Date: Sun, 03 Apr 2016 13:03:41 +0000
From:  <pilgrim566@ghostmail.com>
Subject: Pilgrimage of a Refugee

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Pilgrimage of a Refugee

When I was eight years old, my father caught me masturbating. At that time,
long before I made it to Europe, we lived in a two-roomed shack on the
outskirts of Lagos, where my father—a fisherman by ancestry, but a
witch-doctor by practice—ran a small business dealing in bush-meat and
shamanistic cures. You all know the sort: bells you attach to goat-tails,
seals in Arabic you put on doors, dried snakes you burn in acacia fires,
and which make a blue smoke that sizzles and crackles, spreading all around
a room in every direction but up. He had a great deal of power, you might
say (we call it something else, having a precise term your prudish Western
cultures lack) and a great deal of respect among the residents of the
shantytown. Well-fed and strongly built, he had a thick black beard, and
wily green eyes.

Somehow I had internalised a fear of sexuality, so when he tore back the
printed sheet I was half-expecting a beating. This is something very
strange for West Africans, but I suppose I picked it up from associating
then too much with the girls in our town as friends, and not treating them
as objects for sexual fulfilment or tools for demeaning chores as most of
the men and boys in Nigeria do. As I was jerking off on my side, I tried to
hide my erection from my father under my thigh, which he clearly thought
very feminine and demure, since he let out a shallow chuckle.

'Why you hiding boy?' he asked, grabbing my upper arm and pulling me naked
across the room, 'Where you get that from, hiding like that?'

He dragged me out to the back-garden (a euphemism at best: it is better
described as a gully that fills with garbage when the rains wash Lagos
dirty, and turn dust and flies into mud) and had me stand behind a bush,
under the light from a streetlamp. Proximity to this lamp, the only one for
several hundred feet, made our shack one of the most expensive in the town,
and so my father, whenever he wanted to talk to a family member at night,
always made a point of doing it under that halogen glow so that neighbors,
always happy to witness a scene, would click their tongues in envy while
they admired his paternalistic will.

But this time he was almost whispering.

'Let me see it, boy,' he said, pulling both my arms away this time and
holding them fast against my side. He knelt on the earth and let out a deep
sigh. You could tell his breath was hitching and even as a kid I knew he
was excited. 'Allah be praised...'

He grabbed my penis in his hand, and it swelled as he fondled masterfully
between thumb and fingers. Soon enough it was as hard as it could be, just
over six inches, and thicker than most adults. He looked up and down my
body, gleaming black and brown in sweat under that light and African heat,
and smiled. Standing up, he patted me on the shoulder and told me to get to
bed. 'Don't let me see no hiding next time,' he said.

'Yes father!' I shouted.

The next morning, I woke up to find a great deal of food and water being
packed onto my father's back. My mother had been working for a long time
that morning, clearly, to provide so much, and looked worried.

'You know we don't have much...' she muttered, almost to herself.

'And what's it to you, woman?' he asked, 'You want to eat? You don't even
work. I see my neighbors and they have five sons, six sons. I have three
daughters and only one beautiful son.' He gestured to himself and then to
me, 'There is enough for us.'

As far as my father was concerned, 'him and me' came first. There had been
many moments when drought hit or harvests failed. These universally African
occurrences crippled my father's source of income. He could make some money
during these times by charming the land and driving away evil spirits, but
the poverty of others often led to the spiral of our own hunger—too poor
to eat, with not enough energy to work, their exhaustion would sap our own
energies. My father had respect and plenty of it, but like a saint he
didn't covet money for money's sake. Power was all that interested him, and
money, he believed, could only buy so much of it.

One of my earliest memories, in fact, was the whining and muffled crying of
my sisters, who hadn't eaten for several days, while he and I tucked into
our almost daily sumptuous meal of millet and—truly astounding—spiced
beef. I never starved, and so developed into a strong, capable man; my
sisters were not so fortunate. One is still unable to have children because
of the malnutrition she has suffered. My mother, meanwhile, knew better
than to whine with anything greater than a hen's clucking. This may seem
harsh to you, but a man in my culture is obviously of greater importance
than a girl since he can work his hands and his intellect to greater
success than a woman ever can—in fact, I ask you what is better: four
children malnourished, spindly and incapable, or a strong, driven son?
Girls are everywhere, since they are of course half of those who are born,
a ridiculous percentage that is totally out of proportion to their sole
productive capacity: the bearing and looking after of males, who they too
often coddle. Fortunately their protests against the actions of my kind
with their children are dying out, racist arguments as they are. Mankind
would be better for fewer women, since one can easily do for upwards of
five males. I am not a misogynist; I am a rationalist, and I am happy to
say I have never once felt desire for femalekind.

