Palms joined together I greeted, hesitant from a safe distance. For a child it was an awkward routine. You got dragged to the living room every time there was a visitor. I joined my palms together tentatively, then went about twisting the curtains that divided the passageway from the living room, or stood on one leg, scratching my left ankle with my right toe until my mother perfunctorily dismissed me from the scene. As a grown woman it was still not easy, a contortion of the limbs that came gracefully to other women, perhaps, but sat uneasily on me. It was drawing attention to oneself. Further, the response could not be predicted. I wasn’t much good at the old ritual of prostrating at the feet of elders either. There was the chance, in my case, of clumsily landing at the wrong feet. Moreover, you were never sure who was old enough to merit your going on hands and knees and who wasn’t. Never had I been embraced socially though, or attempted an embrace except that once.
In my husband’s culture, people habitually put their arms around each other spontaneously, long-lost relatives, friends and born-again Christian sisters. In slow motion, on mental replay, what happened in Mamma’s courtyard was my mistake. I had broken a code, acted out of turn in a gathering of elders, as it were. It was a bit like twisting the curtains and scratching my foot in public, except more serious, given the circumstances.
Mamma needed a very good reason to come to the city. And when she came, she complained bitterly about the lights being too bright in the house and the coffee cups too small. Away from the farm and the neighbourhood chit-chat, she was restless. She would walk around the yard and give us all jobs to do: wash the bitter leaf for the soup, slice the green pawpaws and dry them in the sun, shell and sift the melon seeds, and pack all the empty bottles and plastic containers for her to take back to the village. She didn’t approve of anyone staying out late, least of all the young women in our household. A niece got told off that she was a ‘taxi without a garage’, the kind that sought the shade of any tree on the wayside.
Travelling south to the hometown was not a big deal for my husband. He routinely bought potatoes, onions and ‘bar-soap’ to distribute to the members of the extended family, and returned with yams, plantain bunches and local chickens spilling out of the trunk of his car. But to take a foreign wife and children who were neither here nor there, on a formal visit, it had to be Christmas or a family wedding.
On seeing me, the street urchins called out ‘oyinbo’ and ran after the car. It was a six-hour drive on a road that twisted itself round hilly terrain, unfurled through a teak plantation, dropped into a valley with oil palms on one side and a banana grove on the other, and came out on to flat yam country. We were reminded on every trip that my husband’s hometown and the country thereabouts produced enough yams to feed the entire continent! Sure enough, as far as the eye could see, green and succulent yam seedlings sprouted and trailed out of mounds of chocolate-brown earth. All along the road farmers sold yams, arranged in pyramids according to size. It was the king of crops in this part of the world.
A major highway stretched from the north of the country to the south, and ran right through the ‘hometown’. It seemed like a town of contented people to me, where at midday the women pounded yam in wooden mortars and the men drank freshly tapped palm-wine in open-air bars, and expected nothing from the government. And the cars, buses and lorries thundering past the colonial outpost churned up the fine red dust, splattering the whitewashed houses on either side of the highway, making the town look perpetually red.
Mamma’s house was on a little street off the highway, traditional, with a central courtyard and rooms opening into it. If you walked down a lane, on one side of the house, you could enter the courtyard directly. Over the years this had become the centre of social life for the entire extended family and for the neighbourhood as well.
Here, Mamma Ochanya on her way home from the market (a single yam stuffed in a plastic handbag balanced on her head) stopped to greet Mamma and ask if the daughter in Lagos had given birth. Children curtsied and called out a greeting as they rushed past Mamma’s courtyard. The village hairdresser, a thin, gaunt woman with her dyes in a basket, wheeled her bicycle past Mamma’s courtyard and stopped to ask if Mamma needed ‘retouching’. It was here that the village letter-writer had read my husband’s letter from overseas, my photograph had been passed around and, amidst muted half tones and whispers, the idea of an oyinbo wife had become a reality.
Mamma’s bedroom (which also housed a dysfunctional deep freezer and stacks of enamel containers) opened out into the courtyard. Mamma sat at the doorway of her bedroom on a low stool, facing the general entrance. Nothing escaped her eye from this vantage point. Chickens scratched amid the yams, and cassava tubers piled in a corner of the courtyard. Was it on that trip that two women were cleaning out fish in huge enamel basins? With the flick of nimble fingers fish guts spilled out—the sliced fish was washed, piece by piece, with great economy, in the water in the basin and flung into a basket nearby. Beside the covered well in the courtyard, a young cousin sat rinsing dishes in a tub. Another pounded dried okra and herbs in a little wooden mortar. Over our heads a clothesline dangled with wrappers and children’s underwear.
