African SF used to be pretty thin on the ground, although this may be partly down to narrow Western definitions of what exactly SF is – whether it was referring to science fiction or to the broader, more encompassing label of speculative fiction. Certainly, as Nnedi Okorafor (2014) put it in one of her online essays: “African science fiction is still alien.”
Dr. Okorafor’s (2014) essay mentions two important considerations: 1. Africans are (generally) absent from the creative process of global imagining that advances technology through stories. 2. Africans are not yet capitalizing on this literary tool, which is practically made to redress political and social issues. Or as editor Ivor Hartmann phrases it in AfroSF (2012), the first SF anthology by African writers: “If you can’t see and relay an understandable vision of the future, your future will be co-opted by someone else’s vision, one that will not necessarily have your best interests at heart. Thus, Science Fiction by African writers is of paramount importance in the development and future of our continent (p.7: emphasis mine).”
However, when academia starts to collate and analyse it, there is a feeling that a ‘movement’ is perhaps starting to make ground. Such a collation took place with the 25th volume publication of the journal Paradoxa, which focused on African SF (2013). The journal, edited by Mark Bould, starts with a historical overview of the origins and current emergence of African SF – although – given that Africa is indeed a lot more than a country – it may well be that there will be multiple and differing representations of such a huge, geographically rooted form of this genre. The introduction from Paradoxa has been generously made available online and is well worth a read. However, for those unwilling or unable to wade through the online introduction to Africa SF, I will give a summary of contents as – more or less and with paraphrasing apologies – represented by the editor.
Paradoxa 25 covers a sweeping range of topics addressing both stories and issues from authors within Africa and across the Diaspora. Initially, Mark Bould analyses North African texts, such as Mohammed Dib’s Who Remembers the Sea; Sony Labou Tansi’s Life and a Half and Ahmed Towfik’s Utopia, within colonial, neo and post-colonial discourses. (Cheryl Morgan has an interview with Ahmed Towfik on The World SF Blog.)
Lisa Yaszek then “rethinks” portrayals of the apocalypse arguing that in some short African SF stories, the ‘apocalypse is re-contextualised, rewritten – and refused’ (p.12). Melissa Kurtz analyses Lauren Beukes’ first two books, arguing for the enduring legacy of apartheid, transmuted into futuristic cyberpunk representations of capitalism. Marleen Barr situates Zoo City within systems of power and difference – and then focuses on species connections, represented by a common ancestor and the novel’s animal “familiars.”
Noah Tsika reassesses the first Nollywood SF movie, Kajola, with other movies such as Pumzi and District 9 pointing to the gradual emergence of an African SF cinema.
The second half of the book focuses on Afro-Diasporic authors, including an interview with Minister Faust, looking at variations of Afrofuturism. Andrea Hairston is also interviewed and emphasises a wider (and indigenised) conceptualisation of science, including Afrofuturism, as needed to reboot the world from a cataclysmic post-European colonial patriarchy. Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death is examined by Lisa Dowdall as a brave critical feminist dystopia, looking for new and better ways of being. Ian McDonald’s African-set Chaga saga is evaluated by Neil Easterbrook, focusing on postcolonial themes. De Witt Douglas Kilgore assesses the first black superhero in mainstream comics – T’Challa/Black Panther from Marvel’s Fantastic Four 52 (1966). Three major Afrofuturists are then focused on: Sun Ra, Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson. Nick Mamatas and Andrew Butler overview recent work by Samuel Delany. Finally, Nisi Shawl reviews AfroSF and Zahrah Nesbit-Ahmed (aka Bookshy) reviews Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls (2013).
Paradoxa represents (perhaps) the start of a considerable emerging academic coverage of African SF, which in itself appears to be gathering significant momentum. Mark Bould (2015) has updated this overview with a blog posting ‘African Science Fiction 101’ (link below)
2015 has thus already seen Jalada’s online African speculative fiction anthology Afrofutures launched on January 14th. The anthology has a prelude piece from Binyavanga Wainana as a lead in, written late last year. Linked in to Jalada’s anthology is a podcast panel debate on Afrofuturism between Nnedi Okorafor and Sofia Samatar et al at the University of Texas, recorded during their Symposium for African Writers in December last year (2014).
With AfroSF (Vol 2) due to build on the successful launch of AfroSF by publishing African writers’ speculative fiction novellas, as well as Short Story Day Africa’s Terra Incognita anthology – featuring nineteen new African spec-fic stories and headed up by Diane Awerbuck – – African speculative fiction in 2015 is now gaining some serious momentum. Other recent notable books is a collection of short stories by Dilman Dila A Killing in the Sun, Deji Olokotun’s Nigerians in Space and Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician. (Incidentally, the March-April 2015 issue of Interzone will also feature Tendai’s story The Worshipful Company of Milliners.). Also due out this year is Tade Thompson’s. ’Making Wolf’ and Afro Cyberpunk’s Jonathan Dotse continues to drive forward Accra 2057.
Add to this heady mix ongoing work by a number of other established writers including Sarah Lotz, Nisi Shawl, Karen Lord and Sofia Samatar, as well as the launch of this magazine (Omenana) in December 2014 – and the future of African SF looks both bright and imminent.
In fact, I’d say African SF is already here – and is getting ready to take over the planet!
Omelsky, M. (2014) “After the End Times: PostCrisis African Science Fiction.” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, v.1 (March), pp. 33-49.
Wood, N (2014b) SF in SA (23) African SF Rec List from Nine Worldshttp://nickwood.frogwrite.co.nz/?p=1093 (An already out of date list of African SF generated after August 2014 ‘Nine Worlds Con’; – panel on African SF)
Nick Wood is a South African clinical psychologist, with over a dozen short stories previously published in Interzone, Infinity Plus, PostScripts, Redstone Science Fiction, Fierce Family, AfroSF and upcoming in the How to Live Amongst Aliens (2015) anthology, amongst others. He has also had a YA speculative fiction book published in South Africa entitled ‘The Stone Chameleon’. Nick has completed an MA in Creative Writing (SF & Fantasy) through Middlesex University, London and is currently teaching mental health at the University of East London. He can be found: @nick45wood or http://nickwood.frogwrite.co.nz/
At some point, he could not quite remember when, the paladins had left him some water and bread. It was the smell of the bread that had woken him. They had also unlocked the irons on his hands, although his ankles were now in chains. He tore off a crust from the loaf and ate it, sipping some water. The sensation made him feel a little better and he managed to get up onto the wooden bench at the back of the van and cover himself properly with the blanket.
It was a long drive through the two cities and then up through the freezing mountains. They were passing through the outskirts of the second city. He could see out the grilled windows that they were passing Location 22; an area that had once been demarked for ruin. A 13th-century roofless and windowless Franciscan friary had been built at the crest of the road. A process of demolishing and rebuilding that involved the construction of semi-detached Edwardian houses with sundried clay-bricks was taking along the winding streets up the foothills towards the snowline. Four-storey chimneys towered over the structures beneath. They were being built despite the fact that domestic fires had been banned under the Smoking Act of 2275, some 30 years ago.
Chad Rossouw is an artist based in Cape Town. He most recently exhibited a solo show entitled The Planet’s Wake at Brundyn + in 2014. He has a Masters degree in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art. He teaches photography at the Ruth Prowse School of Art in Cape Town and writes regularly for the art publication artthrob.co.za
The day I decide to return to work the taps are dry. The tank is empty because the landlord hasn’t turned the pump on, and none of us tenants has the key. I should wake him up, but this has led to shouting matches in the past, so I take two plastic buckets and go to the well without telling Shakira. She’ll only protest. She is awake when I return carrying both buckets, trying not to spill water on the lino. I see her micro-frown, and I grin to counter it.
I have been off work for two weeks with the worst bout of malaria of my life. I force myself to return even though my mouth is bitter and the blood tests still say I have haemolytic anaemia. In the mirror my eyes have that yellow tinge.
Shakira has been unemployed since June. She does not think I am ready for work, but she does not try to stop me. My mother thinks Shakira should stay home and have babies. I secretly agree, but my wife has her own mind, and the best I can do is hope she starts feeling maternal at some point.
I am weak, but I still take the bus from Idi Oro to Lagos Island.
In hindsight perhaps I should have stayed home.
This is the late 1980s. Billy Eko has just been arrested with eight million dollars worth of heroin at Kennedy Airport in New York. Decree Two has effectively muzzled the press since ‘84. There is no legitimate money to be made anywhere. I have a job with Equity Plc, though. A good one. It pays well and on time. We are fed lunch on the job and we have fuel for our cars. Those who have cars, I mean.
My job title is Special Assistant, which is deliberately vague. What I do is mostly administrative. Filing, posting letters, moving memos around.
When I arrive my co-workers are welcoming. I notice new War Against Indiscipline and Corruption posters on the wall.
”Bakare, pele, o!”
“K”ara o le, egbon.”
“Bros! Welcome back!”
They all smile. I am back. All is well.
#
I see something new, or perhaps I see something old for the first time. It’s in the antechamber before the department secretary’s office, hiding on the floor in the left corner on approach, right corner on departure. It’s a grate, six-by-six inches, visible because of a cut section of carpet. Through the crossbars I see another set of bars about an inch lower than the first. It’s incongruous. We’re in an office building, on the tenth floor. It looks like a drain, but water never collects here. I look inside and see only blackness beyond the second inner grate.
I kneel and put my ear to it, but all I can hear is the hum of regular office machinery, all ambient. If any sounds come from the grate I will not be able to hear them at this time. This close to the floor I smell dust, despite the apparent cleanliness.
“What are you doing?”
A woman stands behind me, holding a stack of files, eyebrows raised. Without saying anything, I rise and walk in a direction opposite to the one I expect her to take.
The day passes with management talking down to me and me talking down to the people I supervise. I make phone calls, sign documents, send faxes. Through all of this I think of the grate. What currents run through it? Is it an access point for servicing the electrical system? Why have I never noticed it? I don’t know why I am so curious about it, why I cannot let it go.
***
For the next week I get used to the grate. On occasion, when walking by on an errand for management, I even salute the grate. One day, after a meeting, I notice a new grate just beside the coffee-machine in the break room on the third floor. I know this was never there before because I come here much more often than the department secretary’s office. It’s the same size and shape as the previous one. Even more striking is the age the grate shows. The metal margins show old, layered grime and weathering that suggests the passage of time, a veteran of cleaning, chemical treatment, and spilled coffee. It belongs.
I leave, wondering if perhaps my powers of observation are not as acute as I’d like to believe, and that maybe these grates have always been there.
I tell Shakira and wonder what she thinks.
“Have you listened to yourself?” asks Shakira “You are talking to me about air vents. Vents, Lanre. I’m trying to get a job and you think I want to hear about architectural features?”
After this I don’t mention it to her again.
#
No one you meet will ever be able to tell you who the managing director of Equity, PLC is.
All the fellow employees I have ever met have their own managers. Inter-employee fraternizing is not encouraged, and this has resulted in a firm shrouded in ignorance or, if you’re the romantic type, mystery.
The fact is I don’t know what I do for a living. The documents handed to me by my direct managers are in a language that I don’t understand or even recognize, the instructions, moron-proof simple. Shred these. Make photocopies. Take these to room 344. I have no clue what these documents mean. We all have non-disclosure agreements.
Every day strangers file through our doors, though they all have appointments. They are led to the managing director’s office and they leave with envelopes or packages, always happy. We employees speculate that it might be drugs or money, but we do not know. We whisper theories to each other.
On one day the managers ask me to stay in my office for exactly three hours and seven minutes. Not three hours; not three hours and fifteen minutes. After this, they tell me to leave for home, even though it is midday and I haven’t done any actual work. I imagine a smell of ozone in the corridors as I leave, but I do not look back. I take the opportunity to do some shopping at Mushin before surprising Shakira.
It’s puzzling, but as employees we come back day after day because our needs are met. Even though the lunch buffet is lavish, Equity allows us to pack one meal only, for supper. It might be a large helping, but only for one. The story is told of one who took meals for himself and a little more for a friend. He was fired the next morning. Some say he was liquidated and that, so as not to waste the firm’s investment in him, his ashes were scattered into the air-conditioning so that other employees might breathe him in and merge with his carbon. I do not vouch for the veracity of this story.
We are secure. As long as we work for the firm no street gangs harass us, we are not in debt, and the spectre of unemployment is something we only read about in the newspapers.
I love Equity,PLC and I truly want to please the managing director, whoever he may be.
#
There are more grates now. Since the one near the secretary’s office I count forty throughout the building. I sketch a map of the building, with floor plans showing the grate locations. Some of them appear overnight, while others seem to mock me by popping up within minutes of my passing an area.
What are they?
I ask a colleague, but I get a blank, hostile stare.
#
Today, when returning from the staff cafeteria, I see someone speaking into a grate but this is from the corner of my eye, and when I take a direct look I see the man adjusting his necktie. This particular grate is located on a wall about five feet up, the first of its kind, all others being on the floor. He walks away before I can ask him. I follow him, but he disappears around a corner. I take the former position of the man and look. Nothing unusual, except the six week old grate.
“Talk to me,” I say. “Is anyone there?”
Silence. Silence and a sense of foreboding so strong I look about furtively.
#
I can’t sleep at night. I lie awake, unable to get the thought of these square spaces out of my head.
#
On the way to work, standing in the molue on Agege Motor Road, trying to ignore the man preaching the Gospel, I remember the induction training as a new employee.
After three hours of presentations on embezzlement, a woman walked to the front of the conference room and told us the story of the day all the animals went to visit heaven. Monkey told the other animals that it was customary to take a new name when visiting heaven. While the others took names like “Peju” and “Kudi,” Monkey called himself “Allofyou”. At heaven the host angel welcomed them and took them to a feast of unimaginable size, spread out with foods known and unknown. “Who is this food for?” the monkey asked.
“All of you,” said the angel.
The animals looked to Monkey who smiled, and ate till his belly was round.
They went to the next room, where they found all manner of gifts waiting for them. There were material gifts and talents and special powers, dominion over learning, music, humans, the royal and the humble, the quick and the dead.
“Who are these gifts for?” asked the animals.
“All of you,” said the angel.
Monkey gathered all the tangible and intangible gifts and the animals move on, containing their resentment because it was heaven.
In the next chamber there was a cage.
“Who is this for?” asked Monkey, apprehensive this time.
