To the Woman in the Purple Lipstick

By Zainab Omaki

/ Nonfiction /      

Technically, I did meet you. I have a picture of you holding me as a baby at some sort of party. You are in a bright orange skirt suit, bathed in the glitter of lights under a sky of darkness. Your hair is a gloriously coiffed jheri curl, your long legs tucked under you on a pool chair, the water in mid-ripple beside you. And your lips, your ostentatiously purple lips, your stunningly purple lips, are spread out in a smile that knows no reservations.

For years, as a teenager, I searched for that shade of lipstick at makeup counters, trying shade after shade of purple in their little round mirrors.

“That looks so beautiful on you,” the saleswomen would gush, trying to hype me up. I’d shake my head. This was not what I was looking for. This was not right. 

In my early twenties, I finally gave up. I was never going to find it. In fact, I forgot about the picture entirely. I didn’t think about it, or you, for nearly a decade, until March of 2021, a few days before I was scheduled to leave Nigeria for good. In the middle of deep cleaning my parents’ home, I stumbled across the photo tucked into a book in their room. The sob that tore from me nearly doubled me over.

Staring at you, the woman who gave birth to me but whom I would never know, the woman I so desperately longed to know, I bawled and bawled. The house was empty except for me, but if it were not, I imagined I’d be heard from every corner of it. That was how loud I was.

* * *

The truth, dear woman in the purple lipstick, is that you died, and your death was both horrible and traumatic. Perhaps I shouldn’t share this with you. It might be difficult for you to learn the trajectory of your life. But here is the story anyway:

I am thirteen years old and on holiday from boarding school. In our small bungalow on the outskirts of Abuja, I spend the day wandering about the house while my mother, the woman you become, is out with my two brothers and two sisters. I rifle aimlessly through cupboards and wardrobes. I watch portions of Bollywood movies during the brief snatches of time the electricity gods think to bless us with power. I stick my head into the fridge numerous times, an animal foraging for food. Then, suddenly it is evening, and the woman you become has returned with my siblings. Then, suddenly, although she was in a good mood on her return, she is all at once in a stormy one.

I am watching TV with my siblings after dinner when she stalks into the parlor. 

“Did anyone take anything from my wardrobe?” she demands, her eyes sweeping over the five of us.

I am instantly overcome with guilt. She has warned us many times not to touch her things. Although I didn’t take anything out of her wardrobe, surely she must know that I disobeyed her by rummaging through it, and that’s why she is bringing it up now. Still, I murmur ‘no’ with the rest of my siblings. Her face is tight as she examines us for a prolonged moment, then she stalks away. Not long afterwards, she returns.

“Who took something out of my wardrobe?” she asks more directly.

Again, all of us insist that we have not taken anything. I relax a bit. It’s obvious now that something is actually missing, and I know I didn’t take it. I am innocent. Which is why, when she comes back a third time and barks out my name, I am so shocked.

“You took it. You are the one who took it. Return it immediately.”

“I didn’t take anything from your wardrobe, Ma,” I reply, still stunned. 

She snaps that I have, that I have taken something that she doesn’t use but likes to keep around, because it makes her feel like a woman. Racking my brain, I remember: the box of condoms that I found and giggled about earlier. Golden Circle. The brand from the television ads. I’d seen the dusty box and wondered why it was there since my father, a diplomat, was away on posting and he wouldn’t be back for some time. After looking at it, I’d put it back exactly where I found it and promptly forgotten about it.

“I didn’t take anything,” I insist.

She maintains that I have, that the benevolent spirits that she carries have told her that it was me; I took it and did something with it. My whole life, I’ve heard about these benevolent spirits. I’ve heard how they protect us, steering us from danger’s path. I’ve heard how they help us survive by guiding the woman you become in business decisions. Once, they told her that there was a deadly snake in our house and, after she summoned a snake charmer, he found a gigantic black and red one, living in our ceiling, saving us from harm. You can imagine my surprise then, at hearing them accuse me of such a thing.

“I didn’t take it,” I wail. 

She storms away and bumbles around our house, slamming doors and muttering to herself. At some point, she ends up in the kitchen, where she cooks beans porridge and brings it back to the parlor where she mixes some herbs into it and forces me to eat it. I cry as I stuff the mixture into my mouth. 

“If you don’t eat, you will die for lying to me,” she insists. 

