New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  SEE PAGE 937 REFERENCE TO MUM (C.E.C.I.) AND APPLICATION FOR FINANCE TO 30 COUNTRIES (APPROVED) UN WEBSITE (START FILES)

  What the—? Right. I see. C.E.C.I, as in Cecelia, Grandma. He thinks some United Nations directive has mentioned his mother and she’s embroiled in some world finance conspiracy, no doubt. Bloody hell, Dad.

  This is why I have purposely kept my latest personal email address from him: a fifteen-year-long deluge of emails with subject headers such as “READ THIS THEN DESTROY”, the introductory body text of which summarily read: “Finished, exploratory examination of UN and world history and development. Love Dad. XXXX.”

  The contents of the attachments were always a balance of well-researched criticisms spliced with nonsensical verbiage detailing an investigation he had undertaken exploring some UN or EU Commission department, explaining where they had gone wrong and how it might be corrected, amended, fixed. At his behest I once read a fifty-page document of such nonsense, with a ten-page appendix implicating such A-listers as Kylie Minogue and Tony Blair in one of his conspiracy theories. This is how he now spends his days: looking up policy documents on the Internet seeking evidence to implicate major institutions in his own misfortunes. His current delusional state has convinced him that he is head of the World Bank.

  There are two attachments. I can’t bear to open them.

  Within half an hour I get a call from Dad, asking urgently: “Did you get it?”

  “Yes, Dad. Was it the email titled ‘U.N., START?’”

  “Yes. You didn’t show it to anyone, did you?”

  “No. I haven’t shown it to anyone, Dad. And that’s your life story, is it? The one you were telling me about in the café?”

  “Yes.”

  “Starting with your childhood and all that?”

  “Yes! Did you read it?” He’s exasperated by my lack of urgency. “It’s all in there . . . I told you. You need to read it.” His tone has shifted from urgent to angry.

  “Cool. Well, I haven’t had a chance to read it properly, but I will.”

  “Make sure you do, yeah, but don’t show anyone, not even your Mum.”

  Lisa Allen-Agostini

  A writer and editor from Trinidad and Tobago, she is the author of the young adult novel Home Home, which as a manuscript won third prize in the 2017 CODE Burt Award for Young Adult Literature. She is also the author of the book of poems Swallowing the Sky (2015) and the YA novel The Chalice Project (2008) and co-editor of Trinidad Noir (2008). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Wasafiri, sx salon, Susumba, Lightspeed Magazine, and past simple. As a freelance journalist, she writes for Trinidad & Tobago Newsday, Caribbean Beat and other publications.

  The Cook

  Prologue

  I was always a loner. Between the gangs outside, the crack selling on my corner and the whores drinking in the rum shop, my father always wanting to be up under me, and my mother always busting my ass with licks, it was best to find a little corner and hide away, keep safe. In school it was the same thing. I mean, no Pappy to interfere with me and sit me on his lap but there was Sir, who was so very friendly all the time, with his breath in my face.

  I can’t wait to get away from them, from there, from that.

  Modelling is my ticket out. I’m taking it. In Seaview I’m just the bony, ugly black girl with big eyes and thick lips, but through the lens of a professional’s camera I am exotic, beautiful, sexy. I am the right size, the right shape, the right colour for once in my life and of course I’ll take it. I can’t wait until I get off this island for good.

  Those fat pigs, slobbering on the chicken bones in their disgusting brown mess, they couldn’t understand. KFC is meat. Meat is protein. Protein is good; carbs are bad. Models don’t eat sugar and yam and flour dumpling.

  I model off this island. It’s too small here, and everybody is in everybody’s business. For instance, I know about the lesbians, trying to hide what everybody can see plain as day, their relationship written like a billboard on the backside of the men’s skinny jeans they wear. And I know all about these bitches and how many of them have been fucked in the back seat of the very car they are sitting in; they play innocent but we all know they aren’t.

  If that bottle had only touched my face, I would have killed the bitch who threw it. I took off for a while, cooling my head on the beach by myself before I did something I would regret.