“Heaven is not a place to be visited by the living,” said the angel. “You can never leave. All of you must stay in this cage.”
On hearing this Monkey fled. He leapt down from heaven, through the clouds, all the way to Earth. The legend said the angel threw down the cage and it landed around Monkey, trapping him on Earth with all the choice gifts.
The woman stopped there and walked out of the conference room, leaving all of us confused. We thought it might have been some light entertainment, because the next talk involved fire safety.
#
I shine a pen torch into one of the grates.
There is something in the inner grating, something alive. I can see it move if I stay still long enough. It is furry. At first I think it’s a rat, and I sigh, thinking these have been elaborate pest traps all along. I am relieved. Then it shifts, and I see a gigantic black eye that looks straight back at me.
I fall back and drop the torch. I scramble backwards, before I pick myself up and run to my desk, struggling to control the shaking.
My work slips. I cannot concentrate and consequently make mistakes, behaviour guaranteed to attract attention. I must give off the smell of the dying because my co-workers avoid me. When Mama Nuru, the woman who brings roasted corn, boli, nuts and puff-puff to the office asks me what I want, I can’t even give her a sensible answer.
Finally, I rush out of the building and do not stop until I hail the taxi that drives me all the way back to my flat at Idi-Oro, where I lock myself in. I cannot answer Shakira’s questions about the matter. I just tremble and shiver for hours, then I fall asleep.
#
The next morning Shakira wakes me.
“There are people here to help you,” she says.
“Help with what?” I ask.
Three men in suits, right there in my room, standing in front of our bed. They have Equity ID badges.
“Hello, Mr Bakare. We are from Medical.”
“What do you want?”
“We heard you had malaria.” One opens a satchel. The other two move towards either side of my bed. Shakira is silently weeping in a corner.
“What are you doing? Stay away.”
“Relax. This is a new injection. It will clear that malaria right up.”
“And you will stop seeing those troublesome cages.”
“What?”
“Just hold still.”
A prick, some pain, then I sleep again.
#
I wake up after 48 hours feeling fantastic. Physically fantastic. Like Power Mike and Ben Lionheart combined. There is a note taped to my door asking me to come back to work when I feel better.
When I’m ready Equity sends a car for me. I answer my manager’s questions about what I saw and when I saw whatever it was and why I was spooked. I say I must have been confused because of the malaria. She is happy to hear that.
After that, things settle down. I am still paid well and on time. Life looks up, and Shakira gets a job with an oil company. She even gets along with my mother for a while.
I work there for years and show no signs of fright.
But I am frightened.
I am frightened because I still see the grates. Whatever drug they injected only worked for a few days. Each day I struggle not to react when I see the furry thing writhe behind one of them. I am too frightened of the eye to take a closer look. I know that if they know what I see, management will take more permanent measures.
I can’t escape and I can’t resign, so each day I go to work in the Monkey House. Or perhaps I am the caged one, the monkey in the cage. After all, how can I tell if I am outside looking into the cage, or inside looking out?
The End
Tade Thompson has been published previously in various small press magazines and anthologies, most recently THE MADWOMAN OF IGBOBI HOSPITAL in Issue 3 of Interfictions Online (May 2014) and HONOURABLE MENTION in the anthology Dangerous Games from Solaris Books (December 2014). In spring 2015 his debut crime novel MAKING WOLF will be released from Rosarium Press and in June 2015 his memoir short KNOCK KNOCK JOKES will appear in Bahamut Journal. Tade lives and works in the south coast of the UK.
My father was executed after a failed coup attempt. He was not the leader, but he was executed all the same. That was the most interesting thing about my father, the execution. He was interesting while alive, yes, but his execution must have been the most interesting thing about him. I didn’t attend his execution. He had forbidden me saying:
-God will punish you if you show up at my execution.
I don’t know why he brought God in that. He rarely talked about God in his life. He never took us to church like most people did with their children. And it was not as if I ever enjoyed church services. I had been there a couple of times with my friends. I had not liked it, but I was with my friends.
He had told me not to be at his execution some months before the coup attempt. I doubt that he knew there were plans for one. But somehow he always thought, or he rather knew, that he would end up getting executed for something.
I don’t know who my mother is. I have never met her. Hannah probably met her once or maybe even twice. Hannah is my bigger sister – was my bigger sister. She would’ve known our mother. I should have asked her before she left. And left is probably not the right word. I would’ve said gone but maybe ran would fit better. I just woke up one morning and her bed was empty. She had just disappeared like that, but I know she wanted to go. I think she might have ran when she was some distance from home, though of course she tiptoed while leaving the house. It is sensible to run when you’re leaving some place you don’t want to stay, but it makes sense to tiptoe first so that you aren’t heard as you leave. When Hannah ran from home, father was still alive.
Father cuts off people’s fingers for a living.
She had left a note saying that by my bed.
That’s all she left. I don’t know what she thought was wrong with cutting off people’s fingers for a living. My sister was a weird girl. She couldn’t stand many things. She couldn’t stand squashing a locust, or even cutting off its hind legs to prevent it from jumping away. She always said we were hurting them. I don’t think that such a simple thing can hurt a locust. Not like a person or a rabbit or a rat. Rats make a lot of noise when hurt. People too. Locusts don’t make a sound. They are not hurt. Not really.
My sister couldn’t even stand wind. She was so weak-spirited I always wondered how she managed to survive like that. One day, while we were walking in the sun, I decided to step on the head of her shadow. It was just a game and I didn’t mean to hurt her. She was not looking when I did it, but she clutched her head in so much pain, her mouth open as if she wanted to scream but was not decided about it. I kept my foot in place, looking at her as she held her head, struggling and unable to move. She let out such a heart-wrenching cry when I let go that I couldn’t stand it without covering my ears. Her face was bleeding from a cut on her cheek. There had been a piece of metal protruding from my shoe sole. It had cut into her shadow.
That was a few years ago when Hannah was still around, when she was still my sister. We still lived in the barracks and father had not been executed yet. The coup attempt had not even been staged yet. She stopped being my sister when she ran away. Father told me anyone who runs away stops being my sister, just like mother stopped being my mother.
I sometimes think Hannah saw more than just fingers. She saw more than she ever talked about with me. Maybe that time I had caught her talking in her sleep had been her way of saying things. That had happened a few days before the note and the running away.
-No, please, father. Don’t cut off my head… I won’t tell anyone… yes… yes… Just do it again but don’t cut off my head… Just leave my head, please…
I didn’t ask her to tell me what it was father had been doing to her. She wouldn’t have told me anyway. Hannah and I rarely talked. We just passed whatever it was that was needed, like salt or the sugar bowl while at the table and that would be it. Or she would ask:
-Jane, is father back from the barracks?
Then I would shake my head, or nod, usually too engaged with my locusts, which I would have tied together abreast, or pierced through the thorax with a wire to make them my oxen. They would drag a plough behind them, and I would whip them with a piece of wire every now and again, shouting their names:
-Dicholi, kenda! Lando, ndahuhuya!
Usually, the game would end up in a disaster. I would whip the locusts too hard, and one or both of them would just stop moving. Then I would go out and trap another pair to complete ploughing my farm.
The wives of my father’s fellow soldiers used to say I had my mother’s nose. They also said I had her ears. I don’t know anything about my mom’s nose or ears, and father never showed us a picture of her. Now that I remember it, my father never had a picture of us as a family taken. Not him and Hannah and I. It is different from all the others. Everybody has a family picture.
Andota and Sarah’s families had many. They used to take pictures every year during Christmas. The photo man would come around, and they would all change into their Christmas clothes and he would tell them to say “cheese!” They would all say “cheese!” and Andota, who was the smallest, would go on saying “cheeeeeeese!” long after the flash from the camera had gone off. And when the photo came after development, we would all laugh at Andota because all the photos had him grinning but with his eyes closed. Then we would all later on call him “Andota the Cheese” just to make him cry. He would start crying and tell us that he would tell his father to come and shoot us like he had done to so and so in the North. He always mentioned shiftas. If you wronged Andota he would call you a shifta and say he was going to tell his father that you were a shifta so that he would come for you. The names of people would keep changing every time we made him cry though his threats would remain constant: shiftas.
I sometimes look into mirrors trying to find my mother. I am interested in knowing about her nose. If I am to find her, the starting place will be to look into a mirror. I mostly concentrate on the nose and the ears. Of the two, the nose is the easier one to look at. It does not have any hidden details, and you can look at it for long without mirrors playing any dirty tricks on you. Staring at ears, on the other hand, is a taxing experience since there are two of them, and you have to decide which one you should start with. In the case of need for a quick decision, the ears have some hidden parts too. You have to turn your head to have a good look at them. And then the mirror usually decides which ear it will bring closest to you, which is not the one you necessarily want. And if you turn too much, your eyes move too far away to be able to look at the mirror. You can’t see when your eyes are too far away. Sometimes, however, I move to just beyond where I can see, and then listen closely. The mirror and I know each other well. So, in the spirit of this understanding, it starts describing my mother’s ears. From previous narrations, my mother had big ears. The mirror says they looked like mine, but a little bigger.
Sometimes, when I am not attentively looking at the mirror, my mother’s face shows up. It used to be timid when it started, but nowadays, it has grown familiar to me. It shows up without trying to hide and without the initial shyness. It is just a blank face with the nose and ears alone. There is no mouth. There are no eyes either. These are the times I like, when my mother’s face shows up in the mirrors. I concentrate on my mother’s nose for a long time, and when I have eventually mastered it, when I am sure I know what my mother looked like, I just cough a little and the mirror gets the message and quickly replaces my mother’s face with my own, with a full face with a mouth and eyes in place, with the broad forehead that looks at me with a little wrinkle of worry spread across it. I also cough when someone is coming along and I don’t want them to catch me staring at my mother’s face. Sometimes, I just clear my throat. Both of them work, coughing or clearing my throat.
There is only one mirror that understands me completely. It is the mirror that holds my secrets without any thoughts about them. The mirror in Aunt Leah’s bathroom. Other mirrors get to do well too, but no other mirror describes my mother’s ears as well as Aunt Leah’s bathroom mirror. The one in the living room once lied to me. I was looking at my mother’s face, and it brought the eyes and the mouth all in place. That is a total impossibility. My mother’s face doesn’t have a mouth and eyes. That mirror lied, and I have never used it since. Not when looking at my mother’s face, at least. But I love the mirror in Aunt Leah’s bathroom. If ever I should move out of here, as Aunt Leah keeps suggesting, I will ask her to give me that mirror. I will say pleeeease, and be ready to break into tears should she refuse me. Aunt Leah hates it when I start to cry. She hates tears and when I cry so much, she too breaks into tears then we hug each other and sob together. That’s how I win most arguments. She can’t stand my tears.
But I am not a bad girl. Aunt Leah doesn’t think so, even though I have killed three of her chickens. She thinks I need some help, but I don’t think there’s any help I require. She thinks I keep killing the chickens because I’m just a delinquent. Not that I do other bad things, but she thinks I am obsessed with chickens.
The first chicken I killed came at me when I was cutting vegetables. I had just moved into Aunt Leah’s place after my father’s execution. A new family had moved into our house at the barracks, and the soldiers had told me that I needed to find a new place since daughters of traitors could not be allowed to live on the premises. Aunt Leah had come for me after I had gotten kicked out, and I had been lucky to identify her since she had eyes and cheeks just like my father’s. And here I was now, preparing vegetables and humming to a tune. Then this chicken comes along and starts walking all over the vegetables I’ve just washed. And as it moves, I don’t like it and the double work it is going to make me do. Then I look onto the knife I am using to cut the veggies and there is my mother’s face. She is just like I’ve seen her before, without a mouth and no eyes either. But this time round, she has her hands. She is pointing towards the chicken. Aunt Leah is in the kitchen and since she shouldn’t see my mother, I go on humming as my mother goes on pointing at the chicken. Then it dawns on me. She is trying to tell me something. So I get hold of the chicken and hold it by the neck to prevent it from squawking. I raise my brows in question and my mother nods at me. When I get hold of the knife, my mother goes on nodding. So I cut the chicken’s head in a single movement. And since I know that Aunt Leah will be mad, I start crying out loudly as I keep hacking at the chicken’s head. Aunt Leah comes out of the kitchen and sees the chicken bleeding from the head and jumping about as I bawl uncontrollably. My mother’s face looks hazy through my tears. Aunt Leah comes and hugs me and tells me it is okay.
-Accidents do happen, but just be careful next time, okay?
I nod as I slow down my crying; then I go on cutting veggies as Aunt Leah prepares the chicken. I don’t know why my mother wanted me to kill that chicken. But the chicken is dead, and Aunt Leah is preparing it and I think that is a good thing. At least we are not going to eat these vegetables as the only stew tonight.
There were other two instances with chickens. One that I ran over with a wheelbarrow after seeing my mother’s face in the water that was at the bottom of the barrow and the other after I saw her face in the glass of water I was drinking. I got so startled that I threw the glass away and it hit a cockerel. That last instance got Aunt Leah so angry; she promised that next time something like that happened she was going to take me back to the barracks.
I wouldn’t want to go back to the barracks. The children would make fun of me, and I wouldn’t have friends to play with. If Hannah had been around, I would easily have gone back. You see, Hannah knew her way around people. She knew how to command them without talking to them. She had ways of getting them to do what she wanted. But she ran away from us, claiming that father cuts off people’s fingers for a living, which I never understood really. I once asked Aunt Leah about the cutting off of people’s fingers. She said she didn’t know that, but soldiers do many things. I shouldn’t go around asking about what my father did with people’s fingers, she warned.
-The dead have ears too. Don’t go about saying things about the dead, alright?
That had been before I caught her talking to her husband about my father. They were speaking in Lunyolo. I don’t know that language very well, but I understand just enough to make out what you’re talking about; I had had Banyolo friends back in the barracks. So when I heard her say my father used to “fall” on women; I knew exactly what she meant. It had been a thing they did to shifta women and boys in the North. And he probably had done it to Hannah and me. It was why my mother had left in the first place, his wanting to always fall on her instead of a normal life. She said he had been caught doing it, and not just once.
-But then he promised to shoot her if she ever came for the daughters, and she had run away and never showed up again.
