Re: My ‘acting’ husband (Al-Bint’s defence)

In March 2008, when I granted an interview to this paper for its 10th year anniversary, I remember declaring that no edition of Al-Bint’s diary is 100% fact and none is 100% fiction. Some editions are up to 95% fact because they are based completely on a real-life incident.What I usually do in such cases […]

In March 2008, when I granted an interview to this paper for its 10th year anniversary, I remember declaring that no edition of Al-Bint’s diary is 100% fact and none is 100% fiction. Some editions are up to 95% fact because they are based completely on a real-life incident.
What I usually do in such cases is to change the setting and the names of characters involved, in order to protect the victims.
Last week’s edition, My ‘acting’ husband was one such story. The story is true, it really happened the way I said it did, the only thing I had to do was to change the names of the actors and the location of the incident. But because, as the saying goes, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, some readers found it totally hard to digest.
One reader was so disturbed that he began his letter with the sentence ‘Please do not ever write something like that again’ and ended the same letter begging me to ‘never write like that again, please and please.’
In between the two sentences, Malam Muhammad Isa had written that Talatu should have smashed the flower vase at her acting husband’s ‘chief weapon’ and someone should make that beast of a ‘real’ husband ‘walk down the streets of the town naked, for at least a month.’
Another wondered how such a thing can happen in a Hausa/Fulani, Muslim community like the one usually depicted in the diary. Malam Hamisu Suleiman said that it was with great consternation that he completed reading this edition of the diary. ‘I kept asking myself questions I couldn’t provide answers to. But my main question was; can this happen in any human civilization? If this can happen in my society then where is our faith, pride and protective jealousy towards our womenfolk?’
Earlier on, Hamisu had admitted being a reader of this diary for over a decade, ‘learning about courtships and matrimonial issues.’ He nevertheless hoped that last week’s episode was ‘a deterrence against this dastardly and monstrous act in any society, not based on reality.’
When it came from a female reader, the reaction, naturally, wasn’t any less angry. Dr Ruqayya Muhammad wrote to tell me ‘This week’s Al-Bint is the most disturbing I ever read. I feel angered and violated just reading it. The husband must be a real idiot to think he can get away with that for long. I hope to God it’s not based on a true life story.
Rather than considering him ‘dead to her’ she should have him and his cousin prosecuted.’
Yet among this flurry of protests, a letter came that re-affirmed my belief in the saying that one man’s food is another man’s poison.
Alhaji Hassan wrote to say that he read the diary with keen interest because a similar thing had happened to his sister. Though he made a few suggestions on how Talatu and his sister can collaborate and move on with their lives, he ended his piece on this note. ‘I commend the writer for a very interesting story, well-served. Thanks for making my day..’
The truth is no matter how horrible a story is, someone, somewhere might have experienced the same thing or something a lot similar but had no way of sharing it. In the early days of this diary, precisely in the year 2000, I wrote about the experience of a friend of mine who lived in another town. It was a very interesting story but it had a rather lame ending. I then decided to give it a more dramatic ending because that will make the story much more appealing to readers; at least that was what I thought.
By the time that edition of the diary was published two friends who lived in the same town with me made these amazing reactions. The first came to me and said that she was unaware that she had told me about that particular incident in her life but she was surprised to see me write about it as if I was a witness to it all. I told her that it wasn’t even her story, that the diary content was even part-fact and part fiction because the ending was a figment of my imagination. My friend told me that that was exactly how it happened in her life.
Now Friend number Two took a different approach, she knew that she had never discussed that episode of her life with me, so she went to a mutual friend of ours and accused her of telling me something about her which I had decided to use in my column. Mutual friend was shocked because she couldn’t remember discussing any such issue with me. When she reached me to ask where I heard that story, I had to tell her that it was an incident in the life of a lady who lived faraway. And that part of it was actually fiction. Mutual friend could not believe her ears. She told me about how she was accused of betraying a friend’s confidence.
The morale of what I just narrated above is to show that no matter how bad or odd your personal circumstance is, there is someone out there who shares it or has been through it. The whole idea of the diary is to provide a social commentary which can act as a mirror to our society, especially on the issues of marital life. This is why I was particularly gratified when a reader once wrote to tell me that sometimes he wondered whether I had a camera hidden in his house with which I see everything that goes on there. He claimed that some editions of the diary were direct reflections of incidents that happened in his life.
It is for this reason that no matter how strange the story, I sometimes still write on the odd situations around us. For instance, ‘All about the perfect murder’ elicited similar reactions from readers who believe that no man will be heartless enough to plan his wife’s murder while she’s returning home from a journey. But it was the true story of a lady I knew well. Of course she survived the murder attempt and the husband was later apprehended. Still it doesn’t alter the fact that the story was stranger than fiction.
In the final analysis, I wish to apologize to all those whose sensibilities were wounded by the contents of ‘My acting husband’ last week. That was not the intention. All I wanted was to advise young brides to be on the alert when their grooms make a habit of bringing them something to eat or drink before bedtime every night and to get them to act once they realize that what they are being given to eat or drink causes them drowsiness or memory loss. This is the only way to check the excesses of people like Danladi, Talatu’s husband, whose perversion, obviously, knows no bounds.
I hope I didn’t bore you with my defence but I couldn’t help thinking that such an intervention was necessary. Have nice weekend!