False Light

When I break, no one catches my fragments.

When I find the root of my darkness, a way to hide the horrors buried in the depths of my psyche, no one holds me.

And I see the truth.

Now I know that my mother’s colourful canvas had always been a skin dappled with bruises in different stages of healing, and her cozy shed had been a storage room where she’d hidden her and me from my father’s questing hands. 

I had grown used to the pervasive darkness of moments before he found me, so I had run mentally and started to paint pictures in my mind of a better and happier place. 

One where a larger masculine hand didn’t grope my smaller body. Where a turgid member didn’t force its way into my little mouth leaving bruises and tears.

A place my mother didn’t have to shatter into glass pieces because she found me in the perverted claws of my very own father.

When I break, I remember my dreams in vivid colours, the red blood spreading on the marble floor and the pink pulsation of my mother’s split head. The unnatural angle of her neck, and the pale terror on my father’s face. The whiteness of my mind as my developing brain tried to process the horror before me, and the sudden flurry of movement as my short legs pushed me to my mother’s body. 

I had screamed and screamed my throat raw, pulling at her cold body. Until my father had picked me up, and put his massive hand over my face, muffling my noises.

“Da ke, Yinka. It was an accident; it was an accident.” He had repeated the same words over. And again as the shed lit up in manmade flames the colors of an oversaturated sunset, and yet again as said colours leached out of the terrifying heat.

I’d watched the white flames lick upwards in roaring silence until my mind went black.

When I’d woken up, I had lost my voice and my entire world. And the monster beside me had bawled like a baby, promising to treat me better. Lies.

But I didn’t know that anymore.

My broken mind had taken the truth from me and warped it into a fairytale with darker roots.

And in the present when I stare at my muddied feet. I’m plagued with two choices.

To continue to know or to forfeit the awareness?

Beyond that, a question filters into my consciousness.

“Yinka, why do you paint?”

And I blink into the harsh light behind the silk-covered shoulder of the woman seated before me, trying to remember her question.

“Because I can?” 

Her berry-tinted lips contrast stunningly with her garden-loam coloured skin and are curved in a smile which should be ideally comforting but ultimately makes me feel like a lamb helplessly being led to slaughter.

“What do you mean because you can? Our weekly sessions are mostly held because you can’t.”

My brain tries to reconcile her comforting visage with the brutality with which she shreds the entirety of my existence. Her words topple my carefully built world, with each syllable I am gifted with unwanted clarity.

She notices my hesitation and continues on her verbal rampage.

“Your paintings are monotonous in their monochromatic existence.”

“I get it. You said it’s because I’ve repressed too much.” I remind her.

“I know that. But don’t you think it’s time to move on? Your life is more than a three-dimensional painting.”

“You know nothing of art if you think that colour is all that makes it what it is.” My tone is condescending.

“I didn’t say that.”

She picks up a pen to scribble something, then as if rethinking it, stops.

“Yinka, you cannot continue like this. There is so much unresolved trauma that you’re suppressing. Our sessions are becoming stagnant.”

“What does that mean? That I am broken beyond repair? Or that changing my art form isn’t going to help me mend?”

“Those are two non-solutions. Being colorblind isn’t the only problem here, it’s more and the fact that you’re here is indicative of some type of awareness.”

“What do you suggest I do? We have tried everything!” My voice is harsh and tight.

“The answer is complex in its simplicity. Allow yourself to remember and grant yourself relief. “

I feel the tingling rush of anxiety rise from my belly to my throat like a poison, to the point where I can’t force my limbs to stay motionless and unfeelingly stiff.

The dull thud of the chair forces my eyes down to the sight of bare feet and powder-blue pants caked with brown mud, for the first time in a lifetime of oblivion, my brain registers the colours.

Awareness washes over me, with it the realization of why I am here because I dream in black and white.

The mind really is a funny place.

Colours are ultimately everything to a painter. 

But for me, apart from a brief consummation of the brilliance of the world in the daytime, my nights never light up with the same luminescence. Dreams are supposedly a form of escape and a place for my creative spirit to thrive, except the muted colours of lifelessness pervade the sanctity of those nights.

