Robtel Neajai Pailey

Coup Babies

The reactions have become akin to the expressions of spectators during the surprising crescendo at the climax of a stage play.

Perhaps the reactions can be more accurately described as the disarming look of horror of a people who are on the cusp of experiencing extreme physical pain and anguish. Eyes pop out of their sockets, jaws catapult to the floor, chests rise with fear, and hearts skip a beat. Whatever the reactions, I have become accustomed to them. The moment the five words leave my mouth and the information is processed, it is too late to press REWIND or PAUSE.

April 12 is my birthday.

I am a coup baby. For as long as I can remember, I have always solicited guffaws of surprise with a slight glazing over of the eyes when I reveal to a Liberian that my birthday is the day that changed the country forever. It is the day that will forever live in infamy. Coached by a private doctor, with my father’s ever watchful and apprehensive gaze, my mother pushed me into Liberia and existence on Monday, April 12, 1982 at 2 p.m. On the same day, exactly two years before my own birth, Samuel Kanyon Doe came to redeem Liberia by leading a military coup to topple the True Whig one-party state, killing and impaling President William R. Tolbert, Jr. in the Executive Mansion while he slept soundly in his bed. This was the genesis of Doe’s symbolic subversion of settler-colonial rule and Liberia’s fall from grace. April 12 has now come to symbolize the beginning of the end of a system structured in dominance and inequality. It was also categorically the beginning of my metaphysical guilt about celebrating when others were mourning, and coming to terms with my own constructive dissent about things that I find unjust and rooted in distortions of truth.

The story does not end with this beginning. On November 12, 1985, five years after Doe’s coup, Commanding General Thomas Quiwonkpa lodged an aborted counter-coup against Doe. When elections were allegedly rigged in 1985, Quiwonkpa seized the moment with his own brand of redemption. His coup was foiled, and Doe now responded by silencing opposition and politicizing ethnic rivalries by filling his Cabinet with loyal members of his own indigenous group, the Krahn. The recycling of political loyalties and responses to Doe’s reprisals and assassination of Quiwonkpa and an estimated 600 others would later give rise to the emergence of a military messiah turned monster, Charles Taylor, who led Liberia’s liberation from Doe as a personal vendetta. Exactly five years after Quiwonkpa’s attempted coup, my younger sister Ella catapulted into the world, across the Atlantic in Washington Hospital for Women, a kicking, screaming, mass of kinky curls with skin the color of shiny black opal, and the sharp piercing gaze of a seer. By virtue of being born on Quiwonkpa’s failed liberation day, my sister Ella is an almost-coup baby whose calmness of spirit defied the circumstances of her birthday. I had this sudden streak of insight in 2002 while sitting in a Ghanaian classroom bursting at the seams with chairs and warm collegiate bodies with nameless faces scribbling away during the instructor’s decisive lecture about the causes and effects of the Liberian Civil War. I was a junior study abroad student at the University of Ghana-Legon then, when the connection between my birthday and my younger sister’s birthday became crystal clear, almost as if 20 years of a turbulent political history had come back to haunt me like a troubled ancestral spirit whose message needed to be conveyed by any means necessary.

Though Ella and I are coup babies, our personal journeys to consciousness have taken very different turns. I was unclear at the time what that actually meant, yet it was eerily jarring that the apparent coincidence was anything but. I stored that prickly connection into the synapse of my right brain. I often wondered thereafter about the implications of Ella and I being born on violent days in Liberia’s history. I can only liken it to the tumultuousness of being born the last two daughters of a man who, I believe, desperately yearned for sons to pass on the patriarchal torch. Dad, unfortunately or fortunately, rolled the Y-chromosome dice, and scored blanks on all three occasions. He was stuck with a ham and hellion, my younger sister and I, with the last two attempts. I have come to think of father-daughter relationships as a series of attempted coups, coups and counter-coups, cease fires, negotiations and peace agreements. It is one of the more difficult relationships, one in which a young woman defines all the other relationships with men that she will ever know…with friends, with boyfriends, with lovers, with husbands. It is the relationship that ultimately reflects who she is as a female subjective body to the world and to herself. My relationship with my father has always been unsettling, a vortex of memories that when hoisted together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, appear to be in constant tension. Dad and I are similar in all the wrong ways and disparate in all the right ways. We are on the cusp only now of finding middle ground.

