my father felt its knuckles crush his jaw
my mother delivered its children,
I have been kissed deeply by its tongue
it has licked Yorkshire on my vowels, left me
with the blushed cheeks of a first crush.
I am a half-written love letter
it does not know where to send.
So when go home
becomes a neighbourhood war cry,
we understand we are not what you wanted,
have been clean written out of your folklores.
But we have built here, loved here, died here,
already carry the heartache of leaving.
When we go home, we go back reeking of you.
Trifonia Melibea Obono
translated by Lawrence Schimel
An Equatorial Guinean writer and activist, she is the author of three novels in Spanish—Herencia del bindendee (2016), La Bastarda (2016), and La albina del dinero—and a short story collection, Las mujeres hablan mucho y mal, which won the 2018 Justo Bolekia Boleká international Prize for African Literature. La Bastarda, translated into English by Lawrence Schimel, was published by the Feminist Press in the USA and Modjaji Books in South Africa. It is the first book by a woman writer from Equatorial Guinea to be published in translation in English.
Let the Nkúkúmá Speak
The House of the Word is full of men: all arranged beside the nkúkúmá. Outside are the women, some seated on the ground, others on small seats brought from their homes.
“Something has changed in the village,” people’s gazes say, and the nkúkúmá, the chief of the tribe and the village, must make a declaration.
Adá committed suicide five days ago. The daughter of the nkúkúmá. Tradition is being questioned by the leader’s own grandson, who lodged a suit against his mother’s widow and his own grandfather.
The village is also waiting for the highest authority to reach a decision about a suit lodged against his first cousin Alogo to recover his brother’s inheritance: the wife he left pregnant and the two girls she gave birth to.
The nkúkúmá is nervous. All the elders expect him to uphold the customs; like the political parties, they feel that traditional institutions must be conserved at any cost for the good of society. Alongside the elders of the village, are some of the youths: girls and boys who are barely in their thirties who sympathize with his grandson and demand justice. There are also some women, seated on the outskirts of this political institution, the House of the Word, who murmur that enough is enough, they want freedom. But they speak in low voices.
One voice comes from inside the House of the Word: “You should be in the kitchen, Women!”
At last the nkúkúmá reacts. He is wrapped in a popó outfit on which can be seen the image of the chief of state holding a torch with his right hand. He postpones for later the case of Adá’s suicide and calls for the claimant against his cousin Alogo to state his case, who in turn summons his sister, eight months pregnant and seated with the women outside. Both of them sit on chairs made of melongo wood in front of the nkúkúmá, who asks if the matter cannot be resolved within the family.
“No and no,” the plaintiff rejects, crossing his arm. “If you don’t want to resolve the problem, give me back the money of the suit. I am in charge of two things and only one of them can be mine. As a Fang man, member of an honorable tribe that follows tradition, I demand that my brother-in-law comes to recover either on the one hand, my sister, her two daughters and the pregnancy, or the dowry on the other.”
Outside, the women murmur about whether a person can be called a thing. The plaintiff continues his demand.
“Your cousin’s brother died eight months ago in a traffic accident and nobody has come to recover the inheritance or the dowry. As far as I know, you are the only male remaining in the family.”
The defendant takes the word and offers a motive: the woman rejected him as a man.
There is an enormous ruckus inside the House of the Word.
The men demand the woman opens her legs and follows tradition. The women outside slowly divide into two groups. Some support the men’s version and others reject it. The nkúkúmá orders everyone to be quiet and offers the word to the widow, a shy woman who places her arms over her swollen belly.
“Finally, I am given the chance to speak. The protagonist of this case is me. Shouldn’t I be the first to speak?”
The protest from the nkúkúmá is immediate, “You, no; your brother, yes. He had to speak before you, because he is your brother.”
“So what? Am I a child? I am thirty-five years old, I work, I have a university degree, two daughters, a house in the city. I am not a child!”
“You are not a child. You are a Fang woman.”
“And . . . ?”
“Don’t be a fool and don’t make me waste my time.”