I used to question why I chose painting as a form of self-expression when I hadn’t even fully comprehended the person that I was and would be.

This question had plagued me for so long, until one night, I closed my eyes to dream.

And like an old television show from the 80s, my dreams came in black and white, with subtle shades of grey between them.

The exact details of it are now lost to me, but I can still remember with scary vividness, the flicker of white flames, the silver sheen of sweat on a slate grey surface, and the silhouette of masquerade trees dancing to some music I could not hear but could feel reverberating through my entire body. 

And the wind.  

The scorching heat of the wind whipping my hair into my face had burned my skin so much that when I had woken in frozen sweat, I could still feel the phantom of the fire’s heat.

And in my cold terror, I had been inspired, like a mad scientist I had the ultimate flash of eureka.

Ah! This is how to do it.

I drew inspiration from my nightmares and made art.

I thrived in the almost colourless space I found a fascination with it. Black.

They called it.

Black was what they saw.

Critics had said my art was a form of self-identification. A way to connect deeper with my heritage, they had peddled righteous nonsense about how painter Yinka Remi used art to represent the diaspora, the oppressed, and the marginalized.

The so-called enthusiasts were blind. 

The African community wasn’t a base colour. They were shades.

And every other person I’ve seen was different shades of black. Some blacks were a paler shade of brown, like the underbelly of a goat, others the obsidian of an earth brimming with both fertility and vitality while some were the palest of pinks from a sky alight with sunrise.

They were called black anyways. 

Colourists are misled. All of them. 

Not me. Or my mother.

Usually, when my mother had mixed paints, she would murmur;

“Black and white are more than just light and dark, Yinka.  There are millions, no, billions of unseen shades between both colors. Anyone else who says otherwise is a quack.”

Those were during the softer days of coconut-scented languidness, before any traumatic experiences marred the sanctity of those memories. 

I have always loved art. 

I cannot exactly pinpoint the moment this love bloomed, but the root of it was my mother. 

How she used to tell me stories of painters, long dead and buried. How she would sit me on her soft thighs and whisper the names of her favourite artists into my ears like a secret, how she would caress my face and draw me into her comforting bosom.

Sometimes when I remember, I can almost taste the warm breeze and smell the green banana trees of those tropical evenings.

I remember that at first all she did was show me the paintings, her eyes would be brimming with serenity every time she walked me through the process of mixing the colours. Then she slowly taught my tiny hands to splash paint on a mini canvas she had assembled just for me. 

I remember loving the moments I had to follow her into the cozy shed.

Loving because, there she would sparkle like a piece of sea glass I’d found on the beach once, her afro forest, impenetrable by the sunlight streaming into the iridescent space and bouncing off the different easels of unfinished works. The workshop had been like an imaginary dreamlike place, where my mother and I laughed, sang my favourite nursery rhymes and finally smeared colours on each other’s faces just because we could.

The smell of those pigments had stung my little nostrils and I remember looking at my mother’s larger nose and wondering what kind of witchery stopped her from sneezing out the irritation.

Later, I’d realize that the smell of the paints didn’t bother her. I’d also later, much later, realize why she had always brought me to her tiny workshop when my father was in the main house, fully capable of entertaining me.

Why she’d always hide in my bed when darkness blanketed the earth with its stifling embrace.

Why, even now, all I can remember are the tiny details of her long-lost face, never the full picture, only barely just there, and the dark paint pooled beneath her form in a parody of blood.

Was that why my art was different? Was it in the trauma? Was it in the individual brushstrokes? Or the colors I could not decipher? 

I wouldn’t know.

All I know is that on the day I finished my first ever canvassed project, years after my life came to a downward spiral, my teacher had stared at my work for the longest time and called me talented.

I had been confused at first because all he should’ve seen were canvases, covered in miles and miles of black paint. Over and over.

I had looked at him questioningly, and he had said simply,

“Your art is reminiscent of Pierre Soulages, the way you play with light and textures to depict depth and shadow is a titillating experience.”

I had been annoyed, and unsatisfied. Because, unlike my teacher’s interpretation, there were only nightmares on those canvases.

And no one, not even myself could see through it. 

Not until now. When I break…