LIKE EVERYONE, SHE’D HEARD the stories: of men who morphed rocks into glass with their bare hands, who dipped thumbs into a bowl of ash and turned it into fire, who transformed into wild animals, and who caused disastrous storms in the night. But, for Mmadjadji, these were tales of her own great-grandfathers. These were her ancestors.
As a child, the one she was most intrigued by was her grandfather, the famous Storm God, who is said to have created both havoc and peace in her village. She’d heard conflicting rumours. Some villagers said he was an angry madman, while others said he was the greatest god who ever lived. So, early one morning, sitting side by side with her mother, Mmadjadji asked her about the Storm God.
Mmadjadji’s mother was sieving maize-meal while Mmadjadji poured the sieved maize into a bucket. Her mother was wearing a yellow dress, the one she liked. She liked it so much that she wore it four times a week. Mmadjadji was dressed in a white, dotted dress. She didn’t like it, actually she hated it. How it clung to her chest and yet floated around her hips. Regardless, her mother forced it onto her tiny body. Mmadjadji would lift her legs as if running on burning coals, her face masked with tears and her mouth wide open, radiating screams. Years later, Mmadjadji always remembered her mother in that beautiful yellow dress, and herself in the ugly white dress, crying for it to be ripped off her body.
“What did he do? Why did our people love and hate the Storm God so much?”
Her mother responded simply, “He healed sick people.”
“That’s it? He didn’t do anything else, like trigger rainfalls, like The Rain Queen?”
Mmadjadji wished she’d lived in the era of the Rain Queen. She was fascinated by the thought of a woman powerful enough to compel the clouds to shed tears whenever she felt like it. Presidents from all over the world flew in fancy private jets to her village of Bolobedu, just to plead with the Rain Queen to put them out of their misery. Their crops were dying, they said. People were crumbling with thirst, they claimed. The people of Bolobedu worshipped her. And although Mmadjadji loved the Rain Queen, she was also jealous that she was not a part of her family.
Mmadjadji’s mother looked at her, offended. “You think healing people is not a great thing?” She shook her head. “Once, when the Storm God was angry at his children, he caused a storm that lasted a year.”
“Haaa!” Mmadjadji gasped. “Did people die from the storm?”
“No. That’s what was strange about that storm. But, because people wanted to farm and go to work, they plied him with money and fruit baskets and apologised on behalf of his stubborn children.”
“Mmawe, what else?”
“Mmadjadji ...”
“Tell me, please.”
“He also cursed sinners and made them sick. Your grandfather detested sinful people. He followed The Book, word for word. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. A man or a woman must not lie with another man or another woman. Thou shalt not commit adultery. One should respect one’s mother and father, and so on.” She handed Mmadjadji the last load of mealie-meal to pour into the bucket. “The Storm God was a man with a pure heart, and that’s how he wanted others to be. When one of his neighbours stole another man’s goats and sold them, he made him impotent and thin; so thin, you could spin him around your fingers like a stick,” she chuckled. Mmadjadji giggled. “Because of that, our whole family is afraid of him. Sadly, your grandfather died of old age, not long before you were born. However, like the other gods before him, he sees everything we do, and he speaks to us when we need answers.” She watched Mmadjadji, who looked at her with attentive eyes. “Years from now, when you become a woman, you will bear a son, and he will become a god too.”
“Does Papa have a good heart like his father? Is Papa like the Storm God?” Mmadjadji asked.
Her mother rose to her feet, picked up the filled bucket and said, “Your father is our god now, isn’t he? So he will be like the great Storm God, even better.”
It wasn’t long after this that Mmadjadji found herself surrounded by almost all the elders in her family. Her mother had called a family meeting. “How could she be pregnant so young; are you sure? Isn’t she just twelve years old? Has she bled yet?” Mmadjadji’s aunt asked her mother.
“She has been menstruating since she was nine!” Mmadjadji hated the way her mother said that. As if it was all her fault. Everyone, from her grandmothers to her uncles sitting there, was gawking at Mmadjadji’s stomach with discomfort, as if she was carrying the devil.
“Abortion is the solution; there is no hiding this,” one of her uncles bluntly suggested. “Our gods will punish us all if the baby lives, the Storm God has communicated this to me.”