But I don’t let that occupy my mind. Not when I have to figure out where I am to go should Aunt Leah decide that it is time I moved out. She took me to school the other day, and I was surprised to see all those new faces staring at me. I don’t know how it reached them, but they started calling me the traitor’s daughter. Nobody plays with me except my mother with whom I am usually with, even at school. Not all the time though, because mirrors and the metallic cases of geometrical sets are not always around. Sometimes, when I’m in class, I open up my geometrical set and look into the shiny inner part of the lid. Then my mother shows up, and I have to look around just to ensure that nobody else is looking at my mother’s face. I zone out of class, and the teacher sounds like a distant voice or a sound you hear when you’re asleep and you keep thinking it is part of a dream.
But lately, I’ve been seeing my father’s face in the shadows too. I was not very sure the first time I saw it. It just came and vanished all of a sudden, and I was left there wondering if that had been my father or if I had just imagined things. But the following day, I heard his voice. I was sure it had been his voice because of his hissing command.
-Give me your fingers, now!
I was so scared that I wanted to run away. But knowing my father, I didn’t dare to run away. He would catch me in no time. He would probably come with his gun and his knife and he would probably use the knife on my head like he had wanted to do to Hannah. Then the voice stopped and his image disappeared when two girls came running towards me laughing and screaming.
-Traitor’s Daughter! Traitor’s Daughter! They shouted as they giggled and made faces at me.
The girls in that school are all stupid. They don’t even know what I am capable of doing should my mother decide to tell me something. They think I am lonely and afraid of them. They don’t know anything about me and maybe that’s why Aunt Leah keeps introducing me to them. Last weekend, she took me to one of the girls’ homes.
-To see Mama Atieno, she said.
As we got there I saw Atieno scowling at me and it made me wish I had a mirror with me to know what my mother would have me do. But it went all well, save for the scowling and the making of faces. It went well until it was in the evening and the light was fading. Mama Atieno, buried in telling stories with Aunt Leah, told Atieno to light the lamps – which she did, alright – and that is when it all started.
I had not noticed the mirror in the room by the dining table. It had round white cushioning with the words, Welcome Aboard written on it. I was seated at a table opposite the dining table, which meant that I had the mirror in my direct line of sight. My mother just showed out of nowhere. I wasn’t so sure at first, but I checked again and there she was. That is when I knew that this time around it wasn’t going to be so cool. My mother had never shown her face in public.
My mother appeared, just like usual, except that instead of missing her eyes and mouth, she had blood running out of her eye sockets and her gums were all bloody and several teeth were missing. I raised my brows in question. I wanted to talk to my mother, but I was afraid that Aunt Leah and Mama Atieno would have to be let in on my secret if I started to.
Then I heard my father’s familiar hiss. The same one I had heard at school. It happened when Atieno walked in with the taadora lamp and cast a shadow into corners and underneath the table.
-Give me your fingerssssss! My father said.
Aunt Leah turned her head and looked around.
-Did you hear someone talk? She asked.
-What, besides me and you? Mama Atieno answered.
-Yes, something close to a whisper.
When they turned to me I shook my head. Mama Atieno had clearly not heard it and Atieno was too busy scowling at me to have paid any attention to any hissing sound.
This was a strange one: My mother bleeding and my father showing up, and their coming out in public and Aunt Leah hearing my father’s hiss. I had to get out of here quick. I had to talk to my mother and find out what the problem was. I hoped she would be able to talk even with her bleeding eyes and her toothless mouth.
-Could you please show me where the toilet is? I asked Mama Atieno. I wanted to find a place with a mirror, or at least a reflection. Aunt Leah looked at me as if to say something, but thought better of it.
-Atieno, show Jane where the bathroom is now, will you?
I was just about to change my mind. I wanted to be alone with my mother and not with some scowling child who wanted to take out her stresses on me, but Atieno held my hand – gently, as if she cared – and directed me. She lit a candle and handed it to me as I got into the toilet then left me to go in. Luckily, there was a big mirror on the wall. I closed the door quickly behind me and held the candle in front of the glass. My mother’s face came slowly, building to form, block by block. She was still bleeding from her eye sockets and her gums but before I could even look properly, there was the hissing sound again. It was from a shadow below the sink. I held my breath and kicked into the shadow to shut it up. I was not afraid of my father. He was not going to make me cower while seeing my beloved mother. But then the flame from the small candle expanded and the candle became heavy in my hand. There was Hannah’s face in the flame.
I had not heard from Hannah since the day she left so I just stood there, holding my breath, and wondering what I was supposed to say. Then my father’s shadow hissed from below the sink and I stamped my feet at it again. But that didn’t prevent my mother’s face and hair from changing into that of a shifta woman. I stood and watched my mother’s hair lengthen as her face became slender. Then she split into two shifta women and both of them were bleeding from their gums and eyes. My sister had also changed into a shifta woman in the flames and she too was splitting into several women who were bleeding from between their thighs. I was shaking by the time my hair started changing from hard and short to long and soft. I was becoming shifta too and stamping at my father’s shadow.
-Stooooop iiittttttttt! My father kept hissing, but he couldn’t do anything about it.
My mothers moved out of the mirror carrying dead babies in their hands and my sisters moved from their flames bearing fire and holding onto their bleeding groins, and the bathroom was suddenly a large house and there I was stomping on him to keep him on the ground.
Then my father appeared in physical form on the other side of the wall, bleeding from the cheek where my shoe was pinning his shadow to the ground. There still was a metal protruding from underneath my shoe sole. It had cut into his shadow. He was holding his head in pain and grimacing, and my mothers were all looking at me with expectation from their bleeding eye sockets. I understood my mothers’ looks even without their eyes. My sisters were still coming out of the flame one by one, too and closing in on my father’s physical form. I knew what was going to happen if I let my foot off my father’s shadow. My mothers and sisters were not going to handle him. But then there was a knock on the toilet door. It was Atieno.
-Your auntie says you need to leave, she said.
I did not answer her back. My father’s shadow had me fully engaged and I could not afford to take my attention off him. I felt him pushing at me from underneath my foot and trying to move towards my mothers. But my sisters were there, blocking his way and his attempts. Then there was a louder knock on the door. It was Mama Atieno this time.
-Jane, will you get done now?
Then she pushed at the door and distracted me making me take my foot off my father’s shadow. He got the respite he had been looking for and lunged at my mothers. My sisters attacked him with their fires, aiming for his head and setting his hair and clothes aflame, but my father kept on coming towards them, lashing at one after the other and making them disappear into the flames from the candle in my hand one by one. I had to do something here to save my mothers. If my father finished my sisters, he was going to get to my mothers and then I would be the last one. But every time I tried stepping onto his shadow, he kept moving out of my reach.
Then he was done with my sisters. Only Hannah was left at last but she was just a shifta woman in the candle flame. I was the only help my mother had now. My father moved to the closest one of my mothers to him, held her by the throat, and shoved her into the mirror. I stood there, stifling a cry as I watched one of my mothers disappear, back to an intangible form. Then he went onto the next one and then onto the next one until it was just me and him remaining in the bathroom, with my sister looking at us from the flame and my mother from the mirror. But then, he smiled and said:
-You fight like a girl, Jane. You need to do better than that.
The knock on the door was now persistent and Mama Atieno was getting louder. My father nodded at me, and since there was no way out of this, I went ahead to open it.
Mama Atieno moved in. It was clear that she was too annoyed to notice my father, who nodded at me and moved his hands towards his throat. I got his message. I grabbed Mama Atieno by the throat and was surprised at how light she was for a woman of her size. Then I shoved her into the mirror and watched as she disappeared with a look of shock on her face. I saw her turn into a shifta woman and then become my mother. My father just smiled, obviously satisfied. We then stood there, none of us talking, as my father went on smiling with that satisfied look on his face.
The sudden silence must have caught Atieno’s curiosity. She came towards the door, peering and craning her neck. My father must have been invisible to her too. When she got within reach, I grabbed at her neck, but she slithered away, more out of surprise than out of defensive instinct, and screamed as she did. I made a move at her again and this time round, my grip was vice-like. I watched her face, looking for that scowl she had been giving me. There was nothing. Just a scared girl’s face that I shoved into the mirror too.
Then I left my father in the toilet as my mothers looked at me with questioning eyes from the mirror. My sister was silent as I dropped the still burning candle to the carpeted floor. I found Aunt Leah standing in the corridor, her mouth agape and her knees shaking, as she watched the smoke rise from behind me. She must have heard Atieno’s scream and noticed the sudden silence.
-What have you done, Jane? She asked, her voice crackling.
-Let’s go home, Auntie. I answered in a tone that said it all.
We walked out of the Mama Atieno’s home leaving the silence behind us, with my mothers in their mirrors and my father in their bathroom. I left my sisters about to multiply to one thousand Hannahs and my aunt following me in silence and her hands shaking. She must have been scared, but the flames danced high up into the air and lit our path as we headed home in silence. My sisters lit our way home.
Sanya Noel is a Kenyan writer living in Nairobi. He works as a mechatronic engineer during the day and morphs into a writer at night. His works have previously been published in the Lawino magazine and the Storymoja blog. He writes poems, short stories and essays and loves eating apples in matatus on his way home.
After a while, it began to get her in trouble at work. Her colleagues thought that she was getting lazy, arriving late, or disappearing in the middle of the day for hours at a time. She bought a headscarf and a long coat, and took to walking into the office with her face turned towards the wall. Once, Gareth from Purchasing bumped into her. She dropped her bag he bent down to pick it up, and then looked her straight in the face. There was nothing there, of course. Her head scarf was empty. But he did not flinch; just handed her the bag and went on down the corridor.
Tendi was getting used to this reaction. As it was impossible that she not have a face, peoples’ brains just put one in for her. Children were different though. They saw what was actually there, whether it was possible or not, and Tendi came to quite enjoy frightening a whiny child on the bus into silence by lifting her scarf, just for a moment.
Her first big visibility loss had happened just as the riots were beginning at home. Her mother had phoned and confessed that she’d been lying, and that actually she did not have enough to eat. She had not liked to ask before, because she knew how hard London was for the undocumented, but she was very hungry now – and would Tendi go on the internet for her and order something?
As Tendi ordered the maize and the meat, her fingers on the keyboard slowly disappeared. At first she thought her eyes were failing, or her mind. She ran away from the mirrors in her flat, down to the corner store, and it was there, at the Pick’n’Go, that she realised that no one else could see her either. While putting out the Pringles, Mrs. Patel picked her nose right in front of her. She thought next about phoning for an ambulance, but she knew that with ambulances came police. She went back up to her flat, and – ever the student, even after all this failure and discouragement – thought of books. She found The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison on the internet and was thrilled when she saw the cover art, but then she read it and found it was just a strange story about some guy in a basement who never actually lost his visibility.
She was slow to it, but she did eventually think of movies. She had been brought up on a farm compound so had little idea of who the superheroes were, but she knew some of them had special powers and thought it might be in some way related to wearing underwear. She went down to the Blockbuster, not sure how she would rent a video while not visible; but once she got there, she realized that of course she did not need a formal rental process. No one could see her taking what she wanted. She took some movies and, this being the early days of her invisibility, actually did return them later.
She watched Spiderman and Superman and Ironman, the Hulk and Transformers and Indiana Jones. That night she got up to go to the toilet and realized she was visible again. Sitting down, she could actually see her thighs and not just her urine hitting the water. She gasped, put out her hands to touch her legs, and immediately disappeared again. She thought about how the Hulk got big and green when he got angry, and wondered if it was distress that was making her transparent. She stood in front of the bathroom mirror in her pyjamas, breathing deeply, talking comforting nonsense to herself. Slowly the outline of her head began to appear, and then her arms. This excited her so much she disappeared again.
She spent hours on the internet learning about managing her emotions. She tried mantras, and whale music, and white music, and breathing of all kinds. She found her special place, a patch of sun outside her grandfather’s house on the farm compound, and went there often. Yoga seemed to help too; she was almost always visible while the yoga DVD was on. She learnt that anything she touched with bare skin also became invisible, but if there was cloth between her and any object, it was not affected. She was very careful never to leave anything in her pockets, after an embarrassing incident in which she terrified an entire tube carriage with her house keys.
Over time, she needed the headscarf less and less, but she never got complete control of what she came to think of as her opticality. There were always embarrassing blips, like when she would disappear and reappear on a car backfiring or a door slamming. Gareth from Purchasing was also a problem. He had a very sweet smile, and sometimes when he stopped by her desk to talk procurement, her heart would pick up its pace and she would flash in and out to its beat.
The news from home also seemed to affect her particularly, often able to make her disappear for hours at a time. It’s not so easy to go to your special place when you hear it’s been burnt to the ground, and that gramps is now living in some city slum. She tried various mantras for it. ‘That’s not your home anymore,’ being often useful, though nothing worked all the time.
Over time she realized that just as she could maintain calm, she could maintain upset. This meant she could be invisible almost as she chose. That she did not start stealing immediately was testament to her Mission schooling. London is, however, a hungry city and will chew up even the strongest. So eventually she did start lifting a little here and there. Just chewing gum and fizzy drinks, at first .I’m illegal anyway, she thought. My every breath steals air from these British. So she began to take more than air.
It had always hurt her in the evenings as she left work to see friends in bars, families in restaurants, the whole happy whirl of people at home. All the wealthy English stepping off the cold streets into the theatres, golden doors opening onto grey pavement. Now she too entered those doors and just like the English she would wait until the lights began to dim, and take a seat. After a while she realised she might just as well sit on the stage. Once during Mama Mia, she started to enjoy the show so much that she lost her feeling of upset, and her outline started to appear, downstage centre. The conductor, whose brain was on the music, actually saw her and dropped his baton on the cymbals with a clash. That disappeared her quick enough.
She stole a lot of clothing. She’d read news from home for twenty minutes or so, just enough to upset herself, and then she’d go out to the shops. At first it was just H&M, but after a while, Selfridges, Harrods, Rigby & Peller. If the news from home was bad enough, she could keep going for entire afternoons. She did sometimes set off the door alarms as she would leave with her arms full of clothes, but staff always assumed it was a malfunction. If the alarm went off and she was not near it, Tendi would run over as quickly as she could, her arms spread out in the empty space, hoping one day to feel the warm body of another invisible.
She took time off work to go and sit for a few days at Her Majesty’s Passport Service. She had no trouble remaining invisible because she was furious all the time she was there. The workers acted as if their duties were just dull routine, and not what could change someone’s life. She followed around a guy called Derek, and learnt his passwords, and one night when the place was empty she sat down at his desk and entered herself in that great database, which separates those who are allowed, from those who are not allowed. She printed out an Indefinite Leave To Remain certificate, and pasted it carefully into her passport. She sat for a while under Derek’s desk lamp, marvelling at the hologram. Then she took all the workers’ family photos and knickknacks off their desks, and threw them in the skip outside. She had let herself stay upset for too long. But she was legal now.
