We sat on steel chairs at the outdoor village-wedding and ate crunchy garden-eggs dipped in peanut paste. It was delicious and we were starving. Here were the working and making of tradition.
After we, in our wedding gear, were ceremoniously seated we were dislodged and asked to make our entry, accompanied by the traditional drummers and video cameras. The sixty-year-old chief, my husband of thirty-three years and the man of the day, was in his element. His coral beads swayed, his pot-belly bounced, he undid and retied the knot on his pyjama cords, and with great dignity took giant strides into the bride’s compound. His best man was a wispy little chief in a copper sulphate blue agbada and a red cap, who had to take several mincing steps to keep up with the bridegroom. We sat ourselves down again on the steel chairs. The compound was full of people, sitting, standing and spilling out of windows and verandas.
‘Give us the fags,’ I said to Jean and lit up no sooner had we sat down. Jean looked uncertain of her role on this occasion. What do you call a friend of the first wife—prop, staff, hand-holder, fellow-sufferer? The palm trees towered over us. In the clearing, canopies had been erected. Under one of the shelters, the Jesus Power Band from the local Catholic church had set up shop. A suave young man in tight pants convulsed holding the microphone. His female companions swung their backsides in unison as they sang Christian lyrics set to pop tunes. The sheer volume of the music radiated heat. Sweat dripped down our faces, necks and legs. I spotted a stack of plastic souvenir plates nearby and picked one up to fan myself with.
The chiefs in a canopy across from us began making the speeches, addressing the bridegroom with all his titles, honorary and earned—engineer, doctor, chief—his latest accomplishment being the taking on of a second wife. Kola nuts and money changed hands. The man with the video camera on his shoulder zoomed in on us and said, pointing the microphone towards me, ‘How do you find all this … the traditional wedding?’
‘Very interesting,’ I said with perfect innocence, sounding completely uninvolved. More peanut paste and garden eggs passed by us in trays within our reach. We dug into them and opened up our bottles of warm beer. The women in the shelters across from us looked aghast.
In the expatriate café in town, the women had been hysterical. Home-made jam and marmalade in glass jars sat on the shelves, and pasta in cellophane packs. Enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke, they were raucous in their disapproval.
‘The man is wicked,’ Ellen began, foaming at the mouth, ‘It is a breach of contract.’
‘It is quite disgusting,’ Regina added, ‘I’ll strangle him if I see him and hand him over to the police.’
‘If only we knew then, what we know now …,’ said Sarah, implying that it was all a question of wisdom and the acquiring of it. Except that one always became wiser when it was too late.
‘My Vincent is an exception,’ said Eugenia, ‘but if he ever did something like this, it would kill me.’
‘You’ll see this as a blessing in disguise. Time to leave and go back to where you belong.’
‘This has taught us all a lesson. We have to be prepared.’
‘You can prepare nothing. You’ll be like the proverbial donkey going from one haystack to the next and eating nothing—starved.’
The MC announced over the microphone that Blessing, or Chika the young bride, would now make her appearance. I adjusted the aso oke on my sweaty shoulder and lit up another cigarette. Lace and beads, gold and silver threads, and mirrors crackled in the heat of noon as Blessing emerged from the interior of the house, followed by eight bridesmaids in orange wrappers and blouses with butterfly sleeves, their skinny feet in enormous platform shoes kicking the dust. They were like a band of Amazons out on a rampage.
‘She doesn’t look happy,’ Jean commented.
Blessing was tall and lanky, of dull complexion (yellow, as the Igbos say), gap-toothed, with a hoarse, cracked voice. Not a bluebell from the woodland shade, I concluded. Apart from her dazzling accoutrements, she had worn no make up, and her eyes looked weary with sleep. If it weren’t for the fact that she led the band of Amazons, we surely wouldn’t have known she was the bride. Where a bridal radiance should have been, there was fatigue. Her jerry-coiled hair hung untidily about her temples, crowned by a jewel-encrusted head-tie elaborately fanned out behind her head. Blessing looked like she had brewed the beer, tapped the palm wine and cooked the wedding feast before climbing into her outfit.
‘Thank God it’s happening now when I’m alive and kicking and not later when I might be decrepit and hobbling along,’ I said. ‘He would have left me in a corner and got on with it.’
