CALABAR CITY From the Eye of a Passerby AS NARRATED BY EL OSAS IYALEKHUE

                  

Calabar is the Paradise City; a city that bustles with a sheer theatricality that even drama itself would find too ambiguous to represent on her divine stage. The city itself is a marvel, beautiful and seducing in outlook, especially when one considers the fact that aesthetic is a remote practice in the sphere of urban planning in Nigeria. Calabar prides itself on the attractive sites that display itself boastfully at every nook and cranny of its environs. Any visitor is bound to fall prey to the allure that the city comes alive with. No one visits Calabar and not have a romance with the city and then fornicate with the idea of living in Calabar (whether long term or short term). This is the sort of energy that emanates from Nigeria’s Paradise City.

The city however, is halved into two intriguing and curiosity inspiring divides. One half of the city represent the now and hope for the future, while the other halve is a living metaphor for incurable hopelessness-a classical open case of human depravity and society’s handiwork at reducing other humans into sub-humans. 

Calabar municipality ensconces the urban warren, school for the rich, hotel for comfort seekers, leisure places for fun seekers, eateries for those who can afford it. Luxury houses, super stores, beauty salons, boutique for designer clothes at designer prices, good pharmacies, splendid roads, clean taxis and petrol stations to  keep them going, street lights to light up the city at dark, spas, cosmetics shops, yes it has all the pleasures that qualifies a city. Calabar municipality is a pretty place armed enough to surpass any city in Nigeria in expression.

An intriguing divide of Calabar is the abysmal settlement known as Calabar south. It may suffice to call it the shadow of Calabar municipality, but in truth, it is a decayed carcass of the old Calabar. A drive through the city into the south is like watching on stage, the existentialist tragedy of a young beautiful princess whose life collapsed from blossoming youthfulness into a senile old age and rejection. Calabar south is the unspoken shame of the rest of Calabar. To narrate the total picture of Calabar south, would by implication translate into a subjection of literature to a tragic essence which its will cannot hold. Or rather, it would mean an unnecessary putting through of the unsuspecting reader to a pained experience. And that is something any sane Man would not want to take credit for. To salvage the dilemma, implies bringing just a fraction of Calabar south under the microscope. The most intriguing fraction would be Bay Side.

Bay Side is a fragment of Calabar South which spans from Garden Street to Marina Street. This is the place known as the Old Calabar. The residential arrangement at Bayside constitutes a visual disharmony that slaps the senses of the onlooker. It is a shock inducing settlement of zinc houses, tents made up plastic bags, mud houses, brick houses, block houses, wood houses, and ancient prefabricate houses that date as far back as the seventeenth century of the colonial epoch. Bathrooms are cubicles made of zinc that shields the Bay side human from the prying eyes his neighbors while he bathes. Toilets are non-existent. At Bay side, the female humans and male humans defecate in the cellophane bags, which they bank on refuse dumps or streets or in gutters for the ever present rain to wash away. This practice adds values to smell of Bay side. Other humans at the Bay side, mostly males, defecate at the abandoned docks of the Calabar River (that once traded the highest number of slaves from Africa) that runs through Calabar to Cameroon. Watching these males defecate is an experience of high spirit. Tens of Bay Side males baring their buttocks naked (scrotum dangling with erectile pomposity) to abuse natural water, yes, all the waste of Bay Side human also go into the same water. Welcome to the most abused water in the world.

In order not to expose this write to the hazard of reducing it to a Bay Side story. It is of unequivocal priority to hit the nail on the temple. Bay Side is  a hot bed for criminals, bastards, teenage prostitutes, adultery, polygamy, drug dealers, free sex, thieves, armed robbers, drug addicts and anything bred of hell; and without apology the simpletons who have come to accept life as it comes. However, what cannot be missed at Bay Side is the playful spirit which encumbers the settlement, the very spirit with which the young and elderly commune, that seeming fraternization that is only reminiscent of places where the down trodden survive, collective pains and grace, of laughter and tears, something that the sophisticated humans living in the municipality could never experience as a unit.

