Kachi A. Ozumba
A baby boy. A baby boy at last. At long last.
Seated on my bed in the sparsely furnished hospital room, I gazed on my baby with such intense emotion, such intense love. My womb still ached from the labour of the previous day. But it was the sweet dull ache of relief, of accomplishment. I have not disappointed my husband. All those years that he stood by me, resisting the pressure to take a second wife or to send me packing. I closed my eyes in a heartfelt prayer of thanks.
For more than six years I had laboured to bear a son. Ozoemena, my husband, having lost his brothers to the Biafran war, was the only surviving son of his parents. He was therefore seen as bearing the responsibility for the continuation of his lineage. My mother-in-law had impressed this well on me before our marriage.
The door to my room swung open after a gentle knock. My husband and our four daughters bustled in. The youngest was almost three years old, while the oldest was six and a half. They were accompanied by their favourite uncle, Okwudili.
‘Mummy, good morning,’ they chorused, rushing towards my bed.
‘Mummy, where’s baby? Daddy said you have brought him out from your tummy,’ said the youngest, as I caressed her fat cheeks. She quickly noticed that her sisters had crowded round an object in the room and rushed to join them. ‘Let me see, let me seeee…’ she cried, tugging at her sisters.
Her uncle had to lift her in his arms before she could see the baby lying quietly and staring with blank eyes in the old metal cot.
I gazed at my daughters and smiled languidly. Each of them represented a milestone in my long search for a male child. And each of their native names told a story. Six months into our marriage we had been blessed with a baby girl. My husband, since he returned from his prolonged period of study in Britain, had built for himself a reputation as a deviant where native customs were concerned. So no one had raised an eyebrow when, instead of taking his first child to his parents for christening, he had insisted we christened her ourselves. Furthermore, being a believer in gender equality, he had stated that I had even more right than he did to name our child, since I was the one that bore her in my womb and delivered her. Nevertheless I asked him to name our first child. He called her Margaret.
‘A beautiful name for a beautiful girl,’ he had said, smiling.
I do not like Western names. I feel they are largely arbitrary and meaningless. My in-laws had been rather disappointed that our first child turned out to be a girl. So, as a second name, I called her Nwanyibuife, which means ‘A girl is something of worth’.
Two years later, I gave birth to another girl. It was then that the pressures from my in-laws really began. My husband tried to placate them, telling them about the X and Y chromosomes, and explaining that the man played a vital role in determining the sex of a child. But they said he had allowed himself to be brainwashed by the white man’s sophistry, and cursed the day he left for the white man’s land to read away his common sense. They insinuated that my womb was filled with girls alone. It was painful. I had answered them by christening the girl Chinenyenwa, which means ‘It is the Lord who gives children’.
Chinenyenwa was soon weaned and I became pregnant again. When my mother-in-law learned about my condition, she sent Aunty Eliza, her husband’s cousin, to me on a special mission. Aunty Eliza was a retired nurse; good-natured, she was the kind of person who got along with everyone. We were quite close, and it was often said in our extended family that she was the only one to whom I listened.
She had knocked on our door one foggy morning, clutching a market bag. My husband had already left for work, so I was alone in the house with Margaret and Chinenyenwa, who had just started to crawl. We sat in the parlour, chatting, while she kept reaching into the bag, retrieving different native condiments and delicacies, some of which were deemed especially good for pregnant women. The smells soon mixed and swirled around in the room, reminding me of my mother-in-law’s kitchen in the village.
The last item Aunty Eliza produced from the bag was a green schnapps bottle. The bottle was corked with dried grass.
‘You know what this is?’ she had asked, holding the bottle up for my inspection.
‘Is it not palm oil?’ I said.
The contents of the bottle were just as dark and thick as palm oil. Moreover, such green schnapps bottles were the favourite choice of palm oil sellers for bottling their product.
She shook her head. ‘This is a medicine from Ezenwanyi Dibia. I’m sure you have heard of her, the greatest midwife and herbalist in the whole of Igboland.’
I nodded.
‘You should take it every day – two spoonfuls in the morning and two at night – and you can be sure that the baby forming in your womb will be male. Like you, my friend Mama Ejima had problems having a male child, but after taking this medicine she delivered twins, both male, and her husband slaughtered a goat in her honour.’
‘Thank you, Aunty,’ I had said, as she handed me the bottle. I did not know what else to say, I felt so confused. I pulled out the grass cork, took a whiff of the contents and was thrown into a fit of sneezing.
‘You see how strong it is?’
I nodded, wiping the tears from my eyes and sneezing some more.
‘Yes, we women have our ways too,’ she continued. ‘In some matters we should trust our mothers and do things the way they did. Let me tell you something, my daughter. Your husband is a man, a very good man. But like every other man, deep down in his heart, he wants a son. He may smile, laugh and talk now as if he does not mind having only girls. But believe me, my daughter, he won’t be able to hold his smile on for much longer if you continue to give him only girls. Don’t fail to take this medicine. He doesn’t have to know about it.’