She thought again about getting help from the authorities. She told herself that the movies had made her afraid of medical experimentation, but really she was enjoying what she had started to think of as her power. She often went over to Gareth’s desk, to listen to him talk on the phone, or to read his emails, or just to smell his aftershave. This came to an abrupt end when she heard him confessing to his sister that he had a crush on someone in the office. She walked back to her own desk, almost in tears. She sat down and kicked off her Jimmy Choos (good fakes, she’d told the girls in the office. African connections, you know. They had no idea).
She went to the bathroom, gave herself a firm lecture, and transitioned back into visible. She went to the lunch room. It was only then, as she sat watching her colleagues warm their sad leftovers, that she realized that the woman Gareth had a crush on was almost certainly herself. She went through each lady there: too old or too married, and had to bite hard on her lip to keep from laughing. It was almost as if she had been in the shadows of the semi-legal for so long she had forgotten she could be noticed.
Then she really did start to follow Gareth quite a lot, to secretly learn what he liked, so she could become it. However, on their first date at a cheap Italian restaurant in Soho, she found she could abandon all her pre-arranged comments about bands and Manchester City. It was strange, after all this time trying to pass as English, to be asked about Africa as it if mattered. There was an embarrassing part, where he thought her gramps owned the farm on which she grew up, and she had to explain that he was just a worker there. But a worker loves his home just as much as an owner does, she tried to explain. She was still a Mission girl, so she didn’t have sex with him for some time, and when she did, she insisted the lights be off. He thought she was nervous about her body, which of course she was.
She still paid for Starbucks, because she couldn’t figure out a way to steal it, and it was one day while waiting to order that the idea of assassination first came to her. She immediately put it out of her mind as obviously ridiculous. But it kept coming back, like a cat you should not have fed the first time. She found she could no longer upset herself over the news from home without a dark shadow of the solution rising in her mind.
She began to feel guilty. It was like the time she had found a dead street kid back home. He wore a bright yellow T-shirt, and would hang about the area where she worked, so she knew him by sight. When she saw him lying on the pavement one morning, curled up in a foetal position, she thought he was just sleeping. But when she saw him again that evening, in the same position, she knew he was dead. She kept walking. He was gone by the next morning. The country was hip-deep in crisis by this point, far beyond where the police might have acted, so she wondered where his body might have gone. She had a horrible image of the other street kids taking him somewhere and some funeral ceremony devised by children. She knew there was a little one who wore a pink shirt and a bigger one in black shorts who often went around with the yellow shirt but she never did ask them what had happened because she did not know want to know the answer. All the times she had refused to give yellow shirt money – “a dollar, mama, please” – would come horribly to her mind for months after that. It only really stopped when she moved to the UK. This guilt now was like that guilt then. As of something she ought to have done, or should be doing.
On the one hand, there was the question of whether it was even a desirable outcome. Would assassination make things any better? On the other hand, there was the question of practicality. Would her invisibility actually make it possible? She had reason to think it would.
One afternoon after a boozy picnic with Gareth in St James Park, she had decided she’d like to see the Queen. It was easy; she just followed a truck through the palace gates. She wondered around for quite a while, feeling a bit deflated by the modern toilets and the standard office equipment. Then she entered a warm living room and there she was! She was wearing a nightie with a dressing gown over it. She looked just like a real grandmother. The corgis ran towards Tendi barking with the pointless enthusiasm of all little dogs. She knew how to deal with them; she just stood still and they lost interest. Then Tendi sat down carefully on the sofa to the Queen’s right and watched some TV with her. She thought she had never felt so welcome in England as she did then, though the old lady did love to channel surf. The living room was just exactly how she had imagined Europe would be before she came, all warm and golden-toned and safe with all the children tucked in their beds, and only on the streets if they were playing on their bikes till dinnertime. And if they did die, after lots of free medical care, they were buried with fluffy bunnies by weeping parents in green churchyards next to their dear old grannies.
So Tendi lay awake at night, trying to find good reasons for dismissing the ridiculous idea. There is little more painful than extended indecision. A line from one of those Blockbuster movies kept coming back to her, the one with the Spiderman: “with great power comes great responsibility.” She hadn’t even liked the movie, but the line troubled her.
Then one day on her way home from work she didn’t get off at her stop. She stayed on the line, which she knew ended at Heathrow. She gave up on being an adult and decided to let the oblivious universe decide for her. If there were free seats to home tonight she would go, and she would do it. If not, she would put all that dark country behind her and enter this new one with her Indefinite Leave and her Gareth, and her Jimmy Choos. She waited in the ticketing line, feeling sick. When she got to the front she asked and got her answer. There were seats.
She did not buy one, of course. She just walked on, invisible, and waited till the doors shut before she sat down. She made sure to be visible then as her countrymen were like rebellious rabbits on planes with no one staying in their own seat for longer than necessary. When they landed and she smelt that familiar smell of dust and hot rubber her body blinked out. She’d thought it might; she expected the stress of home to be too much for her fragile content.
What she didn’t expect was that she would not be able to reclaim visibility, even over days. Something about being there kept her unable to reflect the light. So she wandered the town alone, seeing what was left of her home. She went to see her mother, though of course her mother could not see her. Watching that old lady sit alone in her bare flat steeled her at last to go to where he was.
She slid into a taxi that was headed in the right direction, and slid out near his residence. She walked all the way around its high external walls. She stood at the main gate for a while, and then just as at Buckingham Palace, simply walked in behind a truck. She was sweating. She had a kitchen knife in her hand. The truck went to the kitchens and she followed it there. She was surprised to see normal people there, preparing normal food. She climbed out of the kitchens and found herself in a long hallway. It had a dark green carpet and old photographs on the walls. She stopped to look at some old white people she did not recognize. She opened each door along the hall, finding room after empty room, and then finally in one big sitting room, she found a woman watching TV. The Kardashians was on.
The woman was wearing a T-shirt and some old jogging bottoms. It was his wife. Tendi had never seen her in real life, and never without a hat, but here she was. Tendi stepped in and shut the door behind her. The television was on very loud. Tendi looked around the room, which was decorated in red satin with gold detail. She couldn’t believe how close it all was to caricature. There were even some Harrods bags on the bed. Suddenly the wife started yelling.
“Daddy, come!” she shouted. “Come and see!” There was a pause, and then “Da-ddy!”split into two long syllables. A door next to the TV opened and a bent little man shuffled in. He was wearing a white shirt buttoned to the neck and black trousers. Tendi felt all the blood run up into her face.
“I am not deaf, you know,” he said.
“Oh yes you are,” said his wife. “Anyway, come and see how modern this clinic is, where Kourtney is having her ultrasound.”
As he crossed over towards the sofa, towards where Tendi was standing, she had to control a very strong urge to run away. Here he was; the beginning and the end. He sat and she heard a little creak from the sofa. She was astonished that he had weight. She had imagined him to be only myth.
“It’s not so modern as in Asia,” he said. His wife said nothing to that.
He sat for a while, watching with her, and then got up from the sofa – not without a little difficulty – and shuffled back to the door. Tendi followed.
It was a small study, the walls covered in bookcases. He went over to a well-stuffed chair and sat down. He opened a book and started to read. The worst part was the room had the light, urine-tinged smell she associated with old age homes. She had often thought of all the things she would say to him. But now she wasn’t here to talk. She had looked up how to kill someone on the internet. What was needed was a quick, hard, ear-to-ear slice. She walked up behind him. She read his book over his shoulder. It seemed to be some kind of adventure story, set in England. She stopped reading as the book tilted forward onto his chest. He was already dozing.
This suddenly seemed like murder. But she thought about her grandfather and his life on the farm, about her mother and her pension, about that yellow shirt boy, and she lifted up the knife. With her blood screaming through her veins, she brought it down hard into his neck.
He gasped and his hands swung up to the knife he could not see. She pulled the knife sideways. His neck was thick, and it was very difficult to pull it across. He struggled and his struggling gave her strength. He was a powerful man and deserved no pity. His blood gushed over her hands as his feet thumped on the floor. The blood was warm and it kept pouring, but at some point she understood it was no longer being pumped.
She had been worried that after she did it she would feel remorse, or horror. She had done Macbeth at the Mission school; she knew what fate awaited murderers. But what she found as the blood dripped down was a sense of well-being, as if all her troubles had been removed. As if someone had gone backwards in time and wiped away all her difficult past. The university she could not afford to attend. The menial jobs. That time in Jo’burg when she had been treated like dirt by South Africans with welfare checks while she cleaned toilets. Every time it had rained in London.
He had broken up her life and that of tens of thousands of her generation, and now she had broken his. She felt the joy of justice done. As he grew still, a great peace came upon her. She removed her hands from his neck, and put the bloody knife in her pocket. She did not want to leave fingerprints. She looked at her hands, slick with his blood, red to the elbows. She smiled. It had, after all, been easy. Then she stopped smiling. She realized she could see her hands. She looked down her body. She was visible.
She sent her mind quickly to what she knew could upset her. She thought about that time in South Africa when she had cleaned the toilets. She thought about her mother’s pension. But somehow they were not as terrible to her now as they had been before. She was not just a small pebble ground down by an all-encompassing grinder, but the pebble that had stopped the machine. She had justice now. She was somebody now. She thought of other bad things, of hurricanes and famines, but still she could see herself. She looked for another door out of the study. There was just the one. Then she heard a voice:
“Da-ddy!”
She heard footsteps approaching. She looked for somewhere to hide and went over to the desk, thinking she could get underneath it. Then she stopped. She was not someone who needed to hide now. She went back towards the door and stood in front of it, knife in hand. She was somebody now. They would see.
SM Norman currently lives in South Africa. She has worked widely in the theatre, and her previous publications are in the performing arts, including a contribution to Short and Snappy, a South African anthology of short African plays; radio dramas for Zimbabwe’s Kubatana; lead writer on the children’s pilot for Kenya’s XYZ’s Show; and Harare Files, a play based on interviews
You are in the city, and you are surprised to find yourself alone in a bar that might once have been popular. It feels like midday, and the bar is almost empty. As your eyes adjust to the gloom, they take in the animated movement of two young men drinking at a booth, the two bartenders’ lugubrious nods, and the staggered sweep of the ceiling-fan’s shadow across the floor. There is very little else that holds your attention; you are in a wood-panelled dive.
You take a seat next to the row of dusty beer taps. You don’t feel like drinking, but you worry that your sobriety might offend someone, possibly yourself. Neither of the bartenders have moved towards you, and the two young drinkers have not noticed you, so engaged are they in taking turns to smile and nod at one another. One, pale-skinned, thin and red-haired, is busy miming something that could be sexual, culinary or martial; his brown, barrel-chested companion is convulsing with silent laughter, dreadlocks shaking, teeth flashing behind a thick-curled beard.
You eye them for a second or two in the mirrored liquor shelf before shifting your gaze to the nearest bartender, who walks over to where you sit. He is young, pale and watery-eyed, sporting an optimistic growth of beard. You offer a smile that goes unnoticed; he has moved to get your glass before you are finished ordering something cheap. His colleague, older, bald, with a complexion like varnished wood, watches him critically.
Your drink arrives, which you sip at tentatively. It could be worse. The two young men roar with laughter over something, and you recognize delight. It saddens you a little not to be part of it. The skinny youth and his burly friend seem to be having a better time than you can remember having had in weeks.
You lose yourself for a while, then. You listen to over-loud music from a decade ago, and sip at your lukewarm drink. You run your hand vaguely over the wooden curve of the bar; while the pine is solid, and the varnish relatively fresh, there are faint indentations dotted across the bar’s surface. You begin to filter out the noise of the two revellers behind you, only distantly conscious of laughter, of glasses being clinked and emptied. When you find that your drink has vanished, you order another of the same, and tip your watery-eyed bartender generously. He smiles wonderingly when you do so. You glance past him at the fading portraits of white men in waistcoats who had once owned this place, and lose interest in them almost immediately. That’s what they’re there for. You return your gaze to the figure looking at you in the bar side mirror.
Some time later, your attention is snagged by a sudden stillness in the room. Not quite stopping yourself in time, you look over to the two young men, both of whom have stood up, and are walking stiffly to the bar.
The brown-skinned drinker sets two empty glasses on the bar top, and gestures to the older bartender, who is leaning against a keg, grinning. The redhead speaks up:
“I’d like to buy a last drink for my friend here, please.” You are surprised at how deep and quiet his voice is; you would not have associated it with the laughter you had heard earlier.
“I want to do the same,” says his companion. He has an accent, but you can’t place it.
“What drink?” says the bartender, his eyes on the ceiling fan, his tongue held between his teeth. The redhead offers something between a cough and a laugh, and leans hard against the bar. “It doesn’t really matter. Something to forget.” His companion grimaces behind his beard, and looks away, his gaze running across yours without stopping. You are staring.
“You boys aren’t planning on starting any trouble, I hope,” says the bartender, who has made no move towards the drinks or the empty glasses.
A long, quiet moment stretches on between the two men, snapped back by the abrupt slamming of the bigger man’s fist on the bar. He strikes it only once. His voice is strained by an obscure irony when he says, “No. We don’t want to start any trouble.” He lifts his hand off of the bar to tuck a stray lock behind his ears. You note that there is a faint indentation in the wood where he struck it. The bartender does not seem to react.
The slight man shrugs, and says, “There isn’t much choice in the matter. Now, those drinks, please.” His face is beginning to show either irritation or puzzlement; neither he nor you are quite sure which.
“The drinks to forget, you mean,” says the bartender, rocking on the balls of his feet, still smiling.
The white man’s hand is fidgeting on the bar top, but his voice remains level when he says “Yes, I mean the drinks to for – oh.” He stops, and looks down at the bar’s surface. He runs his hand over two or three of the indentations that run the length of the bar, and glances at his companion before returning his gaze to the bartender. “I see,” he says. “Very neat. We’ll have the usual, I think.”
The old bartender’s smile widens, until it looks like a half-moon might erupt out of his skull.