I do not remember my father in the early years. He was very present when my mother gave birth, but traveled to the United States six months after I was born to seek greener pastures for our family, and the countless other extended relatives he supported in Liberia. He would always regret this move, as leaving a lucrative job as special assistant to a prominent Liberian Senator was akin to professional suicide at the time. Mom told me what a responsible, doting father-to-be my dad was, as she was one of a few non-upper echelon pregnant women who was fortunate to have her own private doctor. I was born into the promise of acquired privilege. Apparently, my mother’s family did not approve of my father because he grew up poor, though his sharp intellect, enterprising spirit, and genuine interest in the wellbeing of his own family made his potential for future success limitless. I grew up with mom the first four years of my life, with the barrage of cousins, aunts, uncles, and extended family surrounding me like a swarm of bees to a honey hive. Mom would leave for the States not too long after my fourth birthday, and I would join her nearly two years later, exactly one year and six months before Charles Taylor’s invasion of Liberia from Ivory Coast in 1989.

Joining my mother and father in the United States took much psychological renegotiation. I shied away from my father, always tentative, because he appeared to be a living, breathing question mark. His beard had grown longer than the photos of him mom often sent, and I could not conjure him into being from my early childhood memories. After months and months of a ritualistic dance in which he attempted to offer an olive branch, and I repelled, I eventually became enticed like a moth to a flame. Dad and I settled into a comfortable routine. He became my superhero, and I his sidekick. We were inseparable those early years. I remember mom working a lot, and dad taking up the reigns. He was always there to pick me from school, and we would embark on the traditional 10-minute comfortable gait to our apartment in Washington, D.C., in animated conversation about what I had learned that day. Dad asked questions, and expected answers. My conversations with him would later be the basis of my intellectual curiosity, and ambitious drive to succeed. I wanted Dad to be constantly proud of and impressed by me. It was as if his approval was a direct mirror into my self-worth.

My father is not a traditional Liberian father. Stoic though he may be, he was a combination of disciplinarian, oracle, playmate, rescuer, and caregiver. Dad taught me how to ride my bike in Dupont Circle. I remember long walks through the parks in downtown D.C., and frequent trips to the local McDonald’s for Happy Meals every Friday after I aced my spelling tests. Dad and I would huddle in front of the television every weekday and Saturday at 7 p.m. to watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, moments during which I realized that you could win an awesome amount of money just by knowing how to spell, and then also lose it all because you wagered too much in a high stakes game of intellectual acrobatics. We often screamed the answers at the television and took scores, as if the presenters could hear us and include us in the game.  I remember being my father’s handbag at countless Liberian Association meetings, in which he wore his signature navy suspenders as chairman of the board. He used to sew my buttons on my uniform when I, hellion extraordinaire, ripped them off during rough activity on the playground. Dad often gave treats to my friends who visited our apartment in D.C., prompting them to profess that he was the coolest dad in the world. He attended most programs at school, and made my lunch everyday because I did not like public school cafeteria food. He cooked my meals, and washed my clothes. He was my first introduction to the dignity of male domestication, so much so that any man who professed not to know how to cook or clean or wash did not sprint far enough in the marathon for my heart.

I do not see many Liberian fathers, or fathers for that matter, engaging with their daughters the way my father did with me, or eventually with my younger sister. There is a huge chasm between the female sphere and male sphere and fathers and daughters seem to maintain an appreciable distance. Because getting too close could reveal a reflection of the same angst and hidden desires that most daughters have for love and attention from the opposite sex. Truth be told, most contemporary Liberian fathers raising daughters have not been socialized to profess, protect, and provide for their female offspring. They may do this in isolation of one or the other, but very few of them use the triple “P” approach. Some Liberian fathers have become predatory, and see their daughters as sex objects whose female bodies become the space upon which to unleash their frustration and anger at the world, while others are just not around long enough to make an impression, and as a result, many young Liberian women go in search of fathers in destructive places, like the god-fathers who use and abuse them, seizing their innocence, and holding it for ransom. If Liberian fathers were raising their daughters to be female reflections of the best of themselves, many of the dysfunctionalities that have become a mainstay in the country—pedophilia, femicide, prostitution, violence against women, sexual abuse—would be aberrations. The family is Liberia’s nucleus, and the father-daughter relationship is a key molecule in that equation. Many mothers raise sons in Liberia, but very rarely are fathers raising daughters to respect themselves, honor their bodies, reach for the stars, and shatter glass ceilings.