This courtyard echoes with women’s wails as I recall a young brother’s tragic death in a motor accident. Wrappers hitched up and hair bundled in nylon scarves, the women at first sat motionless with their backs to the wall, each nursing a private sorrow. Every now and then they went out into the street to blow their noses, before changing places. Then they wept, sang and sermonized in turn, while others fetched water from the well, cooked, cleaned and served the guests. The family remained an inner circle hushed in their grief. We slept on mats in the courtyard that night, guests and family huddled together under the cold and pale stars. The church choir sang and danced; their bodies moved like lightning in the subdued light of the courtyard. Mamma Onyebe, the soothsayer, sat up in the middle of the night, wrestling with spirits in a hoary prophecy of death. There were stirs and murmurs. Her chant grew louder as one by one the women sat up on their mats, misty figures rocking back and forth muttering the name of Jesus. At daybreak, all ghostly presence dispelled, they gathered in groups fondling babies and reminiscing over previous calamities, their pain blunted by the passage of time.
They seemed an impenetrable wall in the courtyard, strong and resilient, vacillating between idle gossip and homegrown comfort. The Prayer Warriors from the Pentecostal church down the road had taken it upon themselves to use every occasion available for spiritual reinforcement.
‘It is like this,’ said Aunt Eya. ‘When you get on the bus, some people get off at Ikeja, some at Apapa, some at Illupeju. The boy had reached his destination and he got off. If you stay on the bus beyond your destination, there is problem. I hope you get me …,’ she trailed off.
Another elderly visitor said, ‘Sister, I think it’s that name you gave your child—Funso, give me for safekeeping—that is the problem. Now, the owner has asked for his property back, who are you to say no? That name …’ And she clicked her tongue.
The place came alive the day of Brother Anthony’s wedding. Trays of pounded yam and egusi soup went to and fro, to visitors who sat on wooden benches, stools and bamboo recliners all over the courtyard. The music was loud and children chased each other, ducking in between the food carriers. Mamma made sure there was a big barrel of kunnu full to the brim, in the corner of the courtyard. She personally supervised its dispensation, as plastic mugs were dipped into the barrel and jugs refilled for wedding guests.
Patience, my ‘co-wife’, considers herself something of an alien as well, coming from the eastern part of the country. In her aso oke, heavy as a blanket, and stiffly starched head-tie, she herded her children into one of the bedrooms and forced pounded yam into them. She warned them that the wedding would take hours. ‘No food there, O!’ she said, rolling her eyeballs. Everyone had to be fortified before the church wedding. Patience is the kind who would swear by the Maggi bouillon cube—her soup would not be complete without it. And then this monosodium glutamate had come into the market, wrapped in cellophane and called White Maggi, or Ajinomoto.
‘For cleaning bathrooms,’ Patience declared. She wasn’t going to touch it. She had been part of this family longer than I have, and was in the habit of soliciting privileged information from dubious sources.
My sisters-in-law looked gorgeous in white lace with orange and gold head-ties and aso oke shoulder pieces to match. It was obvious from the way they strutted about that they wanted to be set apart as the ‘family’.
‘See the uniform?’ Patience nudged me with her elbow. ‘They didn’t tell you and me about it, did they?’
A big-bosomed niece walked past, swinging her hips.
‘Three months pregnant, they say,’ Patience commented, and then changed the story to the parable about casting the first stone.
‘See that woman in blue?’ Patience continued to gripe. ‘That is Brother Solomon’s girlfriend. Married man! Hmm … you won’t believe it! They say he paid to train her.’ (Train her in what? Being a monkey in the zoo?)
She grabbed me by the wrist in the courtyard and dragged me into one of the bedrooms—there was going to be trouble at the wedding, she said, haggling over the bride price. ‘You and I,’ she breathed a sigh of relief, ‘are out of it. We’ll just be watching.’
