Godwin Osaysomemore

The following is a screen shot of a private message received on a social networking site not entirely unlike facebook when I responded to a friend request.

 Dec. 20^th  2013 @4.57 am

Thanks

March 4^th 6.42 am

Hi

Morn

March 16^th

Hi

Hello

March 20^th

Hi

Hello

How are you

 

(Emoticon saying hi from me on March 24^th)

Sup

Nada

Good morning

You looking good girl.

 

Its morning alright, but it is mid night

OK

 

Emoticon of a girl blowing bubbles around her head and very red cheeks.

HOW ARE YOU DOING

Fine and you

OK AM OK

ARE YOU MARRIED

IM IN NIGERIA

ND U

St Patrick is the patron saint of both our countries ................ no clue ? Ireland

OK DO YOU LIKE ME?

DO YOU LIKE ME?

DO You LIKE ME ??

Em how can i like you when we have not met or spoken. We each know nothing of the other ..........(said I as Jane Eyre. )

THAT’S TRUE

But ACTUALLY I LIKE YOU OK

My name is Godwin OSAYNOMORE

ND U

Hello

Are you there

Hello

My num is 080783564130

Am nt married yet

Can u married me????

I LOVE you.

Em  ...........how can you love someone you’ve never met.

U ARE BEAUTIFUL
But i like you with your appearance pic ok

HEY sweetheart

Waiting for you

I am 32 years old

wait let me guess, you come here and we have a fake wedding and you get to stay here legally.............???

Yes.

I will happy if u do that

JESUS Christ

Am serious ok

..................how does this even work?

Is by U

My number is............................

Please can you call me

Hey

Hey

Hello

Godwin I have a husband so I will have to ask you not to contact me again. I wish you well and hope that things work out for you. Thanks.

No I LOVE you ok

No you don’t ............ridiculous behaviour , move on. Take care.

I LOVE. YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

...............................................................................................................................................

The encounter unsettled me.

Despite warnings and protestations from all and sundry I still cannot be restrained from adding people from all over the world to my online accounts and so it serves me right that this and other episodes would leave a sour taste. I am of a mind that a stranger is  just a friend you haven’t pissed off yet.

Long after I finished typing my response, the words written to Godwin returned again and again.

Any online communication that begins with hello dear is always from Nigeria.

 

How bad does your life have to be to extend the hand of friendship to a stranger, to propose to an unknown woman in the hope of bettering oneself, to try and change one’s life situation, one’s postcode AND  hemisphere. 

I pictured hot dusty roads and a coterie of blue black men with bright flowered shirts in an internet cafe that smelt of garlic, warm pepsi belches and soft farts. Taking turns at a greasy laptop with a smell of smoke off the headphones from skyping,  laughing with their big white smiles  and thigh slapping their tight polyester clad legs at  some of the more outrageous photographs of obese needy vulnerable lonely women who would buy this for a dollar.

 

 

I mean, really.

Who in their right mind or even out of it would entertain this?

Maybe the kind of women who go to Kusadasi to dance on bar counters with the venga boys, flirt with  impossibly beautiful  young men 30 years younger than them,  those shell suit wearing, home perm sporting, gold t- bar and sovereign wearing broads, with tongues like navvies and graveyard coughs who marry the first handsome young man who looks crooked at them and then sell their story to Take a Break when he absconds from the high rise block in Sheffield, or Newcastle as soon as the ink is dry on their marriage licence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe they would buy it.

I didn’t.

But I also didn’t feel all that good about myself, or my attitude.

I decided to pay Godwin Osaynomore a little visit.

Relax, I didn’t actually book and board a flight and arrive at his door, but I did drop by.

As the little yellow man from Google  earth on street maps.

It amuses me sometimes that I am on it like a bonnet now.

A short number of years ago I was a complete luddite who used pen and paper and teeth and lips to communicate.

“Turn off them aul computers and stop living virtual lives, communicate with the warm living breathing human in front of you” I pronounced to anyone who came within 50 feet of me once upon a time.

Now I am all over technology like shite on a blanket, and can converse about gigabytes, rams, desktops, printer drivers , external hard drives, software, hardware, malware, antivirus,  paypal, photo editing suites, and can bore the bollix off random strangers at parties when I try to change the music to Jango , a radio station that plays everything you like, and things it thinks you will like, just by typing in one name, like throwing a small pebble into a clear lake and watching the rings,  and also knowing  the name of the pirate site where you can watch new releases the moment they are released  without paying a shilling.

 

 

Downloading, uploading, posting and editing means I can have a random thought in my kitchen at 2am and it is live across the world, with an edited photo attached by ten past.

Maybe Godwin Osaynomore saw one of them.

Maybe he has been reading all my posts, my stream of consciousness thought processes, nostalgic pieces about Ireland, heartbreaking stories of Siobhan and Alzheimers, maybe he is subscribed to my blog, maybe he has scrolled through a thousand photos with my hair a hundred colours and lengths, seen the parade of dresses and outfits, the multi-coloured florals on the big hips that would be perfect for wrapping a small brown infant in and carrying said infant miles down a dusty red road with a pot balanced on my head.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Little does he know that there would be a star in the east if there was to be any mention of infants, unless I google where you can purchase sperm, surrogates, or sexy slaves.  