“I am not a fool and . . . how am I making you waste your time. Are you not the representative of the entire village? Do women not form part of the village? If my brother wants me to disappear from the house of our parents let him say so here and now for everyone to hear. He is in charge of two things? I live by my own efforts and work, he doesn’t feed me. And, by the way, I am a person, not a thing. For seven years, I was living with a man who unfortunately died. I loved my husband. If your brother now wants to take his place in my heart, something that seems impossible to me, let him conquer me. He only comes to my house at night because he wants sex. He says I’m obligated to copulate with him. Copulate with you? Not even if I were dead.”
Angry, the nkúkúmá issues his sentence. He decides that the woman, as tradition mandates, is obliged to spread her legs accepting her brother-in-law as her husband or, alternatively, any other man of the tribe of the deceased, and if she is not in agreement, for her to return the dowry and the two girls of two and four years, when they’ve turned seven.
The woman’s brother celebrates the sentence and when he gets up he gets a long applause from the members of his tribe and from the elders. His sister gets up and leaves crying, with the two girls, and from behind her back she receives jeering and a justification from her brother, “I’m just following tradition. It is my duty to respect and uphold the traditional institutions. I have the backing of the political parties. Maybe I’ll be offered a position.”
Silence spreads throughout the assembled group. Now it is the turn of Nsí, a young man of twenty-two years, grandson of the nkúkúmá and despised by the elders of the village. “He doesn’t respect tradition,” they hiss. He doesn’t even wait for his grandfather to invite him to state his case. Directly he asks him if, when he applies and conserves the traditional institutions, he remembers that his mother was a woman, his wife is a woman, that he has three daughters and female friends, and that one of his daughters committed suicide a few days ago because of tradition.
The nkúkúmá falls silent and lets some teardrops fall. An elder calls him obono fam1 for crying in public, and demands his immediate resignation.
“The position you hold is only for real men. The nkúkúmá doesn’t cry. A Fang man doesn’t cry. Since you fall short of the position, it is better for you to resign before we force you out.”
His grandson does cry. He cries because he found his mother, Adá, hanging from the ceiling of the kitchen with a cord tied around her neck. She’d been dead for hours, two days after having threatened her father to kill herself if he gave her two children to a man who wasn’t their father, but was still her husband because she hadn’t returned the dowry.
Adá’s marriage failed when she was declared sterile by her spouse and his tribe. She returned to the house of her mother and father and met another man. After a few months of relationship, she became pregnant with twins. Five years later, her still-husband appeared demanding the parental authority of the twins. Her own father, the nkúkúmá and honorable member of his tribe, applied tradition whereby a separated woman, if she doesn’t return the dowry, the sons and daughters
she has with another man belong to her still-husband because the dowry legalizes marriages in Fang tradition, its return annuls it.
Besides, the dowry determines the tribe the daughters and sons belong to and their biological or legal paternity.
Adá refused to return the dowry, alleging that her father had taken it. Her father the nkúkúmá also didn’t return it and called his daughter “ignorant of tradition” because he wasn’t under any obligation to fulfill the demand.
The one who barely opened his mouth was Adá’s still-husband. He left before the verdict with the twins. The elders also left, accusing the nkúkúmá of not establishing order in his home as an authority, but first, they kicked out the youth who supported Nsí. The women likewise left, some crying because of Adá’s fate and others in silence, but the boy’s own grandmother stayed behind, and berated him,
“Your mother always exaggerated everything. The name Adá means exaggerated. Adá knew what would happen if she didn’t close her legs before returning the dowry. Well . . . she should’ve kept them closed. Go on, go home and stop bothering your grandfather. Since when does a grandson denounce his own grandfather? You’re a disgrace!”
“Did you know that the man who has taken away my young sisters is sterile?” the boy asked. “He was married three times before marrying Mama, and he didn’t produce children in any of those marriages. Did you know that he has agreed to abandon the children, your grandchildren, in the hands of a distant cousin? Did you know that he brought his lovers home with him and ordered Mama not to leave their marriage bed but instead arranged for her to copulate with his lovers?”
