“No homo,” says the boy, barely visible in the room’s fading light, as he cradles my foot in his palms. He is kneeling before me—this 6’2” JV basketball second stringer—as I sit on his bed, my feet hovering above the shag. His head is bent so that the swirl in his crown shows, the sweat in the follicles catching the autumn dusk through the window. Anything is possible, we think, with the body. But not always with language. “No homo,” he says again before wrapping the ace bandage once, twice, three times around my busted ankle, the phrase’s purpose now clear to me: a password, an incantation, a get-out-of-jail-free card, for touch. For two boys to come this close to each other in a realm ruled by the nebulous yet narrow laws of American masculinity, we needed magic.

No homo. The words free him to hold my foot with the care and gentleness of a nurse, for I had sprained my ankle half an hour earlier playing manhunt in the McIntosh orchard. We ran, our bodies silver in the quickening dark, teenagers playing at war.

The boy—let’s call him K—had helped me up, my arm slung across his shoulder as I limped toward his house, which sat just across the orchard. The war is still going on around us, the other boys’ voices breaking through the brambles, and the larger war, the one in Afghanistan (for it is 2005), amplified what was at stake in the outer world, beyond the feeble sunset of childhood.

No homo.

I look away, as if it isn’t an ankle, but roadkill, in his hands. I scan the room instead, the walls lined with baseball trophies catching the streetlight outside, which has just flickered on. Do I find him handsome? Yes. Does it matter? No.

“You’re really good at hiding,” he said to my foot, and though he meant at manhunt, he might as well have been talking about manhood. For isn’t that, too, a place I have hid both in and from at once?

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Image: Nadja Spiegelman

Emerson said, “If you go expressly to look at the moon it becomes tinsel.” He preached self-reliance—the importance of being with yourself in nature—but he also lived with his mother, who cooked for him and cleaned his muddy boots.

The new moon at the start of May this year signaled the beginning of Ramazan, which the rest of the world calls Ramadan, which I call Ramadan when I speak with my friends, but which I grew up calling Ramazan because that’s how we say it in Farsi. In Farsi there are four different letters that all make the same z sound and maybe we figured if we didn’t use them enough they’d disappear.

This year, for the first time in my life, I have fasted for all of Ramazan. The Quran says during Ramazan you’re supposed to “eat and drink until the white thread of dawn appears to you distinct from the black thread of night.” And then fast until sunset—no food, no drink. The black thread/white thread part fascinates me, eating in the predawn morning until it’s light enough outside to tell the white thread from the black.

Nowadays there’s an app called Muslim Pro (a hilarious name) where you enter your location and it tells you exactly what time to stop eating. But I like to imagine a time when someone was sitting outside eating bread and cheese alone in the dark, checking and rechecking their two threads. They’d eat a bit more, yawn a bit, and then, suddenly, rubbing their eyes, they’d catch a gleam of light against the white thread and shout “Stop! Stop!” to their family inside.

That’s probably not how it ever worked.

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Photo: Paxson Woelber, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)).

Still sometimes late at night it slides in—what it felt like to think of my brother Tom outside. In the coldest seasons of his years of homelessness, it would rise up late in the day if I was alone in the hour in which darkness descended.

Each year as the seasons shifted, as leaves fell and the frosts came to Santa Fe or New York, I would grow tired and short-tempered, my body aching. The small muscles along my spine would seize up and I would get tight headaches. A knot would form at the base of my skull as my shoulders lifted and pinched, causing a tingling pain to come on along the backs of my arms. I would have to distract myself, get my mind off Tom—have a beer, talk about movies, pop a Valium left over from a prescription for back spasms.

I came to rely on certain facts about his relationship to winter. That he had been a skier, a camper, a mountain climber. That Alaska was, aside from a few years in Boulder, the only home he had ever known. He knew how to survive outside. He had the skills to stay warm, to make a camp in the woods. As long as he could keep track of his gear. Find enough food. That was my biggest worry at first—that he was always hungry.

Nights, I tried not to imagine the worst possibilities of where he might be. Instead I placed him in the safest, warmest camp I could conjure. I led him into the thickets beside the Coastal Trail, built him a snow cave, stuffed him into a fat sleeping bag on a thick foam pad, filled his pack with dry gloves and long underwear, placed new socks on his feet. What else was there to do.

If it gets really bad, I thought, he can always go trespass somewhere and get arrested. I knew he knew that. I knew he wouldn’t forget that. Read More

A few months before the election, when eleven six-foot-five effigies of a naked Donald Trump, then the 2016 Republican presidential nominee—bulging paunch, saggy ass, mottled limbs, constipated visage, and puny dick—popped up around the country, I briefly liked being an American. We were tragic absurdists, a nation of disgusted pranksters. The statue had no balls. Like most women, I’ve never been entirely clear on what balls are for, or why they’re meant to symbolize traits like courage and daring. Aren’t they actually the most vulnerable spot on a man—is that how men conquered the world, by costuming their vulnerabilities as mettle? (Something I wish I were better capable of, for the record.)

The country’s disgusted fascination with Trump’s body united us, or so I briefly thought. We were riveted: by the shameless comb-over, the Orangina skin, the stubby fingers, the clown-car neckties. It was a sick pleasure—you couldn’t take your eyes off him, no matter how much you despised him. Trump made it seem right-minded to despise him for his aged, saggy ass, and by extension all male bodies, aged and saggy or not, because that’s where their privilege resides—in their anus mouths and the gross stuff that came out of them, and where their sweaty hands traveled, and making every last thing about their all-important dicks. At some level, you sort of knew that bodily aesthetics shouldn’t bear the burden of moral judgments or political animus, but as far as Trump, we were going to hand him his saggy ass and send him on his way.

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Chigozie Obioma’s experiences as a Nigerian student in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus left him with a knowledge he wished he’d never gained.  

Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, image from Wikimedia Commons

As a Nigerian young adult traveling abroad for the first time, the thrill I experienced was, at first, intoxicating. I’d dropped out of the university I had been attending in Nigeria, and was desperate to return to school, this time to study English instead of economics. My visa application to the UK had been rejected, and so I found my new destination, a university in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. It was a nation few people seemed to know much about. It was, and still is, without international recognition.

After days of celebrations, prayers, and phone calls from relatives far and wide, I took off—my first plane ride—and was immediately overwhelmed. I had expected a warm welcome from the few Nigerians and Africans—about ten or so, mostly young men, along with four young women—who were already there. But they treated my arrival with discomfort and wondered why I had chosen to come. Seeing that their question didn’t make logical sense, since they were in Cyprus as well, they’d always end the discussion by telling me I’d soon discover why they had asked.

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