Footballophobia

The Word Cup season is upon us once again! Hurray! Take out your manly grunts and your vuvuzelas from the backs of their closets, your too-short jersey shorts and ridiculous fanatics' hats. Pump your quads and tighten your glutes. You will need the muscle to jump for joy as you rejoice to a bunch of old men kicking about an inflated piece of dead skin.

Yes, dead skin. That is what my father calls it, dead skin that belongs under the earth and nowhere over it. We have reached that age of technology when a football can now be made from durable plastic but come on! Have you seen a player's legs? They could probably crush a watermelon between their thighs, let alone inflated plastic. However, what I don't understand is my father's apathy towards football when he was once a member of the NYS back when Kenya was young, and billion-shilling scandals were still a Caucasian problem. From the pictures of him that I have seen, he was very active in sports. I wonder where that passion went. Myself, however, I hate balls. No, not the games, but any sort of leathery sphere that people use for recreational purposes, and that is because I believe I am cursed.

Whenever I am involved in a sport that involves balls, they always find their way to my face. Okay... that did not sound like I intended, but you know what I mean. There is a mystical force that always gravitates the damned ball to my face, so hard and so sharp that it would sound like a Nigerian mother slapping her wayward child. You know those kinds of slaps, the ones that Mama Gee (Patience Ozokwor) give. You can feel the prickling pain on your face a thousand miles away, and when you look at the actress playing her daughter (because, oddly enough she always seems to slap her acting daughters and rarely her acting sons), you can see that she has begun hating her in real life.

I suppose this is what a ball to my face looks like.

For two years I lived by my happy, lonesome self in Nairobi West because it was closer to school, and that meant I had to cook for myself. The only problem was that the path that connected my apartment complex to the market was bordered by a large football pitch that was always - always - occupied. Towering, broad-shouldered, jobless men during the day, and snickering little brats coming to have some fun just after school. I was afraid for my life! How would I take that great walk just to go buy some kales and spinach without getting hit by a ball that was kicked a little too hard? 'Oh Lord Jesus,' I would pray, 'He that taketh pain away, deliver me from the awful trajectory of the dead skin!'

It was during one such walk that I came to assume that I am truly cursed. My forte is in the indoor sports. Give me a gym and I will wreck it. Give me a spinning class and I am practically the trainer's assistant. Give me board games and you will become my best friend. But a football? A volleyball? A tennis ball? No thank you. I'd like to save whatever beauty is left on my face, unless you know of a way to break such a curse.

Ah, yes. Curses. That was what we were talking about. How my fear of outdoor ball games contributed to one of the main themes in The Orisha Saga. Each of the major characters in the novel series is cursed, and in more ways that one. The umbrella of death covers them all, but to each a much deeper, more personal curse afflicts. For instance, one of them seems to be followed by death since all loved ones just happen to die around him. This is not such a good thing, especially for one who is supposedly immortal. Imagine the level of madness that would haunt such a person. Another is cursed to perish at sunset every day, and will only resurrect once she has opened and crossed the six gates of the Netherworld (Egyptian myth of the sun god, Ra, who travels the Netherworld - i.e. the Underworld - for twelve hours every day).

However, the thing is we are all cursed in one way or another. 'For we are sinners and we have fallen short of the glory of God', one holy book puts it. Addiction, strife, poverty, narcissism, ego... all these are curses. Worse still is that we have let them run our lives. Our existence depends solely on the actions we take to break them. Run tirelessly after cash to break the curse of poverty. Sell yourself and live with someone you will never love, just to evade the curse of loneliness. Banish your life-long dream to the corners of reality to acquire security over freedom. Curses come in all shapes and sizes, in all forms and appearances, and they are not necessarily magical.

As is with the characters in The Orisha Saga, from the first to the fourth book; they live the entirety of their numerous lives attempting to break a curse and return to a home they are not certain exists. They forget to open their eyes and see the joy that awaits them in the present. Perhaps the cure to their disease is not to survive, but to embrace each day and each beloved like they will never meet again. Perhaps the spell, the single word, the only morsel of hope that they will need in order to break it begins with just but a single syllable:

live.

Embrace the madness, the shouts, the disappointments and the cheers during this football season. It's a jolly good show to be startled by sudden wild applause when a team wins, isn't it? ...Reminds you that your heart still beats.

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