“You boys got there early today.” He laughs, and retreats into a back room you had not noticed earlier. There are one or two wooden barrels visible where the sunlight gets past the doorway, but beyond them is only darkness, which quickly swallows the older bartender. He must know his way since you don’t see any lights come on.
“I don’t understand,” says the bearded one.
“We’ve been here before,” says his red-headed companion, scowling at the space the space that bartender had occupied. “We’d just forgotten about it.”
“What?” the bearded man says, slipping – perhaps without noticing – into the voice he’d spoken in earlier, when he’d been drinking at the table. He looks around the room, taking in the filth, the stink of smoke, faintly ridiculous Victorian portraiture. “I think I’d remember having been in a place like this.”
“You think you’d have remembered my real name sooner, too.”
The man stiffens, and presses his bulk more firmly against the bar. “Oh.”
“Just so,” says his companion, head propped up on his elbows. The two men are silent, and to avoid looking at one another or themselves in the mirror, all three of you look at the younger bartender cleaning pint glasses at the far side of the bar.
At some length, the bartender returns, clutching a long-necked, round-bottomed clay bottle in two hands. He is still making a considerable effort to grin at the unspeaking men, but his mouth is twisted into a grimace; the bottle is not especially large, but its weight appears to tax him. When he emerges from the dark corridor, the younger bartender sets down the glass he has been wiping needlessly, and moves over to help lift the thing onto the bar’s surface.
Elbows still propped up on the bar the red-haired man tilts his head to one side. “Where did you get that?”
Out of breath, the older bartender hits his colleague on the shoulder. The younger man looks confused for a second, and then blurts out, “Oh! Sorry. If he told you, then he’d have to–“
“Fine, fine,” says the redhead, turning away from the bar and surveying the room, unseeing. The younger bartender brings out two shot glasses, and places one on either side of the bottle. “You’ll need to spit into the bottle, sir. Sirs.”
“What?” says the bearded man. Wilting slightly under his dark stare, the young bartender attempts to shrug. “I’m sorry, I’m new here – but it doesn’t work otherwise.”
You watch out of the corner of your eye and the mirror behind the brandy bottle as the bearded man snorts and begins to move away, his pallid companion turning to follow suit.
Wheezing, the older bartender speaks up: “You’ve got to spit your names out.” He coughs, dislodging something in the back of his throat. “The stuff in the bottle clears out all the minor memories, but it can’t drown out your names – and if you both still have those…”
The two men glance at one another briefly.
“You have to put your names somewhere safe,” the bartender finishes.
The big man regards the bottle, and the two bartenders behind it, critically. He scratches his beard, and shakes his head slowly. “No… that won’t work. Where would be safe from us?” He looks at his companion. “We’re wasting time. We should go and get this over with.”
“Wait!” says the redhead, a little too loudly. He whistles between his teeth for a moment, and drums his fingers on the bar, staring at some distant point outside of the room; he glances at you, and stops drumming briefly, but resumes almost immediately. “We’ve been here before,” he says.
“What of it?” says his companion, half-turned towards the door. Your drink has been refilled without your noticing it.
“We’ve been here before, which means we’ve done this before, and successfully.” He turns quickly to look at the bartenders. “What did we do last time? Where did we put them last time?”
“Clearly whatever we did last time didn’t work – or else we wouldn’t be back here,” says the larger man. Late afternoon light creeps into the room as he opens the swinging door.
“It worked for a while!” snaps the red-haired man. “It worked for a while, and that’s something.” His companion says nothing, and with the daylight behind him his face is shadow. The redhead speaks again. “Please. You don’t want to do this now. You don’t want to do this at all.” Still, the brown-skinned man says nothing.
He begins to turn away, and you feel your stomach clench for no reason you can understand.
“I’ll buy this round!” the redhead calls out. He leans forward, trying to make out his companion in the evening haze. You can hear sirens outside.
A snort, and then the man lets the door swing shut behind him, returning the room to a comfortable gloom. He raps his knuckles on the doorframe, and nods, walking back to the bar. “Fine, then. Remind me to get the next one,” he says. You watch the redhead man and the younger bartender relax visibly.
The two men take turns tilting the long neck of the bottle towards them and hawking up some quantity of phlegm into it, neither with apparent distaste. You observe that neither the large, bearded man nor his scrawny companion have much trouble moving the bottle. The bartenders work in tandem to pour the bottle’s contents into the two shot-glasses, the younger aiming the flute of the bottle while his colleague levers the bowl upwards with as much care as he can manage. The fluid that pours out of it is clear and syrupy, and gives off a faint vapour. The redhead pulls a large note from his breast pocket, which the older bartender accepts with a nod. The two men pick up the glasses dubiously. They are silent; you shift in your seat and try not to be heard.
Finally, the bearded man shakes his head and raises his drink. “Skaal,” he says, clinking his glass to his companion’s. Smiling faintly, the other says, “Kara o le.” They knock back the clear liquid with a shudder, and set the glasses down on the bar. They regard one another, and the black man burps; the redhead takes an uncertain step backwards, in your direction. “Catch him!” hisses the younger bartender from behind you; he has rounded the bar and is rushing to grab the larger man, who is stumbling to his left. You jump to your feet, which are less sturdy than you had realized, but you manage to stop the suddenly unconscious redhead from falling over completely, and you manoeuvre him towards the chair you were sitting in. He is surprisingly light. The bartender, on the other hand, has only barely kept his burden from cracking his head on the side of a table; after a few more moments of struggle he shakes his head, and lowers the big man to the floor.
He stands up, panting, and nods at you. “Thanks.” He looks over to his colleague and stretches out his hand. The older bartender stares at it. “What?”
“Give me the money he gave you.”
“What money?”
“The money he paid you for the stuff. You said we don’t charge for that.”
The older bartender mutters, but slaps the banknote on the bar counter, before picking up the two empty shot glasses and bunging them in the sink. The younger bartender steps awkwardly over the supine bearded man’s body, and tucks the money into the redhead’s front pocket.
The older bartender circles to the front of the bar, and heads for the door.
“Where are you going?” asks the younger.
“I’m on break,” he answers, cigarette in mouth. “Mind the cash box.” He wrenches the door open, letting the beginnings of a sunset into the room and making you squint.
“Wait, do you want me to take the memory stuff out back?”
The man at the door pauses, and seems to regard the two unmoving figures.
“Leave it.” The doors swing shut, and the bar seems colder suddenly. The remaining bartender sighs, and moves back to his station to start cleaning up.
You reach over the redhead for your drink, and find a new seat.
“So, um, hey.” You say as you clear your throat. The barman stops and turns from the basin to look at you. “What was all of this about?”
“Oh! Hey, sorry.” He switches off the taps, and walks over to you. “I figured you knew.”
“Not really, no. Sorry.”
“Right! Well, this,” he raps a knuckle against the long clay bottle, “is water from the land of the dead. I’m not sure who our supplier is, but we use it for people who seriously need to forget something.”
You blink, and sip your drink, which has gone tepid. “Okay.”
“Okay, and those,” he points at the man on the floor and his friend propped up against a chair, “are gods. They’re called….ah.” He snaps his fingers. “Sorry, I knew who they were like five minutes ago. This happens whenever they come and get their names erased like that – I remember who they are right until they take a drink, then it goes.” He shakes his head, smiling faintly. “Anyway, so these two are sworn to kill each other.”
“Really?” You frown. “They were sort of hitting it off when I came in.”
“Well yeah, exactly – that’s the thing. A couple of years ago they realized that they had a lot in common – come from the same country, speak the same language, and they don’t really want to kill each other. Also I think if they kill each other the world’s supposed to end.”
You purse your lips, and regard the unconscious figures. “So why don’t they just not kill each other?”
The barman slaps the bar, warming to his subject. “Exactly what I want to know. Exactly. But apparently gods just don’t work that way, so instead they get their memories wiped every now and again, so they forget about one another and don’t have to kill each other.” He grabs a glass and holds it to the light, almost entirely for effect. “Except, since they’re gods, they can’t wipe away their names – not completely. They have to hide them away somewhere, like in a duck or an egg or something.”
“What?”
He shrugs. “This is just what my boss tells me, alright? Anyway, the universe seems to want gods to know who they are, so the duck/egg/whatever thing usually doesn’t last too long. They find the egg with their name in it on their sandwich in two or three days, or… I don’t know, the duck breaks into their house. And then they know who they are again, and what they have to do. Which, apparently, is fight, die, and end the world. After a while my boss figured the best solution was to make them hide their names inside each other – this way they’ll wander the city for a couple of weeks, at least, before they find each other.”
“What happens when they find each other? This?” you gesture towards the two gods. The redhead is beginning to stir.
“Pretty much. I mean it’s not exactly the same every time, but they meet up, hit it off, come here and start telling each other stories, and jokes, and whatever. Eventually they run out of things to say, so god number one says the last thing he has left, which is the other guy’s name, god number two says the last thing he has left, which is the first guy’s name, and then they have to go through this whole spiel again.”
The pale, thin god chooses this moment to wake up, with something of a start; he has drool on his face. He looks from you to the bartender, and back. “Oh my god,” he says. “I’m sorry, but,” he belches, “where am I?”
“Downtown,” says the bartender. “You can get a cab from about two blocks over.”
“Great, great,” says the god. “Thanks.”
“You need a cup of coffee before you go?”
“Jesus,” says the god, standing up retching slightly. “No. Thank you.” He nods at the bartender, and at you, before turning to the door. You nod back. The god pauses, frowning, at the sight of the bearded man splayed out on the floor. “Is he with me?” he asks.
“No, he’s just some drunk,” says the bartender.
“I know the feeling,” says the god, and walks a little unsteadily out of the door.
The bartender waits a couple of seconds for the door to stop swinging before resuming his unnecessary glass-polishing. He shakes his head. “It’s weird – I don’t understand why the little guy always comes around first.”
You don’t have anything to say to that, so you pour the dregs of your drink into your mouth, which you regret. Once you succeed in swallowing the taste of it out of your mouth, you say, “So, that’s what you do? You keep gods doped up so they don’t kill themselves?”
“Well, I mean. Not just gods. I’ve only been here a year or so, but we get a couple of boudain once every now and then, and the guy who runs the kebab place next door is a djinn.”
“A gin?”
“A djinn. It’s how you’re supposed to say genie.”
“Oh.” You look down into your glass. “Alright. How’s the pay?”
“We do pretty okay.”
“I mean – is everybody who comes here secretly somebody else?”
“Not everybody,” says a voice behind you. You turn around; you did not hear the older barman come back in. “A lot of you, though.”
“So who am I?” you ask, only half-joking. “What do I forget?”
The barman looks at you carefully, then over at his colleague. “Go check the stall in the men’s bathroom,” he says. The younger barman nods and ducks out of the room without a word. The older barman moves behind the bar counter, and places a leathery hand on the neck of the clay bottle. He looks at you with something like sympathy, but it’s getting dark and they haven’t turned on the lights yet, so you’re not sure. He whispers your name into your ear.
You look at him, and he doesn’t meet your eyes. You both agree that to be what you are is a terrible thing; he passes the large stone bottle to you, and takes your name away again, safe from you for a time. He hides the knowledge in an obscure writer’s story that, you will tell yourself, is not about you.
END
Liam Kruger is a South African writer currently working in Turkey; He’s had stuff in places like AfroSF, Prufrock, GQ, Mahala and The Rumpus.
“Hey! Bring that back!” The fish salesman yelled at Neila, as she slipped into the crowd and disappeared from sight.
The young woman ran through some back-alleys and hid inside a torn down church. She pushed aside a large stone and crawled into a dusty alcove, caught her breath and began biting furiously into the raw fish she had just snatched from the vendor. She’d gone hungry for a few days, a nibble here, a bite there…
Her meal done, she stepped back out into Haiti’s fractured capital.
“What’s the news?” she yelled at another scavenger who was pushing a cart full of plastic.
“Transparent bottles go ten cents, dark bottles go five, that’s all the news I need,” he answered without slowing his pace or looking at her.
Something inside the people had changed with the First Caribbean War. There were fewer people now, but they shone brighter. You found more dead poultry on the streets; their necks snapped even where people starved. More prayers graffitied in blood against the walls, and little altars to the Saints flourished on every corner, their candles burning day in and day out lighting the streets more efficiently than street lamps ever had. And in some places – where even the rubble sought shelter – reality was thinner.
The warning sirens rang out weakly across the city. It was a miracle some still worked, even if all they did was announce early deaths. Several people hid behind rubble but the rockets flew overhead and landed somewhere in the outskirts of what was left of the city.
The rockets kept raining but Neila wondered why; most of the hills of Haiti had been flattened in the first salvos. Her family had died in the first few days. Bombing the city now was like stomping on sand after kicking down the sand castle.
The battlefields had moved to the Dominican Republic, and then to Mexico while the minor Caribbean islands were slowly being converted into garrison islands for the fence-riding European powers. Port-au-Prince was merely an afterthought.
Perhaps the war was Rapture and all the better souls had gone to Guinea, leaving the damned behind to their empty incantations.
Neila caressed the small statue of Papa Legba in her pocket and made her way downtown towards the coast for the evening. Staying in the same place for too long wasn’t safe anymore. The possessed wandered the alleys to dissonant drum rolls. Hiding among them were the winos and fiends, their eyes rolled upward and muttering gibberish, until they assaulted you. She had to keep moving.
“Incoming!” A random voiced screamed as the shrill sound of a missile rose above the coastline. This time, no alarm rang from the few loudspeakers that remained. Perhaps the warning sirens had given their last wail.
In the candle-lit darkness of breathing shadows there was no telling where the rockets would land. Thankfully, Neila knew of a small hideout nearby. She made her way through a cluster of torn-down buildings and down a hole into the foundation of an older building whose solid structure was impervious to the carnage above. She risked being trapped beneath the rubble, but she could die any day, and her luck had held thus far. Her luck, and her pocketknife.
She sensed another presence in the darkness, and lit a candle.
A diminutive woman was hiding behind a pillar, sobbing faintly and mumbling something under her breath.
“Gerard, Gerard poukisa ou te kite?” The woman said, a little louder. If Jerry was the old lady’s husband, he’d left her for a better place – if there was anywhere else to go.
There was always someone hiding somewhere, no matter how improbable; some people would survive a nuclear winter along with the roaches.
Neila approached her and placed a gentle hand on her shoulders. She had needed a place to cry too, once.
“It’s alright. Jerry must be thinking of you,” she said softly.
