Boys Are Not Stones

When I saw this picture, I remembered how boyhood hurts. How we were planted in the hands of abuse; lost sisters and uncles. How our parents thought we were old enough to man ourselves, to find our way; so they gave us a weak freedom. They gave us the freedom to our doom. The freedom that would kill us later in life. Those pains still remain part of me. The pains of those boy children endangered in the hands of Auntie. Those boy children tampered like broken glasses, strong enough to hold their shattered bodies, thoughts, feelings and emotions together without breaking them; without telling their parents because society stereotyped them. Society foisted heroic names on them.

I wonder why parents always thought we were stronger when the other parts of us seek help and support. I wonder why they take so much consideration in keeping the girl child together. Teaching them how to sit properly. Teaching them how to rebuke a man that touches their body, especially their private parts. Teaching them how to avoid premarital sex. Teaching them how not to go to that boy’s house alone, but the boy child is neglected under the deceptive shroud of self-confidence, the false belief that he has full control of himself. We forget that those boys also have feelings and weaknesses.

We sing more of those girls from paradise than the boys from the ghetto school of hard knocks. Remember, we are all part of the struggle too. We face the same thing that girls face in that lonely room. Auntie and Uncle still stroke us in the dark blind room. They still ask us to plant a kiss on their lips and make us spend hours touching them here and there and watch them groan in an unknown tone. We didn’t tell anyone because if we did, they wouldn’t buy us those Christmas shoes they promised us.

We should be careful whom we send our boys to, whom our boys go visit alone. We should

be careful with home teachers, pastors in the church, Sunday school teachers and those we leave our boys with. The boy child is also prey to Sisters of Christ, the priests and those people we trusted with our lives. They are not stones. 
Boys are not stones, why neglect them to be abused by those lost sisters?

Boys are being raped and brutalized too. They get abused by women old enough to be their mothers but they keep quiet because no one would believe their stories. Because we believe more in the abuse of the girl child than the boy child, why?

Why does the society cry only in defence of the girl child? Lest we forget, the boy child is not a stone. Parents should look into our matters too. Let’s relate this with a family that has a boy and a girl. In the family diagram, the girl is considered more vulnerable in so many more ways than the boy, even though the girl may be older than him. They believe the boy is a man and can take good care of himself. They do not know that as much as he is a boy, he has his own weaknesses weighing him down, but he won’t talk because society taught him that talking makes him a weak man. He is not allowed to cry either because crying reduces him as a man. So, he has learnt to swallow more assaulted bones than his spit.

No one would respect him if he spoke his mind. This is where society also offends the boy child. Society stereotyped him to think he is a superhero, a superman who can take care of himself. Many crazy things happen to boys. We go through severe pains. The government will hear of this and nothing will be done. No imprisonment, no suspension. The priests hurt them. The pastors abuse them, their mothers hit them and their sisters hurt them morally as well as the house help using them also, but no one is saying anything about this. Is there no hope for the boy child in these matters? People don’t really care about what happens to these innocent boys.
We say words like “If anything happens to my daughter;” “Please take care of your sister;” “Protect your sister;” Then, what about the boys? Who takes care of the boys? They are like pastors who pray for others but hope unto God for our every success.

I think that the boy child should be given a voice to speak among his peers, a voice of expression. I think they should be given the chance to explain themselves; the right to see themselves in themselves. They shouldn’t be stereotyped, they should be taught how weak they are and not superhumans.

Boys you are not super humans! Take note, let no one deceive you into believing that.

In as much as they invade our territories and want to have us by all means, we should also defend ourselves. You know when the tale is told, the world will doubt us by saying ‘Women cannot rape or sexually assault a boy;” “How can a boy be raped by a woman?” so, you have to defend your territories. This game is changing every day, and society can’t see it. We talk about the Chibok girls, Dapchi girls and those girls brutalized in the street, yet the boys are not talked about.

I actually observe that parents, especially mothers are just concerned about the girl child losing her virginity and getting pregnant and not worried about the issues of the boy child. They are not worried about the tale that the boy told them about Uncle Ricky removing his pants. They are not moved by the stories they told them about the pastor touching them here and there. Maybe they believed he was praying for them or maybe that Sunday school teacher that took Benny to the toilet and told him he had a big manhood was right saying such things to a boy. These people held in such high esteem are abusing boys, so why do we shy away from them?

Lots of little boys are suffering in silence in the street. They can’t say a thing about the

dangers they face every day. Even if they speak out, who will believe them? How many people believe boys can be raped too or sexually abused on any occasion? Maybe you will understand better when an adult male opens up to you about the horrors of their childhood. This has been my thought and will also be my message and the consciousness I exude. We should try not to keep fostering society’s mistake by raising one and neglecting another in the name of manhood. Don’t raise only a girl and not the boy because you think he is bold enough to stand alone.

