Nna

Easter Sunday, and I went to church. An Igbo church, in a hall behind a supermarket, two hundred people from Imo and Anambra and Abia in their Sunday best, the hymns in the language I think in when I am tired, the specific noise of it, the aunties, the children in the aisle. I stood at the back by the door, where I have always stood.

A man came to me at fellowship. Older, my father's age, from Owerri; he knew the road, he knew Obinze, he knew, I could see it in his face, exactly who I was, because the books are on Amazon and the diaspora reads, and I braced for the face to change.

It did not change. He put his hand on my shoulder and he said, nna, you have eaten? And I said yes, and he said, come and sit, and he sat me at a table with his wife and put rice in front of me and did not say one word about anything except the road to Obinze and how bad it has got.

Nna. It is what you call a son, or a man you respect, or a boy you are being kind to. It is the word my father has not said to me since the afternoon. I wrote in 2019 that I did not know what to do with hope. I still do not. But an old man from Owerri put rice in front of me on Easter Sunday in a hall behind a supermarket in England and called me nna, and I ate it, and I am writing it down in case it never happens again. God bless gay people. God bless that man.