Mine was a complex, yet storied childhood, and my introduction to the father as a socio-cultural trope fairly pleasant and self-affirming. I had a father who professed, protected, and provided, within reason. I often wondered if Dad regretted not having boys because he would later refer to his own brother’s sons with a wistful sigh of wonderment and awe. I think I felt this yearning metaphysically, so I subconsciously became the son he never had. I was aggressive in speech and in deed where most boys would be considered assertive. Needless to say, I got into a lot of playground fights and verbal fisticuffs, and most times emerged the winner whose pyrrhic victory made me relinquish, for instance, a chance at serving as president of my 6^th grade class. I was opinionated when most young women my age did not have long debates about important things with their dad. Dad taught me love for country, and his vivid stories about plum trees, catching fish in Rivercess and bushmeat in Rockcess, political debates he had had with True Whig partisans as a young intellectual, and long conversations with his Grandfather who was a zoe, would eventually be the basis for my constant re-engagement and eventual return to Liberia. The story of his father’s mysterious disappearance when he was eight years old always crept up into conversations, but Dad fed me bits and pieces of the story to be digested not in one gulp but in courses, perhaps for fear that my fragile psyche could only handle a morsel of family lore at a time.

Then something changed. The wedge between my parents grew, and with it came the rumblings of disagreements, emotional jabs, and physical sparring. My younger sister’s birth diffused the tension for me because I had a playmate with whom to divert my fear and isolation. But then the attention that I received from dad waned, and Ella suddenly turned into a new, and more interesting feature story. She had lodged a coup for my father’s heart, it seemed, and I was abandoned like an internally displaced person to fend for myself. Torturous adolescence got the best of me and childhood illusions no longer held a supreme fixture. I changed loyalties like a mercenary soldier, and followed mom’s marching orders. Although I still pushed back like a willful cadet, it was mom I went to for counsel in my teens, and dad I looked at with skepticism. Literature has suggested that most women, by simply growing up, experience the loss of their fathers’ love; for even in the best of circumstances, men find it difficult to relate to their adolescent daughter in the same manner that they related when she was a little girl.

As mom embraced her empowerment, thereby taking control of the family’s finances, Dad’s influence cascaded like the petals of a once vibrant rosebud. He physically shrank in my realm of consciousness. The bags under his eyes were more visible. His gait stymied. He became more and more consumed by the stories of yesteryear in Liberia and his family’s disintegration due to his father’s disappearance. He also became consumed by the civil war raging in the country, almost as if the extra burden of supporting multiple families in Liberia while attempting to give us the leftovers got the best of him. He grew weaker and feeble, as I grew stronger and more fortified in my own emancipation. I suppose Mom went through a similar transformation. Mom was a firecracker and always has been, but it took moving to the United States, earning a disposable income, and finding two jobs to support her coup babies, for her to find the essence of her own power as a woman. She would whip us with her words, and give us looks with daggers that said “Don’t try me.” But she also counseled and coddled, nurtured, and cuddled. In Deborah Tannen’s book about mother-daughter relationships, You’re Wearing That?, she talks about the mother’s need to control her daughter as an attempt to reform the impression that society ultimately makes of her as a mother when her daughter is under a microscope of judgment. Mom was worrisome about my petulance, insubordination, and dismissal of authority, whether real or imagined, so she attempted to clamp down like a willful dictator. Still I rebelled, almost like the context of my birthday gave me the right to shatter norms, creating a paradigm shift on who would tell the story of triumph at the end.

