by Edna O'Brien
For the Mothers and Daughters
of
North East Nigeria
We have helicopters now that can fire four thousand rounds per minute. A truly devastating piece of military hardware. A game changer.
Nigerian government statement
in response to Boko Haram
‘Here’s linen to clothe your wounds.’
Euripides, The Trojan Women
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
‘I was a girl once…’
‘It was a big, muddy yard…’
‘It was like the corralling of cattle…’
The woman led me across…’
‘And the leaves of the trees are…’
‘I was crossing the yard …’
‘Buki, short for Bukola…’
‘Barbed wire above us…’
‘The rain was torrential…’
‘The camp was almost deserted…’
‘A wife of the emir…’
‘The pains started in…’
‘A whine, a whistle…’
‘After the trudge…’
‘Buki and I stood…’
‘Butterflies scudding about…’
‘The place was deathly silent…’
‘The city is teeming with…’
‘If you smiled, you would be far prettier…’
‘At first sight of each other…’
‘It was a feverish day…’
‘I think it strange when…’
‘My last sight of the…’
‘The welcome home party…’
‘Uncle and Mama…’
‘Mama is pulling me out of bed…’
‘First it was her shadow…’
‘Mama lay on the bed…’
‘The woman came in the dead of night…’
‘Mama marched in…’
‘There was no track…’
‘As the double doors of the convent…’
‘There were no gates…’
‘Once a month Babby and I…’
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by the Author
Copyright
I WAS A GIRL ONCE, but not any more. I smell. Blood dried and crusted all over me, and my wrapper in shreds. My insides, a morass. Hurtled through this forest that I saw, that first awful night, when I and my friends were snatched from the school.
The sudden pah-pah of gunshot in our dormitory and men, their faces covered, eyes glaring, saying they are the military come to protect us, as there is an insurrection in the town. We are afraid, but we believe them. Girls staggered out of bed and others came in from the veranda, where they had been sleeping because it was a warm, clammy night.
The moment we heard Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, we knew. They had stolen our soldiers’ uniforms to get past security. They pelted questions at us – Where is the boys’ school, Where is the cement kept, Where are the storage rooms. When we told them we did not know, they went crazy. Then, some others ran in to say they could not find any spare parts or petrol in the sheds, which led to argument.
They could not go back empty-handed or their commander would be furious. Then, amid the clamour, one of them with a grin said, ‘Girls will do,’ and so we heard an order for more trucks to be despatched. One girl took out her cell phone to call her mother, but it was instantly snapped from her. She began to cry, others began to cry, pleading to be let home. One went on her knees saying ‘Mister, Mister,’ which enraged him, so that he began cursing and taunting us, calling us names, saying we were sluts, prostitutes, that we should be married and soon we would.
We were separated into batches of twenty and had to wait, jabbering and cleaving to one another until the order was given to vacate the dormitory at once and leave everything behind.
The driver of the first truck outside the school gates had a gun to his head, so that he drove zanily through the little town. There was no one about who might report on a truck passing through, at such an ungodly hour, with girls crammed into it.
Soon we were at a border village that opened into a landscape of thick jungle. The driver was told to stop and minutes after he was brought out, we heard a barrage of gunfire.
Other drivers have arrived and there is wild talk and conferring as to which girls to put in the different trucks. Terror had paralysed us. The moon that we lost for a time reappeared high up in the sky, its cold rays shining on dark trees that stretched on and on, bearing us to the pith of our destination. It is not like the moon that shone on the dormitory floor, picking up our clothes, but leaving our copybooks, our satchels and our belongings, as we were told. I hid my diary, as it was my last link with my life.
But we had not lost hope. We knew that by then the search parties would have begun, our parents, our elders, our teachers all in pursuit. Through the open sides of the truck we throw things out, in order for them to trace us – a comb, a belt, a hanky, scraps of paper with names scrawled on them – Find us, find us. We talk in whispers, and try to give each other courage.
