New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  With my head down and cassava flying into my sack, I did not see the broker until he was next to me, his trousers almost touching my sack. I stood up. I stepped back enough to see him, the darkness of his skin. There were lines around his eyes from years of cassava broking. He was the height of the tallest building in Kampala. He had a bundle of money in his pocket for his better future, his better life. His trousers were the colour of cassava. He did not smile. His eyes were the colour of cassava. He looked at me. He looked at my sack. My heart started ululating.

  “You!” the man said. “Stealing my cassava?”

  What did he mean?

  “You!” the man said. “Stealing my cassava?”

  “Me?” I said.

  “Yes, you!” The man said. “Who else?”

  I stepped back. I did not let go of my mother’s sack, at least, not right then. Not until the man stepped forward and stood in front of me.

  “You!” the man said. “Thief!”

  I did not wait for more. I just got on my marks. I got set. I ran.

  Everyone knew exactly what happened to thieves. People threw stones at them. Traders took their clothes off. They kicked them in the eyes. Thieves did not return home to their families.

  I hopped over gullies. I jumped over wheel barrows like it was the Olympics. I flew past potato sellers and their sun umbrellas. Past wives and their princess-dressed daughters. By the time they turned to catch the luminous green of my dress, I was not there. I was gone, poof, a ghost.

  “Thief! Thief!” the market said.

  “Thief! Thief!” the wind said.

  “Thief! Thief!” the city said.

  I ran until there was no market to run away from. No voices to escape. Until it was just the main road. It was just people coming from work. Wives buying supper for their husbands. I looked around then I bent down. I tried to breathe, just breathe.

  At home, my mother was not there, hallelujah! There was only my uncle, the one reading for his A-level examinations. He was in the sitting-room on the sofa, his textbook on his lap. He still had on his school uniform, the white trousers and shirt. He looked up at me. He smiled.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” he said.

  My heart started to breakdance, like Michael Jackson himself.

  “Eh?” I said.

  “You heard me.”

  “Me? No!”

  He smiled.

  “Okay,” he said.

  But it was not okay. As soon as my mother arrived, my uncle told her about his passing through the market that evening. He saw a girl flying like there were demons racing after her. That girl looked like me. But he was not sure, not until he saw me standing in the sitting-room in my luminous green dress looking as if I just walked out of a twister. My feet were the colour of charcoal. There was sweat all over my face, perhaps even in my teeth. I had no slippers on.

  “Oh,” my mother said. “Is that so?” then they both started laughing, the kind of stupid laughter that only comes from stupid adults.

  My mother and uncle did not stop laughing. Not then. Not even soon after. They asked me more questions and then they laughed some more. They laughed until tears flowed from their eyes. Until their stomachs were stiff. I just stood there, my face like a porcupine. They did not notice it. They just laughed even if my feet were bleeding, even if my dress was not luminous green anymore and my eyes were filling with water.

  “All that running for cassava?” my mother said. “So funny!”

  But it was not funny, of course. It was not funny at all.

  Yemisi Aribisala

  A Nigerian-born author, she is best known for her thematic use of food to explore Nigerian stories. Her award-winning first book, Longthroat Memoirs: Soups Sex & Nigerian Tastebuds (Cassava Republic Press, 2016), uses Nigerian food as a literary substrate to think about Nigeria’s culture and society. Her upcoming book on Nigerian feminism, identity, migration and Christianity, among other critical parameters for engaging Nigeria and the Nigerian, is to be published in 2019. She lives in London with her children.

  A book between you and me

  He threw a toaster at her head. That’s what she said.

  She said,

  “He threw a toaster at my head.”

  My response was

  “A whole toaster?”

  Let me talk about that response for a bit because I’ve spent many years shaking my head at it. Whenever I have a flashback to that day, I kiss my teeth under my breath in reprimand. In shame. I was one of the two women to whom she was telling the toaster-throwing story. She laughed as she related the build up to the episode. Laughed at the conclusion as if the story could be humorous. I couldn’t laugh, but neither could I give an intelligent answer.

  “A whole toaster?” What did I mean by “whole” as if it could be half a toaster. A quarter. Toaster minus cable and plug maybe was equal to something substantially diminutive therefore legitimate to throw at someone’s head. Toaster model from the shop window made of cardboard and not a real toaster. Toaster minus the weight of chunks of day old sourdough bread . . .

  Perhaps I was distracted by examining her head to see if it was true that she had been assaulted with the weight of a whole toaster. The word “whole” just kept interrupting like a pestilential tic. It was maybe a kind of exclamation that translated to “Is that so!”

  I tried in vain to picture a grown man flinging a toaster across the room with the aim of hitting his wife’s head. Perhaps, I thought, I would see a dent of some sort, like when a car brushes against the side of a stationary object. Brush, not collide—again the veneering of the stroke in question. Slight scraping and not the full collision was what my mind allowed so that it wouldn’t catch in my throat on the way down, so it wouldn’t snag at the barbed corners of my mind. The story was hard to swallow was the point. I’m not sure what exactly gave me the liver to utter such nonsense. Let’s be frank: it was nonsense. I think it was shock maybe. That possibility of being taken unawares and therefore fashioning a bad response doesn’t make me less ashamed.

