MY VILLAGE MUST HAVE BEEN FULL OF NAKED TODDLERS without birthdays, or enlarged photographs of their childhoods taken in studios and displayed on smooth painted walls. I probably grew up the same way, naked and running around with poop in my buttocks. One of those potbellied, food-loving imps whose mothers would beckon the family dog over to lick them clean. I smile each time I indulge myself in those thoughts. But my mother talked about my childhood without nostalgia. She said I was a snot-faced child with nameless longings. I’d cry loudly, squealing like a squirrel baulked of a ripe palm nut. “Ibekazi,” my mother would tease me. “You always preferred to be tied to the back of your aunt, and when anyone tried to take you away to ease the poor girl’s burden, you cawed and fought like a crow, nearly clawing out their eyes.”
When she said this, I hid my face and said nothing, feeling slighted that of all the pretty birds in the village, it was a crow my mother likened me to, but in her good mood I could ask, “What did Okike do when I squealed?”
My mother smiled. When my mother smiles, you catch a glimpse of distant beauty. It flickers and is gone, fiaam, like the dash of a glowworm. “When you squealed because you needed to suck my breast and I had gone to Ogige market,” she said, “Okike plugged her nipple into your little mouth and sang for you until I returned and kissed away your snot and tears.”
My mother said I sucked her like there was no tomorrow, and even suckled Okike’s milkless breasts for comfort.
“Like seven famished puppies,” she chuckled. “After you fed, you insisted on going up again on Okike’s back, leaping with happiness.”
So much for my mother’s similes: first a crow, then seven famished puppies. But I was a big sucker, and that’s the truth. I am amused, and sometimes angry, when my mother retells this story. Angry because I am embarrassed, amused because it is my love story, my childhood, the beauty that lies in not knowing the difference between breastmilk and breast, and because my mother never gets tired of it, this serial retelling.
“What kind of songs did Okike sing for me?” I’d ask my mother each time.
“She sang you baby songs.” My mother would smile again even more broadly, and I’d catch a glimpse of the ghosts of her dimples, long receded into her sunken cheeks. Now they ornament my younger sister Usonwa’s face.
“Sing me the song,” I’d insist.
My mother would clear her voice, laugh a little as if shy, and then she would sing the song about the little bird: Nwannununwannununta turuzanzaturunza nwannununwannununta turuzanzaturunza tukenekisiatu tunwokenikenike tunwanyinikenike tutumeropipiro piropirororo pi.
It reddens my cheeks when I think of all this, now that I am an all-grown skinny boy who finished primary school at the age of fourteen after I lost one year to pneumonia. My mother says it was pneumonia, but now I think it was malnutrition, too much cocoyam and tasteless cowage soup. Some people say I laugh like water. Curiously, I find myself going to the creek in my village to listen to its ululations. Others say it is my father I laugh like, that it is his most telling feature, but most people agree that I look like my uncle Onumonu, my mother’s brother, a primary school teacher, a man who reminds me of a squirrel. I can’t imagine myself growing into a diminutive man in clothes that outsize me.
Let me tell you a little about my family. I am my parents’ third child and their first son, if a boy like me being anyone’s first son is anything to be proud of. So you know, about a year ago, I did pass my Common Entrance exam and raced home to flaunt my result.
“You are not going to secondary school,” my father said in a parched voice. “Unless you will have me trade my manhood for school fees.”
Heartbroken, I went to a corner to sulk. My mother came back and found me there, like a cat starved of affection. You have already met my mother, my heroine, the vibrant force in the family.
“Get up.”
Her voice warmed my heart.
“Tomorrow you are going to the new school to begin your registration.” My mother untied her wrappa, washed threadbare, one of the few pairs left on the clothesline. She reached for a grey pouch-like cloth bag she ties around her waist and emptied its contents, all her life savings. “I am sure I have enough in here to start you off,” she said.
The next week found me walking the street proudly in the white and indigo of Community Secondary School. But after one term, my family could no longer afford the fees and I was forced to drop out.
“Nnam, don’t worry. You will go back to school if I have to work my fingers to stumps,” my mother reassured me.
I have six siblings—two elder sisters, Oyimaja and Ekete; my younger brother Machebe, my younger sister Usonwa; and the twins, a boy and a girl, Ebube and Ihebube—and you already know about my aunt Okike, my benefactress, and that I am her reincarnation. My father is my greatest critic, and I often feel he stands in my way. He has five siblings, but I know only one, my aunt Ogbom; the rest are either dead or lost. Sometimes my father talks about his father, my grandfather, a man my father says lived a lonely life. Ngwu is a white-haired little man in my father’s last memories of him. He did not live to a very old age, and he was drunk more often than sober. My father talks of his late mother, my grandmother, too. He describes her as a tall, stern-faced woman with a glossy dark complexion and a strong will, the opposite of my grandfather. My father smiles brightly whenever he talks about his parents. He leaves me with a sense of guilt, because I don’t think I smile, let alone brightly, when I talk about my father. He used to accompany my grandfather, a roofer, to work.
