, she just got tenure, actually.”
“She wants children?”
“Yes,” you said. That was true; it was you who wasn’t convinced. More silence. You held your breath.
“You haven’t been home in a long time,” she said finally. “I want to show you what we’ve been doing at the workshop.”
You exhaled.
“Maybe you can visit soon. You can bring your friend, River.”
8.
“My parents are inviting us to join them in Spain next year,” Riva says. “They’re planning on walking the Camino de Santiago. They thought we could meet them along the way, maybe in Salamanca?”
“Damn, really?”
Riva nods and takes a bite of her burger. You’re at one of those copy-and-paste airport bistros, waiting for a flight to Toronto. From there, you’ll connect to London and then, finally, Lagos.
Making this trip with Riva has your nerves oscillating between elation and terror.
“Yeah, they’re feeling generous these days.” Riva feeds you a french fry off her plate. You eat it, though your stomach is unsettled.
“That is very generous.” You take a sip of water. “Maybe too generous?” “Of course not. They adore you.”
“I know. I just don’t know if I want to go on a whole trip with them.”
“We’d just be meeting them for like a week or so. I mean, like we can decide on the details later . . . I thought it would be nice.”
“It would, I’d love to, I just want—”
“Hey, ladies.” You are interrupted by a man, middle-aged and white, wearing a blue ball cap with the image of a blue jay and a red maple leaf embroidered on the front.
“Sorry to disturb your lunch,” he says. “I don’t know if this is politically incorrect, but I just love your hair!”
He is looking at you as he says this, so you smile and instinctively touch your locs. You recently had them retwisted and dyed a colour the stylist called Burnt Orange.
“Thank you,” you say politely.
“Your hair is great too,” the man says of Riva’s fresh buzz cut. “Just looks like her’s took a lot of work,” he carries on cheerfully.
Riva chuckles, nods, and says, “Travel safe, sir.”
“Why did he have to make that weird?” she scoffs. “Anyway, we don’t have to go to Spain; I just thought you might be into it. I know my parents can be a lot.”
“I just sometimes feel like one of their . . . I don’t know, another interesting piece of art or whatever.”
“Babe, it’s not like that, you know they adore yo—”
“I know they mean well, it’s just exhausting being constan—”
“Hey, I know they’re, like, wealthy, white, middle-aged people. They’re not perfect and are definitely weird abou—”
“Riv, you’re getting defensive.”
“I’m not.” She shrugs with exaggerated calmness.
“You are, and I don’t want to argue or make you feel defensive. I just want to be able to tell you how I feel.”
“Okay.” She throws a hand up in surrender. “Tell me how you feel.” “Okay, that ‘politically incorrect’ joke compliment guy?”
“Yeah?”
“He means well too. He does really like my hair. And that weird joke is probably just how he knows how to interact with Black people or probably anyone that isn’t exactly like him. But it still feels a type of way for me, not a big troubling type of way, just a constant reminder . . . anyway, I feel that way with your parents like eighty percent of the time. I literally have anxiety dreams about it.”
Riva sighs, then she takes your hands and nods. “Okay.”
“It may change, or it may not. I’m not asking you to do anything but notice, and maybe, let me decide how much time I want to spend wi—”
The pre-boarding announcement for your flight interrupts you, so you start to gather your things as Riva asks for the bill.
9.
Though it’s not necessarily a fight, you and Riva make up and make out for most of the flight from Halifax to Toronto. The occupants across the aisle try and fail at being discreet with their staring.
You’re too anxious to fall asleep on the flight to London, so you watch three movies and some sitcoms and hold Riva while she snores.
The layover at Heathrow is long, and where Riva is excited and buzzing with caffeine, you are exhausted and irritable. The logistics of this trip are stressing you out; obviously, you and Riva will stay in your mother’s flat, but you’ve made note of several hotels close by just in case. She understands that you’ll introduce her as your friend to everyone but your mother. You resent it, but you worry, and you don’t know what to expect. You won’t tolerate anything overtly shitty; you decide this as you board the flight to Lagos. You are prepared to leave early if necessary. Your head is crowded with what-ifs; it starts to ache. You probably just need to sleep, but you don’t want to.
You think of your mother’s face, the vertical ila scars that mark each cheek, her wide nose, the broad curve of her smile, her thick dark lips. And you are asleep, and your nightmare finds you. You’re at dinner again, and as usual, the dining table is impeccably set—ornate dinnerware, intricately patterned silver, and crystal glasses all sparkle with warm light from a low-hanging chandelier; Riva quietly eats her cereal, there’s the smell again, the small talk, the sharp pai—
“Babe.” Riva is gently shaking you awake. “Babe, look.” She points out the window.
You turn to look, and the colours—the dusty orange earth, the bird’s eye view of trees in deep green clusters, the terra cotta, rust, and gray tin roofing that glide into view slowly and then quickly as the plane descends—they tell you that you are home.