We enter dense jungle, trees of all kinds, meshed together, taking us into their vile embrace. Nature had gone amok here. The terrain underneath is so rugged that even the motorcyclists, who have been riding along to stop us from escaping, keep losing their grip and are thrown onto high embankments. Rebeka says to me, ‘Let’s jump for it,’ but I hesitate. She says, ‘Better die than be in their hands.’ She has been praying to God ever since we left that school and God has told her that these are bad men and that we must flee. Seconds passed and I still see it as in a mirage, that gap between two trucks, Rebeka grasping an overhanging branch, swinging from it, and then jumping. I thought, she is somewhere on that ground, dead, or maybe not dead. My nerves failed me and moreover, one of the leaders bellows, ‘If any one of you jumps, you will be shot.’ They must have assumed that she was dead.
The trucks lurch on and we are jolted hither and thither. Aisha, who had dozed for a moment, comes awake, shouting her mother’s name. Wrenched from a dream, she starts to cry. Someone puts a hand over her mouth, otherwise we will all be beaten. We are terrified. We have nothing more to throw out. We had gone too far to be traced.
*
There is only Babby and me now. She cries from the pit of her empty belly, hoarse savage cries and I say to her, ‘You have no name and no father.’ I bark at her. Sometimes I want to kill her. My breasts are the size of egg cups and she is tugging at the nipples, as if she too wants to kill me. We search for a well, because the water in the ditches is brown and muddy. It tastes foul. We drink the clear water in the cavity of the big rocks. I cup my hands in it and she laps it up eagerly, swallows it, as if she might choke. Those are our moments of grace, fresh water, a little reprieve from thirst and hopelessness. I have no notion of what day it is, or what month, or what year. All I know is that the air is scudded with sand, sand blowing in from the Sahel, that scrapes our eyes and half blinds us.
Where there are no trees, the earth is an ochre yellow, scored with deep zigzag lines, quite a picture, and the young curled leaves are starting to sprout on the tips of the branches. In the night, when I lie awake, I see sky. A vast violet expanse of sky, a land of beauty that has become a place of woe. So many dead girls. The sad soughing of the trees.
I lay her down, with her head pillowed on a bit of raised turf. It is the only time she sleeps. I sleep in snatches, for fear of what might befall us. Sometimes I wake in a dream with wet eyelids, a dream of a person I must have known or even loved. But this is not the time for either memory or pathos. Occasionally I hear the barking of dogs in the distance. I have not sighted a single human being in days, and I fear that when I do, we will be dragged back for the bloodiest end.
I am unable to pray in my old tongue, as they bombarded us with their prayers, their edicts, their ideology, their hatred, their Godliness.
IT WAS A BIG, MUDDY YARD, full of clutter. Buckets, shovels, crates, wheelbarrows, paving slabs, cement and cycles. The sand is a dirt yellow from rain. There was the steady hum of generators.
Beyond the high clay ramparts, topped with loops of barbed wire, the vastness of the forest. It was dark and eerie, a multitude of trees, spawning more trees, more darkness, final banishment. The small mosque had a shiny aluminium minaret and nearby a black flag flapped from a pole. Akra, a girl from a class higher up than me, came from the dormitory where we had been held and she stood very quiet, drinking in our grim surroundings. There were only fifteen of us from our school. Others had been taken to different camps in the forest. We were flung into a dormitory of girls still asleep, and we huddled together.
A big tree dominated the centre of the compound with one stout limb forking out. It was a wet brown with a greenish tinge and I wondered if our tree at home had the same damp greenish hue. I did not know it yet but this tree was our future school house. We would stand and sit and kneel under it five times a day for prayer. We would be made to learn and memorise suras in a tongue that was alien to us and worship a God that was not ours. We would be photographed from time to time, so that the pictures would be sent back, us in our drab clothing and our numbed expressions, grouped together for distraught parents to pore over and search for their own among the many faces that now looked identical and pitiable.
From the several circular huts men appeared, hurrying to the mosque. They were dressed variously, some in jeans and T-shirts, others in baggy attire and still others with army jackets. As they ran past us, a few took us in, appraising our juiciness.
