Girl of God
Words and Images by Ryan Youngblood
Its scales shined up from the bottom and towards the dropping rain; a urine yellow reflection that reached off its back and asked you to believe that that wasn’t his native color, but that the time in the confines of a fisherman’s bucket stained the flakes lining his mouth to his tail and it was never what God had intended. Below its eye, an eye as if circled by a crayon with orange infection, sat a pink rash thinly pasted over its gills and faded along the fleshy mouth. He looked up in an unnatural stretch beyond his orbital socket and he thought that he saw himself in a reflection. He had smooth, dark skin and violet framed eyes from the shadow blushed around their curving sadness. His hair was long, but long from a stitching of extensions that sat on his head the way that plastic bouquets brighten a room. His lips, puckered under a muzzle of fear, had much to say, but said nothing at all. In pale unison, the muted glow of his scab skin mirrored the off-gold color of the watch and ear rings he saw in the mirage. They laid on his wrist and rested tiredly in his lobes. Then his fluid impression, while watched from the bucket deep, moved. Yet he did not. Sorrow filled his sharp, tipped bones and he knew that it couldn’t be him.
“You! Pikin!” Edna turned her head and her earrings followed. “I wan chop!” She moved her eyes back over the disorienting mirror of water. In it Edna thought that she saw something of herself in the rippling glass. Trapped in a bucket and snared by paucity and crooked men, she was surrounded by towering walls, save a hole in the sky, floating endlessly as a day’s catch. “Dem send you?”, Edna asked in rhetorical metaphor, inquiring if her fraud copy was sent to torment her. She moved and the suspended yellow mass didn’t. They were again separated, for he was just a tilapia and she was just a girl, both waiting to be eaten.
The brothel was the main artery of Ajegunle, pumping blood and sex and violence through the Lagos ghetto. Open engorged sewers and valleys of garbage lived on this southern tip of Nigeria’s largest city. Area Boys looking for fucks and finds and carrying all forms of disease take from the streets like rabid lions. Hyena Men caravan through the urban filth in a voodoo masquerade as the town criers; a muslim and occult tradition that borders acts of sadomasochism as they bend the wills of hyenas, baboons, and cobras in supernatural ways. The Lagos Lagoon curves itself around Ajegunle, separating it from the affluent Victoria and Lagos Islands. The narrow waterway having no choice as it allows in horror the passage of trafficked commodities used in sodom abuse, running to The Gulf of Guinea like a sinner to be baptized in holy water. Unfinished buildings covered in green netting, floating slums living on stilts in the black lagoon sludge, and cackles at night from an underbelly of lust and profit. Edna called it home.
“Pikin!” Edna recoiled from her pimp’s fish. “You want da fish, na so?”, Edna responded. “No wahala. We chop later. Baff up fo de good man.” In a baby blue thobe, a man sat next to the pimp. A tall, muslim god in his bright sky tunic, stood in intoxicating power over Edna from two meters away. Her pimp had an affinity for western music, and on screeching repeat played Bryan Adams through static speakers. He was drinking Johnny Walker Red Label from the bottle under the translucent, green ceiling. It gave a mossy glow around the brothel like the tilapia’s bucket water. Edna’s client abstained, but in his eyes he was drinking her down. She thought about her boys. Twins from a man, any man. Sometimes she wondered if it was a man who had gotten her pregnant. Some nights looking through the hole in the sky, she wondered if she too was the Virgin Mary. Then she’d laugh a somber laugh and say, “No true”. Hooking was for them, the best way she could love them. Her divine pair were her strength, as well as her chains.
“Baff up ma pikin.” She headed to her room to dig through a harlot’s wardrobe and find the outfit that strips her of dignity and leaves her feeling a cankered tart, yet savory to brothel men. She quit the foyer passing her pimp as he sang “Peez fo geev me..[unintelligible]”. The main parlor had bar coolers with lukewarm bottled Star on account of the constant loss of power. The bar stools had half their backs and used condoms at the swivel base. Crates of Guinness malt blocked the views of posters of Nigerian rap artists, those that peddle CDs at open air fish markets and contain 5 tracks with a virus. The ceiling continued its malachite hue that cracked at the joints of the 2z4’s. Rain found its way through and in the larger gaps you had to leap over puddles. At the ingress of the brothel a banner hung to the door. It was haphazardly covered in smut, images of women far, far from the brothel that were a seductive siren’s song for the night living. Area Boys ran the door and carried modified MP5’s. Beyond the check point was a food stand holding at most three cold samosas. Girls and boys were scattered around like thrown dice. They laughed with each other, held hands, and waited for work. The girls wore thongs and long T’s. The boys were boys and couldn’t be placed beyond any other boy with a football jersey and sandals. Their youth and the arresting of it is what bind them all. Blackberries with cracked screens charged in bulk along hanging outlets with exposed wires.
Edna was in her room letting the fan blow across her face. The wet season brought insufferable humidity that seemed trapped inside the brothel. The room was small and had only enough space for Edna and her side table of hair products, lotions, cell phones, condoms, and HIV prophylaxis. From floor to ceiling a violent, fluorescent purple light covered the space. Beyond the wall of tarp she could hear the familiar tantrum of a client. “Listen well well! I go land you slap!” A crack and a following cry stilled the hallway’s silence. The pimp’s Area Boys rushed in like first responders. A brief altercation spilled into the hanging laundry where the hole in the sky let in rain. A small jerry can of palm oil spilt and a cook stove toppled with dried charcoal dusting the floor with ash. Edna finished putting on her makeup as heels were dragged outside her door. She looked in a pocket mirror and for a moment smiled. It was the girl again from Yabo; beautiful, poor, yet free. The door knocked and she went to it. Like a fun house in a slanted hall of doors, he stood in choice of this one. He took her vulnerable hand and asked, “How bodi?”. Edna led him into the room that felt like being inside of a hibiscus bulb. She latched the door and responded, “Bodi fine.”
Edna and the man in blue returned to the foyer. It was as if she were a part of his robe, stitched to him forever as they came out like a bride and groom to greet their families. But at times she felt that it was her who retained parts of each man. Maybe it was her power and what would one day be harnessed in strength and able to destroy them. He left, but she didn’t. Bryan Adams still carried the mood in dark happiness and light nightmare. “Come chop, pikin.” The pimp’s end of the table was overrun by the empty Johnny Walker and cans of Power Horse energy drinks. Another girl brought two plates for Edna and her pimp. “God don butta my bread!”, the pimp jeered in excitement. Anything bathed in Ata Dindin gave him joy and he shared it with Edna. She looked down at the plate of red sauce and buried underneath was the tilapia. She could almost feel sad for him, but then realized that she was hungry. So she ate as she thought of her boys.
Behind the Project
In collaboration with the CDC and Columbia University, I was commissioned in 2019 to follow a female prostitute who was a PrEP participant. PrEP is an HIV prevention strategy where HIV-at risk/HIV negative individuals take anti-HIV medications before coming into contact with the virus to reduce their risk of becoming infected. Girl of God is my own remembrance and recollection of the female prostitute scene in Lagos, Nigeria. The profession of selling for sex becomes increasingly complex as you come to understand individual stories. Devotion, love, choice, and slavery take on new meanings.