  I think it is like when you are in an airplane and there is terrifying turbulence. The plane drops and you press your personal gears under the chair in front of you. Or like when someone throws a paper plane at your head and you duck with the dramatics of someone avoiding a falling sky. An instinctive reaction to unexpected uncomfortable stimuli. Auto-pilot flaying. There is always shame after the response because it reveals something asymmetrical: a carelessly finished examination paper: immaturity: fear for yourself and your comfort more than the other person: a kind of ridiculous self-preservation: common sense that slipped in full view of others.

  The “whole toaster” response had undigested grains of disbelief in it. I am even more ashamed of this fact. One justifiably wants to always hide the back end of the digestive process. This was a woman whose husband had beaten her so severely, on so many occasions, for so many different reasons, trifling or “defended”; a toaster thrown at her head was restrained going by his CV. I had no right, no precedent, no margin of foolishness or naivety to offer disbelief. Like many victims of abuse her bruises were there, on her face and in your face, broken, traumatised skin at the easy reach of your fingers if you couldn’t believe your eyes.

  My response was a request for evidence of abuse, and I didn’t even know it or see myself well enough to make that crucial assessment. It was years later after layered moments of self-reprimands, after understanding the nature and logistics of a prologue to a head smashing . . . that was when I realised I had been asking for proof. If he had thrown the toaster and there was no dent in her head, no bruise waving for notice, no bald patch where hair had been extracted by the impact, then perhaps we could excuse and forgive him and wait . . . Wait till it was a “whole” table or a “whole” penetrating stiletto heel. I was asking for proof of insanity and wickedness. It had nothing to do with her laughter. I knew even back then that laughter was dialect for processing pain that made no sense.

&nbs
p; I know it from hanging around men whom I seem to befriend more easily than women. Perhaps this is the problem, my soft-spot for my friends who are men. For their ability to cook violence with machismo and vulnerability until it was palatable. Their ability to mask heartbreak with blows. Boys decapitating lizards, knocking their heads against walls just to see their eyeballs fly out; strangling birds with simplicity, with primal innocence, you were both overwhelmed and dazzled. You were impressed by that ability that you so instinctively lacked. I didn’t like animals but I felt sick when I saw a dying bird or a crumpled spider, or a bloody animal run over by a car.

  My best friend in primary school was a boy called Hakeem. One day he asked to go to the toilet and the teacher said “No”. He sat back down and put his head on the wooden desk and burst into tears. My heart melted into the hot stream trickling through his khaki shorts to the cement floor. I never told anyone he was my best friend. I honoured the cul-de-sac by forever and ever befriending heartbroken boys who mutilated animals in protest of pain and humiliation. I learnt from Hakeem and from my brother who allowed me to ride his much-better bicycle only if he was allowed to aim hard guavas at my head . . . how easy (easier) savagery was to boys and to men. I concluded with relief that I wasn’t a wimp for sure when my teenage son’s craniologist pinpointed with perfect accuracy the days when he had a surge of testosterone. On those days there was some form of violence acted out against someone. Or there was some attempt to fly from some elevated place and land four floors down. Some head-butting with walls.

  Once I sat with some friends who were relating the story of a Lagos bus conductor who was decapitated by a passing truck. He had been leaning out of the bus door as bus conductors do, shouting hoarse abuse, apparently high on his morning shot of roots-in-ogogoro. The truck came past close and quick and . . .

  And the men telling and listening to the story laughed riotously as if on cue. Laughed with tears and pounding of thighs. With knocking over of their chairs, scraping the terrazzo with metal chair legs, reeling backwards and holding their bellies. There was cold beer in the equation, in their bellies. A lot of it. I who hadn’t had one drop laughed at the roguery of all of it. We weren’t going to have the chance to laugh at our own deaths after all. So I laughed at all the things we didn’t and couldn’t say out of our mouths. For example, a bus conductor on a new sun-polished morning in Lagos had it coming didn’t he? He’d had it coming for months or years. He had been daring death and he knew. He sauntered into it. Should we mourn? Should we laugh at that which is inevitable? Is there comedy in a tipsy stroll into extinction? A quick topple into that undocumented other side? I knew they laughed because the matter had passed the boundaries of weeping. I knew that kind of pain that blessed you with mechanically flung open gates of sounds from your insides because you had to process the pain and soon other doses of pain with some kind of anaesthetic . . . the raucous acknowledgement of death greased with inebriation, the relief that you could laugh because you had the animation of life to laugh. The sugar for the bitter medicine. We were laughing at all our executions scheduled for their own impromptu beautiful day. Life and death had a sense of humour that made no sense. What was the use of denying that sometimes the more moronic the joke was, the harder you laughed.