Prior to this moment, if I’d been asked about you, and if I’d had the language to put my deepest feelings into words, I’d have said that you were alive and well but in deep repose because the reality of raising five children virtually alone and with limited financial resources had called for another version of you. But as the woman you become forces me to bring spoonful after spoonful up to my mouth, your heart stops abruptly in my eyes. You have to be dead for this woman, with her wild gaze and ruthless prodding, to be in front of me. You have to be dead because, although it had eluded me until this moment, it is suddenly stunningly clear that something violently wrong— something psychological in its essence— is afflicting the person in front of me. Whatever it is, it’s too powerful, too overwhelming to coexist with anything else in her body. Not even you.  

I cry and stuff my mouth, cry and stuff my mouth. She does not let me stop until every bite is gone.

* * *

But what about the subsequent years? I can almost hear you asking. What happened in the years following my death? I would like to tell you that things did not spiral downwards after that. That your death merely marked the beginning of a different, not darker, time. But I can’t offer you that reassurance.

In the years after your passing, the woman you become grew progressively sicker, her mind becoming a trap she couldn’t escape. She morphed into a creature of relentless and unyielding cycles that looked like this:

Day 1: Happiness. The woman you become fluttering about the house with the magical energy of a fairy. 

Day 4: A subtle shift in energy. Her lips tightening, her eyes following my siblings and me around the house, a darkness building up inside her. 

Day 7: An explosion. A giant explosion. An air-sucking explosion. An explosion where the woman you become accused us children, my father—when he was home—friends, neighbors, and strangers of being members of a secret spiritual cult who were trying to kill her. She slammed doors. Broke plates. Woke us up in the middle of the night to curse us with eternal damnation for trying to harm her. Her mind convinced her that we were all enemies, and she raged at us, so we all knew it. 

Day 1: A reset. Back to happiness, as though the last few days had not happened.  

You can imagine our confusion during that period. We didn’t have a name for what she had. Growing up in Nigeria— just as you did— we had been taught to believe that anything out of the ordinary was a result of supernatural forces: witches, wizards, juju, all the things that exist behind the veil. We wavered between believing that the woman you become had been cursed by someone else with a supernatural affliction and questioning whether this was a mental illness as the formal education we had been exposed to suggested. In our society, believing it was supernatural was obviously easier. There were no good mental health facilities available, but native doctors and religious clerics abounded. We took the woman you become, when she would allow it, to these practitioners who prescribed herbs, midnight rituals, and copious amounts of prayer. None of it worked, of course, to our crushing dismay. Do you want to know how many times you can be cut in the same place and still bleed? The answer is infinity. There is no end to the number of times the same wound can hurt. Every time her cycle began again, every time we took her to a new native doctor or religious cleric for treatment that didn’t work, we were cut anew. Our lives became one deep, unhealing injury.

* * *

I broke free from the wearisome pattern of our lives when I finally could. In September 2019, I left Nigeria for England to pursue a master’s degree. On the surface, it was an educational opportunity, a chance to broaden my horizons. But in truth, it was simply a chance to finally escape the woman you become, a reprieve from feeling as though my interior was shattering each time I saw her. 

In January 2021, three months before I would stumble upon your photo again, I returned home for a brief visit. In a few months, I would leave for the foreseeable future, and I wanted to spend this time with family and friends—including the woman you become. 

A few days into my stay, my sister jolted me awake in the middle of the night.

“Get up,” she ordered in the darkness of the bedroom.

“What? What is it?” I asked, disoriented.

“Ma is having one of her things,” she responded.

“Her thing” is how we had come to refer to the explosions that the woman you become rained down on us. We still didn’t have the precise language for her condition. “Her thing” was the nearest approximation that also provided us with emotional distance at the same time.

Dragging myself sleepily out of bed, I followed my sister to my parents’ room, where my father and my second sister were already standing around the bed the woman you become was splayed out on. Besides a cloth around her waist, she was naked. Her body was lax. Her mouth was partially open, and her eyes rolled back in her skull, eyelids fluttering. She moaned in pain. 

“They hit me,” she cried. “They hit me with an arrow.”

In minutes, I gathered that, as with many times in the past, she believed that she had been struck with a supernatural arrow that was now making her physically ill. This arrow had been to the chest, making it difficult for her to breathe. But in the past, there were many occasions when it had been to the neck or leg, and she’d spend the day walking around with her head bent grotesquely at an odd angle or limping like a lame dog. Once her mind conveyed to her body that it had been hurt in any way, her body got into formation by displaying the symptoms.