His grandparents answered that they knew all that and that tradition took into account those behaviors.
“The children won’t be returned and that’s that,” the nkúkúmá spoke. “Your mother always exaggerated everything. Her name was Adá.”
Irenosen Okojie
A Nigerian-British writer, she won a Betty Trask Award for her debut novel, Butterfly Fish (2015), and was shortlisted for an Edinburgh International First Book Award. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, The Observer, The Guardian, the BBC and the Huffington Post among other publications. Her short stories have been published internationally in collections including Salt’s Best British Short Stories 2017, Kwani? and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction. She was presented at the London Short Story Festival by Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri as a dynamic writing talent to watch and featured in the Evening Standard Magazine as one of London’s exciting new authors. Her 2016 short-story collection, Speak Gigantular, was shortlisted for the Edgehill Short Story Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Saboteur Awards, and nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award.
Synsepalum
Manu was first spotted in the display window of the old sewing-machine museum touching holes of light on a Babushka costume. He seemed to have appeared from nowhere, a pied piper staging gowns as soft instruments, framed by gauzy street lights. His fingers were curled into swathes of the costume’s bulbous ruby-red taffeta skirt on a mannequin, surrounded by elaborately designed sewing-machines poised like an incongruous metal army. A spool of gold thread uncurled behind him, drinking from the night. A wind chime above the blue front door argued with the soft falling of snow. The letterbox slot had a black glove with silver studs slipped into the slash like a misguided disruption. Manu gripped a large curved needle between his lips, and wiped his brow with a spotted handkerchief. The ash in his pockets felt weightless. He inserted the needle into the skirt’s hem, unpicking a shrunken, smoggy skyline. He gathered two more mannequins standing to the side, naked, arms stretched towards the skylight in a celestial pose. Their eyes stared ahead blankly as though fixed on a mirage in the distance which could be broken apart then fed into their artificial skin, into cloth. He placed them in the display window, naked calling-cards waiting to be dressed. The spool of thread cut diagonally across rows of sewing-machines moored on metal stands, rectangular golden plaques identifying each one. There was an antique Singer 66–1 Red Eye Treadle from the 1920s, a Russian Handcrank portable number from the ’50s, a 1940s Montgomery Ward Streamliner US model, a compact 1930s Jones model from Bucharest with a silver flower pattern crawling up the sides of its sleek, black frame. Manu gathered the thread slowly, a ritual he performed between each creation. A splintered pain exploded in his chest. In his mind’s eye, the ash from his pockets assembled into feminine silhouettes. He needed to make more dresses, more corsets, more fitted suits, more gowns. He needed to find more ways to make women feel beautiful through his creations. The designs rose from dark, undulating slipstreams as if in resurrection. They were watery constructions, insistent, whispering what materials they needed, leaning against his brown irises until they leaked from his eyes onto the page while his fingers sketched feverishly. He walked to the atelier at the back, a hub flourishing under the gaze of light. There was a long, wooden work table, more sewing-machines dotted around it. A coiled measuring tape sat in the middle as if ready to entrap a rhinestone-covered, meteorite-shaped white gown that would crash through. Materials spilled from the edges towards the centre; rolls of bright silk, piles of linen, open boxes of lace, streams of velvet. There were jars of accessories, decorations winking in the glass; zips, studs, feathers, small jewelled delights waiting to adorn the pleat of a skirt, the breast of a jacket, dimpled, soft satin. A black leather suitcase leaning against one wall spilled tiny grains of invisible sand from its gut. The air’s pressure contorted a candy-hued ballerina-style dress carelessly flung over a guillotine.
