She remembered her three years of marriage not as a time of serenity, because the longing, the terrible desire for a child, had made of each month a frantic climb towards a possible benediction, then, when her period came, a collapse followed by gloomy despondency before hope returned and, with it, the gradual, dazzling, breathless ascent day after day, right up to the cruel moment when a barely perceptible pain in her lower abdomen let her know that it had not worked this time—no, those years had truly been neither calm nor happy, because Khady never did become pregnant.
But she thought of herself as a taut, strong cord, vibrating in the restricted, impassioned space of this waiting game.
It seemed to her that she had not been able to concentrate on anything, throughout those three years, other than on the rhythmic alternation of hope and disillusionment, so that disillusionment—provoked by a twinge in her groin—might quickly be followed by the stubborn, almost ridiculous surge of hope regained.
“It’ll perhaps be next month,” she would say to her husband.
And, careful not to show his own disappointment, he would reply in a kindly way: “Yes, for sure.”
Because that husband of hers had been such a nice man.
In their life together he had given her full latitude to become that desperately taut cord which vibrated with every emotion, and he had surrounded her with kindness and had always spoken to her with prudence and tact, exactly as if, busy with creating a new life, she needed to be surrounded by an atmosphere of silent deference in order to be able to perfect her art and give shape to her obsession.
Never once had he complained about the all-pervasive presence in their life of that baby which was never conceived.
He had played his part with a degree of self-denial, she said to herself later.
Would he not have been within his rights to complain about the lack of consideration with which, at night, she pulled him towards her or pushed him away, depending on whether she thought her husband’s semen would at that moment be of use or not, about the way, during her safe period, she did not beat about the bush in making it clear that she did not wish to make love, as if the expenditure of useless energy could damage the only project she then cared about, as if her husband’s seed constituted a unique, precious reserve of which she was the keeper and which should never be drawn upon in the pursuit of mere pleasure?
He had never complained.
At the time she had not seen how noble his behaviour was because she would not have understood that he could complain about—or even simply fail to accept as legitimate, obligatory and exalting—the ascetic self-denial (ascetic in a sense, though their tally of sexual acts was impressive) to which this wild urge to procreate subjected them.
No, certainly she would not have understood that at the time. It was only after the death of her husband, of the peaceable, kindly man she had been married to for three years, that she was able to appreciate his forbearance. That only happened once her obsession had left her and she had become herself again, rediscovering the person she had been before her marriage, the woman who had been able to measure the qualities of devotion and gallantry which her man possessed in abundance.
She then felt great unhappiness, remorse, hatred almost, about her lunatic desire to get pregnant that had blinded her to everything else, in particular her husband’s illness.
Because surely he must have been ill for some time to die so suddenly, early one pale morning during the rainy season? He had scarcely got out of bed that day to open as usual the little café they ran in a lane in the medina.
He had got up and then, with a sort of choking sigh, almost a restrained sob, a sound as discreet as the man himself, he had collapsed in a heap at the foot of the bed.
Still in bed and barely awake, Khady had not at first imagined that her husband was dead, no, not for a second.
For a long time she would be angry with herself over the thought that had flashed through her mind—oh, a year or more later, she was, in truth, still angry with herself —over the thought that wouldn’t it just be their rotten luck if he fell ill at that precise moment, because she had had her period a good two weeks earlier, and her breasts felt slightly harder and more sensitive than usual, so she supposed she was fertile, but if this man was so out-of-sorts as to be incapable of making love to her that evening, what a mess, what a waste of time, what a horrid let-down!
She had got up in her turn and gone over to him, and when she had realised he was no longer breathing but just lying there inert, hunched up, his knees almost touching his chin, with one arm trapped under his head and with one innocent, vulnerable hand lying flat, palm upwards, on the floor, looking, she had said to herself, like the child he must have been, small and brave, never contrary but open and straightforward, solitary and secretive under a sociable exterior, she had seized his open palm and pressed it to her lips, tortured at the sight of so much decency in a human being. But even then stupefied grief was battling it out in her heart with a still-unattenuated, still-undeflated feeling of exultation that enveloped her at the thought that she was ovulating, and at the same moment as she was running to get help, diving into the house next door, with tears she was unaware of pouring down her cheeks, that part of herself which was still obsessed with pregnancy was beginning to wonder feverishly what man could, just this once, replace her husband to avoid losing the chance of getting pregnant this month and of breaking the exhausting cycle of hope and despair which, even as she ran shouting that her husband was dead, she saw looming, were she forced to pass up this opportunity.
And it was beginning to dawn on her that this fertile period would be wasted, and the following months too, and huge disappointment—a feeling that she had put up with all that hope and despair for three whole years to no purpose—polluted her grief at this man’s death with an almost rancorous bitterness.
Could he not have waited for two or three days?
Khady still, now, reproached herself with having entertained such thoughts.
