by Edna O'Brien
We ate at the classroom table, where she had put a cloth at one end. It was a white cloth, embossed with red silk rosebuds. Hundreds, if not thousands, of stars rested on a baize of the heavens.
She had gone to great lengths with the cooking. Our first course was parsley in a tasty soup. The seeds she had brought from the Mother house planted randomly, and yet they had taken. ‘If you don’t grow parsley, you’ll never get your man,’ she said, mischievously. I asked if she had been in love before she became a nun and the question slightly unsettled her. She took time to consider her answer. Yes. She had been in love. He was an older man, who held a very strong appeal for her, except that he was married. Unlike many others, he would not take a second wife and suggested that she might marry his brother. But that was not what she wished. It was, as she put it, a brief temptation from her true path.
After the soup, we had a different corn dish, a maize which she had ground overnight and then put through a sieve and flavoured with sweet chillies. There were also ground peanuts. Knowing we would feel thirsty, she had made a drink from goat’s milk. The taste of it filled me with a remembered sweetness of my time with my Fulani Madara. In my wishful thinking, I hoped that she and my mother would meet some day on the altar of peace.
As the evening went on, Sister got more talkative. It was when she started to tell about her children, her little clan that walked two or three kilometres every day to the school, she became elated. They had become her life. The difficult thing of course was to try and discipline them. On any excuse their minds wandered and yes, they could be hot-tempered, they could be testy. When there were not enough pencils to go around, what she had to do was halve the pencils with a razor blade. Some brought their lunch, which was porridge in a plastic bag, carried around their necks like trophies. Others had no lunch, because their parents had nothing to give them. They held back, or hid under the chairs, sobbing with shame. She said it was touching to see how everyone wanted to share. What she and Mother Pius did was to put all the porridge in the big pot, add more boiling water and make enough gruel to go around. The children ate quickly. Then they were made to take a short rest, which they resented, being eager to get to the dancing. The beat of the music was in their bones and in their blood and it was funny to see them dance so freely like little men, their hips sashaying, their torsos rippling like waves, the boys acting as chaperons, staring up at the girls. Although they held hands they never kissed, kisses were for mama. After that they would not settle again, ran around chasing butterflies or grasshoppers, boasting about the number of ants they swallowed and having battles. She had to keep them occupied until it was time to line them up in twos and threes and send them down the long road, to their scattered huts.
She had saved it for the end, like the good wine in the gospels. It was a rolled-up cache of drawings. Mother Pius had encouraged the children to paint some aspect of their lives, their houses, their parents, their brothers and sisters and their country. Some had done scrawls and squiggles that were meaningless, but the prize pieces she kept until last. There were three in all. A triptych.
The first was a panel of red, hard and obstinate slabs, with ochre vergings of blood dripping off the edges of the paper. It was called War.
The second was a drab grey, with a crush of children’s faces staring out of a window, in a sustained and silent scream. It was called Home.
The third was a leafy green vista, full of growing things – maize, corn, rye and sorghum, all ripening together. The effect was lifelike, as if a cool breeze had made those leaves quiver, as it would before a shower of rain. It was called Harvest. Then she folded them carefully and held them to her person with a fervour.
It was time for bed. The stars, as she said, were turning in and so should we, as the children liked to set out very early in the morning.
*
I could not sleep. The tarpaulin on the roof of the bedroom had been rolled back. The stars had all gone in and the sky was gold, a dome of gold from end to end, its lustre so bright that it seemed as if the world was on the edge of a new creation. We were safe. We had found a home, at least for now. I was filled with an ecstasy such as I had never known. Spools of light filled the room and lit up the universe outside. All was stillness. In that moment of unalloyed hope and happiness, it seemed to me that those rays were pouring into the darkest dimensions of the land itself.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
IMMEASURABLE THANKS TO the great number of people who helped me over the three years of writing this novel. Firstly my publishers, the great Faber & Faber, and in particular my occult editor Lee Brackstone, along with the two beacons, Rachel Alexander and Kate Burton, who had the crucial task of steering it through various media avenues. The renowned Jonathan Galassi, friend and editor of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was my champion on the far side of the Atlantic.
My consummate agent Caroline Michel and her assiduous team worked indefatigably to have the book published in several countries.
Aosdana generously helped with travel towards my first journey to Nigeria.
Before leaving England, I made a few contacts. First and foremost, the enlightening Teju Cole, and Sven Hughes, who wisely warned me of the pitfalls ahead. Then the authors Elnathan John and Andrew Walker, who led me to Gerhard Müller-Kosack, who had lived in the Gwoza Hills for many years and was the keeper of the oral language of the local people, now alas vanished. Funmi Iyanda wrote a letter of introduction to Dr Oby Ezekwesili, who conceived the brilliant slogan ‘Bring Back Our Girls’. Sam Taylor of Médecins Sans Frontières led me to invaluable sources.
