I Can’t Tell My Father I Love Witches

It is customary in Benin culture to present your first earnings to your parents, who pray over it, share it amongst the family, and offer blessings to the pathway for future earnings. It’s a beautiful tradition every young adult looks forward to, as it signals the first step towards rewarding your parents for all the love and care they’ve shown you your entire life.

It is also the norm in an average household to pray against evil spiritual forces, who are almost always ready to destroy the family for a host of reasons ranging from petty jealousy to generational feuding. So you can imagine my joy-laced anxiety as I shuttled home from the university to present the first earnings from my writing to my father; it was payment for a story about a witch.

“Good afternoon, Daddy, please bless the work of my hands, the work of my hands being witchcraft.”

I wasn’t thrilled to have that conversation.

Before I started writing speculative fiction, I read a lot of speculative fiction. I didn’t even know it had a broad name; it was just fantasy and science fiction to me. But if I were to think further, interest in these stories was born from the folktales my parents and elder siblings would tell me. There was always a thin line between what was considered fiction and what was more informational guide on navigating the supernatural. For the most part, everyone saw folktales as a fad that one outgrows, meant to silently fade away like the memory of a bland protagonist in that one book, you read, that one time, eons ago. But for many like me, the stories ignited a fire within me.

When my mom told me of the creature that awaits unsuspecting villagers who venture out at night to answer nature’s calling, shrouded in dark robes, often by cherry trees. This creature’s feet were the only immediately visible parts of its body, and one would remain safe if they did their business and looked no further, but if your curiosity got the best of you and you followed the feet up to find its face, then you would suffer a spiritual blow to the senses.

The imagery of this tale stuck with me. What do you mean it was meant to regale my childish sensibilities and then be promptly forgotten? Someone forgot to tell my inner child to grow up, because I would go on chasing these stories till I began writing myself. It was as though I took the wrong moral lessons, where one thought: beware, I thought: that’s fascinating. And that’s where the disconnect comes in. I grew up in a vastly conservative and superstitious society where having a fascination for the fantastical indicated a troubled soul. No one expected you to go on seeking out these stories or, even worse, writing them. It would take some time before I was able to find my people amongst the crowd. Thankfully, I was able to recruit an accomplice before then. Every young boy’s precious enabler of peculiar interests: his mom. It was common for us to make requests of her every Saturday and if she could, she’d fulfill a wish here and there. It didn’t take long for her to catch on to my leanings after the hundredth or two-hundredth request featured a magical book or another.

She didn’t understand it —my fascination with the speculative, but she saw that I did, and that was enough. Every other Saturday, she’d go out of her way to hunt for rare fantasy books I had asked her to help me get at the used bookshop. If you’ve ever shopped at Ring Road or Oba Market —where the vendors haggle like fairies underneath a full moon or the particles of ground pepper in the air fill your nostrils and the press of bodies leaves little avenues for personal space —then you’d know it’s a troubling journey on its own without having to move from bookshop to bookshop because your son wants to dive into a weird new world. Bless her.

It helped that she didn’t actually read these books, even though she knew of their contents.  Her literary preferences leaned more towards James Hardly Chase novels. She had hundreds of them which I in turn never read either. My fantasy novels weren’t taboo per se, but one simply doesn’t read books where witchcraft is venerated, even though fictional.

Once, my father threw my copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on the floor in anger. He’d discovered it while looking for proof of waywardness in his children. He found a large book instead.

“What is half-blood? Why is this boy reading such?”

What if he’d seen Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone? Maybe I’d have been thrown out instead.

I felt hard done by. You’re chastising a boy for reading? It was unbelievable to me. Granted, his overreaction was a byproduct of unrelated matters but reading ought to be sacred and kept out of banal matters. The event foreshadowed a potential similar reaction if he ever came upon a work I authored myself. This is why, a few years later, when I got published and received my pay from Fireside, I was conflicted.

I had immense pride at getting payment for my creation, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of a family meeting being called after reading the first line: I think Aunty Adesuwa is a witch.

In the end, I opted to give a vague synopsis and a hard copy of my story; I hoped he wouldn’t read it or he simply wouldn’t understand it if he did. He only ever read official documents like memos, proposals, agreements and so on, so it wasn’t a tall hope. He never mentioned it again so I suppose I hoped correctly. I got Father’s blessings, Mother’s admiration, but I wasn’t sure if their prayers warding off evil would take, as I would spend my time onward, seeking out more stories of witches, bush babies, magic, and more. Science fiction was no better, as I wrote about tests of faith bordering on blasphemy. Characters that cast off the supremacy of God for the assuredness of science would never be welcome at home. It was beautiful.

I love every moment of it. All it took was time, I was comforted by frequent escapes to new worlds and I have found my people. My X username (Amadin Stormblessed), which is a nod to one of my favourite fantasy books, still attracts fellow lovers to my page. Once, when I was using a different name, also fantasy-related, a popular SFF author followed me.

He tweeted: “I’m following just because your name is the Witchking of Angmar.”

He’d later unfollow (I’m still hurt, maybe it was because of my football tweets), but it was a special moment. Witchking of Angmar, in a lot of places where I lived, probably gets me scheduled for deliverance by the family pastor or a divination session by a friendly dibia (a story for another day). As if being a witch wasn’t enough, to be the king of them? That was surely a case for anointing oil.

Now, I’m more expressive of my tastes and I’d like to think people are  becoming more open-minded.Maybe not all people, however. It’s not the worst thing in the world, navigating the sensibilities of a strict culture and my boundless imagination of the macabre, but it is interesting to find pleasure regardless of pressure. It’s not always easy finding things you genuinely enjoy; it would be a waste to give them up for others.

So when I’m in a market, I’ll wonder if putting my head between my legs will make me see spirits, I’ll listen at night to hear a bush baby’s cry, I’ll think about human transfiguration and its potential applications. I’ll do these things. Worse yet? I’ll write about them. I hope you’ll read them.

Just… don’t tell Daddy.