After her husband’s death the owner of the café threw her out to make way for another couple, and Khady had had no choice but to go and live with her husband’s family.
Her own parents had handed her over to be brought up by her grandmother, long since dead, and after seeing them during her childhood at rare intervals only, Khady had finally lost touch with them altogether.
And although she had grown up to be a tall, well-built, slender young woman with a smooth oval face and delicate features, although she had lived for three years with this man who had always spoken to her kindly, and although she had been able, in the café, to command respect with an attitude that was unconsciously haughty, reserved, a touch cold and had therefore discouraged ribald comments about her infertility—despite such major pluses, her lonely, anxious childhood, and later her vain efforts to get pregnant, which, even though they had kept her in a state of intense, almost fanatical emotion, had dealt barely perceptible but fatal blows to her precarious self-assurance: it had all prepared her to find it not at all abnormal to be humiliated.
So that, when she found herself living with in-laws who could not forgive her for having no means of support and no dowry, who despised her openly and angrily for having failed to conceive, she willingly became a poor, self-effacing creature who entertained only vague impersonal thoughts and inconsistent, whitish dreams, in the shadow of which she wandered about vacantly, mechanically, dragging her feet with indifference and, she believed, hardly suffering at all.
She lived in a three-room run-down house with her husband’s parents, two of her sisters-in-law and the young children of one of them.
Behind the house there was a back-yard of beaten earth shared with the neighbours. Khady avoided going into the yard because she feared getting sarcastic remarks thrown at her about her worthlessness and the absurdity of her existence as a penniless, childless widow, and when she had to go there to peel the vegetables or prepare the fish she huddled so closely inside her batik, with on
ly her quick hands and high cheekbones showing, that people soon stopped paying her any attention and forgot all about her, as if this silent, uninteresting heap no longer merited a rude or jeering remark.
Without pausing in her work she would slide into a kind of mental stupor which stopped her understanding what was going on around her.
She then felt almost happy.
She seemed to be in a blank, light sleep that was free of both joy and anguish.
Early every morning she would leave the house with her sisters-in-law. All three carried on their heads the plastic bowls of various sizes which they would sell in the market.
There they found their usual pitch. Khady would squat a little to one side of the two others who pretended not to notice her presence and, responding with three or four raised fingers when asked the price of the bowls, she stayed there for hours on end, motionless in the noisy bustle of the market which made her slightly dizzy and helped her sink back into a state of torpor shot through with pleasing, unthreatening, whitish dreams like long veils flapping in the wind on which there appeared from time to time the blurred face of her husband smiling his everlasting kindly smile, or, less often, the features of the grandmother who had brought her up and sheltered her and who had been able to see, even while treating her harshly, that she was a special little girl with her own attributes, not just any child.
So much so that she had always been conscious of her uniqueness and aware, in a manner that could neither be proved nor disproved, that she, Khady Demba, was strictly irreplaceable, even though her parents had abandoned her and her grandmother had only taken her in because there had not been a choice, and even though no being on earth needed her or wanted her around.
She was happy to be Khady, there had never been any dubious chink between herself and the implacable reality of the person called Khady Demba.
She had even happened on occasion to feel proud of being Khady because—she had often thought with some amazement—children whose lives seemed happy, who every day got generous helpings of chicken or fish and wore clothes to school that were not stained or torn, such children were no more human than Khady Demba who only managed to get a minuscule helping of the good things in life.
Even now that was something she never doubted: that she was indivisible and precious and could only ever be herself.
Juliane Okot Bitek
A poet, her 100 Days (University of Alberta, 2016) was nominated for several writing prizes including the 2017 BC Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the 2017 Alberta Book Awards and the 2017 Canadian Authors Award for Poetry. It won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry, and the 2017 Glenna Lushei Prize for African Poetry. Her poem “Migration: Salt Stories” was shortlisted for the 2018 National Magazine Awards for Poetry. “Gauntlet” (the initial poem of the series these two poems are from) was longlisted for the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Sublime: Lost Words (The Elephants, 2018). She lives in Vancouver, Canada.
genetics 1
these2 are3 our4 stories5 the6 ones7 we8 keep9 to10 ourselves11
genuflections 12
music13
european history14
physical education15
& that fresh-faced kid1
when royalty arrived2
when royalty arrived3
when royalty arrived4
when royalty arrived5
i too curtsied but just a little bit6
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, she was educated at Kenyatta University, the University of Reading and the University of Queensland. She is the author of the widely acclaimed novel Dust, and won the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for the short story “Weight of Whispers”, which the BBC described as a “. . . subtle and suggestive work of fiction that dramatises the condition of refugees.” She was the Executive Director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival from 2003 to 2005. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications worldwide including Kwani? and McSweeney’s. Her story “The Knife Grinder’s Tale” has been made into a short film. She now lives in Nairobi.