  I only came to the cook to get away from home for a day. Anything would be better than Seaview Road.

  I.

  I could feel the undercurrent of jealousy whenever she passed the other girls. It zinged, electric. She looked different from them, walked different, too, with a studied strut, tossing the silky, expensive hair extensions they could only envy but not afford. The other girls called her “America’s Next Top Model”. Her lip-gloss was perfect, nude, and I think she was wearing BB cream. She’d had her eyebrows waxed and arched and well brushed and coloured in, not effaced and replaced in stark black pencil like theirs. You could see those perfect brows over her wide sunglasses, designer sunglasses like the girls wear in pictorials shot on beaches like this one, only they are flown in from Milan or New York, not driven here from Seaview Road, the worst neighbourhood on the island. And her shorts, a perfect size two, showed just a hint of her bikini bottom where the waistband hit the sloping curve as her abs met her hips. None of the other girls had that glamour. None of the other girls even knew what it was they didn’t like about her, so deep in their self-hate that they thought she thought she was better than them.

  I couldn’t even tell why she’d come on this day trip—they call it a cook—in the first place. We’d gathered in town: the community college lecturer who had organised the outing for the hiking club; another guy on staff, his daughter and her girlfriend; and the students, eight teenaged girls. She was one of them. My friend, invited mainly to add another car to the pool, drove two other girls, her and me. She complained for the whole trip, two hours of winding road into the wilderness. She didn’t like the long drive from the city, didn’t like the company, didn’t like the beach. After we arrived she spent the whole time by herself, sitting on the edge of a beached fishing pirogue; Sea Lady was its name. It hadn’t touched the sea for years, its barnacles dried and crumbling, its paint flaking into dust. It sat behind a sand dune far in front of the thin woods where the group had gone to make the cook.

  The men rolled together three heavy river stones, cut dry wood, gathered leaves and kindling, stacked the meagre twigs and bits of old paper and lit them with a match, blew on the small flickering and fed it until its flames blazed taller than the tops of the rocks, banked it until the fire licked lazily and low, just high enough for the pot to stand above. The girls poured brown sugar into the bottom of the pot, stirring it constantly with a long steel spoon so the sugar wouldn’t burn as it warmed, melted into caramel, began to foam like a good stout, turned black and thin. They added a basinful of marinated chicken just before the browning burned, and others dropped in dumplings the size of a man’s thumb, and chunks of peeled yam, sweet potato and green banana. Then they covered the pot with a sheet of steel and left it to simmer over that wood fire between the slender trees beyond the sandy beach.

  She didn’t help.

  The other girls, while the brown down cooked, sat in the lecturer’s car, playing music and dancing with him. She sat in the pirogue by herself and looked out at the sea. I never saw her talk to anybody except me before the fight started, so it couldn’t have been her fault. But what do I know? I’m just a tourist.

  II.

  What them did fighting over? Who the ass know. Woman go fight for anything, for nothing. All I know is that when time come for food to share she take out she box of KFC and start to eat. Them offer she a plate of brown down and she say she don’t eat provision, but them girls and them say how she feel she too good for them, how she feel she is something, America’s Next Top Model or something, when she is really just a nigger girl from Seaview Road and n
o better than none of them. How she dry and hard and how only dog does want bone, but man does want meat, and they roll their bottom to the dancehall blasting from how-he-name car, just to show that they have the fatness plus the wickedest wining skills, and how she don’t have none. Me, I drink my rum and eat the brown down and hush.

  III.

  Me didn’t see no fight. Me and my girl did over on the next side, on the beach, far past the boat, hugging up in the sand and trying to get a little privacy away from everybody who did watching we out the corner of their eye and quoting Leviticus 20 in their mind.

  IV.

