An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  “Tufia!” they spat in unison. To which one of them, Eze Omenkara himself, the great hunter who in his lifetime traveled as far as Odunji and brought home a great deal of game, stood to speak.

  “Ndi ibem, I greet you. We cannot wave our hands to swat away a snake threatening to bite us as we do mosquitoes. They are not the same.”

  “You speak well!” they said.

  “Ndi ibem, kwenu,” he said.

  “Iyaah!” they said.

  “Kwe zueenu.”

  “Iyaah!”

  “Guardian Spirit, you have spoken like one of us. You have spoken like one whose tongue is matured, and indeed your words stand on their feet, they stand—even now—amongst us. Yet we must not forget that if one begins bathing from the knees up, the water may be finished by the time one gets to the head.”

  They shouted, “You speak well!”

  “So tell us about this storm that threatens our son Chinonso.”

  AGBATTA-ALUMALU, I told them everything as my eyes had seen it, and as my ears had heard it, and as I have now conferred to you. I told them about Ndali, his meeting at the bridge, and his love for her. I told them about his sacrifices, how he sold his home. I told them about Jamike, how he swindled my host, and how my host, thinking he had been saved by the white woman, now lay unconscious, having possibly killed another man.

  “You speak well!” they chorused.

  Then there was silence amongst them, a silence like one that is impossible on earth. Even Ichiie Olisa, anguished that his son had sold the land, merely gazed into the hearth with empty eyes, as silent as a dead log. A group of them, about five, rose and went to a corner to confer. When they returned, Ichiie-nne, Ada Omenkara, my host’s grandmother, said, “Do you know anything about the laws of the people of this new country?”

  —I do not, great mother.

  “Has he killed a man before?” Ichiie Eze Omenkara, the great-great-grandfather of my host, said.

  —No, he has not, Ichiie.

  “Spirit one,” Eze Omenkara said now, “perhaps the man he hit with a chair will survive. We bid you return to watch over him. Do not proceed to Beigwe to report to Chukwu until you know for sure that he has killed this man. We hope—if he was hit by a chair alone—that he would not die. Make your eyes as those of a fish and return here when you have another word for us.” Then, turning to the others, he said, “Ndi ibem, have I spoken your minds?”

  “Gbam!” they chorused.

  “A chi who falls asleep or leaves its host to go on journeys—except when necessary, as this one is—is an efulefu, a weak chi, whose host is already a lamb bound with twine to the slaughter pole,” he continued.

  “You speak well!”

  —I hear you, Dwellers of Alandiichie. I will go back now, then.

  “Yes, you may!” They cried, “Go well the way you have come.”

  —Iseeh!

  “May the light not quench on your way out.”

  —Iseeh!

  I turned to leave them, they who are no longer susceptible to death, relieved that at least I had found some respite from my panic. And as I traveled, not turning back, I wondered: what was that beautiful voice that rose again in a song to bid me onwards?

  CHUKWU, thus was my journey completed. I flew through a long stretch of the flaming night, past white mountains of the farthest realms of Benmuo, on which black-winged spirits stood, speaking in sepulchral voices. As I neared the sublime borders of the earth, I saw Ekwensu, the trickster deity, standing in his unmistakable garb of many colors, with his head carried on his long neck, which stretched about like a tentacle. He stood on a limb above the moon’s disk, gazing at the earth with his wild eyes and laughing to himself, perhaps devising some evil trick. I had seen him in the same spot twice before, the last time seventy-four years ago. As in the past, I avoided him and proceeded towards the earth. And then, with the alchemic precision with which a chi finds its host no matter where in the universe he may be, I arrived at the place where my host lay and fused with him. I saw at once by the clock on the wall that I had been gone for nearly three hours, in the White Man’s measure of time. He had been revived, Egbunu. Stitches laddered down on his face, and a big bloody piece of cotton wool was sticking out from his mouth where his teeth had been broken. There was no one else in the room, but by his bed a thing with a screen like a computer sat, as if keeping him company, and from his arm stretched a small bag that hung on a pole, and in it was blood. His eyes were closed, and in his blurred vision, the image of Ndali looking at him had stood, as if bound to his mind with an unbreakable cord.