My father and I walked to the edge of the town, and then caught a ride in
the truck of a small time poultry farmer whose cataracts had recently been
cured by one of my father's poultices. He thus owed my father a favour. He
drove us perhaps thirty miles into the jungle, and dropped us off at the
bottom of a ravine, worn red by rain and illicit gold-diggers. If you dug
deep enough in soil like that, the scars made by fortune-hunters long gone,
you could find among the disfigured earthworms and beetles pools of mercury
caught between rocks. Other boys would sometimes take it and rub it on
their teeth, laughing at how shiny they became. Even at a young age,
however, I knew that this was evil, and was jeered at for running home
whenever it happened.

It had rained sometime the night before, so the forest steamed in the
morning sun, sending up tendrils of pollen among the sounds of basking
insects and whistling birds. Everything was in a torpor, and I could feel
myself getting sleepy. My father, on the other hand, was alert and moving
with purpose. He hadn't said anything to me yet for all the hours we had
already travelled, and I was beginning to get thirsty.

'Not yet,' he responded to my request. 'We wait.'

We climbed up the ravine and further, my father following his nose as
though he had walked this route many times before, though I had never been
here. After about an hour we came across a small cave underneath the roots
of a large, sprawling tree. We sat down under the shade of the opening, and
my father handed me some water.

'Boy,' he said, 'This is a very special place. I wanted to share it with
you. I pray here for you many, many times, and my prayers have been
answered. You,' he placed his hand on my groin, 'have something very
special.'

He stood up and entered the cave. About a few minutes later he came back
with several watermelons. I had never eaten a watermelon before—they
were too expensive, or so I thought. My father saw me licking my lips and
laughed.

'These, boy, are not for eating... yet. These are watermelons for sex.'

What exactly my father taught me with those watermelons is something which
I will reveal later, but suffice it to say we stayed in the jungle for a
whole month, sleeping in the cave at night and living off the little food
my mother had packaged that morning. My father demanded we both be naked
during this time, and sleep in each other's arms, and explore each other's
bodies. He fucked me, and I fucked him and the watermelons after his
example, and I sucked him off with greater and greater skill. He showed me
many Polaroids of him and other men fucking boys, some of whom I knew as
distant relatives, boys from the village, or even close friends, and I
would sit there for hours with one picture, meditating upon every detail of
the image my dick in my hand. Some of the boys were younger even than I
was. Never, however, was the varied and intimate tuition my father gave me
purely for his own sexual benefit. Instead, he was possesed with a
determination I've never seen rivalled to work with the miracle he saw he
had been given, and only had one goal in mind. This will seem strange to
some. Sex without pleasure? Not exactly: my father felt pleasure, but it
was the tender pleasure of a father with his son, teaching him the skills
he knows are most important, a sacred and natural apprenticeship. It was
also the pleasure of anticipation: my father, more than anything, is a
voyeur.

'My son, you must travel the world... I will help pay. It is my purpose in
life to allow you to do this.'

By the time I was twenty, my penis stood hard and curved tightly upwards at
eleven and a half inches, and was so thick that my legs often chafed if I
didn't give it proper breathing space by walking with what others see as an
arrogant swagger. The head alone was as large as a child's fist. I suppose
you would say I am a Priapus. Working with my father, I saved with him
enough money to make the journey which the rest of this story is concerned
with. I was, he said, a well-built man now, with a strong chest, wide
shoulders and stood at over six feet tall.

And so when he saw on the television that millions of Africans and Arabs
were leaving on boats to Europe, the land that had not long ago enslaved
and humiliated our people, that goal was at once on his mind, often
repeated even in front of my sisters and mother: 'You must go and
conquer... and always fuck boys.'

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If you liked the first part of my story (if so, don't worry, there is
plenty more to come and the next chapters will be much longer) or hated it,
please email me at pilgrim566@ghostmail.com. I accept all criticism, even
the harsh stuff. It doesn't need to be constructive: if you have something
to say, say it freely.