Mamma’s voice in the courtyard sent us scurrying towards the backyard. There the cooking stones had been arranged and a wood fire was blazing. I took over the frying of the fish. I had never cooked over a wood stove before; the smoke filled my eyes and hair. Sister Agnes had come to the wedding with her Lagos friends, a bunch of army wives with permed hair, imported handbags and shoes with platform heels. They decided to make a salad, which seemed like something they could manage. They diced and chopped a mountain of lettuce, carrots and cucumbers, which would, at the end of the day, have Heinz mayonnaise poured over and blended.
Everything was done without anyone taking charge of the whole operation; the menu seemed to emerge as we boiled, fried and stewed. No one gave orders, but comments were made with varying degrees of authority. ‘Too many cucumbers,’ said Patience, whisking past. ‘Is there salt in the fish?’ asked one of the Lagos ladies through the fish haze, and followed it with ‘Don’t “turn” the fish in the oil. Just leave it to go dry, or it will break up.’
Before long, putting their salad effort aside, the army wives retired to a corner of the courtyard for their tea break, with Tetley teabags and Carnation milk which they produced from their handbags.
I remember now—it was neither a wedding, nor a funeral, or Christmas, that time. We had just returned to the country after two years in Europe and were duty-bound to visit the hometown. The potholes on the highway were worse than before. Purple watercolour mountains loomed in the distance. The yam heaps were there, but fewer, the oil palms and banana groves stood laden with fruit as we had left them. But all along the road, at every village, people had arranged in the place of yams bundles of firewood, ready to be sold. How long would it be before the encroaching desert reached Mamma’s hometown?
We arrived in that little red town, hot and tired. Cars heaved, sighed and spluttered down the streets of the red town, spewing thick black smoke from the exhaust. A gaily painted truck trundled past bearing the sign ‘No Brain is Idle’. Coming from the land of overfed people, everything looked old and worn, dogs and cats, lean and emaciated. The butterflies in my stomach started flitting madly as we passed the Community Bank, the post office with its paint peeled off and the railway crossing, and headed for Mamma’s house. All along the street, it seemed people sawed off trees wherever they found them and whenever they were in need of firewood. Tender shoots grew out of the amputated limbs of dogon yaro trees.
I tried to recall the traditional greeting, the clan-title by which Mamma had to be addressed, the genuflection, the stock responses. I would have to reacquaint myself with life in the hometown beyond wearing it as a cameo brooch, reflecting myriad colours from afar. Would there be running water in the taps? Coffee?
As we turned into the narrow street I could see children rushing in to announce our arrival. ‘Oyinbo oyoyo,’ they shouted in unison. Mamma, who was on her usual seat in the courtyard, stood up and made her way to the entrance in a stately dance, singing praises to God and clapping. The women around her clapped as well, and joined in the chorus. There was an air of expectancy, a knot at the base of my stomach.
Unknowingly, I entered the courtyard first. Mamma looked much older than when we had left her. Without giving it a thought, I went up with my arms outstretched to embrace her.
She continued the dance movements, elbows bent, feet moving to an internal rhythm, but it was as if she didn’t see me. As if I didn’t exist. Her eyes were fixed in ecstasy, their gaze went past me to her son and grandchildren coming after me. I had barely touched her when, with one strong elbow, following the rhythms of the dance, she forcefully shoved me aside. Still dancing, she went up and embraced her son and grandchildren, one by one. There was laughter and joy of reunion. So many voices in breathless spasms—‘My! How he has grown!’ ‘Do you still remember our language?’ ‘Doesn’t he look exactly like his father?’
When she finally turned to come towards me, I cowered and froze at her touch. My head reeled in the midst of alien voices, gestures and unfamiliar faces. Their resonance reached me deep within a cavern.
It all happened so quickly, so naturally. The message was conveyed to me, quick and sharp, a message I was not to forget for life. The festivities in the courtyard had only just begun.
The following stories in this collection have previously been published:
‘The White Rooster,’ Kunapipi 14:3, 1992.
‘Golden Opportunities,’ Kunapipi 16:1, 1994.
‘Survivor,’ Stand, 38:1, 1996.
‘Exile’, The Picador Book of African Stories, ed. Stephen Gray (London, Picador: 2000).
‘Blessing in Disguise’, The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad 18:3, Summer 2000.
‘Jaded Appetites’, Beyond Gold and Other Stories, ed. David Ker (Makurdi: 2002).