  THREE

  Third Incantation

  GAGANAOGWU, may your ears not strain—

  Even as I stand here, I can hear the singing, the joy, the sweet tune of the flutes. I have been to this palace where you dwell, many times. I know that the guardian spirits and their hosts will come to you here for your final approval of their rebirth, for a reincarnation into a fresh body, and live on earth again as a newborn—

  The fathers say that a man does not stand on burning coals barefoot because his feet are wet—

  One does not dance near the pit of venomous snakes because one’s obi is too small—

  The wingless bird said I should spit into a calabash with holes, but I say to it, my saliva is not meant to be wasted—

  The head that stirs the wasp’s nest bears its sting—

  The one-eyed serpent of shame shelters near my door. May I? it asks. No, I say. I don’t want your terrors in my abode—

  Destruction says to me, “Shall I come under your roof and pitch my tent?” I say, “No. Go and tell whoever sent you that I am not at home. Tell them you did not see me”—

  Egbe beru, ugo ebekwaru, onye si ibe ya ebela nku kwaaya—

  May the words I shall continue to speak hasten to the conclusion of my account—

  May my tongue, as wet as a mangrove, not dry of words—

  And may your ears, Chukwu, not tire from hearing me—

  May this incantation usher in a fruitful end to my testimony tonight, after which I will leave the halls of Beigwe and return to the waiting body of my host—

  Iseeh!

  18

  The Return

  AKANAGBAJIIGWE, the universe does not dwell on the past, gathering around the miasma of burnt-out fires like a pack of crows. Rather, it forges ahead, always on the winding path of the future, stopping only briefly at the present to rest its feet like a weary traveler. Then, as soon as it is rested, it moves onwards, it does not turn back. Its eyes are the eyes of time, cast perpetually forward and never looking back. The universe travels on no matter what happens to its inhabitants. It proceeds, crosses the footbridges, scales the ponds, circles the craters, and continues. Has a conflagration destroyed a nation? No matter. If such a thing has happened in the morning, it does not matter because the sun will rise, as it has done for as long as the world has been, and in that selfsame city, the sun will set and night will descend. Has an earthquake devastated a land? It does not matter; it will not interrupt the seasons at all. And the life of the universe is reflected in the lives of those who live in it. Has the patriarch of the family been killed? The children must sleep this night and wake up tomorrow. Everyone continues, carried forward like old leaves on the river of time.

  But although the universe continues its journey, carrying all the living with it, there is a place where a man can remain still, as if his personal universe has halted. This place is one humans dread because it is a place where they do nothing. They do not so much as stir. They are locked in like captured animals in a circumscribed space. One who is here has his diameter marked out as if by an invisible ink that says, “From this wall to this wall, from this length to that length, is all there is for you in the world.” But I must establish, Agujiegbe, that a man whose movement is limited—that man is not truly alive. The passage of time mocks him. And this is what happens in confinement.

  For in this place, almost no new memory can form.
The man wakes in the morning, eats, excretes in the small hole which he covers with a lid after he has washed it down with water that he fetches in a small bucket from the tap in his room. Then he sleeps. When he wakes up again, if it is night, it is night; if it is morning, it is morning. Only a shadow of light rears its feeble head into the cell like the head of an infant snake. If it is daylight, the light comes in a single rod through the window at the top of the high wall near the old ceiling. The window is closed off with strong iron bars.