‘Do you think she’s pregnant?’ Jean asked, sizing up Blessing.
‘It wouldn’t surprise me—she’d be out of the door if there is no bouncing baby boy in no less than nine months.’
Blessing led the band of clodhoppers to the oldest chief in the gathering. He welcomed her, uttered a long-winded Igbo prayer entreating God to give her ten sons and an equal number of daughters, poured wine into a carved wooden goblet and offered it to her. Cup in hand, Blessing and her giggling train were off again, dancing their way through the crowd to the accompaniment of frenzied drums.
In the meanwhile, Benson, the chief, my husband and Blessing’s bridegroom looked preoccupied with the impending weight of two families on his shoulders. He clutched his plastic bag of money, gave instructions, accepted felicitations and reluctantly counted out money whenever it was asked for.
At fifty-two, I am at the age when one is free of the menace of being a women—I’ve arrived at menopause. It is also as if with a double click of a computer mouse, I’ve faded into a kind of neuter gender. This is not the age for competition, says my husband, stripping me further of all womanly emotions, trying to convince me of the demands of tradition. This was not the outcome of a relationship; this was an arrangement, a way out of a sticky situation. We are marrying a wife, he says, you and me. He makes it sound like buying a deep freezer, another joint venture. He says I look tired and worried constantly. This is the age for bags under one’s eyes, and of insomnia.
The drumming had put Blessing in the mood. The bride now ‘searched’ for her husband-to-be amidst the crowd, her bridal train in orange, clapping after her. Her friends cheered, the relatives teased, the dancing got more ecstatic and the drummers, delirious. The church band raised its volume and joined in the mayhem. Jean and I fanned ourselves frantically with anything we could lay our hands on—wedding programmes, souvenir almanacs. The mock search drew to a climax with Blessing finding her suitor-chief stifling a yawn and counting his money.
Smiling at us shyly, she knelt at the chief’s feet and offered him the cup. Benson took a hasty sip, distractedly, ensuring at the same time that the goat had been tethered securely and the trunk of clothes for the bride brought in from the car. Blessing drank from the cup demurely and offered it to him again. The four mutual sips from the same cup sealed their bond as husband and wife. She and I had now become co-wives, co-conspirators in the game. Jean and I nudged each other.
Geraniums have grown in my baby-bottle sterilizing unit. The children have long since left home for distant lands. What I have ahead of me is not companionship as I know it but a sweet domestic picture of a threesome in front of the fireplace.
The souvenir almanacs were distributed to the wedding guests. In it, my husband the chief sits in an armchair in his lace agbada and gold-embroidered cap, shoulders slumped, coral beads about his neck. Can’t wait to get this thing done with and have the almanac out of the way. Blessing on the other hand looks resplendent. It is her first marriage after all. The same butterfly head-tie, organza blouse that exaggerates her shape and size, and lace wrapper. One hand is on her hip and the other thrown around Benson’s shoulder as she bends down in full ownership of the man. A picture for two, a composition that excludes me.
My fractured memories spill out of golden notebooks. Dead people cease to have ever existed in my husband’s culture. As a child, he said, he and his siblings went through the photograph album and put huge check marks on the faces of dead people. Sometimes they wrote RIP on their faces. None of them knew what RIP stood for except that they had seen it on the tombstones of missionaries.
Benson—the name for a poor-quality wrist-watch in some Third World country. His betrayal is couched in language that defies doubt or argument. The sincerity of his intentions could never be called into question. The family feud over landed property could only be resolved by marrying an Igbo wife, a pawn who could be used to secure his heritage. ‘If I had any other way of dealing with the circumstances, I would,’ was his refrain. Testing the mood of the moment, he would sometimes add, ‘It is war—I can’t fight the battle alone.’
My heart flutters with unknown, unnamed anxieties, halfway between resistance and guilt. The Igbo women in the neighbourhood tell me what they think I want to hear. ‘Madam, just give her six months. He is going to dump her. She will look hungry and lean, and then it is you he will come for.’ It is the same Igbo women who scrambled into the bus that had been hired to take the townspeople to the village after the wedding.