  I had a problem with veneers of violence though. I did. Even though I had built agreeable cul-de-sacs of nice soft excuses for my friends who were men. I was not the only one guilty of that. The women in these men’s lives were always making excuses for them, so they rarely had to pay for anything broken. Yes, I maintain that. Not only the women who were traditional and believed that men had to be men . . . whatever that meant. But also the feminists who denied the biology of men and demanded they do things like women did and that was just a terrible fairytale that was going to break the hearts of a few more generations of women to come. I wasn’t the only one letting men off. I came from a family of women who for generations did so without any iota of demand for accountability from men for anything. Sometimes when a man said he beat his wife because she was rude to his mother, the women in his family ticked that off as justified. I had to learn to put my foot down and demand that my son control whatever biological motivations he had for violence. I owed him that. I owed the world I had pushed him out into that much. That was one of my first points of repentance from my “whole toaster” gaffe.

  One of those stories that we loved to tell and retell for its comedic value was of the woman who told her mother-in-law that her husband never came home. That he slept out most nights. Mother-in-law answered her: “Is it your eyes he is using to sleep outside?” That was the punchline. We laughed hard and let mother-in-law and mollycoddled son escape the parable. Laughter with all its nuances, with its demonstrative convulsions, bops, stomps made full sense. The problem was we were all complicit to the notches of abuse and violence before that one that makes a toaster rebounding off your head “OK”.

  “After all he hasn’t beaten you yet. When he does, we’ll all deal with him.” The first slap after that confident assurance of support . . . well . . . that one is just so-so, a tap, one-off, discussable in emotionless banter over a cup of tea like one is talking about the fluctuation of meat prices in the market; an aside of conversation, a hushed by-the-way, a “I deserved it this time”.

  . . . I quit the cul-de-sac eight years after my honeymoon in the Western Cape. A beautiful trip to a stunning country. We had stopped in Johannesburg for one or two nights before flying out to Cape Town, and I decided to buy Anthony Sampson’s Mandela from a bookshop in Sandton. That year, the book was a big fat tall tome, unlike the shrunken fourteenth edition I bought this year (2017) in the Western Cape.

  “You’re not going to read that book, are you?” was the response from my husband to my purchase of the book.

  “I am,” I said.

  “Why would you read a book on our honeymoon?”

  “Because I’m always reading books”

  “You bought the biggest book in the shop.”

  “Yes. So it lasts as long as possible.”

  “Well, life isn’t all about things in books, is it?”

  “No, it isn’t, but there are millions and millions of books on things about life, so perhaps their presence and our attention to them signify something truly profound where not a lot else makes sense . . . In any case what’s a book between you and me . . . one book?”

  I was leaning so far backwards, I could feel the wall of the cul[ture]-de-sac. For years after I heard and experienced variations of the soft collision, the scrape that removes a little bit of paint every time; the knocks that grew in intensity until, as Fela sang, “suffering ‘debaru[ed]’ the head” and you were too confused to be coherent about anything.

  “You aren’t going to read in the car, are you?”

  “Women who read too much inevitably feel they know too much.”

  “That’s your problem . . . you think you know everything.”

  I always tried to say something clever in response, like: “Everything I learned is from the mad bad Jewish women in Jesus’s bloodline that Nigerian women love to read about in the New King James Version.”

  I only ever got out limp comebacks like “A whole toaster. You mean a whole one?”

  Somewhere among all the self-administered reprimands . . . I knew that veneered savagery over time meant one became inured to the meaning and true nature of violence. To its burrowing progress and its results. To death walking in something that seemed to still be alive. How can I explain it but to talk about seeing a man on fire, engulfed, but running with his hands held up over his head. You knew he was dead and that the motion was some kind of program running for a few more minutes before the crumpling of the hardware. It is easy to sit in a beer parlour and laugh at death, but when you see it progressing, there is nothing to laugh about. The anaesthetic of laughter doesn’t work.

  I had to teach myself the market-place response—that one you give the vendor who sizes you up for a fool. Th
at is, the solidifying of every human pore into a towering wall of NO that cannot be beaten with bare hands. Loud bleating electronic alarm for the intruder sneaking into one’s home at night. The wailing that accompanies the horrors of viewing, touching, cleaning up after death. The refusal of anaesthetic. The sprouting of powerful wings in elevation and flight. Not quiet levitation. The sensational soaring of the mechanics of wings—with sound and wind. This was my last conclusion. This is what I meant to say and feel. This is my response.

  Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro

  Translated by Alejandro Alvarez

  An award-winning Afro lesbian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and feminist activist from Puerto Rico, she addresses both racial and gender issues, and sexual identity in her combative, non-conformist and creative works. She offers lectures about Afro-atheism, decolonial feminism, LGBTTQ issues and how to be an atheist and a black woman in today’s society. She is also the Director of the Department of Afro-Puerto Rican Studies, a performative project of Creative Writing based in San Juan and has founded the Chair of Ancestral Black Women to respond to the invitation promulgated by UNESCO to celebrate the International Decade of Afro-Descendants 2015–2024. Her book Las Negras, winner of the PEN Club Puerto Rico National Short Story Award in 2013, explores the limits of female characters during the slavery period that challenged hierarchies of power. She also won the Prize of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture in 2015 and 2012, and the National Prize of the Institute of Puerto Rican Literature in 2008. She has been translated into German, French, Italian, English, Portuguese and Hungarian.