Tremor by Teju Cole

Author:Teju Cole [Cole, Teju]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

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My mother was easygoing. She respected her religion but she was a calm person about it. But her father whom I knew when I was a child was anything but easygoing. He was known for his sternness and extreme Islamic belief. If he were alive today he’d be the kind of person you could compare to Boko Haram. His trousers never reached the ground and he was skeptical of Western education and bicycles and sewing machines. He was an imam, your great-grandfather. He died long before you were born though your great-grandmother lived until you were about ten. His name was Waleed and his father, named Hamzat, was also an imam. Hamzat was in fact the first imam in Amu Ewa. This would have been in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. There are no photographs of either of them.

Hamzat’s father was Esude. It is a rare name: “Esu has arrived.” Between the generation of Esude and his son, Islamic religion came to our people. Hamzat would have been an early convert, probably under the influence of preachers from the north, from Ilorin and Hausaland. That’s where Islam came in from, usually into areas that at the same time were also resisting Christianity. Missionaries feared Ijebu people and Remo people. They say we were especially stubborn and wicked. Esude was a blacksmith and his name makes me think he was also involved in the priesthood of Esu or his family was. I don’t know when that might have been, maybe around the middle of the nineteenth century. I imagine him holding on to the traditional truths while all around him everyone was finally converting.

Anyway it goes without saying that we don’t believe in Esu anymore. We would probably have said back then that Esu is the god of interpretation and also of mischief, that he is the one who spins messages around and sets people against each other. But as Christians we learned more and came to believe that Esu is the same as Satan or the Devil. That is why isé Esu is now the way we describe evil: “the Devil’s works.”

When I married your dad and became a Christian you could say that it was like that change from Esude to Hamzat. You could say it’s that kind of change, a dramatic change where the world is completely altered. I actually now never think of when I was a Muslim. We have to know how to forget the past in order to make progress into the future. Some people did traditional religion and some did Islam and some did Christianity. That is how eyes gradually open. Whenever a person wakes up, that is morning for them. But this your thing of not believing anything at all, I don’t see that as progress. A person has to believe something.

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