How I Want to Go

In this world of wills, where we buy our coffins and even plots to be buried, while still breathing, I do not want to be left out. Whether man has continuously become mean with time I do not know, but one thing is for sure: that the living just do not trust each other. This has reached the point where you have to buy your own coffin, just in case your mean family and friends decide to send you off in a gunny sack originally having dairy meal. Further still, you do not know that after failing to buy you a coffin they may decide to leave you out in the open for the vultures and other scavengers.

Having, perhaps, messed up a little in my life, and being from that background I always claim, I keep having these crazy premonitions that wake me up in the middle of the night. As a matter of fact, as I write this, I have just woken from a dream where I stood, literally, in line waiting for my turn to be roasted and my famous last words, as I remember them, were me begging those who stood nearby – probably for the same thing as I – to send my remains, or cremains, to my mother. It broke my heart, in that dream I had, to imagine her receiving me dead, and it still does, in reality, but that was the part of the dream where I woke up.

It might strike them, scratch that. It must strike them as so freaking odd as being the first family member to be roasted along or against his will. As you know, when you roast in a burning building it is much against your will to be cremated. My family, the extended one, is highly conservative – and all for the wrong reasons, at least according to me. Some years ago, when I had converted to Islam – not in prison – everybody in my family wanted to “talk” to me, and try to talk me out of it, even those who you could despise: those who needed to be talked out of crazy stuff they were doing, a lot crazier than a person converting to Islam. It was like I had committed a crime against the humanity of that family. My family probably thinks that they are the holiest and most conservative, and I already know what they are going to say about my wanting to be roasted as a final send off.

The reason I really opt for cremation is the hatred I have for coffins and the thought of “suffocation” if buried, a thing I have coined a word for: kimyopic phobia. I would not like to go away in a coffin. I would not like to spend eternity in one either. I am pessimistic about life after death and I do not know why, but maybe it is because I am what you would naturally call, without second thought, a lost soul.

My family is most likely to hold a couple of meetings to discuss my unrealistic, they might call it, wish. They'll probably say that it has never happened in their family tree, (and when will it ever happen?) and they would not like to displease the spirits, and that it is against Christian teachings. That is the time when Christianity and traditional beliefs are mixed with no great problem. I’m talking about double standards. That phrase might mean something that happens in law courts to some BBC ears but even in our daily African lives that phrase's meaning will show itself.

All I am trying to say is that when I die, please roast me to the point of no more roastment, that is until I turn into ashes. The choice will be anybody's after that, they may either blow me with the wind and let me roam places I have never been, or keep me in some container at home and make me feel at home.