The first thing I notice is the hand. Not the words, though they are loud enough — NOT FRIENDLY DO NOT TOUCH, set in the flat, institutional lettering of a warning sign, the kind you see on a gate in Ikeja or a door in a hospital corridor. The hand comes second, or maybe it comes first and the words explain it: a palm held up, then a diagonal line struck through it. A yellow caution triangle frames the whole thing, that particular shade of yellow that means pay attention, this is not a suggestion.
It is a joke, obviously. A shirt that says do not touch is funny because shirts are not usually in the business of issuing instructions. But the longer I look at the crossed-out hand, the less I am laughing and the more I am thinking about how much of diaspora life is spent borrowing the language of officialdom to say something private.
Consider the warning sign itself. It is not a personal form. It does not say I would prefer or I am tired or please ask first. It says DO NOT. It says NOT FRIENDLY. It borrows the grammar of the airport gate, the customs hall, the office door with the keypad. And that is exactly what makes it useful. Some boundaries are too tender to state in your own voice. So you borrow a voice that cannot be argued with.
I have seen this move before, in less comic forms. The aunt who answers the phone with I am not at home when she is very much at home. The cousin who puts Do Not Disturb on a WhatsApp status and means it as a full sentence. The friend who, after years of being the one everyone calls for money, for advice, for a place to sleep, for a character reference, learns to say I am not available in the flat tone of a recorded message. These are not rude people. They are people who have discovered that politeness, in certain family configurations, is a door with no lock.
The shirt takes that discovery and makes it visible. The crossed-out hand is the key detail. A hand is not an abstract symbol; it is the part of you that reaches, that waves, that holds. To cross it out is not to say I hate you. It is to say not right now, not like this, not without asking. The yellow triangle adds urgency, but the hand adds the human cost. You are not a gate. You are a person who has decided, for today, to behave like one.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being the friendly one. In Nigerian-British families, friendliness is often not a personality trait but a job description. You are the one who remembers birthdays, who hosts, who translates, who drives to the airport at 4 a.m., who knows which uncle is not speaking to which aunt. You are friendly because the alternative is a phone call from your mother asking why you have changed. The shirt is not for the naturally reserved, I suspect. It is for the ones who have been friendly on demand for so long that they need a sign to remind themselves they are allowed to stop.
And yet the sign is funny. That matters. A boundary that cannot be laughed at is a boundary that will be resented. The warning-sign format does something clever: it turns a refusal into a bit of theatre. It says I am not actually a hazard, but I am going to borrow the costume of one for a while. The humour is the sugar on the pill. It lets the wearer say do not touch without the room turning cold. It lets the family laugh first, and then, maybe, read the words.
I think about the crossed-out hand again. In Yoruba, there is a proverb about the hand that does not reach where it should not. But I am not going to pretend the shirt is quoting it. The shirt is quoting the airport, the hospital, the car park barrier. It is quoting the places where we are most accustomed to being managed by signs. And that is the quiet joke underneath the loud lettering: we have all been trained to obey a yellow triangle. Why not use that training for something we actually need?
The shirt is available here, if you want the sign for yourself. But the sign is not the point. The point is the moment before the sign — the moment when you realise that the hand you keep extending has started to ache, and that the only way to rest it is to cross it out for a while, in a language no one can mistake for rudeness.
What would you put on your own warning sign, if you were honest? Not the funny version. The true one. The one that borrows the flat yellow voice because your own voice has been saying yes for too long.
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