These Fragments
1.
Weeks later, a message comes with one of the boy soldiers who had gone to visit their illicit food supplier. A pink, scented card with a lily on the front. Inside, etched in gold ink:
Dear Colonel,
Your story seduces.
The world needs to hear it.
Please find me.
Safiya Fakhri.
Filmmaker, Translator. 03/12
The Colonel said nothing. A war-emptied man.
2.
Kalioyolipi. Place of temporary truces. Moonless night. Prickle of skin. Someone has been watching her. Yesterday, she could not sleep, at 2 a.m. needing the chill of a cold night wind that swept in from the dense forest river. Her hut was one of nine in a compound that, many years ago, had been set aside for paying foreigners. Yesterday Safiya had cried as she tried to wash the fecund stench of the African interior out of her thick, black-grey-streaked hair. Safiya waited. She studied the fireflies. She was being watched. Finally, she called out, her voice sharp: “Why don’t you ask what causes a woman to cry in the density of night? Show your face, putain!” She half-rose, intending to check her camera batteries. Only then did a shadow shiver into life behind her.
“Tomorrow morning,” a whisper said, “go to the market place. Wait inside the music stall.”
Safiya turned. Nobody there.
3.
The market was beside a ravaged former military camp. Safiya lurked in a record stall wearing a white jumpsuit, and white high heels. Perfumed, she carried her camera bag. She waited. Nobody offered more than a greeting to her. She would be the last person to leave the market area. Her high heels marching on the uneven dirt road punctuated her rage.
4.
Cicada cacophonies in dark, green, sultry forest. Tea-coloured river water—black in the night. Escorted by four boyish guides carrying oversize weapons, a blindfolded Safiya lurched, shuddering at the screeching of a billion insects. One of her heels had snapped in half. A black cloud of insects hovered above her head. They had walked for more than five hours.
5.
Whispers. Receding footsteps. Sudden warmth and a calloused touch at Safiya’s right elbow, a man’s quiet “Bienvenue,” as if she were a dinner guest.
6.
He leads her into a cool space. The muffled sound of water. “Bend,” he says. “A short crawl, then you can sit.”
Her hands move towards her blindfold.
He squeezes her arm. “The mask . . . stays on.” He says, “A chair . . . to your left.” Safiya tumbles into a hard object, touches metal. A refurbished drum, foliage as padding.
Safiya says, “Colonel? I presume. You are . . . elusive.” She tilts her head. “But you let me find you?”
“You asked.”
“A risk.”
“You baited the trap well.”
She is engaging him with an overfamiliar ease. “My new project,” Safiya says, “explores a theory of haunting about men like you.” The Colonel watches her hands.
“Revolutionary affinity.” She tosses, “And its consequences. Our need for vicarious atonement.”
He inches closer. “Atonement?”
She says, “My father was guerrilla leader for the Ath-Thawra Al-Jazā ’iriyya. His descendants inherited his unresolved guilt.”
“Which war?”
“La guerre d’Algérie. The hero blew up people for The People until post-independence idiots in turn blew up him, and my three uncles, at a family function. Now it’s just the women left.”
He asks, “So what causes a woman to weep in the density of night?”
She turns. “You won’t show me your face? I prefer the human gaze.”
“That I cannot offer you, madam.”
The forest is rustling its leaves. Safiya slips from her pocket a slender, silver, ten-centimetre long object with tiny gem-like green-ora
nge-red-yellow light spots. “Mini-recorder.”
The Colonel stoops to touch it.
She says, “There’s a two point five million-dollar price attached to your head.”
“Do you want it?”
“Yes.”
“Make it four. I’ll surrender to you.”
Laughter.
She says, “But our topic today is ‘Crimes against humanity’. Are you guilty?”
He grimaces. “What is human?”
“Bodies are strewn along the roads you pass. What does ‘meaning’ mean for you?”
“Victory.”
“What’s next?”
Staccato delivery. “Close our wounds. Build a sanctuary for my people.”
She smiles with faux sweetness. “Your orphans? Do you hear them weep for mutilated mothers and fathers?”
He was weary. “Often.”
He watches her hands move in the air. Her full-lipped mouth that tipped towards big laughter, which did not explain her tears.
Whine of a mosquito. She asks, “What’s the hardest part of your war?”
“Loneliness.”
Safiya depresses the audio recorder’s switch. She is asking: “What do you want with your war?” He kneads the back of his neck. He used to know. She hurls a question at him, “Do you bear responsibility for the horror you create?”
His explicit, “Yes” drops her jaw. He asks, “Is this the interview?”
“No,” she answers, perplexed by his “yes”. “Yes,” she corrects. “How did your war start?”
His mind searches for beginnings: “Went to Belgium. Studied flies. Drosophila melanogaster. Over 100,000 different species. Returned with a degree and an urge to grow my country . . . one insect at a time.”
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