The old woman flinched and turned, dropping a bottle of rum. Her braided hair was caked with mud and her threadbare red dress was barely holding together, but her eyes were eloquent and deep. The depth of a sinkhole. There were things buried there, ancient things.
“Padon ti fi, padon,” she apologised, hugging Neila by the waist.
“It’s alright, grandma,” Neila said. “There’s plenty of room for both of us.”
The old woman picked up the bottle, dusted it off, opened it and proffered it to her.
“Rum? It’s good!”
Neila grabbed the bottle and took a swig. It burned her lips and her tongue, removed the plaque from her teeth and seared her vocal cords. But it sent a halo of warmth from her crown to her toes that momentarily lifted her over the rocky basement. Then the alcohol caught up with her and smacked her back to the ground.
“You have kind eyes and a good heart,” the woman said and gulped down two large swigs without so much as a shiver.
They went tit for tat, each taking a swig, for almost an hour but the bottle never seemed to empty and the old lady never seemed to get drunk. Neila, though, was starting to have visions.
“What’s your name?” Neila slurred. “And what is in that rum?”
The old lady smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.” She pushed a cork into the mouth of the bottle. “I’m Maman Brigitte, and the rum has twenty-one spices to open the Loas to you, child.”
Neila tried to get up, but stumbled against a pillar. Her small statue of Legba fell out of her pocket and rolled to Maman Brigitte’s feet. The old woman promptly poured some rum on it, kissed it and recited a quick Hail Mary.
“Elegua!” She shouted. “You carry Saint Peter; you carry Elegua, girl. I have to hear your story now; I have to hear your dreams, girl. Come, tell Maman.”
Her voice was making Neila drowsy, it echoed wrong inside her head, or perhaps it was hard for it to fit with all the liquor and herbs sloshing inside her brain.
But the bottle beckoned, and the old woman had found time to draw a chalk circle with some symbols inside of it, and light some candles around it. Neila tried to make sense of them, but they kept shifting under her eyes, slithering to make new patterns and then change again.
Maman Brigitte handed her the bottle again.
“Have some more, and tell me your tale…”
“Strike out!”
The umpire waved Neila’s brother Serge off the baseball field after he missed the ball for the third and last time, marking the end of the game and the end of the school year. He walked away, his head high and a huge grin on his face. His teammates laughed him off and patted him on the back. Win or lose, the holidays had started.
Standing alongside the field with the other teenage girls, Neila looked down from their uphill slum of Ti Rivyé onto the residential heights of Petionville streaming from the city then farther down to Cité Soleil on the coast below. Oil rigs dotted the sea as far as the horizon, reflecting the sun’s rays into mandalas over the blue-black waters.
Parts of the city were still dotted with thousands of IDP camps dating back to the earthquake 20 years ago. Her sheet metal home was among those in the treeless hills of western Haiti. Yet where others saw only despair, she imagined skyscrapers, sprawling shopping malls and parks, a city sprinkled with cranes around new neighbourhoods, new suburbs and new hopes.
“Still day-dreaming, huh?” said Serge landing a huge paw on her shoulder. Her older brother was too big for his clothes, too big for his room and generally too big, even for baseball, but he kept her safe. “You won’t get your haute couture just yet.”
He was right: her country striking oil didn’t mean anything to them yet, but she was proud and looking into the shape of things to come she knew things would change for the better. Though she knew he would never admit it, Serge also looked at the gleaming oil rigs lining the horizon with envy, he usually spent his summers pestering tourists in Santo Domingo, but now Haiti had to shoot Dominicans trying to cross its border illegally. The world had changed.
“Dad’s got a surprise for us waiting at home,” he said. “Let’s be out of here.”
Their mother was deep-frying chicken and plantains when they made it home through the meandering alleyways of the slum. Dirty water streamed from under every porch, but the smell of dinner drowned out the neighbourhood’s refuse. Some konpa music, an old Martelli song, was playing on the transistor radio inside.
Their father stood by the door shaking hands with a couple of white men in suits flanked by two bodyguards. He smiled at their backs as the men stepped over the sewer and headed downhill towards another house, and his smile widened as his children walked up to him.
“Hope you didn’t make the pros this year, son!” he joked to Serge.
“As if…” Neila whispered under breath and earned an elephantoid elbow to her ribs for it. Her father laughed.
“Good! Because I just landed you a job working the rigs for the summer. Nothing big, part-time for both of us, mostly relaying tonnage on the coast. But maybe you’ll shed some weight – since running across the Dominican border couldn’t do it!”
“Odoya,” Neila said thanking the Mother Lémanja.
Her father grunted his approval and turned to his son. “Light a candle for John the Baptist before sleeping and ask for strength.”
Her mother appeared by the door and grabbed Neila by the shoulder.
“There you are! You thought you’d have it easy, heh! School is done. Now help me with the food!”
Neila stuck her tongue out at Serge and followed her mother to the mud stove. The music on the radio was suddenly interrupted by a newsflash:
“Dominican warships have rounded Jaragua National Park and are making their way towards Jacmel. The government is calling a state of emergency and an immediate curfew over all urban centres. The United States is sending in aircraft carriers to counter Dominican manoeuvres. All residents are requested to remain indoors and keep their radios on until further notice. … Dominican warships have rounded Jaragua National Park…”
Drums beat and herbs burned through the night. Further up the hill someone was allowing themselves to be possessed.
Neila turned on her small cot, drifting in and out of sleep as smoke made its way over and around the shanties, cloaking them in hauntings from another world. Her father and her brother were spending more time out on the rigs. The stand-off between Haiti and the Dominican Republic had drawn in most of the region; destroyers lined the maritime borders of the Hispaniola, and the rigs desperately pumped crude 24 hours a day.
The ground shook violently under her and a blinding flash broke through the window leaving a flurry of black flecks dancing across her vision. She pushed herself up and ran out of the house in her underwear, her mother on her tail. Every resident in Ti Rivyé who was spry enough to move stood outside starring slack-jawed into the clouds.
An unusually large number of shooting stars bisected the night sky; and in the distance, the oil rigs spurted geysers of burning petroleum under a billow of grey smoke that was spreading towards the city.
The shooting stars didn’t disappear but kept getting closer. Narrowing down towards the city, they revealed themselves as scud missiles. Transfixed, Neila barely felt her mother’s hand shaking her shoulders roughly.
“Girl!” Her mother yelled, her eyes locked with hers. “Run in, grab what you can. We have no time. Hurry!”
“But…Father and Serge…” Neila said looking over her mother’s shoulders. Her mother slapped her across the face.
“There is no time!”
Shaken, Neila ran back into the house, grabbed one of her brother’s shirts and her mother’s pocket radio, and together they ran as far up the hills and away from the city as they could.
“…And that was that.” Neila finished. “My mother was dead hours later, Serge and my father probably never made it off the rigs. Even if they did, there’s no way they survived the early bombardment.”
The old lady seemed younger under the glow of liquor and spices, she stopped drinking as Neila finished her tale, put the bottle on the ground and wiped her mouth with a dirty sleeve.
“So. You want to stop this madness do you?”
Neila nodded.
“And bring your family back?”
She nodded again.
“Tsk, you can’t bring your family back, girl – unless you’re looking to trade places. And I don’t think anybody can put an end to this,” Maman Brigitte said. “But you were kind to an old woman and others wouldn’t have been. I can help you ask for a favour – that I can. If you’re ready for it.”
The tale had brought something back. For a moment, she had reconnected with who she had once been. Her mother’s radio was all she had left, but none of the voices on the airwaves sounded like her.
Neila nodded vigorously. “I’m ready.”
Maman Brigitte leaned over her ear conspiratorially.
“First you must find an innocent,” she whispered.
The baby screamed and coughed, the lesions on his skin oozing with blood and pus. Each cough rattled his small body and little red flecks appeared on his lips with every raspy breath.
The candle burned slowly in the centre of the small white circle Neila had drawn on the ground. The old lady had left her with a bottle of that foul concoction and it sat next to her along with her knife, and her mother’s pocket radio. She lifted the knife, but found her hand shaking. In fact, her whole body rocked along as the child coughed and cried.
Finding an innocent in the skid row of lower Port-au-Prince had made sense before she’d passed out, but less when she woke up alone with a hangover searing through her brain. Still, the old woman’s words had been unequivocal.
The child had been abandoned in the gutter. If he’d been old enough to think, his mind would have been filled with hate for what had been done to him, but an infant – the true innocent – screams only in pain, hunger and loneliness, without greed or malice. She had picked him up, wiped him off as well as she could and carried him down to the basement where she had met Brigitte the day before.
The child cried in her arms. He didn’t deserve this, but he did not deserve to die chocking on sewage either. Maybe, just maybe, if her favours were granted and she could bring an end to all this, his painful life would not have been in vain.
Neila found her strength and sliced the baby’s throat before death could take him. She let a few crimson drops hit the ground inside the candlelit circle in front of her. She put the corpse down reverently and closed his eyelids. She wiped her bloody knife on her jeans and pocketed it.
She picked up the bottle of rum, took a hefty swig and sprayed a fine mist in the four cardinal directions. Then she began to chant:
“Papa Legba ouvè baryè a pou mwen, Ago eh!
Papa Legba ouvè baryè a pou mwen,”
Ouvè baryè a pou mwen, Papa, pou mwen pase,
Le’m tounen map remesyè Lwa yo!”
She poured rum out of the bottle three more times, mixing it with the infant’s blood in the circle on the ground. She chanted again:
“Baron Samedi
Brave Gede
My own ancestors! I offer you food and rum.
I offer an innocent
Hear me! And open for me the gates.”
The basement shimmered around her, changing into a field of high grass under the moonlight. She took a step, and a fingery mist spread around her feet turning the moonlit field into the lurid darkness of a graveyard. The smell of cigar smoke hit her and footsteps echoed between the graves followed by the grating of a glass bottle being dragged and bumped against the tombstones.
A shape outlined itself against the mist, revealing a tall man wearing a top hat and tuxedo, his face painted like a skull, taking a sip from a bottle.
“So girl? What have you called on me for? A favour or a thrill? My mojo or my manliness? You know how strong both are, yes?” The man asked in a rumbling baritone, chuckling lewdly.
“Baron Samedi?” Neila asked.
“No, little girl, Baron Jeudi Après-midi,” he said sarcastically as he drew on his cigar, coughed up some phlegm and spit it against a grave. “Are you crazy, or have you forgotten the life you took? Ou te pèdi, ti fi?”
“There was a lady – Maman Brigitte, her name was – she said I could ask you for a favour, but not for my family.”
“You met Maman? And she promised you a favour from me, huh? She drinks too much, she does, Maman Brigitte.” He paused, sombre. “Never get married, little girl, it’s only trouble.”
“Can I ask you to stop the killing?” Neila asked quickly.
Samedi threw his head back and laughed, a hearty belly laugh mixed with wheezing giggles. He wiped his eyes and cheeks of tears, smudging the white paint on his face.
“You need higher Gods than me for that favour, little girl, and you cannot find them at the Gates. They require other rituals to make it through – and more sacrifices.” He smiled slyly. “Do you wish to meet their companions? I cannot favour you, I’m afraid, but since Brigitte promised, I can do that much.”
The graveyard disappeared and Neila found herself in a stable amidst an endless series of stalls, but the ceiling was concealed by a fog that occasionally lit up with flashes of lightning. The air smelled like hay and horse droppings. The floor was wooden and covered with straw. Neila followed the old lecher down the aisle for what felt like hours, but the far end of the stable never got any closer.
The Baron turned and smiled at her.
“Don’t worry, little girl, time runs differently on this side.”
They passed a sickly white horse, its skin covered in boils, panting in a stall.
“The Horse of Pestilence,” introduced Samedi, and they marched on.
Then in another stall she saw a thin brown stallion, its ribs showing through its hide, all the muscle on his legs and shoulders long atrophied
“The Horse of Famine,” said Samedi.
Further along, a pale, almost translucent horse neighed in his stall. It had no eyes yet it stared directly at her.
“The Horse of Death.”
Something battered against the wooden doors of a stall further down the corridor. Angry neighing followed each crash of hooves.
A huge stallion, matte black with burning red eyes, huffed and puffed like an enraged bull. It kicked furiously, crashing into walls that should have shattered under such blows. When it saw Samedi and Neila it charged the door with all its might. The impact shook the ground and the other three horses neighed loudly, but the wood held. Neila patted the knife in her pocket for reassurance.
“The Horse of War.”
Unlike Samedi, who seemed as solid a human being, the beasts all seemed ethereal, like creatures out of a dream.
“Are they… real?” Neila asked.
Samedi didn’t turn. He stared into the stall, fascinated by the red-eyed beast’s mad cantering.
“They are and they are not. When the gods ride them they are invincible, otherwise they are transient and ephemeral, like the human soul.”
The Horse of War stood across from her, its burning eyes intent. So that’s the beast, she thought. The beast that thrives on desolation. The beast that makes people tear each other apart limb from limb, the beast who took my family, my dreams, everything… You took everything from me! The horse seemed to gain consistency as if feeding on the anger and pain she felt. She forced herself to calm her mind. The quieter her breath, the slower her heartbeat, the calmer the Horse of War became, until she saw it flinch and the power in its legs begin to weaken.
She took a step back and when the Baron, still distracted by the horse, didn’t turn she took a few more. Then she broke into a run, past Samedi, and leapt over the door into the stall.
She heard Samedi gasp. “Ti fi!” He shouted his deep voice rumbling threateningly across the barn.
The huge beast towered over her, filling her entire field of vision. It shook its head furiously, its man-sized hooves pounding the ground in anticipation of a fight. Neila threw herself between the animal’s legs, pulled out her knife, and sliced the horse’s stomach open. A rain of blood and guts poured over her and she ran towards the wall at the back of the stall. She began to chant:
“Maman Brigitte, Queen of the Dead, beautiful woman, healer of the sick!
Brave Gede, first among Ancestors,
Open for me the gates!”
The Horse of War neighed and grew thinner, the luxuriant black of its coat fading to grey, to white, then it was transparent, and then it was gone.
The barn wall shimmered, the ground turned to grass, and then to the humidity of the Port-au-Prince basement where the candle still burned in the chalk circle. Neila landed on her knees, out of breath and dripping thick droplets of preternatural blood that singed the floor with a sizzle. Maman Brigitte appeared from behind a pillar and dropped her bottle, shattering it on the floor.