To comfort the woman you become, my sisters and I rubbed her arms and got wet towels from the bathroom, which we placed on her head and chest. She moaned and writhed, her breathing shallow. Finally, after about an hour, she shot up in bed and retched into a bucket on the floor beside her. We all breathed a sigh of relief. This was how many of her physical symptoms were resolved. The moment she believed that the effects of the supernatural arrow had been expelled from her body, she began to feel better.

My sisters, father, and I waited until she drifted off to sleep, then we retreated to the parlor. Even though it was the dead of the night, one of my sisters summoned my brothers from their homes where they now lived with their wives and children. She shared that she had recently learned of a newly opened psychiatric clinic on the outskirts of Abuja, and she thought it would be a good idea to try and get the woman you become medical treatment. As you can imagine, we didn’t need convincing. We were all too exhausted with the status quo, too tired of having our hearts broken when we looked at her, to even consider saying no. 

Over the next few days, we planned and strategized about how to get her there. Although the woman you become could be persuaded to go to native doctors and religious clerics for treatment, there was slim chance she’d agree to go to a psychiatric clinic. Native doctors and religious clerics suggested supernatural games were afoot—a lane that she was comfortable with. A psychiatric clinic was an indictment of her mental state, which she wouldn’t accept. In the end, we managed to get her there by conspiring with her best friend, Aunty M., to frame the visit as an opportunity for her to talk to someone about all the troubles she had faced at the hands of the world. 

At home, after they went together, I was anxious. I paced, tried not to think about it, paced and tried not to think about it. In the middle of the afternoon, a call came in from Aunty M.

“They have committed your mother,” she shouted into the phone above traffic.

Once the woman you become talked to the doctor and he heard her wild theories, her intractable beliefs, Aunty M. disclosed, he had insisted that she stay. She hadn’t wanted to, fleeing from him by running around the building, but eventually he convinced her. Now, she would need a long list of items which the family was to take to her the next day.

How do I describe how I felt in that moment? Stunned? Hopeful? Disoriented? It felt as though time grinded to a halt as I struggled to process the fact that the woman you become was not returning home that day. I shared the news with the rest of my family. And, in the morning, we headed to the clinic with a bag full of her personal effects. My first look at the large, white building enclosed by bars made me weak-kneed. This was where she was? This was how she would get better? I’d thought I understood the gap between fantasy and reality prior to that moment, but taking in the building, I finally did. I’d dreamed that the woman you become would be healed. I simply hadn’t thought that this is what it would look like.

We spoke to her doctor—a thin, extroverted man in a white suit— who assured us he would do his best for her and gave us an initial timeline of six weeks for her commitment. After that, he would assess her progress to determine whether she needed to stay, or if she could transition to outpatient status. He also gave us a provisional diagnosis. Delusional Disorder. An exhale. A name. Finally! After years of not having one, after years of wondering, a name! 

When we talked to the woman you become, she begged to return home, which almost broke all of us. We cried and pleaded with her, in turn, to stay. The guilt I felt leaving her behind was like an albatross around my neck. 

In the end, the woman you become was only at the clinic for a month. As soon as her extended family learned that she had been hospitalized, they insisted that she be released. It was abominable, in their eyes, for us to even suggest that she had a problem with her mind. They lobbied day after day until she was finally let out. We managed to convince her to continue to go for outpatient sessions, but that only lasted a few weeks, after which she stopped and would not return. Her cycle whirled to a start once more. 

On the day of her first explosion after leaving the hospital, I listened to her shatter glass in the kitchen with resignation. This was the way things would always be, I realized. She would never be well. We would never fully be free of her cycles, and wherever we were in the world or whatever we were doing, we would continue to try to care for her. This was our lives until the day she passed from the earth. This was it. 

* * *

With all this, dear woman in the purple lipstick, I suppose you can understand why stumbling across your picture unraveled me so completely. Staring at the ease of your smile, the happiness etched into your features, I mourned the person I was looking at. In that moment, as the shutter clicked, you had no idea where life would take you. If you had, I wonder—would you still have been so luminous? 

It is not all bleak, however. I think I should make that clear. The woman you become is not you, and she never will be again, but it doesn’t matter because, even in this current version, she has a village of people who love her. I love her. My sisters love her. My brothers love her. My father loves her. Her friends love her. If you need some comfort after all of this, I hope that will be enough.