  I did right in the middle of it. I leave the girls sitting inside my car and walk around to every man jack on that beach and tell them how she turn up she nose at we kind of food. I find the brown down was damn good. Damn good. And she didn’t lift a finger. Like she too good to bubble a pot on the beach with the rest of we. She in she skimpy-skimpy bikini—all she breast showing, as if is a blues she in—and wouldn’t shit on the rest of we. It don’t surprise me that after food share, licks share. It was bubbling whole day, like the pot on that three-stone fire. Every time she sashay from the fishing boat she was sitting down in, the same boat what she dead in, and come over in we direction—without even turning she head to smile, to say, “Aye, Dog!”, nothing—the fire get higher and them girls start to grumble louder and harder. By the time food share you coulda hear them, ain’t even bothering to keep their voice down, “Who she feel she is?” and “Look Miss Top Model coming.” It don’t surprise me at all when one of the girls finally stand up and push a finger in she face to confront she about the food, about how she does play like she shit don’t stink. Everything just come tumbling out because that one girl was talking for all them girls who was holding their hate inside for so long. It didn’t take nothing for the bottle to fly.

  V.

  Everyone was drinking. I wasn’t the only one with a bottle in my hand. You can look through my photos and see: Here. Here. Here. We had, nearly all of us, brought rum: Rivers, Clarke’s Court, Fernandes Black Label. Who hadn’t brought rum had brought Hennessy Cognac, Dewar’s Scotch. And my daughter and her friend, well, they only came back after everything was over. So if you’re asking me who threw the bottle at her, I really wouldn’t know.

  Afterwards everybody was tangled up, holding back the girls. Because those girls were out for blood, you could see it.

  When we were all distracted, she just disappeared. It was only when we were packing up to leave that we found her there, strangled to death and laid out in the little beached boat.

  Epilogue

  she did tall and thin and black and she head did plait up in false hair hanging down all by she bottom and she did look like a magazine model or a girl in a nastiness picture on the TV not the white people nastiness with them blonde white girl with fake breast but black people nastiness with big bottom woman and man with wood like chair foot except she wasn’t no fat woman she did thin and hard but she bottom did fat the only fat thing on she except for she mouth she mouth she mouth she had them thick rude lips and I hold she neck and squeeze and squeeze and stuff wood in she mouth force open them rude lips till she choke

  Monica Arac de Nyeko

  A Ugandan writer, she won the 2007 Caine Prize for African Writing with her story “Jamboula Tree”. She had previously been shortlisted for the prize in 2004 for “Strange Fruit”. She has an MA in Humanitarian Assistance from the University of Groningen. She is currently working on a novel.

  Running for Cassava

  The market is different now. Nothing is for free. Not bananas falling off bunches. Not oranges burnt by the sun. Not cobs of maize, with no sweetness. Not green sugarcane stalks. Not overripe mangoes. Not cassava. But, there was a time, when it was possible to get these things for free.

  In those days, in the mornings or evenings, trucks came from up-country loaded with sacks of cassava. Those trucks were rusted. Their fuel gauges did not work. They looked like they would fail at the very next hill. And yet, they did not. For hours, they drove past districts and towns. They went up hills. They went down valleys. They went past children bathing in rivers and mud puddles. For hours, the trucks puffed. They heaved until they reached the city and the market. Then, the cassava brokers in the front and their truck boys seated on top of the sacks, got off. They stretched. They yawned. They welcomed the market with its promise of a big cassava profit.

  In those days, my mother worked in the centre of the city. She was a copy typist at the national social security fund. All day long, she punched letters into the typewriter. She corrected errors with liquid white-out. Then she typed some more, until the copy was ready for the Director to draw his signature on the paper with a blue fountain pen. Soon after, the letters left the office to meet their owners—widows and heirs, sons and mothers. In black and blue ink, they declared the value of their beloved’s life, what they had at the time of their death. The letters told heirs what they might expect by way of a better future, a better life.