“A very good one when he was sober,” he said, “but he was often getting into strife with those he disappointed.”
I sense that my father had been proud following his father and making roofs with bamboo, raffia, and thatch, but ashamed of his father’s drinking habit, as I am of his. I also don’t believe making roofs is a great employment, even if my father treats this story as a delicate heirloom that, if allowed to slip and fall, would shatter like glass.
My father is now the second-oldest man in our village. He is not so old, but he has many strands of grey hair and a rough salt-and-pepper beard. He definitely looks too old to have fathered the twins, my last two siblings. I think it is because he hunches over in the sun to mould bricks. Maybe it was because his older brother Alumona chose to become a roofer like their father that he chose to make bricks instead. I hope that one day he will become the oldest man and thus the Onyishi of our village. Then everything—the hills, the caves, the land, and the trees—will be ours, and everyone will have to do as he says. He will superintend the slaughter of funeral cows at the village square and bring home a big lump of meat. And he will be respected. We will have farmlands to grow crops and drive hunger far away. My mother will become the Obloko, with more palm trees in her custody than any woman in the village. There will be money for me to return to secondary school, and to be reunited with Eke, my childhood friend. We desperately want to go to university and learn to speak big English words that fall from heights like breadfruit heads. And there will be money to build Okike a proper tomb.
But then I dream that my father dies on the day of his coronation.
“Dreams are nothing. They exist only in your imagination.” My mother waves my dream away. But I know that my dreams about Okike are material, and I am overcome with a sense of foreboding.
The university I want to attend is just on the other side of the hill, so near that when the wind blows it fills my nose with the smell of learning: that hot, metallic scent of paper fresh from the mill. It is so close we can hear the sirens and see the helicopters bringing famous people to the Founder’s Day ceremonies.
As children, we were afraid to enter that community of well-dressed English-speakers, where we were expected not to utter the Igbo language that is our mother tongue; their ground seemed too clean for our dirty feet. But our mothers would send us there anyway to fetch tap water in iron buckets during droughts. The cave dried up during those times, water trickling out of the rocks like breastmilk, but in the campus it gushed from the taps. We started to enjoy our visits. We helped the students carry water to their hostels. We cleaned their rooms in exchange for gifts. We gleaned their bins for morsels, but found nothing. “The university cannot afford groceries anymore, and it is the fault of government,” my father said. “The students don’t have enough to eat themselves, much less things to throw away.”
Nowadays they fetch their own water and wash their own clothes, too. My father says it is the fault of government, and that tuition fees have jumped on top of the iroko tree. But that is for Eke to worry about. He is the one most likely to go to university.
To tell you a few truths about my small village of Oregwu, it is nice throughout the year, but sometimes December is brittle-dry, and March is warm, too warm. It is wet and cold in August. I like it in spring when the weather is cool and the grass is fresh and green, a time when it smells of nothing but new leaves and sweet loam. There are no storied houses in my village, but there are as many cement houses as there are those built of mud brick, the ugly type of brick my father makes for a living. The houses are usually squat or L-shaped. Most of them are unpainted. Hideous. Some have cracks where house lizards and geckos live and dash out now and again to snap up an insect. Nothing disgusts me like the guts of a gecko stained on a wall when the younger ones stone them to death.
In my village, every household with a man has a goat pen. In it you find more goats than sheep. The chicken coops belong to the mothers. The villagers mostly farm. Men plough and plant, women weed and cook, and children eat and play. But my father makes bricks, because he doesn’t have many acres of land like his fellow men. There are a few drinking joints where men go to relax their muscles, enjoy palm wine, and chat about community happenings when they come back from the farm, like Madam Bridget’s bar, with its crooked little signboard that says PALM WINE AND BUSH MEAT READY. A man might get drunk and slumber by the side of the road. He might wake up the next day soaked in his own urine and vomit. In the cold drizzle of the early morning dew, he might then sidle home to his irate wife and children. My father has done this many times. My mother does not speak to him for many days after.
When a baby is born in my village, children eat the insides of unripe palm nuts, and women yellow their foreheads with odo. They sing, and men drink palm wine and laugh in loud voices. They laugh like hyenas if the baby is a boy, even if he might grow into a village drunk like Oko. When a person dies, women weep and men cross their arms. A hole is made, and the person is covered with red soil. Dances are made, and after that everyone goes home. A tomb may be made for one out of three-score deaths and ten. I am not sure if we have ghosts in my village. People tell tales of them in Amalla Nkwa, a neighbouring town where human beings and ethereal entities interact between the spiritual and temporal worlds, but I am not sure if there are any here.
It’s probably just moonlight playing with shadows.