  A man sits here all day, merely alive, the enamels of life peeling away from him and withering into flecks at his feet. The world conceals itself from such a man. It conceals its deepest and most shallow secrets and even its nonsecrets. He knows nothing of what is happening, sees nothing, and hears nothing. The bridge he’d crossed to get here, like one constructed by a retreating army, has been destroyed behind him, and all the links with the known world with it. And now he is confined to this space—for however long he must stay. It does not matter. What matters is that his life is stagnant. He spends the day gazing at the walls or the bars that lead out to the other cells until his eyes grow weary from looking. Every now and then he sees something move about in the field of his vision, but soon it is lost to his eyes. No new memory is made of it, for such things, occurring as they do, appear like weak animals who pound their fists against the sealed door of his noiseless humanity and then retreat. Or the vacuous insects that rush to a lightbulb and perform a withering ritualistic dance that only results in their own death. I have seen it many times, Egbunu.

  As soon as my host was taken from the hospital, where he had been for two weeks, to the cell where he would stay in solitary confinement, he could make no new memories. If in a rare case a man makes new memories while in prison, they are often the things he does not wish for but which are done to him. They are not willful history. Because a man has no control over this kind of thing, it lodges in him without recourse to his will. For once he has witnessed a thing, it slips as if through a crack into the mind and stays there. It does not go away.

  My host stayed in this state for four years. To chronicle these four years, to labor over the monotony of living, the anguish of still life, is comparable only to the pain of a slave, as I saw in my past host, Yagazie. For a prisoner, too, is a slave, a captive of the government in this strange country. For many cycles, I have known the darkness of youthful hearts, wallowed in the mud of the ambitions of many men, and peeked into the graves of their failures. But I have never seen anything like this.

  Now he has returned back to the land of the living and to his own land. The process that led to his return to the land of the fathers happened very quickly. For in the early morning of his troubles, I had tried to save him. Once the police took him to the hospital and he was alone in a room, unconscious, I had no choice but to do that which a chi must do as a last resort, when all the strength of man has failed: I went to Alandiichie to seek the intervention of his ancestors, an account of which I have now rendered to you.

  One morning, in the fifth month of his fourth year in prison, his release happened suddenly, without warning. Nothing had prepared him for it. He was seated, his back resting against the wall whose paint had peeled from his resting against it for so long. He was in that moment thinking about some inconsequential things—of the choreography of ants on a hill, then of maggots in a decayed can of milk, and then of small birds congregating on a wild tree—when the bars of his cell began to be unlocked. A guard and a man dressed in a suit stood on the threshold, and the man told him in the language of the White Man that he was being released.

  He followed them to an interrogation room, and later, the interpreter would tell him that his case had been reviewed. The primary witness falsified her initial testimony. He had not gone in to rob or rape her, as had been reported, but she had taken him to her house of her own will. It was her husband who had become jealous and in a fit of rage descended on her and him. My host had merely tried to save her by attacking the man. This, the woman now reported, was the truth about what happened. Gaganaogwu, this was not what was told to the police at all! Quite the opposite. The woman and her husband had conspired against my host, an innocent man, and had said that he tried to rape her. They’d said that it was in the process of doing it that her husband had found her struggling with him and intervened by knocking him, the assailant, unconscious.

  After he heard these things, he said nothing to the guard and the interpreter. He merely sat there staring at the well-dressed man with the files and the interpreter but not seeing them. His eyes had now grown accustomed to registering an image, then immediately disregarding it, and moving on. He kept his gaze unbroken on a great blank wall, a magnificent nothing which, however, had occupied his vision and his mind.

  “Mr. Ginoso, do you have anything to say?”

  When he did not respond, the interpreter bent his mouth towards the ear of the other as if to kiss him, and the two came forth nodding. It was a strange thing, even to my host. One of the men spoke in haste, and the other nodded effusively.

  “My friend Ms. Fiona Aydinoglu wants to offer her apologies. She is very sorry for what happened. Again, this is her lawyer. And she has asked us to give you this money. She wants us to do all we can to help you regain your life.”

  He said nothing, and his eyes remained where he had cast them—on a fly that was droning between the window and the netting located behind the table where the two men were seated.

