The masquerade has moved into the arena. You will be flogged if you remain. Your ears will be filled with news if you run away.
We have a saying back home: Ịchụrụ chi ya aka mgba. One does not challenge their chi to a wrestling match. It feels as if that’s what I’ve been doing for years now, wrestling as if it could end in anything other than my loss. But it’s a relief to finally be thrown, to lie with my back on the sand, alive and out of breath. You can see the sky properly this way. Besides, the sand is my mother and no one can run from her. They say that she can find you as long as your feet are touching the earth, and once she does, the earth can split open like a pod and just swallow you up. There’s a story about a man called Alụ who tried to escape her by jumping from tree to tree like a monkey. He lived like that for years, floating in the treetops, and when Ala couldn’t find him, she haunted the whole forest. His name became the word for taboo, and all taboos are committed against her. Gods really do take things personally.
I wish I could say that after Lẹshi, I became an obedient child who listened to my first mother and walked with my brothersisters, but I was too stubborn and I was still afraid. I know how mad it sounds to call yourself a god. Believe me, I fought it at first. Let me ask questions, I thought, and so I ended up in a restaurant in Lagos speaking to an Igbo man, a historian. When I told him about my others and my name and my first mother, he leaned over.
“I cannot talk to you about these things in an air-conditioned restaurant in Lagos,” he said. “You understand? But you are on the right path. This journey is the right thing to do.”
It should have been reassuring, but it only terrified me further. I wanted to stop there, but I couldn’t, because this was my life, you understand? No matter how mad it sounded, the things that were happening in my head were real and had been happening for a very long time. After all the doctors and the diagnoses and the hospitals, this thing of being an ọgbanje, a child of Ala—that was the only path that brought me any peace. So yes, I was terrified, but I went back to talk to the historian again.
“The name that was given to you has many connotations, you hear?” He wore glasses and spoke in a rush of words. “The python’s egg means a precious child. A child of the gods, or the deity themself. The experiences you’ve had suggest that there is a spiritual connection, which you need to go and learn about. Your journey will not be complete until you do that.” He leaned back and folded his arms. “There is nothing more anybody can tell you. It’s important for you to understand your place on this earth.”
Sometimes, you recognize truth because it destroys you for a bit. I fell apart that night, crying uncontrollably, throwing my phone against a wall and hyperventilating until everything around me started to fade. I was at a lover’s house, the painter, and he put his arm around me, holding me up.
“Stay with me,” he said urgently. “Stay with me, Ada.”
I was gone, inside my head, and I turned to my others. What does he mean, I asked. I’m not going anywhere.
They frowned. We’re not sure. Even if you faint, you’ll wake up.
“Stay with me, please,” he begged.
He doesn’t know what to do, I told them, and they nodded.
Something has to be done, they said. Pick one of us.
I looked at them and it was the same as looking at myself. Asụghara, I said. She was older now, less brutal but still efficient. When she stepped forward, I stopped crying.
“I need to call my mother,” she said, using my mouth. I was already learning what this new balance could feel like, where I controlled how we moved. More and more, I realized how useless it had been to try and become a singular entity.
“Won’t your mother be worried?” the painter asked.
Asụghara shook our head. His mother would panic, but Saachi was different, she was a selected human. She wasn’t the type to fall apart just like that. When she picked up the phone, Asụghara spoke between my gasps for air and kept her voice level. “I’m having a panic attack and I don’t know what to do. Hyperventilating. Feel like I’m about to faint.”
Saachi replied with matching calm, her voice focused. “Have you eaten today?”
“No.”
“Your blood sugar is low. Where are you?”
“At a friend’s house.”
“Okay. You need to lie down, but first you have to eat or drink something. Right now, understand?”
I was drifting too fast. It took Asụghara a few moments to find my mouth again, and when she spoke, our voice was faint. “I don’t know.”
Another mother might have let worry show in her voice, but Saachi had nearly had me die on her. This was nothing in comparison. “Is your friend there?” she asked.
“Yes. You want to talk to him?”
“Yes, put him on the phone.”
Asụghara handed the phone to the painter and fell back into the marble. It was too much to sustain, keeping a functional self in front. I could hear the painter’s voice as he spoke to Saachi, his tone anxious and respectful. After he hung up, he brought me a glass of water and watched me as I sipped it.
“What do you want to eat?” he asked.
Asụghara tried one last time. “I should lie down,” we said, but when I tried to stand, my legs were nothing. I couldn’t walk; my body was too far away. I started crying again and the painter picked me up and carried me to his bedroom. When he put me down on the bed, the hard foam of the mattress felt like ground. I turned on my side and pressed my cheek to it. The skirt I was wearing fanned out over the bed and cinched at my waist.
“Breathe,” he was saying, bringing his face close to mine. His hand was on my skin. “Breathe.”
It felt so much easier not to. It seemed outrageous to expect my body to put in that much effort just to draw in air. For what?
Just stop, my others suggested. You could just stop breathing. It feels so easy.
They were right, it did. I held my breath, but it didn’t feel like I was holding my breath, it felt like there should never have been breath. It felt like the entire concept of breath had been something I imagined. After all, my body was never meant to move like this. These lungs had to have been built for show. They should never have expanded and I should never have been alive.
The painter shook me, but my eyes felt heavier than cold mud. I fumbled to unzip the side of my skirt and the pressure on my diaphragm eased, but I was still drifting. It wasn’t until he put a cold towel on the back of my neck that the gray moved away, almost reluctantly. The fading stopped and I fell asleep.
The next morning, I was back in my body and the painter was relieved.