It was on this night while leafleting that Noma was drawn to the seductive glow from the museum, orbs of light mutating in the front entrance’s bubble of glass, a coloured small window in a door, a geometric code for the eye. A head in the window of that door on a winter’s night could appear trapped there, bobbing in the glass curiously. Noma arrived at that moment through a triumvirate of migration from Swaziland, to Paris to the UK. Picking fruit to sell on the scorching roads of South Africa, homeless in Paris before working in a toy factory, leafleting in London which was repetitive, flexible, mundane but easy, bookended by daily returns to her tiny bedsit on the other side of Wandsworth, in a death trap with no fire exits just off the high street. Noma held a roll of leaflets in her right hand, a run of five hundred for a show about a woman trapped in a warehouse encountering a doppelganger at each exit every time she attempted to leave. She tugged one strap of her rucksack further up her shoulder, walked towards the museum door. Flakes of snow christened her like a black Venus in the cold. Spotting the Babushka dress in the display window, she pressed her face against the glass partition in the door, intrigued. The door opened. Manu smiled warmly, motioned her in with one hand, a ruffle of taffeta material in the other. It smelled like incense inside. The gentle ring of wind chimes multiplied in her eardrums, the low skyline from the Babushka costume bent over the sewing machines, the pressure of air made her skin hum, her senses were heightened. She felt sucked into a vacuum. Air seeped inside her like helium in the lungs. Mannequins facing the outside had drops of dew in their mouths.
“You have come for work,” Manu announced, his elegantly handsome face wise in the light. Not even awaiting a response, he turned, rushing to the atelier.
Noma trailed after him, the roll of leaflets fell from her hands, becoming confetti in the view from the front door’s bubbled glass partition.
She began working for him a week later, scouring shops for fine materials, measuring and cutting, learning to sew, hunting for unusual accessories. She visited millineries, procured fine hats the colour of quail eggs, the burnished gold of the Sahara, the hue of the Garonne at night. She watched his sketches come to life with a soft wonder in her throat, the outfits like architectural constructs waiting for bodies to invade them, her fingers spinning them slowly on a tailor’s mannequin under the kaleidoscopic glow from the skylight, the quiet language of sand stealthily spilling in a corner, the chug of the sewing-machines temporarily silenced
.
The pop-up atelier in the sewing-machine museum sprang up like a small utopia longing for the flurry of action. And the women came like drunken butterflies drawn to Eden, one by one until the atelier became a hive of activity, leaking laughter and excitable voices. The women were seduced by Manu; his beauty, his sophistication, the unpredictability of his style, his erudite tales and the assured rumble of his voice. He told them he was born in the Gambia, Namibia, Zanzibar. He was inconsistent, flamboyant. Oh, but where was he from again? No matter. He offered them Synsepalum, wild African berries, as if the fruit grew from the blade of the guillotine, the hands of the old grandfather clock on one atelier wall, the mouths of the mannequins. The break of sweet, exotic fruit flooded the women’s tongues. They kept coming back for more; more Manu, more handfuls of Synsepalum, more Noma flicking through his sketches, fingering the lines of all they could be, if only. Aspiration captured in drawings. All the while, kernels of pain formed inside Manu, gathering into a mass.
The orders increased. Mrs Jovan, head of the town council, had a nettle-green Boudica gown made for her, which swished around her ankles romantically, Mrs Lonegran, owner of a chain of flower stores cooed in pleasure at the final reveal of her metallic Joan of Arc-inspired ensemble on the atelier floor. Mrs Hunt, a wine buyer, blinked at her image in an intricately designed pale off-the-shoulder 1920s flapper number with a crystal beaded beret to match, gasping as if she hadn’t seen herself before, or at least not in this way.
Manu made women feel marvellous, valued, appreciated. He not only understood the female form, he celebrated it; every dip of the back, every arch of a neck, every individual flare of hips. He masked and he revealed, he obscured and he unearthed. He knew how to make the most ordinary of women feel like a goddess. This was his gift. Every woman had a quality of beauty of her own making lurking beneath the skin. Manu knew ways to make it bloom, how to tease it to the surface. And every night, Noma would return to her lonely bedsit bone-tired, fall into bed, unceremoniously woken up by the leak in her ceiling landing on her face, acting as an alarm for the next day’s activities.
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