“The Risky Bob” By Nze James Chinonyerem

He made himself a hybrid and goes about with a hybridized name, Bobrisky. A born male who passed through all the rites of a man, suddenly became imprisoned and pained in his male personality. He needed a breakaway from masculinity. To him, being a man, in a male dominated society was not ideal. So, he chose the risky paths of a woman. From Idris the man, he changed to Bob de risky, a woman. Ironically, in choosing to flee from men’s identity, he sprang into their autonomy. Bob is still a man’s name, risky is his daily paths and life.

Bobrisky remains mindless and cared less about the internal contradictions that animate his life. He pursues his fairy dream with single mindedness. A he in a she’s garbs, he believes it and behaves it. To him, she is a she. He said she has cut off his parts and replaced them with her parts. He said it was modern medical sciences which aided her. Transplant she called it. He became a new creation not in God as in repentance. He became a she in spite of himself.

He acts funnily in her efforts to force a lie on her being. Luckily for him, she lives in a changing world where values have taken flights. She’s operating in a new world where fundamental human rights gained latitudes to challenge shared social norms. A strange world with strange ways, Bob finds comforts in the congregations of his kindred spirits, male and female, covert and overt, who preach strange philosophies. It is her right, her life the debased bunch insist. They confound the many who found it abominable. His clan and gang conspire to make her their outlet figure, their community’s effigy. Bob takes the risk as an honour but to most people well mannered and cultured, it is a horror, an abominable act of Sodom and Gomorrah. I share this value. Man is man, woman is woman.

His fairy dream life style robbed her of his sense of caution. He became daring in her foolery. He abused our collective cultural sensibilities with her appearances and weird mannerisms. Many resent her audacity to flout her feminity in spite of his masculinity. But our society is a junk of contradictions. Some who complain about her cultural assaults still pay tickets to see her perform. Emboldened, he started to play real as a she. She even began to challenge the real women in their lairs. He talks herself a bird even when she’s less than a butterfly. She was said to have won a million naira as the best dressed “woman” in a social event in Lagos, our dear city of excellence. The organizers of the event fouled the sacredness of the valued city. They mocked the excellent in her excellence. An enraged native, the indomitable and indefatigable singer, Portable couldn’t take the outrageous and senseless maneuver. A man beating women in women’s contest? He cried out in a song. Brotherhood has abused sisterhood he sang.

Bobrisky, is risk to our cultural values and heritage.He is a sad reminder of our fall from grace. Our adorations of things profaned and our willingness to adjust to evil philosophizing it as the norm. It is not only in this aspect that we have failed and fallen. There abounds other areas seen and unseen which have challenged our collective resolves to rescue our fast ebbing society from imminent total fall in all consciousness.

Let Bobrisky remind us of the risks of eternal damnation we face before God.