Sitting there with her family, Mmadjadji felt disgusting and unwanted. It was just like that scorching hot afternoon the year before, when she felt demons grasping her skin and a monster breathing fire all over her body. It was the day her father, on top of her, put his big, sweaty hand over her lips and hissed: “It will be over soon. Shh, keep quiet.” This was after he’d said, “You need to feel like a woman. You are not a boy. You may dress like one, act like one, but you’ll never be a boy …”
She was numb to everything at that moment. From her father’s hoarse voice to his steaming-hot breath, to the two ravens that suddenly flapped their wings on the windowsill. It was as if her body was no longer hers. She didn’t move until her father, the proclaimed god, was done.
When he walked out of her bedroom, Mmadjadji touched herself and felt a twinge between her legs. There it was … blood. Red. Her inner thighs felt as if someone had beat her there repeatedly with a hammer.
During the meeting, no one in the family asked her who’d tiptoed into her bedroom, dug through her clothes with their long nails, and planted the seed in her belly. No one asked about the numerous times he’d touched her. Not a single mouth mentioned her father.
Mmadjadji did not grieve for the baby after her mother flushed it from her stomach and dumped it into a toilet pit. After it was removed, she felt a sudden change in her body. She was no longer Mmadjadji the daughter of some famous gods she’d never met. She was now someone else. She hated her father. She hated her mother. She hated her entire family. And she loathed the gods with every piece of her flesh. Mmadjadji did not grieve for the baby, because it was her own funeral.
What had happened to her remained engraved in her mind. The memory ate her insides like a worm. So, when she turned eighteen and matriculated, Mmadjadji packed her belongings and left Bolobedu without telling anyone.
Years later, she’d realise that they did not ask who’d impregnated her because they knew.
“May I copy your notes? I can’t see the board,” murmured a girl sitting next to Mmadjadji at the back of the second-year modern physics lecture. “I stood on my glasses this morning when I was getting out of bed.”
There was a pause as Mmadjadji looked into the girl’s eyes. She was attractive. The girl’s dark-green braids were tightly held together in a bun. Her skin was radiant. “How did you get to class then?”
“A friend literally held my hand, walked with me from my residence and dropped me here,” the girl laughed. “So, may I? Please?”
“Sure, go ahead. I’m used to girls pretending to be blind after noticing how cute I am,” Mmadjadji smirked.
The girl laughed; a hasty loud laugh that got her a stern look from their lecturer.
At the end of that lecture, the girl wrote her phone number at the edge of Mmadjadji’s notes. It read: “My name is Bontle. I know who you are, Mmadjadji, Mother of the Sun. Here are my numbers. I will be waiting for your call.”
The two became like moist gum stuck between a shoe and tar. Bontle came into Mmadjadji’s life like the sun ascending in the morning after a cold night. Soon after graduating, they got married and went to live together in Randburg, far away from Bolobedu.
Time comes and goes like a train nobody seems to catch. Life carries on, despite the dead in the ground. Mmadjadji does not talk to her family and neither do they talk to her.
However, she’s just found out her father is dead, from a newspaper article. Her father, the most respected living being in her family, has succumbed to colon cancer.
“That man was no god!” she curses. What did he ever do for her village anyway?
She’d ranted like this once before, when she was still at varsity, after reading an online article that said her father had been invited to the Rain Queen’s house to bless the new Rain Queen of Bolobedu. She felt like standing on a rooftop and announcing to everyone that her father wasn’t the man they thought he was. That gods don’t rape and impregnate their daughters!
Were there ever any gods in her family in the first place? The stories about the Storm God and his forefathers, were they made up? Was her childhood all a lie?
“You want to go back?” Bontle asks her, lying on the bed next to her.
“I don’t know.” She does not know how to take her father’s death: kick her legs in the air or wallow in misery.
Mmadjadji and Bontle lie there gazing up at the wooden ceiling of their three-bedroom house. They moved in shortly after their small traditional wedding eleven years ago; a gathering of friends and Bontle’s close-knit family, now Mmadjadji’s family too. Bontle’s mother sat in the front row that day with tears in her eyes.
Even though Bontle’s mother is a religious and godly woman, she supports her daughter. She believes that everyone sins and that they should offer themselves to God for forgiveness. This is how Bontle was raised. She went to church three times a week and prayed with her mother every night. As Bontle grew older, however, she stopped attending church. She found that her mother’s church loved her and forgave her sins, but not all of her and not all of her sins. Not when she’s a woman-loving sinner.
Bontle shifts on the bed, moving closer. After a while, she turns her head to face Mmadjadji, adjusting the glasses that reside on her small nose. She finds Mmadjadji’s eyes shut and her lips vibrating with anguish.