I will now relate to my own childhood experience. I grew up in the ghetto town of Aba where survival was by who you are, how brave you are to defend your sister’s body from being defiled by men and boys. Mother always told us to protect our sisters. That was the ultimate role of a boy at that age. There were boys around. Boys that could take advantage of her. Boys that could harm her. Boys that could teach her bad things. So, she taught us how to defend our sisters, not ourselves, because she believed that our sisters were weaker emotionally and therefore could not protect themselves; but we boys can. We planted those beliefs in our mind. We fought harder so that we would not disappoint the mother and father. We have to make them proud. I fought too even though I was not that strong. But I needed to prove to my parents that I could protect my sister even though I was so weak to defend myself at that time.

There was one day when a friend of mine was beaten by a girl in school. He came back home and told his parents what happened. The whole house broke into elegies. It was torn into pieces and its fragments shattered into dust. The spiders went into hiding, the lizards were afraid too. Everywhere was calm and silence ruled our mind.

His father got angry. He shouted, danced here and there to his ability. He asked my friend where his hands were when the girl beat him up. I was there. I was afraid to explain what really happened to them. My friend was too afraid to speak. The father went into his room, got a rope, tied his hands and legs and began to beat him. His mother did not help the matter. She was supportive of his father. They beat the hell out of him. I helped him escape.

As I grew older, I tried to relate this issue with being inhuman and the things that have to do with boys and girls but failed. I tried to relate it to me as a man but I could not get a reasonable answer to all the questions bothering my mind. They were not abstract things. They were things we see day after day. A wife beating her husband and people laugh it away, a man beating his wife, it becomes violence against women, it makes the headlines in the dailies. Then, what is the name given to the former 

Is it a sin for a girl to beat up a boy of her age or one she is older than? Are we that strong emotionally and physically that nothing can defeat us? Or is it culture or tradition that made it so? Why do boys have to suffer this much and society doesn’t care about them?

The majority of these things happen everywhere. We think there is no way a boy can show his weakness to the world. They look up to the boy child as the firstborn of the family so he is expected to bury his father upon his death.

Boys are not stones, they are flesh and blood just like their counterpart.

by John Chizoba Vincent 

chizobavincent@gmail.com

Remarkable Night

The story began the night she died. 

"You really need to hear my story, right?", she asked, "alright, here it comes". 

It drizzled that night. With a slight prod, the wooden door creaked open. The room was dimly lit by the bedside lamp. It took me few brisk steps to get to where she laid while avoiding the yellow vomit pooled on the wooden floor. The chemist had assured me that the drug would stabilize her condition for some time. But what he didn’t tell me was where and how I could scrounge around for the surgery he spoke of. I scooped small water into a calabash and tapped her to wake. 

Her legs were cold to my touch and her teeth had stopped chattering from the cold. I put my ears to her chest. No heart beat . Then, I knew mother was gone without a goodbye. That night, I cried until my eyes were dried of all the tears.

The next day, I was standing by the side of a mound of loamy soil. Tears rolling down my cheeks filled my chattering mouth. There was no shoulder to share my burden. I watched her corpse, wreathed in white sackcloth, as it descended down to the belly of the grave. 

My uncle took me in. But each passing night in his house came with a fresh pain and agony. 

Was it the pain of my loss? 

He came in every night with a rim of wrapper tied to his chubby waist. He would tell me that no one should know of it. He actually called it “Our little secret.” He threatened to kill me the day I would leak the secret and warned that this secret must follow both of us to our graves and I would wonder how many of such secrets had followed mother to her grave, because mother had shed a lot of tears on his account. Those nights, I would beg him in between sobs, but he would set a deaf ears.

“You are my Uncle. Please don’t do this,” I told him the first night he came.

“This is one of the good gifts uncles can give to their nieces,” was the reply. 

He would crawl into the bed, rip off my panties and would push himself inside me. In futility, I had tried to nudge him aside with my tiny muscles. Tears would pull down my eyelids, while he moaned with each thrust. I would feel a sharp pain running through my spines as his monstrous penis rammed my young vagina. 

Then, came a night –the night that would birth my freedom, the night that would change my story. He ambled in and walked into the bed. His eyes shone lustfully. He patted my legs and I didn’t bother to stop him as usual. I needed to keep him happy, because I knew that the happiest point of a man was his weakest. The moans and erotic air he breathed must have so blinded him that he didn’t see the knife shimmered as I tugged it out of the pillow. I gently sank the blade deep into his neck and immediately gagged down the wails with the pillow. I held to the position as I watched him writhe in pain, until he dropped still. My blouse drenched in his blood. 

“So, how did you find yourself in the prison?” one of the inmates asked. 

I submitted myself to the law. 

 

 #CHA_writes

by  Chukwuebuka Harrison Aninze