While Mom and I negotiated and renegotiated the terms of how far my adolescent angst would go, Dad’s universe began to crack like the fallen pieces of a precarious glass menagerie. His mother passed away in Liberia, and he had to return to pay homage to the one who gave him life. When the news of my grandmother’s death was announced, it came through the shrill voice of my aunt at the other end of the Atlantic Ocean. My father asked me to excuse myself from a previously planned engagement with high school friends, stay behind to be with him, pray with him, in essence to mourn for the dead communally. As I crept silently in his room to render my final verdict, it was the first time I saw my father cry, and his vulnerability scared me. I turned away and walked out of the apartment. It was a heavy-handed slap in my father’s face, and the ultimate dagger in the heart. It was my younger sister, ever the more emotional intelligent one of my father’s daughters, who provided suture to his wounds. That was the beginning of our disintegration. It was also the beginning of my coming to terms with my father as both human and otherworldly.

Dad went to his mother’s funeral in Liberia. When he returned, he was not the same person. He seemed more troubled, and guarded, as if his ancestors held an executive council meeting and delivered a verdict finding him wanting. I kept an appreciable distance, and Ella continued to be his emotional rock. She was also my ally, a reflection of what both of us had encountered while living within our parents’ troubled union, yet she took a decidedly different stance on embracing life. Both of us grew up very fast, but Ella’s emotional intelligence stunned me because she had the ability to delve into the arts to make sense of the world around her. When I began college, I was filled with balls of anger, due mostly to my parent’s disintegrating relationship, and partly to my need for distance and escape. I became distant from men who expressed interest, and scurried away from persistent suitors. I created a wall between me and them so fortified and thick that not even a bulldozer of a personality penetrated the barrier. All the while, Dad and I continued to play a song and dance ritual, avoiding one another so as to avoid conflict, and then shooting above the hip when it mattered most. Mom moved out and into her own home in Maryland. Ella and I stayed with dad to complete middle school and college, respectively. A shattering incident happened in which we had to leave our comfortable apartment in D.C. for another one, and this particular move hit me like a counter-coup of epic proportions. After graduating from college and middle school a year later, respectively, Ella and I symbolically abandoned dad like defeated soldiers after an unsuccessful coup plot—Ella to live with mom in Maryland and I to live in Egypt for one year running away from myself.

When I returned from a year in Egypt a self-professed vegetarian, Dad did not understand my brand of extremism. After all, I was African, and “all Africans eat meat,” he explained with futile attempts to convince me to have the last pork chop he expertly fried to sizzling perfection. Mom, on the other hand, adjusted, and accommodated my new, odd, and self-imposed dietary restrictions. From then on, dad and I have been engaged in what could only be described as tentative steps to meet on an even plateau. I have become his nagging reminder that the world is becoming even more insular, yet diverse. He reminds me that age and wisdom are still within the mystical power of the ancestors, and one must listen to them for guidance and support. He often talks about his father and grandfather almost in the same way as Catholics speak of the Holy Trinity, with him representing the missing imprint of the cycle. It is in these moments that I know how much he wishes he could have just one last word with the sages of his patriarchy. It took me 28 years to see my father as that frightened 8-year-old boy who lost his father and had to carry the family’s burden on his shoulders. There was a flash of current that rippled through my body when I realized that he is flesh and bone, fallible, and still trying to figure out what it takes to be a grown-up. Fathers must be fathered properly in order to make a meaningful impact on their daughters’ lives. What Dad remembers of his own father was a larger than life messiah, a man whose heart was too big, whose vision was too ahead of his time, and whose love for his fellow countryman compromised his own safety. This is a story that I hope to tell with my father one day as co-conspirators.

Like my younger sister and I, perhaps most Liberian girls and women—young and old—could call themselves coup babies because of the very nature of our country’s history and the parallel hailstorm that defines our relationships with our fathers. Father-daughter relationships are complicated enough. But if you add two coups, and countless other social upheavals, it makes for a tragic-comedy of the highest proportions. “You are the string of my heart,” my father said to me in a particularly emotionally charged moment when I was in my early twenties. It was the first time in a long time that I felt completely consumed by his love. It was the first time that I honestly felt like I was his coup baby, and that true to form, I had captured his heart in the most symbolic coup of my lifetime, and his.

April 12 and November 12 have complex meanings for my nuclear family and my nation, because just as both days represent the beginning of Liberia’s downward spiral, they also signify the possibility of transformation and renewal—between fathers and daughters, who are symbolic of the country’s potential.