  As for my mother, by way of a better future, a better life for me, she sat in an office with sofa sets and typed letters. My mother drank tea in the morning. Office messengers brought her lunch to her desk in plastic containers. At the end of the month, she got her payslip. She thanked God for our blessings. In the middle of the school term when I got malaria, my mummy prayed, then she asked the nurse if I really, really needed the injections she was recommending, if perhaps the aspirin and chloroquine might be enough. In the evenings, my mother sat by the lamp to write down the things still left to buy after the day’s demands. Cassava. Sugar. Tea. Exercise books. Pens. Pencils. School uniforms. Go-Back-to-School Bata shoes.

  One day, on her way home through the market, when my mother was not even thinking about better futures, better lives, she saw the trucks of cassava in the market. They were many. The cassava peeped through the sacks. They were red, like the earth. After eight months in the soil, after that much sunshine, they were ready. My mother looked at the cassava. She watched the brokers haggling over prices with the market women. She saw off-loaders carrying cassava from the trucks. She saw also that when there were no sacks left to carry, there were small, broken pieces of cassava all over the truck floor and all around the truck. They were tiny. They were not saleable, but they were still as fresh, still as red. They would taste just as fine with hot oil and salt. With tea and plenty of sugar. With that much cassava, she would not need to add flour on her end of day list, ever. But, for now, they remained in the market, unclaimed. Later, much later on, the market cleaners would arrive to take them away. They would take them to the rubbish pit. There, they would be eaten by rot and time.

  My mother left the market, thoughts of a better future, a better life in her mind, shining like light bulbs. At home, she changed into her slippers. She tied a scarf around her head. She took the sisal sack from the storeroom. She stuck it under her arm. She returned to the market. The sun was going down. It was red, the red of cassava.

  My mother returned from the market when there was no sun. She poured pieces of cassava on the sitting-room floor. She told each of us to take a knife. She told us to start peeling.

  In the night, with the light of the lamp, we peeled cassava. We cut it into pieces. We threw the now white pieces into water. We chewed raw cassava until our stomachs sang cassava tunes. It was sweet, as sweet as a better future, a better life. When we finished, my mummy washed all that redness, all that dirt off the cassava. In the morning, she put the cassava on the veranda. In a few days, my mother would take the dried cassava to the grinding mill across the main road. She would return with flour. For this entire season, we would eat cassava flour with eggplants or beans. At the end of the month maybe we would even eat it with meat or chicken.

  My mother never asked me to go to the market with her. Not even once. But one day, when the sun was almost gone and she was not back home yet, a thought as bright as the gates of heaven shone in my mind. I took my mother’s sack from
the storeroom. I stuck it in my armpit. I crossed the road that separated the market from our house. I made my way through the shops, through the women seated under sun umbrellas with their cassava waiting for customers. I went to the open market where the off-loaders were already taking the sacks off the trucks.

  Now that I was in the market, I did not know what to do. I stood, a distance from the trucks, thinking, waiting for a thought, bright, heavenly. It did not come, at least not as quickly as I needed it to. All that was left before me were the cassava brokers. They were everywhere. There were off-loaders heaving with the weight of the sacks. They were everywhere. There were women with wrappers, their money purses wrapped around their waists. They were everywhere.

  I started to feel okay. I knew these off-loaders. I knew their faces. The women too. I knew them. My mother bought cassava from them. They were here now, everywhere, laughing, happy. Everyone was happy. Standing there, looking at all of them the thought, the one I had been longing for, arrived.

  I stepped forward, towards a truck, a green one. It was newer. There was no rust on it. With each step, I took forward to my truck and to my cassava, the thumping in my chest went down until there was nothing left. Until there was only me, the truck and the brokers. They were happy. The women were happy. Everyone was happy.

  With all this happiness, my feet were rapid, excited, they carried me forward swiftly until I was almost leaning on the truck. There was cassava all around me. This was cassava heaven.

  I took the sack from my armpit. I squatted. I started to put cassava into my sack. My mother would be so proud of me. She would not need to come by herself to the trucks anymore. Maybe she would buy me some beads for my hair. Maybe she would tell everyone at church I was the bestest best daughter. Maybe I would get a dress for Christmas.