  “Mr. Ginoso.” It was the non-English-speaking lawyer who spoke now, perhaps worried that his interpreter had not delivered his message in a clear enough way and that it was better for the originator of the message to deliver it, no matter how battered the language. Surely it would mean more. Surely it would be respected. “I say truth now, my client only truth. We are very very sorry, your sufferingk. Very sorry. For many—” He turned to his friend and asked something. “Years, yani, years. For many years Fiona is sad because this. She sorry, very sorry, my friend. Please, Mr. Ginoso, you must accept her sorry.”

  He said nothing to this man, either. For four years, all that needed to be said and discussed with these people had been said. And afterwards, words had lost their usefulness and had evolved into something else, something without form, amorphous, worthless. In their place, contempt had rooted and blossomed. A man of little rage, he’d become vandalized by a spiritual politics into which he had been unwillingly conscripted. And now so strong was the contempt he felt that while the men spoke, his mind came alive with vivid conjurations of violence. The man in the police jacket he saw lying on the floor, his throat slit with a knife in my host’s hand from which blood trickled onto the lifeless body. The lawyer he saw gasping, the man’s tongue hanging out of his mouth as my host strangled him against the wall.

  Even if faintly, my host realized that this was the person he had become. Without knowing it, something in him had changed. For the spirit of a man may long endure pitiless circumstances, but eventually it will stand erect, unable to take any more. I have seen it many times. In place of submission, rebellion will erect itself. And in the place of endurance, resistance. He will rise with the vengeance of a black lion and execute his cause with a clenched fist. And what he will do, what he will not do, even he will not expect.

  Egbunu, the man of rage—he is one whom life has dealt a heavy hand. A man who, like others, had simply found a woman he loved. He’d courted her like others do, nurtured her, only to find that all he’d done had been in vain. He wakes up one day to find himself incarcerated. He has been wronged by man and history, and it is the consciousness of this wrong that births the change in him. In the moment the change begins, a great darkness enters him through the chink in his soul. For my host, it was a crawly, multilegged darkness shaped like a rapidly procreating millipede that burrowed into his life in the first years of his incarceration. The millipede then yielded a number of progeny, which soon began eating him up, so that by the third year, the darkness had snuffed
out all the light in his life. And where there was darkness, light could no longer encroach.

  For most of the time, the man of rage is consumed with one passion: justice. If he has been stuck, to strike back at those who had stuck him. If he has lost someone, to regain it from those who had stolen it. This is important because that recovery is the only way he can become himself again.

  In my host’s case, the meeting with the lawyer and his interpreter was the first time he had to act on his emotions in a long time. In confinement, what he felt at any time was meaningless because he could not act on it. What use, for instance, was it to feel anger? There was nothing he could do about it. To feel love? Nothing. Everything he felt he swallowed back down into the belly of his incapacitation.

  He would realize that “Mrs. Fiona,” whom he never saw again after her last appearance in court, had insisted that the money be put in his bags if he refused to take it and returned to Nigeria with him on the flight. “Not deportation,” a very young black woman who’d identified herself as a Nigerian, one of the many people who’d spoken to him, had said. “They have asked you—your university offered to give you a free scholarship as compensation if you still want to attend and remain in TRNC, but you have refused to say anything at all to any one of them. Because you refuse to talk, even to me, they are returning you to Nigeria, with everything you brought here.”

  Even to that woman, although he had given her his attentive gaze, he did not speak. This was why those who sought to do something about him or for him had refrained and merely resorted to parsing out meaning from his little gestures—side glances, shakes of the head, even noncommunicative actions like coughs. So they had concluded, or decided, that his not speaking meant that the only thing he wanted was to return home. They looked on his university admission forms and contacted his next of kin, his uncle. Then they drove him two days after his first release to the airport. They gave him tickets and put him on the plane and told him that they had contacted his uncle and that he would be waiting for him at the airport in Abuja. Then, wishing him good luck, the lawyers, the Turkish-Cypriot government officials, one of the officials of the school he had been admitted to, and the Nigerian woman waved him good-bye. Even to this he did not respond.