“Bondye, ti fi! Kisa ou fé!”
“Relax, it’s not your husband’s blood,” Neila said, getting up. Brigitte backed away from her, slipping on the broken glass and leaving a trail of blood.
Neila ran for the small transistor radio. While Brigitte wept in a corner, she flipped through the frequencies and found a frantic voice:
“…has withdrawn its support for the Dominican Republic. Brazilian warships are retreating from the region. The war is over. I repeat the war is over. Vive Haiti! Vive Haiti!”
Neila breathed a sigh of relief, let herself slide against a pillar, and fell asleep…
She couldn’t recognize the landscape or the city across the hills from her, but she knew it wasn’t Haiti and she knew she would need to reach it before nightfall.
Everywhere around her long blades of grass grew, withered, and grew again in endless cycles of death and rebirth. A little boy appeared on the road beside her. It was her Innocent and he was smiling. He caught her hand and pointed ahead.
“It’s this way,” he said.
“Where am I going?”
“To Ifé.” The boy responded. “Come.”
She paused.
“In Nigeria?” she asked, surprised “Why am I in Nigeria?”
Something in the young boy’s voice changed, it sounded deeper, angrier.
“The Horsemen want to see you.”
Panic cut through the dream. Neila looked down at the little boy, his eyes were falling from their sockets, his skin bubbling and melting slowly like running paint.
She screamed and turned to run, but he caught her wrist, and started burning through it.
“You are not done,” he said, his fingers cut through her flesh and into her bones. “You owe me. Come to Ifé.”
All around them the hills burst in flames.
“How? The world is burning!”
The last of the boy’s faced melted and disappeared. “Come to Ifé. Ifé will remain.”
And Neila’s hair caught on fire.
Neila woke up with a scream, alone in the basement. She checked her wrist for burn marks, but found none. She shook the nightmare off, packed her things and walked out from her hiding place into a Port-au-Prince revelling in the euphoria of peace.
“Come.”
The voice rang inside her head as she made her way through a lunar landscape of slagged hills. The hills from her dream, but this time they stayed dead.
In the three weeks she’d spent inside the tanker making the trip back to Africa across the Atlantic, Neila had tried to close her mind to the voices of the dead. But when she shut her eyes, all she heard was Brigitte’s cackle, Samedi’s suggestive laughter, and saw things fall apart all over again, in blood and dreams denied.
Nothing made sense… For a few months things had gone so well. The world had healed: full unconditional denuclearization was underway, terrorism had disappeared overnight, an all time drop in crime; for the first time a woman could walk around safely without fear of aggression. She’d steered clear of the oilrigs, there was too much pain there yet, but she worked construction, one brick at a time, one building at a time, and she taught. Teaching one child and soul at a time. Then China declared war on the world.
The world had won the war in less than two months, but there were no transatlantic flights left, or airports to take off from. Anywhere.
When the first rockets had landed the voice had started ringing again. Come. It had been lingering in the back of her mind ever since she’d woken up, but she’d let the clank of machinery and the questions of eager children drown the voice out. Now it came louder than the explosions, drowning out the screams of her new friends, and tugging at her sanity like a compulsion, until – finally – she listened and obeyed.
Gritty radioactive dust slipped into her lungs with every breath. Her eyes watered, but the dust on her sleeves stung her when she tried to dry them. At the centre of the wasteland a city glowed like an old gem in the evening light. Its buildings were intact and its people healthy and celebrating. The boy in her dream had spoken true: Ifé remained untouched and beautiful.
Come. The voice thundered inside her mind. Come.
She entered the city, exhausted and in pain, every person she approached backing away from her in horror and fright.
She let the voice guide her to the centre of the town, where a belfry stood in the middle of a grassy square.
You are here now.
And the world disappeared.
Neila came to in a dark cave, the pain gone.
Four people stood around a stone table staring into a shimmering screen that showed a scene of carnage in a city she didn’t recognise. They were each cloaked and hooded in different material: white, black, red, and a translucent substance that revealed the wearer’s bald head and thin features. The figure in the red hood had its fingers on a glowing ball.
They lifted their hoods, revealing uniformly bald heads and scarred faces, and turned their eyes on her. They all looked exhausted, but the being in the red hood looked ready to tear his face off. Only the being in the translucent hood seemed fully awake, and furious.
“Where am I?” She asked, picking herself up and adjusting to the gloom. “Who are you?”
The being in the white hood spoke first: “You have come a long way under Olokun[1], Daughter. And not a moment to soon.” His tone was even, but anger simmered through his exhaustion. “We have been waiting. You have no place to keep us waiting.”
“So you’re the higher gods Samedi told me about.” Neila stated flatly. “I hope you’re nothing like him.”
“Why is she allowed to speak, Babalu Ayé?” asked the being in the transparent hood in a snarling voice said that turned to a growl. “Silly little girl has no idea what she’s done.”
The being in the black hood raised his hand to silence the speaker. “Calm down, Eshu, we’re just starting with her.” He turned to Neila his eyes burning. “Samedi was much like you, once. Young, defiant…” his eyes narrowed on hers “…and foolish.” His smile turned predatory. “Now he guards the Gates.”
“I was offered a favour for my kindness!” Neila retorted, more forcefully than she would have thought, given there was fear in her spine. “The Baron let me in and told me what the horses were but I killed the Horse of War. I freed us! And everything got better, didn’t it? The people, the world… The war – it stopped!” She remembered the parades, the shell-shocked joy on her countrymen’s faces as they celebrated with a new hope. “Why else would he have let me in? I needed a favour, the world needed a favour and I took it. I–”
“Silly girl!” Eshu interrupted harshly. He pointed at the black-hooded god. “Heed Oxossi’s words, heed them well!”
“Samedi thought that if he let you into the Stables, he would have your soul. He did not expect you to kill the horse. No one has ever tried to kill the horses.” Oxossi, the black-hooded God, shook his head in disbelief and stared at her as one would an infant. “Do you know how many people they tricked before they found you? Did you really believe there was something special about you? Something stronger than the Gods?” His contemptuous laughter bounced around the cave. “You were presumptuous and selfish,” he snarled. “And now you have unleashed War.”
The being in the red hood was looking weaker by the second. He let his hand rest on Eshu’s shoulder.
“See! See what you have done to Ogun?” Eshu said, turning violently on Neila.
“The horse you killed…” Ogun started, his voice tired and shaky. Then he paused as if trying to focus his thoughts. ”The horse you killed was War and bloodshed and every person’s passions… their desires, their greed… and I reined them in. I tamed them and you set them loose.”
“That’s not what I wanted!” Neila said turning to the gods around her. “Not any of it! All I wanted was peace, I wanted to…”
“You cannot kill war without killing peace, Daughter,” said Ogun. “The price of peace is not the death of war. The price of peace is eternal war.”
He paused for breath. His knees buckled, and his three companions lunged to catch him. He managed to stand upright, waving the others off.
“Had we had your soul we could have carved a new horse out of it. But you fled and then you hid, and now the cycles are spiralling out of control. I can no longer tame your passions; I can no longer rein in War.”
Something minute snapped inside Neila’s chest. The ground was solid rock, and yet she felt an abyss open beneath her feet. It was filled with the angry voices of people killed before they could find their peace, of people who had died aching with regret. She hadn’t just killed the horse, she had slit a child’s throat and watched him burn, and yet she hadn’t saved a single soul. She had gotten drunk with a stranger and the world had paid for her hangover. Her head started to spin, tremors rocked her body. She looked into the abyss, but she would not let it swallow her.
“Take it now!” She yelled. “Take my soul now, I beg you. There are still people out there, millions of people who can be saved, millions of lives who shoulder no blame.”
Eshu leaned over and smiled hungrily.
“Not for much longer,” he said. “Soon Ogun shall fade. Then Oxossi will weaken and there will be no crops, and then Babalu Ayé shall weaken and disease will run rampant, and I… I will collect. For I am Eshu, and I am always.”
“When the cycles spin into infinity, the Orishas will withdraw and all will begin anew,” said Ogun. “For the soul you took for the crossing, you shall become the price of peace. You shall become War and I, Ogun, will rise again to tame you.”
The gods hummed. Several screens appeared circling her and the Orishas. In one, a tidal wave washed over hundreds of thousands of refugees; in another, cave dwellers descended into cannibalism over the body of a dead companion; in a third a mass of people looked like a den of cockroaches as they piled and stepped on top of each other, trying desperately to flee some unknown catastrophe. The screens merged into one, tightening, closing in on her and the humming gods, and then snapped shut.
The darkness was, and then it was no more. She was then, she was now, and she would be again. Through the obscurity she sensed something different: a mind with a purpose.
A small band of bipeds were crossing the border of their traditional hunting grounds into unknown territory for the first time. There were only a few tribes roaming the world, and fewer yet that had decided to expand beyond the bushes or rivers that marked their little territories.
She let herself drift over to the band, swirling unseen around their rough animal skin clothes, pricking her finger on their spears. They were fit, they were hungry, and they were nervous.
A few miles away, she sensed another band was also taking its first timid steps into the wider world. The two tribes had lived next to each other for hundreds years but had never met, and now both had depleted their resources.
She probed into the mind of a single deer, bringing it to graze halfway between the two tribes, and waited. They would meet soon and one of the tribes would want that deer more than the other, but which one?
She waited for them to meet.
This would be fun.
[1]Olokun: Orisha of afro-descendants taken into slavery.
Mame Bougouma L.P Diene, is a French-Senegalese American development worker based in Paris with a fondness for progressive metal, tattoos and policy analysis. He is working on his first publications this year (The Horse of War is his first) and blogs for the Times of Israel when he needs to blow some steam.
In one town like this, not too long ago, lived an enterprising young girl. Ugonwoma, her parents called her, as she was the pride of their lives. She was so rich that she built a house in the village for her retired parents before any of her brothers could say taa! and painted it white so that under the sun it was like staring into the flare from a welder’s torch. People would use the house as a landmark in the village: “Take right until you come to the white house,” which made her parents very happy.
Her mother wore the latest cloth in the market and held her head high, for her daughter was young – had just finished university, in fact – and was doing strong things. Her father bought himself an ozo title; one could hear him laughing kwa-kwa-kwa as he sat with his friends on the veranda of his new house, drinking palm wine and eating bush meat, flicking flies with his horsetail whisk. Yes-men and boy-boys would sing his praise names from the compound below and he would get up to spray naira notes on them like manna. Life was good.
In a little while however, people started to whisper about this young woman and by extension, her family.
“Ee-yi,” they said. “They think it is just to have money. Where are her suitors?”
“This one acts as if she is a man. Let us see if wealth will be enough to keep her warm at night.”
“Can wealth compare to children? Will money look after her when she is old?” they asked. Her newlywed mates jiggled their breasts, slapped their newly fleshed-out hips and laughed behind her back.
The young woman heard all this. She tried to ignore them; after all, what was her own? But the gist gathered momentum. Her father could no longer meet her eyes. He grew so taciturn that his jollification friends stopped coming around. He no longer called his daughter Ugonwoma. In fact, he rarely called her anything at all.
Her brothers began to gloat. They knew the oko man could not say anything to their strong sister after he had followed to chop her money so they took up arms on his behalf.
“You won’t go and marry?” they crowed. “Your mates are on their fourth kids and you’re still here, clinging onto your father’s surname!”
“You eat shit,” she retorted. But deep down, the loss of her father’s approval and support wounded her. She gnashed her teeth and said to herself, “He is treating me like an orphan upon I have given him more than all his sons put together.” And she too stopped speaking to her father.
Her mother called her into her room one day and tried to make peace.
“My daughter,” she said. “It’s time to take a husband. Yes, marriage is not beans, but it is like that because the world is not just a playing something. You need someone so that you are not like the lone tree in the path that everyone cleans their machetes on.” She touched her daughter on the arm. “Your father has to be hard or people will think he is encouraging your stubbornness.”
Her daughter scrunched up her face like a latrine newspaper. She took her hand away. “So it’s because of husband that my father refuses to give me mouth?”
The mother rubbed her hands together, pleading. “I have seen things on my knees that you, my daughter, have yet to see standing on your own feet. I am your mother, I will not lead you astray,” she said. “Find someone. If our men are too frightened of your strong chi, there are others. The world was not made yesterday.”
The formerly-young woman picked at her mother’s words like a seed stuck in between her teeth until it was all she could think about. She concluded her mother must be right. One day she went on her usual travels and returned with a foreigner, a man she called “Dalin” whom she said she would marry.
Her mates threw themselves on the floor, laughing. They said “Ewo, this one has gone and bought herself a husband!” But when they saw Dalin; tall as a palm tree, dark, with muscles that resembled tubers of yams, strutting around as if he possessed two penises under his trousers, they ate their words. They were charmed by his open-teeth and the way he spoke English with barely-moving lips as if he was afraid to bruise the words sliding out between them. They envied the way he held his wife’s waist where people could see while their own husbands would only touch them under the cover of darkness. They heard him call her “Honey” without flinching. The woman’s name became Honi to everyone too.
During the igba nkwu, they forgot all the bad things they said about her as they hit spoons on their teeth and swallowed enough fufu to fell a herd of elephants. They drank so much palm wine that even most manly among the men could not find his father’s house afterwards.
Time passed. Honi and Dalin settled down to married life. She still made money by simply pointing at things and he – well, apart from the two-penis matter – nobody seemed to know what he did exactly. It was not important. They were happy.
More time passed and Honi, who had not been so young to begin with, started to worry that she was not pregnant. It would not have worried her so much if she did not know her husband wanted children; but she knew, and he did, and so she worried.
“Don’t stress,” he said to her. “It’s okay if it is me and you. I love you die.”
Honi still worried and worried and her husband caught her fever, especially when his own mother found Facebook and started harassing him every day in front of everyone.
“Come wife, there is one native doctor like that in my village that gives twins,” he said. And they took a bottle of prayer drink Schnapps and some kolanuts and an envelope of crisp naira notes and went to see him.
The native doctor said “Eat this,” and “Drink this,” and gave her a vial of glittery blackish flakes that turned to powder when she rubbed it between her fingers to take home. “That is the menstrual blood of a woman who has borne seventeen children for her husband. Add it to your bathing water. Make sure the water is hot.”
Her husband smiled and produced the gifts they had brought with a flourish. The native doctor blessed them. Honi pinched her nose as she bathed with the pink water that made her smell of a poultry slaughterhouse. Her husband gingered her up. After a month, it became apparent the native doctor’s blessings were working on someone because Dalin got a job out of state. Nobody seemed to know what exactly. He was gone for one day a week. Then two. Then three.