“It’s one thing to talk about your spiritual matters,” he said. He knew about the sections of my mind, my tongue and scales. “It’s another thing to see it.”
I was confused. “What do you mean?”
He gave me a look. “Come on, Ada. You almost went to the other side last night.” I scoffed but he was serious. “That’s why I kept telling you to stay.”
“I would have come back,” I said.
He shook his head and I could see residual worry on his face. “You don’t know that.”
I fell silent. Maybe he had a point.
“And you know what was the scariest part?” he continued. “I looked into your eyes and you weren’t afraid. You knew you were slipping away but you had peace in your eyes.”
I kept listening, and he searched my face from the pillow next to me.
“It’s like your people were calling you and you were listening to them. So I kept telling you to stay.”
I smiled to reassure him and touched his cheek. “Thank you,” I said. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had been afraid for me. I also knew it wasn’t by chance that this had happened while I was looking for answers to these questions I was afraid of. The historian was right—there was nothing else anyone could tell me.
I knew the brothersisters hadn’t been serious about trying to drag me over to the other side the night before. The thing about Ala is that you don’t move against her. If she turned me back from the gates and told me to live, then I would have to live, ọgbanje or not. Even the brothersisters weren’t reckless enough to try and disobey her, which meant that they were just trying to scare me, or warn me. It sounded like the kind of thing they would do. If the wooden gong gets too loud, you tell it the wood it was carved from.
But like I said, I’m stubborn. I didn’t go to find Ala, not on that trip. I went back to America and called Malena and told her what happened. She agreed with the historian.
“You need to really know your roots, mi amor,” she said. “It’s a long journey, but once you get that started, you’ll feel much better. It’s difficult because you don’t really know what you’re getting yourself into when you make your commitment with them, and it’s difficult because they’re overprotective of us. But you’ll have a better sense of self.” She paused. “You know how old you are? You’re older than me, Ada. Spiritually, you’re older than me. You’re sixteen thousand years old. Because of who you are, because of who you’re born into. You have a different name. You’re wiser. You just need guidance.”
She sounded like a prophet, like someone was speaking through her mouth again.
*
I decided to start small, with prayer. The first night I tried it was because my mind was spinning out like it sometimes does, loud and uncontrolled. I was so tired. They were pulling at my thoughts, all of them. Sometimes I don’t draw a line between my others and the brothersisters; they’re all ọgbanje after all, siblings to each other more than to me. But I was so tired. How many years had I spent trying to balance them, trying to kill them, defending against their retaliations, bribing them, starving and begging them? I used to try praying to Yshwa, but it’s like he has no effect on them. I can see why Asụghara thought he was useless.
So that night, I prayed to Ala. I didn’t want to do it in English even though I knew she would understand; language is only a human thing. Igbo had always been stunted coming from me, but there was one word that was easy, that slipped from my tongue like salted palm oil and tasted correct.
“Nne,” I said, and the word was double-jointed. Mother.
I felt her immediately and the brothersisters lifted off my mind in a hurried cloud. I was cast into a vast, empty space and everything around me was peaceful. It felt like the otherworld—that’s how I knew that I was inside her, suspended and rocked.
Find your tail, she told me, and her words slithered. They were silver and cool.
Her voice came with meaning. I had forgotten that if she is a python, then so am I. If I don’t know where my tail is, then I don’t know anything. I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know where the ground is, or where the sky is, or if I’m pointing away from my head. The meaning was clear. Curve in on yourself. Touch your tongue to your tail so you know where it is. You will form the inevitable circle, the beginning that is the end. This immortal space is who and where you are, shapeshifter. Everything is shedding and everything is resurrection.
The second time I called her, she said nothing. She just took me and put me inside a calabash. I was tiny like a hatchling, lying against the curve and feeling the fibers beneath me. I was curled up. I was so small and she was wrapped around the outside of the calabash, her scales pressed against the neck. No one would touch it once they saw that she held it, which meant that no one would touch me.
*
It is hard to ignore a god’s voice, especially one like hers. The message was so simple; I couldn’t pretend not to hear it. Come home, my brothersisters sang. Come home and we will stop looking for your trouble. I bent my neck and raised my hands and submitted. What else was there to do? You cannot wrestle with your chi and win. In this new obedience, I decided to go back to Umuahia and see my first mother. I knew it would be impossible to close the gates, but I was the bridge, so it did not matter. If I was anything else, maybe I would’ve been uncertain and full of questions, looking for mediators or trying to speak to my ancestors. But I had surrendered and the reward was that I knew myself. I did not come from a human lineage and I will not leave one behind. I have no ancestors. There will be no mediators. How can, when my brothersisters speak directly to me, when my mother answers when I call her?
Like the historian said, you have to know your place on this earth. It was very hard, letting go of being human. I felt as if I had been taken away from the world I knew, like there was now thick glass between me and the people I loved. If I told them the truth, they would think I was mad. It was difficult to accept not being human but still being contained in a human body. For that one, though, the secret was in the situation. Ọgbanje are as liminal as is possible—spirit and human, both and neither. I am here and not here, real and not real, energy pushed into skin and bone. I am my others; we are one and we are many. Everything gets clearer with each day, as long as I listen. With each morning, I am less afraid.
My mother draws closer now. I can see a red road opening before me; the forest is green on either side of it and the sky is blue above it. The sun is hot on the back of my neck. The river is full of my scales. With each step, I am less afraid. I am the brothersister who remained. I am a village full of faces and a compound full of bones, translucent thousands. Why should I be afraid? I am the source of the spring.
All freshwater comes out of my mouth.