SUZYO WAS HERE - THE PROLOGUE

Hi there, how are you doing?

Thank you for stopping by. You could be doing anything in the world right now but you choose to be here, with me, reading this. So I am grateful and I want you to know that.

I’ve been on this earth for quite a while now. Twenty seven years to be exact. I was born in Ghana,then I later moved to Lesotho and now I live in a country deep in the heart of southern Africa. I deliberately choose not to mention what country that is; but even as you guessed you may have got it right. Over the days and maybe even years that follow you will read a lot about my country here.

One day when I was nineteen, I got home from school only to be greeted by the silence from everyone’s absence. On a day like that when I was feeling awfully low spirited that was how I liked home. I could use this silence to satisfy my dire need of peace. I had a lot of assignments I had postponed so I decided to get them done that very day. But first, I was hungry and needed something to eat and thinking of anything else was becoming a waste of time. I decided to get something from the market real quick. 

*Holds face in palms and exhales*

I’m sorry, pardon me, I’m nervous… My name is Akwasi Dzifa. Don’t say it, I know.

So, as I was going to the market, I decided to use a shorter route. The path is in between the last houses in the rural block I live in and a relatively dense thicket. It is obviously not openly acknowledged and displayed so people rarely use it. Even I rarely use it. I have lived here for six years now and I can count the number of times I have used this route on two fingers. But on this day something called me to it. Maybe it was because I really had to get what I needed quickly that I was drawn to it. Maybe it was because the path was deserted and on this day I just wanted to be alone wherever I went that I was drawn to it. Or maybe it was what I found there that was drawing me to the path. Yes, call it divine intervention. So, whatever, I used the path. I was dubious of my decision to do this and the whole time I had thoughts of something coming up to me unannounced and gnarly. Deep inside I felt like one of life’s ‘randoms’ would come out of nowhere, I just didn’t know when. But I chose to remain still and quite inside anyway. I decided to meet my fears and doubts with the resistance a rock shows the wind. Look here, don’t even picture me using this path around 6 PM when it starts to get dark. It was light out. But something just didn’t feel right.  

I got to the market in good shape. I looked for something to order and because I rationed I didn’t want to stay there long I ordered garlic fries and an Appy Apple and headed back home.

I used the same route, again. Despite the odd feelings it had given me, it had gotten me to where I wanted to in the time I wanted. Surprisingly, I still felt like something was calling me to the route. The divine was still trying to intervene. I reached for the headsets in my pocket, plugged them in and turned Radioactive by Imagine Dragons to loud. I quickened my pace. I had my eyes closed trying to let the loud music split me from the world I was alive to. Then I opened them for what I thought would only be a split second and immediately saw it staring back at me.

It was brown, cracked and dry with age, but to me a sight for sore eyes. Most people would have left it without as much as a second glance yet I was enthralled. Without taking my eyes off it, I slowly turned off the music and put my headsets back in my pocket. I bent down and picked it up. 

The leather felt soft and delicate as I ran my fingers over the faded blue bindings. It smelled of pipe tobacco and dust. What remained of the book could barely hold it together. A faint scrawl on the inside of the cover revealed that the journal once belonged to Suzyo Tilabilenji; whoever that was.

As soon as I was home I cleared the breakfast table of the dishes that were on it and made room for the journal.

 I carefully opened the first page. It began in the middle of a sentence, suggesting that either there were pages missing or that there was another journal before this one; unfortunately it’s poor condition made it impossible to tell which. I closed it. Then it hit me. The feeling of being called to that route. The divine had really intervened. Everything made sense. I stared at the journal and marveled.  I knew that now only three things would make me happy; time, a strong cup of coffee and the words in the journal.

Here I am eight years later still completely inspired by the small bit of the life of Suzyo I was able to read about. If my guess was correct, he had been bereft of life for forty seven years when I found his journal.

 See, Suzyo was just human like you and I. He had failings too. After he lost his wife when she was in labor for their second child he took to drinking. There was a time his daughter, who could not remember a time before he was always drunk, tried to help him change. She had to. But how could she help a grown man with a drinking problem? No one could drink as much as he did and be OK. She poured away gallons of his whiskey but he always bought more. When it came to choosing between sobriety and the bottle he always chose the bottle. It’s what alcoholics do. Then one day he found her pouring away his whiskey. He beat her and left her with swollen eyes and a slack jaw with blood drooling from it. After that, he wrote that their relationship was never the same. He had left in her a void so dark that it would be hard for the light from his apologies to penetrate.      

To me, though, Suzyo was not a common man, he did not have common thoughts and he did not live a common life. The thoughts in his journal were disorganized, they were all over the place because there was so much on his mind, yet, I found that all through them, ran this fine filament yarn. 

From what I read, I could see that he refused to be a victim of his birth place, childhood experiences and the culture and society that he lived in. He chose to be different, to stand out and to be the standard of excellence that his surrounding so badly needed. For him conformity was a jailer of freedom and an enemy of growth. He also wanted to show his society that they had been silent for far too long: they had accepted too much to live among them; domestic violence, government corruption and poverty induced by mediocrity. To change the world he believed that people had to change themselves first and then also how they approached different things. He did not speak about Christians, or Muslims or Hindus. He spoke about People who were Christians, People who were Muslims or People who were Hindu’s. Even though these were just words, to him it made a difference to refer to them as People first, which they were anyway. He had hopes, he had dreams and he had the will to fight. He understood that there is no yellow brick road, you lead life and it follows you. He was a brave heart with a real desire to change the world around him. He made a difference and did not care whether people knew it or not.

By the way, he sobered up after he realized that he was the only shot his daughter had at having a father. He got involved in her life so much that he could remember all her teachers all the way down to kindergarten without making up names. His daughter realized that dwelling on the past would never allow her to forgive him and that to be at peace with him she had to let certain things go. She let him back into her life. Later she gave him a granddaughter who loved him so much that she would amuse herself by pulling at his eye brows and tickling him while he would be asleep.

There was just so much about Suzyo, I could only Marvel.

And now I can’t keep this all to myself. Suzyo Tilabilenji is not a name that should be forgotten. I need to tell you about his journal, about him. Maybe I’ll tell you everything that he wrote or maybe time won’t let me, but I need to try. So I’ll write his journal entries. Suzyo was here and I’ll tell his story. If it were up to me I would promise to live nothing out. Raising a glass of your favorite drink in his memory would not be appropriate. But maybe you’ll brush it off, or maybe I’ll taunt your curiosity, maybe you will be inspired, or maybe I’ll spark up a conversation and who knows, maybe even change.