That night when I told my husband what had transpired between his aunt and myself, he laughed heartily. His laughter was infectious and soon I was laughing with him. But my gaze never left his mouth.
‘If my mother asks, tell her you drank it all to the last drop, to the very last drop,’ he had said, holding the green bottle, inverted, over the toilet to ensure no drop was left in it.
A few months later I gave birth to a baby girl. I could not help wondering if Ezenwanyi’s medicine would have made any difference. I pushed the thought out of my mind and called our new daughter Chimamanda, ‘My Lord will not fail (me)’. My husband had taken one look at her ebony colour – our other children had taken after my lighter skin – and said, ‘This one is Junior, Ozoemena Junior. Who says a girl can’t bear her father’s name, especially when it’s a unisex name?’
That became her first name. Although I was happy with my husband’s wholehearted acceptance of our new baby girl, a cynical part of my mind hoped he was not sending me a subtle message, for the name Ozoemena means ‘May it not happen again’.
That night, I had a dream in which I saw my parents-in-law standing in a field littered with guns and corpses. They were both staring lovingly at the baby boy cradled in my mother-in-law’s arms. Their gaze moved from the baby to the corpses before them, then swung up to the skies as they called out with earnest, begging voices, ‘Ozoemena.’
Then they disappeared and my husband materialized. He was holding our new daughter in the crook of his left arm and wagging the index finger of his right hand at me: ‘Ozoemena.’
When it was morning, I told my husband about my dream. He shook his head sadly. ‘Don’t allow yourself to become paranoid about this whole thing,’ he had said, and smiled to reassure me.
I just kept staring at his lips.
When I conceived for the fourth time, my mother-in-law had left the village to take up residence with us in the city. As she watched my stomach swelling, she found subtle ways to remind me of my obligation to produce an heir for her son. She would launch into disturbing tales of what happened in cases where one woman or the other proved incapable of doing just that.
‘Eziokwu,’ she would usually begin, affirming the veracity of the tale she was about to relate, ‘our neighbour in the village, Papa Obi, accompanied by other elders in his clan, took a stout-hipped maiden to his son in the city. They sat him and his wife down and said, “Our son, this is your second wife. Her name is Nkobuna. We have fulfilled all the customs and married her for you. All you have to do is show her you are your father’s son. Your father fathered seven strong sons, and the offspring of a lion cannot be a grass-eater.” ’
After each tale, she would laugh with a toothy grin and clap her hands thrice, like bantering market women. Then, still showing me her teeth, she would launch into another tale, pushing her message down my throat the way I pushed bitter pills, buried in balls of garri, down Margaret’s throat whenever she had malaria.
An agonizing disappointment was born with the birth of our fourth girl. My husband called her Barbara, and her first name was my cry born of desperation to the Lord: ‘Chitiogwa, “The Lord grant us variety”.’
It must have been in answer to that cry that we were granted this – our baby boy.
‘Mummy, what’s baby’s name?’ Margaret suddenly asked, staring at me with my eyes.
‘Mummy, let his name be Rotimi, eh?’ Chinenyenwa suggested. ‘My friend in school, his name is Rotimi.’
‘No. If you call him Rotimi he will have big teeth like Uncle Rotimi, my music teacher,’ Margaret said, and pushed out her upper teeth like a squirrel.
‘But my friend Rotimi does not have big teeth.’
‘That’s because he’s still small. When he grows big like Uncle Rotimi he will have big teeth.’
They chattered on, arguing over the baby’s name. Junior watched them quietly, thumb in mouth, while Chitiogwa still nestled in her uncle’s arms. Soon their uncle took them out to buy them ice cream.
My husband came to my bedside. He stooped and planted a breezy kiss on my cheek. I felt the reassuring tickle of his moustache and the metallic touch of his spectacles. He straightened up and turned towards the baby.
‘Darling, I hope I didn’t take too long?’ he asked, bending over the cot. ‘And how are you this morning?’
Ever since he had set eyes on our new baby, he had been acting like an infatuated teenager. He had insisted on spending the night in the hospital in order to attend to the baby whenever he awoke at night while I was resting. He had even missed his favourite sitcom, Happy Times, although there was a television in the room. He would sit for long spells of time gazing at the baby, then, occasionally, his hand would reach out to touch him – as if to reassure himself that this was no mirage. It was a very reluctant father who left the hospital in the morning to go and fetch our daughters.
I studied my husband. He was staring at the baby with that dreamy look in his eyes again. I wondered if at that moment I still existed in his consciousness. I decided to intrude upon his thoughts.
‘Hmm, I’m sure you would not have been acting this way if it had been another girl,’ I teased.
‘But, darling,’ he protested, turning to face me with an aggrieved expression, ‘I’ve told you time and again that I don’t really mind the sex of our children. Even if it had been another girl I would still have been as happy. A home of girls can be fun… and profitable too,’ he added, trying to make a joke. ‘You know, Mr Nwakaego is planning to replace his rickety Peugeot 504 car with all the money he’ll collect as bride price on the heads of his six daughters.’