‘He doesn’t love this woman, you should know that,’ consoled my lawyer. ‘It is purely a question of status. It is expected of him, and he is not in the wrong. Ask anyone and they will tell you.’ After thirty-three years of marriage, I don’t need sugar syrup to hide the bitterness of the pill. The voices from the subterranean depths within me have never failed me.
Fingers plunged into pounded yam and egusi soup. Everyone was amply fed and then the chief’s wedding presents were displayed in the centre of the compound. Crates of mineral drinks, cartons of beer, several heads of fine tobacco, a mound of yam tubers, a goat, a trunk full of wrappers, shoes and underwear. The crowds gasped; Blessing cheered. Benson’s generosity, unknown during the three decades of our married life, received a public airing.
Next, it was dancing-time. The newly married couple got up to dance as the drummers moved closer and the money ‘spraying’ began. Blessing dug the naira notes into the dust with the heels of her shiny black shoes as she danced. This was the part she enjoyed most. With youthful gaiety, she tilted her backside provocatively in my direction and danced. The head-tie tumbled into the dust and had to be picked up and rammed back on her head. As the chief, Benson carried himself sedately and danced with caution. The women fluttering about like giant moths in lace, brocade and gem-studded organza wrappers landed in the middle of the dancing arena. Unmindful of the elderly aunt with the jute bag, scrambling on all fours for the naira notes, between painted toenails, they danced. Every joint vibrated, every body part moved separately and in unison, according to the dictates of the rhythm. Arms akimbo they shook; their bosoms trembled. It was as if they were in a trance. The men applauded.
After a decent interval I got up to join my partners in marriage in this celebratory dance. The musicians struck up a new rhythm on seeing me, and the video cameras edged closer. But within minutes I was shoved this way and that by the money-sprayers and money-gatherers who were trying to get closer to the newly married couple, and I retired exasperated to my seat.
‘Drat!’ I fumed, lighting a cigarette, ‘Did you see that?’
Benson, looking over his shoulder, caught my eye and seeing the expression on my face, beckoned to me to join him and Blessing once more. When I went up again, fag in hand, he put one arm over my shoulder, another on Blessing’s and danced gleefully. His joy was complete.
‘He planned this a long time ago,’ I shouted above the noise to Jean. ‘He is going to pay for it!’
Try as I did, it was impossible for me to imagine Benson, a British-trained engineer, and eighteen-year-old Blessing, barely out of school, sitting down and starting life together as man and wife. But then, maybe people don’t sit down together to start anything anymore. They just get on with it. What makes us more qualified to be wives than the Blessings of the world? Love, Proposal, Acceptance, Registry Office Wedding, and a Piece of Paper, precisely in that order? Here was another set of rituals that made perfect sense to the people of this village and gave Blessing the legitimacy of a wife.
I announce to the expatriate club of like-minded women that I was leaving.
‘I should have done this a long time ago,’ moans Helen. ‘I sit like a Wedgwood ornament on the top shelf, gathering dust … Things go on around me, but I am not consulted about anything.’
I tell them it’s a new beginning. I talk about living for myself—I’ll go to the cinema, I say, the theatre, there will be water in the taps, no electricity cuts, I toss in a Caribbean cruise for effect. It is hard to work up an enthusiasm for a life you haven’t opted for but has been quite suddenly thrust upon you.
I grope for a lifeline. The younger women in the club see me as their hero, throwing it all in, and bravely venturing out into God knows where. The mercenary among them are shocked that I am leaving this country as I had entered the world—with a ‘naked bottom’ in Russian parlance. It’s not so much the man’s betrayal, but the fact that I allowed myself to be cheated out of a life, without pulling the rug from under his feet first. Benson, who does the laundry? Two sets of clothes pegs?
Never do anything without putting up a fight first, an old aunt in the village had advised me with deep intuition. The men appreciated fighting women who claimed their rightful place, as Wife Number One, Wife Number Two, Wife Dispossessed, whatever, who articulated their grievances in colourful, poetic abuse.
But at fifty-two, I am spent, while Benson has gotten himself a new lease of life. This is the age for the loosening of bonds and whittling down to the core … not a time to make new enemies as Voltaire said on his deathbed when asked if he would accept Christ and denounce the devil.