Benin City in Nigeria IS a hot dusty place, and oh the dirt.

It has a population of 1.7 million people and still he has to send ME a message telling me he loves me and will married me.

Run by Ogisos - (kings of the Sky) -  .... - Benin translates from the Yoruba language as

The Land of Vexation which surely explains a lot.

The Portugese – looking for somewhere else, rocked up here in 1485 and proceeded to take over the gaff, and make a nice  few shekels for themselves exporting ivory and pepper as quick as Johnny wrote the note. The city grew rich and in 1852 the English got a whiff of it and arrived to oust the other crowd and continue their plan to take over the known world and expand the Empire one union jack at a time.

 

An army of 1000 men was sent to rout the lads and 998 of them were killed stone dead pretty swiftly.  2 of them went back to narrate the events that had ensued and so Sir Harry Rawson and 1,200 men were sent back in again,  fought like men possessed and  in their fierceness burnt the city to the ground.

Which surely negates the point of seizing it in the first instance.

Benin is a city of red earth.

Whether it is volcanic or the memory of a thousand atrocities, (while viewing  Benin’s photographs I saw mutilated headless corpses lying in the streets ) from bloody battles or the practice of human sacrifice, that the English  soldiers witnessed to their horror and consternation, the jury is out.

I stood on the edge of the Benin Moat and noted the layers of red clay, the luscious verdant greenery, the overcast  aluminium  skies, ,menacing .
I strolled through Agbado market and looked at the rolls of carpet, hoses, weed whackers, tins of oil, engines, wheels and a small incongruous stall in the filthy street with 2 pale pink parasols shading the melting stock of sweets.



 

The trousers are a little too snug in the crotch and a little too short in the leg to be new. The photo of Godwin sitting on his bed beaming hopefully into the distance, to the woman that will married him is poignant and comedic. He is unusual in that he is not in a group of males as all the others are, the one’s sitting outside the shanties and shacks,  the ones standing around the raised bonnet of a broken down car that was new when I was a child, the ones with their feet in the channels that run alongside the sides of the roads, as although they are all up in the road business and actually have a planning department dedicated to the beautification of ringroads they have no pavements or indeed streets in the poorer areas, just  red clay, some hard core and rocks, the empty beer bottles  flowing down the channels , comprised of raw sewerage, household rubbish and  skeletons of  dead pets and strays.

It is from this space, this land of opposites, capable of great humanity and horrific atrocity, of copper ornamentation and statues, of rapes mutilation and beheadings, of grey skies and red roads that Godwin extended a large black hand of connection around the globe, sending a friend request and a proposal in a matter of days. He must know I have previous, said she who got engaged to a Londoner after a few weeks and ran away with him to Germany without even ascertaining his star sign.

What would he do with himself here?

Try not to knock the pictures off the walls in the tiny kitchen if he exhaled. 
Re-arrange the glasses in the top press, hand me down stuff from high wardrobes, ring people back, open the door, walk the dog, answer the 1,947 unread emails from his countrymen on the laptop, order Chinese, wash up, whitewash the yard, fix the screws hanging out of the windows, wash the mildew off the bathroom walls because I have a tumble drier spinning in there 19 hours a day with no ventilation, read my opening chapters and give me his opinion, massage my aching neck,March around the streets in a quest for cake and company?Clap politely in ther red chair, the red kettle, the red door  and the red madness as he listens to me tell the same story on repeat and entreat of him to find my purse, keys, phone and or dog ? Beat admirers off in packed bars, remember the round, the number of the cab company, the take away dinner people,  remember too that I like only plain  Cadburys dairy milk chocolate and not anything with stuff in it, apart from golden crisp, or Frys peppermint cream. That I can’t eat crisps if there is no lucozade, that I throw out nothing, that I cry at ads and the drop of a hat,  and that no matter how much I am speeding and how loud I shout there is a small terrified child in me looking on in horror with her fingers over her eyes, that no matter how cool I think you are, I will have to run off and think about it by myself, that I am only lost and lonely when I scream and that I will have forgotten in 30 seconds and want a cuddle. That when I have the fear I need constant reassuring and minding and black and white movies and chicken soup.                                           

Well, he said he loved me, didn’t he?

One of the photos in the parade of Benin is from another woman who has her very own Godwin. She is the woman I could become if my friends did not rip off my mousetache and beard, if they did not give me clothes that fit me, if they did not colour my roots, or tell me I look like an explosion in a paint shop on some of my tamer days.  
She is draped around her Nigerian man like a boa constrictor around a telegraph pole, and hers is the matching smile of her new man, so wide they look like they slept with coat hangers in their mouths, and I wonder if telling Godwin Osaynomore to saynomore was a little hasty and if I should entreat him to say some more.

 

MDM Friday 13^th 2014-06-13