A Case of Identity
I remember a particular episode of the old-school series; TWILIGHT ZONE (I guess y’all were too young to watch that shit!) in which the protagonist, a young man woke up in what he thought was his house, beside a woman who he thought was his wife. He woke her up, complaining about the fact that she’d allowed him oversleep, knowing fully well he was supposed to be at work about thirty minutes earlier. He was bantering with her, but she opened her eyes, looked at him and screamed. She did not recognize him.
At first, he thought it was a joke, but as he went through his day and he went to work and nobody knew him, and so on, he lost his mind. Or something like that.
Imagine.
Now imagine that happening to you. I know, I know. God forbid. Just play along with me for a bit. What if you woke up, and your better half did not know you; there are absolutely no pictures of you in the house; rather she’s/he’s sharing pictures with some other person, definitely not you. I mean, YOU know YOU’RE YOU, and you remember everything there is to know about YOU…but there’s NO ONE to substantiate your claims. What would you do?
Would you begin to doubt your sanity? I mean, how convinced would you be about your story if the person you’d spent the better part of ten years waking up beside suddenly said they did not know you. Then you go to your office, and the security guard you had tipped every payday for the past four years did not know you. In fact, he physically handled you and threw you off the premises. Your friends don’t know you anymore, even though you told them about the activities you had shared for the past thirty-something years. You run to your parents, but they do not know you either. They show you pictures upon pictures of their family, and strangely, you do not appear in any. What would you be feeling then? What would you be thinking, that is if you were still capable rational thought?
Would you loose your marbles, or would you be convinced the whole world has gone mad? Would you feel like Neo, who woke up every morning knowing that there was something wrong with the world he could see with his ‘naked eyes’? How strong would your convictions be…and just how far would you go to prove your ‘correctness’?
Now imagine you woke up, and you could not remember anything about yourself. You did not recognize the room you were laying in, or the clothes you were wearing, or the person lying next to you. Then that person wakes up and tells you who you are, what you do for a living…and so on. In the space of a few seconds you go from ‘on one’ to ‘Mr. So and so’. What would that matter? Would that make you feel better, like you’re not just a nobody who fell from somewhere into the general scheme of things? Like Hancock who was wondering what sort of person he was, or what he had done that was so bad no one came to claim him?
Any of this making any sense yet?
Guess it’s just a round about way of me asking you guys…what exactly makes you ‘you’? Take me for instance. The only reason why I believe I am Seun Odukoya is because the birth certificate I was shown has that name on it, and the people who I was told are my parents have called me by no other name since. So basically, I have been conditioned to think and accept that I am Seun Odukoya.
But imagine that some old man (ala Gandalf) walks into my room one morning, and told me that ‘life’ as I have known it for three hundred years is nothing but a simulation I have been fed intravenously since my ‘engineered’ conception. That the people I call ‘ma’ and ‘pop’ are nothing but special government agents, chosen to be my ‘parents’ because they had special training to deal with ‘paranormal’ children such as me. Of course, my initial reaction would be disbelief. After all…three hundred years no be beans! But then, a seed of doubt would have been sown. And I would probably go home and watch my ‘parents’ from the corners of my eyes. And then, maybe a lot of things would begin to make sense, like how I had three birth certificates as if my ‘parents’ were not sure of when I was conceived. Like how they would both inexplicably disappear for weeks on end, and then reappear like nothing happened. Like how my blood group and genotype were totally and inexplicably different from theirs, and from those of my other ‘siblings’.
Dilemma.
But I am sure that in the midst of my confusion, there would be a realization that I could make anything of my feelings. After all, it was not as if these ‘agents’ had been slacking in their duties as my ‘surrogate parents’, even if I would rather have known my biological ones. And then maybe I would remember the saying ‘Some things are best left alone’ or words to that effect. Anyway, the mind…my mind would come up with a perfectly-rational explanation that would serve me, and that would be that.
But then, what if these ‘agents’ got tired of the charade and told me the truth…that they were not my biological? What would I do? Would I be able to handle that ‘truth’…or would the sudden stripping away of all the security blankets I had wrapped myself in for several years take my sanity away with it? Would I get a pistol and blow out the mush Biology calls brains out of my skull, because the truth has suddenly become too much for me to handle?
We will never know.
But know this: a lot of us float through life, living in a warm friendly haze, a ‘matrix’ of a world we have created for ourselves, because reality can be a handful sometimes. And I am reminded one of the rare classic lines from a movie; when movies were still that; an experience in sight and sound. This particular one had Tom Cruise playing amateur lawyer, and he had a veteran soldier in the witness stand. After succeeding in annoying the general, he asks ‘You want answers?!’ Cruise’s character replies, shouting ‘I want the truth!’ and Jack Nicholson; the genera,l in one of his finest movie performances shouts, ‘You can’t handle the truth!’
That addresses a lot of us. We drift through life like sand wood left in a river, directed by whichever way the tide flows, not having a life of our own. And though deep down, we know there’s more to life than that miserable pay-check, more than those constantly changing array of girlfriends, more than that wedding ceremony that cost two million bucks when we know three-thirds of it came via loan, we have settled for mere parodies of living…because that is what society expects of us. Look this way…dress that way…talk this way….by a certain age you should have done this and that…
Who makes the rules? Who defines us; our neighbors? Friends? Parents who have a penchant for insisting that the boy goes to study law just so they can brag back in the ‘village’ about having a lawyer as a son, and it does not even matter if the boy can write circles around Achebe?
Who defines you?
And as I leave, I cast our collective minds back to a movie that was released in 2008, featuring ex Ms. Brad Pitt (cheap shot, I know), titled ‘Wanted’. Allow me cast our minds back to the last scene, a few minutes before the ‘nerd’ popped Morgan Freeman’s character. If you remember, the bullet exited Morg’s forehead, and then the scene was reversed, so we could see the origin of the bullet. After traveling halfway back across town, through the office bully’s doughnut, a fake best-friend’s energy drink can and back into the gun, the protagonist break’s the fourth wall. Looking at us the viewers, he says, ‘This is me taking control of my life. What the f*ck have you done lately?’
Well…what have you done lately, really? Some shit you wanted to do, or some ‘shit’ you really do not like to do but do because it ‘pays the bills’?
What have you done lately?