Bontle speaks softly, rubbing her shoulder. “Love, I will go with you if you want. I know that after everything he did, this must be difficult for you.” When Mmadjadji doesn’t say anything, Bontle decides: “You are going home. It is final.”
Sixteen years since she left home, Mmadjadji sits opposite her mother in the living room, three weeks after her father’s funeral.
She looks around. Everything in the room feels the same. The same smell in the air. The same walls stare back at her. The sofa she sat on years ago now just feels a little flatter under her.
On her right is her bedroom door. She tries to ignore it – old ghosts of her childhood might still be in there. The ceiling still looks the same, too, just with more holes. The only thing that is very different is her mother.
She looks at the deep lines on her mother’s forehead, her greying hair. Her mother’s skin is worn, like an elephant’s. Mmadjadji can’t believe this is the woman she’s resented all these years. Her mother is old and weak.
Bontle sits next to Mmadjadji, holding her hand. She’s dressed in traditional red Pedi attire. She looks everywhere except at Mmadjadji’s mother. Mmadjadji holds Bontle’s right hand tighter, as if to say: don’t leave me with this woman. “Where is he buried?” she asks.
“Mmadjadji, my beautiful daughter, I am happy you are home,” her mother says, smiling. Mmadjadji can’t tell whether the smile is sincere or not.
Mmadjadji’s mother observes her daughter sitting next to the other woman. She reaches for Mmadjadji’s hands, but Mmadjadji doesn’t touch her. “O’khe stabane?”
“I am. I will always be a lesbian.”
She sighs, “I know. I know, I am your mother. Have you forgotten that I raised you?”
“No, you didn’t raise me. You crushed me every single chance you got because of what I am.”
She shakes her head, “Mmadjadji, you know this is a sin. This is not our tradition. Our family does not –”
Bontle interrupts, “Please stop. Stop it. I am sitting here listening to you, and I’m trying to contain the anger brewing inside me. But mosadi, how can you tell her about family when none of your family members, or your terrible gods, treated her like one?” Bontle looks into the old woman’s eyes. “Especially you. You are her mother; the one person she expected to protect her.”
Mmadjadji taps Bontle on the back. But Bontle doesn’t yield. “Your daughter was assaulted by her own father, multiple times. I wonder, where were you when all of that was happening in this damn house? Did you know? And if you did, o dirileng? Nothing? Nothing! No, wait … the only thing you did was kill that baby!”
This offends Mmadjadji’s mother, who raises her pointing finger at Bontle. “This is a family matter, you shouldn’t get –”
“This is my wife. I am the closest family you can get!”
“Bontle,” Mmadjadji calms her, “please, you don’t have to. I don’t want to fight with her.” She looks at her mother and asks again, “Where he is buried?”
All she sees is dirt, mounds upon mounds. Mmadjadji had somehow expected her father to be sitting there on his grave, grinning and mocking her. But he is really dead. If he’s some god, why can’t he rise from the dead and face her?
She feels ridiculous standing there alone. It amazes her how empty she feels. Not a single tear in her eyes. No rage inside her. Nothing.
She stares at her father’s grave, waiting to feel something. Without contemplating any further, she steps onto the mound. She undoes the belt of her jeans and squats on the dirt. She takes a piss.
The warm fluid flows from her insides, forming small bubbles on the soil. She looks around the graveyard. Two white-necked ravens fly over her head. She laughs and laughs.
Shortly after Mmadjadji and her wife return to their house in Randburg, she falls ill. Bontle finds her lying on their bedroom floor, unmoving. When she shakes her, Mmadjadji lies there like stone, not talking or looking at her – she just stares at the wall. Bontle carries her to their bed and covers her with a blanket. She forces food into her mouth because Mmadjadji is not eating either. Later, a pile of vomit is discovered in a paper bag under their bed.
The following morning, while they are still in bed, Mmadjadji howls, “My legs! Bontle, my legs!”
Bontle jumps out of bed, startled to hear the sound of Mmadjadji’s voice again. “What? What about them?”
“I can’t move. I can’t feel my legs …”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I can’t feel my freaking legs!”
Bontle calls their doctor first. Next she calls her mother. “I don’t know, I don’t know how to explain it to you, Mama. She wasn’t eating or talking to me yesterday, and today she wakes up with big, swollen legs! I thought she was just overwhelmed after going back home. But now this happens. I swear, Mama, I think her evil mother has done this to her.”
Bontle’s mother arrives the following day. She finds Bontle sitting on her kitchen floor, weeping. “I can’t recognise her. Mama, my wife is gone,” she moans, dampening her mother’s skirt with her tears.