Tongues are a matter of interest in Calabar, the effuk tongue being the most domineering. The effuk tongue is both a vocal and aural marvel. Listening to the tongue for the first time, may be off-putting, as the delivery of the tongue is as orchestrating incoherent sounds, produced by throwing a variety of object at a rough surface. But soon enough, one would realize that the tongue possess an onomatopoeic quality which is finessed by stresses that makes effuk tongue sound rhythmic. It is proud language, whose fall is in when it is spoken fast. The china man definitely has a surrogate African relative. It is also of emergency to mention that any tongue exposed to effuk language, may never speak any other language without denting it phonologically. This is why the effuk man will pronounce JUNCTION as YUNCTION or YELLOW as JELLOW. 

Women form an aspect of Calabar that cannot by any means be deemphasized; they are like proud flowers that blossom in spring, the green leaves that flourish after Harmattan. Calabar women are God’s own way of personifying beauty; the Effuk woman epitomizes feminine magnificence. These delicate specimens are the most prevalent presence in Calabar. They display themselves everywhere, so that, driving or walking through Calabar is a happy sojourn. Permit me to enforce the impression that Calabar City is a Mecca for beautiful women where the ugly ones are begging to be born. So if the city fails to charm you with its beauty, the women will disarm you, making you fall hopelessly in love with the city. This is why Calabar is a city of angels where saint grow to become philanderers. 

These women, however, present a problem that wears a cloak of acceptance in the social life of Calabar City. A view of this problem from the magnifying glass of a moralist, would inevitably present something of a tragic essence, a dilemma that would make the heart of a clergy bleed out of unreserved pathos; this is a problem whose enigmatic suspense lays in the dress sense and essence of the woman living in Calabar.

Women, that is, both the immature and adult alike is suspect in this fashion crime. The women in Calabar dress with a deliberate intention to gives sex a voice. Coming into Calabar City for the first time, nothing prepares the visitor for the thigh-down revealing cloths that girls and women in Calabar skin into. It is not mere charade if one emphasize that the women in Calabar have arrived at a sense of fashiontopia that diminishes any shyness at revealing what would have constituted keeping in safety the pride of a woman (that is if there is still dignity in a woman hiding her body jealously). These femme fatales bask in a kind of uhuru that allows them reveal their cleavages like the main message of an advert display. Their thigh revealing clothes are usually inches away from giving an observer the benefit of seeing what skins their virginal crevices. Incidents where-in women actors in Calabar City wear trousers, it is usually tight enough to incur the status of near nakedness. But all this feminine near nakedness bothers no one; it is part of the city’s own way of telling her character. This acute whim of scopophilia is what makes Calabar City a place never to forget. The women here are feast for all eyes.

It would be wanton indiscretion for this narration to weave in the city of Calabar women’s dress liberties without knotting it with her male counterpart’s dress language. The man in Calabar is a traditional dresser; like his male counterpart everywhere, shirts, T-shirt and trousers are his wardrobe relatives. This fashion tradition of the women in Calabar has failed to adulterate that of her male counterpart, but his sensibilities on how women should look will never be the same. If he ever lives outside Calabar City, women who fail to dress semi-naked, will perpetually appear unsophisticated him.

Food in Calabar City is a bit tricky in concept. The popular conception outside Calabar is that these human are the chief custodians of good cooking; that when the Calabar human cooks, eating the food is a monumental experience. This is wholly true, because the Calabar human is expert at cooking leafy soups; the most popular being afang and edika ikong- two very taste mesmerizing soups that are eaten with either eba or akpu. The fisher man soup is also special in menu books in Calabar City. Eaten with eba or akpu, fisherman soup is made solely from fish and spices. Another amazing delicacy, though quite unorthodox is the rice and pepper soup dish; it makes excellent surprise for the mouth. Pork, fish and dog are the main flesh that makes meat for humans living in Calabar City. Any order thing outside the listed is eaten sparingly (only by few) or not at all. Put succinctly, variety is a distant concept in the cook book of humans in Calabar City; and in a strict sense, if the opportunity provides itself, it would be downright wrong for one to surmise that humans living in Calabar City have something against fresh vegetables. The largest population living in Calabar are staunch protagonist for heavy duty carbohydrate foods; salads are cook book myths.  This is how living is, and will be in Calabar City.