As the drone of prayer carried out to where we were, a young girl came staggering across the yard and stood before us. She shook uncontrollably. She had a thick wad of lint attached to her bottom lip that was seeping with blood. She could not speak although she strove to. She kept pointing to her mouth and finally managed to prise it open. Her tongue was gone. What crime had she committed.
While we were there, a woman in green wellingtons came towards us carrying a thorn stick. The thorns were the red of ripe berries and sharp as nails. We are ordered back to the dormitory. Thus began our initiation.
Each girl was given a uniform, identical to that which girls who had been there long before were wearing. We were told to put them on. They were a morose blue, with still darker hijabs, and though I did not see myself as there were no mirrors, I saw my friends, transformed, suddenly old, like bereaved nuns. I saw Teresa, and Fatim, and Regina, and Aida, and Kiki, all silenced, and choking back tears. We were told to gather up our old clothes, and leave nothing whatsoever behind. In the scramble, I managed to hide my little notebook. It was a teeny notebook, meant more for sums than for letters, but I squeezed words into each little square. I hoarded them. They now were my only friends. I had won the notebook, along with a scented sheet of paper, for my essay on nature. The sheet of paper had ‘Woods of Windsor’ written on the margins. I did not know where Windsor was.
Our clothes were piled onto a heap and no sooner had she struck the match and thrown some diesel in, than the flames shot up towards a milky dawn. Our white blouses, our uniforms and our headscarves soon dissolving into weightless flakes of grey ash that hovered for a moment, and were then borne up to find their way through the spaces, in the looped wire. I followed them in my mind, and foolishly thought that the ashen flakes would be the messengers for us. They would reach our school, where the plumes of smoke still smouldered from the fire that the militants had started just before the trucks drove away. I imagined many foolish things. I had not slept. The stench of the shoes lingered, because they took longer to burn. The smell recalled the skins of different animals in the slaughterhouses next to the markets, hung up for curing – pigs, yearlings, goats and sheep.
Then we were marched across, to sit under the big tree. Water plopped from the leaves and the ground was wet. Girls who had been there longer than us were waiting, some with their hands folded, and enraptured.
Three men get out of a cream-coloured Jeep. Two are masked and walk behind the third, who is the chief emir. He is holding a sacred text. All three are armed. As the emir comes closer to us, he stretches his hand out wide and it is as if he has snagged the entire world in his grasp.
Girls who have already seen him look up in awe and fresh wonderment. Some stretch their hands out, merely to imagine touching the cloth of his jacket. They worship him. He moves among us, recognising the new faces, his eyes so alert, as if he is seeing into our minds, into our torn hearts.
‘The disease is ignorance.’ He would say it three times. I did not look at him, because he was so fierce. Then he welcomed us as the emergent daughters of Allah and said that we must thank Allah for the miracle of having saved us. We may, as he said, feel estranged, but very soon the scales would fall from our eyes.
Then he lambasted those we had been taken from. Infidels. Thieves. Our president, our vice presidents, our governors, our police were all rotten. They were sultans of the banks, trawling their wealth, sitting in their big villas, on their golden thrones, watching Western movies on their big television screens. Their fat wives had accrued so much money, so much gold, so many pearls, that they had to build extra dwellings to contain this hoard. Even Muslims among these people were contaminated, drawn into that miasma of corruption. We would soon realise that the education we had received was all wrong, just as university education, which we aspired to, was all wrong. It could not be.