I smiled. ‘But you never did a third of all you’re doing now when our daughters were born. Do you remember that when Chitiogwa was born you left me with the baby all night in the hospital, saying you had to look after our girls at home?’
‘But then there was no uncle around to stand in for me at home. Look, darling, let’s not waste words on such matters, let’s talk of more important things… like the name of our son.’
He stared at me as if expecting a response. I said nothing, so he continued. ‘I have the perfect first name for him,’ he said, beaming at me. ‘A name made in heaven for him.’
‘What’s the name?’ I asked.
‘Churchill,’ he said. ‘Churrrr-chillll,’ he repeated slowly, as if savouring the taste of the name on his lips.
‘I don’t like the name. It just doesn’t sound well in my ears and doesn’t sit well in my heart. Besides, why should our first son bear an English name as his first name? How many English children bear Igbo names?’ I queried.
‘Darling, you should not be so racist about these things. The world is becoming a global village and racial barriers are fast thinning out. I have always admired Winston Churchill and would like our son to be inspired by his greatness,’ he explained.
‘I really don’t like the name for a first name,’ I repeated, shaking my head.
My husband became silent. I could see I had hurt his feelings. His voice was quite cool when he asked, ‘All right, what name do you suggest?’
‘Darling, can’t we call him Adimungupu?’ I asked, trying to sound conciliatory. The name means ‘I am not excluded (from the ranks of male-children bearers)’.
‘Oh, so the child’s name should just reflect your new status, eh? Don’t you think…’
My husband went no further. The door burst open. My mother-in-law, buxom and fat, waddled in. Her feet, in their rubber slippers, were still brown with village dust. The old blue ogodo of their local church’s women’s guild which she had on oozed the stale sweaty smell of a long journey. Behind her, leaning on a cane, was my father-in-law. He was tall, wizened and thin – a much older version of my husband. For a man who had retired from the civil service twelve years previously, he was still very strong. Apparently they had set out on the journey upon receiving the news, which my husband had sent them just the evening before.
‘Ah! Papa, Mama, what a pleasant surprise,’ my husband exclaimed. ‘You got here so fast. You must have taken a jet from the village.’
My husband hugged his parents. I pushed myself up from the bed and joined in the greetings. My in-laws were brusque in their response. It seemed they could not wait to brush us aside and head straight for the cot.
‘Ewooooo! Ozo-nwam,’ cried my mother-in-law, calling her son by his pet name and lifting the baby in her arms. ‘This is you all over again. My daughter, you have done well,’ she added, casting a glance my way.
My father-in-law ran his tongue over his lips. It was a slow movement and seemed more like that of a man licking palm wine from his lips than that of one moistening harmattan-cracked lips. He took the baby from his wife.
‘At last,’ he muttered. ‘At long last.’ He held the baby up and stared long at him, the way he must have stared at my husband when he was born, after the demise of his brothers. His eyes brimmed with tears. He turned to his wife and said in a quivering voice, ‘Now I can sing like Simeon: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace…” ’ He broke into a rusty version of the Nunc Dimittis, flashing a set of teeth still kept in good condition by his son’s regular care.
He stopped as suddenly as he started, handed the baby to his wife and reached for the raffia bag still hanging from his left shoulder. He retrieved a small bottle of kai-kai, the exceedingly strong, locally brewed gin used in traditional ceremonies. He unscrewed the cap on the bottle. The heady smell began to spread faintly through the room.
Holding the opened bottle in one hand, he poured a libation of thanks to his ancestors, praying his joy into every drop that he spilled for them on the hard terrazzo of the hospital floor. He then wet his fingers with the gin, placed them gently on the baby’s head and pronounced, ‘Afamefuna Amamechina, welcome.’
Afamefuna means ‘May my name not be lost’, while Amamechina means ‘May my lineage not come to an end’.
The pronouncement jolted my husband back to life from the spell of watching what looked like the carefully plotted script of his parents. He was quickly beside his father, protesting, ‘But, Dad, we already have names…’
‘Shut your mouth,’ his father cut in angrily. ‘You think this is going to be like the other cases, in which you named my grandchildren without even consulting me? I just did not bother because, after all, they are girls who will soon grow up, marry and bear their husbands’ names. Now, if you think I would also fold my arms and watch you do the same with my first grandson, then you are greatly mistaken. I have pronounced his names. It is sealed with God and our ancestors. You know better than to refuse to accept them. The son who tries to wrestle with his father gets blinded by his father’s loincloth!’
My husband shook his head at his father. But I could see in his eyes that he was struggling with his doubts.
His father stormed out of the room.
My mother-in-law handed the baby to me and ran after her husband, slamming the door in her haste. The baby, startled by the sound, stirred and blinked. Then his tiny eyes squeezed shut as his cry pierced the silence of the room like an alarm bell.
‘Afamefuna Amamechina, keep quiet,’ my husband muttered, and puckered his lips.