It may introduce some sort of a problem if one were to throw light on the standard of living in Calabar city. So it is more down- to- earth to say that living in Calabar City is an euphemism for saying living a life of high cost. Yet, making money in Calabar City is hard adventure, expect one was in politics. This under-standard of living means that the human living in Calabar City. carry on his shoulders, the cumbersome problem of a struggle to live in a city that fights to take everything earned back from you. Do not be deceive; the city always wins the fight.

The cost of living in Calabar City may sit heavily on the shoulder of its social life, but it would likely not constitute what would worry a divine messenger (if such were possible) sent from heaven to cleanse Calabar City of her worries. Like a woman who has an unusual monthly menstrual experience, Calabar city is pained by the spirit of sodomy. Aside the act of fornication and adultery that has evolved from sin to social semantics, and has become an accepted character of man’s sexual language, Calabar City gains her carefree sexuality persona from homosexual fornication and adultery. In Calabar City, lesbian and gay sex is popular enough to adopt the status of a national sport. Both the married and single are actors of homosexuality; it is like a silent tradition in the sex life of Calabar , but stay in the city long enough and the stink of the unorthodox practice will reach your nose like the smell of an over fed rat that died at the corner of the house. But Calabar City is happy the way she is; should any other city boast that her peoples are not into one perversion or the other, then let her cast the first stone.

A matter of society that matters in a manner that many will pick malice with is single-hood and the face which is adopts in Calabar City. Single young men in Calabar city are eager to settle down. They even get teenage girls pregnant to prove their point. The lucky ones sometimes are able to convince their teenage child bearers to marry them, even though they will have to live in perpetual romance with poverty. The single young women in Calabar City are however a different tale. They prefer to enjoy the frivolities of single-hood, experimenting with any man who comes with money and fun and settle way, way later in life with any dumb young man or used old man. An extreme way to breathe life into the scenario in case is to say, that most women in Calabar City spend more time living in single-hood than they do being married. This is not to say that there are no girls who marry young in Calabar City; the core of the argument is that they are an insignificant minority. And this is not to also say that the young woman in Calabar City does not marry for love; the contention is that most of them would rather lose love than marry early.

Calabar City assembles an attitude that offers a near no (but not a zero) hospitality to a visitor. It cannot be explained as hostility or outright putting off a visitor, it is rather that lack of warmth and smile that the city’s face fails to wears. That smile that one expects to get from a shop attendant or a snack vendor that never comes. The smile that never comes from the waitress in the restaurants or that annoying way the fruit seller ignores the goodwill “thank you” you tell her after paying just to inspire some form of happiness. There is a seeming stroke of rudeness in the manner of majority living in Calabar City, an acute disposition of unfriendliness that is best not to push, else, an argument ensues. In such light, it would not be strange for a visitor to wander what these people are mad at. In truth they are not mad at anything; it is only part of what forms the attitude of Calabar City- that total skepticism thrown at anyone who is not familiar. On unusual days, one may get a good morning from a cab driver. But be warned, those from around who offer an outright hand of friendship to strangers are like pins lost in the hay stack of Calabar City; they are hard to come by.

Calabar City with all her shortcomings, temper, attitude and all other sentiments which she offers, still remains a splendor. It holds a seductive demeanor. Her language and accents will win any visitor. No matter what one’s biases about the city are, one will either come to fall in love with the city or fornicate with it. Coming to Calabar City and not having a romance with her is a fallacy.  

El Osas Iyalekhue writes and directs for film and stage, among his plays that have been staged are Bush Path, November The First, Walking the Aisle of Dreams,  Dancegeria, Wedlock Is Not For Gods and The Phantom. El Osas Iyalekhue is set to shoot Rage, a movie about human excesses. For stage he is set to stage BREAKING MATRIMONY.