He asked us then to look back on the last forty-eight hours and marvel at the transformation that had been wrought. It was like he was looking into our minds and daring us to contradict him. ‘When our column entered your school two nights ago, your military had pulled out because they knew we were coming. Can you trust these people? Can you trust people paid to guard you? If you are really honest your answer will be no. They could have mounted a counter-attack but they did not. They are too afraid of us. They know they will never enter Sambisa. They will never find you. They know that Allah intended for us to bring you here. As you were gathering your books and your satchels to take the transport to the school for your examination, Allah was watching, it was all predestined. Where were your pastors, where were your guardians, where were your teachers? It was ever thus. When the Prophet Muhammad was chased from Medina, his erstwhile followers looked away. Cowards. Infidels. Your parents may think they loved you and treated you kindly, but they are blind, blinded. The disease is ignorance. There is no deity except Allah. Ask forgiveness for your parents’ sins and Allah will know if you are sincere in your purpose or not. Remember you have been reborn into another life. Even if you think you love your family and have made a promise in your heart, you must renounce it, you must stamp it out now. For a little while, you will shed girlish tears, but they will cease and you will be flying like birds to the fields of paradise. Angels await you, the Angel Gabriel, the Angel Azrael, the Angel Michael. Oh yes, our earthly technology and communication assisted us, but Allah informed us of everything, even the little tittle-tattle in your dormitory. I am speaking directly to each one of you. Turn to the Qur’an, turn to the Hadiths of the Prophet, anywhere you are, turn to Allah. Otherwise we will have to compel you and we will not shirk from punishments. Meanwhile, go about your daily tasks with happiness, memorise the suras, keep yourself nicely fragrant in the knowledge that you are being recruited into the vast, invincible army of Allah. You are warriors. This land that is called Nigeria must be rid of the infidels and the unbelievers. You will play your part in the fight. You will take pride in it. Even if you die on the battlefield, remember that the death of a believer is the sweetest thing. They will roll out the red carpet for you in Paradise. And now I come to the most crucial matter of all. Do not turn away. Do not be afraid. We must take the fight to the barracks of the pigs and the rat
s and the unbelievers that are also your own people, your own tribe, your own parents. Eat out the heart of the infidel. Eliminate them. Cut their throats. Tell them if they want you back then to bring back our dead brothers.’
Then, just before he is escorted away, he looked towards the sky, and a fleet of waiting enemies – ‘Don’t think you can oppose us with your jet fighters. The Allah we worship lives above your jets, poised for the instant to crush you.’
Everything in my mind went black. I had never imagined such power, such immunity. Buckets and crates rolled along that yard and the heavens parted. I saw two Gods holding staffs, or perhaps guns, outfacing one another.
The earth on which I knelt was strewn with half-eaten hearts, and there were cut throats littered everywhere, the blood gurgling away like an endless stream. I ran among the heaped remains, until I found my parents and my brother. I kissed them and they forgave me, even though they were dead. I was too sad to cry.
A few of my friends came across to ask me what was wrong. I could not answer. The small grip I had on reason was gone. We would have cut our own throats if we had knives.
‘Don’t worry … Our parents will find us,’ Aisha said to me, but she had not yet been to the field of the dead.
Three girls were put to one side and stood, confused, while other women took us across the yard, towards the huts, for our next punishment.
IT WAS LIKE THE CORRALLING of cattle. We were brought out and put standing under the big tree, shivering, silent. We had been separated since we arrived. I was in a hut with a leader’s wife, a shrew, who wakened me several times at night and made me repeat prayers and verses that she had taught me in the day.
When I came out and saw my friends, dazed like me, their faces distorted and pulpy from crying, I thought, I am with my friends, it won’t be so bad.
Very soon men began to foregather. They were young and frisky. They wore jeans and variously coloured T-shirts. It was clear that something was about to happen, which involved us, so we clung together. Then two men wheeled on a table and set it down in the middle of the compound, while a third man put a white plastic bucket underneath it. Only seconds passed but we guessed. The first girl, Faith, was taken and as she lay down, two men parted her legs. The others were baying and cheering. As she began to scream, a hand was clamped across her mouth and the first of the youths had his turn with her. The others followed. It was the same for the second girl. I was third. As I lay on that table, I looked up and saw a few stars at great distances from one another, teetering in the heavens. It was not yet dark. It felt like being stabbed and re-stabbed and then a fierce yelling after he had broken into me. I said goodbye to my parents and everyone I knew.