On Being the Black Sheep

by Paul Chuks

Alina Fedorchenko

I sprung into life as the black sheep of the family. No one told me it’d hurt. Black Sheep is the corrupted word for different. Although different becomes layered when we begin to consider whether humans differ. It is a psycho paradox that has left scholars sweating without an answer for centuries. The debate is not in the biological aspect — every human has a single unique gene encoded in them. It is in the psycho-social aspect. The bandwagon versus the outlier. Is the bandwagon inevitable? Are the outcasts anomalies?

Writing this, I’m unable to determine whether one is born a black sheep or society turns one into that. I was banned from going shopping with my mother as a young boy because the kind of shirts I usually chose were, as she puts it, “ugly” and “mysterious.” Or sometimes, “what a child of God should not be wearing.” I’d frown, yank my hand off her grip and leave her to do the heavy lifting when she refused to pay for them. When we got home and they asked why my face was scrunched like I was used for a bad joke, she’d say it was because I chose ugly shirts that she wouldn’t pay for. I’d quip, but I liked them. Everyone believed her as they have at a point in time, chided my choices.

I did not watch cartoons that many other kids watched. I only read books. While my mother liked it, she also wanted me to be a kid. Although I was proactive in public, I barely made friends in private. I enjoyed my company because I was allowed room to think. I asked all the questions: how are children made? Where is heaven? Who gave birth to God? Why did he make me left-handed and all the others, right-handed? Is God a man? Why was I born with a cleft palate? Why did he make some people white and some people black? I barely attended weddings. When I had the chance to choose between attending one and staying at home, I chose the latter. It was time to stay alone without any adult haranguing me for one thing or the other. And when they came back, I was told you are such a weird boy, you missed a lot. The other brought out a snack or food to eat in my face but was disappointed when I did not ask for some.

I was the slowest student in my class. My teachers forced my right hand on me and did not understand the implications. My handwriting was scattered like a crooked queue of ants on a page. I could not write fast, meaning I owed too many notes. My hack was paying my seat mate 20 bucks to help me complete them. To date, I still do not write fast. I did not have notes while in school and read mostly handouts. It was hard to not feel different.

After my friends had joined the choir in church, I was harangued to be like them. Every morning during devotion I was the topic of discussion. If I made a mistake, it was because I was not a chorister and God was not in me. To become a chorister, one needed to give their life to Christ and be baptized before membership. I did not like the concept of baptism because I was scared of water. But nobody listened. I went to the children coordinator who saw me as a special child because I always aced the memory verse every Sunday. Immediately I told him it was my dream to sing; he asked me to choreograph a full hymn for him and half way through, he gave me the green light. I sang for a year and quit. I started doubting God. Once during holy communion, the pastor claimed that the bread and the wine were of Christ and solely for believers. If sinners ate and drank it, they’d pay for it heavily with their health or spiritually. I placed a bet with my friends that I’d take the communion and remain without blemish. They all held their breath as I gobbled it down. When we met at the following church service, I was the guy with a promise of death hanging over his head.

When I got promoted to the youth session, I started arguing with the youth pastors. I’d tell them Tithing was part of the Laws of Moses that Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection fulfilled, and collecting it made it look as though Jesus’ crucifixion was a façade. They’d report me to the district coordinator and I’d repeat my statement. Instead of giving me biblical lashings, he would take me into his office to deliver me of the spirit of the devil that has possessed me, while I watched, eyes wide open, waiting for the spirit to eventually come out and maybe fly out the window. He’d point to every kid in the church asking if anyone kept their hair like me. No, but I like my hair like this, I would say. He’d say that God doesn’t like men in long hair and those who kept them are doomed for damnation. I’d remind him that Jesus had long hair as a Palestinian Jew and he wouldn’t punish us for what he created. He’d bite his lips and say that I am the most stubborn child he’d ever met and it is my stubbornness that kept my prayers for my dad from being answered. The last time he said it was the last time I went to his district. I walked away with my eyes refraining from watering my cheeks. I went to a new district and no sooner did I leave the church entirely.

I always got into trouble because I was always fighting. One day at the camp, I joined a long queue of people waiting to fetch water. Everyone gazed at me ruefully, as though I had emerged from a horror show with my costume on. I had gotten used to it because I had been gazed at that way since I could make sense of the world. Is my palate this bad? Sometimes I asked myself after people had drowned me in their gazes. A boy who came to get water, dropped his bucket at my back and stationed in my face, watching me like a gripping football match. I warned him against it but he proved balky. We got into a fight, I gave him a black eye. Although I was left with a swollen lip, the left side of his face was bruised and swollen. Everyone on the queue knew I warned him to stop looking. But after the brief match, I was the bad person who was being taken to the security post until a woman stood her ground saying heaven will fall if anybody touched me. I fetched my water and left for the alcove my mother had prepared for our stay. Evidently seeing my lips, she knew I had fought. She pulled my ear and promised to beat me when we got home. A classmate who called me shovel mouth told my mother I used to strangle people. He did not say that I strangled those who called me shovel mouth but that I strangled people. I was shown the fury of an angry mother that day. I was usually judged before my explanation (if I were ever allowed to) and on most days, expected the same result: beating.

In my realization, the bandwagon is powerful but the outcast is designed to survive them. Burnaboy, in an interview, said he does not make Afrobeats because much of it is premised on nihilism; instead he prefers to artistically document his introspection about life. It was as though he stirred the hornet’s nest, everyone came swinging with profanity. Others have said it in the past and didn’t draw vitriols. He responded mildly on a song off his album, highlighting the insults he had gotten, which includes claims that his mother danced for Fela. Everyone chugged it up to “Burnaboy can’t just take criticism.” The bandwagon mocks the outcast for being an outcast because they do not like that anyone is an outcast, even when they are behind why such a person is an outcast. They’d say that the outcast enjoys the “attention” they get from being an outcast, when in fact, 90% of it is mudslinging.

Epictetus compared people who fit in to the white thread of a toga — indistinguishable. And the outcasts, the purple thread that makes the whole dress shine bright. When asked by a guard if he’d attend the emperor’s show, this dialogue ensued: ‘But if I refuse to take part in the Emperor’s show, I’ll lose my head.’ ‘Go ahead, then. Take part. But I won’t.’

‘Why me and not you?’ ‘Because you’re thinking of yourself as just one thread in the toga.’ ‘Meaning what?’

‘You’re bound to care about how to be similar to other people, just as a thread too wants to be no different from all the other threads. But I’d like to be purple, the little bit of brightness that makes all the rest seem fair and lovely. So why are you telling me to conform to the majority? How, in that case, would I be purple?’