On a hot afternoon as Honi drove home, a neighbour stopped her by the gate of her compound, clapped her hands and said, “Ee-yi, woman, stay there. You don’t know your husband has left you?” and the woman went into her house and noticed the things that were not there that were supposed to be and her life fell apart.
***
After the woman walked around her house, noticing the gaps where things used to be, she ended up in the kitchen store. Her husband had taken all the sacks of rice and beans, and all the tubers of yam and plantains. He did not leave behind the cornflakes and coffee, salt and sugar. Even ordinary bottled water, he collected. The woman saw he had been in a hurry. A smashed-open gallon of palm oil lay on its side, pouring out congealing orange blood.
The woman slumped on her nwanyinoduluokwu and put her hand under her chin. “So this man not only left me but wants to starve me as well?” and she wept, tears flowing down her cheeks, hanging from her jawline like glass beads, dropping into the palm oil around her feet. For four market days, the woman sat on the kitchen stool crying because she had been fed excrement first by her father, and then her brothers, and now her husband had put pepper into her eyes. She felt the humiliation of the native doctor keenly. For what, kwanu, had she bathed in another woman’s menses-water? There was no baby to show for her efforts.
The next day, she woke up to a new sound. The congealed oil had vanished from the ground and in its place lay the most beautiful baby girl she had ever seen. The baby was fair, had dark curly hair, and dimples in her knees and her elbows. The woman picked her up, wonder all over her face, and held her to her chest.
The baby grabbed at the woman’s hair in closed fists and the woman beamed. She knew the gods had shown her mercy. Here was her chance to do things the right way, a baby made from her own tears and her own sweat. A pure baby. She would raise her to be her own person, to never let anyone make her feel inferior.
“No man will pour san-san in my garri ever again,” she vowed.
At first, the woman did not plan to tell anyone about her good fortune. Which mouth would she have used to explain that kind of a thing? She locked herself away, nursing her baby girl who grew lovelier by the day. But soon the woman’s love grew until her stomach could not contain it. She rang her mother and let some of it spill from her lips.
The old woman was only too happy to come. She left the white, merry house in the village that her daughter had built, which by now was neither white nor merry – not since her husband died and his sons and their wives and children moved in, circling her head like vultures in search of carrion.
***
They named the baby girl Nmazuruahu and the woman became known as Nne Nma because she was her mother.
The girl was full of beauty! The dimples in her elbows and knees transferred themselves to her cheeks and the small of her back. She had a long neck and breasts that jiggled like agidi on her chest. When she smiled at her grandmother, the old woman’s arthritis seemed to vanish for days.
The women handled her delicately like a fresh egg; Nne Nma gave her the best clothes and latest gadgets. Her mother plaited her long, thick hair into different styles and her grandmother cooked her anything she wanted to eat. Nmazuruahu was not allowed to lift a finger. In spite of this, she did not spoil. She was sunny and respectful and if she wondered why she was never allowed to go out she did not voice it. She waved to school children from her third floor window as they trudged past in their chequered blue uniforms, before going downstairs for lessons with her tutor.
“But what story will you tell her when she becomes older?” asked the grandmother, watching the girl bounce downstairs, plaited hair flying.
“When she gets older, we will decide,” said her mother. “I am not letting her out of my sight.”
The grandmother had been going to put her mouth and say that children were like plants who needed tending, yes, but also space to grow. Instead she swallowed her spittle and shuffled away. Her mothering days were behind her and besides, she still felt guilt at the part she played in her daughter’s failed marriage.
***
The morning of Nmazuruahu’s sixteenth birthday, harmattan winds blew with anger. Dust swallowed the entire house, making the marbled floors treacherous to walk on. The cleaners scuttled about, fighting the onslaught. When they tried to fill the tanks for the daily mopping, the water pump would not start. One look at the well told them the water levels had dropped.
They called around for a water tanker to come up the hill and when Nmazuruahu saw the vehicle, swaying and groaning its way up the hill, she was seized with an unusual excitement. She followed the men with her eyes as they alighted, especially the dark one who scurried up the outside of the tank-tower with the hose wrapped around his torso. As he reached the roof, his eyes caught sight of Nmazuruahu in her bedroom and he stopped dead.
Nmazuruahu was afraid to open her mouth. Her heart jumped about like a rat that had eaten sugar, her feet felt hammered to the floor. She could feel them sweating. The boy stood on the roof looking at her, forgetting everything but what was in front of his face. Because they were busy eating each other up with their eyes, they did not hear when his colleagues started up the pump. The pressure of the water pushed the man off the roof and he fell, crashing through a nearby guava tree and landing on the ground.
Nmazuruahu ran downstairs. She stood on the back porch and watched as the men hauled him away. He had been knocked out and water twinkled in his bushy afro like stars on a dark night. Nmazuruahu saw he was closer to her own age than she first assumed.
By the time her grandmother woke from her nap and came to find her charge it was too late. Nmazuruahu shivered as if from a malarial chill. No amount of sweet treats could tempt her up from bed.
Nmazuruahu, it seemed, had fallen in love.
***
Even after the well had been re-dug and the tankers were no longer needed, the boy still came to see Nmazuruahu. He would wait in the bushes behind her mother’s compound for the woman to leave for work and once she was gone, he would scale the fence on nimble feet, through the back door and upstairs to her room. Nmazuruahu’s tutor thought about saying something, but what was her own? Nmazuruahu learned faster than she could teach and had not needed lessons for months now. In fact, the girl was so intelligent that she had even finished materials not on the curriculum. The tutor did not want to do anything to jeopardise her bread and butter. She minded her own business.
As for the grandmother, happiness tickled her belly. She told herself that she had not interfered and so had nothing to feel guilty over. The girl had chosen a mate for herself. Who was she to stand in their way?
So the boy came, bearing two waterproof bags of kuli-kuli and tiger nuts and his flute. He would greet the grandmother on his way up, prostrating. She did not understand his language but good manners know no barrier. Grandmother would sit there tapping her feet to music that came from Nmazuruahu’s room, eventually falling asleep. She was always woke up to make sure that the boy left at the right time.
One day as Nne Nma returned home from work, a neighbour stopped her on the street. “Ee-yi woman, stay there. You don’t know that a boy comes to be with your daughter when you are not around?”
And the woman’s world fell apart a second time.
***
At first Nne Nma had been going to ignore her daughter. Her shock at having a neighbour poke her nose into her carefully-concealed business jarred, but she was prepared to look the other way. However as Nmazuruahu grew even more beautiful and filled out, her mother started to gnash her teeth. She began to mutter whenever her daughter was within earshot.
“If a man is hungrying you, just say so. I will understand. We can hire someone; men are like sand on the earth. Nothing special.”
Nmazuruahu wrinkled her fine nose. “Mummy, that is disgusting.” She left her food untouched that night and every other day after. Still her skin shone and her eyes twinkled.
“You don’t know what tune the gongs are playing,” said her mother. “The song is beyond your years.” She stopped going to work, determined to catch the boy and twist his ears. He did not show up. After a while she returned to work. When she came back, she could tell from her daughter’s open face that the boy had come around.
“You, what are you doing that someone is taking food from my mouth and eating?” she shouted at her mother. “Is this what you came here to do?”
“I am old, my daughter, I see no one. You know my eyes… and which leg will I use to pursue if there was such a person?” she raised up her wrapper to reveal knees swollen from the arthritis.
Nne Nma huffed. She lay in bed and plotted to send Nmazuruahu away, but to whom? Nowhere was safe from the greedy men with their long throats and big eyes. Nmazuruahu was not only stunning, but smart and clever. She would also be very rich when her mother died. Where on this earth would she be safe? In the end she decided she must send her own mother back to the white house in the village and start a new life somewhere else with Nmazuruahu. She would drug the girl and steal away in the middle of the night, somewhere far, perhaps Hausaland.
“After all, my chi is awake. I can always start afresh elsewhere.” She started to make plans.
But the grandmother knew her own daughter. When extra bags of this and that started to appear in the house she said to herself: “She wants to send me to the village to go and die by myself.” She knew there was a chance she might never see her beloved granddaughter again in this life, so she called her.
“You have to run away, you and that boy. Your mother means to have me out of the way so she can do him harm.”
“But my mother would never do that,” said Nmazuruahu, biting her lips. She began to doubt all she knew. If it had been someone else saying this to her she would have laughed, but her mother’s mother? Perhaps she was right.
“I am only talking my own as your grandmother,” said the old woman, rubbing her hands together. “I want a chance to see my granddaughter happy with the man she loves; I want to live to see my great-grandchildren. If I go back to the village, my daughters-in-law will bury me before I am dead.”
Nmazuruahu was sick with love. She could not imagine being parted from the boy. She started to gather her things a little at a time. But she had no experience with deception and her mother suspected what she was doing when money started to vanish from her handbags. She entered Nmazuruahu’s room as the girl slept, searched her phone and found the proof she needed lurking in Whatsapp, signed with the childish code they too had used in their youth:
3 la4va2 ya45.
3 la4va2 ya45 ta44.
So, this foolish boy is trying to steal my daughter right from under my nose? Nne Nma thought. He thinks he loves my daughter more than I do? She modified her plans.
Nne Nma waited until the morning of the lovers’ rendezvous, went to the police station and bought as many uniforms as her money could buy – which was a lot. Even the ones she did not call followed her for the price of beer.
They swarmed the house like a dark cloud and waited all day in the bushes for the boy to climb back over the fence.
Late in the afternoon, the boy’s bushy head appeared first. He had spread a jute sack on the spikes of the fence so that he would not cut himself. He turned and helped Nmazuruahu up. The woman looked at him. She watched his muscles bunch as he leaned over. They were like cocoyams under his skin. He was darker than night. Even sitting she could see he was tall and carried himself as if he knew all the secrets of the world’s creation. The woman put her hands between her teeth. Her stomach filled with rage.
“Shoot him,” she hissed to the corporal by her right. “You can see him stealing from my house. He is an armed robber.”
The corporal shrugged, took out his gun. They say the corporal had been exhausted from standing all day in the hot sun collecting dash. Some say he had already washed a bottle or two, nobody knows for sure. He took aim, he fired and the bullet flew into Nmazuruahu’s stomach. She tumbled off the wall.
“Nmazuruahu!” her mother shouted. The boy took one look at the policemen emerging from the bushes and picked race. Some policemen gave chase. Others drew slowly away from the scene in front of them. The corporal who fired his gun left behind only his boot prints to show he had been there.
Blood poured out of the girl’s wound. The light from the setting sun pierced through the bushes, turning it the orange of palm oil.
Nobody knows what happened to the woman or the grandmother. Some say she went berserk after her second loss, that you can sometimes find her talking to palm trees, trying to tempt them into giving her some of their juicy nuts. Others say she went ahead with her plan and moved, leaving her house to revert to farmland. But everyone knows where her daughter is.
On the spot where she died a flame tree grew, tipped with blazing orange and red flowers, a thing of such beauty that many forget themselves admiring it.
She stands there till this day waiting in the path that cuts through the bush, her crimson flowers a blanket of colour on the ground.
And whenever labourers finish their work, they wipe their machetes on her trunk.
Chikodili Emelumadu is a Nigerian writer, journalist and broadcaster living in London. She turned down a possible glittering career in medicine for one involving words and penury. She has been published in Luna Station Quarterly, Eclectica and Apex magazines, and the now defunct Running Out of Ink magazine. Check out more of her work (and ramblings)on her blog, igbophilia.wordpress.com.
I was perhaps eight or nine years old when my father told us the story of his encounter with a mythical being. What people in my part of Enugu State, Nigeria, call Oku Ikpa. The word Oku Ikpa translates loosely as ‘wild fire’ and the creature would correlate somewhat with the phoenix of European mythology. I don’t know why, but that story, told to me when we lived in the northern city of Kaduna — thousands of miles away from the place of incidence and on an afternoon of telling ghost stories — stuck with me.
I don’t know if my father’s encounter was true or if he was just making things up, but I don’t need to close my eyes to see him bowed before that ball of fire on a lonely hill road, emptying his pockets to find something that would appease it, his RoadMaster motorcycle forgotten where it lay. Perhaps I was fascinated by the mystery: What exactly is the Oku Ikpa? Where does it go to when day breaks? Why, when a hunter once fired at it (as the stories say), did pieces of broken clay and calabash cutlery appear at the spot he shot?
I am not sure these questions led me to science fiction, horror and fantasy, but I recall thinking that many of the supposedly strange stories I read from JRR Tolkien, Anne Rice, Stephen King or Philip Jose Farmer didn’t appear at all otherworldly. I soon recognised that a copious amount of material for fantasy and science fiction existed around me. It was then that the urge to take a pen and put to paper stories about the fabled dwarfs who are supposed to grant wealth, or about Ananmuo where spirits travel from when they come to rule the night. I yearned to weave fables set in unfamiliar and unheard of scenes and to have an Emeka walk across the Martian pole. These yearnings, in time, became too great to bear.
I think it was in early 2010 that I came across a call for entries for a science fiction writing workshop in Lagos. I was elated, for at that time I had already written some fantasy and science fiction shorts and was itching to get some training to help me with my writing. I can’t recall what story I sent in as an entry, but I was over the moon when I got an email informing me I had qualified for the workshop. That workshop birthed what is Nigeria’s first science fiction anthology, Lagos 2060, edited by Ayo Arigbabu.
Lagos 2060 was supposed to be Africa’s first science fiction anthology but it lost that pride of place to Ivor Hartmann’s AfroSF because of publication delays. For it, I submitted a story titled ‘Annihilation’ that imagined what Lagos would be like 50 years into the future. Written in 2010, it was my second attempt at writing science fiction and, until last year, my longest short story.
Science fiction is still very new in Nigeria, but while we could barely find 10 people to contribute to the anthology in 2010, there are now hundreds of writers who will readily try their hand at the genre. Just as I did, more writers are recognising that we have a copious amount of material for speculative fiction here in Nigeria. That means we need platforms where these stories can be anchored. To help this along, Chinelo Onwualu and I present Omenana, a bimonthly speculative fiction e-publication.
Mazi Nwonwu is a Lagos based writer and journalist with a bias for speculative fiction written primarily for Africans and from an African perspective.