“Where is she?” her mother asks. Fingers trembling, Bontle points at their bedroom door.
When Bontle’s mother opens the door, she finds a creature with flaking skin, inflated legs and pimples all over its face. Its head is so big, it looks as if it’s stuffed dumplings into its cheeks.
Bontle’s mother doesn’t scream or run. She looks at the creature and calls, “Mmadjadji!”
Mmadjadji writhes silently on the bed. Bontle’s mother says, “I think we should take you to church. You have been bewitched.”
Bontle does what her mother’s priest tells her to do. She and her wife will no longer drink tap water; she will find a stream where two rivers meet, collect water in bottles, mix the water with salt and vinegar, then drink it. She will wear a doek on her head every single day. She will not wear any jewellery or makeup. Bontle will sprinkle salt around their house to chase evil spirits away, she will burn stones and make Mmadjadji inhale the steam. At midnight, she will gather the burnt stones together on a public road, so that someone else can pass over them and possess the ugly illness instead. Bontle will also fast. She will starve herself to death for Mmadjadji, if need be.
When Mmadjadji doesn’t get better, Bontle holds the Holy Bible in her hands and stomps her feet in their house, loudly singing hymns – in case this God her mother’s church preaches about every Sunday is somehow hard of hearing. But still, nothing changes. It’s as if all this time she’s been praying, she was just pouring water over a pile of rocks. Just pissing into a well.
After two months with Mmadjadji just getting worse, Bontle decides she must take her home, back to Bolobedu. Perhaps Mmadjadji’s mother will undo the curse. Perhaps Bontle will just strangle her until she confesses.
Bontle is shocked by what they find in Bolobedu. Mmadjadji’s mother is so thin, a breeze might engulf her body and throw her to the ground. Her skin is ashy from the waist down, and her hairs can be counted on one hand. They find her lying on a blanket in her living room, surrounded by family.
When Bontle and Mmadjadji step into the room, everyone looks up and begins to sob. A very light-skinned woman, Mmadjadji’s aunt, with big front teeth and dark gums, says to the two of them, “We have been waiting for you. Why did you take so long, my children?”
“La’reng?” Bontle asks.
“The gods ... they can’t take this bad blood between Mmadjadji and her mother. They need them to reconcile, or they both die.”
Bontle cocks her head, “What are you saying? Aren’t you people the ones bewitching my wife?”
The woman shakes her head in disgust and spits on the floor, “Do you see a witch in this room? We are not witches here. Please, don’t insult us. Your wife has been named by her grandfather, that’s what’s making her sick and looking like that. She should have come home sooner.” She looks at Bontle with sharp eyeballs and announces, “Mmadjadji has been chosen as the next god!”
Mmadjadji drops to her knees. Her chipped lips stretch when she speaks. “I will not, not after everything this family has put me through!”
Her uncle, the one who suggested years ago that they rip her belly open to remove the thing that was inside her, opens his mouth. “Please, my child, you have to. My father … the Storm God will punish us.”
“The same god who told you to kill the baby? The same god who says I can’t love another woman?”
They all look down. Her uncle murmurs, looking at his wrinkled hands, “Clearly we were wrong. The Storm God would never choose someone he believes is evil.”
Mmadjadji says, “My father was an –”
Her aunt interrupts, “Your father was not chosen by the gods. We only named him a god after your grandfather died because he was his firstborn son.”
Another aunt says, “We are ashamed of the things your father did to you. All of us here are terribly sorry. Please, my daughter, heal yourself so that you can heal your mother. Become the god you were destined to be.”
As they sit there begging her, Mmadjadji’s chipped skin starts to heal. Her bulging body resumes its original form. Her pimples ooze water, and her face becomes clear. Everyone in the room, including Bontle, watches in astonishment.
When Mmadjadji has fully transitioned, she knows she is expected to heal her mother. She looks at her mother lying there on the floor, dying. She looks at Bontle, who is beaming, loud pride written all over her cheeks.
Mmadjadji looks down at her mother again. She slowly kneels beside her and holds her thin hands. Her mother sturdily grasps her, lifts her chest and screams as if giving birth for the first time. To everyone’s wonder, bit by bit, Mmadjadji’s mother’s body returns.
Later in the evening, the sky unleashes lightning bolts like bombs, windows shatter, trees and mud-houses fall to the ground like splintering glass, dogs huddle into corners and howl in the dark, heavy rain pours to the ground as if cleansing the village, and Mmadjadji becomes the first woman in her family to become a god. They will call her the Storm Queen.