Arriving in Abuja, the capital, at pre-dawn, I was met by the Irish ambassador Seán Hoy, who, with his wife Susan, welcomed me to the embassy. Seán’s assistant, Dorothy Barraquias, helped me each morning, bringing the newspapers, all in English, and endeavouring to contact a great number of people and organisations. Soon, I am trying to get my bearings among the crowds, with its hungers, its markets, its debris, and yes, its great vitality, but what I wanted was to meet girls who had been taken by Boko Haram. With the help of Dr Oby, and her assistant Deborah Olumolu, I would meet Rebecca, Abigail, Hope, Patience, Fatime, Amina, Hadya, and many others, all with stories to tell but constrained by their reserve and delicacy. Most of them had babies who were spotlessly clean and wrapped in white shawls. Subsequently, I met doctors, psychiatrists, trauma specialists, NGOs and voluntary workers from all corners of the world. The journalist Ahmad Salkida gave me an insight into Boko Haram machinations and their bargaining skills. Kim Toogood brought my attention to the plight and sometimes ostracising of girls who had been captured and were labelled, even by their own clan, as ‘Bush Wives’. I visited various IDP camps, met hoards of children and needing mothers, but very few men. Father David showed me around my first camp, which opened my eyes to the destiny of women with nowhere to go. Many followed me down the track and my interpreter, John Dghwede, said they were pleading with us to rescue them.
From Abuja, I travelled to Jos, which was a long drive and sometimes unnerving. I was welcomed by the Franciscan Sisters to a guest house where normally visiting priests or bishops came to a retreat. Sister Christiana and Sister Nora saw to my needs and I had happy conversations with a very young sister, Rita Satum, whose tiny convent was at the far end of the Plateau State. I also met Sister Antoinette and Sister Anne, both Irish. The anthropologist Adam Higazi, with his cousin Yusuf Habu Na’ango, brought me to the Kaduna State, where we visited two Fulani camps, or wuro, as they are named. That landscape and their way of life differed so radically from the teeming masses. Much as I loved my convent quarters, their dogs, their only guards, barked ferociously all night. Once again I was on the move, and, through the influence of Seán Hoy, I stayed in a compound with a garrulous and marvellous Irishman, Timothy McPeake, who with his team were responsible for the building and upkeep of the roads. Timothy whetted my interest in the myriad aspects of the country – rich and poor, thriving and woebegone, a modern Babel with a legion
of stories.
While in Jos I visited Women for Women International where Antonia Olieh and Bukola Onyishi had organised a group of women all who had suffered deprivations of a different kind. There fears were of their farms being raided by Fulani, herdsmen, and some spoke of husbands or sons who did not come back from their farms, and whose remains they had to search for. At the end I was presented with the brightly coloured honorary robe, in which, to my embarrassment, I was photographed.
The list grows, and includes Anna Badkhen, Sendi Dauda, Fatuma Hamidali Ibrahim, Fatima Akilu, and Dr Peter Ebeh, whose insight into the secret history of the captured girls was devastating. It was then I decided that my only method was to give the imaginative voicings of many through one particular visionary girl.
There were friends back in Europe, Dr Evelyn Stern, Jonathan Ledgard, and once again, the indefatigable Sven Hughes. Clodagh Beresford and Carlo Gebler (for a sudden epiphany), Richard and Ajjua Rickson (proposed taking me to some dancing in a church), Sasha Gebler (provided essential plot improvement) and friendly worshipers in Nigerian Churches and Houses of Praise scattered throughout London also had stories and happier memories to relate.
Last but not least, the workers, that diligent, ever-obliging succession of people who typed it again and again, starting with my stalwart of twenty-five years, Nadia Proudian, and in her absence, Louise Hardy, Rebecca Wearmouth, Amber Medland, Anna Martin, and ultimately, Sally Hayden, a young and brilliant journalist, whose research was so exigent and whose availability extended to the midnight hours.
I would finally like to thank Kate Ward of Faber, who oversaw the uneasy emergence of the manuscript, and Lucy Irvine from Caroline’s team, for enduring frenzied last minute corrections, until the time had come to let it Go.
About the Author
Edna O’Brien has written more than twenty works of fiction. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the American National Arts Gold Medal, the Frank O’Connor Prize and the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, she has lived in London for many years.
Also by the Author
fiction
The Country Girls
The Lonely Girl
Girls in Their Married Bliss
August Is a Wicked Month
Casualties of Peace
The Love Object and Other Stories
A Pagan Place
Zee and Co.
Night
A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories
A Rose in the Heart
Returning
A Fanatic Heart
The High Road
Lantern Slides
House of Splendid Isolation
Down by the River
Wild Decembers
In the Forest
The Light of the Evening
Saints and Sinners
The Love Object
The Little Red Chairs
non-fiction
Mother Ireland
James Joyce (biography)
Byron in Love
Country Girl
drama
A Pagan Place
Virginia (The Life of Virginia Woolf)
Family Butchers
Triptych
Haunted
The Country Girls
Copyright
First published in the UK in 2019
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2019
All rights reserved
© Edna O’Brien, 2019
Cover design by Faber
The right of Edna O’Brien to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–34119–1